Still Winning : Our Last Hope to Be Great Again (9781546085287)

by Hurt, Charles

  There is always a hushed formality inside the West Wing of the White House. Secret Service agents blend silently into the walls like grandfather clocks. Aides and advisors scurry across the lush carpeting in silence and absolute efficiency. Visitors tend to whisper because they really are not sure where to stand or whether to even speak. Decorum rules everything.

  Sarah and I stood waiting for the president, marveling to ourselves at the man’s ceaseless energy. We talked about how his unorthodox style and scaldingly honest language has changed the way people talk politics in Washington. So many of the fake niceties have been put away.

  Even on an overcast day, a beautiful, slightly filtered light shines through the bank of windows behind his uncluttered desk. Beyond that, the city was glowing in its majestic annual festival of cherry blossoms. On the small table behind his chair are framed black-and-white pictures of his mother and father.

  After a few minutes, President Trump came bounding in, wearing a crisp white shirt. Blue suit. Red tie. He had just gargled with Listerine, the classic yellow stuff that scorches the inside of your mouth. He welcomed me and immediately invited me behind the famous Resolute Desk for a picture.

  For the longest time after Trump first began running for president, I studiously avoided riding on his plane or being in any situation where I might be unavoidably invited into a picture with him. Part of that is just the automatic reflexes of a reporter who never wants to be too chummy with somebody he is covering, either as straight reporter or as an opinion columnist. I never wanted anybody to doubt the sincerity of my opinions about the guy.

  But I also never wanted Trump to have some embarrassing picture of me standing beside him smiling, thumbs up, for the camera in the event he abandoned his campaign promises, in which case I would have readily turned harshly against him.

  That never happened. So I happily walked around for a picture with him. I might have even offered a smile and a thumbs-up.

  When we sat down, Sarah Sanders and I took two chairs opposite him across his desk. He spoke graciously about how much he appreciates my routinely defending him in my columns for the Washington Times and in television appearances on Fox News.

  “You’re tough,” he says. “I like that.”

  Then he looked at Sarah and an impish grin crossed his face. He told me I could have all the time I needed in this interview. Then he added, “Don’t let Sarah push you around.”

  We all laughed, because it was genuinely funny. But like bear cubs play-fighting, there was something more serious going on. He was testing a little. Did I have the spine to blow her off if she—being the excellent press secretary that she is—started rushing me to finish my interview so he could get to more important presidential business?

  Among confident people it is an easy test. But it also would have revealed any weakness. And Trump—ever watching—would have recorded it.

  Of course, Donald Trump certainly likes to test people. He says something and watches your face for a reaction. He is always pushing, looking for those soft spots in people. And the hard spines that do not budge. He can be belittling, but also highly complimentary.

  When not testing people, Trump likes to review his record—whether it is his accomplishments, his epic public fights, or the slights people have committed against him. In this case, he wanted to linger a little longer on his announcement speech back in June 2015.

  “You know, it’s funny,” he said. “They gave me great marks for a great speech.

  “And then, about three days later, remember?” he asks. “It was like a delay. They said, did he use the word ‘rape’?”

  He was talking, obviously, about his line about the Mexican rapists that caused such a firestorm.

  “Okay, so I did,” he confessed. “You know, the ‘rape’ word you don’t use. But I used it.”

  It really doesn’t matter how many millions of times the media has chewed this over, Trump talks about it with great interest and vigor—as if it just happened yesterday and he is talking about it for the first time.

  Now, he said, we have had a couple of years to evaluate his comment about rapists illegally crossing the border into the United States.

  “Okay, now we have a few years behind us, right? But the only thing I was wrong about: that it was mild compared to what is going on,” he said, drawing out the word “mild.”

  “That speech was tame by comparison to what is happening.”

  He said he was astonished when he learned from Border Patrol agents that mothers were giving their young daughters birth control pills before their treks north across the border so that they would not become pregnant if they were raped along the way.

  Whether you love Trump or hate him, you have to admit that the guy has stuck with the issues that got him elected like a dog with a bone. That is not to say he has successfully solved all the problems he vowed to fix. Illegal immigration is a good example. Even as the problem has gotten worse, Trump has redoubled and redoubled his efforts to solve the crisis at the border once and for all—in the face of constant opposition from Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress.

  During the first two years of his presidency, as Trump has remained unswervingly focused on the issues that got him elected, Democrats in Congress have been focused on something entirely different. Instead of debating Trump about the issues, Democrats have painstakingly woven a ludicrous web of lies about some supposed “collusion” between Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.

  Anyone who was following Trump’s campaign knew that the campaign had a hard enough time colluding with itself on most day-to-day matters. The idea that they were colluding with a foreign government that speaks a different language was laughable on the spot. But, of course, the media took every bit of it totally seriously—hook, line, and sinker. And they ran with it, clucking ceaselessly like so many Chicken Littles.

  Imagine what must have been going through President Trump’s mind the first time he heard all the lurid, disgusting, and entirely fabricated claims contained in the so-called Steele Dossier, which we now know was nothing but a crude political hit job. These claims were shared directly with him by his top U.S. intelligence officials.

  I asked Trump what has been the lowest, hardest moments of his presidency. When he dismissed the question several times, I could not tell if he simply did not think it mattered or did not care to dwell on anything that hinted of weakness on his part.

  Finally, he answered, sort of.

  “The biggest moments are when I found out how totally dishonest the press is,” Trump said. “Where a story should have been good on the Russia delusion—you know, the whole thing with Russia—and it would end up being horrible.”

  He looked over to Sarah, adding, “Sarah knows it better than anybody.” She smiled and nodded.

  Given the madness of the entire Russia “collusion” investigation, I asked how close he came to firing special prosecutor Bob Mueller.

  “I never came close to firing him,” Trump said.

  Why?

  “I am a student of history in a true sense,” he said. “Certainly, I watched what happened to Richard Nixon when he fired everybody. That didn’t work out too well. So, I didn’t.”

  For anyone who actually cares about the Constitution and relies on our free press to hold government officials accountable, these are incredibly frustrating times. While most of the media has been on a two-year drunken bender over their phantom Russia “collusion” crusade, they have entirely missed the very real and far more important story.

  Under Barack Obama’s previous administration, America’s intelligence services were turned over to political partisans who spied on domestic political enemies and used the product of that illegal domestic espionage to punish their political enemies.

  This actually happened. In America. In 2016. And, yet, if you were a devoted consumer of most of the media in America the past two years, you very well may have never heard a word about it.

  The
notion that an administration would spy on political enemies at the height of a presidential campaign is absolutely terrifying. It is the sort of thing that happens in North Korea or Russia. Not in a constitutional republic.

  Even more terrifying is that you have a supposedly free press that has almost entirely ignored the scandal. And we are talking about a scandal that is way worse than Watergate and every bit as bad as the Pentagon Papers. And hardly a peep out of the press.

  At least President Trump is clear-eyed about the seriousness of the true constitutional crisis, however ignored it may be by the press. “This is something that should never be allowed to happen to another president,” he told me.

  And it was not just the spying on his campaign during the election that raises seriously alarming questions. All the hyperpartisan actions inside the Department of Justice that we now know about should horrify any red-blooded American, no matter their partisan stripe.

  Rogue agents inside the FBI were lustily pursuing a political candidate whom they clearly loathed. All the while, you had the same agents working overtime to squelch a legitimate investigation into another political candidate, Hillary Clinton, whom they clearly favored and fully expected to become the next president—and their next ultimate boss.

  This level of clandestine corruption at the highest levels of the federal government is supposed to be why good reporters become reporters in the first place. It is the kind of story we dream about uncovering. Yet, for the vast majority of Washington political reporters, it was virtually ignored.

  “I don’t think it was ever like this,” President Trump said. “I don’t think that there has ever been a time—whether it’s politics or not—like the corruption [that’s been] uncovered.

  “Hopefully that’s going to be pursued,” he added, almost wistfully. “By reporters, too.”

  Few people come in for a greater beating in this whole scandal than former FBI director Jim Comey, who was one of the top ringleaders of the Russia charade.

  “I think Comey was a poor man’s J. Edgar Hoover,” said Trump, referring to the corrupt former FBI director who collected dirt on political figures so that he could control them. “What he did with that [Steele Dossier] report, I think, was [an effort] to sort of gain influence over the president of the United States.”

  Then he offered an incredulous smile.

  “It didn’t work out too good for him,” Trump said, citing his refusal to be intimidated by the lurid and outlandish accusations. “It worked out because I had the opposite reaction.

  “But Hoover made a living off doing that for many years,” Trump added. “He was there for many, many years.”

  Trump then came about as close as he ever does to chiding or correcting himself.

  “I didn’t see it at the time,” he said with a half shrug. “But, in retrospect, that had something to do with what was happening.”

  Even in this, however, President Trump takes pride.

  “You know, it’s very interesting. A lot of things have been exposed in my administration that never would have been exposed in a more typical administration,” he said of the FBI’s clear vendetta against him, exposed in the aftermath of Comey’s firing.

  “I am very proud of it. Now you can keep your guard up, at least. You can do what you have to do.

  “It is amazing that I won in light of what we found out,” he added.

  “When you talk about collusion, the collusion is with Google and Facebook and all of these different platforms—all of these different companies—with the Democrats. And beyond those, it’s the New York Times, the Washington Post.”

  Then, shifting back to the big picture, he said, “So, I’ve done a lot of good. I think I’ve done more than anybody in the first two years ever as president, if you really think about it.”

  He paused a moment, looked past me to the open door.

  “Hey,” he called out. “Give me the list of things!”

  Turning back to me, he said excitedly, “I just wrote out a list.” Copies of the long list of his administration’s accomplishments were brought in and passed around.

  “It goes on for pages, okay? Pages!” Three single-spaced pages, to be exact.

  The list chronicles all the details of the booming economy, rising wages, and falling unemployment that have occurred during Trump’s first two years in office.

  “Look what I just did for Israel two days ago,” he said, referring to his declaration to recognize the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as sovereign property of Israel.

  “They’ve been talking about that for forty-eight years, right? I did it in two seconds,” he said with a wave of his hand.

  Throughout Donald J. Trump’s short, triumphant political career, he has been truly blessed with the greatest gift every politician prays for: terrible opponents. Whether it is Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, Trump’s opponents have been, to use a favorite term of Trump’s, “real beauties.”

  Looking toward 2020, those beauties get more and more beautiful every day. He is looking at everything from fake Indians to fired porn star lawyers to open-border fanatics. The most sensible among them are the full-blown socialists.

  If Donald Trump’s 2016 election was the barbarians storming the gates of Washington, this Democrat field looks more like the lunatics trying to take over the asylum. The first debate will look like a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with one of them barking, another refusing to take his meds, and another screeching across the white floor without pants.

  Meanwhile, on planet earth, President Trump will be the character played by Jack Nicholson, utterly pole-axed by the sheer lunacy of the entire bunch, but also thoroughly enjoying it and taking every opportunity to offer encouragement for each one to flaunt their zaniest ideas.

  Trump can barely conceal his glee over the opportunity to face such a bunch in the election. “We have three hundred fifty million people living in America and this is the best we can do?” he asks, smiling.

  Always nearby the Oval Office is Dan Scavino, the president’s director of social media, a clear nod to how important Trump thinks it is to communicate directly to voters instead of going through the traditional media outlets.

  While we were talking, Scavino walked into Trump’s office with blown-up copies of a fresh tweet, hot off Scavino’s printer. It was from Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary-general, who had just been meeting with Trump moments before I arrived.

  Scavino handed out copies of the printed tweet to President Trump, Sarah, and me. It was three minutes old. Trump’s eyes flitted over the printed page, then he showed a small smile.

  “Great discussion with President Trump,” Trump read approvingly.

  In his tweet, Mr. Stoltenberg thanked Trump for “keeping #NATO strong.”

  “His message on fairer burden sharing is having a real impact,” Stoltenberg wrote. “By the end of next year, European Allies & Canada will have added $100 [billion] to their defense spending.”

  President Trump smiled and looked up. “You think that’s good?”

  To the very end, President Trump seems unafraid to tackle any topic or issue. Unlike the vast majority of politicians, he is not governed by the slightest hint of political correctness.

  “What’s going to happen with the Smollett case?” he asked me, inquiring about the horrendous episode in Chicago where police charged black actor Jussie Smollett with setting up an elaborate hoax in which he paid two African brothers to beat him up so that he could blame a couple of guys in Make America Great Again (MAGA) hats and claim it was a racially motivated hate crime.

  Trump said that indeed it was a “hate crime,” but it was a “hate crime” committed against his supporters.

  “That’s a hate crime,” he said. “He blamed that on MAGA. He said MAGA did that.”

  Trump is clearly incensed over the smearing of his supporters. “Those are great people,” he said firmly. “Great people.

  “They had the lawyer of the two brothers on last
night. He said they put whiteface on,” Trump continued. “It’s incredible how dishonest the whole thing is. But that’s a hate crime. A hate crime is a federal situation. And you know, [Smollett] was anti-MAGA before.”

  The whole situation has been terrible for Chicago, he said.

  “Chicago is a great city. Hey, look, I have a big tower in Chicago. Now [Chicago’s] being scoffed at all over the world.”

  The city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who blamed the hoax on the political tone set by Donald Trump, bears some of the responsibility, Trump said.

  “Rahm has turned out to be a horrible mayor. He looked like such a fool,” Trump said.

  After a pause, he added, “You know, his brother is a good friend of mine. Ari. And, uh, I spoke to him two days ago.”

  Trump chuckled, before continuing, “He’s embarrassed by the whole thing.

  “Rahm has turned out to be such a terrible mayor,” he repeated. “I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.”

  Trump shrugged.

  Nothing animates the president more than when he talks about his supporters and how horribly they get maligned by the media. It is why he prefers to talk directly to them, instead of trying to trust the political press to accurately convey his messages to them.

  “You know, you almost know your enemies when they start saying, ‘Don’t use Twitter, don’t use Twitter.’

  “I had a beautiful woman in Ohio a few weeks ago,” he smiled.

  “‘Please, please don’t give up Twitter. Please! Please! It is so important,’” he quoted the beautiful woman in Ohio as telling him.

  He called out for Scavino again, asking for the very latest totals on the number of followers he has across all the social media platforms that he controls: 168 million followers, according to Scavino’s latest tally.

  I joked that he was going to put me out of business.