Fear: Trump in the White House

by Bob Woodward

  Two days before the election, November 6, I appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace. The discussion turned to the possibility that Trump could win.

  According to the transcript, I said on the show, “If Trump does win, how is that possible? What’s been missed? And I think I find in travels around the country talking to groups from Texas to Florida to New York, people don’t trust the polls. And they look at voting as much more personal. They don’t like the idea, oh, I’m in a demographic group, so I’m going to go this way. They want to decide themselves.”

  Wallace asked if I thought that meant people were lying to the pollsters.

  “I think that’s quite possible,” I said. But I didn’t see any signal or have any inside information. I was far from understanding what was going on.

  The day before election day, Trump made a five-state swing, including North Carolina. He was exhausted.

  “If we don’t win,” he said at a rally in Raleigh, “I will consider this the single greatest waste . . . of time, energy and money. . . . If we don’t win, all of us—honestly? We’ve all wasted our time.”

  It was an odd thing to say, seemingly a downer, but the crowd appeared to love it and took it as motivational.

  One of Clinton’s last rallies was at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where tens of thousands gathered on November 7. President Obama was there. According to Clinton’s book, he hugged her and whispered to her, “You’ve got this. I’m so proud.”

  About 5 p.m. on election day Trump received the latest exit polls. They were brutal. Tied in Ohio and Iowa, down nine in Pennsylvania, down seven in North Carolina.

  “There’s nothing else we could have done,” Trump told Bannon. “We left it all on the field.”

  On election night, it was remarkable to watch the needle on the live forecast dial on the New York Times website, which started out giving Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning. But the dial began to swing swiftly toward Trump. A good sign for Trump was North Carolina. African American and Latino turnout was down. The state was called for Trump at 11:11 p.m. It was announced he had won Ohio at 10:36 p.m., Florida at 10:50 p.m. and Iowa at 12:02 a.m.

  President Obama sent a message to Hillary Clinton that he was concerned that another uncertain election outcome, as had happened in the 2000 presidential election, would be bad for the country. If she was going to lose, she should concede quickly and with grace.

  The AP called Wisconsin for Trump at 2:29 a.m. and declared him the winner.

  “Donald, it’s Hillary,” Clinton began her concession phone call shortly afterward.

  Trump went to speak to the crowd at the New York Hilton in Midtown Manhattan, a few blocks from Trump Tower.

  “Now it’s time for Americans to bind the wounds of division,” he said in remarks right out of a good-government playbook. “I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be president for all Americans.

  “As I’ve said from the beginning, ours was not a campaign, but rather an incredible and great movement . . . comprised of Americans from all races, religions, backgrounds and beliefs.

  “We must reclaim our country’s destiny and dream big and bold and daring.

  “We will seek common ground, not hostility; partnership, not conflict.”

  He thanked his family, Conway, Bannon, Alabama Republican senator Jeff Sessions (“great man”), who had given Trump an early endorsement, and General Michael Flynn, a retired Army general and national security adviser to the campaign. Flynn had forged an extraordinarily close relationship with Trump.

  The president-elect dwelled on Priebus. “Reince is a superstar. But I said, ‘They can’t call you a superstar, Reince, unless you win.’ Reince come up here.” He located Priebus in the audience and summoned him to the stage.

  Priebus stumbled up from the crowd.

  “Say a few words,” Trump said. “No, come on, say something.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Priebus said, “the next president of the United States, Donald Trump.”

  “Amazing guy,” Trump said, and as if he fully understood what the RNC had done for him—all the money, the workers, the volunteers, the canvassing—added, “Our partnership with the RNC was so important to the success and what we’ve done.”

  He closed by saying, “It’s been an amazing two-year period. And I love this country.”

  Bannon was convinced that Trump himself was stunned. “He has no earthly idea he’s going to win,” Bannon said later. “And he had done no preparation. He never thought he would lose, but he didn’t think he would win. There’s a difference. And you’ve got to remember, no preparation, no transition team.”

  Putin called from Russia with congratulations, as did President Xi Jinping from China. Many other world leaders called. “It’s finally dawning on him,” Bannon recalled, “that this is the real deal. This is a guy totally unprepared. Hillary Clinton spent her entire adult life getting ready for this moment. Trump hasn’t spent a second getting ready for this moment.”

  After a few hours of sleep, Bannon started flipping through the transition documents. Garbage supreme, he thought. For secretary of defense they listed some big campaign donor from New Hampshire. Unbelievable. Now there were 4,000 jobs to fill. He realized they would have to at least temporarily embrace the establishment. Perhaps a better word would be fleece—pluck off some people who knew something.

  “Give me the executive director of this thing,” Bannon ordered, seeking some connection with whatever transition apparatus existed. “Get him in my office immediately.” He didn’t remember his name.

  Bannon reached the director’s office. Can he come in? he asked.

  “It’s going to be tough.”

  Why?

  “He’s in the Bahamas.”

  “This is the Island of Misfit Toys,” Bannon said. “How the fuck are we going to put together a government? We relieve the watch in 10 weeks at noon. We’ve got to be up and running.”

  * * *

  Priebus and Bannon were now going to share top staff power. They worked out an unusual arrangement. Bannon would be “chief strategist”—a new title and idea. Priebus would be White House chief of staff. The press release listed Bannon first, which Priebus agreed to in order to keep Bannon from being chief of staff, traditionally listed at the top.

  CHAPTER

  6

  A week after the election President-elect Trump invited retired four-star Army General Jack Keane to Trump Tower for an interview to become secretary of defense.

  “You’re my number-one guy,” Trump said.

  Keane, 73, a regular on Fox News and a close adviser to former vice president Dick Cheney, declined. Financial debts from taking care of his wife who had recently died made accepting impossible. In an hour-long meeting, he gave Trump a tour of the world and offered some advice.

  Mr. President-elect, he said, Congress, public opinion and your cabinet will be involved with your domestic agenda. “In national security and foreign policy, this is really your lane. The world’s problems have a way of coming to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue whether you want them or not.

  “Mistakes on the domestic side have a correcting mechanism. You can get a do-over. There are no do-overs” in national security. “When we make mistakes, it has huge consequences.”

  He thought President Obama had been too timid in a dangerous world.

  “By our actions or lack of actions, we can actually destabilize part of the world and cause enormous problems,” Keane warned.

  Trump asked who he would recommend as secretary of defense.

  For practical purposes, Keane said, Jim Mattis. He was the retired four-star Marine general whom Obama had sacked as central commander in the Middle East. Obama had relieved Mattis in 2013 because he was thought to be hawkish and too eager to confront Iran militarily.

  “He’s a good man, Mattis. Isn’t he?” Trump said. He had heard of the general, whose nicknames were “Mad Dog” and “Chaos.”

  “Yes, sir,
” Keane said. “He’s a good man.” There are advantages to Mattis, he added. “He’s very current. So if we have major problems on our hands, you’ve got a guy that can roll up his sleeves on day one and get after these problems. That’s number one.

  “Number two, he’s very experienced, particularly in the most volatile neighborhood in the world, in the Middle East. And he’s a very experienced combat veteran” in both Afghanistan and Iraq. “And highly regarded inside the military but also highly regarded outside.

  “What’s not obvious is how thoughtful he is,” Keane said. “And how deliberate he is.”

  “What do you mean?” Trump asked.

  “He thinks things through. He spends time thinking through the problem.” Mattis had not married and he read books all the time. He had 7,000 books in his library. Also known as the “Warrior Monk,” he had been totally devoted to the military with more than four decades of service. He was single-minded but calm. “I have a lot of respect for him,” Keane said. “He’s a man of courage and a man of integrity.”

  Back in his car, Keane punched in Mattis’s number. He explained that Trump had asked him first, and he had said no. Mattis seemed to want assurances.

  “You can’t do this, Jack?” Mattis said.

  “No, I can’t,” Keane said. “Jim, you can do it, can’t you?”

  “Yeah, Jack,” Mattis replied.

  “They seem to have their minds set on a military person to do it because of the challenges they’re facing.”

  * * *

  Later in November, Trump invited Mattis, 66, to Bedminster. Mattis’s quiet presence was imposing.

  We have to take care of ISIS, Trump emphasized. The Islamic State had grown out of the remains of al Qaeda in Iraq and expanded brutally into Syria with the ambition of establishing and ruling as a caliphate. Trump had promised to defeat ISIS in the campaign, and the threat was growing.

  Mattis looked directly at Trump. “We need to change what we are doing,” he said. “It can’t be a war of attrition. It must be a war of annihilation.”

  Trump loved the concept. Perfect. He offered Mattis the job, though they agreed not to announce it right away.

  Bannon considered Mattis too liberal on social policies and a globalist at heart, but the connection Trump and Mattis had made was central. Mattis was both a warrior and comforter. Bannon soon was calling him “the Secretary of Assurance” and “the moral center of gravity of the administration.”

  At Bedminster, Bannon arranged to make the photo shoots of candidates being interviewed look like 10 Downing Street as Trump and visitors walked through the large door.

  “It’ll be perfect,” he told Trump. “We’ll put the media across the street. And you’ll meet and greet like a British prime minister.”

  The photograph that ran in many newspapers was Trump and Mattis in front of the door—Trump’s fingers joined in the air, Mattis with his perfect Marine posture, erect, the quiet general.

  * * *

  As a colonel, Mattis had taken the Marines into Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Navy captain, and SEAL for 17 years, Bob Harward had led the SEALs in.

  “Hey, want to go together?” Mattis had asked Harward in 2001. In the dozen years that followed, Harward had major assignments under Mattis.

  In the summer of 2013, now a vice admiral, Harward was sent to MacDill Air Force Base in Florida to become deputy central commander to Mattis. He checked into the BOQ, Bachelor Officer Quarters, worked a day, and went back to his room. All his belongings had been moved out. He was told everything had been moved to General Mattis’s house.

  Harward went over to the house. He walked into the kitchen and found General Mattis there, folding Harward’s underwear.

  “Sir,” Harward said, “what the fuck are you doing?”

  “I did my laundry,” Mattis said. “I figured I’d do yours too.”

  Harward found Mattis the most gracious, humble officer he had ever served under. Rather than introduce Harward as “my deputy,” Mattis said, “I want you to meet my co-commander.”

  When Harward retired and moved to the Middle East as the chief executive of Lockheed Martin in the United Arab Emirates, he kept in touch with Mattis.

  Mattis worried about the effects of the Obama administration’s failure to deter Iran.

  But “if you know Jim Mattis,” Harward said, “he’s not a fan of going to war.”

  * * *

  In Marine lore, Iran had inflicted a wound on the Corps that had never healed and had not been answered. Iran had been behind the terrorist bombing of the Marine Barracks in Beirut in 1983. The attack killed 220 Marines, one of the largest single-day death tolls in the history of the Corps. Another 21 U.S. servicemen died, bringing the toll to 241—the largest terrorist attack against the U.S. before 9/11. Mattis had been a Marine Corps officer for 11 years and was a major.

  As CentCom commander from 2010 to 2013, according to one senior aide, Mattis believed that Iran “remained the greatest threat to the United States interests in the Middle East.” He was concerned that the Israelis were going to strike the Iranian nuclear facilities and pull the United States into the conflict.

  Mattis also believed the United States did not have enough military force in the region and did not have robust rules of engagement. He wrote a memo to President Obama through Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta seeking more authority to respond to Iranian provocations. He was worried that the Iranians might mine international waters and create an incident at sea that could escalate.

  Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, answered Mattis. A memo, soon referred to as “the Donilon memo,” directed that under no circumstances would Mattis take any action against Iran for mining international waters unless the mine was effectively dropped in the path of a U.S. warship and presented an imminent danger to the ship. The Donilon memo would be one of the first orders Mattis rescinded when he became secretary of defense.

  Mattis continued to beat the drum on Iran. He found the war plan for Iran insufficient. It was all aviation dependent; all air power. It did not have a broad joint-force plan. The plan had five strike options—first against small Iranian boats, another against ballistic missiles, another against other weapons systems and another for an invasion.

  “Strike Option Five” was the plan for destroying the Iranian nuclear program.

  Mattis wrote a scathing memo to the chief of naval operations saying your Navy is completely unprepared for conflict in the Persian Gulf.

  Panetta told Mattis his stance on Iran put him in real trouble with the Obama White House. Give me something to counter that perception, he asked.

  “I get paid to give my best military advice,” Mattis replied. “They make the policy decisions. I’m not going to change what I think to placate them. If I don’t have their confidence, then I go.”

  And go he did. Mattis was relieved five months early, and when he left in March 2013, he shredded what he called “a big smartbook,” almost a foot thick, containing all his key memos, documents, notes, issue summaries, and memory joggers. For someone who reveled in history, he didn’t choose to keep any of it for others.

  As part of his end-of-tour report Mattis attached a 15-page strategy for Iran because he didn’t believe the Obama administration had one. Though he noted that Obama had made several statements on Iran, Mattis remarked, “Presidential speeches are not a policy.”

  His draft strategy focused on confronting and not tolerating Iran’s destabilizing actions through Hezbollah, the Quds Force operations, and their actions in Iraq to undermine the U.S. It was designed to reestablish U.S. military credibility. The second part was a long-term engagement plan to shape Iranian public opinion.

  With Mattis out the door, no one cared about his views on Iran. When he was nominated as secretary, there was a sudden run on the plan and copies could not be made fast enough. The question was, did Mattis’s appointment as secretary of defense in a hawkish Trump presidency mean a likely military co
nflict with Iran?

  At the suggestion of former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former defense secretary Robert Gates, Trump met with Rex Tillerson, 64, the CEO of Exxon for the past decade.

  Trump was impressed with the native Texan’s confidence. He had a big presence. Tillerson had spent 40 years at Exxon and was untainted by government experience. Here was a man who saw the world through the lens of deal making and globe-trotting, a businessman who had negotiated oil contracts worldwide, including billions with Russia. Putin had awarded Tillerson the Russian Order of Friendship in 2013.

  In December, Trump thumbed his nose at the Washington political world but embraced the business establishment and named Tillerson as his secretary of state, the top cabinet post. Trump told aides that Tillerson looked the part he would play on the world stage. “A very Trumpian-inspired pick,” Kellyanne Conway said on television, promising “big impact.”

  CHAPTER

  7

  Jared Kushner invited Gary Cohn, the president of Goldman Sachs, to come talk to his father-in-law on November 30 about the economy. A meeting was arranged for Cohn at Trump Tower. Cohn was a legendary risk taker at the premier investment banking firm. He had an ego and sureness to match Trump’s. He was advised that Trump routinely kept meetings to 10 minutes.

  In Trump’s office were Bannon, Priebus, Kushner and Steve Mnuchin, also a former Goldman banker and hedge fund manager who had been Trump’s chief fundraiser during the last six months of the campaign. Mnuchin had been rewarded with the cabinet post of treasury secretary though the appointment had not yet been announced.

  The American economy overall is in okay shape, Cohn told Trump, but it was ready to experience a growth explosion if certain actions were taken. To achieve this, the economy needed tax reform and the removal of the shackles of overregulation.