A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  In a way that’s how the President likes it. He is a non-politician, unused to and impatient of the boring and plodding ways of bureaucratic committee structures and inter-agency cooperation: working groups reporting to subcommittees, subcommittees funnelling up their findings to full committees, minutes prepared and signed as a true and correct record. Dotted lines, straight lines, direct reports, organograms were not his thing. This is not who Donald Trump is. He is an irascible alpha-male who barks orders, and expects people to act accordingly. Nor is he a military man, with a strong sense of the chain of command. He does what he wants. Even when discussions have taken place and agreements reached, he’ll still feel free to undercut them. He will do things his way. People can be in favour one day, and languishing in the Siberian wastes the next. He will say things that make officials wince. He will routinely ignore advice. He will not be corralled. And that unorthodox, devil may care, screw the rest of you, take a poke in the eye approach is what fires up his base.

  And one other important thing: he doesn’t often read the briefing documents presented to him by his Cabinet officers and White House staff. His attention span is limited. He is easily bored, and very easily distracted. In meetings the TV is often on in the background – Fox News naturally. Sims tells of another occasion when the Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, was briefing the President on the complex plans to reform healthcare in the US. After 15 minutes Donald Trump spent a brief time staring out of the window, and then stood up without saying a word and walked out of the room and into his adjacent private dining room where he has installed a giant, flat screen TV on the wall, and sat down and turned the television on. Meeting over, Mr Speaker. Briefing papers are kept, well, extremely brief. A paper prepared for the President will ideally be one sheet of A4, with bullet points, diagrams and pictures. Officials talk about giving him the Reader’s Digest version of events.

  The President’s second National Security Advisor was a bald-headed, thickset general, H.R. McMaster. He was a warrior (the President loved that), and an academic (the President was less impressed by that). And H.R. McMaster liked to do things by the book, and do things formally. Before giving the President a recommendation, the carefully prepared paper would first go into the background, setting a historical context of the issue, then he would give an overview of the different options, the pros and cons, the risks and advantages. And eventually he would reach his conclusion and tell the President of his recommendation. It drove Donald Trump nuts. They never hit it off, and stories would keep on emerging of Trump becoming increasingly frustrated with McMaster during meetings. He droned on too long and was too rigid in his thinking, the President would tell friends. In one instance, when McMaster entered the Oval Office over the summer, Trump complained that he had already seen him that day.

  The Washington Post put it thus: ‘President Trump consumes classified intelligence like he does most everything else in life: ravenously and impatiently, eager to ingest glinting nuggets but often indifferent to subtleties.’ And so new ways were devised to communicate the nation’s secrets to the Commander in Chief. Dreary, formal documents, with appendices and referencing, now had maps, charts and pictures. There were videos, as well as ‘killer graphics’, as the then CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, put it. ‘That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate.’

  Chris Christie recounts an occasion during the presidential campaign when they were meeting to prepare for one of the debates, when a new member of the team put a four-inch thick binder in front of where Trump would be sitting at his luxury Florida Gold Coast retreat. Christie asked what it was. The earnest staffer told him it was detailed research on every topic that might come up, lines to take, background research, historical context, facts and figures. Weeks of work had gone into it. Christie told him it was destined to become the most extensively researched coaster in the history of Mar-a-Lago. A few minutes later Trump came in, sat down, ordered breakfast and, sure enough, when his orange juice arrived, he took it from the waitress and plonked it on top of the binder – and never once peered inside at its contents. Christie had been right.

  But because Trump doesn’t like to read, don’t mistake that for him not wanting to learn. What he loves to do is talk. Chatter to endless people – many nothing to do with the administration – to bounce ideas off, to be challenged – occasionally, to hear what people are thinking on the outside – often calls that are conducted in the evening when he is back in the residence, on his old unencrypted Blackberry – a source of constant worry to his security people.

  And for all the chaos, don’t think that means important decisions aren’t being made. Donald Trump loves to brandish his Sharpie to sign some new executive order that will hack away at the thicket of Obama era regulation and red tape that – to his mind – has stopped industry producing and growing. Bans on building pipelines, forget it. He even issued an executive order making it a requirement for government departments to cut two regulations for every one they introduced. It is from the Oval Office that he signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a sweeping legislative change that saw corporations being given big tax cuts, and gave a massive sugar rush to the US economy. That was his signature legislative achievement. It was also the marquee achievement of his chief economic advisor, Gary Cohn, who has told friends that the key to success was giving Donald Trump only four key bullet points about the legislation (and no more); and ensuring he was away in Asia during the two vital weeks when Congress was considering it.

  As befitting a man who is not exactly a stickler for orthodoxy, on all manner of issues over the years Donald Trump has flipped and flopped. He is not what you would call ideologically rigid; indeed, he prides himself on his almost contortionist-like dexterity. He has been pro-choice for women and their right to have an abortion, and is now ardently pro-life. He has given money to Democrats and given money to Republicans; he has supported an NHS style health system, and sought to undo anything that smacks of socialised healthcare. He has seemed to back gun control, only to change his mind a day or two later. He can march purposefully in one direction, and then turn through 180 degrees without so much as blushing or breaking step.

  But on one thing he has been utterly consistent: his belief that globalisation and free trade have invariably been at the expense of the American worker. If American manufacturing jobs have gone abroad, that is the reason; if coal mining is in decline; if steel mills are shuttered; if factories are mothballed; if companies have gone offshore, that is where the finger of blame should point. At rallies during the election campaign he called it a ‘politician made disaster’. None of it was down to increased investment from abroad, cheaper labour or increasing automation – it was all the fault of the politicians who went before him, and who had allowed themselves to be mugged in trade deals by smarter, savvier opponents: ‘the consequence of a leadership class that worships globalism over Americanism’, he would tell audiences.

  He will not be budged from the view that if there is a trade deficit, it is because America has been swindled. His economic worldview is of a zero-sum game. There are no win-wins. There are only winners and losers. The North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, which has transformed trade between Mexico, Canada and the US? A con. Trans Pacific Partnership? Don’t go near it. And the reason is that all his predecessors and their trade negotiators and commerce secretaries were idiots, and only he can be trusted to do the deals that will put that right. And he is an economic nationalist. His job is to protect the American worker, to stop companies moving offshore. And for the first year of his presidency, battle raged in the White House between the ‘Wall Street brigade’ and the ‘protectionist insurgency’. The Sharks and the Jets – all that was missing was a score by Leonard Bernstein.

  Gary Cohn, the former top man at Goldman Sachs and at the White House heading the National Economic Council, would try on a near weekly basis to school the President on the structural shifts in
the US economy. It had moved – as most of the advanced societies had – away from manufacturing to a service economy. He dealt in facts, charts and detailed numbers to show that deficits were not automatically a bad thing. He led the Wall Street free traders. The old joke is that if you put twelve economists in the room you will come out with thirteen different opinions. But about 99.999% of economists would agree about the importance of free trade to global business and stable economic growth. In Peter Navarro, the President had found that rare 0.001%. He stands way outside the academic mainstream. As an academic who loathed free trade as much as the President, he saw his job very clearly: ‘This is the president’s vision, my function really as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.’ Navarro, who earned a PhD in economics from Harvard was now the director of the White House National Trade Council. And he headed up the ‘protectionist insurgency’.

  If this is a circus, Donald Trump sees himself as the charismatic, brilliant master of ceremonies. The person who, when he is in the arena, will always be directly under the spotlight, centre stage. The ringmaster. The greatest showman on earth. A modern P.T. Barnum – the impresario who, incidentally, also flirted with politics, spending two terms as a Republican congressman in the Connecticut legislature in the nineteenth century. And though the phrase ‘fake news’ is distinctly twenty-first century, Barnum liked creating his own hoaxes and designing his own reality. In 1842 he spoke of having discovered an exotic new creature – the Feejee – an animal with the head of a monkey and the body of a mermaid. When asked about his somewhat tenuous relationship with the truth, Barnum said that his claims were advertisements to draw attention to his museum. ‘I don’t believe in duping the public,’ he claimed, ‘but I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them.’ Some things just seem to echo down the ages.

  But not all those who worked most closely with the President saw him in the same light. They accepted that they must never try to steal his limelight – that was a sure-fire way of being evicted from the circus – but they balked not only at the way this president would take decisions and make policy, but often they were horrified at the policy decisions themselves. And so the central guiding narrative of this exceptional administration has been the battle between a president who sees himself as the all-powerful ringmaster; and those around him who see their role as akin to the circus’s lion tamers. A battle of wills. A fearsome, untamed, king of the jungle versus the cunning of those who want to suborn the animal to their will.

  All of us who cover the White House on a daily basis know about the different factions, and the all-out battles on policy that have been waged. Early on I was told that among the so-called ‘adults’ (that equates to the generals McMaster, Kelly and Mattis, and the Wall Street wing – represented by Cohn and deputy national security advisor Dina Powell – and others more junior) there was an agreed policy that there could never be a time when all were out of Washington at the same time. Someone had to be there to keep the President in check, someone needed to stop him from allowing gut instinct to become implemented policy. There had to be a grown-up in the room. It should be noted that by the beginning of 2019, the White House had been gutted of all the so-called ‘grown-ups’.

  It wasn’t until the publication of the book Fear by Bob Woodward that the extent of this ‘chaperoning’ of the President became clear. When the book first emerged, the first instinct of the White House would have been to rubbish it, deny its contents, call it fake news and move on. But Woodward has a track record that is not so easy to dismiss. Having been one half of the legendary duo that played a critical role in bringing down Richard Nixon, and having written a number of hard-hitting, well researched books on the presidents who’ve succeeded him, this would not be swatted away so easily.

  The initial headlines would have caused Donald Trump anguish enough. Apparently the chief of staff John Kelly had referred to the President as unhinged and an idiot; Jim Mattis apparently called him a fifth or sixth grader (in other words a ten-year-old); while the chief economic advisor, Gary Cohn, was just ‘astounded’ at how dumb the President was. It was manna from heaven for the cable news networks and the headline writers. But there is much more to this book than name-calling. What is immediately apparent the moment you delve into its contents is that a lot of very senior staff, after donning the latex gloves to leave no fingerprints, had spilled the beans on life on the inside. Indeed, for hours after publication there was that rarest thing – silence from the comms team at the White House as they figured out what to do or say.

  The Woodward book gives a remarkable insight into the White House battle to impose tariffs, in which the President was ready to blow his whistle and order his men to climb the ladders out of the trenches. First, though, there was the internal dispute to resolve, which had become a long-term, attritional battle. On one side was the free trade globalist Cohn, arguing for the existing order in world trade; on the other the protectionist Navarro, urging Trump on to try the wrecking ball – and each also had his own surrogates within the West Wing, backing their man every inch of the way.

  The character who found himself at the centre of this was Rob Porter, the President’s Staff Secretary (he would later be forced out after former partners alleged that he had been violent towards them, charges he called ‘simply false’). If ‘staff secretary’ sounds a rather dull, workaday grunt job, don’t be mistaken. The staff secretary is the funnel through which all paper passes that will end up on the Resolute desk for the President to sign. Anything the President sees, the staff secretary will have read first, and in many cases helped draft. And the situation he often found himself in was walking into the Oval Office to find Steve Bannon handing the President his proposal, or Kellyanne Conway handing over hers. None having gone through the normal filtering and straining process. Random bits of paper flying around and landing on the President’s desk – which no one else knew anything about.

  On trade, Porter was allied with Cohn. As well as getting rid of NAFTA, the deficit with China and Japan, and what Donald Trump perceived to be the unfair trading relationship with the European Union, the President was incredibly vexed about KORUS – the South Korean US trading relationship. According to Woodward, allies of the President had prepared documents for Trump to sign that would herald an American withdrawal from KORUS, a free trade agreement setting the rules for $150 billion worth between the two nations. But the trade deal could not be disentangled from the security relationship with South Korea, and many in the White House saw the trade deal as a small price to pay for the military presence it allowed the US. Jeopardising KORUS was about much more than Samsung TVs and smartphones flooding the US market. National security was at stake. Porter alerted Cohn, and Cohn resorted to desperate measures. Woodward says he stole from Trump’s desk the letter that was sitting there awaiting the trademark signature. Remarkably the President didn’t seem to notice. And on this occasion the protectionists backed off.

  In this skirmish it was a win for the free traders. But it wasn’t over. Donald Trump was growing impatient about the foot dragging over removing the US from the NAFTA agreement: ‘Why aren’t we getting this done? Do your job. It’s tap, tap, tap. You’re just tapping me along. I want to do this,’ Trump reportedly told his then staff secretary Rob Porter.

  So Porter did as he was instructed. He drew up a letter notifying NAFTA officials that the US would withdraw. But he was fearful of what the consequences of this precipitate action would be. So once again, he spoke to Gary Cohn that doing so could trigger an economic crisis. Cohn is a thickset, bald, physically imposing man (he and H.R. McMaster looked comically similar when they shared a platform together, as they sometimes did in the White House Briefing Room), and he was one of the few who openly confronted Donald Trump on policy. Cohn said, according to Woodward, ‘I can stop this, I’ll just take the paper off his desk.’ And he did. In the spring of 2017 that draft comm
uniqué went missing from the Resolute desk.

  The first excerpts of the Woodward book, with its detailed accounts of how staff were flagrantly ignoring the President’s will, or just quietly blocking, caused a sensation in Washington. But something altogether more earth-shaking would appear the next day. The New York Times – or the ‘failing New York Times’ as the President would have it – had something rather unusual on its op-ed page. This was an anonymous article, written by a senior administration official, setting out in explicit, toe-curling detail the extent to which some of those in the President’s inner circle had deep concerns about Trump’s temperament, his ability to govern, his grasp on reality. It would have been journalistic suicide for the New York Times to have agreed to grant someone the cloak of anonymity unless it could be properly justified; unless there was no other means for the individual to express him or herself. Whoever wrote it must have been very senior indeed.

  The headline accompanying the piece read: ‘I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration.’ The headline and the piece tipped the President over the edge. He hated everything about it: the paper it was published in, the disloyalty of whoever wrote it, the unflattering portrayal, the suggestion that he was losing his marbles. It presented the complete opposite image of how the President – who once declared himself a ‘very stable genius’ – liked to see himself. He wanted blood. He wanted a head on a platter. That night on the cable news channel MSNBC the credits rolled and the veteran news anchor Brian Williams sat behind his desk and read a headline that seemed to capture the chaos engulfing the man brooding in his Oval Office: ‘The portrait of a volcanic president who wants a newspaper to hand over a mole in his own government. Or, as we call it, Wednesday night.’