At War with Ourselves, page 21
Trump equivocated during a press conference in Trump Tower during which he intended to talk about infrastructure. When asked about Charlottesville, he told reporters, “I think there is blame on both sides.” He went on to say, “You had some very bad people in that group,” referring to the white nationalist groups rallying against removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. “But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.”
Later in the day at Bedminster, he seemed to recover from that bout of moral equivalence, condemning “in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence.” But he added, “On many sides, on many sides.”
Much of his statement was irrefutably positive, such as “We have to come together as Americans with love for our nation and true affection.” But as often was the case, his obsession with avoiding any offense to a political base that included a racist fringe undermined his ability to lead the country through a difficult and divisive experience. Some of the same groups that received only tepid condemnation for the violence at Charlottesville were those whom Trump and his supporters would mobilize under the false claims of widespread fraud during the 2020 presidential election.7
The day after the Unite the Right violence, I appeared on two Sunday news shows, on ABC and NBC. My intention was to clarify the president’s policy on North Korea, but I knew that the first questions would be about Charlottesville. When George Stephanopoulos asked if the violence was terrorism, I answered unequivocally, “Of course it was terrorism.”
Then, on Meet the Press, Chuck Todd asked about attacks against me and about my relationship with Bannon. After noting, “You’ve had your own run-ins with the alt-right,” he cited a tweet asserting that “McMaster’s media allies who he leaks to are trying to frame Bannon for #Charlottesville.” Todd then asked, “Um, what is going on inside this White House with you and Mr. Bannon?”
I responded, “Well, this is just a lot of noise, from my perspective.”
I tried to turn it back to North Korea as Todd raised Bannon again, interjecting brusquely, “Can you and Steve Bannon still work together in this White House or not?”
I responded, “I get to work together with a broad range of talented people, and it is a privilege every day to enable the national security team.”
Todd told me that I hadn’t answered the question. I replied that I was “ready to work with anybody who would help advance the president’s agenda and advance the security and prosperity of the American people.”
Todd still wasn’t finished and asked if I believed that Bannon was working to accomplish those same outcomes.
I ended the interview by responding that “I believe that everyone who works in the White House who has the privilege, the great privilege every day, of serving their nation should be motivated by that goal.”
As I walked out, I thought that Todd had been right to push me on those questions. As I saw it, Bannon and his allies were not in the White House to serve their nation. They were there to advance their own agenda, at all costs, even if it meant undermining the Constitution we were all sworn to “support and defend.”
The next day, Bannon was out. As with Lady Macbeth, his demise came as a consequence of his own ambition. As with Lady Macbeth, his sociopathy was a kind of political suicide. Out of the White House, he would continue to grift among his supporters. Two years later, he would be arrested and charged with fraud over an online fund-raising scheme to build a wall on the Mexico border. Bannon used flattery and dissembling to work his way back into Trump’s good graces in time to help instigate the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol and secure a presidential pardon for himself. In 2023, his podcast earned the dubious distinction of having the highest percentage of unsubstantiated and false claims of the seventy-nine political podcasts studied.8
* * *
AS THE August humidity reminded me that Washington really is a stifling swamp, I split time between the capital and Bedminster, staying for a few days at a time in a small guest room on the grounds of the club adjacent to the pool and gym and across from the president’s and First Lady’s residences.
Bedminster provided an opportunity to engage with Trump away from the hectic pace and many distractions of Washington. After the August 7 lunch with Pompeo and officials from his agency, we had an informal meeting with Trump to discuss Afghanistan. The intelligence officers stressed the importance of their mission. They described how they had foiled attacks against Americans and prevented jihadist terrorist organizations from becoming more dangerous. Trump asked questions, and the discussion helped him revise his assessment of the situation. It also helped him understand the vital role the U.S. and Afghan militaries played in our counterterrorist efforts. It was clear that a proposal to privatize support for Afghan armed forces would still require significant Defense Department infrastructure. The discussion also revealed that an “over-the-horizon” approach to counterterrorism would have little effect on terrorist organizations.
Trump was relaxed. He was away from people who agitated him or constantly vied to curry favor. I often visited his apartment in the morning and in the evening to prepare him for and listen in on his phone calls with heads of state. I began the succinct briefings with “Mr. President, the purpose of this call is . . .” I then gave him a card. “Here are the points you may want to make.” After summarizing what he might hear from that head of state, I asked the Situation Room to connect the call. During the call, I would occasionally pass him notes with pertinent information or recommended points.
But agitation sometimes visited Bedminster, too. On August 11, Tillerson, Haley, Kelly, and I met with Trump in a small conference room to discuss the implementation of the maximum pressure strategy for North Korea. When Tillerson expressed hope that “we will get to negotiations with North Korea through China,” I pointed out that using Beijing’s offices was “inconsistent with the strategy that the president had approved and a bad idea because it would dissipate pressure on the North, drive a rapprochement between Pyongyang and Beijing, and put China in the driver’s seat.” I was concerned that China was already reverting to form and continuing to use the DPRK and its nuclear and missile programs as a means to maintain its geographical buffer and drive a wedge between the United States and its South Korean and Japanese allies.
To reinforce the point that we needed more pressure on Pyongyang, not diplomatic help from Beijing, I mentioned the great work that Ambassador Haley had done in securing stronger UN Security Council sanctions, including bans on North Korean exports of coal, iron, lead, and seafood. If enforced, the sanctions would reduce North Korea’s annual export revenue by more than a third.
My comments apparently triggered Tillerson’s disdain for Nikki Haley. He denigrated her work at the United Nations in impolite terms. As the conversation got heated, Kelly suggested that we move on to a press event he had arranged, in part, to demonstrate unity among this disunified segment of Trump’s foreign policy team. We were to follow the president through a portico and onto a small lawn where Trump, flanked by Tillerson, Haley, and me, would take questions.
Before we left the room, Tillerson said, “Mr. President, please don’t say anything about military options for Venezuela.” As we walked past the swimming pool on the way to the press pool, I said, “Rex, you know that he is a contrarian, and now the first thing he is going to say about Venezuela is that we are considering military options.” Sure enough, when a reporter asked Trump about Venezuela, he said, “Venezuela is not very far away, and the people are suffering, and they’re dying. We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option, if necessary.” Asked if it would be a U.S.-led military operation, Trump said, “We don’t talk about it, but a military operation, a military option is certainly something that we could pursue.”9 (There were no military options under consideration.) This was another slightly amusing example of how it would have been much easier on all of us if we had collaborated more closely.
Yet Tillerson and Mattis continued to prioritize control over collaboration, even after a series of failures ranging from the phone calls to Gulf leaders to the president’s Venezuela comments. There were many examples of this, including a meeting at the end of July in the Pentagon intended to convince Trump of the value of allies and American military presence abroad. I was on a short vacation in California, and Mattis and Tillerson had cut me out of the planning. The meeting was an utter disaster, ending with Trump berating all those present. It quickly devolved into a Trump rant in which allies were “trade abusers” and all present were “stupid people” who had been duped by those abusers. Someone leaked to the press that Tillerson, after the disastrous meeting, had called Trump “a moron.” The estrangement between him and Trump grew after he refused to deny that he had done so.
It was past time for us to work better together.
The president, who was always game for gossip, intrigue, and infighting, often asked leading questions to see if I might criticize Tillerson or Mattis. I never did. And I never would. And I told Mattis and Tillerson, “Whenever you are ready to expand your club of two to a club of three, I am embarrassingly free.”
There were glimmers of cooperation with Mattis but he and Tillerson continued to play bureaucratic power games. On June 19, Senior Director for Asia Matt Pottinger told me that he was not welcome at a security dialogue with Chinese officials that the State Department was hosting the following day. I called Rex, who simply said, “I am hosting the meeting, and Pottinger is not welcome.”
I told him, “That doesn’t make sense. Pottinger is the president’s senior advisor on Asia.” I then called Mattis and explained the situation. I said I would rather not bother the president with this and then asked him to talk to Tillerson. Mattis called back. He had talked to Rex: Pottinger would be admitted. I thanked him.
After Tillerson tried to exclude Pottinger, I went to the vice president for advice. I could deal with Tillerson’s hostile demeanor, but I was concerned about its effect on our ability to serve the president. I told him that, in addition to excluding NSC personnel from meetings, the State Department was withholding personnel from normal rotation to the NSC staff. I mentioned that I had asked Tillerson for a one-on-one meeting. I suspect Pence encouraged him to agree to it. I regretted having to ask the vice president to act like a vice principal of a high school, but it was the only option short of bringing the deterioration in the relationship to Trump.
Tillerson arrived for our June 30 meeting with his chief of staff, Margaret Peterlin. A meeting on the National Security Strategy was just breaking up, so I asked Nadia Schadlow, who had the lead for the strategy, to stay for what became a two-on-two meeting. The grievances Tillerson aired were ones we had already acted upon and rectified. He was not getting read-aheads on time; I told him that we sent them out at least three days in advance but that, in the future, would send them directly to him and Peterlin. He wanted more long-range predictability; I showed him the “horse blanket” calendar with events, presidential travel, principals committee meetings, and backward planning milestones for all the above. He raised “implementation by the White House;” I reminded him that every case to which he had objected had been at the behest of or approved by people in his department. He raised “inappropriate communications” by Nikki Haley, in particular, a speech she had given on Iran. I told him that I could not find any daylight between Haley’s statements and the president’s positions, while promising to send draft talking points for all key issues to him for approval before distributing them to the rest of the cabinet.
The sit-down wasn’t going well. I emphasized the purpose of the NSC and used 9/11 as an example of the dangers associated with a lack of coordination among agencies. Tillerson’s centralization in the department, combined with his inaccessibility, was slowing everything down. He was sabotaging the process by telling assistant secretaries not to attend White House meetings and withholding personnel. I explained that this behavior was not hurting me; it was hurting the president’s ability to set his foreign policy agenda and make timely decisions.
“Rex, you wanted fewer in-person PCs, but you are not replying to paper PCs on time,” I said. “And we send our coordinated materials in advance, but then you ‘table-drop’ briefings, so no one has an opportunity to read them in advance, and remote stations cannot access them at all.”
“I want it that way,” he responded.
We were clearly getting nowhere. The most productive agreement that emerged from our discussion was that to improve coordination among key cabinet officials, we would conduct brief phone conferences every Tuesday and Friday morning.
But I knew that the real problem was not lack of coordination or read-aheads or too many meetings or the planning horizon. The problem was, Tillerson and Mattis had decided to run foreign and defense policy. They viewed the president’s disruptive tendencies as dangerous.
Mattis had started saying he was determined to ensure that “reason triumphs over impulse.” It was clear that he and Tillerson were playing the role of reason and that Trump had been cast as impulse. That is why I did not take personal offense to their obstructionist or even their occasionally rude and petty behavior. They seemed to have concluded that Trump was an emergency and that anyone abetting him was an adversary. While Bannon had viewed my efforts to give Trump options as constraining the president from the alt-right agenda that he and many Trump voters wanted to advance, Mattis and Tillerson viewed my efforts as enabling a president who was a danger to the Constitution.
Trump’s denial of the 2020 presidential election results and his encouragement of the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol Building might be invoked as an ex post facto justification for their behavior. But in August 2017, I was just trying to help the elected president set his own course for foreign policy and national security. I saw many of Trump’s disruptions as opportunities to challenge and reverse what I believed were failing policy approaches, from the Middle East to South Asia, from the Indo-Pacific to Northeast Asia. Besides, the only person who had been elected was Trump, and he had the right to make disruptive decisions consistent with his authorities under Article II of the Constitution.
A secondary explanation for Tillerson’s and Mattis’s behavior may have been as simple as proximity. The NSC staff and the national security advisor are close to the Oval Office. Cabinet secretaries are farther away. Normally, the Departments of State and Defense are at loggerheads. But because Mattis and Tillerson were playing a competitive game of influence, they had aligned closely with each other, in part to compensate for the disadvantage of distance. I tried and failed to convince them that I was not in competition with them. I worked every day to give them greater access and to amplify rather than mute their voices. Whenever the president asked, “What do you think, General?” on questions that had policy implications, I would say something like “Let me consult with your cabinet and some experts and get back to you” or “We should have a discussion with Secretary Tillerson and Secretary Mattis on that.”
Finally, Tillerson and Mattis may have bought into Washington bureaucratic cultural folklore in which the NSC staff and the national security advisor appear as the usurpers of departments’ authority and prerogatives. Tillerson—like me, new to Washington—had been warned about the dangers of an overbearing NSA. Both men were close with Bob Gates, former secretary of defense, CIA director, and deputy national security advisor, who had shared his frustrations with an Obama administration NSC staff that grew to 450 people, lamenting, “It was that micromanaging that drove me crazy.”10
But ours was not the Susan Rice NSC staff, and no one was trying to run an operation out of the EEOB.
The tragedy is that Mattis and Tillerson were playing a zero-sum power game. Sometimes their actions seemed petty, but they were designed to put the NSC staff and me in our place. Mattis’s assistance with Tillerson was a temporary phenomenon. As I came under attack from the alt-right and the Russians, Mattis arranged a call with me that I thought might be an offer of assistance or encouragement. Instead, he informed me that he had decided that all military personnel detailed to the White House would have to wear their uniforms while on duty. If I wanted any exceptions, I could send a memo to a colonel on his staff.
I responded, “Mr. Secretary, you cannot be serious. Do you even know what I am dealing with over here?” Mattis knew that officers detailed to the NSC staff wear civilian clothes so people in the U.S. government and foreign counterparts do not confuse their military rank with their position. He did not raise the subject again.
Mattis and Tillerson seemed to believe that undermining me, the NSC process, or the NSC staff would garner more influence for them. But the more independent of the president and the White House they became, the less effective they would be. And the more they impeded coordination, the more difficult it would be to sustain a consistent approach to the nation’s most important challenges to security and prosperity. As a senior State Department official observed years later, “I didn’t understand why the Secretary [Tillerson] had to pick fights with the White House . . . I mean with H.R. in particular. . . . It undermined his own effectiveness as the primary formulator, implementer of foreign policy.”11
I had tried everything I could think of to improve the relationship. I am sure I made mistakes. I remained calm and respectful in our interactions, but I am terrible at masking emotion. I might have complained directly to the president, but I really did want Tillerson and Mattis to maintain a good relationship with Trump and help the president develop and implement his foreign policy and defense agenda.
Moreover, I had realized that Trump was not a team builder. He enjoyed and contributed to interpersonal drama in the White House and across the administration.
Chapter 13
Movement in a Resistant Element
Deadly Barcelona attack is worst in a day of violence in Spain . . . PRESIDENT UNVEILS NEW AFGHANISTAN, SOUTH ASIA STRATEGY . . . Trump is expected to deploy about 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan and try to tighten expectations on its government and that of neighboring Pakistan . . . Trump says U.S. can’t afford ‘hasty’ withdrawal from Afghanistan . . . ‘WE ARE NOT NATION-BUILDING AGAIN,’ TRUMP SAYS WHILE UNVEILING AFGHANISTAN STRATEGY . . . former Afghan president Hamid Karzai [denounced] Trump’s strategy as “a clear message of killing, killing, killing” . . . Afghanistan endorses Trump’s revised strategy; Taliban warns of ‘graveyard’ . . . “OUR TROOPS WILL FIGHT TO WIN,” TRUMP SAID . . . TRUMP’S AFGHANISTAN WAR STRATEGY: USE MILITARY TO FORCE PEACE TALKS WITH TALIBAN . . . The Pentagon has described the war as a “stalemate” . . . TRUMP’S AFGHANISTAN STRATEGY TURNS UP THE HEAT ON PAKISTAN . . . PUTIN, RESPONDING TO SANCTIONS, ORDERS U.S. TO CUT DIPLOMATIC STAFF BY 755 . . . U.S. RETALIATES AGAINST RUSSIA, ORDERS CLOSURE OF CONSULATE, ANNEXES . . . Trump mulling withdrawal from Korea trade deal . . . NORTH KOREAN NUCLEAR TEST DRAWS U.S. WARNING OF ‘MASSIVE MILITARY RESPONSE’ . . . POSSIBLE TWO-STAGE HYDROGEN BOMB SEEN ‘GAME CHANGER’ FOR NORTH KOREA . . . Trump Moves Closer to Decertification of Iran Nuclear Deal . . . TILLERSON, MATTIS, MCMASTER PRESENT IRAN PLAN TO TRUMP . . . DONALD TRUMP DENOUNCES IRAN OVER NUCLEAR DEAL
