by Obama Barack
Is that, I wondered, what my presidency was now reduced to? Fighting rearguard actions to keep the Republicans from sabotaging the American economy and undoing whatever I’d done? Could I really hope to find common ground with a party that increasingly seemed to consider opposition to me to be its unifying principle, the objective that superseded all others? There was a reason why in selling our recent budget deal to his caucus, Boehner had apparently emphasized how “angry” I was during our discussions—a useful fiction that I’d told my team not to dispute in the interest of keeping the deal on track. For his members, there was no greater selling point. In fact, more and more, I’d noticed how the mood we’d first witnessed in the fading days of Sarah Palin’s campaign rallies and on through the Tea Party summer had migrated from the fringe of GOP politics to the center—an emotional, almost visceral, reaction to my presidency, distinct from any differences in policy or ideology. It was as if my very presence in the White House had triggered a deep-seated panic, a sense that the natural order had been disrupted.
Which is exactly what Donald Trump understood when he started peddling assertions that I had not been born in the United States and was thus an illegitimate president. For millions of Americans spooked by a Black man in the White House, he promised an elixir for their racial anxiety.
The suggestion that I hadn’t been born in the United States wasn’t new. At least one conservative crank had pushed the theory as far back as my Senate race in Illinois. During the primary campaign for president, some disgruntled Hillary supporters had recirculated the claim, and while her campaign strongly disavowed it, conservative bloggers and talk radio personalities had picked it up, setting off feverish email chains among right-wing activists. By the time the Tea Party seized on it during my first year in office, the tale had blossomed into a full-blown conspiracy theory: I hadn’t just been born in Kenya, the story went, but I was also a secret Muslim socialist, a Manchurian candidate who’d been groomed from childhood—and planted in the United States using falsified documents—to infiltrate the highest reaches of the American government.
Still, it wasn’t until February 10, 2011, the day before Hosni Mubarak stepped down in Egypt, that this absurd theory really got traction. During a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Trump hinted that he might run for president, asserting that “our current president came out of nowhere….The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.”
At first, I paid no attention. My biography had been exhaustively documented. My birth certificate was on file in Hawaii, and we’d posted it on my website back in 2008 to deal with the first wave of what came to be called “birtherism.” My grandparents had saved a clipping from the August 13, 1961, edition of the Honolulu Advertiser that announced my birth. As a kid, I’d walked past Kapi‘olani Medical Center, where my mother had delivered me, on my way to school every day.
As for Trump, I’d never met the man, although I’d become vaguely aware of him over the years—first as an attention-seeking real estate developer; later and more ominously as someone who’d thrust himself into the Central Park Five case, when, in response to the story about five Black and Latino teens who’d been imprisoned for (and were ultimately exonerated of) brutally raping a white jogger, he’d taken out full-page ads in four major newspapers demanding the return of the death penalty; and finally as a TV personality who marketed himself and his brand as the pinnacle of capitalist success and gaudy consumption.
For most of my first two years in office, Trump was apparently complimentary of my presidency, telling Bloomberg that “overall I believe he’s done a very good job”; but maybe because I didn’t watch much television, I found it hard to take him too seriously. The New York developers and business leaders I knew uniformly described him as all hype, someone who’d left a trail of bankruptcy filings, breached contracts, stiffed employees, and sketchy financing arrangements in his wake, and whose business now in large part consisted of licensing his name to properties he neither owned nor managed. In fact, my closest contact with Trump had come midway through 2010, during the Deepwater Horizon crisis, when he’d called Axe out of the blue to suggest that I put him in charge of plugging the well. When informed that the well was almost sealed, Trump had shifted gears, noting that we’d recently held a state dinner under a tent on the South Lawn and telling Axe that he’d be willing to build “a beautiful ballroom” on White House grounds—an offer that was politely declined.
What I hadn’t anticipated was the media’s reaction to Trump’s sudden embrace of birtherism—the degree to which the line between news and entertainment had become so blurred, and the competition for ratings so fierce, that outlets eagerly lined up to offer a platform for a baseless claim. It was propelled by Fox News, naturally, a network whose power and profits had been built around stoking the same racial fears and resentments that Trump now sought to exploit. Night after night, its hosts featured him across their most popular platforms. On Fox’s O’Reilly Factor, Trump declared, “If you are going to be president of the United States you have to be born in this country. And there is a doubt as to whether or not he was….He doesn’t have a birth certificate.” On the network’s morning show Fox & Friends, he suggested that my birth announcement might have been a fake. In fact, Trump was on Fox so much that he soon felt obliged to throw in some fresh material, saying that there was something fishy about my getting into Harvard, given that my “marks were lousy.” He told Laura Ingraham he was certain that Bill Ayers, my Chicago neighbor and former radical activist, was the true author of Dreams from My Father, since the book was too good to have been written by someone of my intellectual caliber.
But it wasn’t just Fox. On March 23, just after we’d gone to war in Libya, he surfaced on ABC’s The View, saying, “I want him to show his birth certificate. There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like.” On NBC, the same network that aired Trump’s reality show The Celebrity Apprentice in prime time and that clearly didn’t mind the extra publicity its star was generating, Trump told a Today show host that he’d sent investigators to Hawaii to look into my birth certificate. “I have people that have been studying it, and they cannot believe what they’re finding.” Later, he’d tell CNN’s Anderson Cooper, “I’ve been told very recently, Anderson, that the birth certificate is missing. I’ve been told that it’s not there and it doesn’t exist.”
Outside the Fox universe, I couldn’t say that any mainstream journalists explicitly gave credence to these bizarre charges. They all made a point of expressing polite incredulity, asking Trump, for example, why he thought George Bush and Bill Clinton had never been asked to produce their birth certificates. (He’d usually reply with something along the lines of “Well, we know they were born in this country.” ) But at no point did they simply and forthrightly call Trump out for lying or state that the conspiracy theory he was promoting was racist. Certainly, they made little to no effort to categorize his theories as beyond the pale—like alien abduction or the anti-Semitic conspiracies in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And the more oxygen the media gave them, the more newsworthy they appeared.
We hadn’t bothered to dignify all this with any sort of official White House response, uninterested in giving Trump a bigger spotlight and knowing we had better things to do. In the West Wing, birtherism was treated like a bad joke, and my younger staffers were heartened by the way late-night TV hosts frequently skewered “the Donald.” But I couldn’t help noticing that members of the media weren’t just booking Trump for interviews; they were also breathlessly covering his forays into presidential politics, including press conferences and travel to the early voting state of New Hampshire. Polls were showing that roughly 40 percent of Republicans were now convinced that I hadn’t been born in America, and I’d recently heard from Axe that according to a Republican pollster he knew, Trump was now the leading Repub
lican among potential presidential contenders, despite not having declared his candidacy.
I chose not to share that particular piece of news with Michelle. Just thinking about Trump and the symbiotic relationship he’d developed with the media made her mad. She saw the whole circus for what it was: a variation on the press’s obsession with flag pins and fist bumps during the campaign, the same willingness on the part of both political opponents and reporters to legitimize the notion that her husband was suspect, a nefarious “Other.” She made clear to me that her concerns regarding Trump and birtherism were connected not to my political prospects but, rather, to the safety of our family. “People think it’s all a game,” she said. “They don’t care that there are thousands of men with guns out there who believe every word that’s being said.”
I didn’t argue the point. It was clear that Trump didn’t care about the consequences of spreading conspiracy theories that he almost certainly knew to be false, so long as it achieved his aims; and he’d figured out that whatever guardrails had once defined the boundaries of acceptable political discourse had long since been knocked down. In that sense, there wasn’t much difference between Trump and Boehner or McConnell. They, too, understood that it didn’t matter whether what they said was true. They didn’t have to actually believe that I was bankrupting the country or that Obamacare promoted euthanasia. In fact, the only difference between Trump’s style of politics and theirs was Trump’s lack of inhibition. He understood instinctively what moved the conservative base most, and he offered it up in an unadulterated form. While I doubted that he was willing to relinquish his business holdings or subject himself to the necessary vetting in order to run for president, I knew that the passions he was tapping, the dark, alternative vision he was promoting and legitimizing, were something I’d likely be contending with for the remainder of my presidency.
I’d have plenty of time to worry about the Republicans later, I told myself. Same with budget issues, campaign strategy, and the state of American democracy. In fact, of all that was giving me cause to brood that day on the patio, I knew that one thing above all else would demand my attention in the next few weeks.
I had to decide whether or not to authorize a raid deep inside Pakistan to go after a target we believed to be Osama bin Laden—and whatever else happened, I was likely to end up a one-term president if I got it wrong.
CHAPTER 27
OSAMA BIN LADEN’S PRECISE whereabouts had been a mystery since December 2001, when, three months after the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly three thousand innocent people, he had narrowly escaped as American and allied forces closed in on his headquarters in Tora Bora, a mountainous area along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The search had continued in earnest for a number of years, though by the time I took office, bin Laden’s trail had gone cold. He was still out there, though: As al-Qaeda had slowly reorganized, basing itself in Pakistan’s FATA region, their leader would periodically release audio and video messages, rallying supporters with calls for jihad against Western powers.
From the very first time I spoke publicly on America’s response to 9/11, opposing the Iraq War at Chicago’s Federal Plaza on the eve of my U.S. Senate race in 2002, I had advocated for a renewed focus on bringing bin Laden to justice. I’d returned to the same theme during the presidential race, pledging to go after bin Laden inside Pakistan if the government there was unable or unwilling to take him out. Most of Washington, including Joe, Hillary, and John McCain, had dismissed that promise as a stunt, a way for a junior senator unschooled in foreign policy to sound tough. And even after I took office, some people undoubtedly assumed I would set aside the issue of bin Laden in order to deal with other matters. But in May 2009, following a Situation Room meeting about terrorist threats, I had brought a handful of advisors—including Rahm, Leon Panetta, and Tom Donilon—up to the Oval Office and closed the door.
“I want to make the hunt for bin Laden a top priority,” I said. “I want to see a formal plan for how we’re going to find him. I want a report on my desk every thirty days describing our progress. And, Tom, let’s put this in a presidential directive—just so everyone’s on the same page.”
There were the obvious reasons for my focus on bin Laden. His continued freedom was a source of pain for the families of those who’d been lost in the 9/11 attacks and a taunt to American power. Even deep in hiding, he remained al-Qaeda’s most effective recruiter, radicalizing disaffected young men around the world. According to our analysts, by the time I was elected, al-Qaeda was more dangerous than it had been in years, and warnings about terrorist plots emanating from the FATA appeared regularly in my briefings.
But I also viewed the elimination of bin Laden as critical to my goal of reorienting America’s counterterrorism strategy. By losing our focus on the small band of terrorists who had actually planned and carried out 9/11 and instead defining the threat as an open-ended, all-encompassing “War on Terror,” we’d fallen into what I believed was a strategic trap—one that had elevated al-Qaeda’s prestige, rationalized the Iraq invasion, alienated much of the Muslim world, and warped almost a decade of U.S. foreign policy. Rather than gin up fears about vast terror networks and feed extremists’ fantasies that they were engaged in some divine struggle, I wanted to remind the world (and, more important, ourselves) that these terrorists were nothing more than a band of deluded, vicious killers—criminals who could be captured, tried, imprisoned, or killed. And there would be no better way of demonstrating that than by taking out bin Laden.
A day before the ninth anniversary of 9/11, Leon Panetta and his CIA deputy, Mike Morell, asked to see me. They made a good team, I thought. As someone who’d spent much of his career in Congress before serving as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, the seventy-two-year-old Panetta not only provided steady management of the agency but also enjoyed the public stage, maintained good relationships across Congress and with the press, and had a keen nose for the politics of national security issues. Morell, on the other hand, was the consummate insider, with the meticulous mind of an analyst, and while only in his early fifties he had decades of experience at the agency.
“Mr. President, it’s very preliminary,” Leon said, “but we think we have a potential lead on bin Laden—the best one by far since Tora Bora.”
I absorbed the news in silence. Leon and Mike explained that—thanks to patient and painstaking work, involving the compilation and pattern mapping of thousands of bits of information—analysts had identified the whereabouts of a man known as Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, who they believed served as an al-Qaeda courier and had known ties to bin Laden. They had been tracking his phone and daily habits, which had led them not to some remote location in the FATA but rather to a large compound in an affluent neighborhood on the outskirts of the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, thirty-five miles north of Islamabad. According to Mike, the size and structure of the compound indicated that somebody important lived there, quite possibly a high-value al-Qaeda member. The intelligence community had set up surveillance on the compound, and Leon promised to update me on anything we learned about its occupants.
After they’d gone, I made a point of tempering my expectations. Anyone could be in that compound; even if it was someone with al-Qaeda connections, the likelihood that bin Laden would be staying in a populated urban area seemed small. But on December 14, Leon and Mike were back, this time with an officer and an analyst from the CIA. The analyst was a young man with the polished, fresh-faced look of a senior congressional staffer, the officer a lean, thickly bearded gentleman who was older and with a slightly rumpled, professorial air. He turned out to be the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and the team leader for the bin Laden hunt. I imagined him holed up in some subterranean warren, surrounded by computers and thick manila folders, oblivious to the world as he combed through mounds of data.
The two men walked me through everything that had led us to the Abbottabad compound—a rema
rkable feat of detective work. Apparently the courier al-Kuwaiti had purchased the property under an assumed name. The compound itself was unusually spacious and secure, eight times larger than neighboring residences, surrounded by ten- to eighteen-foot walls topped with barbed wire, and with additional walls inside the perimeter. As for the people who lived there, the analysts said they went to great lengths to conceal their identities: They had no landline or internet service, almost never left the compound, and burned their trash instead of putting it outside for collection. But the age and number of children in the compound’s main house appeared to match those of bin Laden’s children. And through aerial surveillance, our team had been able to observe a tall man who never left the property but regularly walked in circles in a small garden area within the compound’s walls.
“We call him the Pacer,” the lead officer said. “We think he could be bin Laden.”
I had a ton of questions, but the main one was this: What else could we do to confirm the Pacer’s identity? Although they were continuing to explore possible strategies, the analysts confessed that they weren’t hopeful. Given the configuration and location of the compound, as well as the caution of its occupants, the methods that might yield greater certainty that it was in fact bin Laden might quickly trigger suspicion; without us ever knowing it, the occupants could vanish without a trace. I looked at the lead officer.
