by David Frum
How were allies to interpret all this? A president caught in surveillance because he had accepted pro bono campaign services from the same operative who had previously served Putin’s many in Kyiv? Something had obviously gone terribly wrong inside the American national security apparatus. That apparatus abruptly seemed largely powerless to protect itself, much less friends and allies. What choice did those allies and friends have except to make their own new arrangements for a world in which the United States could no longer be trusted? In which the president of the United States seemed at best a destructive incompetent; at worst, an outright Russian intelligence asset?
The wrongness sank deeper than national strategy, deeper than military affairs, deeper than staff and secrets. The wrongness seemed to have darkened and distorted the very idea of America to the rest of the world.
Early in 1990, in the joyous months after the collapse of the communist regimes of central Europe, Czechoslovakia’s president, Václav Havel, addressed a joint session of Congress. To explain the past and future of his own country, the great writer interwove a long meditation on what the United States had meant to Europe and the world.
Wasn’t it the best minds of your country, people you could call intellectuals, who wrote your famous Declaration of Independence, your bill of human rights, and your Constitution and who, above all, took upon themselves practical responsibility for putting them into practice? . . . Those great documents . . . inspire us all; they inspire us despite the fact that they are over 200 years old. They inspire us to be citizens.50
Which democratic ally would address the United States Congress in such terms in the Trump era? The government of the United States seems to have made common cause with the planet’s thugs, crooks, and dictators against its own ideals—and in fact to have imported the spirit of thuggery, crookedness, and dictatorship into the very core of the American state, into the most solemn symbolic oval center of its law and liberty. The man inside that oval center did not act alone. He held his power with the connivance of others. They executed his orders and empowered his whims for crass and cowardly reasons of their own: partisanship, ambition, greed for gain, eagerness for attention, ideological zeal, careerist conformity, or—in the worst cases—malicious glee in the wreck of things they could never have built themselves. They claim the symbols of the republic as they subvert its institutions. They pin the flag to their lapels before commencing the day’s work of lying, obstructing, and corrupting. They speak for America to a world that remembers a different and better America. But that memory is already fading into a question of whether it was not perhaps always an illusion, whether this new regime of deceit and brutishness will not only form the future—but whether it also retrospectively discredits the American past.
Chapter 9
Autoimmune Disorder
If the national security apparatus could not constrain President Trump, neither would it go down without a struggle. Trump had the power of the presidency; his bureaucratic opponents, the weapon of the leak. No administration ever has been so perforated by leaks as Donald Trump’s. As the joke went, it fell to Donald Trump to deliver on Barack Obama’s promise of “the most transparent administration ever.”
Those leaks thwarted many of the worst impulses of the new Trump administration. Leaks swiftly removed from office Trump’s profoundly compromised first choice for national security adviser, Michael Flynn. Leaks alerted the world that President Trump had blabbed a crucial military secret to the Russian foreign minister. Leaks deterred the Trump administration from lifting sanctions on Russia as soon as it entered office, as Michael Isikoff reported for Yahoo News in June 2017:
In the early weeks of the Trump administration, former Obama administration officials and State Department staffers fought an intense, behind-the-scenes battle to head off efforts by incoming officials to normalize relations with Russia, according to multiple sources familiar with the events.
Unknown to the public at the time, top Trump administration officials, almost as soon as they took office, tasked State Department staffers with developing proposals for the lifting of economic sanctions, the return of diplomatic compounds and other steps to relieve tensions with Moscow.
These efforts to relax or remove punitive measures imposed by President Obama in retaliation for Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and meddling in the 2016 election alarmed some State Department officials, who immediately began lobbying congressional leaders to quickly pass legislation to block the move, the sources said.1
Yet the same leaks that thwarted Trump’s pro-Putin agenda also exacted a heavy price. Those leaks revealed US surveillance capabilities in a way that compromised national security. For example, Greg Miller, Adam Entous, and Ellen Nakashima broke the news in the February 9, 2017, Washington Post that Flynn had lied when he denied speaking to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak about sanctions relief.
Nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
All of those officials said Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit. Two of those officials went further, saying that Flynn urged Russia not to overreact to the penalties being imposed by President Barack Obama, making clear that the two sides would be in position to review the matter after Trump was sworn in as president.
“Kislyak was left with the impression that the sanctions would be revisited at a later time,” said a former official.2
Kislyak, being no novice and no fool, would have conducted his conversation with Flynn by some modality he regarded as safe from American surveillance. In order to expose Flynn’s lie, the nine officials who talked to the Post also revealed to the Russians that the United States had cracked a link that Russian intelligence operatives had regarded as secure.
It had to be assumed that the Russian embassy would immediately alter its communications methods, denying the United States future information flows, at least for some period of time. To protect the United States from a compromised national security adviser, nine senior intelligence officials agreed to burn an important American national secret.
Such trade-offs would occur again and again.
As noted in the previous chapter, Trump blurted an important secret to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov in the Oval Office on May 10, 2017. Trump’s boastful blabber mouthery was bad for many reasons, but on its own, the blurt may have done only limited harm. The secret purportedly exposed an Israeli penetration of ISIS communications. The Russians might have shared that information with their clients inside Syria and their partners in Iran. But would any of those actors—Russia, Iran, or the Assad regime—have shared the information with ISIS? Perhaps ISIS in turn has penetrated the Assad regime. Still, all those risks were more roundabout than what happened next: the possible divulgence of the substance of the secret to the news media by disgusted national security professionals. (I’ve used hedged language here because it is not impossible that the secondary round of leaks consisted of deliberate disinformation from national security professionals, frantically trying to minimize the harm of the president’s mistake.)
Even if the round-two leaks were disinformation, however, the revelation, as legitimately public spirited as it was, inflicted yet another harm. A president—any president—would normally expect his staff to protect the confidentiality of his deliberations, including the inevitable mistakes that any human being will make: the goofs, gaffes, grievances, lapses of memory, political incorrectnesses, and remarks-best-not-repeated-outside-this-room that have echoed off the walls of government ever since those walls were erected.
Donald Trump says more things that should not be said than any president in American history. But also more than any president in history, he works in an office he cannot trust and knows he cannot trust. Donald Trump may not be a proper president, or a competent president, or a patriotic president, or even a legitimate president in any larger
ethical sense of the word “legitimate.” But he is the lawful president, charged with public functions. In order to stop him from betraying his office and the country, the professionals around him have also effectively prevented him from fulfilling his office and serving his country, supposing he were ever minded to do that. He must do his job, however he conceives that job, within a narrow ambit of relatives and cronies, selected mostly for their negative qualities: their lack of knowledge, their lack of experience, their lack of independence, their lack of integrity. The dysfunction inside the White House is Trump’s fault, but it is not only Trump’s problem.
The executive office of the president has until now almost always been staffed by committed people who take their jobs highly seriously. There are few slackers at a White House. The smallest jobs must be done with the greatest care; a future election can turn on whether the president has offended a local notable by mispronouncing her husband’s name.
The Trump White House is a mess of careless slobs. At the highest levels, one sees mutual sabotage, easily decoded “on background” name-calling, false filings of disclosure documents, and institutionalized lying about readily ascertainable facts. The failure of leadership at the top contaminates the whole enterprise. Even the most routine work product of the Trump White House is strewn with errors of spelling, fact, and protocol, sometimes of quite serious consequence. Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star compiled a list of some thirty such goofs. The funniest was perhaps a July 12, 2017, release attacking the accuracy of the Congressional Budget Office that misspelled the word “inaccurately” as “innacurately.” The most serious was a July 8 reference to China’s Xi Jinping as “president of the Republic of China”—the Republic of China being the official name of Taiwan, of course. Along the way, the Trump White House misspelled not only the names of many of its own newly appointed officials, but also that of the prime minister of Great Britain.3 In a prime-time television address in August 2017 about his decision to escalate the US commitment to Afghanistan, President Trump described that country’s prime minister as its president. More bafflingly, on October 1, 2017, the official spokesperson for the Department of State assured the world via Twitter that North Korea would never attain the “nuclear capability” it had in fact attained in 2006.4
At best, the dysfunction of the Trump team has actively advanced the public interest, by unintentionally thwarting the Trump administration’s more sinister instincts. But at worst, the casual incompetence has risked authentic harm. During the visit of Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe to the United States in February 2017, Trump received word of a North Korean missile test while dining on the patio at his Mar-a-Lago club. Rather than withdraw into the secure communications area established for a president wherever he may go, Trump read a report on the situation on the spot, illuminating his reading by the light of aides’ cell phones—a shocking security breach. Because mobile phones can so easily be hacked and converted into spy cameras, it’s not permitted even to bring them into a secure facility, much less to point them at a sensitive document. Not only did Trump ignore that rule, so did the half dozen aides who crowded around him in the photographs snapped by other diners and posted on Facebook.5 By the time of the May meeting with Lavrov, these egregious departures from basic operational security had been curbed, to the public benefit.
If Trump were not so locked into a tiny circle by his distrust of outsiders, his handling of health care reform might also have amounted to less of a fiasco. Trump started as something like a moderate on the health care issue. He has praised the universal systems of Canada and the United Kingdom, promised broader coverage, and defended Medicaid against criticism from the congressional party. It’s easily imaginable that a more professional policy process inside the White House would have enabled him to triangulate against both congressional Democrats and Republicans, arriving at a position broadly acceptable to much of public opinion. Given Trump’s extreme ignorance of health care issues, however, such a plan would require bringing aboard some authentic nonpartisan experts who could draft a policy consistent with Trump’s own surprisingly generous instincts on the issue. But by the time the health care debate was reaching its peak, FBI director Comey had been fired, a special counsel, Robert Mueller, had been appointed, and the Trump White House had immured itself for siege. Welcoming somebody with no special loyalty to Trump into the council of such an embattled president: impossible and unthinkable. This enabled the do-or-die House Republicans under Speaker Ryan to hornswoggle a president with no particular commitment to their ideology into subscribing to the most crushingly unpopular item on their agenda.
The pattern would repeat itself on tax reform. Trump allowed congressional Republicans to write a tax plan that delivered little or nothing to his own constituencies within the party. Trump relied heavily for advice on a treasury secretary so politically tone-deaf that he had sought a government plane to transport him around Europe on a three-week honeymoon. A more modest revision of the notorious inefficiency of the corporate income tax might well have gained bipartisan support: John Kerry had endorsed corporate-tax reform in 2004. Instead, Trump committed himself to yet another shove-it-through plan that left him hostage to any three nervous Republican senators.
I am not suggesting here that Trump was a victim of anything or anyone other than himself. There were sound reasons for professionals of all kinds to keep a far distance from the Trump White House. Some forty people were indicted as a result of the Watergate scandal. Among those sentenced to prison: the attorney general of the United States, the White House counsel, and President Nixon’s two most senior White House aides. A dozen men were convicted or pleaded guilty to a range of charges after the Iran-Contra affair. White Houses can be dangerous places under leadership that does not respect the law. Official lying is usually unethical, but not always illegal—until suddenly the official is called before a congressional committee or federal investigation. Then he or she must choose either to confess the lie or repeat it under oath. The terms of service in the Trump White House were not only dishonorable and humiliating, but also dangerous. People with sense and people with options preferred to stay away.
Trump’s abuse of the power of the presidency invited reciprocal abuses by members of other branches of government.
When President Trump banned travelers from certain Muslim-majority nations from entering the United States, he was exercising a lawful power of his office. It’s well-established law that the president has power to bar “any class of aliens” both as immigrants and as nonimmigrants and to impose on their ordinary comings and goings “any restrictions he may deem appropriate.”6
Some argued that Trump violated the Constitution by imposing a restriction that disadvantaged adherents of one religion from traveling to the United States. But the Constitution applies only to Americans. The Supreme Court ruled as recently as 2015 that the president could deny a visa to an alien for no stated reason at all! Aliens have no due process rights against the United States, and no First Amendment rights against the United States.7
Yet the courts have shredded Trump’s travel ban anyway. In the words of the first of a series of federal judges to rule against the Trump administration: the courts could not overlook “significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus driving the promulgation of the Executive Order and its related predecessor.”8
To amend an old saying: Bad presidents make bad law. Because President Trump behaved in what the courts regarded as a wrongful way, the courts responded in ways they would have regarded as wrongful only twelve months before. For it was not only one judge in Hawaii who stripped Trump of previous presidential powers; the travel ban litigation would snake its way through the Ninth Circuit to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration losing at almost every step of the way. (In July 2017, the Supreme Court would uphold the administration’s rights to reduce the intake of previously accepted refugees.9)
In the travel ban litigation, the courts asserted a new power to disregard
long-established and long-accepted formal law if the president’s personal words created a basis for mistrusting his motives. In response to the danger posed by Trump, other holders of American power are tempted to jettison their historic role too, and to use any tool at hand, no matter how doubtfully legitimate, to stop him. In order to save the constitutional system, its defenders are at risk of corroding it.
Nowhere is that risk more acute than in the realm of civilian-military relations—and from two directions.
The first directional risk is the movement of the military into government. Barack Obama appointed one former general, Eric Shinseki, to his cabinet, to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, and another, David Petraeus, to head the Central Intelligence Agency. George W. Bush appointed some as well, including Colin Powell as secretary of state. Bill Clinton appointed a general, Barry McCaffrey, as director of the office of drug control policy, and an admiral, William J. Crowe, as his first ambassador to the United Kingdom. Retired and active generals have more than once held the job of national security adviser: Brent Scowcroft under George H. W. Bush; Colin Powell under Ronald Reagan.
Never before, however, had a president concentrated anything near so much power in former military hands as Donald Trump did. The National Security Act of 1947 expressly forbids active or recently retired generals from serving as the secretary of defense. The ban was waived only once before, in September 1950, to permit George C. Marshall to reorganize the US armed forces, which were demoralized after their humiliating retreat down the Korean Peninsula. No such emergency existed in 2017, but Trump asked for and got a second waiver to appoint James Mattis as secretary of defense.