At War with Ourselves, page 20
But Trump was caught in a vortex created by the interaction of those narratives with the fragility of his ego and his deep sense of aggrievement.
* * *
ON DAY two of the G20, we filed into the meeting room and sat across from our Chinese counterparts. Trump asked Xi Jinping to begin. Like Putin, Xi seemed worried that Trump might act against the growing threat from Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programs. Xi was also fearful of a Kim regime collapse that could result in the loss of a “buffer state” between U.S. allies and his border. To justify his hedging on sanctions, Xi warned against “excessive pressure” and “long-arm jurisdiction”—his phrase for U.S. secondary sanctions on Chinese banks involved in circumventing sanctions.
But then he contradicted that argument with a metaphor: “Those who are barefooted do not fear people with good shoes.” He wanted us to conclude that the North Korean people were so accustomed to deprivation that sanctions were futile. He urged no chaos and no wars while communicating his desire to keep North Korea intact with the observation that China had lost 190,000 men during the Korean War to ensure there was not a hostile power on the China-Korea border. He then made a token promise to support more pressure on North Korea after the next provocation.
It was obvious that Putin and Xi had coordinated their efforts to downplay the threat and portray maximum pressure as ineffective or dangerous.
Trump countered Xi’s effort to obfuscate and delay a reckoning by again observing that China could solve the North Korea problem if Xi decided to do so. Trump reminded Xi of the danger of proliferation. What if Japan, South Korea, and others concluded that they needed nukes, too?
As we boarded Air Force One at the end of the summit, Gary Cohn and I compared notes. On balance, the trip was a success. Although the reaction to our op-ed after the G7 had been mixed, Gary and I drafted (with our staffs) another essay, this time for the New York Times. In it, we emphasized the need to take advantage of opportunities associated with “vast supplies of affordable energy” and “untapped markets that can be opened to new commerce.” Critics accused us of cloaking irrational Trump policies in coherent language. But we were helping Trump direct his disruptive nature toward what needed to be disrupted.
* * *
WE HAD only three days back in Washington before another trip to Europe—this time to Paris, for Bastille Day and to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the United States’ entry into World War I.
Upon arrival in Paris, we went directly to the ambassador’s residence, the Hotel de Pontalba, one of the most magnificent homes on one of the most storied streets in the city. Its sixty thousand square feet easily accommodated the president and his immediate staff. After lunch, we departed for a reception in honor of the president and First Lady at the Hôtel des Invalides, the seventeenth-century complex constructed under Louis XIV for the care and housing of disabled veterans and as a place of worship. After the band performed and troops passed in review, our party trailed the presidents and First Ladies through the Musée de l’Armée, the military museum of the Army of France. I smiled when President Trump remarked that he did not know France had such a rich military history.
We drove to the Élysée Palace for a small group meeting with Macron; his chief diplomatic advisor, Philippe Etienne; and his economic advisor. Gary and I greeted Macron and our counterparts and took our seats next to Trump.
Trump explained his rationale for withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords. He told Macron that “Ivanka and my whole family wanted me to stay in, but the people who voted for me wanted me out.” He then aired his grievances about the lack of reciprocity in trade and market access in the European Union.
We walked downstairs for a joint press conference. Even in Paris, Trump could not escape questions about Russiagate and, in particular, Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian attorney to hear damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
Nobody loves a show like Donald Trump, and the Bastille Day parade is quite a show. We sat in the bleachers with the presidents and the First Ladies, front and center. The parade had it all—marching troops, mounted cavalry, vintage tanks and armored cars, modern combat vehicles, an overflight of fighters and bombers, and even a military band on horseback.
On the return flight, Trump told me, “Tell Mattis I want to have a similar parade on the next Veterans Day or Fourth of July.”
Although I was not one to shirk a responsibility, I was happy the parade issue fell clearly in Mattis’s area of responsibility.
* * *
IN HIS last tweet before he passed away, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote, “Sophisticated U.S. leadership is the sine qua non of a stable world order. However, we lack the former while the latter is getting worse.”3 Despite the friction, we were helping Trump win friends, influence foes, and exert U.S. leadership internationally. Battles within the administration, I had come to realize, would be a permanent feature of Trump’s presidency. I had to work harder to minimize the effect of those battles on the development of sound policy. The stakes were too high not to, as North Korea’s ICBM, China’s reluctance to pressure Pyongyang, and Putin’s unrelenting efforts to manipulate Trump and divide Americans further attested.
Chapter 12
Knives Out
THE KNIVES ARE OUT FOR LT. GEN. H.R. MCMASTER . . . Reince Priebus Is Ousted Amid Stormy Days for White House . . . TRUMP NAMES HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY JOHN F. KELLY NEW WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF . . . MCMASTER ADDS MUSCLE TO KUSHNER’S MIDDLE EAST PEACE EFFORT . . . Sean Spicer Resigns as White House Press Secretary . . . ANTHONY SCARAMUCCI: FIRED FROM THE WHITE HOUSE AFTER 10 DAYS . . . FORMER FBI AGENT SAYS RUSSIAN TWITTER BOTS WERE BEHIND PUSH FOR MCMASTER FIRING . . . Right Wing Media Declares War on National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster . . . Trump and Kushner Push Back on Right-Wing Campaign to Fire McMaster, for Now . . . NSA MCMASTER ON CHARLOTTESVILLE: ‘OF COURSE IT WAS TERRORISM’ . . . Charlottesville residents recall horror of car attack: ‘Bodies writhing, blood everywhere’ . . . TRUMP DEFENDS WHITE-NATIONALIST PROTESTERS: ‘SOME VERY FINE PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES’ . . . Stephen Bannon Out At The White House After Turbulent Run . . . TRUMP ALARMS VENEZUELA WITH TALK OF A ‘MILITARY OPTION’
I THOUGHT that August would be a quiet time in Washington. Congress is in recess. Many locals go away on vacation to escape the capital’s heat and humidity. I planned to review long-term projects like the national security, counterterrorism, cyber, and space strategies; the nuclear Posture Review; and various integrated strategies under development.
After five months on the job, I should have known better. It may have been hot and humid outside, but inside, the cauldron of the Trump White House was about to bubble over.
I got word that Trump was going to fire his chief of staff. What would become a familiar process was already under way at the end of July: leaks predicting impending departure, fervent denials by the White House communications team, and, ultimately, a tweet.
I spoke with Kelly on the phone the day before the tweet. He asked me whether he should take the job. He was reluctant to leave the Department of Homeland Security, where he had a degree of autonomy, to enter the fray in the White House. I told him, “I know what it was like leaving command for a staff job”—something no military officer would ever want to do—“but we need you over here, and you can make a difference.”
I warned him that the toxicity of the White House was the biggest impediment to serving the president. Priebus “is not a bad person,” I explained. “He had this pact with Bannon in an effort to protect himself, and he enabled much of the dysfunction.” I pledged the support of the NSC staff and predicted that the vast majority of well-motivated people in the White House would welcome Kelly with open arms.
Kelly brought with him his chief of staff from the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen. I met with them on their first day and handed them a binder containing the National Security staff vision, mission, goals, key tasks, priority national security challenges, and a description of our process for framing complex challenges and developing options for the president. I told him that, despite efforts to disrupt the process, we were achieving good outcomes.
Later that day, Kelly stopped by an NSC staff all-hands meeting in the EEOB auditorium. I saw him enter through a side door. I introduced him and asked if he would like to say a few words. He walked to the front of the room, put his arm around me, and announced, “I love this guy, and the president does, too.”
Our team applauded as Kelly departed. After he left, I summarized his bio and predicted that he would pull the White House team together and help us better serve the president.
Kelly would struggle to get his bearings, as would have anyone taking that job in the Trump White House.
Just before Kelly arrived, Sean Spicer resigned as White House communications director, as Anthony Scaramucci, a financier and entrepreneur with a degree from Harvard Business School, took over the job. I first met “the Mooch” on Wednesday, July 26, in my office. His candor was refreshing, and I felt his sense of humor might lighten things up in the West Wing. I invited him to join me and some of our colleagues at my home for a welcome dinner the following week.
But on July 30, while staffing the president for a late-night phone call with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, Trump told me that Kelly planned to fire Scaramucci the next day, in the wake of an embarrassing New Yorker article. The Mooch had not told the reporter that their conversation was off the record—a rookie mistake. The transcript and tape of the conversation contained expletives and uncouth descriptions of Bannon and Priebus.
Shaking his head, Trump said, “I thought I hired Harvard Anthony, not Long Island Anthony.”
We laughed.
“What do you think, General?” Trump asked.
I told him that I had a good first impression of Scaramucci and believed he could overcome his mistake.
“Call Kelly and tell him that, would you?”
Kelly was unpersuaded. I saw Anthony in the West Wing the next day, the day before the welcome dinner at my house. I said, “Sorry you got fired, but please join us tomorrow for what will now be your farewell dinner.”
The irrepressible Mooch showed up sporting blue-tinted sunglasses. He apologized to Katie and Colleen, who were on their way out for a separate dinner, for his “potty mouth.”
The Mooch’s eleven-day tenure in the White House would become a unit of measurement for service in the Trump administration. In case you’re wondering, I served for 41.3 Scaramuccis.
We had a fun and relaxing evening. But it was the calm before the storm.
* * *
AS KELLY arrived, Bannon and his small staff with unclear portfolios were under duress. Priebus was no longer there to protect them, and Kelly was determined to clarify everyone’s role. Scaramucci’s direct criticisms in The New Yorker had further exposed Bannon’s self-serving agenda. Many in the White House and beyond were certain he was the source of leaks designed to derail the policy process on Afghanistan, take credit for the president’s policy decisions, and undercut his colleagues. Bannon had exposed himself as a malicious, untrustworthy grifter, and he was about to be hoist with his own petard.
Bannon and his acolytes betrayed tactics similar to those employed by the three witches, or “weird sisters,” in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The witches use equivocating prophecies to manipulate the Scottish general Macbeth. Bannon and his people used false information delivered through social media and pseudo-media, including Bannon’s old tabloid website, Breitbart News, to manipulate Donald Trump and turn him against those who might impede their amorphous “alt-right” agenda. But Bannon and his associates were less subtle than the weird sisters.
I had been the target of the weird sisters’ campaign of slander and disinformation for weeks, but the attacks on me and the NSC staff intensified after the White House released a statement on August 2 that I had replaced a senior director on the NSC staff with a more experienced official who was better suited for the work ahead of us.
The far-right American news and opinion website for which Bannon had served as executive chairman portrayed the personnel change as a systematic effort to purge the NSC staff of Trump loyalists.
Breitbart connected my decision with the departure of other NSC officials, including Rick Waddell’s firing of a staffer whom I had never met. That staffer had, in his first days on the job, composed a conspiratorial “manifesto” calling for political warfare against Democrats, establishment Republicans, and what he described as a cabal of leftists, cultural Marxists, Islamists, and others.
I had nothing against any of those whom Rick and I had replaced. Personnel changes were meant to ensure that the president had the best staffers available, people who understood their roles and responsibilities. But Bannon and his allies saw me as an impediment to their nativist and neo-isolationist agendas. Stories planted in the pseudo-media quickly crossed over into social media and ballooned into what the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab described at the time as the most well-organized campaign against an individual by the alt-right and the Russians.1
Consistent with the witches’ line in Macbeth’s first act, “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” the tsunami of attacks under the FireMcMaster campaign accumulated an array of baseless and often contradictory charges all designed to estrange me from Trump. A total of 136,292 posts on social media using the #FireMcMaster appeared between August 3 and 6, with two thirds posted between August 3 and 4. Stories laden with disinformation from the sites Circa News, Breitbart, Liberty Writers News, the Daily Caller, and Young Conservatives garnered 126,000 engagements on a single social media platform alone. Years later, a study of the campaign confirmed an extremely high level of botlike actors and coordinated right-wing cohost activity around three main narratives: McMaster works for the deep state; McMaster is targetting Trump loyalists; and McMaster is “Deeply hostile to Israel.”
Alt-right and Russian cohosts began to reinforce one another after a few influential social media personalities made the connection. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones invited an ultranationalist Russian political philosopher on his show to call for my removal. Paid Russian agent Lee Stranahan, founder of Populist.TV and cohost of a show on the Russian government media outlet Sputnik News, also jumped in. Then internet bots and trolls controlled by Russian intelligence, the so-called Internet Research Agency, amplified the #FireMcMaster campaign. Soon, Fox News personalities Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham joined in the effort.
While Bannon rallied some members of the far-right-wing Jewish-American organizations supporting him to falsely portray me as anti-Israel, this was quickly debunked when others rallied to defend me from such charges.2 Even Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and Israeli minister of defense Avigdor Lieberman offered their support. Many Republican leaders called to ask how they might help. Senator McCain described the attacks as “disgraceful.”3 Jared Kushner released a statement: “General McMaster is a true public servant and a tremendous asset for the president and the administration.”4 He included with his tweets a photo of a dinner I had hosted at my home for senior Israeli officials. And under the headline “Israeli Officials Say Under-fire McMaster a Great Friend of Israel,” the Times of Israel ran a story with supportive quotations from Israeli officials who “were constantly impressed by how pro-Israeli the U.S. national security adviser is.”5
The smear campaign was not a surprise. Attacks from Bannon and his allies were not new and a government agency had warned me of an impending Kremlin effort designed to diminish my influence and separate me from Trump. But I had anticipated neither the scale of the operation nor the degree to which the Russians and the alt-right would reinforce one another’s efforts. As former FBI agent Clint Watts said at the time, the alt-right campaign provided an opportunity for the Kremlin to sow “chaos and disunity among the American government.”6
While I focused on my job, my comms director, Michael Anton, who understood the alt-right ecosystem well, led the defensive effort. Josh Raffel, senior communications advisor to Jared and Ivanka, volunteered to assist. I had decided to ignore the attacks on me, but it was hard for family members to look away from the sustained effort to defame me, and it was difficult for me to see the attacks on members of my staff, some of whom received threats of physical harm.
Over dinner at my home on August 4, Rupert Murdoch shared his perspective: “Only Trump’s opinion matters,” he told me. “Try not to worry about what these people are saying. You are doing a great job for the president.”
Trump did not fall for the falsehoods. On August 5, he released a statement: “General McMaster and I are working very well together. He is a good man and very pro-Israel. I am grateful for the work he continues to do serving our country.”
I saw Trump at Bedminster on August 7, when I had lunch with Mike Pompeo and two senior intelligence officials with whom I had served in Afghanistan. He echoed Murdoch: “Remember General, only my opinion matters, and I think you are doing a great job.”
But the “witches” were unrelenting. After the President supported me publicly, Breitbart accused Trump of defying his base in defending the “globalist general.”
I appreciated Trump’s reassuring words, but I also knew he was attuned to the views of those who would continue to attack me and many members of our team on the NSC staff. Trump had thrown cold water into the cauldron, but Bannon and his allies would continue to roil and boil.
* * *
FIVE DAYS after my lunch at Bedminster with Pompeo, a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, turned deadly when a twenty-year-old Ohio man accelerated his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring approximately thirty others, five critically.
