by Bob Woodward
Trump loved that also. Bannon had pushed about as far as he thought he could. They were trying to make policy on a string of one-sentence clichés.
Graham had one more warning for Trump.
“Pull them all out, because 8,600 [troops] ain’t going to work, and accept the consequences,” he warned Trump, referring to the number currently in Afghanistan. “And here are the consequences: It becomes Iraq on steroids. There are more international terrorists in Afghanistan than there ever were in Iraq. The deterioration will be quick and the projection of terrorism coming from Afghanistan will exponentially grow. And the next 9/11 is coming from where the first 9/11 was. And you own it. The question is, are you going to go down the Obama road, which is to end the war and put us all at risk, or are you going to go down the road of stabilizing Afghanistan?”
CHAPTER
16
You’ve got to be kidding me,” Priebus had told Secretary of State Tillerson in a phone call in early March. The controversial Iran deal negotiated by Obama had to be reviewed every 90 days. They now had two days to renew or reject, Tillerson said. In February, Trump had called it “One of the worst deals I’ve ever seen.” As a candidate in 2016, he had said, “My number one priority is to dismantle the disastrous deal with Iran.”
Tillerson wanted to renew as a matter of both practicality and principle. Central was the fact Iran was in compliance with the deal as Obama had negotiated it. He came up with some language for renewal.
“The president’s not going to go for it,” Priebus said. “You need to come up with a better statement. Mild, matter-of-fact won’t cut it. We need language that’s going to actually make the case for President Trump’s position. He’s not going to like it. Secondly, if he reads this, he’s going to really blow up.”
When Priebus briefed Trump on Tillerson’s proposal, the president retorted, “You aren’t going to jam this down my throat!”
Priebus ran shuttle diplomacy between the president and the secretary of state.
“They’re not in violation,” Tillerson said. The intelligence community and the allies who were signatories to the deal agreed that Iran was not in violation.
“Those arguments would not fly” with the president, Priebus said. Tillerson held his ground. “We’ve got a problem then,” Priebus said. He felt he had to remind Tillerson. “The president is the decision maker here.” He took himself off the hook. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time.”
Tillerson went to see the president. “This is one of my core principles,” Trump said. “I’m not in favor of this deal. This is the worst deal that we have ever made, and here we are renewing this deal.” Since it was only for 90 days, he would go along. “This is the last time. Don’t come back to me and try to renew this thing again. There’s going to be no more renewals. It’s a shitty deal.”
Mattis found a diplomatic, quieter way to agree with Tillerson. “Well, Mr. President,” Mattis said, “I think they are probably in technical compliance.”
Priebus watched in admiration. Mattis was not meek but he sure knew how to handle Trump.
* * *
Tillerson had to send a letter to Speaker Paul Ryan by April 18. Trump didn’t like the first draft. He directed that the short letter include that Iran was “a leading state sponsor of terror” and that the NSC would review whether to continue the suspension of economic sanctions that were part of the deal.
When the letter was first released, television commentators pounded Trump. Watching this made him more upset. He ordered Tillerson to hold a press conference to denounce both the deal, which had just been renewed, and Iran. It was extraordinary to unleash an attack within hours of renewing a landmark diplomatic agreement.
In a five-minute presentation, Tillerson read a prepared list of all the grievances against Iran: ballistic missile testing, “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism,” threats to Israel, human rights violations, cyber attacks, arbitrary detention of foreigners including U.S. citizens, harassing U.S. Navy ships, jailing or executing political opponents, “reaching the agonizing low point of executing juveniles,” and support to the “brutal Assad regime in Syria.”
The Iran deal, Tillerson said, “fails to achieve the objective of a non-nuclear Iran. It only delays their goal of becoming a nuclear state.”
Obama had defined the deal as a “non-binding agreement” rather than a treaty which requires Senate ratification. “Perhaps,” Priebus said to Trump, “we can declare this a document that needs to be sent to the Senate for approval. Just take it out of our hands. Give it to the Senate and say, you pass it with two thirds and declare it a treaty.”
Trump seemed intrigued but soon understood he would be giving up authority by sending it to the Senate. He agreed that for the moment they were stuck with it. Only for the moment.
* * *
Priebus and Tillerson and McMaster made sure they were “calendaring”—as they say in the White House—when the next 90-day renewal would come up.
“They’re in violation,” Trump said in a meeting before the July 17 deadline, “and you need to figure out how the argument is going to be made to declare that.”
One day Tillerson came to the dining room next to the Oval Office to see Trump and Priebus and explain to the president again that there was no violation.
“They are in violation,” Trump insisted, “and you should make the case that this agreement is done and finished.” He suggested they might consider reopening the terms of the deal. “And that maybe we’d be willing to renegotiate.”
“Mr. President,” Tillerson said in exasperation, “you have the authority. You’re the president. You just tell me what you want me to do. You call the shots. I’ll do what you say.”
He was getting dangerously close to violating the protocols of dealing with a president.
CIA Director Pompeo did not disagree with Tillerson’s arguments on Iran and the reality of the Iran deal, but he, like Mattis, handled it more softly with the president. “Well, Mr. President this is how I understand it works technically.”
Mattis still saw Iran as the key destabilizing influence in the region. In private, he could be pretty hard-line, but he had mellowed. Push them back, screw with them, drive a wedge between the Russians and Iranians, but no war.
Russia had privately warned Mattis that if there was a war in the Baltics, Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons against NATO. Mattis, with agreement from Dunford, began saying that Russia was an existential threat to the United States.
Mattis had formed a close relationship with Tillerson. They tried to have lunch most weeks. Mattis’s house was near the State Department and several times Mattis told his staff, “I’ll walk down and say hello to him.”
McMaster considered Mattis and Tillerson “the team of two” and found himself outside their orbit, which was exactly the way they wanted it.
* * *
To complicate things, Tillerson was having rows with the White House over personnel for the State Department. Priebus called a meeting with Tillerson and half a dozen White House staffers on the patio outside the chief of staff’s corner office. At one point Tillerson had adamantly opposed the person suggested by the White House for a senior post and he had hired his own person.
Johnny DeStefano, the director of personnel for the White House, objected. Tillerson erupted. “No one’s going to tell me who to hire and not to hire. When I got this job I was told I got to hire my people.”
“You get to hire your people,” Priebus said, intervening. “But the problem we’ve got here is that it’s going so slowly. Number one, we’re bogged down not having personnel where they need to be. Number two, it’s making us look like fools. You need to either hire these people by the end of July, or I’m going to have to start picking people.”
Tillerson soon engaged in another fight, this time in the Oval Office and in front of the president. He belittled policy adviser Stephen Miller, a Trump favorite, charging he didn’t k
now what he was talking about. “What did you ever really run?” he asked Miller condescendingly.
* * *
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who was a commander in the Naval Reserves, tried several times to persuade Mattis to appear on Sunday talk shows on behalf of the administration. The answer was always no.
“Sean,” Mattis finally said, “I’ve killed people for a living. If you call me again, I’m going to fucking send you to Afghanistan. Are we clear?”
* * *
“I’m never signing one of these recertifications again,” Trump said. “I can’t believe I’m signing this one. There’s no way you’re going to get me to sign another one.”
McMaster later signed and put out a 27-page methodical Iran strategy with two prongs. The first was engagement, which was really a subversion campaign to influence Iran’s population. The second was confrontation for their malign actions.
CHAPTER
17
During the campaign, Trump had pounded almost as hard on U.S. trade agreements as he had on Hillary Clinton. As far as he was concerned, the current U.S. trade agreements allowed cheaper foreign goods to flood into the United States, which took away jobs from American workers.
At a rally in June 2016 at a Pennsylvania scrap metal facility, he said the loss of industrial jobs was a “politician-made disaster” and “the consequence of a leadership class that worships globalism over Americanism.” The result was that “Our politicians took away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families . . . moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas.” He blasted Clinton “and her friends in global finance [who] want to scare America into thinking small.”
Nearly all economists disagreed with Trump, but he found an academic economist who hated free trade as much as he did. He brought him to the White House as both director of trade and industrial policy and director of the National Trade Council. Peter Navarro was a 67-year-old Harvard PhD in economics. “This is the president’s vision,” Navarro publicly said. “My function really as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.”
Gary Cohn was convinced that trade deficits were irrelevant and could be a good thing, allowing Americans to buy cheaper goods. Goods from Mexico, Canada and China were flooding into the United States because they were competitively priced. Americans who spent less money on those imported goods had more money to spend on other products, services and savings. This was the efficiency of global markets.
Cohn and Navarro clashed. At one meeting in the Oval Office with Trump and Navarro, Cohn said that 99.9999 percent of the world’s economists agreed with him. It was basically true. Navarro stood virtually alone.
Navarro took Cohn on, calling him a Wall Street establishment idiot.
The core of Navarro’s argument was that U.S. trade deficits were driven by high tariffs imposed by foreign countries like China, currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, sweatshop labor and lax environmental controls.
The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) had sucked the manufacturing lifeblood out of the U.S. just as Trump predicted, Navarro said, turning Mexico into a manufacturing powerhouse, while driving U.S. workers to the poorhouse. U.S. steelworkers were being laid off and steel prices were dropping. Trump should impose tariffs on imported steel.
Trump said he agreed.
“If you just shut the fuck up and listen,” Cohn said to both Trump and Navarro, dropping deference for the moment, “you might learn something.”
Goldman Sachs, to Cohn, had always been about research, data and fact. Anytime you went into a meeting, you should have more hard, documented information than anyone else in the room.
“The problem,” Cohn said, “is that Peter comes in here and says all this stuff and doesn’t have any facts to back it up. I have the facts.” He had sent Trump a heavily researched paper on the service economy. He knew Trump had never read it and probably never would. Trump hated homework.
Mr. President, Cohn said, trying to summarize, “You have a Norman Rockwell view of America.” The U.S. economy today is not that economy. Today, “80 plus percent of our GDP is in the service sector.” Cohn knew it was about 84 percent but he did not want to be called out for rounding numbers up. The Goldman way was to carefully round down.
“Think about it, sir, when you walk down a street in Manhattan today versus when you walked down a street in Manhattan 20 or 30 years ago.” He chose a familiar intersection from memory. Twenty years before, the four corners had been occupied by a Gap, a Banana Republic, J.P. Morgan and a local retailer.
“Banana Republic and Gap don’t really exist anymore, or they exist in the shadow of themselves. The local retailer doesn’t exist. J.P. Morgan still exists.
“Now it’s Starbucks, a nail salon and J.P. Morgan. They’re all service businesses.
“So when you walk down Madison Avenue today or you walk down Third Avenue or you walk Second Avenue, it’s dry cleaners, it’s food, it’s restaurants, it’s Starbucks and it’s nail salons. We no longer have Ma and Pa hardware stores. We don’t have Ma and Pa clothing stores. Think of who you rent space to in Trump Tower.”
“I do have the largest Chinese bank as one of my major tenants,” Trump said.
“Who’s your one retailer in the Trump Tower?”
“Starbucks,” Trump replied. “And a restaurant in the basement. Oh, and two more restaurants in the basement.”
“Exactly,” Cohn said. “So your retail space today is services. It’s not people selling shoes, or hard goods, or white goods. This is what America is today. So if we’re 80-plus percent services, if we spend less and less money on goods, we have more disposable income to spend on services or do something miraculous called savings.”
Cohn found he almost had to shout to be heard. “Look,” he said, “the only time that our trade deficit goes down” were times like the financial crisis in 2008. “Our trade deficit goes down because our economy’s contracting. If you want our trade deficit to go down, we can make that happen. Let’s just blow up the economy!”
On the other hand, Cohn said, if they did it his way—no tariffs, no quotas, no protectionism, no trade wars—“if we do things right, our trade deficit’s going to get bigger.”
And when the trade deficit got bigger each month, Cohn went to Trump, who grew more and more agitated.
“Sir, I told you this was going to happen,” Cohn said. “This is a good sign. It’s not a bad sign.”
“I went to parts of Pennsylvania,” the president said, “that used to be big steel towns and now they’re desolate towns and no one had a job and no one has work there.”
“That may be true, sir,” Cohn said. “But remember there were towns 100 years ago that made horse carriages and buggy whips. No one had a job either. They had to reinvent themselves. You go to states like Colorado, you’ve got 2.6 unemployment rate because they keep reinventing themselves.”
Trump did not like, or buy, any of the arguments. “It has nothing to do with it,” Trump said.
Cohn brought in Lawrence B. Lindsey, a Harvard economist who had held Cohn’s job under President George W. Bush. Lindsey bluntly asked, Why are you spending any time thinking about our trade deficit? You should be thinking about the economy as a whole. If we can buy cheap products abroad and we can excel in other areas—service and high-tech products—that should be the focus. The global marketplace provided immense benefits to Americans.
“Why don’t we manufacture things at home?” Lindsey asked. “We’re a manufacturing country.”
Of course the United States manufactured things, but reality did not match the vision in Trump’s mind. The president clung to an outdated view of America—locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines.
Cohn assembled every piece of economic data available to show that American workers did not aspire to work
in assembly factories.
Each month Cohn brought Trump the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, called JOLTS, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He realized he was being an asshole by rubbing it in because each month was basically the same, but he didn’t care.
“Mr. President, can I show this to you?” Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president. “See, the biggest leavers of jobs—people leaving voluntarily—was from manufacturing.”
“I don’t get it,” Trump said.
Cohn tried to explain: “I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?”
Cohn added, “People don’t want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don’t want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal dollars, they’re going to choose something else.”
Trump wasn’t buying it.
Several times Cohn just asked the president, “Why do you have these views?”
“I just do,” Trump replied. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re right,” Cohn said. “I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.”
* * *
Staff secretary Rob Porter had been hired by Priebus. He came into the job with five-star recommendations from people who had served as staff secretaries to Republican presidents. Priebus had required Porter almost to sign a blood oath of loyalty to him. “It’s great you went to Harvard, Oxford; you’re smart and everybody vouches for you. But what really matters to me is that you’re going to be loyal to me.”
Porter had overlapped at Harvard with Jared Kushner, who had taken a class there taught by Porter’s father, Roger Porter, who had served on the staffs of Presidents Ford, the first Bush and Reagan. Jared and Porter met during the transition for about two hours. The first hour also seemed like a loyalty test.
