A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  There are no quiet days and no calm weeks in the Trump presidency. No period where the whirring machine of government takes a roughly hewn idea and hones it into a carefully assembled and thought through policy, whose roll-out proceeds effortlessly. At one point in that tormented week, the President’s long-suffering press secretary, Sarah Sanders, even seemed to admit as much when she said it’s not always pretty, and that it was unconventional how this White House functioned.

  There are times when you can just feel it. There was a press briefing I was at where Sarah Sanders looked like she hadn’t slept a wink. She probably hadn’t, as a new hurricane was blowing through the West Wing. There have been any number of occasions where the White House staff agree what line they’re going to take – only for the President to contradict it. Talk to officials and they either shrug their shoulders with a ‘What can I do?’ or, after a few drinks, they will unburden. It’s exhausting enough reporting on this President. But working for him? Well, that requires saintly levels of patience, or heavy doses of prescription pharmaceutical products. I was in Sarah Sanders’s West Wing office to discuss some matter or other and asked how she coped with the endless drama. ‘Bourbon,’ she replied without a nano-second’s hesitation. I don’t think she was joking.

  When I had my famous clash with the President, and he called me ‘another beauty’ it was over precisely that. I had challenged him over whether this administration could be described as a smooth-running machine. He has always insisted it is. But the pretence was now gone. It is worth quoting at length from the anonymous piece because of its incendiary nature:

  The dilemma – which he does not fully grasp – is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. I would know. I am one of them.

  To be clear, ours is not the popular ‘resistance’ of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

  But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

  And it goes on:

  The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making … From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the Commander in Chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

  Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

  And then the coup de grâce, which almost reads as a call for a coup d’état:

  Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in the right direction until – one way or another – it’s over.

  The 25th Amendment is the hitherto never used provision in the Constitution to remove a president from office if the cabinet believes he is mentally incapacitated or unable to carry out his functions and duties as head of state.

  Critics of Mr or Ms Anonymous would say this: the country voted, 62 million of them for Donald Trump, and by the rules of the electoral college he was the duly elected president. Furthermore, no one could say he wasn’t doing what he promised. Renegotiating trade deals, tougher immigration laws, cutting taxes, exiting the Iran nuclear deal and winding back regulations. These are precisely the policies he promised during the campaign. And as Sarah Sanders noted, while it may not always be pretty, the economic policies were paying dividends, with growth up and unemployment at record lows.

  So what legitimacy did the writer have in declaring that s/he is the guardian of US democracy? For better or worse, the ballot box is where elections are decided, and in November 2016 the American people spoke. If someone is that unhappy about the direction of travel of the administration, they have the honourable choice of resigning, and fighting the Trump agenda at the next election. Or stay and fight their corner. But if they lose the battle while fighting from within, then surely their duty as a public servant is to remain and enact the policy that the head of state is constitutionally entitled to decide.

  There are two other things that Donald Trump said repeatedly during the campaign, which were designed to appeal to those who always love to smell conspiracy in their nostrils: that there was a deep state, and that Washington was a swamp that needed to be drained. The deep state is the idea that there is a self-perpetuating élite of lawyers, lobbyists, industrialists and politicians who are the unseen resistance to change, whose only guiding principle is to keep their hands on the levers of the state so that they continue to get rich, keep power and see off anything that might curdle their gravy train. According to this theory, lurking in every marble corridor and around every neo-classical column were malign actors whose allegiance was to the status quo, who would thwart the newly elected president and scupper him as if their lives depended on it.

  I thought it was tendentious in the extreme – a ploy designed by Donald Trump to show that he was the non-politician in the race, the change maker and people’s tribune taking on the deeply entrenched élites. But that article can be seen as the very definition of the deep state. I started thinking conspiratorially whether the article might have been penned by Donald Trump himself as a means of justifying a crackdown on those around him, while demanding greater, unfettered power in decision making. The clincher that stopped me believing it was him – I just couldn’t see him writing those nasty things about himself. But the article had the net effect of the President becoming even more distrustful of those in his court, with fewer being allowed to be brought into the inner circle of decision making. Presumably completely counter to what the author would have wanted.

  Also, just on a slightly practical note, if you are part of a deep state conspiracy, don’t you keep your mouth shut about it and get on with the business of conspiring, rather than advertise what you are doing in the pages of the New York Times? I know that in spy-craft hiding in plain sight can be mighty effective. But this? What did s/he hope to achieve?

  ‘Anonymous’ still hasn’t been unmasked. Anonymous is presumably still functioning within the administration – thwarting, blocking, subverting and laying booby-traps wherever possible. The hashtag of 2018 across the United States was undoubtedly #metoo. But at the highest altitudes of the Trump administration it brought into being the #notme movement. Senior officials, from the Vice-President downwards, were falling over themselves – almost racing each other to Twitter and the microphone – to be the first to say ‘I didn’t do it’, ‘it wasn’t me guv, honest’, ‘my nose is clean’, and ‘don’t try and fit me up for this’ – and any number of other cockney phrases you would never hear in Washington. It was as if Donald Trump had given them all a class detention, and no one was going home from school until the miscreant in the form had owned up to letting off the stink bomb in the headmaster’s office.

  It gave rise to a good cottage industry in textual analysis. Sleuths were cracking their knuckles and working late into the night looking for clues; uncovering motives. Washington was playing Cluedo. The author had used the word ‘lodestar’ – a word often used by the Vice-President, Mike Pence, in his speeches. Aha. Swift denial followed. Who had motive? Well, lots of people, it seemed. Who disliked the President? Again, quite a few people. Who harboured ambitions of their own? Everyone. Why now? Well, why not?

  It was around this time that I took a transatlantic flight, and a bit bored I settled down to watch Kenneth Branagh’s high camp remake of Murder on the Orient Express. And then, like a flash, an e
piphany, it came to me. ‘Anonymous’ wasn’t a person. It was joint endeavour. They’d all written it. Kellyanne, Sarah Sanders, Mike Pence, the FBI director, the CIA director – you name them, they were in on it. I’d cracked it. It was all the senior administration officials, in the Oval, with the lead piping.

  Life would change for Donald Trump in November 2018, although at the time he didn’t realise just how profoundly. The midterm elections were the first full report card on how Donald Trump was doing. A third of the Senate’s hundred seats were up for grabs, and the full House of Representatives. In the key Senate races, Trump had cause for satisfaction. Some rock-solid red states returned to trend and the Republicans increased their Senate majority. But more significant were the nationwide results in the House. Here there was a ‘blue wave’ (confusingly in US politics the more right-wing party – the Republicans – are ascribed the colour red; while the more left-wing party, the Democratic Party, has blue as its colour) and the Democrats overturned a big Republican majority to take back control easily.

  Again, the Oval Office was the immediate backdrop for this new political reality, and needless to say, the cameras were invited in. But the Chuck and Nancy show was different from anything else we had seen. Nancy Pelosi, who was then the frontrunner to become the Speaker of the House (and she would subsequently be confirmed in that post by the Democratic Caucus), and Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, had not come as supplicants, like so many other people we had witnessed passing through. They had not come to tell the President how marvellous he was, they had come to plant a flag in the ground. The contested issue was Donald Trump’s belief that the only way to secure the southern border of the United States was by building a wall. Of course, in the campaign he had said repeatedly that Mexico would pay for it. But – surprise, surprise – they hadn’t ponied up the money. So instead it would be the American taxpayer footing the bill.

  They quarrelled. They fought. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer immune to the President’s exhortations and threats. Eventually an exasperated Donald Trump said he would be ‘proud’ to shut the government down over this issue, and happy to call it a Trump shutdown. And Chuck and Nancy smiled. Big smiles. Big knowing smiles. These two veterans of legislative battle had got the President to agree ownership of something that invariably turns into a smelly bucket of ordure.

  Just before Christmas 2018 the government did shut down. No budget had been agreed – and just shy of a million federal workers were laid off without pay. The President talked tough. There would be no reopening of the government until there was a $5.7 billion line in the budget towards the border wall. Nancy and Chuck were unmoved. The closure dragged on. White collar workers in Washington, living pay-cheque to pay-cheque, were lining up at food banks. Families were choosing between vital medicines and keeping their homes warm. It had become the longest government shutdown in history, and as Chuck and Nancy had correctly calculated, it was hurting the President far more than it was the Democrats. Airport security staff and air traffic controllers were required to work unpaid – but once they started calling in sick, and some of America’s biggest airports had to shut, or at least severely curtail flights, the game was up. After 35 days Donald Trump had to hoist a white flag. The government would reopen temporarily, but without a single cent pledged towards his wall. It was a chastening lesson to him in how much more difficult life was set to become. He’d got himself into an arm wrestle with this slightly built Californian grandmother, the 78-year-old Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi – and had come second. She had delivered a lesson on governance. And a warning shot to the executive of what power she now wielded as the leader of one part of the legislature.

  The President now either had to admit failure or go for the nuclear option. He did the latter, and early in February 2019 sat in the Oval Office and signed the declaration that the situation on the southern border was a National Emergency, allowing him to raid other departmental budgets to pay for his wall. And in the process he set off a constitutional battle between Congress and the White House. The emergency powers law, passed in 1976, had never been used for anything as overtly political as this – and this was a naked attempt to steal the budget-setting power of Congress.

  Just before the midterms and the government shutdown Americans had become transfixed by something other than the fireworks of the administration. There was a real firework show to watch. A volcano had started to erupt in Hawaii. The Kiluaea volcano was putting on a spectacular show. It was belching hazardous gases, there were molten lava flows, smoke rose menacingly and at night the sky was lit up with luminous red flames, as volcanic rock was fired out of the crater over great distances. Seventeen hundred homes were abandoned. What was occurring in Hawaii brought a revelatory aperçu in Washington. A staffer told me earnestly that events in Hawaii had brought a change in how the White House staff would treat its president. The policy had gone from resistance to strategic surrender. You can’t change his mind. No point trying. He is what he is. But perhaps you can manage him, as the volcanologists and civil emergency people were doing on Hawaii’s big island. You may not be able to stop the President from blowing his top and erupting on this or that point. He will spit with anger at times. All you can do is manage the lava flow. Keep the molten rocks from landing where they will do most damage. Try to funnel; try to direct. But don’t think you can stop the man in the Oval Office from doing what he wants to do.

  Chapter 2

  The Office of the Chief of Staff

  If you get up from behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, and you take the first door out on the left-hand side, you go past the President’s study – which in reality is where he does most of his work – past the Dining Room, where Donald Trump has installed a huge flat screen television, so he can watch Fox News – which he spends a lot of time doing – and at the end of the corridor, after a couple of small rooms, is the Chief of Staff’s office, occupying the south-west corner of the West Wing. It is spacious enough. There is a long table for meetings with staff, and above the fireplace hangs an oil painting of Abraham Lincoln. It has none of the grandeur of the Oval. The Chief of Staff, it has often been said, does the grunt work for the president. Or to use a nautical metaphor, this is the engine room, not the bridge.

  The title is relatively new. Before the Second World War the description was President’s Private Secretary; in 1946 it became Assistant to the President; and then in 1961 it finally became Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff. It is one of the senior jobs entirely in the gift of the president, requiring no Senate confirmation. And it is not a legally required role – if President Trump chose to do without one, he would be free to do so.

  At various times Donald Trump has openly mused about doing away with the role altogether. As with so many senior White House roles, this president fundamentally believes he could do the job better than anyone else, therefore why have someone else doing it? But in reality, the chief of staff is the man (there has never been a female chief of staff) with the oily rag, the socket set and a screwdriver, immersed in the detail, adjusting the tappets, making sure the cylinders are firing, the engine isn’t overheating and the oil is sluicing round the vital components. However else you might describe Donald Trump, he is not a greasy-fingernailed, under the bonnet man, with a thumbed copy of the owner’s manual. And so, like every president since Harry Truman, he accepted the need for a chief of staff.

  H.R. Haldeman, Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, is quoted in the book The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency, by Chris Whipple, reflecting on his appointment: ‘Eisenhower had told Nixon that every president has to have his own son of a bitch. Nixon had looked over everyone in his entourage and decided that Haldeman was pluperfect SOB. And because of that somewhat unflattering appraisal, my career took a rise.’ Nixon soon found himself plagued by endless leaks and palace intrigue. He was a man who always had a keenly developed sense of paranoia, and he announced at a cabinet meeting
in 1971, ‘From now on Haldeman is the Lord High Executioner. Don’t come whining to me when he tells you to do something. He will do it because I asked him to and you’re to carry it out.’ Leon Panetta, who was Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, put it slightly differently: ‘You have to be the person who says no. You’ve got to be the son of a bitch who basically tells somebody what the President can’t tell him.’

  And you are the person who behind closed doors might have to tell the President some home truths, and even, when the cameras are rolling, whisper in his ear. That is literally what happened on 11 September 2001 when George W. Bush’s chief of staff, Andy Card, had to approach the President, as he was reading to schoolchildren in Florida, to tell him about what was unfolding in New York. The first Bush and Card knew about a crash came just before the President walked into a second-grade classroom. Initial reports were of a small prop plane hitting the Twin Towers. Card waited in another room while the President spoke to the class. Then a US Navy captain told Card that, in fact, it was a commercial jet that had slammed into one of the towers. A few minutes later, Card recalled, the captain exclaimed, ‘Oh my God, another plane hit the other tower.’

  Card would later recount the experience to Congress, where he had once served. He had decided, he said, to ‘pass on two facts and one editorial comment and to do nothing to invite a dialogue with the president’. He walked into the classroom and whispered into the President’s ear, ‘A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack.’ Card said he was convinced that his words to Bush ‘caused the president to reflect on his job; not the speeches he had given, but the oath he had taken … to preserve, protect and defend’.

  Accepting the need for the chief of staff role, as Donald Trump had done, is one thing; willing the holder of the post the means to do the job most effectively is quite another. And that is where the problems were most conspicuous for this president’s first two chiefs of staff. Unlike being Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State, where the job description is more or less displayed on the tin, here there is nothing constitutionally laid out, fixed and immutable, no document detailing where responsibilities begin and end. Former President Gerald Ford once said that the ideal pick for the job should be ‘a person that you have total confidence in, who works so closely with you that in effect he is an alter ego’. The flippant remark would be that Donald Trump is Donald Trump’s own alter ego. How could he have total confidence and trust in anyone else, when no one is as smart as he is? For Donald Trump the only person that would closely resemble that would be one of the family members – say, daughter Ivanka, or her husband Jared Kushner. But that would fuel suspicions about the White House being run as an unaccountable family business, not the pre-eminent global superpower.