by Bob Woodward
The honeymoon was soon over. Beginning in September, Kelly and Porter would be together alone, or with a few senior staffers.
“The president’s unhinged,” Kelly said. There would be something, especially about trade agreements or the U.S. troops in South Korea. “We all need to try to talk him out of it,” Kelly said. They needed to stand up to the president. He wasn’t listening.
Oval Office business and decision making became increasingly haphazard. “The president just really doesn’t understand anything about that. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Kelly said.
As Trump redoubled on withdrawing from trade agreements or costly foreign policies, Kelly would say, “I can’t believe he’s thinking about doing this.” He made a personal appeal to Porter.
“Rob, you’ve got to put a stop to this. Don’t write that [order] up. Don’t go down and do that. Can you go in and talk to him and just see if you can make any progress? I was on the phone with him this morning. I made these arguments. Can you go see what good you can do?”
The U.S. troop presence in South Korea continued to be a constant theme with Trump. We are subsidizing South Korea, he insisted. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Porter reminded him that Mattis and many others had told him these were possibly the best national security dollars that the United States spent. The troop presence provided the indispensable top secret intelligence that was vital to detecting and deterring North Korean missile launches.
On August 25, the president decided he was going to make a sweeping decision on NAFTA, KORUS and the World Trade Organization. “We’ve talked about this ad nauseam,” Trump said. “Just do it. Just do it. Get out of NAFTA. Get out of KORUS. And get out of the WTO. We’re withdrawing from all three.”
Cohn and Porter enlisted Kelly, who didn’t want trade to roil national security. Kelly and Porter went to the Oval Office. “South Korea is an ally,” Kelly told Trump. “The KORUS deal is actually better than you think.”
Porter presented some studies showing that KORUS kept the trade deficit down.
“This is a really important time with North Korea and that whole region,” Kelly said. “We don’t want to do anything on the trade side, especially given how peanuts this is in the grand scheme of things. It’s going to blow things up.” He recommended that the president call Tillerson. Tillerson made the same arguments.
Tillerson, Mattis, McMaster, Kelly—everyone on the national security side—agreed that if the trade deficit with South Korea had been 10 times greater, it still wouldn’t justify withdrawing. It was insane to even be thinking of that, they agreed.
“All right,” Trump finally said on Friday, September 1, “we’re not going to do the KORUS 180-day thing today. It’s not that we’re not going to do it, but all right, we won’t do it today.”
Porter put out the word to the legislative staff, the White House lawyers and the NSC staff to rest easy for at least that day. He made sure there was nothing drafted that the President could sign.
Four days later, on September 5, Cohn, Porter and the others went to the Oval Office. Trump had in his hands a draft letter giving notice of the required 180 days that the United States was withdrawing from KORUS. Porter had not written it and he was never sure who had, probably Navarro or Ross, but he never found out for sure.
“I’ve got a draft,” Trump said. “We’re going to withdraw from this. I just need to wordsmith this and we’re going to get it on official stationery and send this off. We need to do it today.”
McMaster made the national security arguments. Cohn and Porter made the trade and economic arguments.
“Until I actually take some action to demonstrate my threats are real and need to be taken seriously,” Trump said, “then we’re going to have less leverage in these things.” He then left the Oval Office.
Now that the president had gone outside of the staff secretary process that Porter controlled to get a new draft letter, Cohn was really worried. He removed it from the president’s desk.I
* * *
For the first several months of his job as chief of staff, it seemed that Kelly sat in the Oval Office almost all day, in every meeting. He didn’t say much, acting more as an observer and monitor. He tried to make sure that the door was closed between the Oval Office and the little outer office where Madeleine Westerhout sat. She was 27, a former RNC aide, and looked like Hope Hicks with her long brown hair and big smile. The stated reason was to provide more privacy and security. Kelly also wanted to keep people from wandering in and out as they had done regularly in the past.
“No, no, leave it open,” the president would say. “I need to be able to see Madeleine so that I can call out to her.”
* * *
Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, the president’s White House physician, stopped by to see the president most days, certainly several times a week.
“How are you doing today, Mr. President?” he would say, sticking his head out of his office as the president passed by. It would usually be a 30-second check-in, often about something like a nasal spray.
Several times Dr. Jackson visited Kelly. “The president’s been under a lot of stress recently,” Jackson said at one point. “We may need to figure out some way to dial things back, or to ease up on his schedule.”
Another time, Jackson was more specific. “Seems like the president’s under more stress than usual. We may just want to try to cut back on the schedule tomorrow.”
Kelly’s solution was to give the president more “Executive Time.” Trump normally set his own schedule on when to start the day and often had flexibility when he returned to the residence.
Kelly tried to respond to Jackson. Which meetings were essential? Could they give Trump an extra half hour or an hour in the mornings or clear his schedule an hour earlier in the evenings? They tried. But the nonstop presidency did not abate and Trump often got everyone, himself included, spun up.
* * *
Trump assembled a group in the residence to discuss steel tariffs. Ross, Navarro, Lighthizer, Cohn, McMaster and Porter attended. Trump said he was tired of the debate and wanted to sign a decision memo to implement 25 percent steel tariffs across the board, with no exemptions for any country.
They had the usual Groundhog Day round of arguments, until Mnuchin said that tax reform had to be the number-one priority. A Republican-held House, Senate and White House was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to pass tax reform, he said. It had not been done since Reagan’s presidency more than 30 years earlier.
Mnuchin warned that many of the Republican senators he would need for tax reform were free traders and strongly opposed steel tariffs.
Mr. President, you could lose them, he said.
Cohn seconded this, and Porter agreed. McMaster, who had been arguing on national security grounds that steel tariffs would severely damage relations with key allies, agreed about taxes and Republican senators.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Trump finally said. “As important as this is, we can’t jeopardize the tax bill for this. So we’ll hold off. But as soon as we’re done with taxes, we’re going to move to trade. And one of the first things that we need to do is put these steel tariffs on.”
* * *
With Bannon out of the White House, Trump and Sessions came up with another solution for immigration on September 5. Trump announced the end of the Obama-era DACA program. He labeled it an “amnesty-first approach” and said Congress should find a replacement in six months.
Two days later he tried to calm everyone down. On September 7, Trump tweeted: “For all those (DACA) that are concerned about your status during the 6 month period, you have nothing to worry about — No action!”
Bannon, who still had access to Trump, called to remind him of the importance of hard-line anti-immigration.
“Do you understand this almost destroyed the Republican Party in the summer of 2013?” Bannon recalled asking the president. “This is the central reason you’re president. The o
ne thing that can destroy the Republican Party. It’s been haunting us, this amnesty issue.”
Stephen Miller passed word from the White House to Bannon that this whole debate was now about chain migration. He calculated that the current policy would add 50 million new immigrants in 20 years if it continued.
Miller told Bannon, “The Democrats will never give up on chain migration. It’s changed the country. Chain migration is everything. That’s how they get the family unification.”
Miller turned out to be correct. Trump might continue to talk as if he would compromise, but there was no deal with Democrats.
* * *
“I don’t have any good lawyers,” Trump said one day in the Oval Office. “I have terrible lawyers.” He singled out White House Counsel Don McGahn. “I’ve got a bunch of lawyers who are not aggressive, who are weak, who don’t have my best interests in mind, who aren’t loyal. It’s just a disaster. I can’t find a good lawyer.” He included the personal lawyers he had handling the Mueller investigation.
Porter went to Kelly’s office to give him a heads-up. It was just the two of them. “I’ve seen this movie before,” Porter said. “I’m concerned, because there have been some times in the past, including especially after the appointment of the special counsel—the Comey, Mueller period—where the president got so consumed and distracted that it was a challenge to continue to do the work and make the decisions—effectively to be president. And to give the direction that the rest of us needed to be able to carry on the work of the government.
“Thankfully we got through it. I’m concerned that there are going to be those kinds of flare-ups again, especially as the investigation takes its course. As things come to a head. I don’t know what the catalyst is going to be.”
It could even be something from the Senate and House Russia investigations. “Or who knows what. But we need to be cognizant of this. If we don’t do a better job of partitioning things, of giving him time and space to deal with some of the Mueller stuff where the president could get his head in a better place, then it is going to infect the rest of the White House.” Trump needed time “to vent and sort of emotionally stabilize himself.”
Porter urged Kelly to give this some thought, “so that you can be prepared, so that we can continue to function and this doesn’t lead to an incapacitation of the entire West Wing for days if not weeks, like it kind of did in the past.”
Kelly nodded. “Yeah, I’ve seen little bits and pieces of that. And I can imagine it being that bad.”
“We barely got by the last time it happened,” Porter said. “It could be even worse than before. So we need to start to game out a plan for how we handle that.”
Kelly agreed that made sense. “Let’s try,” he said. But neither had an immediate idea.
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I. See Prologue, page xvii–xxii.
CHAPTER
33
It was not just the distraction of a wide-ranging Mueller investigation hanging over his head, but the constant media coverage that Trump had colluded with the Russians and/or obstructed justice, a real feeding frenzy—vicious, uncivil. The result, Porter said, “In some moments it was almost incapacity of the president to be president.”
McMaster noticed it. Trump normally wouldn’t listen long or very carefully to his national security adviser but it had gotten much worse, McMaster told Porter. “It’s like I can’t even get his attention.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Porter advised. “He’s clearly distracted. He’s been like that all day. Because he’s focused on this news about Russia.”
Gary Cohn told Porter, “It’s pointless to even talk to him today.”
Hope Hicks was worried. “He’s worked up about this,” she told Porter. She wanted the president to settle down, avoid doing or saying anything rash or that he would later regret. She would try to get Trump to talk about other things, get his attention away from the television, even try to make light of things.
They would get him on Air Force One to a rally. Leaving the plane for one rally, he said, “I think I’m going to spend the first 10 minutes just attacking the media.”
* * *
On several occasions, Trump asked Porter if he was interested in being White House counsel. Porter declined.
When Trump’s personal attorney came to talk about matters relating to Special Counsel Mueller, Trump at times asked Porter to join in.
“Rob, I want you to stay. You’ve got to be a part of this.”
“I’m not your lawyer,” Porter said. “I’m not acting as a lawyer. But even if I was, I’d be a government lawyer, not one of your personal lawyers and that would break attorney-client privilege. And so I can’t be in here.”
“No, no, no,” Trump said, “that doesn’t matter.”
It would take one of Trump’s personal lawyers, like John Dowd, saying, “Rob needs to go.”
* * *
“I don’t know how much longer I can stay,” Gary Cohn told Porter, “because things are just crazy here. They’re so chaotic. He’s never going to change. It’s pointless to prepare a meaningful, substantive briefing for the president that’s organized, where you have a bunch of slides. Because you know he’s never going to listen. We’re never going to get through it. He’s going to get through the first 10 minutes and then he’s going to want to start talking about some other topic. And so we’re going to be there for an hour, but we’re never going to get through this briefing.”
Porter tried to prepare organized briefing papers with relevant information, different viewpoints, costs/benefits, pros and cons and consequences of a decision. It didn’t work.
* * *
Gary Cohn and Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, had worked for months to get Trump to agree to authorize an intellectual property inquiry into China’s trade practices. It was a case where Trump could flex his antitrade muscle without blowing up a trade agreement. The authority came from section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which gave the president power to unilaterally institute punitive trade restrictions on countries that engage in unfair trading with the U.S.
The Chinese broke every rule. They stole everything, from tech companies’ trade secrets to pirated software, film and music, and counterfeited luxury goods and pharmaceuticals. They bought parts of companies and stole the technology. They stole intellectual property from American companies that had been required to move their technology to China to operate there. Cohn considered the Chinese dirty rotten scoundrels. The administration estimated China had committed $600 billion in intellectual property theft.
A 301 investigation, 301 for short, would give Lighthizer one year to determine whether the office of the U.S. Trade Representative should open a formal investigation of China. If so, Trump would have the authority to impose tariffs, sanctions and other measures against China.
The Europeans, Japanese and Canadians would join the United States in a massive, coordinated effort against Chinese intellectual property violations. This would be the first trade enforcement by Trump.
Trump had finally agreed to sign a memo and announce in a speech a year-long investigation of China’s intellectual property violations. It had been a long march to provide him with clear definable action on the trade front.
During an August meeting in the residence with his economic and trade teams, Trump balked. He had just talked to President Xi. He didn’t want to target China. “We’re going to need their help for North Korea,” he said. “It’s not just one U.N. Security Council vote. We’ll need their help on an ongoing basis. I want to take all the references to China out of the speech.” He did not want to jeopardize his great relations with President Xi.
Porter said the short two-page memo mentioned China five times, and only China. It was all about China as they had been discussing for months.
“No, no, no,” Trump said. “I don’t want to make it China-specific. Let’s just do it for the whole world.”
Under the law, these investi
gations have to be about particular unfair trade practices by a specific country.
“In this case it’s China,” Porter said. “We can’t get around the fact.”
“Well, okay,” the president said, “I can sign whatever, but I don’t want to mention China in the remarks.”
“We can’t explain what this is without mentioning that we’re targeting China.”
Okay, Trump said. In his public remarks, he said, “The theft of intellectual property by foreign countries costs our nation millions of jobs and billions and billions of dollars each and every year. For too long, this wealth has been drained from our country while Washington has done nothing. . . . But Washington will turn a blind eye no longer.” He made one mention of China.
Cohn and Porter hoped signing the memo authorizing a 301 investigation would divert Trump from imposing steel and aluminum tariffs immediately.
Whenever either of them would challenge Trump’s conviction on the importance of trade deficits and the need to impose tariffs, Trump was immovable. “I know I’m right,” he said. “If you disagree with me, you’re wrong.”
* * *
Cohn knew the real battle was going to be over tariffs, where Trump had the most rigid views and where he could do the most damage to the U.S. and world economies. He shoveled all the data he could to the president about how tariffs on imported steel would be a disaster and hurt the economy.
