The Divider, page 12
By 10:30 p.m. the immediate crisis was over and the White House issued a statement saying Trump would not pull out of NAFTA. “For now.”[30] Publicly, Priebus claimed that it had all been a brilliant ploy by Trump to begin the negotiations on advantageous terrain. “The president has put himself in a perfect position on NAFTA,” the chief of staff told The Washington Post the next day. “The leverage is all with the president.”[31]
That is not at all what Priebus actually thought. For years afterward, in fact, Priebus would take credit for having “orchestrated”—his word—the successful pushback. That day, Priebus confided to others, had been the closest of close calls, a moment when Trump was truly prepared to upend the global economy for the sake of an applause line at a political rally.
“I was all set to terminate,” Trump told the Post the day after he had decided not to. “I looked forward to terminating. I was going to do it.”[32]
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In May, Trump embarked on his first foreign trip, flying to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for an Arab summit, in the visit that Jared Kushner and MBS, the two princelings, had orchestrated. The trip was most memorable not for any diplomatic breakthroughs but for its sheer bizarre optics, which included courtly Rex Tillerson awkwardly swaying along to a sword dance with their Saudi hosts—“not my first sword dance,” joked Tillerson, who had spent years in the Middle East as ExxonMobil’s chief executive.[33]
When Trump and the Saudi king placed their hands on a glowing orb, as the first lady looked on, the eerie photo op spawned endless social media memes. More to the point were Trump’s glowing words to his Saudi hosts, promising them that in his presidency they would no longer hear annoying speeches about human rights and pretending as if he had never said all those terrible things about Muslims. “We are not here to lecture,” he said, offering instead “partnership based on shared interests and values.”[34] Within a few months, MBS would undertake a massive purge of leading Saudis as he consolidated power in the kingdom. He locked up nearly four hundred members of the country’s small elite, many of them his fellow royals, in the Ritz-Carlton Riyadh, the same lavish hotel where Trump had stayed during the summit and on whose facade had been projected five-story-high portraits of the president and his Saudi host.
The real confrontation on the trip would come later, not with Arab autocrats or the Israelis and Palestinians he visited next, but with the European allies. In Brussels, NATO was set to have its annual leaders summit and much advance care had gone into Trump’s debut, including a decision to build the public portion of the summit around a grand opening of the new, not-actually-quite-finished NATO headquarters building, sure to appeal, it was thought, to the real estate mogul. The ceremonies would also include dedication of a September 11 memorial, whose centerpiece was a large, twisted piece of wreckage from the fallen World Trade Center towers. This too was meant as a teaching moment for Trump; perhaps, it was hoped, he would be reminded that the 2001 attacks on the United States had prompted the only time that NATO had invoked its Article 5 provision of all-for-one, one-for-all mutual defense, the cornerstone of the alliance. It would be the perfect moment for Trump to finally put to rest the speculation about his commitment to NATO that his own comments had caused.
Ever since his campaign, and much to the delight of Vladimir Putin and other adversaries, Trump had put NATO on notice that he was hardly committed to the “obsolete” alliance. For months leading up to the Brussels summit, McMaster, Mattis, and Tillerson, the Axis of Adults, sought to explain away or reframe his criticism, insisting to allies that Trump was merely the latest president to lobby Europeans to spend more on defense—he was just louder about it. At points, they even got Trump to make public statements suggesting that he was supportive of NATO and only trying to make sure other countries paid their fair share.
The reassurance had worked, to a point. “There was still a kind of hopefulness—‘oh, that was just his campaign, he doesn’t really mean it,’ ” a senior NATO official recalled of the lead-up to Brussels. “They were used to hearing it from every president from Eisenhower on down the years, and it was kind of ‘yeah, yeah, the Americans are asking for more money.’ ”
Their hopefulness was misplaced. Trump had been briefed early in his tenure about Article 5 and how mutual defense in NATO worked. “You mean, if Russia attacked Lithuania, we would go to war with Russia?” he responded. “That’s crazy.”[35]After a few more statements like that, his foreign policy team concluded that Trump’s animus toward NATO was more than just Twitter bluster. It was so serious that Trump repeatedly threatened to pull out of the alliance altogether. “He hinted many times that he wanted out of NATO,” a senior defense official recalled. “He never said, ‘Do it.’ But he got really close.” A senior White House official confirmed: “He wanted to pull out of NATO on a number of occasions. That was actually much more serious than people realized.”
Trump’s visit to NATO headquarters had been shaping up for months as a major confrontation not only with the allies, but within his administration. In a government where no one was exactly sure what was official policy and what was just the latest thing Trump had blurted, or tweeted, out, sometimes there was just nothing to do but show up and see what happened. That, in essence, was what the Brussels trip came down to. Drafts of Trump’s speech ricocheted around the bureaucracy for weeks. In versions approved by the Defense Department and National Security Council, there was a twenty-seven-word statement explicitly affirming Trump’s commitment to Article 5. It read in its seemingly noncontroversial entirety: “We face many threats, but I stand before you with a clear message: the U.S. commitment to the NATO alliance and to Article 5 is unwavering.”[36]
Reporters were told that the Article 5 language would be in the speech and NATO officials were also shown a copy with the language in it. “Everybody assured us it had been cleared all the way up,” recalled a senior NATO official who saw the draft. But in reality, the fight over what Trump would say continued until the very minute when he would say it. Jim Mattis was so nervous about what Trump would do that he had rearranged his schedule to attend the Brussels summit. Rex Tillerson was also present. H. R. McMaster had spent weeks trying to ensure the meeting came off without a disaster, only to find himself in the motorcade on the way to NATO headquarters, screaming at Stephen Miller, the speechwriter, to delete various attacks on allies in the text—“just gratuitous insults,” as McMaster would later put it. The fight persisted for so long that McMaster had to call ahead to aides to make sure the excised phrases were taken out of the version of the speech already loaded in the teleprompter.
Trump, meanwhile, had already created the first diplomatic crisis of the day just by walking with his fellow NATO leaders to a photo op. On a tour of the new headquarters building, Trump lashed out, denouncing it to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg as an expensive monstrosity. Nearing the end of the tour, a glowering Trump shoved aside the prime minister of tiny Montenegro—whose accession to the alliance was being celebrated at the meeting—to secure his place in front for the cameras set up to record them.
Then came the speech.
Standing backstage with Trump were McMaster, Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary, and Gary Cohn, the economic adviser who was filling in for Reince Priebus on the trip. “You have one thing to say, one thing only to say: Article 5,” Cohn told the president as he walked onstage. But when it came time to do so, Trump never uttered the promised twenty-seven words.
“Holy shit,” the senior NATO official thought as the president spoke. Standing nearby was the rest of Trump’s White House staff team, and the official noticed they “were looking at each other with shock in their eyes—except Stephen Miller, he was calm.” Backstage, meanwhile, Cohn and the others were stunned.
“What now?” Cohn asked McMaster.
The national security adviser shrugged. There was no training for something like this. “I shoot guns,” McMaster joked.
Eventually, the aides wrote up a short statement saying in essence that of course the United States still supported the NATO treaty, and McMaster put it out in his name.
Brussels was a bracing reminder that the Axis of Adults had not managed to tame Trump. McMaster and Cohn, who had become allies in the White House’s fierce internal wars after meeting back in February while waiting on a couch in Mar-a-Lago the day of McMaster’s job interview, spent the ride back to the United States dealing with the fallout. They settled on a strategy of public denial. “America First does not mean America alone,” the pair insisted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed they drafted on the plane. In this wishful-thinking version of his inaugural international trip, Trump had not rattled the allies and undercut their mutual defense pact but was “reconfirming America’s commitment to NATO and Article 5,” while also bolstering “strong alliances.”[37]
Of course, they knew that Trump had done no such thing. McMaster had long since concluded that convincing Trump of the value of allies was the biggest challenge he faced on a daily basis. After the disaster in Brussels, he spent weeks begging Trump to fix the problem by making the public statement of support for NATO that he had withheld. But McMaster found that Trump was reflexively contrarian. If he told the president he should do something, he would instead do the opposite.
Trump flew home from Europe late on a Saturday. A few days later, he announced that he was unilaterally pulling the United States out of the Paris climate accord, a decision that McMaster and Cohn, along with Ivanka Trump, the president’s other senior foreign policy advisers and the allies with whom he had just met in person for the first time, had spent months resisting.
In Munich, Angela Merkel had her own response to Trump’s disruptions. For all her obsession with studying the new American president, she had not really been prepared for “this degree of unpredictability,” as a close adviser put it. The Playboy interview did not begin to cover it. But the evidence was now clear. After the meetings with Trump, Merkel had reached a conclusion. “The times in which we could completely depend on others are, to a certain extent, over,” she announced in a speech that sounded like an obituary for the American-led international system. She added, “We Europeans truly have to take our fate into our own hands.”[38]
CHAPTER 5
The Ghost of Roy
Late on the afternoon of May 9, Trump summoned several aides to the Oval Office. Reince Priebus and Stephen Miller were already there. So were Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, and several lawyers for the White House and Justice Department, looking grim. The new arrivals were handed copies of a letter from the president to James Comey, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation: “You are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.”[1]
Comey terminated? The man leading the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and any secret collusion between Moscow and Trump’s campaign? The one investigating Mike Flynn and who knew how many other Trump associates? The aides were stunned.
“Mr. President,” Mike Dubke, the communications director, asked in astonishment, “did you just fire the director of the FBI?”
“Yes, I did,” Trump said.
It soon became clear that the most consequential decision thus far of the Trump presidency was little more than an amateurish, slapdash affair. It was already 4:30 p.m. by the time Trump told his aides he was ordering them to release the letter at 5 p.m. But there was no plan for how to announce this monumental news, much less how to spin it, no talking points for allies, no notifications for congressional leaders, no schedule for administration officials to go on television shows explaining it. No one had even been told—not even Comey.
“Before you contact members of Congress and before this becomes public, don’t you want to confirm that Comey is aware and has received the letter?” ventured Jody Hunt, Sessions’s chief of staff.
Trump harrumphed. “I don’t care if he knows about it,” he said.
Eventually, Priebus tried again. “Shouldn’t we make sure Comey gets that letter before it gets out in the media?” he asked.
Trump repeated himself. “I don’t care if he learns about it in the media,” he snapped.
No one had even figured out how to deliver the news. When someone asked whether the FBI director was at his office, the president responded that he was. But, in truth, he had no idea. “Can someone find out if he’s in his office?” he shouted to an assistant. Without waiting for an answer, Trump summoned Keith Schiller, his longtime bodyguard now granted the glorified title of director of Oval Office Operations.
“Keith, get in here. Would you like to fire the director of the FBI?”
“Yes, sir,” Schiller said. “It would be my pleasure, Mr. President.”
But Comey was not, in fact, in his office to receive the letter. He was in Los Angeles, where he would soon find out that he had been fired from the chyron scrolling across a muted television screen.
Trump, who was sucking down Diet Cokes and chomping on a Hershey’s chocolate bar, seemed pumped up. “This is historical,” he kept saying. Finally, he summoned an official White House photographer to record the moment, then got into a discussion about how he should pose. “I should be reading something,” he said. “I can be reading Jeff’s letter.” Mike Pence arrived. “Mike,” Trump said, “this is a historic moment.”
Historic, yes; well-planned, no. “How do you think they’ll take it?” Trump asked his aides as he prepared to make a round of calls to congressional leaders.
“I think they’ll be fine because Schumer has called for Comey to step down multiple times,” Dubke said.
But when Trump called Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, there was a painfully long pause after he heard the news. Finally, Schumer responded, “I’m going to have to get back to you, Mr. President.” And in that moment Dubke realized how bad all the advice to the president had been, his included.
If there was a before and an after in the Trump presidency, the firing of James Comey on a lovely May afternoon was it, a power play gone bad that transformed much of the rest of his tenure into an endless brawl over the investigation that had prompted him to fire the FBI director in the first place. But if Trump hoped that getting rid of Comey would end or allow him to contain the inquiry, he was quickly proved wrong.
What the lawyers who had been called to the Oval Office were slow to grasp was that the poorly planned and politically ill-advised ouster of Comey was not only a scandal, it would also be seen as an effort by the president to obstruct a federal investigation into his own campaign, one they had failed to stop. They had even helped Trump concoct an implausible cover story claiming that the real reason for Comey’s dismissal, six months after the election, was that he had mishandled the FBI inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s emails—as if Trump, who had led crowds at his rallies chanting “lock her up” and vowed to throw Clinton in prison if elected, cared whether she had been treated unfairly. Many Democrats loathed Comey for what he had done to Clinton, especially his last-minute decision before the 2016 election to briefly reopen the probe to examine a trove of newly discovered emails, a move that many believed had helped Trump win the presidency. But it was a fatal miscalculation on Trump’s part to think that Democrats might welcome Comey’s firing at this point rather than see it as an act intended only to protect Trump.
The blowback was immediate. Within minutes of the letter’s release, television airwaves were filled with comparisons to the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when Richard Nixon ordered the firing of the Watergate prosecutor only to have his attorney general and deputy attorney general refuse to carry out the directive and resign in protest. The Nixon Presidential Library joined the fray with a tweet noting that even though the late president had pushed out the special prosecutor, “President Nixon never fired the Director of the FBI,” cheekily adding the hashtag “#notNixonian.”[2]
Since Watergate, presidents had largely left FBI directors alone to avoid the appearance of political interference. Bill Clinton despised Louis Freeh, the FBI director whose agents were digging through his finances and sex life for independent counsel Kenneth Starr, but never thought he could get away with firing him. George W. Bush was so afraid of a Saturday Night Massacre repeat that he backed down when his FBI director, Robert S. Mueller III, and deputy attorney general—the same James Comey—threatened to resign rather than reauthorize a terrorist surveillance program they deemed illegal. There was a reason why Congress mandated ten-year terms for FBI directors, to insulate them from politics.
Trump’s fundamental misunderstanding of Washington was laid out there for all to see in a series of self-pitying tweets that night and into the next day:
“The Democrats have said some of the worst things about James Comey, including the fact that he should be fired, but now they play so sad!”
“Comey lost the confidence of almost everyone in Washington, Republican and Democrat alike. When things calm down, they will be thanking me!”
“Dems have been complaining for months & months about Dir. Comey. Now that he has been fired they PRETEND to be aggrieved. Phony hypocrites!”
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At the heart of the decision to fire Comey was the mystery of Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, the master of the Kremlin for whom he had expressed such inexplicable admiration. By the time Trump sent his bodyguard to FBI headquarters with his peremptory dismissal letter, the new president had given the world every reason to wonder what Russia’s leader had on him.
Trump’s history with Russia went back long before he was in politics. A Putin cheerleader of long standing, he had written him a mash note in 2007 after the Russian was named Time’s Person of the Year, an honor Trump himself craved. “You definitely deserve it,” Trump gushed, adding, “As you probably have heard, I am a big fan of yours!”[3] For years, Trump had tried to build a tower with his name on it in Moscow potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Ever since American banks stopped doing business with him because he was so unreliable, Trump had been financed by Deutsche Bank, the German institution with close ties to Russia. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Don Jr. said in 2008.[4] Five years later, Eric Trump reportedly said the family did not need American banks because “we have all the funding we need out of Russia.”[5]
