So Help Me God, page 30
Trump was eager to keep his promise. Most of his administration was less eager. The State Department and intelligence agencies were against the move. Rex Tillerson encouraged the president to wait. So did Mattis. They argued that it would lead to violence. Foreign heads of state felt the same. During a gracious call, French president Emmanuel Macron told Trump that moving the embassy couldn’t be done. But there were a few members of the administration who felt differently, including Nikki Haley and our ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, a brilliant real estate lawyer, the son of a rabbi, and a longtime friend of the president—and Jared Kushner, who had a great heart for Israel. I supported the move as well.
“We’ll see. We’ll see,” he said when warned about the danger of relocating the embassy. He and Friedman also saw moving the embassy as part of a larger strategy, a new approach to achieving peace between Israel and its neighbors, which had been elusive so far. Like so many of Trump’s attitudes toward governing, it came from his business background. To get a deal done, you take the one thing that is nonnegotiable off the table, in this case that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. At one point he looked at me and asked, “You still think we should do this, right?” My answer was “Right.” I saw God’s providential hand at work. I felt that my career—much of my life, really—had prepared and led me to that moment, put me into the position to sit by Trump’s desk when the decision was made. I remembered the horrors and sadness I had felt during visits distant and recent to Dachau, what I had learned about the incredible spirit of the Jewish people, who had endured centuries of persecution, from my late sister-in-law Judy and her family and my lifelong friend Tom Rose, and my travels to Israel while in Congress and as governor. When almost everyone—his cabinet, the diplomatic team, the national security advisor, allies in Europe and the Middle East—discouraged Trump from moving the embassy, I was able to provide reassurance and reinforce his resolve. The truth, though, was that he never wavered; he knew it was the right thing to do.
During a meeting late in 2017, the president went around the large oval table in the Cabinet Room, asking each member of his team for his opinion on recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. The majority, including Tillerson and Mattis, were against it. It would create chaos and lead to violence, they argued. As was his custom, Trump asked for my opinion last. I told him that it was the right thing to do historically, that Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish state, that he had promised to recognize it as such, and that he would be the first president to honor that promise. On December 6, Trump officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Tellingly, given the sparse support for the move, when the president made the announcement from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House, I was the only one who joined him. Behind us was a portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart. I thought of his legendary letter to the congregation of Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, with its wish of goodwill for “the Children of the stock of Abraham.”
As 2017 drew to a close, when I was not on the road, I was often at the Capitol working to help pass tax cuts. The president was heavily engaged in that, and so was I. He turned on the charm with legislators and lobbied them respectfully, listening to their objections. “I hear you, but we can get this done?” he would ask. I would talk and listen to members of Congress as well, asking what their issues were. Let me go to work on it, I’d say. I met often, not just with conservative Republicans but with moderates as well. I invited them to the vice president’s residence for meetings and working sessions. I met with and pursued support from outside organizations that advocated tax reform, including Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the Heritage Foundation, and the Club for Growth. I talked to governors, many of whom I knew from my time leading Indiana, catalogued their ideas about what tax reductions would best impact their states, and conveyed their concerns as well.
It was an all-out coordinated effort, supported greatly by the work of Representative Kevin Brady of Texas and Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. The two men, both of whom I had known during my time in the House, steered the tax bill through the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees. They helped reconcile the party’s competing populist and more traditional supply-side impulses. The House passed its version, which reduced taxes for almost all Americans and cut the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 20 percent, on December 20 with little drama. The vote was 224–201.
Passage in the Senate was going to be a bigger challenge, of course. Three senators were uncertain as the final bill came up for a vote. One of them was Susan Collins, a moderate from Maine who was holding out for changes to the bill. As the Senate leadership worked with her, Ivanka Trump, who had asked early on if she could help with the effort, partnered with Collins. The two worked together to secure an expansion of the child tax credit in the bill, and Ivanka traveled to Maine, joining Collins for forums on the tax bill. When the senator announced her support for the bill on December 1, Ivanka had played a large part in securing it.
Bob Corker, a plucky senator from Tennessee, had a rocky record with Trump. Corker had interviewed with Trump in 2016 for the vice presidential nomination and had then been considered for secretary of state, a position he wanted. A few months into the administration, however, he turned critical, complaining about what he considered to be “chaos” in the White House. A back-and-forth between Trump and the senator followed before a thaw and then another round of adversarial Twitter exchanges between the two during the summer of 2017. Corker’s votes followed a similar trajectory: originally a no, he flipped to a yes at the last minute. That left one holdout.
Over the years, Jeff Flake and I had followed different paths: in 2013, I had left Congress to return to Indiana; that same year, he had moved from the House to the Senate. When Trump nominated me as running mate, one of the earliest trips I made was to Arizona to meet with Jeff and John McCain, both of whom were Trump-skeptics. We were still good friends; that never changed. But Jeff couldn’t support Trump. One issue was immigration. Jeff, who represented a border state, simply objected to Trump’s hard-line, harsh language on illegal immigration. A devout Mormon, he objected to Trump’s blunt style. He said he would support me but not Trump. I wasn’t running for president, though. I don’t think he ever really gave Trump a chance.
As voting began on the bill, Jeff was noncommittal. He was concerned about the bill’s potential to increase the deficit. And, I think, he wasn’t so eager to give Trump a victory. On the night of December 19, I called Jeff from the vice president’s residence. Members of Congress are given the option of buying their desks when they leave office. Though I hadn’t originally been interested, Karen had persuaded me to purchase the desk I had worked from during my time in the House. Talking to Jeff, I sat at that desk, the same one we had huddled around back when we had been rebel congressmen, Butch and Sundance. Talking to him was a walk down memory lane. But it was also business. We had both worked for years to lower taxes and reform the tax code. We were the ones who had thought George W. Bush’s tax cuts were too small in 2001! Whatever his issue with President Trump, I told Jeff, “This is what we came here to do.” He didn’t disagree. He wanted to work with the administration on immigration reform, on finding a solution to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), a program created by an executive order by President Obama that had delayed the deportation of children brought to the country illegally. I didn’t make him any promises, but I said I would try. He didn’t give me any commitment on the tax bill. He later informed the Republican leadership that he was a yes. The Senate passed the bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, by a vote of 51–48 on December 19. I presided over the vote. It cut taxes across almost all brackets, dropping the top individual rate from 39.6 percent to 37 percent and reducing the corporate tax rate to 21 percent. It was the Trump administration’s first major legislative victory and a big, though hard-earned, one. And it was a victory for the American people.
As the year came to a close, our attention turned to Afghanistan.
H. R. McMaster had asked me to have regular calls with the president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, following the announcements of the president’s new military strategy earlier in the fall. He told me that the president was not inclined to participate in routine calls with heads of state, reserving them for times when issues needed to be discussed. But our goal was to maintain a strong relationship, and I readily agreed to the outreach.
In the fall, my staff had proposed that I travel to Afghanistan right before Christmas to visit with the troops executing the United States’ new military strategy. They observed that no one in the West Wing had gotten a firsthand look at our progress. And with the president’s ongoing desire to ultimately bring our troops home, it was important that someone go.
The following Monday at our weekly luncheon, I told the president that my team had put together a detailed proposal for a trip and slid a copy of the itinerary in front of him. As the president looked at the proposal, to the dismay of my chief of staff, who had planned the trip, I told him that I was willing to go but said, “You should do it.” That was in keeping with my practice of always deferring to the president. He seemed intrigued by my suggestion. I told the president, based on my earlier travels as a congressman and governor, how important I thought visits to our troops were and that I thought the commander in chief should go first. With that we walked through the whole plan and the president said that he would think about it and let me know. In the end, he would travel to visit troops the following year, and he directed me to make the trip. But deferring to him and having him make the decision for me to go were important to me—and to him.
On December 22, Karen and I left for Afghanistan, flying in the belly of an anonymous C-17 transport plane. Inside it was a retrofitted Airstream trailer with an office and a pullout bed. The trip, for security reasons, was top secret. Only a handful of administration officials and the press flying with us knew where we were headed. My wife had first traveled with me following the end of major combat operations in Iraq and had been a great encouragement to our troops and their families everywhere she had gone.
When we arrived at nightfall at Bagram Air Base after a stop to refuel in Germany, it was the same scenario I was used to by now: when I arrived in a potentially dangerous area, military officials always wanted to place me in a secure conference room, keep me there, hold meetings there, and then fly me out safely. But I am a big believer in walking the ground and being seen. If you are going to fly the flag, fly it. We were closer to victory in Afghanistan than ever before. I wanted to fly into Kabul and land at the presidential palace, and I let that be known. My staff said it wasn’t possible. When I protested, they said I should talk to the general. The general was John Nicholson, Jr., who was commanding the US forces in Afghanistan. He explained to me that because of fog and clouds, visibility was poor and landing at the palace, in the center of Kabul, might be impossible.
“Sir, we can get you up,” he explained, “but there’s no guarantee we can get you down.”
“Well, General,” I answered, “one thing I know for sure: if we don’t go up, we for sure won’t get back down.” He smiled. “You got a point.” If I was willing to try, so was he. I put on a bulletproof vest and a Kevlar helmet and buckled up inside a heavily armed Chinook helicopter. During the thirty-minute flight into Kabul, the cabin remained completely dark. We got down, and when we arrived in a courtyard outside the presidential palace, Ghani was there waiting. He projected a quiet strength that belied the underlying weakness of his government. The tenuous nature of the Afghan government was evident, though, when I realized that Ghani’s main political rival, Abdullah Abdullah, was the nation’s chief executive, a position equivalent to the American vice president. He joined our meetings at the presidential palace. As someone who now understood a bit about vice presidents, that struck me as an impossible arrangement. In the early days of our republic, we, too, had had an unworkable system: the runner-up in the Electoral College had become the vice president. When the Afghan government collapsed amid the disastrous withdrawal of American forces under the Biden administration, I knew my suspicions had been correct.
I delivered remarks to the soldiers in a hangar back at Bagram, and the mention of Trump’s name elicited thunderous applause. They knew their commander in chief had their back, that he was going to get them the resources to get the job done and return home. When the trip received significant media coverage, the president was very pleased that he had sent me. It was a privilege for Karen and me to be among those American heroes.
The White House had originally planned to host a Rose Garden signing ceremony for the tax bill in early 2018. But Trump had promised to deliver the cuts before Christmas. On the morning of the twenty-second, before we left for Afghanistan, he called me to talk about signing the bill. He told me he wanted to do it now, not wait. Planning a formal ceremony would take too long. An Oval Office event was quickly arranged that morning, and the bill, the administration’s most significant domestic accomplishment of its first year, was signed. It was done with little fanfare, but it did keep a promise.
The year 2017, then, ended much the way it had begun. On the first day of the year and the administration, my son, Michael, had remarked that the president had kept his promise not to reduce the military. Now, on one of the last days of the year, he kept his promise to cut taxes before Christmas. As Michael remarked, the little things are the big things.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE On a Foundation of Faith
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
—Hebrews 11:1 (ESV)
Karen and I spent New Year’s in Colorado, catching our breath after a busy but amazing first year in the vice presidency. We had stopped off in Columbus on our way back to the capital to celebrate her birthday with her family. My wife was the first little girl born in Kansas in 1957. Then it was back to work, another year with an ambitious agenda—we were going to keep the economy roaring, secure our border, reform the country’s criminal justice system, confront the growing threats to the world’s safety from North Korea, and take the upper hand in the competition against China. And I was going to do everything I could to help the president achieve all that.
After takeoff, Air Force Two took a hard turn and banked to the left. The sky was clear; I could see for miles in all directions. I shifted in my seat, leaned toward the small window, and looked down on Columbus. I oriented myself, then realized I could see my elementary school, Parkside. Then I spotted what seemed from so high above like just feet from it, the street I grew up on, Hunter Place, the home I had left to go to college. I hurriedly snapped photos with my phone. Then the Boeing 757 leveled and jetted east, back to Washington. In a few minutes my hometown was out of sight. I couldn’t forget the view, though, or how blessed our family was by the assignment, even with its thorns. It was a uniquely American moment: a small-town kid from southern Indiana flying high above his home in that blue-and-white jet.
One of my first tasks in 2018 was an easy one. On January 3, I was back at the Capitol to swear in a new senator from Minnesota, Tina Smith. I was joined for the ceremony by former vice president Walter Mondale, who was, of course, also from Minnesota, and Joe Biden. After the ceremony I visited with the two former vice presidents, who were affable and funny. We bonded over the peculiar position in the US government we had in common. I had not previously met Mondale and took the opportunity not only to tell him that I have great respect for his career of service but I also joked that I hoped he wouldn’t be offended to know that I had actually voted for him—and Jimmy Carter—in 1980. He was shocked. I also recalled how he had flown into Columbus as vice president on Air Force Two in 1978. He had come to town to campaign for Phil Sharp, the same congressman I would run against early in my political career. His motorcade had departed from the airport and driven into Columbus. I was working at Ray’s Marathon, pumping gas, when I saw the limo approaching. It came swinging by on South Central Street and turned onto Highway 31. The procession of cars slowed as it neared downtown. I stood there in my blue Marathon shirt with my first name stitched on my pocket and stared into the rear window of the limousine. I raised the hand that wasn’t on the gas pump and waved at him. He waved back. It was the greatest moment in my young life! He wasn’t a remote official; he was a fellow citizen. Even if it was just a few seconds, and a quick wave, it was a connection.
Now, some forty years later, as we sat around a coffee table in the vice president’s ceremonial office, I recounted the story for Mondale. “Well, to be honest with you, I don’t actually remember that,” he confessed with a smile. Everyone laughed. Then he grew philosophical and looked at me sincerely. The most important thing public servants do, he observed, is to show kindness to the people we serve. And he was right. As vice president I always kept my eyes out of the window of the car, always made eye contact, always waved at the people on the other side. I shook every hand I could. In the United States, public men and women owe the people respect, not the other way around—because someday a kid standing on the sidewalk waving will be riding in that car, and the vice president waving back will return to being a private citizen. History has shown us that it is those ordinary Americans who often change the course of our nation for the better.
