A Year At The Circus

by Jon Sopel

  When they arrive back at Joint Base Andrews – with Priebus aboard – a moment unfolds as though from a movie. The rain is hammering down, the tarmac is glistening from the downpour, and as is normal there is a fleet of black SUVs waiting to ferry the President’s party back to the White House. The senior administration officials run to the cars to avoid being soaked to the skin. Two staffers, who clearly haven’t checked their Twitter feed, run up to Priebus on the tarmac to see if they can ride with him. ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m being driven home.’ And without a moment’s hesitation they turn their back on the former boss and look for a ride with someone else. And as the presidential motorcade turns left on leaving the gates of Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, with its panoply of motorcycle outriders and ambulances and heavily armed special agents, Priebus turns right. All alone in his car. In Washington you pass into history exceedingly quickly. Priebus was the past.

  John Kelly was barely ten minutes into the job the following Monday morning when he made his first decision of consequence. Scaramucci’s scabrous interview could not be allowed to stand. The Mooch would have to go. He had lasted ten days as communications director. A ‘mooch’ in Washington-speak now had a new meaning: it became a unit of time – if something had gone on for three mooches, it meant that it had lasted a month. So when someone says, ‘We’re going on holiday for half a mooch,’ that equals five days away. As was noted at the time, a pint of milk lasts longer before going off. John Kelly was not done, though. A couple of weeks later Bannon was forced to walk the plank, this time with insults flying. When it emerged that Bannon had been a source for an unflattering book written by Michael Wolff about life in the West Wing, Trump turned on his one-time campaign chief and chief strategist: ‘Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad!’

  In the space of a month the chief of staff, the chief strategist and the communications director had been fired, and the press secretary had walked out. The John Kelly era had started, and with the unmistakable smack of firm discipline. It was time to shape up or ship out. A new broom was sweeping through the West Wing – and across Washington there was a general feeling of ‘not before time’.

  John Kelly had spent most of his life in the US Marine Corps, enlisting in 1970, and rising to the rank of general. This no-nonsense, plain-speaking son of Boston, Massachusetts, served in Iraq with the 1st Marine Division as assistant division commander. His last military posting before being recruited to the White House was as head of SOUTHCOM – in other words, he was responsible for Guantanamo Bay, and all US military operations in South and Central America.

  One diplomat who had very close dealings with him described him to me as serious, honourable – and with an unmistakable sense of melancholy. Kelly’s two sons, John and Robert, had also served as marines. In November 2010, Robert stepped on a landmine in Afghanistan and was killed, aged 29. He would talk about the loss of his son at a White House briefing when there was controversy over the way Donald Trump had handled a call to the family of a fallen soldier. Defending the President, Kelly said, ‘In my case, hours after my son was killed, his friends were calling us from Afghanistan, telling us what a great guy he was. Those are the only phone calls that really matter. If you elect to call a family like this – and it’s about the most difficult thing you could imagine – there’s no perfect way to make that phone call.’

  Kelly exuded authority and integrity. He was also part of that small group referred to as the ‘Axis of Adults’, meaning those people in the Trump administration who were not afraid to stand up to their boss and ‘speak truth to power’. But this description – which, as you might imagine, Trump detested – carried an implication that they were all, somehow, at odds with the President over policy too. A few were, but it would be a mistake to overstate that in the case of John Kelly. He had come from the Department of Homeland Security, where he was every bit as tough on the need to secure the border as the President.

  What he wanted was order in the way business was transacted. This was the great advantage he brought as chief of staff. Here was a general who knew about the chain of command, who understood the need for discipline. And there was something about his bearing and demeanour – military, straight back, no nonsense – that ensured staff did not mess with him in the way they did with Priebus. A lot of the activities that were so prevalent before now came to a stop. At least in the short term.

  People would no longer be able to wander in and out of the Oval Office as though it were some kind of communal water-cooler space, where you just stopped by for a chat. There would be appointments, and he would police who went in and out, and why they were going in and out. A lot of the leaking subsided too as a result of the staff changes that he made. It didn’t stop completely – that would be impossible. And the president, having endured months of adverse headlines about the way the White House ran, seemed – for now at least – pleased with the recognition that the place was transitioning from playground to a heel-clicking parade ground.

  But if Kelly brought the necessary order and structure that the job needed, there was one area where he was a novice. He may have spent forty years in the military, but he was relatively unprepared for Washington’s asymmetric warfare that is waged between the executive branch of government and the legislature. Aside from a brief spell as the congressional liaison for the Marines he had little experience of DC politics. The deal-making, horse-trading, pork-barrel politics – the things that are the lubricant to the workings of Capitol Hill – were things he had scant experience of. Priebus may have lacked authority but he knew what the Republicans on the Hill wanted or needed from the President. Kelly was on a steep learning curve.

  His main problem was that while in theory Donald Trump loved the sense of order that Kelly seemed to bring, it was questionable how much he appreciated it in practice. Within weeks of Kelly taking the post, well-sourced reports started to emerge that the President was ‘chafing’ at the controls being placed on him. He was missing the gossip, the informality. He hated it that when friends telephoned, their calls would now be routed through the chief of staff’s office. And when other chums were in town with time to kill, where once they would apparently drop by the Oval, just to sit and chat, now they would be told the President was unavailable.

  This is, of course, what Kelly was employed to do, but when this new formality and structure was reported in the media it had an unintended consequence. Yes, it was good for the President that what was now being said was that the White House was running more smoothly; but what he hated was the notion that people might get the impression that he was somehow being managed, or, worse still, controlled. And so well-known Trump surrogates started feeding stories that were unhelpful.

  Roger Stone, a long-time Trump confidant, whose views are as provocative as his clothes are flamboyant, told the Washington Post: ‘Donald Trump resists being handled. Nobody tells him who to see, who to listen to, what to read, what he can say … General Kelly is trying to treat the president like a mushroom. Keeping him in the dark and feeding him shit is not going to work. Donald Trump is a free spirit.’ Anthony Scaramucci also joined in, saying that Kelly ‘hurt the morale of the place. And he’s hurt the president … and he [Kelly] has hissy fits.’

  Kelly had also made two unfortunate enemies. His attempt at exerting iron fist control over who got to speak to the President, and who was allowed to go into the Oval Office, did not go down well with Jared Kushner and Ivanka – or Javanka as Steve Bannon had disparagingly dubbed them. During the campaign I was told by someone who spent a lot of time at Trump Tower that anyone and everyone going to see Donald Trump had to knock before entering his lair, except Kushner. He had an ‘access all areas’ pass and came and went as he pleased. For these family members it rankled now to be told that they, like everyone else, would have to go through the office of the chief of staff.

  What Kelly admitted he had no
control over was the President’s use of Twitter, even though there were those who implored him to try. Kelly said he would not waste time and effort on a pointless task. ‘Believe it or not, I do not follow the President’s tweets,’ he told reporters. And even attempting to control who he spoke to on the phone had its limitations. In the evening the President would retire to the East Wing, where he would use his old, unencrypted cell phone and freely chat to whoever he wanted.

  But if John Kelly couldn’t exert complete control over Donald Trump, nor could the President totally manage his independent-minded chief of staff. I remember a rally that Trump addressed in Phoenix, Arizona, in the summer of 2017, where the President was particularly wild in some of his attacks – on the media, on black American footballers who ‘took a knee’ during the national anthem. He attacked Congress, and was clearly furious that he had been talked into sending additional troops to Afghanistan. He’d also had a fight with Kelly before the rally started. At one point during his address he tried to call Kelly up on stage. ‘Where’s John?’ he asked. ‘Where is he? Where’s General Kelly? Get him out here. He’s great. He’s doing a great job.’ But Kelly did not appear. He wasn’t going to play to the crowd; he wasn’t going to pander to his boss or ‘reward’ him when he was behaving badly.

  And Kelly would have made a lousy poker player. On numerous occasions he would be caught on camera, almost wincing at what the President was saying. During some of the most contentious episodes of the Trump presidency there would be photographs of Kelly looking pained. When Trump spoke about there being ‘very fine people’ on both sides during protests in Charlottesville where neo-Nazis clashed with anti-racism protestors, Kelly could be seen folding his arms and hanging his head. Photos of Kelly looking unimpressed when Trump was referring to Kim Jong-un as ‘Rocket Man’ very quickly went viral.

  Kelly’s background was very different from predecessors who’ve held the role. Most White House chiefs of staff are former politicians, and many go on to continue their political careers in other senior roles. So, Alexander Haig, who was one of Richard Nixon’s chiefs of staff, went on to become Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan. Dick Cheney, who was chief of staff to Gerald Ford, became a Wyoming congressman, then a Secretary of Defense to George H.W. Bush and then Vice-President under George W. Bush. Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to Barack Obama, had been in Congress, and after leaving the White House became Mayor of Chicago. Jack Lew, President Obama’s fourth chief of staff, was later appointed Treasury Secretary.

  When I interviewed Obama back in 2015 in the West Wing – I had a slightly surreal conversation when the President asked whether I wanted to go out and walk in the Rose Garden with him. Of course, I said, trying to sound nonchalant, as though that was quite the most normal thing in the world to be doing on that Wednesday afternoon. ‘Yeah, sure thing Barry …’ We walked together out of the Roosevelt Room, and down the corridor that leads to the doors which open out onto the famous colonnades. In front of us were two men. To get between the President and the secret service staff who act as a sort of force shield around him, you have to be fairly senior. Obama introduces me to them. ‘Jon, this is my chief of staff Dennis McDonough, his job is to keep me out of trouble. And this is my general counsel, Neil Eggleston, his job is to keep me out of jail.’ It was a neat and succinct description and distinction between the two roles.

  General Kelly did his best to keep Donald Trump out of trouble, even if that meant there were times when telling an impulsive and determined president what he could not do led to fairly incendiary clashes. On almost every occasion these eruptions would solely be heard by the staff in adjacent West Wing offices. A bust-up over immigration between the National Security Advisor, John Bolton, and Kelly was so loud that word of it quickly spread. But there was one row which, though the voices did not carry out onto the street, you could chart quite clearly by watching the movement of the flagpole above the White House.

  It was regarded at the time almost as a moment of black humour, but what this episode conveyed was a brutal arm wrestle between an impetuous president, who nursed and tended his grudges and grievances with a care that a gardener might show to a herbaceous border, and a military man who believed in respect, honour and decency. The flashpoint for what became a defining battle was the death of someone who was widely revered as an all-American hero.

  Senator John McCain was someone whom Donald Trump had a thing about – and not in a good way. McCain was an old school Republican who had run for the presidency himself against Barack Obama in 2008, but could do nothing to resist the tide of hope and ‘Yes we can’ that was sweeping America. Trump thought he’d run a lousy campaign. But it was McCain’s background that made him such a role model in most people’s eyes.

  He was from a military family with a storied history. Both his father and grandfather had risen to the rank of admiral in the US Navy. He followed them into the navy, where he became a naval aviator. In 1967, during his 23rd bombing mission over North Vietnam when he was en route to take out a power plant, a surface-to-air missile struck his plane, knocking one of the wings off. As the plane corkscrewed at terminal velocity towards earth, he was forced to eject. In the process he was knocked unconscious, broke both his arms and a leg. Grainy black-and-white photos show North Vietnamese soldiers pulling the 31-year-old from Truc Bach Lake in the centre of Hanoi, where he’d ended up. After being beaten and stripped to his underpants he was taken to HoaLò prison in the city centre. HoaLò translates as ‘fiery furnace’. The building of yellow stone, surrounded by high concrete walls, was nicknamed by Americans ‘the Hanoi Hilton’. At the Hilton you would never want to stay at, soldiers dumped McCain’s stretcher on the floor.

  He would have been left to die, so serious were his injuries, but for the discovery of his family background. Here was a high value catch. Radio Hanoi boasted of the capture of ‘air pirate McCain, son of Admiral McCain’. McCain was still badly disabled from the crash and the inadequate medical treatment that followed. Because of his importance the means were there to negotiate his swift return. But McCain wouldn’t hear of it. He chose instead to adhere to the POW code that you wait your turn. He refused to be repatriated ahead of other American prisoners who had been in captivity longer than him. He wouldn’t budge, despite it being made clear to him what this would mean. His guard told him, ‘Now, McCain, it will be very bad for you.’ He was tortured for his defiance, and ultimately spent more than two years in solitary confinement. The original injuries from the crash, the negligent and negligible treatment, and the physical abuse by his captors all left a physical mark on McCain. A physical mark that would stay with him until his dying day.

  So, it was one of the most stunning and shocking moments of the presidential campaign when Donald Trump – a man who managed to perform a body swerve around the draft to go to Vietnam because of ‘bone spurs’ in his feet – spoke of McCain in the most disparaging terms: ‘He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured? I like people who weren’t captured.’ Trump’s disrespectful poke-in-the-eye drew gasps. But though the pundit class predicted this would be the end of the Trump candidacy, that this would be the moment when the air went out of his balloon, it barely left a mark. If anyone wants to pinpoint a single moment to demonstrate that the cultural unity around the things which Americans were thought to hold dear shattered, this was probably it. Trump had mocked self-sacrifice and demeaned honour, and blithely got away with it. Among those who might have been expected to find this unforgivable, there was a barely concealed shrug. Politics was now being played by Donald Trump’s insurgent rules.

  There was mutual disrespect, which would carry on through the campaign and into the White House. A media savvy senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, would later try to broker a peace between the two men, but it never got very far. Graham, a close friend and ally of McCain, had been equally critical of Trump, but had come around, and felt there was more to be gained from trying to school the inexperienc
ed President in matters of defence and foreign affairs than there was in standing on the outside hurling stones.

  In truth, though, McCain seemed to enjoy tweaking the President’s tail: pointing up his shortcomings, not seeking to mask policy differences. But things changed when the Arizona senator was diagnosed with brain cancer. With characteristically phlegmatic courage McCain would carry on coming to Capitol Hill, to speak on key issues and to vote. One of the most crucial votes was on Trump’s efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act – or Obamacare as it was more widely known, the signature health reform from the Obama era. The policy had given millions more Americans insurance cover, but it had raised premiums for the middle classes and reduced choice. It was seen by many Republicans as unconscionably bureaucratic, unwieldy and, heaven forbid, a dangerous, slippery step towards the socialist nightmare of a National Health Service.

  The vote was evenly tied in the Senate and, very deliberately, with the cameras running on the unfolding test of Trump’s authority, McCain made sure he was the last to vote – and as he went towards the tellers he held his arm out, and left it there with a deliberate, dramatic pause. The eyes of the nation were on him; the eyes of the White House were burning into his back. He kept the pause going, just as the presenters on a TV talent show would do before announcing whether it is the fire-eating contortionist or the magician and his lovely assistant who would be going through to the finals, the cameras cutting quickly between their anxious, nervous-looking faces. All that was missing from the Senate floor that night was the roll of the drums.