Inside Trump's White House

by Doug Wead

  Americans had to watch as their own armored vehicles, with black ISIS flags waving from their turrets, proudly raced across the deserts of the Middle East, massacring villagers and subjecting thousands of civilians to slavery. Entire Christian and Yazidi communities of men, women, and children were herded into open-air pens without shade, food, water, or sanitation and then, over a period of days, systemically slaughtered. Some of the Christians claimed that they could trace their heritage back to the first century. They and the Yazidis, an ancient, persecuted religious minority, had lived in peace for generations with their Muslim neighbors.2 They were now disappearing. Members of families who escaped the ISIS net spoke with horror of seeing decapitated bodies littering the streets.

  On the night of April 14, 2014, a group of terrorists called Boko Haram, who would later align themselves with ISIS, kidnapped 276 girls, most of them Christian, from a government school in Chibok, Nigeria. A few days later, in a proof-of-life video sent to CNN, the Boko Haram commander laughed into the camera. “I’ve got your girls,” he said. “I’ve got your girls.”3

  Two years later, I interviewed some of the girls and young women who escaped Boko Haram. Their harrowing stories are hard to forget.

  In 2014, ISIS forces overran the town of Sinjar in northern Iraq. It had been a safe haven for Yazidi women and children while their husbands battled the terrorists. No longer. ISIS slaughtered the children and took thousands of the women as sex slaves. The United Nations declared it a genocide.

  THE OBAMA DOCTRINE

  The concern of the Obama administration had been that the appeal of ISIS was spreading. The group was attracting allies in Yemen and parts of Africa. In February 2015, the Islamic terrorists took twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christians to a coastal Mediterranean beach in Libya and beheaded them there in a videotaped ritual. The killers chanted sacred passages from the Koran during the bloody sacrifices. One of the victims on the beach cried out, “Jesus, help me!”4 The next day, Pope Francis denounced the killings.

  In March 2015, the BBC reported that in Nigeria, Boko Haram had set up roadblocks on major highways. Truckers reported that non-Muslim “infidels” were pulled from their vehicles and beheaded on the spot with chainsaws.5 The squeamish American media largely ignored the story.6

  Before the year ended, ISIS could boast an annual budget of $2 billion. It had thirty thousand troops on the ground in the Middle East. It operated in eighteen countries.7

  On April 20, 2016, two months before Trump announced his run for president, Boko Haram announced that it was collaborating with ISIS and pledged to follow its leadership in creating an Islamic state that would stretch into Central Africa.8

  The implications of the ISIS campaign were clear: We will do what we want with impunity. We will kill men, women, and children at a whim. And we will do it with your guns, your armored vehicles, and your grenade launchers. And no one can do anything about it.

  The message of ISIS to America was menacing: Eventually, someday soon, we are coming for you.

  In the United States, the public was puzzled over how the terrorists had seized American guns and armored vehicles in the first place. It was embarrassing to the Obama administration and politically harmful to Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic presidential candidate.

  Perhaps out of respect to Obama-Clinton, online editors and television producers in America largely passed on the story.9 Much of the public assumed that US military forces had abandoned the equipment, which wound up on the black market, where the terrorists bought it.

  In fact, some of the equipment was new, and the dates on the weapons showed that some of them had been purchased by ISIS fewer than sixty days after they were manufactured.10

  President Obama’s strategy was to defuse the whole idea of war with Islam. His administration refused to use the phrase “Islamic terrorism.” This strategy was popular with the more liberal leaders of Europe, especially in France, where large pockets of Muslim immigrant neighborhoods exist.

  Obama often seemed to be speaking more to the Islamic world than to his own American audience. On March 6, 2007, Obama was quoted by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof as saying that the Muslim call to prayer was “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.”11

  At the 2015 National Prayer Breakfast, Obama compared ISIS to the Crusades. “Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place,” he said to a ballroom full of three thousand stunned religious officials, “remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”12

  It must have been a bit disconcerting to most in his audience, who not only questioned his historic conclusions but were struck by the fact he had been forced to retreat eight hundred years to find anything comparable. He seemed to be inadvertently making the point of his critics. This was something from another century, and it was barbaric.

  In contrast to Obama’s approach, then-presidential candidate Trump’s declarations against ISIS were graphic and direct. At a 2015 rally in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Trump was asked about the terrorist group.

  “I’d bomb the shit out of them,” he said.13

  In April 2016, on the campaign trail in Connecticut, presidential candidate Trump promised, “We’re going to beat ISIS very, very quickly, folks. It’s going to be fast. I have a great plan. It’s going to be great.”14

  His Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, mocked this promise. In their first head-to-head presidential debate, Clinton jabbed at Trump’s declarations about ISIS. “He says it’s a secret plan, but the only secret is that he has no plan.”15

  DONALD TRUMP’S VICTORY

  In hindsight, it looked easy. Trump had promised on the campaign trail that he would take care of ISIS quickly, and that appeared to happen. By November 2017, during Trump’s first year in office, the terrorist organization had been practically wiped out.

  But the American media, obsessed with their campaign to convince the public that Donald Trump was a Russian spy, was in no mood to award him another victory. They insisted that ISIS had not been defeated at all. ISIS forces were still there, they said, even if they had lost most of their territory.

  The media compared the Trump administration’s enthusiasm over the defeat of ISIS to President George W. Bush’s declaration in 2003 that major combat operations in Iraq had ended. As he spoke, viewers could see a banner behind him that read MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. But the war in Iraq was not nearly done and would resurface in deadly fury. It would be the same with ISIS, the media promised.

  At first, Trump was careful not to declare ISIS as finished, but by the end of his first year in office, the group’s forces had been bottled up inside just a few square miles of territory. Voices in the Pentagon were saying that it was all but over. Trump began saying that it was “virtually defeated.”

  Even then, Trump’s detractors wouldn’t let go. CNBC ran a story in November telling readers that “experts warn the terror group is still a serious global threat.”16

  By December 10, 2017, ISIS’s remaining fighters were trapped in a small enclave a few miles wide. “Has ISIS Been Defeated in Syria, as Trump Claims?” asked one headline.17

  Pundits on CNN and MSNBC now insisted that ISIS was not dead at all, because its ideas were still alive. It was like arguing that the Allies had not won World War II because Nazism still existed. On December 22, 2018, CNN correspondent Arwa Damon expressed contempt for the idea that ISIS had been defeated. “It’s so naive,” she said.18

  But by March 2019, MSNBC and CNN had to face reality. Trump had chalked up another victory. There was no way around it. ISIS was dead. “It ended, in the Syrian farming hamlet of Baghouz, as little more than a junk yard about the size of Central Park, filled with burnt-out vehicles and dilapidated tents,”19 Robin Wright reported for the New Yorker. The once great terrorist organization that had once attracted legions of young recruits was now a cesspool of urine and feces. They had been reduc
ed to making soup from boiled grass. The organization’s warrior families, who had once been willing to blow up themselves, their children, and any hated nearby infidels, now surrendered meekly. They begged for water and food, seeking the luxury of prisons over the promises of paradise that they had used to entice their recruits.

  Ironically, the last word out of ISIS did not come from a fearsome warrior making a heroic, suicidal stand. It came from a young woman, Hoda Muthana, a three-time ISIS bride. She surrendered to authorities and then promptly announced that she was a citizen of the United States from Alabama and wanted to go home. “I believe that America gives second chances. I want to return and I’ll never come back to the Middle East,” she promised.

  Her lawyer passed information to ABC News and the Associated Press. Hoda had traveled to the Middle East, where she had married three ISIS warriors. She had lived with the terrorist organization for four years. Her Twitter feed had exhorted, “Go on drivebys, and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them.”20

  Muthana was interviewed on CBS’s Face the Nation, after which a blogger, Karen Townsend, observed, “It sure seems like the intention is to make Muthana into a sympathetic character.”21

  Thus ended the story of ISIS, not with a bang but with a whimper. A twenty-four-year-old mother with a baby was all that was left as a spokesperson. Her first two husbands had been killed in battle, she explained. Her third husband had divorced her. She wanted to go home.

  ISIS had dominated a large portion of the public discussion during the 2016 election campaign. Now Trump’s war was being called “the most successful unconventional military campaign in history”22 by Elizabeth Dent, a nonresident scholar with the Middle East Institute’s Countering Terrorism and Extremism program.

  But media critics said the credit belonged to Barack Obama.23

  Donald Trump, the master brander, closed the book on ISIS by giving them a new name. “While on occasion these cowards will resurface, they have lost all prestige and power. They are losers and will always be losers.”24

  The fact was that no one—except, perhaps, Donald Trump himself—had expected it to be that easy. It was this expectation of failure that had left so many in the media trapped into the position of denying its success. After the victory was finally established, it was quickly forgotten. There were no colorful documentaries produced, no interviews given, and no history books written. It was like a magic trick. Once members of the public had learned the secret behind what Donald Trump had done, they were no longer interested. But I was interested.

  INSIDE THE CAMPAIGN TO TAKE DOWN ISIS

  In the late summer of 2019 I was told that the White House was setting up another meeting for me with the president. If it happened, it would be my fourth. We had never talked about ISIS, so I was planning to ask plenty of questions about it.

  To prepare myself, I stopped by the White House to check in with some of the administration sources who had already been so helpful. They advised me to contact Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his predecessor, Rex Tillerson. They said I should speak to former national security adviser Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster and his successor, John Bolton. They mentioned former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, and a long list of others.

  The president had suggested that the whole government would be available to me, and Sarah Huckabee Sanders was diligent in contacting any of the sources I needed but the response was mixed. Some of them did not respond at all, and others could not provide the answers I needed. When I finally found the person who had the inside story I needed, he would only talk from the position of anonymity. I had taken pride in writing a book that was on the record, with personalities that had never spoken openly before, but the information I was offered was too valuable to pass up.

  It was a good thing I didn’t. My final conversation with the president was interrupted by world events. What I gained instead was someone who was in the room with the president and saw it all unfolding in real time and best of all, was willing to talk about it if I would only protect his identity.

  “When the president first came into the White House,” my source said, “He started assembling the different experts from the National Security Council and from the military. He started asking a lot of questions about the status quo. What had been tried? What had failed?”25

  “When was this?” I asked. “When did the president take on ISIS? When did he get started?”

  “Right away. The first day. It was, ‘Let’s focus on this, let’s focus on that.’ I think the president just came in and wanted to start doing everything immediately.

  “General McMaster realized that the president had a lot of ambition; that there was a lot he wanted to accomplish and quickly. So he took the initiative to say, ‘Well, let me try to put this into a national security strategy. Let me take all of your ideas and instincts and put them into an operational plan.’

  “He did a very, very good job of doing just that. You’ve seen our national security strategy document that was released? General McMaster did a fabulous job with that. What McMaster was able to do was to take all of the president’s ideas, and all of the things he wanted to achieve, and put them together into an organized document. I give General McMaster a lot of credit for that. Then, through the interagency process, we were able to get feedback from everybody. The strategy paper made it easier to develop action plans and then make sure we coordinated outcomes in all of these different areas. It was very helpful.”

  How soon did all of that take place? What was the timing?

  “This whole process probably took about four months or so.”

  How long did it take for the president to get it all assigned and carried out?

  “Well, it took about a year to put the final product together. But we knew what we were doing after a couple months. It just took time to get the teams in place and to find the right people.”

  The national security presidential memorandum was dated January 28, 2017, and titled “Plan to Defeat the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.”26 The document called for a new plan to be submitted within thirty days. The president wanted to know if there should be any changes to the rules of engagement.

  He wanted to know what international laws applied regarding use of force against this enemy. He wanted to identify cyber strategies to isolate and delegitimize ISIS and its ideology. He wanted to recruit new coalition partners to help in the fight. He wanted to shut down ISIS’s financial support, cutting off money transfers, oil revenue, revenue from human trafficking, and sale of looted art and other sources of revenue.

  “With regards to ISIS in particular this was a very big focus for the president,” the White House source said. “He spent a lot of time on it. What more could we do to expedite the campaign? He wanted to take care of it. People were suffering, people were dying.”

  WHAT TRUMP DID DIFFERENTLY

  Obviously, America’s handling of ISIS had not been working. What did Trump do differently? Some of his tactics, the source told me, remain secret and sensitive. But some simply involved establishing a different relationship with his men in the field.

  “The generals made recommendations,” my source told me. “The president immediately gave them whatever authority they needed. He asked a lot of questions. He constantly challenged the different assertions, and we eventually started to make a lot of progress.”

  Secretary of Defense Mattis said Trump “delegated authority to the right level to aggressively and in a timely manner move against enemy vulnerabilities.” 27 This meant troops on the ground could sometimes call in an air strike, something that would have been undoable in the Obama-run war.

  In March 2017, when an American-backed fighting unit asked for immediate air transport to conduct a surprise attack on an ISIS-controlled dam, the request was carried out smoothly and quickly.28 Again, an outcome that would previously have been impossible to achieve was happening because of Trump’s new orders.

  Another major shift
was to do more than simply win battles. Now, instead of driving the enemy out of a city and then moving on to the next enemy stronghold, military forces surrounded the enemy forces and annihilated them. The result was that ISIS fighters could not retreat and fight again another day in another location. Instead, they were eliminated.

  To carry out this mission, Trump gave US Special Forces more freedom to engage the enemy on the ground. They were no longer just support personnel whose actions were subject to approval from higher authorities. With their participation came more independent action supported by sophisticated air power and drones.

  Donald Trump Jr. saw this as an important change in strategy. “The president was more than happy to let the generals on the ground make decisions,” he told me. “They would have a much greater understanding of the battlefield, and the threat, than a lawyer bureaucrat back in Washington.

  For example, he said, friends working in SEAL teams told him they were not able to complete their mission because they had to check with Washington first. “As an example, I have friends in the SEAL teams, and they have said, that they have actually had targets in their cross-hairs, but with the time difference in DC, they had to wait for approval and lost the opportunity,” he told me. “Imagine, they needed that kind of approval from DC? By the time the guy wakes up in Washington, shows up to office at nine thirty in the morning, goes through a full assessment of the situation, obtains the approval, children have moved into the target area and the team on the ground have literally lost the opportunity to take out a high-value target.”29

  There is no question that the empowerment of the Pentagon and soldiers in the field to make split-second decisions helped advance the war on ISIS. That same kind of empowerment applied to other practices, which remain unknown publicly.