by Doug Wead
“The whole notion of us being entangled in all these foreign wars is not sustainable,” Jared Kushner points out. “The president realizes that everyone else is being competitive economically, and so we should be competitive, too. Sure, we want to help everyone around the world. We are the most generous nation on earth, but we also need to help our own citizens.
“So, this is part of his legacy. He has brought a balance of new ideas. It has involved slaying a lot of sacred cows and figuring out how we put America on a new course. Look at the definition of America First. Look at his first speech during the campaign at the Mayflower Hotel on foreign policy. Follow through to his speech in Saudi Arabia, his speech in Warsaw, and all his other foreign speeches. Read the speech in South Korea. If you follow his foreign policy, you will see he is really rewriting what America’s role in the world should be for this century.
“That could be a great legacy—if future leaders will really follow that model and hopefully not revert back to some of the old ways, because the old ways are not sustainable. This is hard medicine for some people to take on a lot of fronts. But Donald Trump is courageous enough to lean into these fights and really push people to do things the right way.”
Jared didn’t flinch when I broached the subject of political defeat in 2020. He pointed out that its impact would not only be domestic. “A lot of countries are now waiting for the next president so they can get a better deal. They don’t want to have to pay to clean up their own environment or to provide for their own security. They can just wait until they get a Democratic president or a weaker Republican president and then America will go back to paying for everything again.”
REINVENTING POLITICS AND COMMUNICATION
Donald Trump, like all presidents, will leave a political legacy as well. Critics bemoan his childish nicknames of opponents and his branding slogans (“Make America Great Again”). But no future effective politician will be without them. In his own unique and colorful way, President Trump has been a great communicator.
The evolution of American-style politics has been ongoing from the birth of the republic. When political parties emerged, George Washington was in dismay. Heated divisions began immediately. Jefferson’s partisan supporters used pamphlets to broadcast Alexander Hamilton’s affair with a married woman and his subsequent blackmail.23 Hamilton’s supporters accused Jefferson of fathering children with an underage African slave.
When Andrew Jackson ran for president he was depicted in lithographs. For the first time someone could actually see for whom they were voting. It was the first art many people on the frontier ever had. They would nail the poster up on the interior walls of their log cabins. Critics were outraged. Good old, fat, bald John Quincy Adams would never have been elected if lithographs had been available a few years earlier. What’s more, Jackson was cheating by showing himself on horseback leading troops into battle. Critics said it was a false depiction.
President William Henry Harrison, “Old Tippecanoe” introduced music bands, and critics bemoaned the idea that the presidency would soon be reduced to whoever had the best band. Harrison, whose vicepresidential running mate was John Tyler, also dabbled in a bit of pre-Trumpian branding of his own, telling voters they could vote for “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.” The intellectual elites were mortified.
These inventions occurred constantly all throughout history. In modern times there was Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign, which registered the largest plurality victory before or since, more than the reelections of FDR or Ronald Reagan. That campaign taught the importance of voter identification and turnout.
In 1988, kindly, old George H. W. Bush, of all people, taught us the power of negative campaigning when he ran against Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Bush’s supporters ran advertisements about Willie Horton, a murderer who happened to be African American. He had been released from prison by his opponent’s state furlough program, only to commit further crimes, including rape. I worked for Bush at the time. We encouraged him to let others tell the story.
Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign taught the importance of a rapid response to negative attacks. It was like the World War II tank as the solution to the World War I trench. This was when the fax machine affected the political world.
Barack Obama mastered social media in new ways. In 2012, Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters said that Obama had created a “kind of database that no-one has ever seen before. With information about everything, on every individual.”24 It was promised that with this power, the Democrats would never lose another election.
According to Obama’s 2012 media analytics director, Carol Davidsen, Facebook executives came to the Obama offices and “were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”25
Finally, in 2016, Donald Trump taught us powerful lessons in branding. It will be a part of his legacy and will likely be a permanent part of any other future politician’s success. Trump can do big things with only a few words. With Twitter and social media, he is communicating directly with his audience and his political base.
Jared Kushner sees the president’s style as a key to his success and a way he has affected the science of politics. “From a communications point of view, he’s changed the whole game. Again, I think he’s had a whole new notion of communicating with the public and of being available. People are starting to copy his style.
“He also has a lot of authenticity. That’s something that people love. They want to know who he is and that he’s not pretending to be somebody he is not. People know he is fighting like hell for this country. That’s something that a lot of people respect and love.”
Jared sees something deeper than new technology or style. “He has increased the metabolism of Washington. Things happen faster. For example, he has this sharp focus on a metric of jobs for American workers and for increasing their wages. With that focus he has found new ways to get it done. But it didn’t happen automatically.”
THE BETTER POLITICIAN
White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney told me a story about President Donald Trump and the day he learned that he was the better politician. It was in the hot summer of 2019. I was sitting in the chief of staff’s office. Judd Deere, the White House deputy press secretary, was with us taking notes.
“Of course, everybody who’s elected to Congress thinks they’re a good politician,” Mulvaney said. He was already chuckling about what he was going to tell us. “And I got elected to Congress four times. I was the first Republican in my district in 130 years, beating the sitting budget chairman by ten points,” He was laughing now, setting us up for how this story would rebound against him. “My opponent was a twenty-eight-year incumbent. So I thought I was a damn good politician.26
“Anyway, I was President Trump’s OMB director when this happened. I got invited up to Camp David for the weekend. It was a small group of about five of us. John Kelly and Kirstjen Nielsen were there. We were having dinner with President Trump in the dining room at the Laurel Lodge. It was a big room and a small table.”
General John Kelly was then serving as White House chief of staff. Kirstjen Nielsen was the director of Homeland Security.
“The president turns to me and he says, ‘Hey, Mick, what’s that thing next week, that thing in Switzerland?’
“I’m like, ‘Davos?’
“‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says. ‘I’m thinking about going to that. What do you think about that?’”
Davos is a mountain retreat in Switzerland where the World Economic Forum had been held each year since 1971. It hosted many of the financial movers and shakers of the world. The Americans, under Trump, had stayed home from Davos in 2017, but the president’s shadow had loomed over everything that had happened. World leaders had spent the week talking about what to do about Trump.
Inside the White House, the conventional wisdom held that the president should stay home from the 2018 forum as well. He would be ambushed
by critics if he went. His “America First” policy was rankling the rich nations of Europe and the Pacific Rim. It would be like stepping into a hornet’s nest.
“I gave him a frank answer,” Mulvaney said. “Which is one of the reasons, I think, he likes working with me. I said, ‘Mr. President, I think that’s the shittiest idea I’ve heard all day.’
“He laughed. He goes, ‘Why is that? Why is that?’
“I say, ‘Mr. President, no one over there wants to see you and no one over here wants to see you go. It’s a no-win situation.’
“Every time I say something that I know registers with him, he sort of pauses and he raises his left eyebrow. And he looks at me and he goes, ‘No, no, you’re wrong.’ He turns to John Kelly and he says, ‘John? I’m going. Set it up!’
“Now Kelly is kicking me under the table, because Kelly absolutely does not want him to go. He thinks it’s a terrible idea. I’m thinking I have pissed off the chief of staff and somehow I’m going to be blamed for convincing the president to go to Davos and get fired.
“So Trump goes to Davos. It was a huge success. Even a media success. He gave a speech over there, and the key line that everyone remembers was ‘America first is not America alone.’
“Okay.” Mulvaney is laughing. “In hindsight, watching it on TV, I said to myself, ‘Very clever. He just figured it out. He had a great line. He was looking for the biggest forum, with the biggest megaphone, so he could deliver that line to the whole world and that was it. It was a fabulous line. It was a fabulous trip.
“But that’s not what I remember most. What I remember most is what happened a few days later. He gets back home. I’m working on something and I go into the Oval Office. Very often, I’ll go in a few minutes before the meeting and just sit by the edge of the Resolute desk and work on my notes and my papers. This day, the president walks in behind me.”
While he is telling the story, Chief of Staff Mulvaney jumps up out of his chair opposite me and starts acting out the scene. Judd Deere, who has been sitting there with us, taking notes, puts down his pen and paper and looks on, smiling but spellbound. The chief of staff is circling behind me while he is talking. Judd Deere can see what he is up to but I have my back to him, so I am reading Deere’s face to anticipate what’s coming. Suddenly, unexpectedly, Mulvaney slaps me hard on my right shoulder from behind.
Bam!
“And the president goes, ‘You were wrong about Davos, weren’t you?’
“I say, ‘Yes, Mr. President, I was.’”
“So that was the day,” Mulvaney says, laughing and sitting back down in this chair, “I realized Donald Trump is a better politician than me.”
MEASURING THE INTELLIGENCE OF A PRESIDENT
Most presidential ranking systems make an accommodation for assessing the intelligence of a president. It is certainly not the most important criteria. As pointed out, both Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover were brilliant men who are routinely ranked poorly as presidents because of their handling of the nation’s economy.
Journalists and some historians enjoy ridiculing the intelligence of the forty-fifth president. Trump defends himself as having “a very large brain,” which prompts even more mockery from his enemies.27
In fact, journalists and historians love to portray presidents as dumb. Perhaps it offers some salve to their own failed lack of ambition or industry. One encounters a similar, petulant portrayal in literature. Giants are usually dumb. In motion pictures, beautiful women are often dumb. Many people find blonde women attractive, so many people make jokes about blonde women. It is a way to even the scales. Perhaps it is reflective of our own insecurities.
Even some of America’s greatest presidents have been slapped with the label. Abraham Lincoln was referred to by one of his own cabinet members as “our dear imbecile.” General George McClellan, the commanding general of his armies, called him an “idiot.”28 Oliver Wendell Holmes once called Franklin Delano Roosevelt “a second-class intellect.”29
I have met and known six American presidents, and none of them were dumb. But they were all portrayed that way.
It was my privilege to entertain former president Gerald Ford in my home on two different occasions and talk with him about the Warren Commission and pardoning Nixon. He was so effectively branded by Saturday Night Live as dumb that I was shocked by my first conversations. Ford was a policy wonk and knew the details of issues that were far beyond my reach.
As a college student, Jimmy Carter apparently scored a higher on an IQ test than did John F. Kennedy.30 That didn’t stop The Atlantic from assessing his presidency with an article entitled, “How Stupid Is Jimmy Carter?”31 It was my privilege to meet Carter on several occasions. He is a voracious reader. When we first shook hands in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, he said, “I read your book!” I had written an instant book called The Iran Crisis, and the problem it discussed was still lingering. After he left office, I met him again with his wife, First Lady Rosalynn Carter, in Atlanta. They sat down with me for an interview. I asked how it would have affected history if he had bombed Tehran. Rosalynn was sitting on a couch nearby. She jumped to her feet and said, “Jimmy would have been reelected president!”32
Christopher Hitchens once wrote an essay on “the stupidity of Ronald Reagan.”33 I would write the 1980 campaign biography for Reagan. My brother and I would have dinner with the Reagans in their home in Pacific Palisades the week he announced for president. Over the years he would tell me stories about “the Gipper” and jokes from the Soviet Union.
On one memorable night Reagan gave me his theory on what really happened to Ted Kennedy at Chappaquiddick. When the Reagans moved into the White House I would plan three charity events with Nancy Reagan, two in the East Room. And even more charity events with them both after they left Washington. Ronald Reagan was not dumb and neither was Nancy.
George H. W. Bush would give me his first published account of being shot down over the Pacific. We would sit in his White House vice presidential office in front of a warm fireplace. His staff, who had never heard the story before, soon gathered around, and the next appointments were postponed. I would later coauthor a book with him and serve on the Bush senior staff as special assistant to the president in his White House. My family has notebooks full of wonderful handwritten messages from the president and first lady.
On one unforgettable night, they would take me off to the Nine Dragons Chinese restaurant at Epcot, where we sat and talked about books while the Disney World theme park was closing down and fireworks were exploding out over the lake just beyond our windows. George H. W. Bush was a brilliant man with a generous spirit. People insisted that he was dumb because he preferred Robert Ludlum over John le Carré.
Finally, I would know George W. Bush better than any of them. We would spend hours together on the road, on commercial airlines, on private jets, in car caravans and Winnebagos. We ended up talking about everything that two men talk about when they are alone on the road together, including money, government, baseball, God, and sex. Mostly sex.
In 1987, when the Bush twins were just little girls, I would take George and Laura and Jenna and Barbara for Mexican food in Corpus Christi, where we spent the night talking about George’s future in Washington, DC. George W. Bush, newly retired from the oil business, was fascinated. The three ladies were bored.
One day, when George W. Bush was governor of Texas and thinking of running for president, I called him in a panic. “You were featured on Saturday Night Live last night,” I said. “And they made you look really, really dumb.”
There was a very long pause. At first I thought he had hung up. And then he finally spoke up and said, “Good.”
“No, it’s not good,” I insisted urgently. “They are defining you.”
He was not impressed by my argument. The fact is, he knew what he was doing.
There are some who believe that academia and the media purposely target Republican presidents and cover for Democratic president
s. The comedian Chevy Chase, star of Saturday Night Live, who portrayed Gerald Ford as a buffoon, admitted as much in an interview on CNN. “Obviously my leanings were Democratic and I wanted Carter in and I wanted [Ford] out and I figured look, we’re reaching millions of people every weekend, why not do it.”34
Most of the American people loved Democratic president Barack Obama—even many who disagreed with his policies. The fact that the American people elected and reelected an African American president was a source of great pride. So, the media consistently covered for his lapses. When he referred to the “English Embassy” it was overlooked. When he toasted the queen in the middle of the British national anthem it was forgiven. When he claimed that America had built “the Intercontinental Railroad,” no one was particularly upset.35
When Republican vice president Dan Quayle misspelled “potato,” however, it was a national story. When Barack Obama misspelled “respect,” it was considered a brain freeze moment that happens to us all.36
Partisan or not, most agree and the metrics clearly show that the American media is hostile to Donald Trump. A Harvard study illustrates this fact dramatically.37 There is persistent criticism declaring Trump unfit to be president. But Trump was right about the economic numbers, and the greatest economists in the world were wrong. History has a way of sorting hysteria from fact. Leo Tolstoy once said that “wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”38 The numbers clearly show that the attacks on Donald Trump’s performance as president are wrong. Future historians who wipe away the dust of collective bias will see those numbers etched in stone and will be able to judge without contemporary emotion.