Inside Trump's White House

by Doug Wead

  If presidents are partly ranked as strong or weak based on their personal intelligence, then surely Donald Trump’s ability to see what the greatest economists in the world could not see is an example of remarkable insight.

  THE IMPEACHMENT GAME

  Even before Donald Trump assumed office, even before the Russia collusion conspiracy theory was launched, his political opponents were calling for his impeachment.39 What does history teach us about impeachment? How would it affect the Trump presidency, and what would it mean to his legacy?

  The process of impeachment is brutal. President Andrew Johnson was impeached in 1868 but survived the vote in the Senate. His son, Robert, who worked in the White House and served his father like the chief of staff would serve today, died in an accident the very next year. Many believe it to be a suicide.40

  Historically, impeachment is not an easy thing to pull off. President Richard Nixon would have likely been impeached and convicted, so he resigned. But Nixon was opposed by a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, and arguably a Democratic national media. Most important of all, Nixon’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” were eventually made very clear and obvious. They were not debatable, as in the case of the ongoing accusations against Donald Trump.

  President Clinton was impeached but not convicted in the Senate. And Clinton had actually committed crimes and was eventually found guilty of them—perjury, for example. Clinton was also accused of rape, though no charges were brought against him. The Republicans who opposed Clinton controlled both the House of Representative and the Senate. And yet he survived.

  The outcome of an impeachment hearing and trial is not easy to predict. Attacks on President Clinton were perceived as unfair. People didn’t like the idea of overturning a recent election, and the economy was good. Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996.

  This is the great fear of Democratic House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who throughout the summer of 2019 refused to launch impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump. She counseled fellow Democrats that by doing so, they would only be helping to reelect him in 2020. The Democrats had hurt themselves by calling for impeachment even before Trump had assumed office. It looked like anything they said and did was only an attempt to overturn the election. Meanwhile, the American economy under Donald Trump was at its peak.

  In late September, pushed by radicals in her own party, Pelosi finally encouraged the Democrats in Congress to start the impeachment process.41

  The national corporate media boldly led the charge, at a time when it had lost much credibility by its failed story on Russian collusion. Without any self-examination or accountability over its handling of past Trump “scandals,” it now tried to convince the nation that this time, they had their facts right. Would the nation listen? Or would an ongoing impeachment process only reelect Donald Trump?

  What will be the historical legacy of impeachment hearings? How would history see Donald Trump if articles of impeachment were passed by the House of Representatives? Much of the answer would depend on how it was done and if it were nonpartisan. The fact is, in recent years, impeachment has become a much more common political tool. Barack Obama, both Bush presidents, even Ronald Reagan have been threatened with the possibility of articles of impeachment. Only one president in American history has been effectively removed from office, and that is Richard Nixon. Yet even Nixon is favorably ranked by some historians, as is Bill Clinton, who was also impeached.

  It is very possible that the preposterous Russian collusion story has successfully inoculated Donald Trump from any new scandals that the impeachment process can uncover. While Russian collusion was meant to be a knockout blow, it may, in the end, be his key to political survival.

  HIS TOUGHEST CRITICS

  Almost immediately after his election, Donald Trump was under attack from pundits and presidential historians. They lined up to join the aggrieved national media in bemoaning the rise of Trump. Jon Meacham described the period as “an odd and disconcerting moment, to say the least. My own hope is that when we look back on this it will simply have been a waste of America’s time and not the beginning of a serious cataclysm.”42

  Doris Kearns Goodwin, who wrote a book about what makes a great president, said “Trump doesn’t measure up.”43 Presidential historian Allan Lichtman suggested that the Democrats needed to impeach Trump if they hoped to beat him for reelection in 2020.44

  Ken Burns, producer of popular television documentaries, compared Trump to Hitler.45 Burns told an audience at Stanford University, “Asking this man to assume the highest office in the land would be like asking a newly minted car driver to fly a 747.”46

  Other’s picked up on Burns’s Hitler comparison, and the national news networks shamelessly ran such commentary without any irony. Steve Schmidt, a former political strategist for Senator John McCain, compared Trump to both Hitler and Stalin.47 Nicole Wallace, the former communications director for President George W. Bush, announced on her show on MSNBC that Donald Trump was “talking about exterminating Latinos.”48 She later apologized for her mistake. Michael Beschloss warned television audiences that Trump “may be planning to become dictator for life.”49

  How reasonable persons could make such comparisons is difficult to comprehend. To think that such ideas would be promoted by scholars is baffling. To make an obvious point, dictators such as Hitler or Stalin controlled the press and the media in their respective nations. Does anyone seriously believe that Donald Trump controls the American media?

  Dictators control academia. Hitler’s government, for example, established the curriculum and approved the textbooks. Classroom lectures were monitored under both Hitler and Stalin. A professor who misspoke could end up in Dachau in Germany or be sent to a labor camp in Siberia in the Soviet Union. Does anyone seriously believe that Donald Trump controls academia in America? In many cases, conservative speakers and writers are not allowed on American university campuses. In some cases, free speech has been effectively silenced and conservatives are not allowed to speak in defense of the duly elected president of the United States.

  Dictators control the cinema. Stalin personally read the scripts of major motion pictures before they could be produced in the Soviet Union. Joseph Goebbels had to personally approve of every actor or actress appearing in major films in Nazi Germany. Does anyone seriously believe that Donald Trump controls Hollywood? Yet this mind-set of calling Trump a dictator now dominates the media narrative in the United States. It has no basis in reality.

  The president would tell me an amusing story. We were in his “real office” behind the Oval Office. He lowered his voice conspiratorially, and then said that soon after his election a very prominent presidential historian, one of those mentioned earlier in this chapter, had made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. According to the president, he had stayed for days, flattering him and angling to be given the nod to write the authorized book on his administration. “He kissed my ass for a week,” the president said, his eyes twinkling, knowing that he was being naughty. “Now he is paid money to attack me on television.”50

  He may be crude. He doesn’t pull any punches. He is surely colorful. But Donald Trump is no evil dictator. His rise to power offended the establishment of both political parties and their respective surrogates, including almost all of their writer friends. The Bush family will not soon forgive his trouncing of their last nominee, Jeb Bush, whom Trump labeled “low energy.” Nor will they forgive his early opposition to the Iraq War, a point that the national media refuses to concede, even though everyone I found in Trump world would attest that he had, indeed, been opposed to that war throughout.

  The president has his share of friends among the national media as well. He invoked the name of Sean Hannity several times in our conversations. He admires his fearlessness. He laughed happily when discussing Lou Dobbs, whom he counted as a friend who would support him to the end. He regretted a misunderstanding with Neil Cavuto, which he didn’t explain, only adding, “I wish I could do that
over.” And he mentioned the hosts of Fox and Friends several times.

  THE ART OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

  The German statesman Otto von Bismarck once said, “Politics is the art of the possible.” This is exactly what I have experienced and seen in the presidents and presidential candidates I have known. They focus on winnable, doable goals that they know can be achieved even before they publicly announce them.

  Donald Trump the businessman approached the presidency in a totally different way. In his book The Art of the Deal, as a businessman, he argued that one tackles the most difficult problem first and then moves onto the next hardest. Thus, Donald Trump’s first question to Obama was not “What can I get done quickly?” It was “What is the biggest problem this country faces?”

  “North Korea,” Obama had said.

  So began the presidency of Donald Trump. It represents a new concept for government. Politics for Trump has become the art of the impossible.

  He was elected in 2016 to take care of the two biggest issues of that time: Rebuild the American economy and defeat the seemingly unstoppable terrorist group ISIS. Like a good magician he kept his audience spellbound by his words. “I will be the greatest jobs president God ever created,” he promised when he announced his run for president.51 “We’re going to beat ISIS very, very quickly folks. It’s going to be fast,” he boldly declared on the campaign trail in Connecticut.52 Afterward, from his White House stage, Donald Trump, like a good magician, made it look easy. It is only now, much later, when we know how the trick works, that the fascination wears off and we forget and take the relative peace and prosperity for granted.

  The true measure of Donald Trump’s success may be seen in the policies and decisions he has made that will survive him and endure. While the media howled and criticized his demands on NATO, will anyone in the future want to do it any differently? Will they want to retreat from what he has achieved? Would some future president refund the tens of millions of dollars that Trump raised from his NATO partners? The organization is now stronger than ever before.

  Will we go back to the now discredited NAFTA and abandon the new Trump treaty that all three countries, Canada, Mexico, and the United States, like better?

  Will some future president give up the hard-won first steps with China? Work that will not be felt for years to come but work that had to be done?

  Will a future United States allow North Korea to go back to testing nuclear weapons?

  Will the American embassy be moved back to Tel Aviv? Will an America of the future withdraw support for Israel to occupy the Golan Heights?

  Will the United States go back to the Bush-Obama era of silencing and shaming the families of Americans held hostage abroad? Or will the Trump Doctrine prevail and America keep bringing its innocent citizens back home from foreign tyrants?

  Will America retreat from its carefully won energy independence achieved by President Donald J. Trump?

  Will a future America raise taxes again on companies and drive them out of the United States?

  Will America, once again, return to nation building, sending American troops back into wars all over the globe? Or will it mind its own business more? Will it put America first?

  This will be a big part of his legacy. What has he done that will remain? What will stick?

  Of course, eventually, some of what Donald Trump has done will be reversed by future political successors, but no matter how shrill and harsh the media has been, it is not likely that many of the great things he has accomplished will be reversed any time soon. The media feigned outrage at the time of his decisions, but they will remain quiet when his successors do the same thing.

  The American people like balance. It is why they seldom give a president a Congress of the same party with which to work. It is why, over the years, the pendulum swings back and forth between Right and Left. It is how Donald Trump was elected in the first place, at a time when the establishment elites were practically hysterical in their support of his opponent.

  As the years pass, the nation will once more swing back into a time of manic political correctness. When the bitter voices of a domineering American media are more carefully revered and obeyed. When they feel more secure and take on a less emotional and a more dignified tone. When voters and viewers retreat back into a somnolent, obedient state of compliance. When all the search engines are wiped clean and supplied with the approved information, in the appropriate order. When politicians once again talk without saying anything and no one stretches the boundaries of civility or excites the imagination. When the big monopolies feel that they are once more secure and can emerge from the shadows.

  When those days return you will begin to see bumper stickers. Slowly at first. And then more and more. “Give us back our Trump,” they will say. But by then, he will be gone. He will have passed into history.

  Jared Kushner talked about that on that cold January night in 2019, when my wife and I visited him and Ivanka in their Georgetown home. The fireplace was ablaze, and Jared and Ivanka were on the couch opposite us. “There will come a day,” Jared mused, “when people will miss him greatly. He goes for the big thing and he gets it done. Nobody can keep up with the spirit in which he leads.”53

  NOTES

  1. Interview with Eric Trump, 2019.

  2. https://www.achievement.org/achiever/jimmy-carter/

  3. This conversation took place in 2019 at the White House.

  4. https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx

  5. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-is-not-a-socialist_b_8047266

  6. https://news.gallup.com/poll/116500/presidential-approval-ratings-george-bush.aspx

  7. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/07/05/fable/

  8. https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/resource-files/34SNAPmonthly-9.pdf

  9. https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tommy-hick-president-trump-legacy

  10. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckdevore/2019/02/01/manufacturers-added-6-times-more-jobs-under-trump-than-under-obamas-last-2-years/

  11. https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/06/17/how-trumps-tax-cuts-are-helping-the-middle-class/

  12. https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-tax-law-paycheck-calculator-every-income-level-2018-3

  13. https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2019/04/09/five-good-reasons-it-doesnt-feel-like-the-trump-tax-cut-benefited-you/#6792681c13e0

  14. https://www.apnews.com/51fdeebd6f5340af874cdac8e223fed7

  15. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/style/2019-financial-crisis.html

  16. https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/456942-bill-maher-roots-for-recession-so-that-trump-loses-in-2020

  17. https://www.forbes.com/sites/lawrencelight/2018/07/31/4-financial-savants-warn-about-the-great-crash-of-2020/#4e168b356197

  18. http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-carterreagan.htm

  19. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/john-mccains-100-years-in-iraq/

  20. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/03/20/15-years-after-it-began-the-death-toll-from-the-iraq-war-is-still-murky/

  21. https://suntzudo.weebly.com/sun-tzu-ten-principles-of.html

  22. Interview with Jared Kushner, 2019.

  23. https://www.history.com/news/alexander-hamilton-maria-reynolds-pamphlet-affair

  24. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/03/19/flashback-maxine-waters-confirms-obama-has-database-with-information-on-every-individual/

  25. https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2018/03/19/flashback-maxine-waters-confirms-obama-has-database-with-information-on-every-individual/

  26. Interview with chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney July 9, 2019.

  27. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/27/president-trump-cites-chinas-respect-for-his-very-very-large-brain.html

  28. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/06/abraham-lincoln-is-an-idiot/309304/

  29. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41573846

  30. https://www.townandcountrymag.com/soc
iety/politics/a9923248/john-f-kennedy-student-life-at-choate-rosemary-hall/

  31. https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2009/09/how-stupid-is-jimmy-carter/196430/

  32. Interview with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, 1981.

  33. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/06/the-stupidity-of-ronald-reagan.html

  34. http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/TV/11/03/chevy.chase.snl/index.html

  35. https://www.dividedstates.com/list-of-obama-gaffes-blunders-mistakes-and-stupidities/

  36. https://time.com/15556/barack-obama-aretha-franklin-respect/

  37. https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-donald-trumps-first-100-days

  38. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/right-and-wrong

  39. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/01/20/the-campaign-to-impeach-president-trump-has-begun/

  40. Doug Wead, All the Presidents’ Children (New York: Atria, 2003), 345.

  41. https://www.politico.com/news/2019/09/26/nancy-pelosi-impeachment-trump-002118

  42. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9wv9ms7KwM

  43. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership-in-turbulent-times-trump

  44. https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/28/politics/allan-lichtman-donald-trump-2020/index.html

  45. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/10/ken-burns-donald-trump

  46. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ken-burns-donald-trump_n_575daa58e4b0ced23ca85aa4

  47. https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/brad-wilmouth/2018/06/26/schmidt-invokes-hitler-trump-faction-trying-impose-cruelty

  48. https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/msnbcs-nicolle-wallace-claims-trump-is-talking-about-exterminating-latinos

  49. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2018/03/22/nbcs_michael_beschloss_like_xi_putin_and_stalin_trump_may_be_president_for_life.html

  50. My interviews and conversations with President Trump took place from 2016 to 2019.

  51. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/video/2015/jun/16/donald-trump-us-president-republicans-video