The Divider, page 39
Miller proved adept at circumventing Nielsen and other cabinet officers by contacting their underlings and issuing orders in the name of the president. Nielsen even discovered that he was calling officials down at the southwestern border to weigh in. Nielsen was constantly playing catch up (“Ma’am, we just found out that Stephen called so-and-so”) but her subordinates read the newspapers, knew the president was unhappy with her, and could not be sure how long she would be around whereas Miller was clearly staying.
At one point during the summer of 2018, Miller took it upon himself to call Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education. DeVos was overseas for meetings at the ambassador’s residence at The Hague in the Netherlands when the White House called and said Miller had to talk with the secretary right away.
DeVos took the call only to find it was no emergency. Miller told DeVos that the White House wanted her to stop federal Title I funding for schools that allowed undocumented students to enroll. There were perhaps 750,000 children without immigration papers in kindergarten through twelfth grade. Miller said he wanted a memo within a week. It was an extraordinary request—not to mention an extraordinary breach of government protocol.
DeVos, exasperated at his nerve, answered carefully. She was about to go into a dinner with the ambassador, she replied. She would have her team look into the issue and get back to Miller. After she hung up, her chief of staff, Josh Venable, called the department’s top lawyer in Washington to ask for a one-page memo on the issue. That was an easy one. The Supreme Court had already ruled on that very question, deciding in Plyler v. Doe in 1982 that no child could be denied a public education based on their immigration status. What Miller wanted to do was patently illegal. Not to mention objectionable, as far as DeVos and her team were concerned.
Even after DeVos returned to Washington, however, Miller did not let the issue go. He pushed the Education Department to take other measures, such as revoking eligibility for Title IV funds for colleges and universities that granted lower in-state tuition rates for undocumented students, another nonstarter. He was full of ideas. DeVos and her staff wondered who was giving the orders. Was it really the president? Or was it Stephen Miller, assuming the power of the president?
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As Miller pressed Trump to shut down the government to win money for the border wall, the president failed, and not for the first time, to take the measure of the person he was picking a fight with. Returning to the speakership eight years after losing it to Republicans, Nancy Pelosi had just become the most powerful Democrat in the country. She would prove to be a most formidable opponent for the president.
Unlike Trump, Pelosi at age seventy-eight was a lifelong practitioner of power in Washington, raised in a family steeped in politics as the daughter and sister of mayors of Baltimore. Since first winning a special election in 1987 to the House from California, where she moved after marriage, Pelosi had spent thirty years accumulating allies and learning the ways of the Capitol. After leading Democrats to victory in the 2006 midterms, she became the first woman ever to serve as speaker. A tough partisan whose frequent references to her five children and nine grandchildren fooled men of Trump’s generation into underestimating her, Pelosi was known for steamrolling rivals and paying obsessive attention to the needs of her caucus. This time, her mandate was explicit: to take on the president.
Trump had once been a Pelosi financial patron. The first time they met was during that 2006 campaign when she and Charles Rangel, a New York congressman, came to Trump Tower hustling for dollars. She left saying that Trump “was a gentleman, and lovely.”[24] He donated $20,000 and sent a note of congratulations after her victory that November.[25] “I think that I’m going to be able to get along with Pelosi,” he said during the 2016 campaign.[26] Pelosi had no such illusions. She now considered him “the most dangerous person in the history of our country.”[27]
The most important advice she ever received about how Trump operated came in 2016, when she attended a ceremony honoring Geraldine Ferraro, the late congresswoman from Queens who had been the first woman nominated by a major party for vice president. Several attendees with firsthand experience dealing with Trump in New York came up to warn her how he did business: “First he’ll flatter, then he’ll bully, then he’ll sue.”
If Trump thought he could flatter or bully Pelosi, he had not been paying much attention. He had only the most superficial understanding of her. Behind her back, he trashed her looks. He told visitors to the Oval Office that Pelosi was an example of why women ought to be cautious about plastic surgery. For her part, she considered Trump a “snake oil salesman” and a mentally unstable budding “autocrat.” He was maddeningly unreliable, making it impossible to forge bipartisan deals. “One day I said to him, ‘Who’s in charge here? Is there somebody else we should be talking to? Because you agree to these things and nothing happens,’ ” she recalled. By the time she returned to the speakership, she had concluded that “this is not a well person.”
With Trump triggering a government shutdown as the opening act of the new post-midterm era, Pelosi prepared for battle. Although many Democrats had supported fencing or other barriers at the southwestern border in the past, Trump had turned the border wall into a signature issue in a presidency rife with demonization of migrants. There was no way Democrats could support that, and she now declared the wall “immoral.”[28] Once something is immoral, then compromise is not simply splitting the difference between the $5.7 billion Trump demanded and the zero dollars she was offering.
At midnight on December 22, 2018, much of the federal government formally shut down, leaving 800,000 workers either on furlough at home or required to work without pay as “essential workers” heading into the holidays. Pelosi knew what Trump evidently did not, which was that historically the public blamed Republicans for government shutdowns since they were the party most hostile to the public sector. Trump thought he could force Pelosi to cave. She was not about to fail her first test back in the speaker’s office.
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With Christmas at hand, aides convinced Trump that he could not go to Florida to celebrate at Mar-a-Lago while the government was shut down, so Melania and Barron got on the plane without him. “I am all alone (poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security,” he wrote on Twitter on Christmas Eve.
The day after Pelosi and the new Congress were sworn in on January 3, 2019, Trump invited her and Chuck Schumer back to the White House to discuss a deal, but the meeting went nowhere. Trump threatened to keep the government closed for “months or even years” if he had to.[29] Although he had agreed not to blame Democrats for a shutdown, of course he did anyway, but polls showed 55 percent of Americans blamed Trump or congressional Republicans while just 32 percent faulted congressional Democrats.[30]
Trump assigned Jared Kushner to broker a solution. His son-in-law had just proven his congressional deal-making skills by delivering Trump a win on a significant criminal justice reform bill reducing sentences for non-violent drug offenses and improving prison conditions, the only major bipartisan legislation of Trump’s tenure so far. Kushner had learned a lot from the exercise, not just about how to force action on Capitol Hill but how to manage his mercurial father-in-law. The young man’s interest in overhauling criminal justice, of course, was as personal as it was political given his father’s time in a federal prison in Alabama. But Kushner knew he had to sell Trump on the idea, which he did by mobilizing celebrities like Kim Kardashian West and allies like Rupert Murdoch and Sean Hannity.
Looking to assuage Trump’s fears of a conservative backlash, Kushner had brought four Republican senators to the Oval Office one day to convince him. They walked Trump through the main elements of the legislation, and he seemed on board. “That all sounds very fair,” Trump said. “I’ll go ahead and do it.”
As the group walked out of the Oval Office, Senator Mike Lee of Utah gave Kushner a hug. “So we got it!” he said, excited.
Kushner knew better. “No, no, no,” he said. “That’s a soft yes.”
“What do you mean?”
“So right now, what I have to do is bring in people who hate the policy that we’re trying to do,” Kushner explained. “Because if we think it’s a yes, he’ll change his mind when Tom Cotton’s on Tucker Carlson basically explaining how we’re letting rapists and murderers out.”
Kushner’s approach worked and Trump became a firmer yes. But then he needed to persuade Mitch McConnell, who agreed to schedule a vote only if Kushner and his allies came up with sixty votes beforehand to ensure there would be no filibuster, then raised his demand to eighty votes. Working with liberals like Van Jones, the activist and CNN pundit, Kushner and Mike Pence managed to secure the requisite votes on both sides of the aisle. Even at that point, it took a threatening tweet from Trump to prod McConnell to bring it to the floor. Ultimately, the First Step Act passed both houses with wide margins and was signed by Trump on December 21, right as his budget negotiations with the Democrats broke down and the shutdown loomed.
Kushner was less than sure how to proceed on his father-in-law’s latest fight with Congress, however. In fact, he increasingly harbored doubts that the border wall fight was worth it at all. A few days after Pelosi took office, he convened a meeting and asked a hypothetical question: Which would be more effective, a fully funded border wall or getting Congress to close every loophole it wanted eliminated from immigration law?
Kevin McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection commissioner, said a complete wall would cut illegal immigration by 20 or maybe 25 percent. Closing the loopholes, he said, would decrease it by 75 percent to 80 percent.
“Okay,” Kushner said with resignation. “So we’ve wasted the last two years.”[31]
At Kushner’s urging, Trump delivered his first formal Oval Office address to the nation on January 8 to offer his case for the border wall, a speech bearing all the hallmarks of a Stephen Miller text, denouncing “vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs” and citing the case of a veteran “beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien.”[32] It made little difference.
Trump met the next day with congressional leaders.
“Why are you hurting people with this shutdown?” Pelosi asked.
“I don’t want to hurt anybody,” Trump said. He said he would reopen the government if Pelosi committed to paying for the wall. “If we open the government today, in thirty days, will you also fund border security, including the wall?” he asked.
“No,” Pelosi said. That was a bottom line for the Democrats—no money for the wall.
“Okay, then this is a waste of time,” a frustrated Trump declared, abruptly standing up. “Bye bye,” he said and stormed out of the room.[33]
Trump and his team exhibited tone-deaf indifference to the burden imposed on the 800,000 unpaid government employees, many struggling to make the rent or pay utility bills. Wilbur Ross, the billionaire commerce secretary, expressed bafflement at why the sidelined workers did not simply borrow from a bank since they would eventually get back pay once the crisis was over.[34] Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president, said the workers were basically getting a free vacation.[35] Trump himself insisted that workers had told him they were happy to forgo paychecks so that he could promote border security.[36]
Stephen Miller was not the only one encouraging Trump’s defiance. In Mick Mulvaney, Trump finally had a chief of staff who would not try to tame him. Having watched Reince Priebus and John Kelly get singed, Mulvaney would just let the fire burn. If anything, he fanned the flames. His let-Trump-be-Trump approach made him the president’s chief enabler, encouraging his more confrontational instincts.
Mulvaney knew how to push Trump’s buttons when he needed to. Like his predecessors, he considered Peter Navarro a loose cannon. Mulvaney brought Trump charts showing how stock markets would fall when Navarro went on television, which was enough to convince the president to pull the opinionated aide off air for months. But otherwise, Mulvaney’s West Wing was geared to serve the president’s daily impulses, not restrain them. When criticized, Mulvaney would shoot back: John Kelly might have had “a well-functioning policy process” but he had failed at the real job, “getting the president the type of things that he wanted,” as a close ally put it.
As the government shutdown dragged on, Trump knew what he wanted but he had no plan for forcing Democrats to back down. The drawn-out battle turned increasingly petty. On January 16, Pelosi told Trump that she thought he should postpone his State of the Union address to Congress since security officers who would normally guard the Capitol had been furloughed. Angry at being denied his biggest audience of the year, Trump retaliated the next day by canceling Pelosi’s military plane for an overseas trip she was scheduled to take. A week later, Pelosi formally disinvited Trump from the Capitol for his State of the Union until the government reopened.
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For Trump, the end of what had become the longest government shutdown in American history came ignominiously. Mitch McConnell, who knew all along what a wasted effort it was, finally came off the sidelines a month into the stalemate, convinced that it had gone on long enough for Trump to grasp that he could not win. The Senate leader scheduled votes on two plans to end the impasse, one on Trump’s terms and another Democratic version, mainly to show the president that he did not have enough support to prevail. After both failed to muster the sixty votes required to overcome a filibuster, McConnell called the president. With televisions in the White House showing air traffic slowing in the Northeast because of the shutdown, Trump knew it was over. He was already threatening to use his executive power to declare a national emergency to divert funds without congressional permission. McConnell urged him to sign the spending bill without the full wall funding.
“I don’t know, Mitch, some of my people are telling me this legislation ties my hands,” Trump said. “If I can’t do a national emergency and build the wall, I can’t sign this legislation.”
“Sure, you can,” McConnell said. “My lawyers say you can.”
“So, you’ll support the national emergency?”
“If you sign the legislation, yes,” McConnell said.
McConnell wanted to lock it in before Trump could change his mind. “I’m going to the floor to announce your support now,” he said. “Do I have your permission to do so?”[37]
The president said yes. McConnell wasted no time heading to the cameras. But it was a surrender by the Senate majority leader too. He had finally ended the spending crisis but just agreed to let a president dilute the most fundamental authority of Congress, the power of the purse.
Trump strode out to the Rose Garden to declare “that we have reached a deal to end the shutdown.”[38] In fact, there was no deal. There was defeat. The bill he now accepted was the same as the one that he had refused to sign five weeks earlier. For a president who believed in zero-sum politics and considered compromise a sign of weakness, it was a bruising setback that underscored the limits of his ability to bull his way through the opposition in a new era of divided government. He had lost the thirty-five-day shutdown with nothing to show for it.
But barely thirteen hours after Congress passed a final spending measure without the money he had demanded, Trump took the money anyway by declaring a national emergency at the border. With Jim Mattis gone and a more compliant acting defense secretary in Patrick Shanahan now in place, Trump unilaterally siphoned off $6.7 billion from military housing projects as well as counter-narcotics programs and other funds, daring Congress or the courts to stop what even some Republicans called a blatant abuse of power. Mulvaney claimed this as his first big victory for the president. “He had been asking for many months: Can I use military funding to build a wall?” the Mulvaney ally recalled. “We were stymied because John Kelly didn’t want to do that.” His new chief would get Trump what he wanted.
In the Senate, Lindsey Graham took it upon himself to bring around conservatives outraged by the move. One night he called Trump’s executive assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, announcing that he was in a car with Ted Cruz and Ben Sasse heading to the White House and needed to see the president urgently. Trump was having dinner with Melania and Barron at the time. “I haven’t had dinner with my wife in six months,” Trump groused. But he let Graham and the others come anyway and ordered appetizers for the unwelcome guests. “He was pissed,” Graham remembered. “You could fry an egg on his head.”
Nonetheless, Trump summoned White House lawyers and they went at it with Cruz, arguing over the legality of the plan. Trump took it all in as if he were at a tennis match.
“This is pretty good, isn’t it?” he whispered to Graham. “Who do you think’s winning?”
“It’s too early to tell,” Graham said.
