Inside Trump's White House

by Doug Wead

  MORE ON HOW RUSSIAN COLLUSION SAVED THE ECONOMY

  The president expected major challenges to this process. The established monopolies, protected by Democrats and Republicans alike, and, more importantly, by their allies in the national news media, had been years in the making. There were still spats over particularly onerous regulations that punished the more outrageously partisan business enterprises, but since the end of the Cold War, this new arrangement had become solidified.

  It was international. Some companies in Europe and the Pacific Rim also depended on hobbled American competitors. This “new world order,” as President George H. W. Bush and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed it in 1990, had only become more entrenched with each successive president.

  The expectation in the White House was that each step Donald Trump took toward deregulation would be challenged. After all, deregulation would disrupt monopolies that had been years in the making. The news media would focus narrowly on isolated examples of suffering or damage, thereby stoking outrage until the process reached a boiling point. There would be no explanation or understanding of the advantages of a free market, and no news coverage about the creation of new jobs. Any moves toward further deregulatory measures would be universally denounced and blocked. The whole process would end.

  For the Trump administration, the trick was to eliminate as many of the worst regulations as quickly as possible before the national media, backed by their corporate sponsors, began their campaign.

  Then, as painful and as unfair as the situation may have been, the Trump administration’s deregulatory process was saved by an unlikely new actor: the Russian collusion conspiracy.

  Jared Kushner had talked about this to me during our conversations at his Georgetown home the previous January. “The fact is that the media didn’t focus on deregulations one way or the other because they were so obsessed with the palace intrigue, and the Russian nonsense,” he said.

  The result?

  “We had a very aggressive deregulation agenda. It was historic. I think, over the first two years of the administration, we had a net decrease in the cost of regulation. We had a big decrease in the pace of the Federal Register. It was something that hadn’t happened ever. So that was a very, very big push from the government. Deregulation. It led to a lot of investment from companies and the creation of many jobs here in America.”

  DONALD TRUMP’S “BIG, BEAUTIFUL CHRISTMAS PRESENT”

  America had tax cuts under George W. Bush. Over the years rates had gone up, rates had gone down. But there had been no tax reform bill since Ronald Reagan, and even he hadn’t been able to accomplish it until his second term.

  On August 2, 2017, less than seven months after Trump took office, Newsweek ran an article titled “Tax Reform: Why Trump and the Republicans Will Fail.”25 The writer warned “It’s going to be much, much harder this time, and Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan.”

  Nevertheless, on December 22, 2017, during his first year in office, Donald Trump signed into law the largest tax-reform legislation in more than three decades. Trump called it a “big, beautiful Christmas present.”26

  “The corporate tax cuts and the personal income tax cuts really helped America be competitive globally,” Jared Kushner said.

  “It gave companies a lot of strategic advantages to be here. America has the most advanced and developed private sector in the world. We had the best rule of law in the world and the best democratic system. So, companies want to be here, but we were making it cost prohibitive for them to do so. That’s why they were moving overseas.”

  The president had been a relentless cheerleader for American business. From his first day in office, his words seemed to ignite the stock market. Trump made it his business to praise or scold every business leader who visited the White House about job creation; on every trip abroad, he included a shameless pitch for American business.

  “The president used his voice to focus on business,” Jared said. “Celebrating business and telling them that he wanted them to be successful. The last administration had a war on business, where they were demonizing CEOs and demonizing their business.”

  But Trump’s approach was nuanced, promoting those businesses that were helping the economy, and going after those businesses that were closing factories. “The president’s voice was two edged. So, while he would promote some businesses, he would publicly go after other companies who were closing factories and moving them overseas,” Jared said.

  Trump’s approach had an impact.

  “You had a lot of CEOs that were afraid to close factories and close production and move them overseas now, thanks to the president’s carrot-and-stick approach,” Jared said. “He was a great cheerleader for the market. He was able to unleash the animal spirits of the American industry that had really been hobbled and deflated after years of the last administration.”

  NOW THE PRESIDENT GETS A DAILY TRADE BRIEFING

  From time to time in my interviews, I unexpectedly stumbled onto items that were not publicly known. This happened during my conversations with Jared Kushner about the economy.

  “Another thing he’s done to rebuild the American economy is to focus on our trade deals,” Jared said. “After the Second World War, we were the wealthiest country in the world. We tried to create a new world order by protecting everybody and paying for a global defense. At the same time, the United States gave sweeter deals to its trading partners than it got in return. Of course, we did that to rebuild the rest of the world and to build democratic allies. That was very successful. But in the eighties, and especially after the Cold War, we probably should have rebalanced all of that. We never really did.”

  Kushner told me that he and others in the White House noticed that the president got a daily threat intelligence briefing, but he never got extensive trade briefings and economic briefings.

  “We changed that,” he said, noting that Trump believes that national security and economics are tied together. “You can’t be a safe country if you don’t have a strong economy,” he said. “And you can’t pay for a big military if you don’t have a strong economy. So the president focused much more on economics, on trade deals, than probably any president in history. He speaks to his trade rep every day. He’s focused on doing a lot of different deals at one time. And he’s trying to rebalance things, to make sure that we’re bringing a lot more jobs and a lot more industries back to America.

  “Conventional thinking had held that free trade creates a global supply chain, which lowers the cost of goods for consumers, and everyone benefits,” he said.

  “But that’s not how it works,” he added. “The reality is that, in free trade, you have winners and losers, and the costs of free trade are that factories are closing in different communities. The costs are very concentrated. You’ll have a factory in Baltimore that will go out of business and you have a thousand people laid off. Some people can get new jobs, and some people can’t. Some go on government programs. Some experience great poverty. There is an increase of crime, there are addictions, drugs. The families pay the consequences.

  “So, there is a downstream effect of free trade that has brought a huge cost to our society. And it’s been disproportionate in terms of how it has impacted. This is why the president is trying to protect American industry.”

  TRUMP’S SECRET ECONOMIC MOVES

  While members of the news media have largely ignored the big stories of economic success in America under the Trump administration, they have also shown little interest in writing about any of the more nuanced advances the White House was making, Jared said.

  Jared cited important work by Ivanka to help people get jobs.

  “This retraining initiative is something that Ivanka has taken a lead in,” Jared said. “She has really taken a lead in trying to make sure that we’re reskilling the American workforce for the future,” he said.

  “Our education system has not evolved. We have a big focus on college degrees. Meanwhile, w
e have a lot of great careers that are within reach [to people without college degrees]. They require just a little vocational training. We’ve got a ton of unfilled jobs, as we have a growing economy.”

  Jared noted that business leaders tend to look far into the future to identify—and take steps to avoid—problems that may be coming down the pike. “In politics, you really only get credit when you solve problems where there is a crisis,” he said. “But businesspeople get rewarded by making sure that you don’t have problems in the first place. A businessperson is thinking of things that will prevent problems and create future opportunities.”

  “Ivanka’s retraining initiative is an example of this administration taking steps to prepare the US workforce by looking far down the road,” he said. “So, we see the reskilling effort as something that helps us in the short term but will also help us avoid displacement of workers in the long term,” he said. “It will make sure we have the right skill set to deal with the economy as it’s evolving. That’s a great thing.”

  “At present, the president is focusing on the industries of the future, such as the nation’s many great innovators, including the internet companies,” Jared said. “That, too, requires a long view. We have to make sure that we have an industrial plan to be globally competitive for the next thirty years. The president is very focused on that. We are talking about 5G [fifth generation cellular network technology] or major investments in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and synthetic biology. These are areas that are very important for the future of our country.”

  Some of this work goes unrecognized, and much of it is thankless. If the media will not even credit Trump for the economic advances he has already achieved for the nation, what chance is there that the media would credit the president for decisions he is making for the nation’s future?

  One of the administration’s big decisions concerns what to do about the nation’s decaying infrastructure. Long before he became president, Trump was bemoaning the sorry state of America’s roads, highways, and bridges. He remembers when American airports were the marvel of the world. Today, foreign visitors are stunned by what they find.

  This was one of the major issues that had driven Donald Trump into public life in the first place. He could see with his own eyes the collapse of America. It is what inspired his America First policy. It wasn’t that America had no responsibilities worldwide, it was that it was losing its battle at home.

  “One thing I’ll say is that when the president laid out his vision for a lot of these issues, people thought it was impossible to accomplish any of it. You had a lot of people in the last administration saying two percent growth was the new normal.

  “The president had a campaign outline for what he was going to do. He brought in the right advisers when he got here. He was able to put a lot of these things in place. If you look at the Council of Economic Advisers and a lot of their estimates, we’ve been spot on. We’ve actually been more accurate than the CBO [the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office] with the past administration about what was possible.”

  As a result of Trump’s policies, “what you’re seeing now is workforce participation growing. We’re bringing a lot of people off the sidelines. We have productivity growing as well, which means you’re getting higher wages for the first time in many years.”

  THE OUTSIDER PRESIDENT

  At times, Jared seemed amused by the president’s fearless leadership in the face of such establishment headwinds. Old Washington hands told him that other presidents had operated differently. “What they say about this president,” he told me, “is that he’s not looking at polls. He’s not saying, ‘Oh, should I make this decision or that decision?’ And he’s not saying to himself, ‘Oh, this guy gave me money, so should I decide one way or the other?’

  “He truly was elected as an outsider president. He brought a lot of people into the administration, and we’re not part of the establishment. He’s brought in a whole new crop of people.

  “The election was not a right-versus-left contest; it was the outsiders versus the insiders.

  “One of the smartest things the president did was not allow people who publicly criticized him during the campaign [to] come in and work in his administration. There were a few exceptions to that. He also tended to avoid the experts who were wrong about predicting the election. He saw that as a sign of bad judgment, and it revealed a little bit about the circle they lived and worked in. It was a way to filter out who was part of the old establishment class.

  “So he brought in a whole new crop of people. Maybe they didn’t have the traditional résumés for doing their jobs, but many of them shared his vision. It took a little bit of time to figure out who were the right people and who were the wrong people.

  “Basically, there were two types of people: those who thought Trump was saving the world and those who thought they were saving the world from Trump. Over time, we got rid of a lot of the latter. Eventually, the president got a really good team, a really coordinated team. And he was able to start empowering his whole administration.

  “He’s not afraid to make decisions. He’s action oriented, and he’s telling everybody, ‘Do your job.’ Not surprisingly, the metabolism of this government is just far higher than I think any government before. People are working really hard to keep up with all the different things that are happening. Some are focused on price transparency, others on electronic medical records interoperability, still others on all the different regulations we’re putting in place that really help business.

  This was a story that never got reported. While the Trump administration eliminated many onerous, unnecessary regulations, as well as regulations that helped create monopolies for some chosen corporations, it was also, revising and modernizing needed government rules. It was replacing outdated regulations that were only defeating their purpose.

  “The FDA [Food and Drug Administration] has approved more generic drugs for the first time ever. The prices of drugs have gone down. You’ve got all these accomplishments that are happening all across government. But people don’t really notice, because they have nothing to do with Russia.”

  NOTES

  1. Interview with Jared Kushner, May 2019.

  2. Conversations with President Trump, 2019.

  3. https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/rich-noyes/2018/10/09/study-econ-boom-ignored-tv-trump-coverage-hits-92-percent-negative

  4. https://www.blackenterprise.com/black-unemployment-rate-falls/

  5. https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/americas-unemployment-rate-falls-lowest-level-almost-50-years/

  6. https://nypost.com/2015/06/16/i-will-be-the-greatest-jobs-president-that-god-ever-created-trump/

  7. https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/281936-obama-to-trump-what-magic-wand-do-you-have

  8. http://larrysummers.com/2017/01/17/economy-under-trump-plan-for-the-worst/

  9. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/05/23/larry-summers-trumps-budget-is-simply-ludicrous/

  10. https://financialtribune.com/articles/world-economy/78259/trump-is-dreaming-pigs-dont-fly

  11. https://financialtribune.com/articles/world-economy/78259/trump-is-dreaming-pigs-dont-fly

  12. https://www.economy.com/mark-zandi/documents/2016-06-17-Trumps-Economic-Policies.pdf

  13. https://www.economy.com/mark-zandi/documents/2016-06-17-Trumps-Economic-Policies.pdf

  14. https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-3percent-20170519-story.html

  15. https://www.theguardian.com/business/live/2018/aug/29/markets-buoyed-by-trump-trade-deal-ahead-of-us-gdp-business-live

  16. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Eric Trump in this chapter come from conversations, emails, and interviews in 2019.

  17. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2019/01/14/china-is-losing-the-trade-war-in-nearly-every-way/#47d6631d7f03

  18. Interview with Lara Trump, 2019.

  19. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/06/26/world/polit
ics-diplomacy-world/first-ladys-spokeswoman-white-house-press-secretary/

  20. My immediate boss was David Demarest, the director of communications, who answered to Sununu.

  21. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes Mick Mulvaney in this chapter come from an interview conducted in his White House office in the summer of 2019.

  22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ5dVBa3grw

  23. https://www.businessinsider.com/jared-kushner-avi-berkowitz-trump-2017-3

  24. https://www.newsweek.com/tax-reform-wont-pass-645118

  25. https://www.theepochtimes.com/tax-reform-a-big-beautiful-christmas-present-says-trump_2363920.html

  14

  THE ISIS HORROR STORY

  “We’re going to beat ISIS very, very quickly folks. It’s going to be fast.”

  —DONALD TRUMP ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL IN 20161

  During the 2016 election campaign, the narrative presented by candidate Donald Trump on American foreign policy was widely belittled by academics, members of the news media, and State Department experts. Political professionals derided his chances of winning the election. Economists laughed at his plans and projections for the American economy. And foreign policy doyens mocked his ideas about America’s place in the world.

  While the savviest observers agreed that Trump had correctly identified North Korea’s emergence as a nuclear power as the preeminent, long-term strategic danger to the United States, the bulk of the nation was focused on the immediate threat posed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The soldiers in this black-clad, murderous army were proponents of radical Islam.

  The terrorist organization had conquered 35,000 square miles of territory, carving out its proclaimed caliphate in the Middle East. ISIS controlled massive swaths of land, including the major cities of Raqqa, Syria, and Mosul, Iraq.