A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  Had the public schools in her home state of Michigan improved? she was asked. ‘I don’t know.’ Were the number of sexual assaults equivalent to the number of false accusations? ‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Why was she known as the most hated cabinet secretary? ‘I’m not so sure exactly.’ Had she visited bad schools? ‘I have not. I have not. I have not intentionally visited schools that are underperforming.’

  ‘Maybe you should,’ said the interviewer.

  ‘Maybe I should, yes.’

  Two years in, Betsy DeVos was still a firm favourite of the President. But what about those he wearied of, those who had not committed any ethical transgression, but had simply fallen out of favour with this capricious leader?

  The treatment meted out to Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was extraordinary. Serving for just a year, Tillerson became one of the shortest serving US foreign ministers ever. Thickset and white-haired, when he took up the post he was lauded by establishment Republicans as someone who would be one of the ‘grown-ups’ in the room. If anything was likely to get under the President’s thin skin it would be the suggestion that there would be a group of men who would act as wise counsel to stop him careering off the rails – the nurses and matrons for a wayward toddler, if you like. But Tillerson, with his distinguished career as a corporate titan – he had for more than a decade been chairman and chief executive of Exxon, one of America’s most important and significant global companies – was seen as a ‘big beast’ who would be able to stand his ground with Donald Trump, and wouldn’t be cowed.

  That was one part of it, but that business background, a history of running a global company, a career spent closing deals in the Middle East and Russia – these were seen as invaluable attributes. And he was commended to Trump by any number of former senior administration officials – the likes of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former defence secretary and CIA director Robert Gates championed his cause with Donald Trump. But very quickly problems began to emerge. What was clear was that neither man trusted the other. And that is simply an untenable position.

  Ambassadors would write cables back to their governments based on conversations they had had with Rex Tillerson, stating what the US position would be on this or that issue – only to find it directly contradicted by the White House. So along Massachusetts Avenue in north-west Washington, where all the embassies are housed, diplomats started to pose the question: what’s the point of talking to him if he doesn’t know the President’s mind and the President doesn’t care what he thinks? There were any number of flashpoints. It was clear Tillerson wanted to keep the US in the climate change agreement, but Trump wanted out. Trump prevailed. Likewise on the Iran nuclear deal, where scant attention was paid to Tillerson’s concerns about the dangers of US withdrawal, and the universal acceptance that Iran was in compliance with the terms of the treaty. Again Trump prevailed.

  One of the most jarring disagreements was on what US policy would be towards the massively wealthy Gulf state of Qatar, also the site of the Al Udeid airbase – home to ten thousand US and US-led anti-ISIS forces. But Mr Trump called Qatar a ‘funder of terrorism at a very high level’. And he said that within minutes of the State Department questioning whether the Saudis were using the terrorism charge as cover for ‘long-simmering grievances’ between the Arab nations. So, to the world it looked as though Rex Tillerson’s State Department was lining up behind Qatar; while at the White House they were falling in behind the house of Saud. It would be a central source of tension between President and Secretary of State. Tillerson found himself in the middle of a power battle for control of Middle East policy with Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner – who was furiously advocating for the President to make Riyadh the first foreign stop of his presidency. Kushner prevailed.

  What didn’t help Tillerson was his broadly antipathetic view towards the staff he worked with at Foggy Bottom (a name that always sounds as though it should be the punchline of a joke), the district of Washington where the State Department is housed. He thought it was bloated and inefficient; they thought he didn’t understand what they did, and even if he did, he didn’t much care for their work. Under his watch, 60 per cent of the department’s top-ranking career diplomats quit, with new applications falling by a half, according to figures put out by the American Foreign Service Association. The place had hollowed out. Key diplomatic missions had no head; some staff were acting five grades above their pay grade. Juniors were making policy. And when Tillerson wanted to bring people in, he was often blocked by the White House. On a presidential trip to Asia, staff were talking to journalists on the plane about what their Far East policy should be. They were making it up as they went along.

  One friend of mine, who was headhunted for a very senior position, had endless meetings, and was told he was exactly what they wanted, only for the whole process to just fizzle out. It wasn’t that anyone else was appointed to the post; the job just remained vacant. Another hole in America’s diplomatic armoury.

  But what really did for Tillerson was a report that emerged on the US network NBC of a meeting that took place at the Pentagon in October, 2017. He had apparently called Trump ‘a moron’. Actually, what he is believed to have said was that Trump was ‘a fucking moron’. Not good. This story emerged on the day when the President was flying to Las Vegas to offer comfort to the families of those who had been killed and injured in America’s worst mass shooting incident, when a gunman, holed up in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, had opened fire on thousands of people who had gathered for an outdoor country music festival below.

  Before the President departed from Washington word had gone out from the White House that Tillerson needed to go out and clear up the mess. So Tillerson, who was not exactly media friendly, reluctantly came before the cameras. He insisted he enjoyed a close relationship with Trump and called him ‘smart’. Yes, but what about you calling him a moron? ‘I’m not going to deal with petty stuff like that,’ Tillerson said from the State Department Treaty Room. ‘I’m just not going to be part of this effort to divide this administration.’ Umm. That is what we call in the business a non-denial denial. And everyone recognised it for what it was.

  Now one immutable law about surviving in Trump’s administration is that no one shall get between the President and a headline. As Donald Trump boarded Air Force One at McCarran Airport in Nevada, the TVs were switched on – and the headlines were not ‘Donald Trump consoles victims of worst mass shooting’. They were ‘Tillerson refuses to deny calling Trump a “moron”’. Really not good. The President was volcanic. Tillerson was the headline and for all the worst possible reasons. And all the way back from Las Vegas to Washington, Donald Trump fumed.

  If this incident sealed his fate, the dénouement would come a few months later. Tillerson had been on a long and exhausting trip to Africa, and was on the last wearying leg home. Tillerson was neither user friendly, nor media savvy and not au fait with newfangled twenty-first-century things like social media. All of which was a bit of a problem. Because as his staff turned on their phones as they landed, they all very quickly became aware of a presidential tweet, and one of them would have to be tasked with breaking the news to the Secretary of State. The tweet read:

  Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!

  Well, strictly speaking, congratulations to all except Rex Tillerson, who had just been fired in the most brutal way imaginable. The President hadn’t even bothered to pick up the phone to tell him in person before announcing it on Twitter. This one-time giant of corporate America, who had been begged to come out of retirement to serve his country, had just been given the most unceremonious heave-ho. Humiliation doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the one-time host of The Apprentice – with its fa
mous catchline: ‘You’re fired’ – finds it easier to get rid of someone in a confected boardroom, under television lights, than he does in person. In the brutal world of politics, he repeatedly showed himself to be a coward – either doing the firing via Twitter or handing the gun to his chief of staff, so he could be the one to carry out the execution.

  Tillerson returned to the State Department and bade his staff a tearful farewell, with a thinly coded attack on Donald Trump, who wasn’t mentioned by name. ‘This can be a mean-spirited town,’ he said, ‘but you don’t have to participate in it.’ And he spoke about the importance of treating people with respect. ‘Each of us get to choose the person we want to be, and the way we want to be treated, and the way we will treat others.’

  But as if all this wasn’t bad enough, there was worse. The chief of staff, John Kelly, gave an off-the-record briefing to journalists – which inevitably found its way into the public domain. He spoke about how he had tried to warn Tillerson on the Africa trip that he might be about to receive bad news from the President. Kelly told us that at the time he called, Tillerson was suffering from a bad stomach bug from his journeying through Africa and ‘was on the crapper’ as he broke the news. So not just humiliated but embarrassed as well.

  After a long silence, Tillerson would eventually pull the curtains back a touch on what life had been like in Trumpworld. ‘What was challenging for me coming from the disciplined, highly process-oriented ExxonMobil corporation,’ Tillerson told the CBS network months after his firing, ‘was to go to work for a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just says, “This is what I believe.”’ And he went on to say that this was a man who acted on his instincts, which looks like impulsiveness. But perhaps the most damning thing he had to say about working with Donald Trump was the extraordinary lack of respect he had for the law. ‘So often the President would say, “Here’s what I want to do, and here’s how I want to do it,”’ he told the Houston Chronicle, ‘and I would have to say to him, “Mr President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way. It violates the law.”’

  Remarkably, even though months had passed from his firing, Tillerson’s comments could not go unanswered. Any criticism of the President brings a big, swinging counter-punch – and it came literally within hours of the former Secretary of State’s comments being made public. On Twitter – and with even more gusto than is normal – Trump said that Tillerson had been as ‘dumb as a rock’, he didn’t have the mental capacity required and he was ‘lazy as hell’. Yes, the same man who, when he was appointed, Trump had praised for his ‘tenacity, broad experience and deep understanding of geopolitics’.

  Going back to the ‘love-in’ that took place round the cabinet table that first time it was assembled, the remarkable thing is just how few are left unscathed. A record number have been forced to quit, some have been fired, while some survive despite the ethical cloud that hangs over them. The turnover is unprecedented and life expectancy is short.

  The only person at that first meeting to leave the cabinet with head held high was Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the United Nations. Unlike Tillerson, who never seemed to learn to speak the language of Trump, what Nikki Haley could do was translate Trumpian dialogue and turn it into a form of words that those around her on the East River in New York would find more palatable. At times she would distance herself from the President. Most notably when the White House said she had been ‘confused’ when she said the administration was getting ready to impose fresh sanctions against Russia. ‘With respect,’ she witheringly fired back, ‘I don’t get confused.’

  But most of the time she was able to put a more human face on some of the ‘America First’ rhetoric that was anathema to the internationalists at the United Nations. She was also totally street smart. She understood Washington politics in a way that Tillerson never did; she knew how far she could push it; and she knew how to fight America’s corner at the United Nations. So it was a bit of a bombshell when she came into the West Wing undetected and told Donald Trump she wanted to resign. Officials were blindsided. But this was no disorderly departure. This had more of an old-fashioned feel to it. Both sat in the Oval Office as the President lavished praise on her: ‘She’s done a fantastic job and we’ve done a fantastic job together. We’ve solved a lot of problems and we’re in the process of solving a lot of problems,’ he told reporters. While she thanked the President for the opportunity to serve, Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, who has political ambitions of her own, added that she would not be running against the President in 2020. I suspect that had she not said that, the farewell would have been nothing like as cordial.

  Donald Trump had something else to say on Nikki Haley’s planned departure. Paying tribute to her spell as the United States’ public face to the world, and one of the key jobs in the administration, he said that she had made it ‘a more glamorous position’. Obviously being good-looking and ‘glamorous’ should be a key part of the ‘job spec’ for the UN job, so it was really not much of a surprise at the close of 2018 that the person nominated to succeed her was a woman called Heather Nauert. She was, on the face of it, your stereotypical ‘glamorous’ blonde ex-Fox News presenter, but she was undoubtedly smart and mastered the brief quickly. She had one other huge asset going for her. She very quickly earned the trust of the President. She came to the job with no diplomatic or policy making experience, nor having ever held elected office, but she was the President’s pick to be in charge of US foreign policy at the United Nations.

  There is another wrinkle in this appointment. During the November 2018 midterm elections Republicans found themselves doing terribly among educated women voters – and that cost them a number of seats in the House. But in making the announcement that Ms Nauert was his choice to be at the UN, he also said he was downgrading the job, so it would no longer be cabinet level. What a combination: upgrading the importance of glamour; downgrading the status of the job. I think a political strategist might comment that the optics of that, given Republican Party difficulties, left a little to be desired. Before Ms Nauert’s nomination got very far she withdrew her name from consideration.

  The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that I have gone around the cabinet table in this chapter and barely mentioned Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III. The story of Jeff Sessions and his tenure at the Justice Department as Attorney General is such an epic tale and rollercoaster ride that it really deserves a whole chapter to itself. His brief, tumultuous tenure came to an end after the November 2018 midterm elections.

  The last departure of 2018 was of the Defense Secretary, Jim Mattis (his tenure too will be covered in more detail in a later chapter). His exit from government would also mark the passing of the last of the so-called grown-ups from the administration. Just a few days before Christmas 2018 he had woken to a Trump tweet that did not please him. Not one little bit. For a start it was on a matter of defence policy – his purlieu; second, it hadn’t been discussed with anyone; third, Mattis believed it was fundamentally wrong; and fourth, this wasn’t just Trump sounding off. He meant it. The offending tweet was that America was pulling its troops out of Syria because the war against ISIS had been won. ‘We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.’ In other words, the President woke up one morning and, without telling anyone, decided to pull American troops from Syria, and reduce America’s commitment to Afghanistan. Worse, it looked like the person who had persuaded him of the wisdom of this course of action was not anyone in the administration, but the President of Turkey, Recip Tayep Erdogan.

  It was a decision that begged myriad questions to do with where this left America’s allies, and where this left the Kurds, who had been instrumental (and American backed) in the fight; to do with whether defeat had really been achieved, to do with consultation, to do with wider geopolitics – but f
or Jim Mattis it begged the very personal question – and one he had been wrestling with for some time: could he any longer serve under this president? It had always been a delicate balance. His sense of public service, patriotism and love of the armed forces – and his importance as a counterweight to the President’s more impulsive and impetuous pronouncements – had hitherto tipped the scales in favour of him staying. But if his advice and the counsel of the generals in the Pentagon was to be routinely ignored, then there was only one conclusion to be reached. He had to quit.

  His resignation letter (quoted in full in a later chapter) was as far as you could get from the one delivered by Scott Pruitt. It amounted to a thinly veiled repudiation of Donald Trump’s defence and foreign policy, and it made clear how much the two men did not see eye to eye. ‘Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects,’ Mattis wrote, ‘I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.’ Mattis said he would leave at the end of February 2019. But Trump wasn’t having someone else dictating the terms. So at a cabinet meeting a week or so after the shock resignation the President announced that he was bringing forward Mattis’s departure date. Why? Because it allowed Trump to claim that he’d brought Mattis’s career to an end. In the President’s mind Mattis didn’t quit. He was fired.