Inside Trump's White House
Page 43
9. https://abcnews.go.com/US/great-leader-melania-trump-boyfriend-donald-trump-1999/story?id=58465095
10. https://abcnews.go.com/US/great-leader-melania-trump-boyfriend-donald-trump-1999/story?id=58465095
11. https://abcnews.go.com/US/great-leader-melania-trump-boyfriend-donald-trump-1999/story?id=58465095
12. https://abcnews.go.com/US/great-leader-melania-trump-boyfriend-donald-trump-1999/story?id=58465095
13. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Donald Trump Jr. in this chapter are taken from interviews conducted throughout 2019.
14. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Lara Trump in this chapter are taken from interviews conducted throughout 2019.
15. https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/15/opinions/melania-trumps-spokeswoman-speaks-out-grisham/index.html
16. https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/15/opinions/melania-trumps-spokeswoman-speaks-out-grisham/index.html
17. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/world/africa/melania-trump-africa-trip.html
18. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/world/africa/melania-trump-africa-trip.html
19. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Lara Trump come from interviews and email follow-up questions conducted in 2019.
20. https://abcnews.go.com/US/great-leader-melania-trump-boyfriend-donald-trump-1999/story?id=58465095
21. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/us/melania-trump-africa-trip.html
22. https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/26/politics/melania-trump-africa/index.html
23. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/us/melania-trump-africa-trip.html
24. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/03/us/melania-trump-africa-trip.html
25. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/world/africa/melania-trump-africa-trip.html
26. https://www.c-span.org/video/?460495-1/lady-melania-trump-marks-be-best-year-anniversary
27. https://www.c-span.org/video/?460495-1/lady-melania-trump-marks-be-best-year-anniversary
28. https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/t/eric-bolling-declares-melania-trump-is-the-most-important-and-accomplished-first-lady-in-american-history/vp-AAB28xS
29. https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/t/eric-bolling-declares-melania-trump-is-the-most-important-and-accomplished-first-lady-in-american-history/vp-AAB28xS
30. https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/melania-trump-haters-attacked-first-lady-throughout-2018-from-mocking-accent-to-slamming-christmas-decor
31. https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/melania-trump-haters-attacked-first-lady-throughout-2018-from-mocking-accent-to-slamming-christmas-decor
32. https://milnenews.com/2018/06/06/cnns-brian-stelter-called-out-for-lying-proving-once-again-hes-fake-news/
33. https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/the-view-star-joy-behars-anti-trump-statements-of-2018
34. https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1156597/michelle-obama-news-first-lady-state-dinner-melania-trump-white-house-latest
35. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/michelle-obama-melania-trump-never-reached-out-to-me-for-advice
36. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/laura-bush-separating-children-from-their-parents-at-the-border-breaks-my-heart/2018/06/17/f2df517a-7287-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html?utm_term=.a9c6cf9700f4
37. http://archive.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2009/04/24/official_report_other_data_show_more_than_110600_iraqi_deaths/
38. https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2018/12/04/laura-bush-touched-melania-trumps-invitation-white-house/2208982002/
39. The author had three separate conversations with the president from 2016 to 2019. This took place in 2019 and was voice recorded.
40. From conversations with George W. Bush, 1988.
41. https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/11/politics/melania-trump-be-best-initiative-bullying/index.html
22
YOU CAN CALL HIM GREAT
“The more my father succeeds, the more his enemies hate him but they will never stop him from doing what he knows is right.”
—ERIC TRUMP1
How does Donald Trump compare with other American presidents? What will be his legacy? Presidents are ranked based on a long list of criteria, but it is safe to say that they are primarily judged on their handling of the economy, on wars, on their ability to communicate, and on their personal intelligence. As of this moment, at this writing, on the basis of this remarkable economic boom alone, even should there be a recession and a war in his last year in office, even if there should be an impeachment, history would have to say that Donald Trump is one of America’s greatest presidents.
Traditionally, the economy towers over all other factors in rating a president. For example, Jimmy Carter is one of the most intelligent persons to have held the office. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, he pursued graduate studies in nuclear physics at Union College in Schenectady, New York.2 Yet he is usually ranked as a poor president. George W. Bush is hailed by some as a great “warrior president,” having decisively defeated Iraq in a volatile region of the world, but he too is increasingly ranked poorly. First for the dubious rationale for his war and second because it practically bankrupted the country. In both cases, Carter and Bush, the US economy suffered greatly, hurting the reputations of an “intelligent president” and “a warrior president.” On the other hand, Bill Clinton was impeached, yet his balanced economy offers him remarkable historical resiliency.
Donald Trump’s war record may be an inverse credit to his account. While it is still very possible that we will have a war with Iran during his last year of his first term, as of this writing, he is the first president in forty years to avoid involving the United States in a new hot war. Trump, for all the fear he engenders in a hostile American media, is a president of peace.
When it comes to communication, another of the metrics of presidential greatness, historians look for soaring rhetoric that can be etched in marble. Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy, and Reagan come to mind. But Donald Trump has been a transformational communicator. His use of social media has changed American politics forever. Indeed, world politics and international diplomacy will never be the same again. In 2019, when I talked with him about Andrew Jackson and how that president had organized his alliance of pro-Jacksonian newspapers, Trump only smiled and said, “I’ve got Twitter.”3
When it comes to intelligence, critics are loath to credit Donald Trump, on the grounds that he arrogantly claims it for himself, but one must ask how was he able to see what every great economists in the world had missed. Was it luck? Was getting elected luck? Was creating jobs luck? Was he lucky in bringing back hostages that other presidents had left languishing in foreign prisons? Was defeating ISIS so easily just luck?
Of course, it is much too early to be having such conversations. The presidency of George W. Bush, which had an approval rating of 90 percent in 2001, collapsed into utter failure his last year in office.4 With the economy in free fall, Bush, a so-called conservative Republican, did what only a socialist government in Europe would do. He nationalized the banks.5 Before he left office, his approval rating was registering an anemic 25 percent.6
Then there is the question of whether or not the American national media and Euro-American academia will even allow Donald Trump to be considered great, no matter what he does or doesn’t do in his remaining year in office and what he should achieve in a second term. Numbers be damned. If the American media can insist with a straight face that Donald Trump is a Russian spy and maintain that assertion, without evidence, for three years, they should have little trouble promoting the idea that he is a bad president in spite of what he has done to reduce poverty and economic misery for masses of Americans. They will simply inflate a market correction and turn it into an economic crisis. They can easily stack the historical deck against him. Didn’t Napoleon himself once quote the adage that “history is but a fable agreed upon?”7 Since when do numbers speak louder than the subjective opinion of the world’s elites? Why would they want to honor a man who has diverted their monopolistic streams of income t
o masses of people who are only lower middle class or even poor? The people who FBI agent Peter Strzok said “smell”? The people whom Hillary Clinton threw into a “basket of deplorables”?
The answer is that none of that matters to me. My job is not to anticipate what will please wealthy media elites or academic critics but to write what I heard and found in my unique journey inside the world of Trump. That’s all. And to offer my own opinion, without shame, based on what I have seen and heard, regardless of how it resonates.
TRUMP’S ECONOMY IN HISTORY
Herbert Hoover was everything the modern media seems to desire in a president. He was erudite, measured, politically correct, even courtly. He was also demonstratively compassionate, having saved Europe from famine after World War I. Hoover was a brilliant engineer. The Hoover Institute is a proud fixture of Stanford University. But Herbert Hoover is ranked as one of the worst presidents in American history. He led the nation into its most devastating depression. Hundreds of thousands of Americans lived in hunger and suffered from malnutrition. There were squalid cities of homeless people that sprang up near garbage dumps across the country. They were called “Hoovervilles.” They had no water or sewage. Mothers made soup for their children by boiling the roots of weeds. People scavenged for food among the garbage.
This is the suffering that a bad president brings to a country.
Donald Trump is the anti–Herbert Hoover president. He is direct, tough, controversial, and decisive. He has rough edges and can say and do outrageous things. He is not politically correct. But in his first three years in office, he has presided over one of the greatest, longest economic booms in American history. Everything that socialist engineers and liberal politicians have ever wanted for the poor or the disenfranchised, the persecuted minorities, has apparently happened through free markets on Donald Trump’s watch. Since he took office, more than 6 million Americans have been able to get off food stamps.8
By the time Trump announced for reelection, June 19, 2019, America had added over six million new jobs. The stock market was up 55 percent. Wages were up. Unemployment was down. Records were being broken among every demographic: African American and Hispanic unemployment had reached record lows. Youth unemployment was the lowest since President John F. Kennedy. Costs of health care were down, and prescription drug prices were declining for the first time in forty-six years.9
Moments that economists thought America would never see again were now starting to happen. A Forbes magazine study found that in Trump’s first two years his economy had added 467,000 manufacturing jobs. Such numbers were considered an impossibility only a few years before. In Trump’s first two years he had created six times more manufacturing jobs than Obama’s economy had created in any of his best two years.10 Economists were now anticipating that Trump’s renegotiated version of NAFTA would create another 176,000 manufacturing jobs. During the Great Depression, fifteen million people were out of work. By Trump’s third year in office there were seven million unfilled jobs in America.11
The American Left, prominently featured by the corporate media, promotes the idea that only the wealthy benefit from Trump’s economic miracle. It is not true. According to the IRS, 90 percent of Americans saw an increase in their take-home pay.12 Even so, the media message was effective. Only seventeen percent of Americans were convinced that they were seeing that increase.13
Donald Trump’s most obdurate enemies hold out the possibility that in the last year of his first term as president, things could go horribly wrong with his “miracle” economy. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democratic candidate for president, openly predicted a coming economic catastrophe.14 A New York Times headline read “Are You Ready for the Financial Crisis of 2019?”15 On August 8, 2019, HBO comedian Bill Maher, who had openly “wished” for a recession the previous year, doubled down and called for it again. “Sorry if it hurts people.”16
Some experts believe that it is likely that there will be a stock market correction in the last months of Trump’s term in office.17 That’s what markets do, they go up and they go down. The fact that Trump’s stock market, for example, has continued to ratchet upward, with only short interruptions, throughout his presidency is an anomaly.
Even so, the momentum of his economic success is so broad based and now so diverse, any serious economic collapse is unlikely. All indicators are sound. The experts who once predicted Trump couldn’t do what he wanted to do are now saying that it cannot be easily undone. Even with the worst of news, Trump will have presided over the hottest economy in the world and, arguably, the longest-running boom in American history. It has all happened at a time when the world’s other great economies, such as those of China, Germany, and Japan, are all suffocating.
On the other hand, if the Trump miracle keeps right on chugging, if he pulls off a deal with China, if wages rise even more, if poverty continues to disappear, new jobs continue to be created, right up to the last days of his first term in office, then Donald Trump should easily be ranked as one of America’s great presidents. This, based on the economic numbers alone. Either that or history will have to apologize to Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush. Hoover and Bush presided over the worst depression and worst recession in American history, respectively. Carter presided over inflation of 13.5 percent his last year in office.18
If the economy doesn’t matter, then the whole list of ranked presidents will have to be reshuffled. The professors will have to hurriedly rewrite their history books and change the rules. Indeed, that may actually happen. Academics, like Olympic judges and football referees, can cheat. But it will lead to some awkward moments for professors in classrooms, as new textbooks are rushed into print and sold to compliant students and Google manipulates its searches to cover its tracks.
THE PRESIDENT OF PEACE
As mentioned, historians delve deeply into a president’s prosecution of war. To put it bluntly, wars define a presidency. Donald Trump’s robust reaction to Syria’s use of chemical weapons showed a leader who was willing to act quickly and decisively, while shunning a protracted conflict. Likewise, Trump’s annihilation of ISIS was so quick and so decisive that the media could hardly catch its breath. Americans are used to long wars. Senator John McCain, Donald Trump’s political nemesis, once suggested that the United States could be in Iraq for one hundred years.19 Long wars have supporters. They make money for companies, lobbyists, and politicians.
In Trump’s case, both military actions, the Syrian missile strike and the campaign against ISIS, involved inherited crises. Aside from these early flashes of force, Trump has been remarkably adept at avoiding armed conflict. As of the early fall of 2019, Donald Trump is the only American president in recent memory who hasn’t committed the nation to a new military conflict during his term in office.
As he urgently pointed out to me, a war with North Korea was a very real possibility when he came into office. He chose diplomacy instead. In comparison, Barack Obama had his war in Libya that turned badly and arguably helped allow the rise of ISIS. George W. Bush invaded Iraq, insisting that it had secret weapons of mass destruction. His war upset the social and religious equilibrium of the region and turned the Middle East into a killing field. Earlier in this chapter I quoted an Associated Press estimate of deaths in Iraq, but by some other respected estimates 400,000 people died in the whole region.20 Bill Clinton committed the United States to the war in Kosovo. George H. W. Bush invaded Panama. Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada. Critics like to portray Donald Trump as reckless, but there is no basis in policy for that portrayal. He may one day be seen by historians as a man of peace who will have finished his first term in office without a hot war—something no other recent president can claim.
Even if war comes in the last year of Trump’s first term—a war with Iran or North Korea, for example—the president will have set the stage and given the United States the moral advantage. In Sun Tzu’s philosophy of leadership, the side with the moral or “character” advantage is t
he side that will eventually win in a given conflict.21 Trump will have shown a willingness to negotiate with both countries. His tempered reaction to Iran’s hostile attack on an American drone, the seizure of British tankers, and the Iranian-Yemeni attack on a Saudi oil refinery will allow him to respond with decisive force to any further provocation and still keep the respect of many diplomats. It will be said that “he tried.”
Jared Kushner sees the president’s legacy in broader strokes. He has been redefining America’s role in the world. “This is the first president, really, since the Second World War,” Kushner told me, “to have new ideas on what America’s place in the world should be for a new time. The world has changed a lot. We need a different strategy. What the president is trying to do, in creating reciprocity and fair trade deals, is to lead by example. This is how you get other people to do more.”22
At the end of World War II, America was pouring money and investment into all the other countries devastated by war, especially the countries that had been defeated, such as Japan and Germany. The idea was partly humanitarian but partly to rebuild the world’s economy to our own benefit as well. We made refrigerators, but we needed customers.
These struggling nations had no money for their own defense, so we paid for that too. But time has caught up with us. We are like a successful father who always picks up the tab for dinner. There is a problem. The kids are grown, they are making more money than we are, and we are struggling but unwilling to forfeit our honorific role. America is a proud nation. We are still, always, paying for dinner.
The American national media portrays Trump’s America First policy as selfish. He sees himself as realistic and as someone who cares about the American middle class, which has had to carry the rest of the world on its shoulders. He sees the Democrats and their corporate media allies as willing to take the money from the American middle class and use it to clean up the environments of China, India, and South Africa. To use it to defend Germany and NATO nations. To give them the freedom to use their own money to build airports, high-speed trains, highways and improve their education.