The Divider, page 11
Trump was not interested. He and Bannon had their own plans for the meeting. He opened their session by presenting a figurative bill. “Angela, you owe me one trillion dollars,” the president said shortly after they sat down.[15] This, according to the funny math Bannon had an aide pull together, was the amount that Germany should have been spending on defense if it committed the 2 percent of its GDP annually that NATO allies had agreed to. Never mind that 2 percent was just a goal and not due to go into effect until 2024. Even then, the money was meant to go to Germany’s own defense budget, not to NATO’s coffers and certainly not to the United States. But Bannon and Trump pretended it was money being sucked directly from the United States Treasury, a fiction the president would go on to repeat scores of times.
To Trump, NATO was a sort of protection racket that the United States had been suckered into for decades. Facts were irrelevant. He believed that “literally, Angela Merkel owed him a check,” one senior aide said. Trump’s more responsible advisers would later claim they tried to tell him over and over that the 2 percent was not owed to America or even owed at all. He did not listen.
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Trump’s disdain for America’s traditional allies came with an equally striking corollary—his desire, even eagerness, to court the world’s autocrats. And not just Vladimir Putin. The same week as Merkel’s visit, in fact, Trump played host to a figure who would end up having far more influence over American foreign policy in the Trump years than the chancellor of Germany: Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, known by his initials MBS.
Although just thirty-one years old and technically still the deputy crown prince, MBS was the ascendant power in Saudi Arabia, a self-styled modernizer and architect of his country’s stalemated, American-supported war in neighboring Yemen. The Saudis and their allies in the United Arab Emirates decided early on to forge a close relationship with Trump after years of disappointment with Barack Obama, whom they viewed as too sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood opposition movement and too soft on Iran, the mortal enemy of the Gulf Arabs. They got their entrée into Trump’s circle through Tom Barrack, a wealthy Lebanese American investor and Trump friend who had managed his inaugural festivities. Barrack recommended they meet Jared Kushner. “You will love him and he agrees with our Agenda!” he wrote in May 2016 to Yousef al-Otaiba, the politically connected ambassador from the United Arab Emirates in Washington.[16] After the election, Rick Gerson, a hedge fund manager also close to Trump, brokered a visit by Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, the de facto ruler of the Emirates, to meet Kushner in New York. “I promise you this will be the start of a special and historic relationship,” Gerson texted the prince afterward.[17]
The Emirati leader in turn connected Kushner with MBS in Saudi Arabia. Just four years younger than Kushner, MBS had grand ambitions for transforming Saudi society, lifting some of the most oppressive religious-based rules while drawing international investment, although he had a strong autocratic side that did not brook dissent. Barrack reassured the Arabs not to worry about Trump’s anti-Muslim campaign rhetoric. “He’s just being hyperbolic,” he told Otaiba. A Saudi delegation that met with Kushner after the election came away cautiously optimistic. “The inner circle is predominantly deal makers who lack familiarity with political customs and deep institutions, and they support Jared Kushner,” the delegation said in an internal report on its trip.[18]
Having bonded over the phone and in text messages, MBS worked behind the scenes with Kushner on an unlikely idea that no other American president would have even contemplated. They wanted Trump to make his first foreign trip as president to Saudi Arabia. This would be an epic snub of America’s democratic neighbors. Every president since Ronald Reagan had made his first official visit to Canada or Mexico. MBS further bypassed diplomatic channels by snagging a last-minute lunch in the State Dining Room with Trump after Merkel’s trip to Washington was delayed a few days because of a snowstorm. It was not an auspicious start for the so-called Axis of Adults.
Unorthodox ideas like this seemed to come from nowhere all the time in the new administration. Outside advisers, old friends and business associates, canny lobbyists, random Mar-a-Lago members, and junior senators all had as much chance, if not more, than any member of the cabinet at getting Trump’s ear. But it was not always clear whose interests were being served. Tom Barrack would later come under investigation for what prosecutors claimed was an undisclosed foreign-lobbying effort to shape the new administration’s policy toward the Middle East—including pushing for close ties between Trump and the young Saudi prince.
Foreign policy was being made in a free-for-all. This dynamic was immediately apparent to Bob Corker, the Tennessee senator who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and had been considered at one point as Trump’s vice presidential running mate. Just after Thanksgiving following the election, Corker had been called to Trump Tower for an interview for secretary of state. Corker showed up early, only to find Trump talking with the Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate whose major cause other than the GOP was the state of Israel and its longtime prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Adelson had announced a $25 million gift to Trump in September of 2016, as part of a $65 million overall donation to Republican campaigns, making him the largest single Republican donor that year. His investment looked prescient when Trump won, and several weeks later, the president-elect and Bannon listened approvingly in Trump Tower as Adelson demanded action on a pet issue: moving the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Such a relocation had been official American policy for years but had been perpetually put off because of the furor everyone was sure would erupt and the expectation that the move should come only along with real progress toward a lasting settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. “Sheldon was saying we need to move the embassy and do it on day one,” Corker recalled. Trump was eager to oblige—so eager that Corker later learned he had to be talked out of literally announcing the embassy move in the first hours of his presidency.
Like other senators used to the discipline of past White Houses, Corker found himself both dazzled by the access and disturbed by it. In the early weeks of Trump’s tenure, he would go to the White House for a meeting and find himself pulled into the private dining room off the Oval Office to share a cheeseburger with the president. It was quickly apparent to Corker and others that decision making was essentially random, as much about who got to talk to Trump, and when, as anything else. White House staffers were soon calling Corker with strategic advice on how to be the last voice in Trump’s ear: “I would get calls at 6:30 in the morning from a staffer asking me to weigh in on a decision that was going to be made at 10,” Corker would recall, “and they asked me to call him at 9:45.” Over the holidays, Corker had spoken with Trump and asked him to nominate a fellow Tennessean, Bill Hagerty, as ambassador to Japan. Within an hour, Trump had called Hagerty and offered him the job.
Trump, Corker came to realize, was especially drawn to outlandish ideas that might offer the chance to fulfill his campaign promise to blow up the existing international order. The new president was absolutely the “wrecking ball” he had claimed to be, the Senate Foreign Relations chairman said a few weeks into the administration; the only question was whether he could, or would, “evolve.”[19]
On April 6, the evolution theory got a surprising boost. Trump, once again visiting Mar-a-Lago for the weekend, this time for a summit with China’s Xi Jinping, hastily convened his most senior advisers in a room at his club little bigger than a broom closet and decided to launch a missile strike against the rogue Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad in retaliation for a sarin nerve gas attack on civilians.
Photographs of the victims had horrified the normally indifferent president. “Even beautiful babies were cruelly murdered in this very barbaric attack,” Trump said in announcing the decision to hit the Syrian airbase from which the chemical weapons had been launched, a sharp change in policy for someone who had never previously expressed concern about the hundreds of thousands of civilians dead in the Syrian civil war, including an estimated 55,000 children.[20] For months, in fact, Trump had made clear his skepticism of even the modest existing level of involvement in Syria; he had gone ahead with plans made by the Obama administration to help Syrian rebels attack the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa but saw the offensive as a get-done-and-get-out kind of antiterrorism mission. He had no interest in overturning the Russian-supported Assad government, although that remained stated American policy inherited from the Obama years.
The military prepared three options for Trump in the days after the gas attack, including an all-out “decapitation strike” on the Assad government’s leadership; Trump chose the least aggressive of the three, a barrage of fifty-nine cruise missiles on a single airfield.
The sort of cavalier, anyone-can-come-in nature of the decision appalled Joe Hagin, the White House deputy chief of staff who had served in more serious Republican administrations. So many people squeezed into the cramped room used as an away-from-home Situation Room who had little business being there, like the commerce secretary and economic adviser and speechwriter. In describing it to colleagues later, Hagin called it “the cruise missile cocktail party.” To him, he related, “It just summed up the frivolous lack of understanding.”
And then Trump turned the whole business into another grand spectacle he had arranged for his important guest. The missiles were due to smash into their targets just before 9 p.m. as he was finishing dinner in the Mar-a-Lago dining room with Xi. Dessert had just been served—“the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you have ever seen,” Trump later revealed to Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business—when he received a message that the attack was imminent and told Xi about it.[21] Xi, according to Trump, paused for about ten seconds, then asked his interpreter to repeat the information. Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, later regaled a California audience with the scene. Trump, he said, had made the strike into “after-dinner entertainment.”[22] After dinner, Trump and his team returned to the makeshift secure room for an update on the strike, then many in the party retired to Mar-a-Lago’s Library Bar, where they ran up a $1,000 tab that was billed to the government.
Trump’s decision to punish Syria for its horrific chemical attack, however, turned out to be just the signal that some anxious foreign policy elites had been looking for, and Trump woke up to unexpectedly glowing reviews. “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States,” Fareed Zakaria enthused on CNN.[23] Other national security veterans in both parties greeted the airstrike as if it were a transformative event—and a stark contrast to Obama’s much criticized failure to enforce a “red line” he had set when Assad launched chemical attacks against civilians. Trump “finally accepted the role of Leader of the Free World,” Elliott Abrams, a hawkish veteran of past Republican administrations who had just been vetoed by Trump to serve as deputy secretary of state because of his past criticism, wrote in The Weekly Standard.[24]
In reality, of course, Trump was still Trump. He had not at all changed his mind about Syria, or anything else. It was just another spur-of-the-moment decision, driven by what he had seen on television.
More lasting would be Trump’s impression of Xi Jinping, the self-confident autocrat he had been threatening with a nasty trade war. Like Putin, Trump decided, this was a tough guy he could do business with. “I really liked him,” Trump told Bartiromo after the Mar-a-Lago weekend. “We had a great chemistry, I think.” In a verdict that sounded almost affectionate, he added: “We understand each other.”[25]
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Soon after the summit with Xi, H. R. McMaster found himself in hostile territory for a general with a tin ear for politics, being yelled at by the president on the telephone as he headed to the Fox News studio on Capitol Hill. Trump had ignited an international freakout that week with comments warning of the possibility of a “major, major conflict with North Korea.”[26] But McMaster’s problem at that point was not so much Kim Jong-un as it was managing his unmanageable boss. The allies had invested their hopes in McMaster, but failed to anticipate that titles, even one as exalted as national security adviser, did not necessarily confer power in the Trump White House.
The problem that had set Trump off, as far as McMaster could tell, was Reince Priebus. McMaster had ended up on the wrong side of one of the Trump White House’s most toxic divides, the running power struggle between the insecure and overwhelmed Priebus and the preternaturally self-assured Jared Kushner. Preparing for the Xi summit, Trump had, uncharacteristically, praised McMaster. Priebus heard it and, according to the account McMaster would later give others, from that day on did everything he could do to cut the national security adviser’s legs out from under him. For Trump, it was a zero-sum game.
That Sunday morning, McMaster was convinced, Priebus had given Trump a story in a South Korean newspaper claiming that McMaster had contradicted the president on an issue that had rapidly become an obsession of sorts for Trump: the THAAD missile defense system that the United States had stationed in South Korea. As with the Germans and NATO, Trump thought the South Koreans should be paying more for their own defense and he wanted a billion dollars for the THAAD battery. He appeared neither to know nor care that the United States had just agreed with the South Koreans in 2016 to finance the missile deployment. McMaster had told his South Korean counterpart that of course Washington would still honor the deal, boilerplate assurance that was interpreted as a rebuke of Trump. Angry, Trump called McMaster as he was about to be interviewed by the sharp Fox News Sunday host, Chris Wallace, cursing him out and then hanging up.
Rattled, McMaster sat down for the television interview. When the camera came on, McMaster praised Trump to Wallace as a “masterful” diplomat in Asia who had not only developed a strong personal rapport with Xi but had also “reinvigorated and strengthened our alliances with key nations in the region, including South Korea and Japan.”[27] McMaster, it seemed, had already learned the clutch move of the Trump White House: sucking up to the Fox audience of one.
The THAAD fight would be one of many recurring internal battles over how and even whether to defend South Korea and other traditional partners of the United States. Trump complained the battery cost too much and wanted to put it in Portland, Oregon, even though the military believed it would be far less effective there at intercepting North Korean missiles. But the argument on THAAD, as with those on NATO, on Syria, and Afghanistan, was never really won. Trump would circle back to make his same points again and again.
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Few themes were more persistent than Trump’s desire to prove that his predecessors, all of them, had made the worst deals. His plan was to blow them up and make better ones—or at least new versions of the old ones, with full credit to himself.
NAFTA was the first big target and, on April 26, Justin Trudeau’s nightmare of Trump torching the world’s most successful free trade pact seemed to be coming true. Neither Trudeau’s flattery of Trump nor his attention to Ivanka, whom he took to a Broadway showing of Come from Away, a musical highlighting Canadian support for Americans after the September 11 attacks, had dissuaded the president from deciding to abruptly withdraw from NAFTA. The 1994 agreement had helped shape the richest trading bloc in the world, but Trump had campaigned against it as the “worst deal ever.”[28] That morning, Steve Bannon had walked into the Oval Office with an executive order drafted to exit NAFTA by formally triggering a six-month pullout clock. The plan was for Trump to sign the order and announce it at a prime-time rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on Saturday night, as the signature event of his hundredth day in office.
Belatedly hearing of the plot, Reince Priebus hit the panic button. Priebus might have made an uneasy truce with Bannon, but there were no truly permanent partnerships inside Trump’s Darwinian White House. His years as Republican chairman had made Priebus acutely sensitive to the needs and views of the party’s donor class and he knew that immediate withdrawal from NAFTA would create an economic crisis—and a political catastrophe for Trump. Seeing no other way to stop his boss, he called all the cabinet officers he could think of who supported NAFTA, including Rex Tillerson and Wilbur Ross, and urged them to race to the White House to try to stop Trump. Word leaked to Republican allies on Capitol Hill, who also started calling the White House. When the news hit the markets, corn futures dropped precipitously. Business leaders drafted urgent letters. An estimated $1.2 trillion in trade among the countries and 14 million American jobs depended on the free flow of commerce with Canada and Mexico.
Ross called Sonny Perdue, the agriculture secretary, who rushed into the Oval Office, bringing two maps printed out on eight-by-eleven paper, one showing in red and blue the areas where farmers and industries would be harmed by an abrupt withdrawal and another showing in red and blue the counties won by Trump and Hillary Clinton. The overlap was clear. “These are your people,” Perdue told Trump. By dinnertime, the president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, was on the telephone, promising to open negotiations on a new and improved NAFTA if only Trump would not blow it up on the front end. Then Trudeau called Trump. He told reporters after the call that he had urged the president not to cause “a lot of short- and medium-term pain for an awful lot of families” on both sides of the border.[29] Privately, both the Mexicans and Canadians warned Trump that if he took such a dramatic step, they would not be able politically to return to the negotiations.
