So Help Me God, page 37
The pleasantries over, it was time to talk business. Before I had left for Asia, I had met with Trump in the small dining room near the Oval Office and asked him if he had any particular message for Xi. “Yeah, okay,” he had said before sharing the message. I had pulled out a note card and pen, jotted down what he told me, and brought it with me. With only a few minutes to talk before the leaders would pose for the group photo and sit for dinner, I said to the Chinese leader, “President Xi, President Trump gave me two messages for you.” He nodded, with some apprehension. “First, he wanted me to tell you that he likes you very much.” After the translator relayed the first message, Xi softened and smiled. Growing animated, he told me he liked Trump very much, too. Right then the crowd began moving; it was time to snap the photo and have dinner. We parted ways.
During the dinner Karen and I sat next to Prime Minister Morrison. We bonded over our Christian faith and conservative values. He told me that his party would win the upcoming Australian elections against all odds. And it did. After a long trip, Karen and I were watching our energy and decided to turn in before dessert was served. As we said our goodbyes, I made my way down the banquet table to where President Xi was sitting, five chairs away. “Mr. President, excuse me for interrupting, but I want to get my wife some rest,” I told him. He stood up, shook my hand, and then said I had told him there was a second message from President Trump. Right. “President Trump said to also tell you that you have to open your markets. When you see him in Argentina, you need to be prepared to open your markets.” The two would meet at the G20 Summit in Buenos Aires later in the month. With a furrowed brow he replied that dialogue is good.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT Go Fix This
Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved.
—2 Timothy 2:15
In 2018, our son, Michael, now a first lieutenant in the marines, made his first tailhook landing. It’s difficult and risky, guiding an aircraft onto the small space of an aircraft carrier and snagging the plane’s tail on cables stretched across the deck. The ship he landed on was the USS George H. W. Bush, a Nimitz-class carrier. Michael was set to graduate from flight school in August. A month before his graduation, I sent President Bush a photo of the landing. I wasn’t writing as a vice president to a former president but as a proud dad to a former aviator. Could you sign this picture for him? I asked.
Shortly afterward we received the signed photo in the mail, accompanied by a letter dated August 29. “The road to becoming a Marine Corps aviator,” it read, “is long and arduous and requires grit and determination, qualities I am sure you learned from your parents.” President Bush gave us perhaps too much credit. In closing, the former president wrote, “Though we have not met, I share the pride your father has for you during this momentous occasion. I wish you many CAVU days ahead.” CAVU is an old aviation acronym for “ceiling and visibility unlimited.” Bush had known it ever since he had joined the navy at the age of eighteen.
Michael was thrilled by the letter. Not long after it arrived, I learned from Bush’s chief of staff that the former president, who was legendary for his letter writing, was writing only two or three a day because of his failing health. Bush never wrote an autobiography, so the story of his life in his own words is spread out across the countless letters he wrote, including the one he sent my son. I remember meeting him in 1988 as a twenty-eight-year-old congressional candidate, during the same trip to Washington when I met President Reagan. If sitting across from Reagan was like looking at Mount Rushmore, spending time with Bush was like being with an old friend. And his vice presidency—a loyal counselor and advisor to an outsider president—was an influence on my own.
After Bush died, on November 30, the Bush family asked me to deliver a eulogy. I told Bush’s sons George W. and Jeb about the letter to Michael, and they urged me to share it when I spoke in the Capitol Rotunda on December 3. Surrounding the president’s flag-draped casket that day were generations of leaders, Democrat and Republican, who had paused their partisanship to salute one of their own. It didn’t last long. A few weeks later, the longest government shutdown in US history began.
During our conversations leading up to the election, the president and I had debated how bad a Nancy Pelosi speakership might be for the administration’s agenda. We were about to find out. In the closing weeks of the year, Congress worked on an appropriations bill to fund the government. During the campaign Trump had promised, in an effort to curb illegal immigration, that he would build a “great, great wall” on the southern US border. Though he had taken executive action to initiate construction of the wall during our first year, Democrats in Congress had successfully postponed funding of the wall in previous spending bills. But this time Trump was adamant that he would not sign the annual appropriations bill if it did not include funding for a border wall.
The House, still controlled by Republicans until the end of the year, scrapped an initial bill, then passed a stopgap measure to fund the wall that Democrats in the Senate filibustered, causing an impasse. Pelosi was set to assume the speakership on January 3. The president now had to negotiate with the new speaker and Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, to keep the government running. And he was not about to give in on the wall or much of anything else. The morning of December 11 was a preview of things to come.
Pelosi, the speaker-designate, and Schumer came to the White House to meet with the president and me. I spent the morning preparing for a phone call with Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi. After the conversation concluded, I joined Trump, Pelosi, and Schumer in the Oval Office. The meeting had been planned to be closed to the press, but Trump invited reporters and their cameras into the Oval Office. To my right was Pelosi, seated on a couch. Across from her, to the president’s left, was Schumer on another couch. The meeting got off to a pleasant enough start. “So the wall will get built, but we may not have an agreement today,” Trump began before turning to Pelosi. “Nancy, would you like to say something?” It was all downhill from there.
For nearly twenty minutes, she and Schumer argued with the president, interrupted, even insulted him as the nation watched on live television. Early in the meeting, Pelosi mentioned the “Trump shutdown,” and claimed that Americans were losing their jobs; the unemployment rate was 3.6 percent. Schumer claimed that there was no support in Congress for the border wall and reminded the president that “elections have consequences.” Trump thought for a second, then shot back, “And that’s why the country is doing so well,” making the point that his election had left the country in a much better place.
Eventually the meeting fell apart over the fact that Trump would not sign any appropriations bill that did not fund the border wall and Pelosi would not include a border wall in any budget. The two Democratic leaders were clearly uncomfortable with the on-camera arguing, but Trump relished it. “Oh, it’s not bad, Nancy, it’s called transparency.” I didn’t say a word. And I couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise anyway.
My view was that it was not my job to direct traffic when the president was driving the conversation. My silence, and probably my somewhat pained expression, was quickly turned into a meme: Twitter equated my performance with the classic holiday toy Elf on a Shelf, the rosy-cheeked, button-eyed messenger from the North Pole that families place on shelves or elsewhere around the house at Christmastime. “Pence on a Shelf” briefly became a thing. There were even a few tweets with a photoshopped picture of the meeting with me in a red elf suit with a pointed hat. Always happy to provide a laugh.
After Pelosi and Schumer departed, the president looked at me and said, “Mike, go to Capitol Hill, fix this.”
I may have been silent during the meeting, but from that point on I was busy during the long shutdown. Democrats scoffed at the idea of a border wall, but there were thousands of illegal immigrants pouring across the US southern border, more than sixty thousand a month as 2019 began. The volume was higher than ever and the immigration patterns had changed. Twenty years ago, the majority of migrants apprehended at the border had been from Mexico and usually on their own. That had made it much easier to return them to their native country. Now entire families were traveling from across Central America up through Mexico, making their return far more challenging. Mexico wasn’t particularly cooperative with us, interested in taking the migrants, or doing anything to block their path.
The president called it a crisis, and in his view, the wall was one way—he never claimed the only way—of dealing with it. In fact, Schumer, Obama, Biden, and Hillary Clinton had all voted for the Secure Fence Act of 2006, funding seven hundred miles of fence along the southern border. So the Democrats’ argument was never about the effectiveness of a wall in deterring illegal immigration; it was about denying Trump a victory, about humiliating the president.
So the government closed. And negotiations began. Karen and I canceled our holiday travel plans and remained in Washington over Christmas. Trump called off his trip to Mar-a-Lago, where he usually spent the holiday. One day during Christmas week we were talking on the phone, discussing negotiations to reopen the government, when he asked me what I was doing that night. Karen and I have a Friday-night routine of ordering pizza, one we continued while living in the vice president’s residence. When I shared our plans, he asked if we could get together that night. And so Donald Trump, accompanied by Jared Kushner and Mick Mulvaney, now the acting White House chief of staff, came over to our house for pizza. We set up a small table in the dining room on the first floor of the Naval Observatory. When Karen learned that Melania wasn’t coming, she sat that one out. It was just four guys having pizza on a Friday night. Mulvaney said the grace over the meal, and we dug in. We had a relaxed and wide-ranging discussion. The president had the ability to drop the formidable persona when he wanted to—or when he was tired—and be just one of the guys. That was one of those times. The only thing missing was a deck of cards.
When the New Year began, I led the White House delegation, joined by Kushner and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, in meetings on Capitol Hill, often accompanied by my favorite wingman, Michael J. Pence, who was home for Christmas. We met not just with members of Congress but also with staffers, twice on Saturday and Sunday, the fifth and sixth of January, in the vice president’s ceremonial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Pelosi’s position was that she would not negotiate on the border wall until the government reopened. The president wanted $5.7 billion for the wall. After two weeks of negotiating, the president offered the Democrats a deal: temporary amnesty for “dreamers” in exchange for $5.7 billion for the wall plus $800 million in humanitarian aid for the border. I wasn’t surprised that Trump was willing to offer asylum for the dreamers; he had given a speech in Arizona during the 2016 campaign in which he had outlined a ten-point immigration plan that stipulated that after building a border wall and dealing with illegal immigrants with existing criminal records and those with visa overstays, he would work to reform our broken immigration system. There was always much more to Trump’s immigration policy than the wall. He led with law and order but was prepared to follow with compassion. In any case, it was a fair proposal. The Democrats refused it.
On the twenty-fifth, the president agreed to reopen the government—with a commitment to continue negotiating over the wall for the next three weeks with the threat of another shutdown if no progress was made. But the Democrats were never going to give in. It was left to Jared Kushner, working with Patrick Shanahan, now the acting secretary of defense, to find a solution. On February 15, the president would use his executive authority granted by the Constitution to declare a national emergency at the southern border. That allowed the administration to use $8 billion already appropriated for military spending to build the wall. Congress quickly passed a joint resolution ending the national emergency. Trump vetoed it in March. It was the first veto of his presidency.
With funding for the border wall secured, President Trump continued to press for policies that would end the crisis on the US southern border. Cartels, which make as much money on human trafficking as on trafficking narcotics, were hauling humans up north to the border for $5,000 apiece. When the illegal immigrants reached the border, they applied for asylum, claiming persecution in their native country. They then would be given a hearing date, usually in a year and a half. Then, free to go, they disappeared into the United States. But our administration believed that forcing them to wait in Mexico for that year and half would discourage them. Secretary Nielsen had reached an agreement with the Mexican government at the end of 2018 that required illegal immigrants entering the United States from Mexico to remain in Mexico while their cases proceeded. But that agreement had never been enforced.
During an Oval Office meeting in late May, the president was presented with the latest illegal immigration figures. He was furious. He stood up from the Resolute Desk and paced around the room. “Here’s the thing,” he warned me and Nielsen and her staff, “you just need to tell ’em I am going to tax everything coming across the border at five percent until they agree to do their part. Just tell them that.” Then he turned to me. “Mike, you get with the Mexican officials tomorrow, you meet with them and tell them how it’s going to go down.” Then he pulled out his phone and tweeted, “On June 10th, the United States will impose a 5% Tariff on all goods coming into our Country from Mexico, until such time as illegal migrants, coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP.”
Upward of 80 percent of Mexico’s exports are shipped to the United States. The tariff would have devastated the country’s economy. It wouldn’t have been great for our country’s, either. The next day I gathered in the Roosevelt Room with Mike Pompeo and US trade representative Robert Lighthizer, sitting across the table from the Mexican ambassador, Martha Bárcena Coqui; Mexican foreign secretary Marcelo Ebrard; and the nation’s foreign policy team. They pulled out charts and graphs with elaborate explanations for why Mexico didn’t have the infrastructure or capacity to hold the immigrants while the United States processed their cases.
I waited until they finished their presentations and listened patiently to their explanations. “Are you guys done?” I asked across the table. Yes, they said, they just needed President Trump to understand that Mexico couldn’t hold the migrants. “Okay, President Trump wanted me to meet with you about this and all have to say is… he really means it,” I warned. “I’ve been working with him for three years. He’s not bluffing. He really is going to do it. And we have until Monday to get this figured out. And if we don’t, he really is going to impose a five percent tariff and ratchet it up to twenty-five percent.” Pompeo piled on: “The vice president is right, it’s going to happen.” The Mexican delegation was stunned. Pompeo suggested that the ambassador and foreign secretary go to the State Department with him and hash out an agreement in writing. The next day he came back to the White House with one. Trump wasn’t surprised.
Remain in Mexico, as it was called, reduced illegal immigration at the US southern border by 90 percent. It was a classic example of Trump’s hardball approach and our ability to leverage his unorthodox style. When he made threats across the table, the United States’ negotiating partners flinched because they knew he meant them. I played my part, as usual, by delivering the message with a smile and then closing the sale.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE Changing of the Guard and Walking in the Ruins of Evil
Remember the days of old; consider the generations long past.
—Deuteronomy 32:7
The new year began with thunder. And more comings and goings. After two years of valuable service, Jim Mattis tendered his resignation at the end of 2018. It was a stand on principle: the president was committed to withdrawing US troops from Syria, but Mattis, who had fought alongside the Kurds, believed that removing US forces would leave them at the mercy of the Syrian and Russian armies. He understood that the president wanted to bring the troops home, and rather than fight, he stepped down. It was an honorable thing to do. At first the president graciously accepted his resignation and said he was retiring with “distinction” at the end of February. But when his resignation letter became public, it was seen as being critical of the president, who quickly tweeted that he had “essentially” fired Mattis and announced that he would be removing him from office two months before his planned departure. I would have preferred, in the words of Douglas MacArthur, that the old soldier be allowed to just fade away.
Also, since becoming chief of staff, John Kelly had brought order and structure to a White House that was often freewheeling. He had created a process for managing the Oval Office. He and the president had a very good and successful working relationship. In their time together, they had won tax cuts, confirmed a Supreme Court justice, and overseen a diplomatic breakthrough on the Korean Peninsula. But with the midterm elections over and the president’s campaign for reelection beginning, I perceived that their relationship began to cool. Kelly’s service wasn’t political, he wasn’t partisan—it was duty to country, to the president. But as 2019 began, it was clear that the president wanted a new chief of staff, someone with political experience as the election year and our own reelection campaign approached. Mick Mulvaney, a former congressman from South Carolina who had served as the president’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, stepped in as acting chief of staff when Kelly left in January.
There are few people in public life I admire more than Jim Mattis and John Kelly. As Mattis told me back in 2016, they rode for the brand, the brand being America. Mattis had overseen the destruction of ISIS. Kelly was a superb chief of staff and a much-needed gatekeeper, much to the president’s benefit. In the waning days of the administration, one of his successors, Mark Meadows, a congressman from North Carolina, would fling the doors to the Oval Office wide open, allowing people in who should not even have set foot on the White House grounds, let alone have access to Trump.
