by Bob Woodward
Trump had great instincts and was a political genius, Kushner said, but he was going to take some getting used to. “You’re going to have to learn how to handle him. How to relate to him.”
Though he had not been a Trump supporter during the 2016 campaign, Porter had accepted the job. By Inauguration Day he had not yet met Trump. During the speech Porter sat behind the podium and winced when Trump invoked “American carnage.” He left two thirds of the way through the speech so he could begin his duties and meet the new president.
“I’m Rob Porter, Mr. President. I’m your staff secretary.” It was clear Trump had no clue what that was or who Porter was. Jared told Trump that Porter was going to structure and order Trump’s life.
Trump looked at the two of them as if to say, What are you talking about? You’re not doing anything like that. No one’s going to do that. The president walked away without saying anything to find a TV screen.
The first official piece of paper for Trump to sign was the legislation granting retired Marine General James Mattis a waiver to become secretary of defense. Mattis had retired from the military less than the legally mandated seven years before being permitted to serve as secretary of defense.
Another matter was withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a regional free trade deal negotiated under Obama that lowered tariffs and provided a forum to resolve intellectual property and labor disputes between the U.S. and 11 other nations, including Japan, Canada and numerous countries in Southeast Asia.
During the transition several people had told Trump that he didn’t have to do it on day one. It was a little more complicated. It ought to be discussed.
“No way, no how,” Trump said. “This was on the campaign. We’re not backing off this. We’re signing it. Draw it up.”
He signed the papers to formally withdraw on January 23, the first full weekday of his presidency.
* * *
“The Trump trade agenda does indeed remain severely hobbled by political forces within the West Wing,” Peter Navarro, the White House assistant heading the National Trade Council, wrote in an Eyes Only two-page memo to the president and Chief of Staff Priebus on March 27, 2017.
Navarro, who agreed with Trump’s view that trade deficits mattered a great deal, was furious. He had been unable to get traction in the first two months of the Trump presidency. “It is impossible to get a trade action to your desk for consideration in a timely manner,” Navarro wrote.
He unleashed at Rob Porter, the staff secretary. “Any proposed executive action on trade that moves through the Staff Secretary process is highly vulnerable to dilution, delay or derailment.”
Cohn “has amassed a large power base in the West Wing and his two top aides on trade . . . are skilled political operatives fundamentally opposed to the Trump trade agenda.
“Not reported in the press is that Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is part of Cohn’s ‘Wall Street Wing,’ which has effectively blocked or delayed every proposed action on trade.”
Navarro identified those fighting against “the Cohn headwinds” as Bannon, Stephen Miller, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and himself.
“Mr. President, are you aware that under pressure from the Cohn faction, I was demoted on Day One from Assistant to Deputy, given zero staff on trade, went almost three weeks without an office and have had no direct access to the Oval Office?”
Using an analogy sure to be understood by Trump, he said, “In golf terminology, I have been given only a five iron and a putter and ordered to shoot par on trade—an impossible task.” He proposed that he and the National Trade Council be given more power, staff and access. He included some news articles critical of Cohn and reporting on his increased power.
Navarro handed the memo to Porter to be forwarded to Trump and Priebus. Porter was trying to present himself as the honest broker but he had taught economics at Oxford and was convinced that Navarro’s views were outdated and unsupportable. As far as Porter was concerned Navarro was a member of the Flat Earth Society on trade deficits, like the president himself.
Porter and Cohn had formed an alliance. The staff secretary was squarely a member of the “Wall Street Wing.”
At the same time Porter saw clearly that Navarro represented the president’s heart on trade. If he forwarded the memo it could intensify the trade policy struggle and mushroom into a major fight.
Porter showed the memo to Priebus.
“This is a terrible idea,” Porter said. “I’m not going to give it [out]. I’m going to keep it on my desk, keep it in my files. Not going anywhere.”
Priebus didn’t disagree.
Porter again spoke with Priebus about trade. “We’ve got to do something about this,” he said. “An absolute and complete mess”—the Cohn-Mnuchin faction versus the Navarro-Ross faction. “It’s just a free-for-all, a melee, a sort of every-man-for-himself state of nature.”
“Well,” Priebus said, “what do you think we ought to do?”
“Somebody needs to coordinate trade.”
“Who should it be?” Priebus asked.
“In a normal administration, it would be the National Economic Council and Gary Cohn,” Porter said. That was the job—gather all the points of view, the data, integrate them if possible and present the president with some options, get a decision and develop an implementation plan.
Priebus knew the theory.
“Gary Cohn can’t do it,” Porter said, “because he’s a self-identified globalist. Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross would never let him be an honest broker coordinator of anything, and would never respect it.” And “He doesn’t want to do it anyway.”
“Well,” Priebus said, adopting Trump’s management habit of picking the person in the room, the closest at hand, “why don’t you do it?”
So Porter, the 39-year-old staff secretary with no previous experience in the executive branch, became the coordinator for trade policy and took charge of one of the major pillars and promises of the Trump presidency.
Porter began chairing 9:30 a.m. trade meetings every Tuesday in the Roosevelt Room. He invited all interested parties. Priebus gave it his blessing but did not announce anything. It just happened. Soon half a dozen cabinet secretaries and more senior staffers were showing up.
Trump later found out about the Tuesday meetings because he was talking to Porter so much on trade. Porter had developed a close enough relationship with the president, and had spent enough time with him, that all the others apparently thought his authority to chair trade coordination had come from the president.
* * *
In the meantime, Robert Lighthizer, a Washington lawyer and former deputy in Reagan’s trade office, was confirmed on May 11 as the U.S. trade representative. He was the person who was supposed to be in charge of trade issues.
On July 17, Lighthizer and Navarro brought a large poster to show Trump in the Oval Office, a brightly colored collection of boxes and arrows titled “The Trade Agenda Timeline.” It was a vision of a protectionist Trump trade agenda with 15 projected dates to start renegotiations or take action on the South Korea KORUS trade deal, NAFTA, and to launch investigations and actions regarding aluminum, steel and automobile parts. It proposed imposing steel tariffs in less than two months, after Labor Day.
Navarro and Lighthizer began the presentation. Trump seemed very interested.
Porter arrived several minutes after and soon began objecting strenuously, calling Lighthizer and Navarro out on their process foul. Since March 22, when he had spelled out the rules in a three-page memo, Priebus had required formal paperwork for presidential meetings and decisions. The memo said in bold,“Decisions are not final—and therefore may not be implemented—until the staff secretary files a vetted decision memorandum signed by the President.” Knowing how the Trump White House worked, the memo also said in bold, “On-the-fly decisions are strictly provisional.”
Porter said that several of the actions on the poster required congressional a
uthorization. “You don’t have authority,” he told the president.
There had been no attempt to coordinate the arguments. “Peter and Bob represent one viewpoint,” Porter said. “You need to get the viewpoint of Commerce [Wilbur Ross]. You need to get the viewpoint of Treasury [Mnuchin]. You need to get the viewpoint of the National Economic Council [Cohn]. We need to vet and have a process.”
For the moment, but only for that moment, the trade issues gave way to process. Nothing moved forward.
CHAPTER
18
By spring, Bannon saw that the constant disorder at the White House wasn’t helping him or anyone. “You’re in charge,” Bannon told Priebus. “I’m going through you. No more of me doing my own thing.” A chief of staff who was not in charge had become too disruptive even for certified disrupter and loner Steve Bannon.
It was a major concession that Jared and Ivanka would not make. They were their own silo in Priebus’s view. He could not get them into some orderly program. The whole arrangement was hurting everyone. It was hurting him. Hurting them.
“You don’t think they should be here?” Trump asked several times.
No, they shouldn’t, Priebus answered each time. But nothing happened. He believed he could go no further to try to oust Trump’s daughter and son-in-law from the West Wing. No one could fire the family. That was not going to happen.
The president would go as far as to say a number of times, “Jared and Ivanka are moderate Democrats from New York.” It was more description than complaint.
Bannon was convinced that Jared had leaked a recent story to Britain’s Daily Mail about Trump blowing up at him and Priebus and blocking them from traveling on Air Force One to Florida. It wasn’t true they had been kicked off the trip. Both had declined to travel that day. “You fucking set me up,” he said to Kushner. “You trashed Reince in this story. And I know you did it.”
Kushner vehemently denied it, and seemed offended at the accusation. For his part, he was convinced that Bannon had leaked a story to The New York Times about his December 2016 meeting with the Russian ambassador, adding fuel to the allegations that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia.
During a meeting in Priebus’s corner office Bannon and Ivanka got into an altercation.
“You’re a goddamn staffer!” Bannon finally screamed at Ivanka. “You’re nothing but a fucking staffer!” She had to work through the chief of staff like everyone else, he said. There needed to be some order. “You walk around this place and act like you’re in charge, and you’re not. You’re on staff!”
“I’m not a staffer!” she shouted. “I’ll never be a staffer. I’m the first daughter”—she really used the title—“and I’m never going to be a staffer!”
The rift widened.
Bossie, Trump’s deputy campaign manager, still kept in close touch with Bannon even though he had not received a White House appointment. Bannon was running a full-frontal assault against Kushner in the White House, and Bossie offered some advice.
“Steve,” Bossie said, “one of you is the father of his grandchildren and the other is not. If you put yourself in the president’s shoes, which one of you guys is he siding with?”
Priebus had his troubles with Bannon but Bannon had fallen in line and was 10 times the unifier that Jared and Ivanka were.
* * *
Priebus was still having trouble getting McMaster to click with Trump. When the national security adviser came to the Oval Office for scheduled meetings, the president would often say, “You again? I just saw you.” McMaster’s briefing style was all wrong for Trump. It was really the opposite of Trump in almost every way. McMaster was order and discipline, hierarchy and linear thinking. Trump would go from A to G to L to Z. Or double back into D or S. McMaster was incapable of going from A to C without hitting B.
Priebus found that McMaster was also a bit of a hothead. The prime minster of India, Narendra Modi, who had been courted assiduously by Obama, was coming for a visit to the United States in June to see Trump. India was the counterweight to Pakistan, which was giving the new administration as much trouble as it had given previous ones by hedging maddeningly on terrorism. Modi wanted to go to Camp David and have dinner, bond with Trump.
It’s not in the cards, Priebus told McMaster. “We’re just going to do dinner here. It’s what the president wants.”
“What the fuck?” McMaster blew up. “It’s India, man. It’s fucking India.” He understood the strategic importance of India, a sworn enemy of Pakistan. Outreach and strong relations were essential.
The later event for Modi was a “no-frills” cocktail reception. The working dinner was at the White House.
* * *
Donald Trump, full of emotion, phoned his secretary of defense James Mattis at the Pentagon on the morning of Tuesday, April 4. It was the third month of his presidency. Pictures and videos of a sarin gas attack on Syrian rebels were flooding into the White House.
It was a gruesome, brutal attack, killing dozens. Among the dead were women and children—babies, beautiful babies. Choking, mouths foaming, parents stricken with grief and despair. This was the work of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad on his own people.
“Let’s fucking kill him!” the president said. “Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.”
The military had the capability to launch a covert top secret leadership air strike in Syria.
Trump sounded personally attacked. Syria had promised not to use chemical weapons—an apparent reference to Syrian president Assad’s agreement to destroy all his chemical weapons.
Yes, Mattis said. He would get right on it.
He hung up the phone.
“We’re not going to do any of that,” he told a senior aide. “We’re going to be much more measured.”
They would develop small, medium and large options for a conventional air strike, the standard three tiers.
Mattis saw that the administration had been presented with a rare golden opportunity to do something without doing too much, but certainly more than Obama.
In 2012, Obama had announced that chemical weapons use by Assad would be a red line. The next year, Assad killed 1,400 civilians with chemical weapons. Obama had the military prepare a strike plan, but he equivocated. He wanted to avoid another armed conflict and quagmire.
It was Vladimir Putin, of all people, who came to Obama’s rescue. The Russian leader brokered an agreement under which Assad would agree to destroy all his chemical weapons. An astonishing 1,300 tons of chemical weapons were removed from Syria.
Obama basked in the success. In 2014 he said, “We mark an important achievement in our ongoing effort to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction by eliminating Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpile.” Secretary of State John Kerry went further. “We got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out.”
Classified intelligence reports dispute this. In 2016, DNI Clapper said publicly, “Syria has not declared all the elements of its chemical weapons program.”
As the Syrian civil war ground on, Obama was tagged with a strategic failure. The war had left more than 400,000 killed and millions of refugees.
After the chemical attack, McMaster and his NSC Mideast chief Derek Harvey went into action at the White House to develop options.
Bannon got word of what was in progress. It was impossible to miss. When Trump was on fire, everyone in his orbit could feel the heat. Bannon confronted Harvey in a West Wing hallway.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.
“Developing options for the president,” Harvey replied. “He asked for options, and this is how the process works.”
The process was precisely what Bannon hated. He saw it as tilted toward military action, toughness, with a momentum and concept of its own: America as the world’s policeman. Do something, became the mantra; fix it. They hadn’t even answered Trump’s question about exactly what the United States was doing with its large presence in t
he Middle East.
Bannon saw Ivanka’s hand at work. She knew how to work her father better than anyone. She took pictures of the suffering or dead babies to him in the residence. The gas attack was a true horror, Bannon understood, but a military response was exactly what Trump should not want.
In sharp contrast, Derek Harvey was tired of being involved in managing national security policy to inconclusive results. Syria was a classic case study of words and half measures almost designed not to solve the problem. This was a chance to maximize a military response.
The middle option called for a strike of about 60 Tomahawks at one airfield.
“We have an opportunity here to do more,” Harvey argued to McMaster, “and we have to think in terms of hitting multiple airfields.” They could strike with real impact. “Take out their air power because that’s a force multiplier for the regime. We’re trying to shape the endgame and put more pressure on the regime to engage politically.”
Harvey said they should “take out his air force—not 15 or 20 percent, let’s take out 80 percent of it.” That would mean using 200 Tomahawks, more than triple the 60 from the middle option.
“Derek, I know,” McMaster said, “but we’ve got to deal with the reality of Mattis” who “is berating me for the direction we are heading here.”
Mattis wanted to be careful. Action in any form was risky. Russians were working at the Syrian airfields; kill Russians, and they would have a whole new ball game, a confrontation or a catastrophe.
A National Security Council meeting was scheduled to discuss options. Bannon availed himself of his walk-in privileges and went to see Trump alone in the Oval Office. He told the president that part of avoiding unnecessary wars and overseas commitments was not responding with missiles the way his advisers were proposing.
