A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  I don’t know whether logs are kept for the sheer numbers who have visited Donald Trump in the Oval Office, but I would wager under this president it has been more than under any other. 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the People’s House, and to his great credit he likes to throw open its doors – even if on occasion it is with slightly chaotic results.

  There have been the visiting heads of state. When Angela Merkel came for her first visit since Donald Trump took over, he just scowled at the woman who had been Barack Obama’s closest ally. And when she leans over to him, as camera shutters click and TV cameras record the moment, and says, sotto voce, ‘Should we shake hands?’ Donald Trump ignores her and keeps his hands firmly between his legs, palms planted together, fingers out straight. He clearly has no intention of going near his German guest.

  With Emmanuel Macron, the French president, the body language couldn’t have been more playful – you almost felt like saying, ‘Get a room.’ Donald Trump struck up an early rapport with him, and he was afforded the first state visit of this presidency. Mr Trump summoned up his inner European, and everywhere you looked he was kissing M. Macron on both cheeks (goodness knows what his macho, not ever so metrosexual, redneck base made of that). They had arms round each other. But there was also – unmistakably – the assertion of seniority by the US president. As they stood together in the Oval Office, Mr Trump started picking dandruff off the French president’s lapel. ‘In fact, I’ll get that little piece of dandruff off – you have a little piece. We have to make him perfect. He is perfect.’ If there were any silverback gorillas watching their flat-screen TVs in the forests of sub-Saharan Africa they’d have said, ‘You see, those humans aren’t so very different from us.’ Stephen Colbert, the late night TV satirist, would joke that it wasn’t dandruff. ‘After two days in Donald Trump’s company,’ he said, ‘it was cocaine.’

  And can you imagine the preparation that goes into these meetings for the visiting head of state? What you might be asked, where the president might try to blindside you. When Portugal’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, came to call on Donald Trump in the Oval Office, what was the subject of discussion? Cristiano Ronaldo. The President wanted to know on behalf of his son Barron how good a footballer he was. The best, his Portuguese visitor confirmed. And then Mr Trump asked whether he thought Ronaldo would ever run for office against him. White House staff always prepare briefing notes for the President ahead of these meetings, complete with talking points – and Mr Trump rarely, if ever, looks at them. Many guests leave utterly bewildered.

  Though something extremely unusual happened in October 2018. Into the Oval Office swept the rapper, Kanye West. And it was full Kanye. Over a period of ten minutes he went on a rambling soliloquy, covering such subjects as space, race, his favourite comic book hero – and not letting President Trump get a word in edgeways. The Trump show had been superseded. I was in the office when I got the first ‘pool report’ from the meeting – this comes from one of the small group of journalists, rotating on a daily basis, who cover the President when he is holding a meeting in his office. These are the scribbled notes taken down while the talks are taking place, and is a sort of ‘heads up’ to newsrooms before the full audio and video is played out.

  This ‘pooler’ noted: ‘Kanye went on extended monologues, banged on Resolute desk many times. Says his MAGA [Make America Great Again] hat makes him feel like “Superman”. Says “bullshit” and calls himself a “motherfucker”. Hugs Trump and says “I love you.”’ I am going to hazard a guess: this is the first time in the course of an Oval Office meeting that a pool report has included the word ‘motherfucker’. And another guess: there’s never been a meeting like that one.

  The week that Kanye came to call ended equally unorthodoxly with the visit of an evangelical pastor, who had just been freed from a Turkish prison. He had become a cause célèbre, and Donald Trump had made strenuous efforts to get him freed, mindful no doubt of the importance of the evangelical vote in getting him elected. Sitting in one of the yellow chairs normally reserved for visiting heads of state, Pastor Andrew Brunson – TV cameras rolling, naturally – knelt down, put his left arm round the president’s back and prayed. He asked for God to give Donald Trump ‘supernatural wisdom’ and to ‘protect him from slander from enemies’. In the course of three days we had run the gamut in the Oval Office from the profane to the sacred. From ‘mofos’ to supernatural wisdom. Neither particularly normal.

  OK, there was that time when Elvis Presley just pitched up at the door of the White House in 1970, high on drugs, and asked to see the president. Yes, that was pretty crazy too. Elvis arrived in a purple velvet suit, gold belt, and carrying a Colt 45 revolver, and a letter. ‘I have done an in-depth study of drug abuse and Communist brainwashing techniques and I am right in the middle of the whole thing where I can and will do the most good,’ the then 35-year-old singer wrote. ‘I would love to meet you just to say hello if you’re not too busy.’ Nixon, then not yet tainted by Watergate, was riding high having promised to bring American troops home from Vietnam, and to desegregate schools. Elvis was on a big comeback, and was selling out wherever he went. So, the two men met.

  No actual transcript of the meeting exists in the archive, though President Nixon agreed that Elvis could be a force for good in the war on drugs; Elvis, who collected badges, wanted one that declared he was a narcotics agent at large. A memo was drawn up by a Nixon aide who’d been in attendance, and it noted there was one important respect where Elvis was seeking to undermine one of the cultural ties of the special relationship between the US and UK. ‘Presley indicated that he thought the Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit. He said that the Beatles came to this country, made their money, and then returned to England where they promoted an anti-American theme. The President nodded in agreement and expressed some surprise.’

  I noted earlier that I suspect records will show no president has had so many visitors to the Oval Office as Donald Trump; equally I suspect no president will have had the television cameras in the Oval Office as often. Hardly a day seems to go by without some iteration of the Trump show, the Trump circus. Sports stars, celebrities, Kim Kardashian pushing criminal justice reform, unknowns with poignant stories to tell, traffic cops, servicemen, people of faith, people of none. The President will sit behind the Resolute desk, they will congregate behind – and Donald Trump will make sure that every visitor gets the photograph of their dreams to go with it. The days when the 45th president goes off the grid are few and far between.

  Early on in Donald Trump’s presidency, a friend from a rival news organisation went to interview the President. They had received an invitation to interview him in the Oval Office. Or they thought they had. Bosses flew in. The Washington correspondent was there to meet them. But when they got to the security gate on Pennsylvania Avenue, there was no record of an appointment. The rain was hammering down, and if the system says there’s no scheduled meeting, you don’t get in through the gate, and that in turn means there is nowhere to take cover. So they got wetter and wetter. Other news organisations have experienced similar things.

  Staff in the White House seemed vaguely aware of the interview, but no one seemed to know who had authorised it. Certainly, the press office and the communications team didn’t have anything written down. Nothing was joined up. Eventually they were told to come in. They were told they would be able to see Mike Pence, and he would seek to find out if they might get a word with the President himself. Eventually they go into the Oval Office, and not only does the President agree to be interviewed, it will be on the record. No one has discussed with him subject matters, areas of interest, subjects that might be out of bounds. There had been no talk within the White House itself of what they wanted to get out of the discussion. Or even why they were doing the interview. Strategy? There was none.

  When I interviewed President Obama in 2015, we had had pre-meetings with his staff about the ground we might cover and why it would b
e good for him to be interviewed by the BBC, rather than one of the American networks. The President was about to go on a trip to Africa, and the BBC World Service has a particularly strong reach in Africa with its English language broadcasts, and its Somali and Swahili service. It was agreed that questioning would start with Africa, but after that I could go where I wanted. It was also agreed that clips of the interview would go out immediately, but the whole interview would be embargoed to coincide with African breakfast shows – a source of huge irritation to the American broadcasters.

  One other extraordinary difference worth noting: when I interviewed President Obama, the only other people in the room from the White House were the President’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, a junior press officer, and a rather large secret service officer. When journalists conducted their interviews with President Trump, there would be the journalists from the media outlet – but that wasn’t all. Virtually every senior White House staffer would find reason to be there. The Chief of Staff, the Press Secretary, the Communications Director, the Treasury Secretary, the Director of Strategy, the Chief Economic Advisor, the Staff Secretary (and probably the gardener, the cook and chief bottle washer too). And others. It would be standing room only.

  In this disorderly White House, the only way to find out what the President is thinking on any given day is to be in the room as he speaks; and in a chaotic White House, with a president who can change his mind fundamentally on any given issue, you also wanted to be the last person in the room. So, meetings would come to an end, and the participants would gather up their papers incredibly slowly; they would find a reason not to leave their chair, and as everyone else filed out they would try to be the last person to cup their hand over the President’s ear – and seek to influence his thinking. It was musical chairs without the music.

  On one occasion when the President was giving one of these ‘standing room only’ interviews, the presidential diary had started to fall apart. A large group of US Navy submariners had been invited into the Oval Office to meet the President. The corridors of the West Wing are decidedly cramped and pokey, so they were shown straight in while the interview was going on. Now in the Oval Office you had the President, a group of journalists with notepads poised, the entire senior staff of the White House – and a couple of dozen sailors. They stood patiently in their dress uniforms, and probably vowed never again to complain about space being cramped underneath the oceans in their nuclear submarine.

  This was a White House largely without rules, largely without structure. One person who’d been in the Oval for a meeting with the President wrote in an email afterwards: ‘I saw twenty different people. Omarosa came by; Tiffany Trump was there. Bannon, Priebus, Kushner. Everyone. People walked in and out like it was a shopping mall. There was no paper trail of who had said what to whom. There were no appointments. No diary. There was no formal minuting. People just came and went.’

  Omarosa Manigault Newton (though she was only ever known as Omarosa) was one of the more colourful characters in this crazy set-up. She had been appointed to a senior position at the White House on the basis of … err – well, no one was quite sure what, other than – at that time – a ferocious loyalty to the boss. She had first come to public attention as a contestant on The Apprentice and had many Trump-like qualities. In the show she displayed cunning aplenty, chutzpah galore and brashness by the bucketload. But policy expertise? Political acumen? Knowledge of the inner workings of government? Not so much. She was also African American in a White House that was, well, very white. Tall and physically quite imposing, she also sensed that her tenure would be relatively short – if ever you were going to put money on someone flaming in and flaming out it would be on her. And so she made a habit of secretly recording her conversations with other senior staff. It made for great listening when eventually – and inevitably – she was fired.

  And with a firing comes a book. Omarosa’s account of life in the White House has a glorious story of her walking into the Oval Office to find the President and his then personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, locked in conversation. He is the man who facilitated the $130,000 payment to buy the silence of a former porn star who wanted to sell her story of an alleged affair with Donald Trump. Something the President has always denied. According to Omarosa, the moment the President saw her he stuffed the piece of paper he was reading into his mouth and started eating it. ‘Since Trump was ever the germaphobe, I was shocked he appeared to be chewing and swallowing the paper. It must have been something very, very sensitive.’ That story, I should add, has been denied. Michael Cohen said it did not happen. The White House said the book was riddled with lies.

  But there was no doubting the veracity of the call that President Trump made to her just after she had been fired. It is almost funny, as the President seeks to feign ignorance about the circumstances of her dismissal by the then chief of staff, John Kelly. Or of the conversation she recorded with General Kelly as she was being fired. That conversation really did seem to hold out the prospect of work for her on any future Trump campaign if she kept her mouth shut and didn’t make waves. She chose waves.

  But if she was eccentric, many of the other staff inside the White House were part of distinct power bases. In any ‘court’ there will be different factions, different groups jockeying for power or prestige. That is politics. But it seemed in this White House – at least in the early days – all the senior staff mistrusted each other. There were rival groupings, which would occasionally overlap. Broadly it shook down into three groupings. First there were the ‘more Trump than Trump radicals’. This was the grouping led by Steve Bannon, the populist, provocateur, economic nationalist – and supposedly the brains of Trumpism. And also Donald Trump’s young speech writer, Stephen Miller – a man who was particularly keen on the crackdown on immigration – has been a significant force.

  Then there were the orthodox Republicans, who, though they had their misgivings about Donald Trump’s brand of populism, wanted to help him deliver economic reform, reverse Obama-era health policies, and ensure proper conservatives would fill vacant court positions. Their obvious leader was the Vice-President – the pro-life, anti-abortion, socially conservative evangelical, Mike Pence.

  Finally, there was the Wall St/New York/globalist gang. They were internationalist, free-marketers, and deeply antagonistic to the President’s views on tariffs and trade, and socially quite liberal too. There was a raft of people who had joined the administration with Wall Street backgrounds – Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, Gary Cohn, the head of the National Economic Council, and Dina Powell, who was Deputy National Security Advisor, were all graduates of the Goldman Sachs executive floor. The president’s daughter Ivanka and her orthodox Jewish husband Jared – both of whom were appointed to senior White House positions (remember this US presidency still has many of the characteristics of a family run business) – were also at the forefront of this grouping.

  Incidentally, Jared and Ivanka’s observance of the Jewish Sabbath was an opportunity not to be missed in this scheming, conniving court. They have been cast – and cast themselves – as one of the restraining influences on the President. They were the brake as he wanted to put his foot on the accelerator. They are family and can therefore say things to him that others dare not say. But from sundown on Friday to sundown on Saturday they are out of the loop. Their mobile phones are switched off. In the early months of the Trump presidency some of the most controversial things that happened – the signing of the executive order banning travellers from mainly Muslim countries, the accusation that Barack Obama had tapped Trump Tower, the President’s bizarre self-aggrandising speech at CIA headquarters – all happened during Shabbat. As the Huffington Post noted – when the Jews are away, Steve Bannon can play.

  In the early stages it was a White House where everyone was leaking and briefing against each other. Sieves look like positively robust and solid structures when compared to the administration in these formative months. Sometimes
transcripts of whole conversations would emerge – as happened with a call between the then Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and the President. After the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov visited the White House the official minute of that meeting emerged in its entirety. Everyone inside the building condemned the leaking, while carrying on leaking prodigiously.

  One of the communications professionals brought in to help deliver the Trump revolution was a man called Cliff Sims. Like Omarosa he would depart, and like Omarosa he would write a memoir of his five hundred days there. Its title tells you everything you need to know. It was called Team of Vipers. In an article he wrote for Vanity Fair he noted: ‘The inner circle of Trumpworld was not always a pretty picture. Too often, it was a portrait of venality, stubbornness, and selfishness. We leaked. We schemed. We backstabbed. Some of us told ourselves it was all done in the service of a higher calling – to protect the president, to deliver for the people. But usually it was for ourselves.’ And he went on: ‘Lincoln famously had his Team of Rivals. Trump had his Team of Vipers. We served. We fought. We brought our egos. We brought our personal agendas and vendettas. We were ruthless. And some of us, I assume, were good people.’

  Sims recalls a meeting with the President where Trump asked him to draw up a list of the people who were leaking, and those who were loyal. It wasn’t that simple: there were leakers who were also loyal. And don’t forget one important point: when you read in an article that ‘a source close to the president has told us …’ – who do you think that might be? This is the most media savvy and media obsessed president there has ever been. You think he doesn’t leak?