The Divider, page 19
The generals were under no illusion that they had tamed Trump, on Afghanistan or anything else. They had been watching closely and what they had learned was that Trump’s fixations were Trump’s fixations. They might disappear as suddenly as they appeared, but they would never really go away.
One abiding fixation was with the military itself, which Trump saw as an irresistibly theatrical backdrop for his presidency. After his election, Trump had not only stocked his government with generals but had also tried to order up an explicitly militarized inauguration until aides talked him out of it. “I don’t want floats,” Trump had said at one planning session, according to Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the New York society friend of the first lady who had been hired to help produce the event. “I want tanks and choppers. Make it look like North Korea.”[37] Trump never seemed to understand or care that his generals might recoil at such a display, or why his strongman style might be incompatible with the world’s oldest democracy.
In the summer, taking a brief break from the Russia controversy and the internal White House intrigue, Trump had flown to Paris for Bastille Day celebrations thrown by Emmanuel Macron, the new French president. Macron, who had taken up from Canada’s Justin Trudeau the task of serving as designated Trump-pleaser among the Western allies, staged a hardware-filled display of military might to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the American entrance into World War I, including vintage tanks rolling down the Champs-Élysées and fighter jets roaring overhead, all calculated to appeal to Trump. “You are going to be doing this next year,” the French general in charge had predicted to an American counterpart as they watched Trump’s delight.
Sure enough, Trump returned home determined to have the Pentagon throw him the biggest, grandest military parade for the Fourth of July ever. “I’d rather swallow acid,” Mattis said, when the idea came up in one of many Pentagon meetings meant to find a way out of having to give in to the president.[38] Eventually, military officials would point out that the parade would cost millions of dollars and the heavy equipment would ruin Washington’s city streets.
But the gulf between Trump and his generals was not really about money or practicalities, just as the endless policy battles were not only about clashing views of Afghanistan or North Korea or Syria. Their divide was wider than that—it was about what the generals believed in and what the president believed in. That was never clearer than when Trump told John Kelly about his vision for the parade. “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade. This doesn’t look good for me,” Trump said, explaining that in the Bastille Day parade in Paris there had been several formations of injured veterans, including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost legs and arms. Kelly, still early in his tenure, could not believe what he was hearing.
“Those are the heroes,” Kelly told him. “In our society, there’s only one group of people that are more heroic than they are and they are buried over in Arlington.” Including, he did not add, his own son.
Trump was not buying it. “Yeah, but I don’t want them,” the president replied. “It doesn’t look good for me.”
Not long after Kelly became chief of staff, he was in the Oval Office for a briefing with Paul Selva, an Air Force general and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. At the end, Kelly joked in his deadpan way about the parade, already a sore spot with Trump. “Well, you know, General Selva is going to be in charge of organizing the Fourth of July parade,” Kelly told the president. Trump did not get the joke. “So, what do you think of the parade?” he asked the general. No matter how many times he had been told that the military did not want his parade, he refused to believe it.
Selva, however, had one of those moments that were all too rare in the Trump presidency: instead of saying what Trump wanted to hear, Selva said what he thought. “I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,” he told the president, according to an account he later gave colleagues. “Portugal was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.” He added: “It’s not who we are.”
Even after this impassioned speech, Trump still did not get it. “So, you don’t like the idea?” the president asked, incredulous.
“No,” Selva responded, in as blunt an answer as Trump would ever get. “It’s what dictators do.”
But it did not matter. Trump would not give up his military parade just because some general had lectured him. Trump continued to bring it up, “dozens and dozens of times” afterward, Joe Dunford would later tell others. Not even being called out in the Oval Office itself as a wannabe dictator by one of the generals he claimed to revere was enough to stop him.
CHAPTER 7
The Adhocracy
The old Marine got up at four each morning to get ready for the day. He put on a dark suit, still adjusting to a coat and tie after a lifetime in green and khaki uniforms. During the ride to the White House, he leafed through The New York Times, Washington Post, the websites of CNN and Fox News, and, just to know what missiles were coming his way, Breitbart News. He had aides watch Fox, MSNBC, and CNN starting at 7 a.m. so that when the president called to ask, “Did you just see that?” he could get a quick download about whatever cable news segment had caught Trump’s interest.
The White House that John Kelly had taken over remained far from a tightly disciplined Marine unit. Chaos was still the order of the day, encouraged by a commander in chief who liked to stir the pot while pitting members of his own team against each other. It was a place with a “Hunger Games vibe,” in the words of Stephanie Grisham, then communications director for the first lady.[1] Cliff Sims, a media aide, thought it was more like “Game of Thrones, but with the characters from Veep,” as he put it in a later book aptly named Team of Vipers.[2] The departure of Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, and others had upended and reordered the factions but did not eliminate them. Ideologues such as Stephen Miller and Peter Navarro, the trade adviser, all but ran their own separate shadow White House, bypassing the process to slip paper onto the Resolute Desk for a Trump signature. Their establishment rivals, such as the unlikely duo of Gary Cohn and H. R. McMaster, tried to keep the most far-fetched ideas away from the president lest he pull out his Sharpie pen and abruptly approve something crazy without discussion. Kellyanne Conway and Hope Hicks, wary allies, had Trump’s ear and access to the Oval Office. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, having soured on Priebus and helped push him out, remained a power center unto themselves. Mike Pence floated above it all, rarely saying much of anything that anyone could remember.
As they settled into their offices in the fall of 2017, Kelly and his deputy, Kirstjen Nielsen, were stunned to find presidential aides still fighting over the spoils of victory months into the administration, demanding fancy titles and fancy offices they swore they had been promised and unfairly denied. Some believed they should have private government airplanes anytime they traveled; others openly ignored security rules and carried cell phones with them even into meetings with the president. After the first lady complained to him, Kelly even found himself telling the White House staff that they could no longer use the White House pool or tennis courts because she considered them family space. Kelly was determined to stop the Grand Central Terminal–style crowds in the Oval Office. He decreed that access to the Oval would be limited and phone calls to the president monitored and logged. And Kelly tried to cut out the freelancing, at one point confronting Miller, the young immigration hawk and speechwriter: “You have no authority. You’re not Senate confirmed. You have no authority to direct operations.”
Six-foot-two and two hundred pounds, Kelly remained a formidable figure at age sixty-seven. In age, height, and bearing, he was more of a match for Trump than Priebus and not easily intimidated. White House officials who thought nothing of calling Priebus by his first name addressed his successor as “General Kelly.” Even Trump seemed a little daunted by the Marine at first, which is the only reason Kelly would have some early success imposing order.
Kelly had quickly realized through the shocks of August that he would never transform Trump into a normal president nor stop him from tweeting. But he told himself that if he could control the information that got to Trump, if he could keep some of the nuttier figures in the president’s orbit off the phone and out of the Oval Office, if he could stop some of the wackier Breitbart clips from being slipped to him by the hardliners in the building, then there was a chance of keeping him focused on reality. If Kelly could make sure the input was better, then maybe the output would be too.
To that end, he decided to empower Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary, whom he had gotten to know in Bedminster during the hectic early days of his tenure while Trump was promising “fire and fury” for North Korea in between golf rounds at his New Jersey club. Porter, a forty-year-old Harvard Law School graduate who exuded calm professional competence and would have been at home in any normal Republican White House, was eager to help right the ship. He considered Trump’s White House thus far nightmarish, a living manifestation of an adhocracy, a term his father, Roger Porter, a Harvard Kennedy School professor and chief domestic policy adviser to George H. W. Bush, had famously coined.
The senior Porter had realized that many presidents were attracted to the sort of improvisation that had taken hold in Trump’s White House. Franklin Roosevelt used to hand out assignments almost willy-nilly to favored aides with no mechanism for follow-up; John Kennedy often acted as his own chief of staff, presiding over a team of generalists who worked through issues with him. They both met the definition for adhocracy that Porter came up with in 1980, a White House that “minimizes regularized and systematic patterns of providing advice and instead relies heavily on the President distributing assignments and selecting whom he listens to and when.”[3] But no one had taken it to the chaotic extremes that Trump had, the point of which, as Porter had foreseen, was to show the American people a president who was personally in command.
Among those who had taken Porter’s class at Harvard was a young Jared Kushner, who was living in the most radical version of adhocracy. Now Porter’s son set out to do something about it. He drafted two memos for Kelly to issue to top officials. They codified in writing what Kelly had been telling the staff: even Trump’s White House needed at least a basic form of regular order. Specifically, the first memo said, all paper, including news articles like those that various internal intriguers snuck onto Trump’s desk when no one else was looking, had to first go through the staff secretary’s office and be “approved by the Chief of Staff” before being presented to the president. Any event with the president had to include talking points and a list of attendees in the formal Event Memorandum. “People not listed on the EM may be excluded from the event,” the memo said, in italics for emphasis.[4] Any remarks to be delivered by the president should be submitted by the speechwriter to Porter at least three days in advance. Any executive orders would require sign-off from the White House counsel and the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.
The second memo confronted perhaps the most challenging issue raised by Trump’s unique approach to the presidency: just what constituted a presidential decision. With Trump tweeting pronouncements early in the morning and late at night, and prone to dictate abrupt shifts in policy in the midst of Oval Office soliloquies, what were advisers supposed to make of his decrees? Less than a month earlier, Trump had infuriated Jim Mattis and the military leadership by ordering the Pentagon to ban transgender soldiers in a three-part barrage of tweets. Was it legal? Did the Pentagon have to obey? Joe Dunford quickly sent an internal memo to the Joint Chiefs indicating that the military would make “no modifications” to current policy unless a proper policy was developed through channels.[5] Porter, and Kelly, now adopted that position as theirs too.
“Decisions are not final—and therefore may not be implemented—until the Staff Secretary secures a cleared DM that has been signed by the President,” the memo said.[6] Trump could tweet all he wanted but without a Decision Memorandum prepared by the staff secretary and signed by the president, it was not legal. The sentence was underlined to make the point clear.
Nothing in either memo would have been especially surprising in any other White House—that was how most of them worked. Only in Trump’s was it out of the ordinary. Aides who had grown accustomed to the way Trump operated and had figured out how to manipulate the system to advance their own goals bristled at the new strictures. But no one was about to challenge Kelly. Not at first. Rob Porter now ended each day by giving the president a thick briefing book full of schedules, informational documents, press clippings, screenshots of television chyrons that might interest him, and duly vetted Decision Memoranda to be signed with his black Sharpie, along with a separate manila folder with a few one-page summaries of the most important issues on the assumption that the president would never read the longer documents. “The fact it was Kelly, that he empowered it, everybody else at least for a time kind of saluted, which was just a huge difference,” recalled one White House official.
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Even as Kelly strived to calm the West Wing, Trump was still using Twitter to wreak havoc outside the building against targets that included his own party’s leaders. He was particularly irritated by Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, blaming him for John McCain’s late-night vote killing legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. McConnell, for his part, did not think much of Trump’s handling of the issue either and their disagreement went public during the August recess at the same time Kelly was trying to plant his feet.
While traveling in Kentucky, McConnell told a local Rotary Club that Trump’s inexperience was responsible for the failure of the legislation. “He had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process,” the senator said.[7] Trump was angry when he saw the comments. He was not the one who had been promising for so long to overturn the Obama program. He called McConnell to ream him out, then went public on Twitter. “After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done?” he tweeted at the senator. “Can you believe that Mitch McConnell, who has screamed Repeal & Replace for 7 years, couldn’t get it done,” he added the next day. “Mitch, get back to work,” he went on.[8] When a reporter asked if McConnell should step down, Trump said, “If he doesn’t get repeal and replace done and if he doesn’t get taxes done, meaning cuts and reform, and if he doesn’t get a very easy one to get done, infrastructure—if he doesn’t get them done, then you can ask me that question.”[9]
Indeed, Trump seemed to relish throwing his own side off balance. Perhaps because of his new feud with McConnell, he decided after Labor Day to throw a wrench into negotiations over a spending measure that would also raise the debt ceiling. Democrats led by Nancy Pelosi in the House and Chuck Schumer in the Senate wanted a bill that would keep the government open and extend the deadline for the debt ceiling by three months, a relatively short period to give them leverage in coming negotiations. Republicans wanted a longer-term bill to avoid a politically damaging collision. Speaker Paul Ryan called the Democratic proposal “ridiculous and disgraceful,” then headed to the White House to meet with the president and other congressional leaders only to be undercut when Trump agreed to the very Democratic plan that Ryan had just deemed unacceptable.[10]
Ryan and McConnell left the meeting stewing. Even Steven Mnuchin was caught off guard and upset at the surprise deal across party lines. It was the first genuinely bipartisan moment of Trump’s presidency. Trump delighted in the positive reaction and called Pelosi and Schumer separately to revel in it. “The press has been incredible!” he gushed to Pelosi.[11]
But rather than opening a new era of cooperation, it was a short demonstration of what could have been. Trump more than any president in generations had come to the White House without strong party affiliation or philosophical moorings and in theory might have bridged the capital’s divides had he chosen to. Trump won the presidency in spite of his party’s establishment rather than because of it, having challenged traditional Republican orthodoxy on foundational issues like trade, war, and Russia.[12] He was openly scornful of the party’s last three presidential nominees, all of whom had refused to vote for him. And once in office, Trump seemed just as comfortable blasting fellow Republicans as he did Democrats. In the days following his deal with Pelosi and Schumer, Trump dismissed discontent within his party, posting a tweet that began, “Republicans, sorry,” as if he were not one of them, and criticizing their leaders for having a “death wish.”[13]
All of which left McConnell in a bind. After thirty-two years in the Senate, McConnell, famous for his owlish face, round glasses, and maximalist use of Senate procedure in service of his goals, was no mushy moderate but no Trump-style Republican either. He had arguably played a decisive role in electing Trump by refusing to consider any nominee from Barack Obama in 2016 to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia, leaving the open seat to be filled by whoever won the November election and providing extra incentive to conservative voters to turn out. McConnell considered the early confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court after Trump took office as validation of his strategy. His wife, Elaine Chao, even served in Trump’s cabinet, as transportation secretary—a post Trump would later claim he had offered her only because McConnell “begged” him to do so, an assertion the senator dismissed as laughable. But McConnell found Trump vulgar, unserious, and difficult to work with.
It did not help that Steve Bannon, the self-styled keeper of the “America First” flame, was targeting McConnell’s fellow Republicans for defeat. While no longer in the White House, Bannon was acting as if he were Trump’s outside field marshal purging the party of those deemed insufficiently loyal to the president. At the end of September, Bannon helped beat McConnell’s candidate in a Republican primary for Jeff Sessions’s old Senate seat, sending to the general election a deeply flawed nominee in the form of Roy Moore, a flamboyant far-right former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who had been twice removed from his post after defying federal rulings barring display of the Ten Commandments on government property and requiring the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Bannon then openly attacked McConnell, going on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show to threaten a series of primary challenges to incumbent GOP senators. “Right now, it’s a season of war against a GOP establishment,” Bannon reaffirmed at a Values Voter Summit in mid-October. Addressing McConnell directly, he added, “Up on Capitol Hill, it’s like the Ides of March. They’re just looking to find out who is going to be Brutus to your Julius Caesar. We’ve cut your oxygen off, Mitch.”[14]
