The quiet force behind the criminal justice reform efforts had been Kushner, for whom the issue was deeply personal considering his father’s incarceration. Kushner helped orchestrate a months-long lobbying campaign to unite tough-on-crime Republicans and liberal Democrats to reconsider sentencing laws. He had even invited the rapper Kanye West and the reality-television star Kim Kardashian West, both criminal justice reform advocates, to the White House to help spotlight the issue.
At Trump’s Oval Office signing ceremony, Senator Mike Lee reflected on Kushner’s persistence. “I speak to Jared Kushner about five times a day,” the Utah Republican said. “In the middle of dinner, when my phone rings, my family says to me, ‘It’s Jared, isn’t it?’”
* * *
—
On December 12, Trump called Christie with an urgent request. He asked his old friend if he could come down from New Jersey right away. They made plans to meet on December 13 at 5:30 p.m. in the White House residence. When Christie asked what was going on, Trump wouldn’t tell him. But on the train down to Washington the afternoon of December 13, Christie got a call from Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer and another old friend.
“Listen,” Giuliani told Christie. “He’s going to offer you chief of staff tonight.
“He just got off the phone with me,” Giuliani added, referring to Trump. “He told me that that’s the decision he’s made. You’re the best person in position for the reelect. You’re the smartest politician. You can run the place. He needs you.”
“Rudy, is Jared leaving?” Christie asked.
“No,” Giuliani said.
“Why the fuck am I going to take this job?” Christie said. “You guys are nuts. I’m not going in there and [having] Jared down the hall.”
As the train hurtled toward Union Station, Christie’s mind was racing. If Trump really was about to offer him chief of staff, he had to figure out what to say. So he called Jim Baker, a legendary former White House chief of staff under both President Reagan and President George H. W. Bush. Christie knew Baker and relied on his sage advice; when he was Trump’s transition chairman, Christie had spent two hours in Houston talking with Baker about staffing administrations. Baker picked up right away. “Governor,” he said, “if you’re calling me, you’re about to be offered the worst fucking job in America.”
Christie asked what kinds of things he should request from the president. Baker went through a list of demands, including that he have walk-in privileges to the Oval Office; is able to attend any meeting in the White House that the president is in; chooses all staff and that all staff report to him, other than family members; controls his own media appearances; and gets his own personal lawyer. Christie jotted down notes as he listened.
“If you take this,” Baker told Christie, “we have to come up with a new phrase that goes beyond patriot.”
Carrying a briefcase with his notes, Christie arrived at the White House and was whisked into the residence through a back entrance so he wouldn’t be spotted. He met the president and Melania Trump in the Yellow Oval Room upstairs; downstairs, the staff was preparing for a holiday party later that evening, which the president and first lady were due to attend.
The Trumps and Christie started talking about the chief of staff job right away. The only one of Baker’s points that the president objected to was that Christie control his own media appearances. Christie told him, “I’m not here to be your press spokesman. I’m here to be your chief of staff.” But Trump insisted upon being the one to decide when Christie went on television. When Melania asked Christie how he intended to deal with Kushner and Ivanka, considering his famous tensions with the presidential son-in-law, the president interjected.
“Don’t worry about that,” Trump said. “I’ll handle that part of it.”
“Sir, that is something to be concerned about,” Christie said.
“Jared really doesn’t have any problem with you,” Trump said.
“Mr. President, please, this is ridiculous,” Christie said.
“Don’t worry about that,” Trump insisted.
Christie wanted to avoid giving the president an answer to his offer on the spot. He was looking to buy some time. And as they wrapped up their conversation, Trump told him, “I know you. You’re going to want to talk to Mary Pat about this, so go home and talk to Mary Pat and I’ll call you in the morning. But I want you here.”
Christie went straight to the train station to head home. By the time the Amtrak passed the Wilmington station, about ninety minutes into the ride, Christie saw a breaking news headline on his phone: “Trump meets with Chris Christie to discuss chief of staff role.” This was another scoop for Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for Axios. Swan quoted “a source familiar with the president’s thinking” as saying of Christie, “He’s tough; he’s an attorney; he’s politically-savvy, and one of Trump’s early supporters.”
Early the next morning, December 14, Christie’s phone rang. It was Kushner. He told Christie something along the lines of “I know the decision the president’s made. I’m completely supportive. You and I can work together great. All the things in the past are things in the past. All the things that matter is getting the president reelected, and I know you’re the best person to help us do that. I’m excited about you coming.” Though Kushner reached out to Christie that morning, and stood ready to work with him in the White House, he told associates that he did not recall this specific conversation.
Later that morning, Ivanka called Mary Pat Christie. “Mother to mother, wife to wife, I know what your concerns must be,” the presidential daughter said, pledging that no harm would come to Christie were he to take the job.
“You don’t have to worry about me saying, ‘Oh, this is bad for the family, you can’t go,’” Mary Pat told her. “This is Chris’s career. If he wants to do it, I’m not going to stand in the way, but I’ll give him the advice I think he needs to hear.”
“I hope that advice would be positive towards taking the job,” Ivanka said.
Mary Pat ended the call by saying that she would tell her husband what she felt was important for him to hear and that her advice would stay between them. Mary Pat then said to Christie, “Listen, if you’re going to take it, take it, but if you’re going to say no, you better call him now because these calls didn’t happen by accident. With him, you never know. He could just tweet out that you’re getting it, and then you’re fucked if you don’t want to take it.”
At his wife’s urging, Christie called Trump. “It’s just not the right time,” he told the president. Christie explained that he had concerns about working with Kushner and that his memoir was set to be published the following month, which the world would soon learn was unsparing in its criticism of Trump’s son-in-law.
Trump was already frustrated by Ayers’s rejection of the job and the resulting media narrative that no one wanted to be his chief of staff. So Christie proposed a face-saving way to bow out without embarrassing the president. “How about if I just tweet out that I’m withdrawing from consideration, that way I didn’t say no to you?” he asked.
Trump liked that idea. “That will be a great story for us, you withdrawing from consideration,” Trump said. “Like the Axios story last night. Wasn’t that a great story?”
“I wondered about that,” Christie said. “It was just me, you, and Melania in the room, and I’m pretty sure nobody saw me coming in, so how’d that happen?”
“Oh, I did it,” Trump said.
“Who did it for you?” Christie asked.
“No, no, I did it myself,” Trump said. “I called Jonathan and told him.”
Christie thought to himself, “You’re leaking yourself? And to think I came this close to being your chief of staff?” But he held his tongue.
“You’re really not supposed to be doing that,” Christie told Trump.
“Ahhh,” the president said playfully. “Don’t worry about it. He’s a good kid.”
Trump told C
hristie he would go ahead and name Mulvaney a temporary chief of staff. “He’s begging for the job,” Trump said of Mulvaney. “So I’ll make him the acting. He’ll be fine with that. He’ll take whatever I offer him. And then you and I, six months from now, you and I will revisit it.”
A few hours later, Trump named Mulvaney as his acting chief of staff, replacing a strict disciplinarian with a conservative hard-liner eager to please the president at the dawn of a divided government. Mulvaney, fifty-one, had long ago declared his loyalty to the president’s family. He quietly campaigned for the job for months, once even vowing to Trump that if he were chief of staff he would manage the staff but not the president. But he never formally interviewed for the job. Mulvaney came into the Oval Office the afternoon of December 14 for a meeting about the budget showdown, and Trump offered it to him right then and there. The news was announced an hour or two later.
On December 17, Christie returned to the White House with his wife to attend a Christmas party for cabinet members and other administration officials. As soon as he walked in, he locked eyes with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.
“Look at this! A ray of sunshine has entered the building,” Mattis said.
“To what do I owe that compliment, General?” Christie asked.
They shook hands and Mattis said, “Because you’re smart enough not to get into the shitshow.”
As he walked away, Christie said to Mary Pat, “There’s someone who’s not happy in their job.”
“Really not happy,” Mary Pat said.
* * *
—
In the first week of December, Mattis visited Ottawa for a meeting with a small group of coalition partners in the U.S.-led network to defeat ISIS worldwide, where he assured them the United States had their backs in the ISIS strongholds of Syria. By late 2018, the coalition’s multipronged effort to liberate vast swaths of Syria from the grip of ISIS had been stunningly successful. America’s secret weapon was a unique pairing: small teams of U.S. Special Forces, highly sophisticated in their training and surveillance capabilities, partnered with a comparatively large militia led by General Mazloum Abdi. Coalition forces provided air cover, and since Trump’s arrival in 2017 the U.S. military provided the Kurdish forces with weaponry.
In his early December meetings in Canada, Mattis assured his partners the United States would provide financial and military backing at least into 2020, per a policy vetted by the National Security Council and signed by John Bolton. Aboard his plane flying to Ottawa, Mattis told reporters that “this remains a coalition effort” and added, “There’s more work to be done. That hardened core means tough fighting there.”
Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, had joined Mattis on the trip to help explain how the coalition needed to adapt to cut off ISIS’s spread. On December 11, McGurk gave a press briefing at the State Department to help spread the word of the U.S. commitment and the need to ensure the “enduring defeat” of ISIS. He seemed to dismiss the idea the United States would withdraw from Syria anytime soon.
“We have obviously learned a lot of lessons in the past, so we know that once the physical space is defeated we can’t just pick up and leave,” McGurk said. “So we’re prepared to make sure that we do all we can to ensure this is enduring.” He added, “Nobody is saying that [ISIS is] going to disappear. Nobody is that naive.”
But on December 14, a single phone call between Trump and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan undid those plans. On the phone with Trump, Erdogan beat a familiar drum: Why did the United States have to keep arming Kurdish fighters to fight ISIS? And why did Trump need two thousand U.S. military personnel in Syria if they were close to triumphing over the caliphate? Erdogan argued that his forces could ensure ISIS didn’t creep back to power—and that they didn’t need the Kurds, an enemy of the Turkish regime.
“You know what? It’s yours,” Trump told Erdogan. “I’m leaving.”
One senior administration official summed up the sentiment: “Trump was like: You want that pile of dirt, Erdogan? Fine.”
Without thinking it through or conferring with any of his government’s many experts on the region, Trump effectively condemned a tireless partner of the U.S. military, the Kurdish general Mazloum Abdi, to death. Kelly called Kevin Sweeney, Mattis’s chief of staff, to let him know what Trump had just done.
“He told Erdogan we’re pulling out of Syria,” Kelly said.
Sweeney knew this spelled disaster. Words failed him at first.
“Phhhhhfffft,” he exhaled. “Fuck.”
On December 17, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo alerted McGurk and a handful of senior State Department leaders that he needed them to join him in an important call. McGurk was stunned when Pompeo told him “there had been a change of plans” about Syria. Pulling out meant withdrawing the two thousand troops and an estimated two thousand more special forces currently there, as well as turning off the spigot of money and intelligence. The size of the U.S. military footprint in Syria was a pittance compared with the local coalition force, the Syrian Democratic Forces, which had sixty thousand Arab, Kurdish, and other fighters trying to regain towns from ISIS control. In the most active years of their partnership, the SDF estimated it lost eleven thousand fighters in Syria, while the United States had lost fewer than two dozen.
Just before 9:30 a.m. on December 19, Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from Syria as if it were a triumph. “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” he wrote. Trump also posted a short video on Twitter in which he stood in the Rose Garden and looked skyward to the fallen U.S. soldiers and declared that they, too, would want the United States to withdraw from its battle against ISIS. “Our boys, our young women, our men—they’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now,” Trump said.
Trump’s announcement drew immediate criticism, from Republicans as well as Democrats. Sarah Sanders called over to Mattis’s office asking if the Pentagon would be sending any military brass or spokespeople out for media hits to discuss the value of withdrawing from Syria. Dana White, Mattis’s communications chief, checked with Sweeney. “No one is going out,” Sweeney told White. “You can go back and tell her that this was a White House decision. So help her, but no one in this department is going out to represent this decision.”
White called Sanders back with the bad news. “Sarah, we’re not putting anyone out,” White explained. “This was a decision that was not made here. I’ll send you everything. . . . We’ll help you make your case. The caliphate used to be the size of California. Now it’s 98 percent gone. That’s all I can do. Nobody here is going out.”
“No one?” Sanders asked.
“No,” White explained. “I’m sorry.”
Mattis was genuinely distraught. He believed it was wrong for America to abandon its Kurdish allies. And he worried that the president’s sudden tweet announcing the U.S. withdrawal would put troops in greater danger than if they had stayed the course. “He began to feel like he was becoming complicit,” recalled one of the secretary’s confidants. “Sending the troops to the border was obviously a no-no and inappropriate, especially based on the circumstances at hand. That began to chip away at his feelings of being a patriot. And then the Syria thing. We were six weeks away from annihilating these guys and then he just tweeted it out. That was devastating.”
The Pentagon’s leaders, still licking their wounds, had more serious work to do than help the White House generate sound bites defending the president. At 2:00 p.m. on December 20, Mattis’s assistant secretary for policy, John C. Rood, led a meeting about the practicalities of pulling out. McGurk, the premier expert on the ground, had canceled his trip to Jordan and flown back to the States the previous night to help, gotten up that morning after a few hours of sleep, thrown on a suit without shaving, and arrived at the Pentagon for a slew of meetings. The military officials had so many questions crying out for decisions. How wou
ld they withdraw the troops? In what order? What was the time frame for stopping key elements of their work? Did they have to stop air support for fighters on the ground immediately, or could they continue for some time? If other coalition members wanted to continue working with the militia, what should the United States tell them? What advice or help should the United States give other allies that had joined the U.S.-led coalition who might be in harm’s way?
A central question nagged at everyone. How would they help protect the SDF and coalition members? Erdogan’s Turkish fighters were reported to be massing at the border, waiting for U.S. forces to leave. Rood explained that they were getting some specific operational questions from General Mazloum. He had explained that ISIS was still a threat, but if the United States let the Turks rush into Syria from their northern border, Mazloum would have to redirect his fighters to the north to protect themselves. Around the table at the Pentagon were dejected faces. “We were all resigned to the fact that he was going to massacre the Kurds,” one civilian official said of Erdogan.
A question arose about whether the U.S. forces should technically reclaim the weapons they gave the SDF fighters. Some discussed whether the National Security Council should review and decide whether militia members kept or surrendered the weapons. Rood stepped in with a firm no. He said something to the effect of “It’s not our priority to take back certain weapons because this is too lethal for them. ISIS is not defeated. We are not taking them back.”
At that moment, McGurk had had it. He burst into the discussion with a fury.
“Let’s just be real, everybody,” McGurk said. “Stop the wishful thinking. The president’s ordered us to leave without a plan or any apparent thought. We’re not picking up weapons on our way out. We can’t get out safely without the Kurds. They protect our supply lines, convoys, and facilities. To say we’ll take their weapons as we invite in the Turks is nuts. It will get Americans killed. The Kurds will be slaughtered from all sides.”
A Very Stable Genius Page 37
