by Jon Sopel
This was McCain’s moment – and he knew it. Then, finally, like a Roman senator deciding whether a slave who’s given his all on the floor of the Colosseum should be spared or thrown to the lions, McCain, with the flicker of a smile playing on his lips, turned his thumb down. He was now tired and weak, his face scarred by the medical interventions to tackle his brain cancer. He was dying and he knew it – but he hadn’t lost his sense of the theatre of politics; nor had he mellowed enough to acquiesce and just toe the party line. He thought the new health plan was flawed, and he was damned if he was going to just be meek lobby fodder. The former naval officer had torpedoed the Trump plan, and holed it below the waterline.
The froideur between McCain and Trump was now Arctic – penguins would have struggled to survive in this icy, windblown tundra. All of which was awkward, as the one-time presidential candidate was fast reaching the end of his life. Not that that brought any softening from the President. When it became clear that McCain was planning to oppose a Trump nomination for a post requiring Senate confirmation, one of Trump’s loyal West Wing aides retorted, ‘It doesn’t matter. He’s dying anyway.’ This lion of the Senate, war hero and independent-minded statesman would soon be gone. The McCain family kept lines of communication open to the White House through John Kelly, keeping him informed of the senator’s deterioration. The chief of staff would in turn brief the President. Kelly and McCain were friends. They had known each other well, and with their shared military background there was a huge amount of mutual respect.
Then Kelly had the call from Cindy McCain that he had been expecting. The doctors thought the time had come to turn off the life support machine. The family had concurred. The news would be announced that John McCain had passed. That day came on Saturday, 25 August 2018.
Kelly has told friends that he relayed the news to the President, and wanted him to engage on what should happen next. How did the President want to mark this death: would there be a period of mourning, was there to be a state funeral, and so on and so forth. But the President wouldn’t engage. And in this impasse the chief of staff decided he would go it alone. He ordered that the flag over the White House should fly at half-mast to mark the death of this great American. That was Saturday evening.
When Trump realised this on Monday morning, he apparently went berserk at his chief of staff. I’m told the air was thick with F-bombs and with language so salty that it could clog your arteries. Kelly may have been a general, but Donald Trump was the Commander in Chief, and he decided the time had come to show who was the boss and who gave the orders. He commanded that the policy be reversed. So up went the Stars and Stripes, back to the top of the White House flagpole. Kelly has told friends that he said to the President in no uncertain terms, ‘You can fire me if you want, but I am always going to do the right thing.’
The President had got his way. But it was turning out to be a pyrrhic victory. The White House was now out of kilter with the rest of Washington, where on public buildings flags were still at half-mast. The cable news channels had their cameras trained on the White House roof. Social media lit up. Donald Trump had picked an argument with a newly deceased American hero and statesman – and it very quickly became apparent he was losing. The President wasn’t only fighting his chief of staff; he was fighting a good chunk of US public opinion. Lawmakers from both parties were calling on Donald Trump to show respect. Veterans’ organisations piled in too. That morning the President repeatedly avoided journalists’ questions on the subject. But by Monday lunchtime it was battle over, and the Stars and Stripes returned to half-mast. Trump had relented and issued a statement saying, ‘Despite our differences on policy and politics, I respect Senator John McCain’s service to our country, and, in his honour, have signed a proclamation to fly the flag of the United States at half-staff until the day of his interment.’
Throughout Kelly’s tenure there were repeated stories that he was about to leave or be fired, only to be followed up by a Trump tweet that it was all nonsense, and they got along just fine. There would be further reports that his influence in the White House was on the wane, and he was becoming a marginal figure.
Then came the reports going in the opposite direction: the repeated suggestion that Kelly thought Trump was an idiot – and that he, John Kelly, was the one that was saving the country, not Donald Trump. Friends of his told me that the four-star general thought his period in the White House bunker had been the most demanding he had faced in his career. In June 2018 there were suggestions that Kelly had given up trying to save Trump from himself. That he had concluded he should let the President act unilaterally, even if that would result in impeachment – a threat that became more real after November 2018, when the Democrats made sweeping gains to take control of the House of Representatives.
Support for that view was provided by former White House communications staffer Cliff Sims in his tell-all description of life in the White House. He offers a lurid account of Kelly fulminating in his office. ‘This is the worst fucking job I’ve ever had,’ he says to a group of aides. The chief of staff was sitting in his office, with the White House swimming pool just visible beyond the French doors. ‘People apparently think that I care when they write that I might be fired. If that ever happened, it would be the best day I’ve had since I walked into this place,’ Kelly tells them. ‘And the President knows it, too.’
But then came the most extraordinary news of all. Kelly said he had accepted Trump’s invitation to remain as chief of staff through to the 2020 election. Really? Are you kidding? No one believed that was going to happen. And sure enough, at the end of 2018, with relations severely strained, and the chief of staff exhausted and disillusioned from his 18 wearying months of trying to hold the reins at the White House, it was agreed he would go.
The chief of staff job certainly has its rewards: the signature pieces of legislation passed when all seemed lost, the triumphant bits of diplomacy, the disasters averted through the chief of staff’s acuity and diligence. But ultimately the job leaves most holders of the post burned out and frazzled, which is why it is a position where the tenure tends to be exceptionally short, and turnover is high. When Barack Obama was getting through his chiefs of staff at quite some rate, Donald Trump took to Twitter to berate him: ‘3 Chief of Staffs [sic] in less than 3 years of being President: Part of the reason why @BarackObama can’t manage to pass his agenda.’ By the end of 2018, Donald Trump was on his third chief of staff inside two years. In political circles when you have the job of chief of staff you are known as the ‘javelin catcher’. And for a reason. You are the person that has to interpose himself between the troublemakers and the bruised ego brigade who are intent on hurling a sharpened metal spear in the direction of the president with as much force as possible. You can only catch the javelins for so long in this high stress, no respite job.
Kelly and the President agreed a statement that would be put out on a Monday morning announcing his departure. But perhaps inevitably it was pre-empted by Trump himself, who announced it 48 hours early. The White House was doing nothing to steer journalists away from the suggestion that the 68-year-old Kelly would be succeeded by a 36-year-old wunderkind, Nick Ayers, who had served as chief of staff to the Vice-President, Mike Pence. He would be the political brain needed by the President in the run-up to 2020. There would be a renewed focus in the White House on campaigning and messaging – a common approach for a president halfway through his first term and starting to eye what needed to be put in place to win a second. In this Trump had the strong backing of daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared.
A fine plan – except Ayers had got cold feet. He wanted to ‘spend more time with his family’. He was going back to Georgia to see more of his triplets. What is interesting is how the story was allowed to gain traction that he was a shoo-in for the post, and that it was almost a done deal. It made it look as if the President wasn’t the master of his own destiny. More damaging, it made it appear that the President, far from bein
g able to pick and choose from the brightest and best, was being rebuffed. In the normal course of events the greatest honour that could be bestowed upon an American patriot is to get the call to serve the country and the president. But Ayers chose to give it a miss. Things would go from bad to worse in the search for chief of staff number three.
A number of other names started to be bandied around. Some were put out there as kite flying exercises – you see what reaction their name provokes before you take it any further. Others were fantasy names, just as you might pick your fantasy football team. One name, though, started to get proper and due attention. Chris Christie has been in and out of favour with Donald Trump over the years. Back in 2015 when Trump launched what people thought would be a quixotic attempt to get the Republican nomination, Christie had been told that Trump would pull out, having milked the publicity for branding purposes – and the property tycoon would get behind the New Jersey governor. Christie is a heavyweight in every sense of the word. He knows politics. As a former federal prosecutor, he knows the law – although the fact that he put Jared Kushner’s father away in prison a few years back didn’t exactly endear him to the President’s son-in-law. (The father pleaded guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign contributions and was sentenced to two years in federal prison.) Christie also shared the President’s pugnacious and pugilistic approach to politics, and the two men knew each other extremely well.
On paper he was the ideal candidate, particularly with Donald Trump facing multiple legal challenges wherever he looked. We were told that the meal that he and the President had at the White House had gone very well. And then, bang. Christie had turned down the job as well. ‘I have told the President that now is not the right time for me or my family to undertake this serious assignment,’ Christie said in a statement. ‘As a result, I have asked him to no longer keep me in any of his considerations for this post.’ As with the Ayers refusal, this is pretty extraordinary and would have never happened in the Bush or Obama White House. You just do not get out in front of the president and publicly contradict him. It breaks all normal protocol, and speaks volumes about the dysfunctional way decisions were made.
There was now an air of panic, fury and impotence at the White House. To lose one potential chief of staff may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness, as Oscar Wilde might have said, were he reporting Washington politics at the end of 2018. Someone, anyone, surely would want the job. This spoke to the darkening clouds that were gathering over the Trump administration, with a mass of legal problems beginning to close in on the President – and the knowledge that it was likely to get a lot worse.
And this wasn’t just an issue relating to finding an appropriately qualified chief of staff. A super-smart lawyer friend of mine, who had worked in the private sector and on Capitol Hill on a Judiciary Committee inquiry, was returning to the private sector and was seeing advertised any number of jobs in the executive office of the White House. These are jobs that in normal times would never need to be promoted. There would be a long queue of the most capable people with shimmering CVs fighting to get the chance to burnish their credentials with a spell at the White House. But it no longer works that way. There is a sense that what you are getting involved with will be chaotic; that given the President’s multiple legal difficulties you might find yourself needing to retain outside counsel, which is cripplingly expensive; and finally, how many people have emerged from their time at the Trump White House with their reputation enhanced?
In this climate, the White House hurriedly put out a statement saying that Mick Mulvaney, the Director of the Office of Budget and Management, would also take on the acting role of Chief of Staff. The prospect of Mulvaney taking on the post permanently took a hit when footage emerged of him during the 2016 election campaign describing Donald Trump as a ‘terrible human being’. Mulvaney would claim that he and Trump joked about it – but it is hard to believe the President was laughing when he watched it. It all looked a bit scrappy, gave the impression that his appointment had been a scramble, and conveyed the image of a White House at the mercy of events, not in control of them. Exactly the sort of thing a strong chief of staff is meant to forestall. But an acting chief of staff? The one job that is meant to convey strength and stability and it is an ‘acting’ role? How does that work? If you are trying to say to Washington and the rest of the world that the second most powerful person in the administration is there in an acting capacity, you are sending a very mixed message.
The approach of Mulvaney also seems to represent a third way in doing the job. Mulvaney, like Kelly, wanted to impose some order and structure in the executive branch that he is presiding over – but unlike Kelly he was not trying to constrain the President. He is firmly signed up to the ‘let Trump be Trump’ school of management. Mulvaney is happy for the President to go his own way. That has pleased the President. He is also not going around – as Kelly did – telling everyone how much he hates and detests the job. And that has pleased the staff.
John Kelly would give an interview soon after he left the White House. He said it was a ‘bone crushing hard job’. And he set the bar in a fascinating way on how his tenure should be measured. He said he should be judged by what the President did not do. In other words, don’t look to the legislation that he helped push over the line. Look instead at what he stopped an impulsive and reckless president from doing. The chief of staff not as facilitator, but as safety net.
Chapter 3
The Cabinet Room
Probably the most famous cabinet ever assembled by an American president was the so-called ‘team of rivals’ that Abraham Lincoln brought together in 1861. Much is made, and rightly, of the extreme polarisation in US politics today, and the fiercely partisan nature of debate. But America in the 1860s – though it had the enviable benefit of no Twitter or Facebook – was on the point of genuine disintegration; it was a Divided States of America, with the South seeking to secede from the North over the issue of the abolition of slavery. And the country was about to plunge into the Civil War, which would claim the lives of three-quarters of a million men out of a population of 35 million. Lincoln, the self-educated lawyer from Kentucky, who was not much versed in the ways of Washington, needed the ‘brightest and the best’; he needed people who could hold America together at this moment of maximum peril for the nation. The first shots in the civil war would be fired more or less as soon as Lincoln assumed the presidency.
Lincoln went about his task by bringing in people who wouldn’t just be ‘yes men’ – compliant ciphers who would do his bidding – but strong-minded politicians in their own right, with their own bases of power. It was an effective ploy, as the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin emphasised in her influential 2005 book Team of Rivals, subtitled ‘The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln’. Those who had fought him for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination – New York senator William H. Seward, Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase, and Missouri’s distinguished elder statesman Edward Bates – found themselves appointed to the highest positions in the land. Despite their difference – and the bitter rivalry – they gradually warmed to Lincoln during those fraught Civil War years. That is, with the exception of Chase, who was never reconciled to his defeat and still thirsted for the presidency. He would continue to plot incessantly against America’s 16th president. But Lincoln indulged him, on the principle expressed most eloquently by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a hundred years later, when he said of his troublesome FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, that it was better to have him in the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in. Chase, though, did eventually quit in 1864, only for Lincoln – stunningly – to appoint him as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
By now, compatibility was a second order concern for Lincoln. After the ravages of the Civil War, there could only be one purpose, one goal – and that was to staunch the bleeding and restore the Union. And on that basis, there was common endeavour from these d
isparate men. Lincoln was the first among equals, yes. But he wanted big figures, who felt free to challenge him. And he knew they would. Lincoln worked to the time-honoured political axiom that you hold your friends close, and your enemies closer.
It is probably fair to say that is not the overriding philosophical underpinning of today’s president, or the guiding principle behind his cabinet appointments.
Donald Trump just has to take a few steps from the Oval Office, through the door into the outer oval office and straight into the cabinet room. The large oval table – a gift from Richard Nixon in 1970 – seats 20, and each cabinet secretary sits in a strictly appointed place, according to the date the department was established. The President sits at the middle of the table with his back to the Rose Garden. And lest anyone should be in any doubt which is the President’s chair, his has a higher back and arms than anyone else’s. To his right sits the highest ranking of the department heads, the Secretary of State; to his left sits the Secretary of Defense. Opposite him is the Vice-President – and Mike Pence is flanked by the Treasury Secretary and the Attorney General.
All cabinet meetings are held there, although there are records of interesting ‘awaydays’. In 1844 the 10th US president, John Tyler, invited members of his cabinet aboard a new warship called the Princeton for a cruise on the Potomac, the river that runs through Washington and leads out into the Chesapeake Bay. The ship had a 12-inch cannon aboard, which someone had seen fit to call the Peacemaker. And throughout this happy little voyage, the big gun was fired ceremoniously to the delight of onlookers lining the banks of the river. Drink was consumed, and there was an atmosphere of celebration. After several hours, and several toasts, the captain of the ship, one Robert F. Stockton, was persuaded to fire the cannon one last time – only for the gun to explode, sending white hot metal scattering across the deck and killing eight people including two cabinet members, Secretary of State Abel Upshur and Navy Secretary Thomas Gilmer. Tyler, who was below deck at the time, was unhurt. Well, that’s one way to create the need for a cabinet reshuffle.
