At War with Ourselves, page 16
As I worked on a draft of the speech with Stephen Miller, I had thought this the most important line, and I sensed that it resonated with the small group gathered around Trump, including Margot Hershenbaum, the only surviving member of her family. Hershenbaum presented Trump with a replica of her sister Ester Goldstein’s personal journal, which contains entries from Ester’s deportation from Germany to Latvia, where she was shot to death in a forest.
* * *
HOURS AFTER the final event in Israel, a speech at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, we arrived at Villa Taverna, the U.S. ambassador to Italy’s residence in Rome.
After the president and First Lady were settled in, I walked onto the villa’s back patio and noticed, just outside the seven-acre property, what looked like an apartment building with an unusual number of antennas and satellite dishes on the roof. Our Secret Service detail told me that the surveillance and communications equipment had appeared on the roof soon after the Chinese had purchased the building.
Early the next morning, I dropped off my bags to be loaded onto Air Force One and returned to Villa Taverna to meet with the president. While he got dressed, I briefed him on key intelligence and events over the past several days, from the killing of ISIS’s second-in-command in Syria to a new set of sanctions on Iran to the forensics on the WannaCry cyberattack, a ransomware attack on hundreds of thousands of computers across 150 countries using a digital worm from North Korea.
I warned the president that it would be another long day for him and the First Lady, but a consequential one. For me, the first event of the day would be the experience of a lifetime.
I am Catholic. My sister, Letitia, and I attended an excellent Catholic elementary school, Norwood-Fontbonne Academy, in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia, and our family had gone to Mass at Immaculate Heart of Mary every Sunday. Katie either taught at Catholic high schools or worked in faith formation for Catholic dioceses for many years; and when the option was available, our daughters went to Catholic schools. But what had solidified my faith over the years were experiences in combat that were very difficult to explain except for divine providence. I had borne witness to moral and physical evils that might have shaken anyone’s faith. But I had also seen good triumph over those evils in ways that only affirmed my belief in God.
The Vatican expects visitors to observe tradition and is a stickler for protocol. Our motorcade pulled through large gates and into a courtyard. The Swiss Guard opened the doors, and the president and First Lady preceded our party to meet with the pope.
We entered the pope’s study and, as instructed, lined up in front of high-backed armchairs facing one another. Pope Francis moved clockwise, opposite Tillerson, White House director of social media Dan Scavino, and me, silently taking each person’s hand in his hands.
Pope Francis took my hand, looked me in the eye, and said, “Please pray for me,” I smiled and responded, “Holy Father, I hope that you will pray for me.”
I felt a peculiar sense of calm and serenity. I saw in the pope’s countenance his understanding of the challenges I would face. In the coming months, I would reflect on this brief but powerful encounter and recall the first few lines of the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Although Pope Francis and Trump had jousted in the media over the border wall, there was no discernable tension between them. The president’s gift to him, a box of signed first edition books by Martin Luther King Jr., was appropriate and thoughtful. Pope Francis’s gift to Trump, signed copies of three documents, was pointed: the copy of Francis’s encyclical on climate change, “Laudato sí,” was clearly meant to challenge Trump’s skepticism on global warming. Trump promised to read it.
I caught myself smiling, thinking, It’s a good thing Trump isn’t Catholic, or he’d have to go to confession for that lie.
After we left the pope, Tillerson and I met briefly with Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, and then trailed behind the president and First Lady on tours of the Sistine Chapel and St. Peter’s Basilica. Priests and nuns from the United States joined us. Tillerson and I spoke with them as they guided us.
As Rex and I took our first steps down to the Vatican necropolis, walking beneath St. Peter’s Baldachin, the bronze canopy on which Bernini labored for nine years, I looked up at the marble canopy’s radiant sunburst, meant to evoke the Holy Spirit. Visiting the tomb of Saint Peter, who was crucified upside down nearby, during the Christian persecutions of Roman emperor Nero, made me think that the most prominent theme of Trump’s travels, promoting religious tolerance, was a noble but not a novel endeavor.
We descended below the level of the upper grottos that hold papal tombs and entered the dimly lit chamber housing Peter’s grave. Rex and I knelt next to each other in prayer. It was a moment of solace in our less-than-harmonious relationship. I allowed myself to hope that he and I might overcome our incompatibility and work together, change the things we could and accept those we couldn’t. We looked at each other and nodded before we stood. I wondered if he had the same thought.
We departed the Vatican for the short drive to the Quirinal Palace, where Trump was to meet with Italian president Sergio Mattarella. The main building, which has twelve hundred rooms and has served as the residence for thirty popes, four Italian kings, and twelve presidents of the Italian Republic, is surrounded by a majestic courtyard.
If Trump had experienced inner peace while visiting the Vatican, it was wearing off. He found it difficult to understand why he was meeting with President Mattarella rather than with Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, whom he had met in Washington on April 20. I explained that under the Constitution of the Italian Republic, the president is the head of the state and commander in chief of the armed forces, while the prime minister, whom the president appoints and Parliament approves, holds executive power. Trump had little patience for protocol. The pace of events and what he regarded as a superfluous meeting had made him cranky.
After the meeting with Mattarella, I rode with him and Jared on the way back to Villa Taverna, where Trump was scheduled to meet with Gentiloni. He was getting tired and angry. He turned toward Jared and me in the far back and said, “How long is this fucking trip? Whose idea was this?”
I smiled and said, “It was Jared’s idea, Mr. President,” which prompted a smile from Jared and a scowl from Trump.
Trump rallied, however. The meeting with Gentiloni was cordial, even though each man asked the other to do things that were unlikely to happen: Trump wanted Italy to spend more on defense, and Gentiloni wanted the United States to grant entry to more migrants from the Middle East and North Africa. In a moment of spontaneity typical of Trump, he invited the prime minister to join him in addressing the embassy staff and family members who had gathered outside. After Rex said a few words, I introduced Trump and Gentiloni, who thanked our diplomats, staff, and family members for their service.
* * *
THE NEXT leg of the trip concerned me the most. Candidate Trump had called Brussels a “hellhole”; had celebrated Brexit, predicting that more countries would follow the United Kingdom’s lead and depart the European Union; and had said the NATO alliance was “obsolete,” not only pointing out (as other American leaders had done) that many member nations were free riding on U.S. defense, but also suggesting that the United States might not come to the aid of NATO allies if they were attacked. Businessman Trump thought it logical to condition fulfillment of the treaty obligation under Article 5, to treat “an attack on one as an attack on all,” on whether the attacked country had met its pledge to invest at least the equivalent of 2 percent of its gross domestic product in defense.
In the months prior to the trip, especially in preparation for White House visits by European leaders and the NATO secretary-general, I had shown the president statistics on military spending by NATO member nations. Trump was right that many countries were not fulfilling their pledge to invest at least 2 percent in defense. But, I told him, Russia wanted nothing more than to divide NATO and the EU countries and fragment the most successful military alliance in history as a precursor to reestablishing control of former Soviet states and dominant influence over the former nations of the Warsaw Pact. On the short flight to Brussels, I suggested to Trump that he press hard to get NATO nations to increase defense spending while not giving Putin what he wanted—a divided alliance.
Cohn gave the president similar advice on trade: to demand changes to EU protectionist and unfair economic practices that disadvantaged American companies and workers, but not to advocate for the disintegration of the European Union. We told Trump that divisions in the transatlantic relationship and within Europe were good not only for Putin, but also for the country that posed the largest economic challenge to the United States—China.
I grew more concerned as we drew closer to Brussels. Watching the news on the flight had put Trump in a bad mood. Being away from home for a long stretch of time, combined with the constant drumbeat of Russiagate coverage, had made him anxious. In the midst of the trip, he had hired a new lawyer to interact with the Mueller Commission. Priebus and Bannon, who advanced their influence through cultivating a bunker mentality and portraying themselves as his most loyal defenders, only stoked Trump’s anxiety. I told Gary that I was concerned. Trump needed to lash out—and he might do so against NATO and the European Union in a way that would be a boon to our adversaries.
The motorcade took us directly to the Royal Palace, where the president and First Lady met briefly with King Philippe and Queen Mathilde. It was the first of three meetings in well-appointed rooms that evoked Belgium’s troubled history as a territory, principality, and, after 1830, a federal constitutional monarchy. Because Belgium had been so frequently ravaged over history, from the Middle Ages through the world wars of the twentieth century, its leaders were naturally staunch advocates of the European Union and NATO.
But Trump was incurious about Belgian and European history and only vaguely aware of the success of those organizations relative to Winston Churchill’s prediction in 1946 that if Europe did not come together to form a “family,” it would be condemned to “infinite misery” and “final doom.”4 I hoped Trump might also see Europe as an American success due to the relief effort after World War II; the Marshall Plan, which had reconstructed Western Europe; and the defense of the Continent, which had contributed to victory in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.
But in Trump’s mind, the success of Europe had occurred at the expense of the United States. The European Union was an unfair competitor that employed a range of unfair trade and economic practices. There was an element of truth to Trump’s perspective, as U.S. trade representative Bob Lighthizer would teach me in the coming months. But Gary Cohn and I tried to help Trump see that we could demand reciprocity in trade and market access while also advocating for a strong Europe.
We sat down across from Belgian prime minister Charles Michel at 5:30 p.m. I could sense that the breakneck schedule of the past week, Trump’s anxiety over being abroad, the testimony back home of ex-CIA director John Brennan before the House Intelligence Committee on Russian interference in the 2016 election, and being in the home of international organizations he loathed had him on edge. The conversation with Prime Minister Michel was direct but polite, and mercifully short. I was grateful to get to the hotel after we dropped the president off at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, where he would spend the night.
The next morning’s meetings with the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council, Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk, respectively, in the Europa building in Brussels, were benign mainly because Trump and the EU leaders talked past one another. Trump and European Council president Tusk agreed that Russian gas pipelines to Europe were problematic because they fed the Kremlin’s ATM and gave Vladimir Putin coercive power.
The meetings were cordial, but most of the press viewed Trump exclusively through the lens of his brash persona, misinterpreting body language and minor comments as indicators of major tensions. Reports on his meetings had become formulaic: Trump was rude and destructive to relationships.
Like his European counterparts, the recently elected president of France, Emmanuel Macron, was wary of Trump. Trump greeted Macron outside the U.S. embassy in Brussels, after which our delegation shook hands with Macron and his entourage. The dining room was perfectly suited for a one-table conversation. Over lunch, Trump and Macron found common ground in their penchant for challenging conventional wisdom and in their skepticism of international organizations. Both had tapped into popular discontent over the failures of government elites and inept bureaucrats to win elections. They shared similar views on migration and border security. I was happy to see them get along, but I soon grew concerned as each fed off the other’s skepticism of NATO.
Macron enthusiastically joined Trump in criticizing NATO because, I believed, he calculated that he could use Trump’s skepticism of multilateralism in France’s favor. With the brash American president’s “abandonment” of Europe, the French president could make a case for EU “strategic autonomy” in the form of trade and economic policies that sidestepped geostrategic competitions with Russia and China in ways that benefited France’s economy. And because the United States was not actually abandoning Europe, France, like Germany, could continue to economize on defense.
Next up: the NATO summit itself.
In a room on the second floor of the U.S. ambassador’s residence, I sat next to the president at a round table for a final preparation session. Mattis and Tillerson joined. Stephen Miller was taking notes. Trump, who would give a speech to dedicate the 9/11 memorial at the new NATO Headquarters, wanted to threaten to pull out of NATO if member nations did not “pay their dues” and “pay arrears” for past underpayments to the organization.
I tried to explain—as I had many times before—that the commitment was for NATO nations to spend at least the equivalent of 2 percent of GDP on their own defense capabilities. Talk of “dues” and “arrears” to NATO would only confuse leaders, rather than put pressure on them to own up to their commitments. I tried not to sound exasperated. “Mr. President, the best way to make your point is not for the United States to threaten to renege on its obligation, which would weaken the alliance’s ability to deter Russia or other hostile actors, but to get others to live up to theirs under Article Three of the treaty, which obligates member states to ‘maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.’ Threatening to leave NATO would be a gift to Vladimir Putin. And vacillating on Article Five while standing in front of a remnant of the North Tower of the World Trade Center at a ceremony commemorating the only time the alliance evoked Article Five after that mass murder attack on your hometown would not be a good look.”
Trump relented and went to his quarters to rest before we departed.
Later, as I was packing up for the drive to NATO headquarters, Stephen Miller came to me. He had just been with the president, and I could tell by the look on his face that he was bearing bad news. He started with “I swear I had nothing to do with this. The president called me in and dictated some changes to the speech.”
Trump had excised a sentence affirming the United States’ commitment to Article 5 of the treaty. I was not worried about that—NATO leaders should not be expected to affirm their intention to uphold a treaty to which they are signatories every time they speak. More concerning, though, was new language in the speech: Trump had followed through on demanding that NATO countries pay “arrears” in their “dues” to NATO. Much worse, he had added that the United States would not be obligated to come to the defense of countries that were “delinquent” in their “payments.”
Miller gave me the news as he departed for NATO Headquarters to load the speech into the teleprompter. I met Tillerson and Mattis at the top of the residence’s marble staircase. I needed their help. “Let’s all ride with the president so we can explain why that language is offensive and counterproductive.”
Mattis replied as we stepped outside: “H.R., I think you can convince him. I’m going to ride with Rex.”
I responded, “Would both of you please get in the fucking car?”
They acceded.
On the short drive from the ambassador’s residence to NATO Headquarters, I told Trump that the reaction to his comments would focus exclusively on his threat of withdrawal from NATO and not on members’ failure to meet their obligations. Tillerson and Mattis reinforced this point.
Finally, about halfway into our twenty-minute drive, Trump said, “Okay, okay, you can take it out, General.”
With the issue resolved, I tried to raise Stephen Miller on my cellphone, to tell him to delete the new language from the teleprompter. He was waiting for my call, but the jammers in the motorcade made it difficult to get through. I finally got a broken message to him. He made the change just prior to the president’s arrival at NATO Headquarters, the political and administrative center of the North Atlantic Council.
NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg met us out in front of the brand-new structure on Boulevard Leopold III in Haren and walked us through the building complex and to the greenroom. He thought that Trump would be impressed with the new home to the North Atlantic Council, and he was—just not in the way Stoltenberg had hoped. Trump said something about the stupidity and cost of the new building, observing that “one bomb would take out the whole thing.” He was right. The new headquarters symbolized the overconfidence of the post–Cold War period.
I exited the building and walked past the 9/11 memorial and the podiums to the U.S. seating area, where I joined Gary Cohn. “How was the ride?” he asked.
