Everything Trump Touches Dies

by Rick Wilson

  By their own words from just a few years ago, Obama was a lawless tyrant for using executive orders. The headlines from the conservative press were breathless and hyperbolic:

  EXECUTIVE ORDER TYRANNY—OBAMA PLANS TO RULE AMERICA WITH PEN, PHONE16

  OBAMA’S CHIEF OF STAFF ADMITS THEY WANT TYRANNY17

  THREE WAYS OBAMA’S EXECUTIVE ORDERS ARE THE WORST OF ANY PRESIDENT18

  OBAMA THE TYRANT: A PRESIDENTIAL OVERREACH THAT UNDERMINES THE MOST IMPORTANT FOUNDATION OF THE WESTERN POLITICAL TRADITION19

  I was no fan of it myself, but if governing by executive order was wrong when Obama did it, why not when Trump does it? Is it just one more hypocritical knot in this skein of excuses Republicans will make for Trump? The likely explanation is the paucity of other accomplishments; executive orders and regulatory tweaking are almost all they’ve got to show for a president who kills most of the legislation he touches.

  Executive orders are by their very nature ephemeral, intangible, and easily subject to the whim and whimsy of the next president, be they Democrat or Republican. When executive orders are reversed, as Trump reversed many of Obama’s, we end up reposing more and more power in the hands of the executive branch. It gives Congress less and less motivation to act.

  Executive orders and bureaucratic tweaking have almost no impact compared to the passage of a law. Will you get every single thing you might like in a sweeping executive order compared to a messy legislative fight? No, of course not.

  I know it’s old-fashioned, but it takes us back to the pesky intent of the Founders, as always. They envisioned this kind of problem and built the dynamics of compromise into our Constitution and our system of government precisely because they knew competing states and districts would have competing interests and ideals. They understood that Congress would be responsive to different cues than the executive. The goal was to pass laws and govern, and not merely by executive fiat. There are areas where executive orders are appropriate, necessary, and beneficial. Day-to-day governance is not one of those areas.

  Conservatives taking victory laps over Trump’s reversal of rules on coal, oil drilling, climate change, abortion, and other issues important to the cause are overlooking the fact that they haven’t truly achieved anything more than a momentary victory. They’ve given future Democratic presidents the justification not only to undo what Trump has done but to impose new executive orders of their own and continue to diminish the role of Congress in setting the laws that govern this nation.

  Inside the Oval Office

  A Comedy in Five Acts

  – ACT V –

  You look around your office one last time. The uniformed-division Secret Service officer is standing behind you. There’s not much to take, really.

  A small framed photo of you and POTUS, the president grinning and shooting the thumbs-up. Your phone. A handkerchief Ivanka had dropped coquettishly near your door. The copy of “The 879th Turning: An Examination of History and Power Through the Story of Locusts” Steve Bannon had given you.

  You realize you’re a microcosm of the entire administration. You had no business being here, and once you were, you didn’t know what your real job was from one moment to the next. You’d been surrounded by people who were similarly in the dark about their real missions, and about who had power and authority in the process. No one was loyal to anyone else in the building. It wasn’t a team of rivals; it was a raw Hobbesean nest of vipers.

  Like everyone else, you’d bought in to the image of Trump as a decisive leader, but after so many months up close, you discovered he was anything but. This moment of self-awareness stretches for a long, long time, until the officer politely clears his throat.

  As you walk down the White House drive, you think about home, and how you’ll tell your family the president fired you. Then you realize it.

  Being fired by this president may have been the best thing that could have come out of this experience. You head for a bar near the White House. It’s on the edge of the George Washington University campus, about a block away. It’s dim and quiet and there’s a gorgeous woman at the bar, sipping a tequila. It’s the First Lady. Her detail is nearby, but they recognize you.

  She beckons you over and smiles.

  You croak out, “He fired me. And God help me, I’m happy.”

  “Don’t vorry,” she whispers, “Ze Donald divorces everyone in ze end. In meantime, tequila. Is good. Be best.”

  9

  * * *

  THE GROWN-UPS ALL DIE TOO

  BY APRIL 2018, DONALD TRUMP’S administration had lost more Cabinet members and senior staff than any administration in the past 150 years. Even the mature, experienced people who came to serve the president with the best of intentions left with their dignity strip-mined away by Trump’s circus act. Reputations and political futures have been shattered. Decades of good deeds and honorable service have been stained. The burn rate of the moral, intellectual, and political capital of the people who joined Team Trump is spectacular by any standard.

  THE TERRIBLE TRAGEDY OF JOHN KELLY

  After the departure of the hapless, luckless Reince Priebus at the end of July 2017, the White House needed a break. The chaos field around Trump was intense, and the news hits coming against his presidency made it seem as if the White House was lurching from one crisis to the next. In the brief interregnum between naming a new chief of staff, America watched the antics of Anthony Scaramucci, a man with the affect of a person deeply familiar with the edgy joys of Bolivian Marching Powder. Scaramucci’s rise as the court jester of the Trump White House soon came to a screeching halt.

  The warring factions inside Trump World that had pushed Reince off the cliff needed a steady hand. They needed a grown-up. They needed adult supervision. They needed John Francis Kelly. Kelly, a 45-year Marine Corps veteran, had served honorably and well, rising through the Corps with a reputation as a man who got things done. In the long-running war on terror, he also made a sacrifice few in the highest reaches of government do in this age; his son, 1st Lt. Robert Michael Kelly, USMC, died in combat in Sangin, Afghanistan, in 2010.

  In Kelly each faction thought they’d be getting something they needed. For the Bannonites, Stephen Miller, and their ilk, Kelly would be an administrative accelerator for their plans to purge America of the brown people. For Jared and Ivanka, it was a way to discipline Daddy and keep their sinecures intact. For Team Crony and the Goldman Guys, it was a moment to relish—finally, a strong professional who could tamp down Trump’s worst impulses, end the tweeting, and focus the White House on what mattered: their tax cut plan. A nervous Washington expected Kelly would finally discipline Trump, cut off the flood of crazy articles thrown on his desk, and end the tweeting.

  Gen. John Kelly is a man out of central casting for the job of White House turnaround executive. He was already vetted and was serving as secretary of homeland security when he was named chief of staff. He was perfect on paper, a disciplined, accomplished military leader with deep experience in managing complex, multivariate problems and organizations. Kelly is bluff and straight-talking, finally the grown-up that Trumper Room needed to settle the boisterous children down for a nap.

  Kelly has qualities Trump himself lacks: discipline, focus, and diplomacy. Like every other military general who pins on that fourth star, Kelly had been through the military’s charm school and he can work with discretion and determination.

  He would also begin to lose all of those characteristics the moment he took the job as chief of staff.

  He had some wins on the front end. If there was a polar opposite to John Kelly for seriousness, it was the aforementioned hypercaffeinated White House leprechaun Anthony Scaramucci. Within hours of Scaramucci’s announcing he reported directly to the president and didn’t have to work through the chief of staff, Kelly dropped the hammer on the Mooch. Trump gave Kelly the latitude to do it, and DC saw the firing of Scaramucci from his role as White House communications director as a Good Thing. After a
twilight struggle with Steve Bannon, Kelly sent Bannon off to spend more time with his gout.

  In a reality-TV show moment worthy of an Emmy, Kelly fired Trump’s longtime sister-from-another-mother reality-TV frenemy Omarosa Manigault. Omarosa had been identified as one of the people around Trump who would stoke his already lavish sense of entitlement, his rampant paranoia, and his juvenile desire to scrap with people. Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng of the Daily Beast called her “ ‘Patient Zero’ for unfettered access to the Boss.”1 She played Trump’s ego, vanity, and rages like a fiddle, and Kelly needed exactly the opposite.

  On the day she was dragged from the White House grounds, it was said she tried without success to enter the Residence.2 It’s remarkable she’s alive. Someday, the video will leak. Omarosa, honey, the cameras were rolling, but not the ones you’re used to on The Apprentice and Big Brother.

  It went downhill from there. By the spring of 2018, Kelly’s transformation as an effective counter to Trump’s impulsivity and indiscipline had fallen apart. Like the rest of the White House and the rest of America, he was just along for the ride. Kelly might make the paper flow move smoothly, but he can’t stop the president from digging himself into deeper political and legal holes and from giving the perverse imp on his shoulder free rein.

  After the death of U.S. Army Sgt. La David Johnson, a Green Beret killed on a mission in Nigeria, the president called his grieving widow. It didn’t go well. Trump is alleged to have told her that Johnson “knew what he signed up for” and that the president struggled to remember her husband’s name.3

  Their conversation took place in the presence of Congresswoman Frederica Wilson, an African American Democrat from Florida who backed up the wife’s account. A few days later, Kelly tried to challenge Wilson’s account by claiming Frederica Wilson had lied and exaggerated at an event he’d attended during his tenure with U.S. Southern Command. It turned out Kelly’s account was itself a lie.4 It wasn’t a good look.

  Then Kelly raised eyebrows in October 2017 when he wandered into the swamp of defending Robert E. Lee’s honor.5 In a White House that had nearly been destroyed by its long flirtation with the alt-right and its disastrous handling of the racist hate march organized by white supremacist and Nazi fanboy Richard Spencer. After Charlottesville, Kelly might have been a wee bit more mindful when it comes to celebrating Confederate generals.

  Kelly had originally been placed in the Department of Homeland Security because he was perceived to have two things Trump loves: a military background and a hard-line position on immigration. Kelly was there during the notoriously botched rollout of Trump’s Muslim ban and had been a stalwart defender of the ban and of the rest of Trump’s vocal anti-immigrant rhetoric. It should have been a tell that some of the values our military holds dear today—inclusion, teamwork, the sense that America really is an ideal, not just a race—got lost somewhere along the way in the belly of the Trump beast.

  Days before what would become a defining moment in the progression of Kelly’s terminal death from ETTD, he stepped into a verbal bear trap. When asked if the president would extend the deadline for deporting the American-raised children of illegal immigrants covered under the DACA program, he responded, “There are 690,000 official DACA recipients and the president sent over what amounts to be two and a half times that number, to 1.8 million. The difference between 690 and 1.8 million were the people that some would say were too afraid to sign up, others would say were too lazy to get off their asses, but they didn’t sign up.”6

  “Too afraid or too lazy” was a sign Kelly was growing quite comfortable with the Trump White House’s style of racial dog-whistling. DACA is an issue the rational few in the White House understand is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the Make America White Again demo at the heart of Trump’s base wants everyone with a vowel at the end of their surname deported on the next train down Mexico way. On the other hand, they understand how utterly catastrophic the politics of ripping apart law-abiding immigrant families looks. As DC struggled to resolve DACA, Trump’s chief of staff’s gaffe tore another hole in Kelly’s position as an honest broker.

  For all Kelly’s missteps and failure to rein in Trump’s behavior, it was Rob Porter who permanently broke John Kelly’s reputation. The story of Rob Porter would be unexceptional in most cases, but Kelly’s handling of it shows in many ways just how deeply compromised he’d become by spending time in the moral vacuum of Trump’s personal orbit.

  Porter was serving in one of those faceless, anonymous, and utterly vital White House jobs you’ve never heard of: staff secretary and personal assistant to the president. The person holding this job has some of the most frequent and intimate contacts with the president and chief of staff. It was Porter’s role to help John Kelly keep the paper flowing to the president, and by all accounts his was a rising star in Trump World.

  There was just one problem. Porter’s ex-wives and friends told the FBI he had been physically violent and emotionally abusive in the course of their relationships. Porter, a man handling some of the most sensitive and consequential documents placed before the president, was unable to be cleared by the FBI for a Top Secret/SCI clearance the job required. Hell, with a reputation like that, Porter wouldn’t pass the background check at a Waffle House.

  This was a widespread problem in the Trump White House, given that many of the people willing to work there were either dragged away from the bus station with promises of a fifth of Olde Ocelot bourbon and a hot meal, or were of the problem-child sort of DC fourth-stringers.

  The problem for Kelly wasn’t simply that he defended Porter even after the revelations were public. It was that Kelly knew of Porter’s difficulties in getting a clearance six months earlier. White House Counsel Don McGahn was also aware of Porter’s background as an alleged domestic abuser for more than a year by the time the story broke.7

  Kelly made it worse by initially issuing a ringing defense of Porter’s character, partly engineered by Porter’s then-girlfriend Hope Hicks, who took over as the White House Communications director after Scaramucci was booted. “Rob Porter is a man of true integrity and honor,” Kelly vouched, “and I can’t say enough good things about him. He is a friend, a confidant and a trusted professional. I am proud to serve alongside him.”8

  Kelly was forced to issue an awkward backfill statement to try to undo the mess he’d created for himself.

  Days later, Kelly was forced to dismiss another White House staffer for domestic abuse. In a period when the MeToo movement was reviving a frankly moribund class of political feminism, Kelly’s actions would have hurt any chief of staff. Hovering over Kelly’s failures in judgment, however, was President Pussy Grabber’s reputation as a serial and self-admitted sexual harasser.9

  From the now-ubiquitous adult-film actress and object of Trump’s temporary affections Stormy Daniels to a cast of 19 women who came forward to tell their stories of Trump’s sexual misconduct, harassment, and sleaze, Trump’s attitude toward women is a matter of public infamy. Even though Trump was later reported to have said Porter was “sick,” he continued to defend his former aide as Kelly twisted in the wind.10 Trump’s views toward women clearly infected his White House at some level, John Kelly included.

  Everything Trump touches dies, and in this White House, John Kelly’s reputation and honor were no exception. Watching Kelly’s stature dissolve in the acidic slurry of amorality, stupidity, and moral blindness of the Trump White House was a slow-motion tragedy that made his former military comrades shake their heads and made Washington ask itself a painful question: “If this guy can’t get him under control, who or what can?”

  REX TILLERSON’S YEAR IN HELL

  Rex Tillerson was a letter-perfect pick for a Trump secretary of state; the wealthy corporate titan is the former CEO of Exxon, Russia-philic, tall, and equipped with a sweeping head of silver hair. He looks the part, which is important for Shallow Don, and he is a big-swinging-dick corporate type Trump only dreams o
f being.

  While Tillerson hadn’t been his first choice, a number of people close to Tillerson put his name on Trump’s radar screen as the president was trying to decide between Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Shakes the Clown.11 His first reaction to the Exxon CEO bordered on gushing enthusiasm combined with his usual reality-TV salesmanship.

  Trump jumped in as Tillerson’s hype man, teasing Tillerson’s name for secretary, and from December 2016 to February 2017 it was all sunshine and praise. Reading these tweets a year and a half later and knowing how far Tillerson would fall is redolent with irony:

  Whether I choose him or not for “State”—Rex Tillerson, the Chairman & CEO of ExxonMobil, is a world class player and dealmaker. Stay tuned!12

  I have chosen one of the truly great business leaders of the world, Rex Tillerson, Chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, to be Secretary of State.13 The thing I like best about Rex Tillerson is that he has vast experience at dealing successfully with all types of foreign governments.14

  Congratulations to Rex Tillerson on being sworn in as our new Secretary of State. He will be a star!15

  Trump’s coming hatred of Tillerson should have been obvious from the start. Tillerson’s decades of international business experience involved more than licensing skyscraper projects and cheap ties. He knew people abroad and where many of the levers of power were located, particularly in the Middle East and Russia. While Donald Trump was hustling real estate branding deals, crappy steaks, and a strip-mall “university,” Rex Tillerson was running the largest public corporation in the world. While Donald Trump was eyeballing beauty pageant contestants in their dressing rooms, Rex Tillerson was expanding Exxon’s global reach as the world’s energy giant.