American Carnage

by Tim Alberta

  The problem was, Blackwell didn’t want the job. He was knocking on seventy’s door and didn’t need the headache of working in government. When Trump learned of his disinterest, he demanded that Blackwell be summoned to New York. Sitting across from him days later, Trump asked Blackwell to accept the job. Blackwell declined. “So, you’re afraid of the challenge?” Trump asked.

  Blackwell said that he wasn’t afraid. He simply wasn’t interested in the position.

  “Maybe you don’t have the street credibility we need,” Trump said.

  Blackwell arched an eyebrow. “You don’t have to worry about my street credibility.”

  “Oh yeah?” Trump replied. He picked up his phone and began dialing. The others in the room, including Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon, exchanged looks. “Hey, I’m trying to kick the tires on a guy from Ohio,” Trump said into the receiver. “I’m wondering if you know him. His name’s Ken Blackwell.”

  Everyone heard the voice singing on the other end: “Kennn-aaaaay!” It was Don King, the legendary (and black) boxing promoter.

  Blackwell shook his head. “Like I said,” he told Trump, “you don’t have to worry about my street credibility.”

  All things told, the transition process was orderly compared to the anarchy of Trump’s campaign. The RNC, flush with Priebus’s longtime staffers, was a natural farm system for mid-level hires. (One of them, twenty-five-year-old Madeleine Westerhout, broke down crying on Election Night, inconsolable over Trump’s victory. To the amusement of her RNC peers, she was later chosen as the president’s executive assistant, and now sits just outside the Oval Office.)

  Pence’s ties to the conservative movement, and to so many members of Congress and Republican leaders around the country, were instrumental in filling out the administration. So, too, was a project by the Heritage Foundation years in the making that sought to provide an incoming Republican president with an exhaustive file of ready-made appointees to federal jobs from secretary of defense to White House speechwriter. Heritage, once the mighty engine of the right, had seen its influence wane in recent years. Rumors had circulated about the board’s displeasure with DeMint, who had antagonized many of the think tank’s allies and mismanaged the foundation from the top. The ambitious staffing project bought Heritage some goodwill, but it seemed unlikely to save DeMint’s job.

  Any other Republican president might have sent the base into open revolt by tapping a pair of veteran Goldman Sachs executives, Steven Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, for treasury secretary and National Economic Council director, respectively. Yet the rapture of the postelection period, on top of Trump’s promises of hiring “the best people” to help the government run more like a business, bought him plenty of leeway. This was equally true for his eventual secretary of state choice: Exxon-Mobil’s Rex Tillerson, who enjoyed a warm relationship with Russian officials that would traditionally have sent the GOP’s hawks into a tizzy.

  There was plenty of slack being cut in part because the new president, aided by Pence, was filling out his roster in ways that were largely energizing to conservatives. Jeff Sessions, the Alabama senator and immigration hard-liner, was picked for attorney general. Rick Perry, the former Texas governor (who’d called Trump “a cancer on conservatism”), was tapped to lead the Energy Department. And Ben Carson, the storied heart surgeon whose political ascent began with a viral rebuke of Obama, ultimately accepted the position at HUD.

  The most reassuring hire, for many Trump fans and skeptics alike, was Jim Mattis. The retired four-star Marine general, lauded for his intellect and beloved by his subordinates, was appointed secretary of defense. Nicknamed “Mad Dog” for his array of plucky quotes (“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet”6), Mattis was better known within the military as a warrior monk. He was married only to the Marine Corps, a general known for taking watch shifts alongside young grunts and requiring moving vans to relocate his vast collection of books.

  One hire did give party officials heartburn: Michael Flynn, the retired general who had joined a chant of “Lock her up!” while addressing the GOP convention, would be Trump’s national security adviser. Flynn was qualified on paper, but his temperament and judgment were suspect; in December 2015, he had attended a dinner in Moscow honoring the television network Russia Today (RT), a state-run propaganda outlet. Flynn’s seatmate at the gala dinner? None other than Vladimir Putin.

  The most symbolic selection for Trump was his White House chief of staff.

  The candidate’s general election victory had been, to paraphrase the young private from Platoon, a child born of two fathers. On the one side, the energy and grassroots support behind Trump’s candidacy owed largely to the base, as embodied by Bannon, the combative former head of Breitbart. On the other side, the infrastructure and organizational support were lent primarily by the party’s establishment, whose avatar was Priebus, the mild-mannered RNC chairman.

  The jockeying began no sooner than the race was called. Everyone on the right saw Trump as malleable to their ideas, if only they controlled the flow of information. That job belonged to the chief of staff; the competition to fill it became a proxy war for the soul of Trump’s presidency.

  After five days of suspense, the president-elect decided to split the baby. He named Priebus his chief of staff and Bannon his chief strategist and senior counselor. (Bannon received top billing in the press release, sending gasps through the tea leaf readers in Washington.) Trump had not yet been sworn in, but already he had created warring power centers in his White House.

  THOUGH NOT AN ELECTED OFFICIAL, THE WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF has long been considered the second-most powerful figure in Washington. Traditionally, the chief is given supremacy to organize, authorize, hire, fire, and speak on behalf of the president. The position is that of manager, decision shaper, and ultimate gatekeeper, filtering the flow of people and information reaching the Oval Office so that a time-constrained president is met only with the most pressing matters.

  Priebus knew that would not be his job description.

  Having spent the past four months traveling with Trump and observing his management style, Priebus realized that the president-elect would never empower someone to run such a structured enterprise. Anyone who read his books or watched his television show knew that Trump thrived on turmoil and dissent, competing viewpoints and warring personalities. He hated to be overbooked; he wanted to go into the office with a wide-open schedule each day and see what happened.

  No staff member, regardless of title, was going to change that.

  To the extent it was possible to curb Trump’s instincts toward chaos, the chief of staff position required a strong hand, someone who could go nose to nose with the president and talk him down if necessary. But Priebus was never going to be that person. Meek and mild-mannered, he had thrived as party chairman precisely because of the job’s accommodating nature. He spent most of his days doing maintenance: donors, RNC members, elected officials, activist groups. Priebus’s job as chairman had been, above all, to raise money, keep the peace, and win elections. By those metrics, he had been a historic success.

  Recognizing all this, the chairman’s friends warned him not to take the chief of staff’s job. Ride into the sunset, they urged him. Give some paid speeches. Write a book. Go make a million bucks a at some law firm or lobbying office. Steer clear of the shitshow.

  The warnings were always the same. And so was Priebus’s response: “We need a sane voice in the Oval Office,” he told friends. “There has to be a reasonable person in the room with him.”

  Sane and reasonable, Priebus was. But he lacked the authority, the swagger, the piss-and-vinegar personality needed to rule Trump’s White House. And he knew it.

  Shortly after Thanksgiving, Priebus sat down for a private dinner with former Bush 43 chief of staff Josh Bolten. They were at Bolten’s downtown office, in a conference room overlooking Lafayette Square and the White House. Carefully arranged around the table wer
e four-by-six cards with the titles of the key assistants to the president as well as some of the deputy assistants whom Bolten considered important—a system nearly identical to the one used by the Obama White House.

  As they munched on takeout food, Bolten explained all the positions to Priebus and advised him on which were the most critical for him to fill personally—jobs where he needed experienced people, not just Trump loyalists, who could fit into a manageable structure. “Either you create the org chart and you fill in these boxes, or someone else will,” Bolten warned. “And you’ll have a very hard time running the White House.”

  Bolten also described the “Andy Card Principle,” named for his predecessor as Bush’s chief: “There’s a difference between wanting to be in a meeting and needing to be in a meeting.” It would be his role, Bolten told Priebus, to direct traffic and dictate an efficient schedule.

  Priebus listened politely. But he seemed distant, even disinterested. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate the advice. But he knew that much of what Bolten was prescribing was implausible. Priebus had been allowed to hire a deputy, his RNC chief of staff, Katie Walsh, as a security blanket who could reaffirm him and look out for his interests. But most of the other positions Bolten was describing would be filled by Trump or by members of his inner circle.

  “He had already, I think, relegated himself to an executive assistant role rather than the chief of staff, the person that actually organized and ran the White House,” Bolten recalls of Priebus. “He did not treat himself as the chief of staff, and it was probably because his boss was unwilling to treat him as chief of staff.”

  The one person excited for Priebus was his old friend from Wisconsin, the Speaker of the House. They went back decades and had served as mutual sounding boards and grief counselors throughout the 2016 campaign. With changes to their party gusting all around them, Ryan and Priebus clung to each other, a buddy system that did not escape the watchful eye of Trump.

  After ensuring his own survival on Election Night, Ryan now saw as his new concern the perching of angels and devils on the new president’s shoulders. He was horrified at the prospect of Bannon running the White House. As a self-proclaimed figurehead of the “alt-right,” an internet movement of knuckle-dragging misfits who rejected the classical liberal philosophies that underpinned modern conservatism, Bannon had used Breitbart to stoke the embers of xenophobia that smoldered beneath the tinder of nationalism.

  Not only that, but Bannon had led a ruthless onslaught against the GOP itself, with Ryan occupying an honored place in Breitbart’s crosshairs. On editorial calls with the outlet’s reporters during the 2016 campaign, Bannon would refer to Ryan as “the enemy,” according to reporting by journalist Jonathan Swan, and plot for his ouster as Speaker.7 Swan quoted one former Breitbart staffer who said Bannon “thinks Paul Ryan is part of a conspiracy with George Soros and Paul Singer, in which elitists want to bring one world government.”

  Even though they had pretended to make up and play nice after the election, Ryan could not stomach the idea of Bannon as chief of staff. The selection of Priebus, then, gave the Speaker great comfort. He would have an ally inside the Oval Office who could help him to influence the president’s thinking.

  None of this was lost on the House Freedom Caucus. They had long resented Ryan for his undermining of the GOP nominee. Now they feared the Speaker, whom Trump likened to “a fine wine” after their postelection rapprochement, would be steering the president’s agenda while they, who had stood publicly behind Trump through his tribulations, would be treated as second-class legislative citizens.8

  This was foreshadowed by a December incident in which Jordan informed Ryan of his intention to proceed with an effort to impeach the IRS commissioner. Ryan’s office objected, and when Jordan ignored them, the Freedom Caucus chairman got a sudden call from Priebus (whose phone number Jordan didn’t recognize), asking him to please hold back. Jordan pushed ahead, all the more motivated after Ryan’s apparent decision to enlist Priebus to stop him. (Jordan’s resolution was rejected on the House floor and referred back to committee.)

  The thought of being sidelined by a Ryan-Priebus axis was especially irksome to Mark Meadows. The North Carolina congressman had, in private, been as skeptical of Trump as anyone. The month before the convention, Meadows told friends in the Freedom Caucus that he was considering not going to Cleveland, despite being a delegate, because he feared living with the legacy of nominating the erratic Trump. As the campaign progressed, Meadows was instrumental in stifling criticisms of the GOP nominee that brewed within the Freedom Caucus. He told his comrades that when Trump lost—not if, but when—the base would be out for blood. Did they want to be blamed for Trump’s loss? Or did they want Ryan to own it?

  All the while, Meadows nestled closer to the center of power. He introduced himself to Trump and his team, and by fall was campaigning with him regularly during the GOP nominee’s trips to his battleground state. It was during these visits that Meadows became acquainted with Bannon. The two men could not have been more different; Bannon was hyper and disheveled, Meadows equable and polished. But Bannon respected what Meadows and Jordan had built with the Freedom Caucus. More important, the two men had a common enemy: Ryan.

  As Ryan celebrated the placement of his close friend as White House chief of staff, Meadows toasted his ally’s selection as the president’s senior counselor and chief strategist.

  The alliances had formed, spanning both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue: It would be Ryan and Priebus, the establishment insiders, versus Meadows and Bannon, the populist outsiders.

  WHEN MICK MULVANEY WAS NAMED DIRECTOR OF OMB, THE POWERFUL agency that supervises and coordinates the government’s financial planning, Freedom Caucus members—and Ryan, notably—issued statements lauding Mulvaney’s selection as a sign of Trump’s commitment to fiscal responsibility.

  That was one way of looking at it. Another way: Trump had sidelined one of the House’s most outspoken conservatives, someone who repeatedly stood up to Republican leadership, thereby weakening potential intraparty resistance to his administration’s initiatives.

  Republicans had spent the past eight years complaining of executive overreach and abuses of power by the Democratic administration. They referred to Obama as “an imperial president,” a continuation of the Bush-era expansion of executive authority that showed little regard for the primacy of the legislative branch. They pledged, after Trump’s election, to reassert themselves as an aggressive check and balance on the new administration in hopes of a return to limited government. “We saw Republicans stray away from the core principles during the Bush 43 presidency,” Texas congressman Bill Flores, the outgoing chairman of the Republican Study Committee, warned during a December forum at the American Enterprise Institute.

  But as Trump prepared to take office, the question wasn’t whether he would stray from the party’s core principles. It was whether he would redefine them altogether.

  This presented something of an early existential challenge to the Freedom Caucus. They worried about standing up to Trump, but they also wondered whether his election was an implicit rebuke to their own hard-line philosophical stances. Conservatives had learned a hard lesson over the previous year: Anger at Washington was not a mandate for ideological purity. This was apparent in Trump’s rise, but also in the elimination of one of their own.

  Since the dawn of the Tea Party, no primary challenger had defeated a Republican incumbent by running to their left. That changed in 2016: Tim Huelskamp, a leading instigator of the 2010 class, lost his seat to obstetrician Roger Marshall, who campaigned on the message that Huelskamp was representing a rigid ideology rather than the people of Kansas. This had been preventable: In the agriculturally dependent “Big First” district, Huelskamp had made himself vulnerable by voting against the Farm Bill in 2013—after he’d already been kicked off the Agriculture Committee for other protest votes.9 Marshall, who promised to make the government more responsive to the
interests of the district, beat Huelskamp by 13 points, a giant margin against an incumbent with no ethical or legal baggage.

  The episode put a scare into conservatives. They saw establishment Republicans emboldened after claiming their first Freedom Caucus scalp and wondered who would be targeted next. Sensing opportunity, Meadows convinced Jordan to step aside as chairman of the Freedom Caucus. Its members had little cash in their campaign accounts and were therefore susceptible to primary challenges from better-financed, establishment-backed candidates; Jordan was persuaded to throw himself into growing the House Freedom Fund, his leadership PAC, with the aim of defending those members.

  That left Meadows at the controls of the Freedom Caucus. It was the culmination of a meteoric rise. Feted as the man who felled John Boehner, Meadows became a cult celebrity on the right, keynoting dinners and receiving awards. Four years after arriving in DC as an obscure businessman turned realtor from rural North Carolina, he was the incoming president’s conservative point man on Capitol Hill and the chairman of Congress’s most influential faction.

  Not everyone in the Freedom Caucus thought this was a positive development. Raúl Labrador and Justin Amash, two founding board members, raised repeated concerns about Meadows’s coziness with the president-elect and questioned how aggressively the chairman would position the group to Trump’s right. They were also wary of Meadows’s proximity to Bannon; some of the members believed both men to be more interested in celebrity than conservatism. Three weeks after the election, there was a shouting match between Meadows and some of his members during a Freedom Caucus meeting. The reason: Breitbart had published a story with the headline “Exclusive—Rep. Mark Meadows: House Conservatives Ready on Day One to Help Donald Trump.”

  The issue wasn’t merely about whether Meadows had the stomach for a principled fight with the new administration. It was about the tactical orientation of the Freedom Caucus, a group that had been founded on the notion of placing ideological consistency ahead of partisan unity. Meadows was taking over the group at a time of transition. Mulvaney was gone; so, too, were board members Scott Garrett, who had lost his New Jersey seat in November, and John Fleming, who lost his bid for Louisiana Senate. Meanwhile, an incoming board member, Dave Brat, the Eric Cantor slayer, was nicknamed “Bratbart,” for his love of the far-right website and his determination to stay in its good graces.