by Doug Wead
Other presidents, both Democratic and Republican, stood by as crony capitalism corrupted the nation. It was seemingly the poor and senior citizens on fixed incomes who financed the process. Retirement funds suffered. But in the first two years of Donald Trump’s administration, free enterprise erupted. Many senior citizens saw a greater return in retirement accounts in Donald Trump’s first two years than the sixteen years of the two previous presidents, Bush and Obama.25
The middle class, who had seen the value of their homes wiped out by the years of Bush and Obama, now saw that value coming back.26
Other presidents avoided tax reform. Even Ronald Reagan took five years to get it done. Donald Trump did it his first year in office.
Other presidents stumbled over Supreme Court nominations. Liberals had come to expect their own judges from Democratic presidents and an occasional liberal judge, as a gift, from a Republican president. The liberal social and cultural agenda, abetted by the national media, saw itself ahead of the voters in attitude and thus dependent on the judiciary to do what the voters would not.
Donald J. Trump was different. Elected with the help of conservatives, libertarians, and labor Democrats, he kept his promise and nominated a conservative, Neil Gorsuch, as his first Supreme Court justice and Brett Kavanaugh, another conservative, when he had a second chance. The American Left was outraged. Protestors, some paid by the leftist billionaire George Soros, shouted obscenities in the halls of Congress and interrupted Senate Hearings.27 The process became fierce and contentious. There was every expectation that Trump would back down and withdraw the nomination as past Republican presidents might have done.
Trump never wavered. Brett Kavanaugh was duly confirmed. At the end of his first year in office, Donald Trump would appoint four times as many federal appeals judges as Barack Obama and more than any other president in American history.28
“MAYBE I’LL BE KNOWN AS A FOREIGN POLICY PRESIDENT”29
No matter where our conversations began, Donald Trump would soon find himself sliding into a discussion of some critical foreign policy issue. He hated the waste of American lives and money in unnecessary nation building. Once he caught himself doing this in a discussion of history and suddenly said, thinking aloud, “Maybe I’ll be known as a foreign policy president.”
On August 20, 2012, President Barack Obama drew a red line in the sand and dared his enemies to cross it.30 The Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad was told that he could not use sarin gas on his own people without consequences. When the Syrian dictator did exactly that only a few months later, killing and paralyzing hundreds of children, Obama fell silent.
When newly elected President Donald J. Trump was confronted with the same enemy, violating that same, exact, red line, he rained down fifty-nine missiles on Syria.31
The world was on notice.
Many presidential candidates, including George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, promised to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Their promises vaporized when they won office. Donald Trump got it done.
When Trump warned that America’s bad trade deals were crippling our economy and costing American jobs, he faced immediate outrage and opposition. Media personalities and spokespeople for academic think tanks warned that by breaking the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), he had forever ruined our relationship with Canada and Mexico, our closest neighbors and most critical trading partners. Once broken, the critics warned, the relationship could never be put back together again.
Trump ignored the hysteria and sent his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to craft a new and better trade deal. It was like rebreaking and resetting a broken bone that had healed incorrectly. It was a painful process to experience and see, but it had to be done. And it is not likely that any other president in modern history would have had the nerve to do it. Mexico’s foreign minister declared it a better deal for all three countries.32
Likewise, when Trump asked NATO members to honor their commitments and pay their small, token share of providing for their own defense, he was accused of destroying one of our oldest alliances and putting the free world at risk.
“Imagine,” he told me in one of our interviews, his voice taking on an incredulous tone, “we spend billions of dollars on missiles and just give them to these rich countries? We just give them away. And to some of the richest countries in the world.”
With Trump as president, NATO nations that were the most flagrant abusers of their own agreement started coming into line. Trump’s action raised more than $40 billion for the United States—money that would have never come in without him. NATO nations added $100 billion toward their own defense. According to NATO’s secretary general, Jena Stoltenberg, the alliance was now stronger than ever.33
Past presidents had kept America’s negotiations for the release of hostages a secret process. It was embarrassing for America to appear so weak in the face of international terrorists or belligerent nations. In some cases, even our own allies, such as Turkey, were holding Americans hostage. Just during the months that I had access to the Trump administration, Donald Trump brought home twenty-one American hostages from countries all over the world.34 For the most part, the national media ignored these stories. I was able to interview some of the rescued hostages for this book.
Arguably, eleven American presidents had failed to make peace with North Korea or stop its ongoing, imposing development of nuclear weapons. Donald Trump met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore on June 12, 2018, and signed an agreement to denuclearize the Korean peninsula. And for the first time since the end of the Korean War in 1953, remains of American soldiers were finally brought home to the United States.
Before Donald Trump, four American presidents, presiding over twenty-eight years of history, had witnessed and abetted what was, arguably, one of the largest transfers of wealth in world history. It had been the wealth of Americans, primarily from the middle class, transferred year by year, dollar by dollar, to what some were saying would soon surpass the United States as the greatest economic power on earth, the People’s Republic of China.
By 2017, Donald Trump’s first full year in the White House, the United States was importing $505 billion of Chinese goods a year.35 By one estimate, China had stolen $600 billion worth of American intellectual property. The massive flow of money out of the United States had been ongoing for years. The American presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, backed by a powerful, greedy corporate lobby, had presided over this staggering transfer of wealth and intellectual theft. Diplomats and politicians, some with good intentions perhaps, but others with deep financial obligations to corporate interests, had forced America into a deadly embrace with the Chinese.
Ironically, it would take a New York businessman, thinking outside the box, unencumbered by his own deals with China, to see the danger and to develop the painful strategies to begin the slow walk back from what many saw as an ongoing economic trap.
NO TIME FOR MAR-A-LAGO
On December 23, 2018, Donald Trump was one lone man, standing in the darkness in the Blue Room of the White House, with the glow of distant marble monuments reflecting off the glass windows. More challenges and more bitter attacks were coming his way. He had lived a long and eventful life, creating an immortal brand name and reaching the pinnacle of world power. Yet, ironically, he knew that the greatest challenges of his life were coming in the days just ahead of him. That Christmas the findings of the special counsel Robert Mueller, who was investigating the president, hung over his White House like a dark cloud.
Just after noon on Christmas Eve, Donald Trump had tweeted, teasingly, “I am home alone (Poor me) in the White House waiting for the Democrats to come back and make a deal on desperately needed Border Security.”36
The president had been looking forward to the balmy breezes and moonlit nights of his Florida estate. The plan was to take his family to the midnight Christmas Eve services at the Episcopa
l church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea. It was becoming a new Trump family tradition. He and Melania were married in that church. After the presidential election, in 2016, when the president-elect and the new first lady had gone there for Christmas services, they had received a standing ovation. They had come back the next year, this time with their son Barron.
So Florida and Mar-a-Lago represented a much-needed time for family and friends, an escape from the cruel political winter of Washington, DC—but then, Trump was a fighter. If there was a chance for “his wall” and thus delivering on one more campaign promise, he would take it.
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, had left for Mar-a-Lago the Saturday before Christmas and would come back the next Wednesday. Before leaving the city, he had told the president, “I can stay with you.” He didn’t like the idea of Donald Trump spending the holidays without family. “You don’t have to be alone.”37
“No, no, you go to Florida with your family,” the president had insisted, then added wistfully, “You know, I own Mar-a-Lago. I have all these other houses I own. I can stay in them anytime I want. This one is a rental. So I’ll just stay here and enjoy it.”
Jared smiled when he related the story. “He knew perfectly well that the White House didn’t belong to him, that it belonged to the country and that his stay would be brief.”
Eric Trump, the president’s third child, remembers checking in with his father that December as well. Eric often spent Christmas at the home of his wife, Lara, in North Carolina. This year they too had opted for Mar-a-Lago. Lara, who competed in triathlons, loved the sun and could get in her training, swimming, biking, and running. This was a chance, in the middle of winter, to walk the dogs on the beach. She knew how much her father-in-law loved Florida. “I thought, how sad that he wasn’t going to be there.”
Eric and Lara had an earnest discussion about it. “I think we should go to DC to be with my dad,” Eric said.38
“Let’s call him,” Lara suggested. “If he wants us to come, let’s go. My parents will understand.”
But when they called the president, he would have none of it. “No, no, you kids have fun. Don’t worry about me. I will be here working for the country.” He was playfully teasing them, acting the martyr.
MELANIA COMES BACK FOR CHRISTMAS
The next afternoon, on Christmas Eve, December 24, 2018, First Lady Melania Trump flew back to Washington, DC, to be with her husband. She and the president took calls to Santa Claus. It was becoming a new presidential tradition. Back in 1955, a child had called the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) to ask to speak to Santa. Now NORAD took calls every year and the first lady, at least, loved it. The media was allowed in to record a few moments and picked up a comical exchange between the president and a seven-year-old boy named Coleman.
“Are you still a believer in Santa?” the president asked. “Because at seven, it’s marginal, right?” They talked and the president listened for a while and then laughed, “Well, you just enjoy yourself.”39
Melania had clearly been able to shake her husband out of his lethargy. Near midnight, they attended the Eve of the Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ Festival Holy Eucharist at the National Cathedral.40 They were escorted to the front row.
The president and the first lady appeared happy to be with each other and to enjoy the familiar Christmas Eve service. The massive organ shook the cathedral, and the young voices of the choir echoed into the highest rafters of the church, the boy sopranos reaching the impossible octave above the others. “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”
Some of the recent mysterious movements by the president and first lady and some of their coy conversations with family over the holiday had been for security reasons. They were planning a secret trip to Iraq together to visit the troops. It would be his first presidential visit into a combat zone and one of the few times ever for an American first lady. The Secret Service had not wanted it at all, but she had insisted. She would not let him go alone. They would fly out together on Christmas night.41
When the congregation at the National Cathedral turned softly to “Silent Night,” there was a hush and the president gripped Melania’s hand. It would be the last silent night for the Trump family for many months to come.
NOTES
1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from President Trump come from conversations and interviews conducted by the author between 2016 and 2019.
2. Interview with White House staff member, January 10, 2019.
3. Doug Wead, Game of Thorns (New York: Center Street, 2017), 2.
4. http://www.businessinsider.com/hillary-clinton-endorsements-newspaper-editorial-board-president-2016-2016-9
5. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-26/billionaire-donors-led-by-soros-simons-favor-clinton-over-trump
6. https://www.alternet.org/2017/02/experts-agree-trumps-rosy-predictions-economic-growth-are-mathematic-impossibility/
7. https://dailycaller.com/2018/06/01/economists-trump-economy-numbers/
8. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/dec/31/trump-economy-false-predictions-left/
9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/23/larry-summers-trumps-budget-is-simply-ludicrous/?utm_term=.3b6ad044d2f5
10. https://financialtribune.com/articles/world-economy/78259/trump-is-dreaming-pigs-dont-fly
11. https://ntda.org/u-s-economy-tops-4-gdp-growth-in-second-quarter/
12. https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/24/investing/stocks-donald-trump-hillary-clinton/
13. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2017/12/20/president-trumps-successes-have-been-underreported-gary-varvel-column-nation-now/968842001/
14. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/trumps-list-289-accomplishments-in-just-20-months-relentless-promise-keeping
15. https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/453956405389967360
16. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/281936-obama-to-trump-what-magic-wand-do-you-have
17. https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/26/clintons-debate-take-on-trump-only-secret-is-he-doesnt-have-a-plan/
18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5jRHn153ZQ
19. https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/bill-maher-under-fire-for-ivanka-trump-incest-joke-1.5469269
20. Ivanka Trump to the author in 2018.
21. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Eric Trump come from interviews with the author in 2019.
22. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Ivanka Trump come from interviews and conversations conducted by the author from 2017 to 2019.
23. This story was related to the author by Ivanka Trump in 2019.
24. https://www.borgenmagazine.com/johnsons-war-on-poverty-speech-reaches-50/
25. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/01/19/year-into-trump-presidency-401-k-balances-looking-good/1045408001/
26. https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/05/trump-effect-that-house-you-want-got-16000-more-expensive-since-he-won.html
27. https://dailycaller.com/2018/09/18/soros-kavanaugh-protesters/
28. http://time.com/5066679/donald-trump-federal-judges-record/
29. President Trump to the author.
30. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/15/17238568/syria-bomb-trump-obama-russia
31. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/15/17238568/syria-bomb-trump-obama-russia
32. Interview with Luis de Videagaray, January 2019.
33. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/01/27/nato-chief-credits-trump/2695799002/
34. https://www.foxnews.com/world/trump-american-hostages-home-policy-experts
35. https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html
36. https://deadline.com/2018/12/donald-trump-christmas-eve-tweet-storm-border-wall-general-mattis-dow-plunge-jerome-powell-1202525594/
37. Interview with Jared Kushner, January 2019.
38. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Lara Trump come from interviews with the author in 2019.
39. https://www.re
viewjournal.com/news/politics-and-government/trump-first-lady-answer-christmas-eve-calls-from-children-looking-for-santa-1558683/
40. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/melania-trump-returns-washington-trumps-attend-christmas-eve/story?id=60006016
41. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/us/politics/trump-iraq-troops-visit.html
1
NO NUCLEAR WAR ON MY WATCH
“These are the personal letters exchanged between me and Kim Jong-un. You can’t keep them, but I’m going to let you read them. These are amazing. This is history.”
—PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP1
There was a stark contrast between the atmosphere in the White House and the dark political storm that was blowing outside.
It was January 24, 2019. The nation was in turmoil. The government was experiencing the longest shutdown in American history. Only the day before, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, had canceled the president’s State of the Union address to the nation, refusing to allow the president to use the House chamber. No one had seen such bitter partisanship since the days of the Civil War. The national media, still stung by its failure to have their anointed candidate elected president, was seriously promoting the idea that the current president of the United States was a Russian spy. It would soon be proved, they insisted, by the special counsel Robert Mueller.
As president of the United States, Donald Trump had seemingly accomplished the impossible. While being pounded daily by a hostile, contrarian media, he had helped rebuild the American economy, quietly brought home twenty-one hostages, all but abandoned by past administrations, and delivered on his promise to be “the greatest jobs president God ever created.” During the campaign, in the face of universal scorn, Trump had promised an economic rate of growth at 3 percent. The last quarter it had already broken 4.5 percent. Unemployment was at record lows in almost all categories.2