The World as It Is

by Ben Rhodes

  I answered patiently. I’d just come back from Laos, I said, where unexploded American bombs were still killing kids over forty years after they’d been dropped. Then I repeated my lengthy refrain about why not going to war in Syria wasn’t a betrayal of who we are—that there were no good options; that we were trying to preserve America’s capacity to lead the world rather than fighting an endless series of wars in the Middle East. Underneath, I felt incredulous. You guys are aiming your fire at Obama when we are a few weeks away from an election in which someone who is a clear and present danger to American values and international order could win. When the session was over, I walked out into a sunny and unseasonably hot afternoon, my shirt sticking to my back. Friedman followed me out and expressed regret at the tone in the room. “I think we just got to a place where we were talking past each other,” he said of the last couple of years. I had come to like and respect him over the years and said thank you. Then I walked back to the White House, dropping my Blob poster into a trash can along the way.

  Obama’s popularity kept rising in the country and around the world, but the criticism being leveled at our foreign policy at home had reached a fever pitch that reinforced Trump’s dystopian vision of an America in free fall. Of course, the world was faced with a challenging moment. Everything we had tried had failed to stop the killing in Syria. Refugees were pouring into Europe. Russia was lashing out, from Ukraine to Syria. But Obama was the most respected leader in the world, and the acknowledgment that there might also be limits to our capacity to solve all of the world’s problems could be easily cast aside by someone like Trump, who simply asserted that he alone could do so.

  We were at the center of power, ensconced in the White House. But we had less and less control over the political forces roiling the country—the toxic brand of nationalism on display at Trump rallies; a media that was increasingly broken into hermetically sealed, impenetrable partisan echo chambers; the obvious Russian efforts to influence our election that continued unabated. Even our scandals had moved on—Benghazi was no longer about Susan Rice’s Sunday show appearances, it was now about Hillary Clinton’s private email server, something to justify chants of “Lock her up.”

  In a way, I welcomed the chance to retreat into the backdrop of this drama. I walked my daughter to daycare on my shoulders, counting the passing buses. I listened to all 179 episodes of a podcast about the history of Rome, lying in bed contemplating the dreams of emperors long dead. I binge-watched The Americans with Ann, sitting on the couch in a darkened room, following American actors playing Russians pretending to be Americans. I began my days eating the foil-wrapped egg and sausage burritos that warmed under a heat lamp in the White House mess. I plodded through my bucket list, which had increasingly intersected with the ghosts of American interventions past—$90 million to clean up bombs in Laos, negotiating agreements with Cuba, implementing the Iran deal. I chaired meetings on our nascent effort to combat Russian disinformation in Europe.

  In an October meeting with Obama, the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, raised the issue of Russian meddling. They are, he said, doing the same thing in Italy as they are doing to you here. The Italians had a referendum coming up in December. If it failed, Renzi would have to stand down as prime minister, opening the door to Putin’s friend Silvio Berlusconi. Renzi described how the Russians were creating fake news stories and then steering them to specific regions. It was sophisticated—not just antireferendum, but mini-scandals that created clouds around members of Renzi’s coalition.

  “Ben’s been working on this problem,” Obama said. “Your people should follow up with him.” Renzi looked at me expectantly, as if I had the answers.

  By that point, Wikileaks was publishing John Podesta’s emails—a drip, drip, drip of gossip that created an aura of scandal and mirrored the themes Trump was sounding on the campaign trail. Hillary was at the center of a corrupt establishment. Hillary took money from Wall Street. Hillary was in poor health. The Clinton Foundation was a criminal enterprise. The leaked documents, the Trump rallies, and a flood of stories—some true, some false, some a blend of fact and fiction—worked in unison like a symphony. Our government had responded to the Russian meddling as a cybersecurity issue. The people who’d been in meetings were largely intelligence and cyber experts; not one person had a communications background, despite the fact that we’d been dealing with fake news in Ukraine for more than two years. That October 7 statement said nothing about fake news or disinformation.

  Cybersecurity was something that the government could at least get its mind around: secure systems, issue warnings. Stopping a flood of propaganda from overwhelming people’s Facebook feeds and Google searches was not something that the government could do, or something that the tech companies wanted to do. Even if we were more focused on the fake news, Obama couldn’t become editor in chief of people’s social media feeds. If I scanned the Internet or Twitter, slogging through the cascade of attacks on Hillary, it was impossible to know where the stories came from. Breitbart? InfoWars? An American? Or a Russian? The content was the same.

  I’d raise this with Obama. “I know,” he’d say. “They’ve found the soft spot in our democracy.”

  In prep sessions for press appearances, we’d raise the criticisms that Obama should speak out more on the issue of Russian meddling. “I talk about it every time I’m asked,” he’d say. “What else are we going to do? We’ve warned folks.” Of course, we had no idea—Obama had no idea—at the time that there was an FBI investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia; that information was walled off from the White House, and I wouldn’t even learn about it until long after I left government, in the press. Clinton was further ahead than we had been at the same point in 2012 and it looked as if she was going to win. On the campaign trail, Trump was railing that the election was “rigged” and that the Russia allegations were “fake news.” The crowds responded with a bloodlust that would have been comical if it wasn’t so frightening. “If I speak out more,” Obama said, “he’ll just say it’s rigged.”

  * * *

  —

  A FEW DAYS BEFORE the election, Susan convened a meeting in her office. “Denis wants us to prepare for the possibility that Clinton wins and Trump says the whole thing was rigged.”

  “What does that have to do with us?” I asked.

  “He’s worried about the Russia angle. He wants us to think about validators.” For the next thirty minutes, we brainstormed a list of Republicans who could come out immediately after the election to help counter the inevitable accusation from a losing Trump that we’d made up the Russia story: people like Condi Rice, Brent Scowcroft, Jim Baker.

  We had meetings to plan for the likelihood of a Clinton victory, and what we’d do with Obama’s remaining time in office. The confirmation of Merrick Garland, securing a liberal majority on the Supreme Court for a generation. We could line up some concessions from TPP countries, secure Hillary’s tacit approval, get the deal through Congress, the final piece of our foreign policy legacy. Perhaps something bold could be done on Middle East peace. At home, we could push for criminal justice reform. Maybe Obama could decriminalize marijuana.

  We also assessed the alternative of a Trump victory. We had a gloomy meeting in McDonough’s office where we digested the scenario. “Can you imagine how the Russians would respond?” I said. The room was silent.

  In the last week before the election, I went on a couple of campaign trips with Obama. He was loose, powerful on the stump, deconstructing Trump, puffing up Clinton. But it felt a bit like a classic rock concert. The crowds roared, the music played. They were there to see Obama, to hear the hits, but they seemed less enthused when he spoke about Clinton, who was counting on Obama’s coalition—young people, blacks, Hispanics—to turn out for her in similar numbers.

  One afternoon, I was sitting on the Marine One flight back to the White House after a
campaign swing to Florida. It was just a few days before the election. We got an email from Obama’s political director with the last requests for Obama’s time from the Clinton campaign: The day before the election, could he go to Michigan and Pennsylvania?

  “Michigan?” Obama said, eyes wide. It was a state he’d won by 10 points in 2012. “That’s not good.”

  CHAPTER 32

  THE END

  Election night, I picked up some Chinese food and headed over to Cody Keenan’s house. It was going to be an early night, we thought, given Clinton’s lead in the polls. As I walked into his building, I checked my phone to find that Florida appeared to be going for Trump. We sat there for the next few hours as the map showed slowly spreading red. Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania—states we hadn’t worried about in 2012. That was it. I drank warming beer and occasionally walked into the kitchen to eat lo mein, standing at the counter. For long stretches of time, we said nothing to each other, together in a room, alone with our thoughts. So many things I had worked on—from Iran to Cuba to climate change—were now at risk. It was all happening too fast to digest; it seemed as if it couldn’t be real, that the country—and world—could turn that abruptly from the story of the last eight years to the brand of racist, mean-spirited, truthless politics that had shadowed us since 2008. Everything was suddenly eclipsed; I felt enveloped in a darkness.

  After Trump was declared the victor, Obama emailed Cody to call him through the switchboard so that we could discuss what he was going to say about this the next day. We called him on a BlackBerry, putting the phone on speaker. Both of us had received dozens of calls like this, but the familiarity only made it feel more cruel. “So, that happened,” he said. He sounded surprised but as if he was trying to force himself to be subdued, like a man who just received an unexpected diagnosis and is trying to avoid getting too upset.

  “What do you want to say?” Cody asked, laptop out, yet another speech to write.

  Obama plowed through a set of boilerplate messages that suddenly seemed radical in contrast to Trump—pay tribute to democracy; congratulate Trump and say nice things about Hillary; pledge an orderly and professional transition. “There should be something at the end for young people,” he said. “Don’t get discouraged. Don’t get cynical.”

  I had been largely silent. “Do you want to offer any reassurance to the rest of the world?”

  “What do you have in mind?” he asked.

  “Something for our allies, for NATO. That the United States will continue to be there for them.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “No,” he said. “I don’t think that I’m the one to tell them that.”

  I walked home in the early morning darkness, seven blocks, moving slowly as if delaying getting home and going to bed would forestall the world that was to come. The trees were half-empty of leaves and the half-light of the street lamps cast a ghostly light. Obama sent me a brief note reminding me that there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the earth. I sent him one back that progress doesn’t move in a straight line. I walked past the apartment on S Street where I’d lived when I was twenty-seven years old. I remembered how I’d planned to move back to New York City. I’d met Ann and stuck it out in my job; we’d moved in together; then I got this job working for Obama.

  When I got home, Ann and I talked a bit. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what to say,” she said. “After all the work you guys did…” She let her thought trail off. She was seven months pregnant with our second child, who would be born in an America that I couldn’t yet reconcile.

  “I know,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “I know.”

  I slept for three or four hours. When I woke, I had a sensation that I’d known only a few times in my life—the feeling that you don’t want the knowledge you’d gone to sleep with to be true. When someone has died. When something like 9/11 has happened. It was a sense of profound anxiety, a shortness of breath, a constriction in the chest; it was all those things at once—an event that would challenge my assumptions about America and alter the course of the world as well as my own life. After all the work we’d done, it was going to end like this.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should have seen it coming. Because when you distilled it, stripped out the racism and misogyny, we’d run against Hillary eight years ago with the same message Trump had used: She’s part of a corrupt establishment that can’t be trusted to bring change. Change we can believe in. How many times had I written those words? Because Trump was a product of the same forces I’d seen aligning against us for ten years. Because Sarah Palin. The Tea Party. Benghazi. The irrelevance of facts. A healthy majority of Republicans still did not believe that Obama was born in the United States. The Republicans had ridden this tiger, and we’d all ended up inside.

  The morning after the election, I went to work, like any other day. I got my PDB, learned about the progress of our counter-ISIL campaign. I ate an egg and sausage burrito. I fought off the sadness that would have been too overwhelming if I succumbed to it. There was still work to do. When I went upstairs for Obama’s morning briefing, the entire communications staff of the White House was gathered in the Oval Office. Obama wanted to speak with us directly. He stood in front of the Resolute Desk and addressed a large semicircle of people, most of whom were younger than I was. I stood, clutching my iPad with the government’s most prized intelligence on it, mine for a couple more months. When I looked at the faces of the assembled group, most were crying.

  Obama was smiling, and tried to strike an optimistic note. “The sun is shining,” he joked. Then he thanked us all for our work. “We are leaving this country indisputably better off than we found it eight years ago, and that’s because of you.” He urged us to be professional in the transition, just as George W. Bush’s team had been with us. “Ben sent me a note last night,” he said. “We have to remember—history doesn’t move in a straight line, it zigs and zags.”

  With that, the group filed out of the Oval Office so that we could resume the normal rhythm of the day, the daily briefing. Walking over to my seat, I saw the words stitched into the ring around the carpet on the floor, the quote from Martin Luther King, whose bust watched silently from a table along the wall: THE ARC OF THE MORAL UNIVERSE IS LONG, BUT IT BENDS TOWARD JUSTICE.

  * * *

  —

  OBAMA WENT THROUGH STAGES. That first day, I was in multiple meetings where he tried to lift everyone’s spirits. That evening, he interrupted the senior staff meeting in Denis McDonough’s office and gave a version of the speech that I’d now heard three times as we all sat there at the table. He was the only one standing. It was both admirable and heartbreaking watching him take everything in stride, working—still—to lift people’s spirits. When he was done, I spoke first. “It says a lot about you,” I said, “that you’ve spent the whole day trying to buck the rest of us up.” People applauded. Obama looked down.

  On the Thursday after the election, he had a long, amiable meeting with Trump. It left him somewhat stupefied. Trump had repeatedly steered the conversation back to the size of his rallies, noting that he and Obama could draw big crowds but Hillary couldn’t. He’d expressed openness to Obama’s arguments about healthcare, the Iran deal, immigration. He’d asked for recommendations for staff. He’d praised Obama publicly when the press was there.

  Afterward, Obama called a few of us up to the Oval Office to recap. “I’m trying to place him,” he said, “in American history.” He told us Trump had been perfectly cordial, but he’d almost taken pride in not being attached to a firm position on anything.

  “He peddles bullshit. That character has always been a part of the American story,” I said. “You can see it right back to some of the characters in Huckleberry Finn.”

  Obama chuckled. “Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.”

  In breaks between meetings in the c
oming days, he expressed disbelief that the election had been lost. With unemployment at 5 percent. With the economy humming. With the Affordable Care Act working. With graduation rates up. With most of our troops back home. But then again, maybe that’s why Trump could win. People would never have voted for him in a crisis.

  He kept talking it out, trying on different theories. He chalked it up to multiple car crashes at once. There was the letter from Comey shortly before the election, reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server. There was the steady release of Podesta emails from Wikileaks through October. There was a rabid right-wing propaganda machine and a mainstream press that gorged on the story of Hillary’s emails, feeding Trump’s narrative of corruption.

  He talked about what it took to win the presidency. To win, he told us, you have to have a core reason why you’re running, and you need to make it clear to everyone how much you want to win. “You have to want it,” he said, like Michael Jordan demanding the ball in the final moments of a game.

  Ten days later, on our final foreign trip, there were flashes of anger. Standing backstage before his press conference with Angela Merkel, I told him that it was probably the last time a U.S. president would defend the liberal international order for a while. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe this is what people want. I’ve got the economy set up well for him. No facts. No consequences. They can just have a cartoon.”

  In a way, he was just like the rest of us—trying out different theories for what had happened, trying to figure out what it meant, what it said about us as a country. But of course he was different. He’d seen the country, and the world, from a different perch. And the one thing he kept coming back to was the expanse of time, the fact that we were just “a blip” in human history. In giving advice on how to deal with Trump, he offered a simple maxim: “Find some high ground, and hunker down.”