The Briefing

by Sean Spicer

  While the White House itself is rather expansive, the West Wing is rather small. The lower level has only a handful of offices, including the Navy Mess where senior staff can dine and get takeout. Before its latest renovations were done, the West Wing was tired with carpet that had not been replaced in over a decade and paint that showed the test of time.

  The staff secretary position is by no means a clerical job, and the role requires personal neutrality and a depth of experience to know what is essential for the president and what isn’t. Policies, appointments, and programs can live or die according to what the staff secretary decides is important.

  Rob Porter, acting in that role, was a seasoned, political professional. Until the story broke about domestic abuse allegations against him, very few people in America knew about this key position in the White House. A graduate of Harvard University and a Rhodes Scholar, Rob is the son of Roger Porter, also a Harvard grad and a Rhodes Scholar, who was the domestic policy adviser to President George H. W. Bush.

  Rob’s assistant told me he was not in his office. He was in a meeting.

  “Could you please call him out?”

  She did. Rob came down the cramped, dimly lit hallway, expecting a crisis.

  “Do you have a folder?”

  Rob gave me a sidewise look—did you truly call me out of a meeting for a folder? He reached into a nearby office and grabbed a folder from a shelf.

  I handed him the second copy of my letter.

  “Can you timestamp this for me?”

  Rob gave me another funny look.

  “What’s going on?”

  “This is my resignation letter. I’ve told the president it is time for me to leave.”

  I wanted my resignation recorded properly so that it would be clear I was in fact resigning. With all of the media reports on White House palace intrigue, one in which back-stabbing daggers are fashioned from leaks, somebody would surely try to sell the story that I had been pushed out.

  Rob went back to his meeting. I stood there alone in the West Wing of the White House for a moment trying to absorb the magnitude and impact of what had just happened in the last few minutes.

  I was not gone, not yet. I was still White House press secretary. I had tasks to complete and responsibilities to fulfill. Above all, I had a staff that needed to know what was going on. Given the way that closed-door discussions in the Oval Office were seemingly secretly live-streamed to the media, my staff would certainly have heard something about Scaramucci.

  They needed to hear straight from me why I was leaving and how much I appreciated and valued their work and support. I had worked with many of them in the trenches during the campaign and at the Republican National Committee (RNC). Some of them I had known for years.

  As I walked back to my office, I had a strange feeling—one we get only a few times in our lives.

  It’s over.

  It’s that feeling you get when you end a relationship. Or when you move from a home you’ve lived in for years. Or when you graduate from a school. It’s that feeling you get when you know that a rich, significant part of your life has come to a definitive end and there is no turning back. Great and interesting things may await you in the future, but what you had known was gone for good. And the future—be it good or ill—would not be the same.

  Working in the White House and speaking for the president had been a dream of mine. That dream was now over.

  CHAPTER TWO

  AGAINST THE ODDS

  In the days leading up to the election, the media sketched the outline of Donald Trump’s political obituary: he was a fluke candidate who would be trounced by Hillary Clinton, many proclaimed.

  Statistician, ABC correspondent, and editor of the influential FiveThirtyEight.com website, Nate Silver gave Hillary Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning the presidency.1

  The New York Times gave Donald Trump a 15 percent chance of winning.2

  Newsweek even printed a special edition all about Hillary Clinton’s historic election as the first woman president, because that magazine, like almost every other media outlet and pundit, dismissed the possibility of a Trump victory.3

  Or in the unvarnished opinion of Deadspin columnist Drew Magary, “Donald Trump is going to get his ass kicked.”4

  On Tuesday, November 8, election day, I saw Donald Trump and he looked nothing like a man who was about to get kicked.

  Around 11:00 p.m., when the polls in all the pivotal states had closed, I turned to Donald Trump and said, “Congratulations, Mr. President-elect.”

  “Not yet,” he replied without taking his eyes off the incoming results on several screens. Wisconsin was looking very good, but it wasn’t confirmed. And Pennsylvania was not yet official.

  He didn’t want to jinx it.

  Donald Trump was very focused, filled with anticipation, as we all were. He was optimistic from the word go, but he grew more excited as one critical county after another swung his way. Melania Trump’s face expressed the suspense that we all felt while anxiously waiting for the results of the long, hard-fought campaign. As precincts in key states started reporting their results, she remained pensive, likely beginning to realize the awesome responsibilities her husband would soon have.

  The man who was not expected to break 270 electoral votes—veteran-poll-watcher and political-analyst Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics predicted Donald Trump would win only 216 electoral votes5—was on track to rack up 306 of them, with blue state after blue state going for him. When I saw him at the magic moment, Donald Trump’s trademark grin filled his face.

  If you’ve ever been involved in an election, from student council to U.S. president, you always think, no matter the odds, you can swing a win somehow. On election night four years earlier, the Romney campaign in Boston had convinced us that we had a clear path to victory. By then, I was a veteran of close elections.

  In my first paid job, I served as a campaign aide in a congressional race in Connecticut’s second district (the New London and Groton area). I was a “field operative” for the challenger, and we as a team had given it our all. The polls had us down—and down big. On election night, we were glued to the returns. The results weren’t nearly as bleak and dreary as the polls had suggested. Throughout most of the night, the results were neck and neck. But at the end of the night, after every single vote had been counted, we lost by two votes. Not two thousand. Not two hundred. Two.

  Every vote matters.

  I experienced the same anxiety several years later while I was working for Representative Clay Shaw’s re-election campaign in Florida. Clay was a beloved grandfather figure in South Florida who had served several terms, but his district was changing. His district was home to an aging population, and about a third of his constituents died between each election. But this year wasn’t like the others for Clay—it was 2000. It was the year that the word “hanging chad” became a household name during the Bush vs. Gore recount in Florida. And here I was working on a congressional race that was too close to call on election day. Once again, on election night, I found myself glued to the returns. Would we pull it out? We wouldn’t know until every single vote had been counted. Fortunately, this cliffhanger had a much better ending than my Connecticut experience. Clay Shaw won—even if by a narrow margin of 300 votes.

  Every vote matters.

  So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I never accepted the media’s certainty that Donald Trump couldn’t win. I thought it would be close, and we were campaigning until the very end in places like Grand Rapids, Michigan; Raleigh, North Carolina; Scranton, Pennsylvania; and other key cities in critical states.

  As all-consuming as the election was, I also had something very personal going on.

  In the last weeks of the campaign, my father, Michael Spicer, was valiantly fighting pancreatic cancer. Emotionally, I was pulled in two directions—excitement at the possibility of a great professional achievement and deep anxiety over my father’s i
llness.

  There were other pressures as well. The more I was drawn into the Trump orbit, the more I heard that “long-time” Trump “loyalists” were sniping against Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and myself as RNC outsiders who weren’t “Trump guys.” To some degree, they were right. My priorities have always been very clear: God, family, country, Navy, Republican Party, candidate. I was a Republican operative and strategist who had worked at the RNC, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. So, yes, I worked for the Republican Party, but, of course, I wanted Trump to win. I hadn’t spent this much time and effort—and put so much of my personal reputation on the line—to lose, and I didn’t remember many of these so-called loyalists campaigning for Donald Trump in May, June, and July. Many of them didn’t show up until October. Yet they couldn’t wrap their minds around the idea of a party operative who could be just as loyal to the candidate as they were while perhaps offering perspective and knowledge they lacked.

  There was one more thing working on me. Donald Trump had come to know me at the RNC and through the campaign. He was beginning to accept me as a trusted adviser and spokesman. I hoped I would have a significant role in his White House, and I knew that working with the new president would be an extraordinary experience—a man who is calculating and mercurial, charismatic but erratic, and now a politician capable of defeating anyone, including himself.

  I was raised in a Roman Catholic family that had dinner together every night, with very few exceptions. TV never supplemented this nightly ritual. Instead, we enjoyed robust dinner conversations about school or our friends, but never about national politics. When politics was mentioned at all, it was usually my father complaining about some “idiot” in local or state government who screwed something up or said something stupid. It was never ideological or based on party.

  I grew up in a tiny town in a small state, Barrington, Rhode Island, down the street from the Barrington River just before it flows into the Narragansett Bay. It’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone else. As a boy, I’d simply tell my mother, “I’m going to the neighbor’s,” without specifying which one, and she knew I would be in a safe place. We played four square in the street, rode our bicycles everywhere, and played tag with flashlights when it was dark. If we weren’t home by dinnertime, my mother would call the neighbors to find out where we were. But there were no real worries. Everyone looks out for you in Barrington. Everyone on Oak Manor Drive was part of your family.

  Oak Manor Drive was also where I learned the very basics of business. I was a neighborhood entrepreneur, doing everything from selling stationery, to delivering birthday cakes, to creating my own ski-sharpening business. In college, I sold sailing apparel and gear.

  Barrington has a reputation for being one of Rhode Island’s most prestigious towns, with its yacht club, country club, large homes on the bay, and good schools. But like affluent towns everywhere, Barrington had a section for middle-class homes and working-class families. We lived in the Hampden Meadows neighborhood in a comfortable, two-story, four-bedroom home with a large lawn, and we were decidedly in the middle-class category.

  Both of my parents attended college, though neither graduated. Mike Spicer grew up loving the water in nearby Newport. Sailing was in his blood. His father, Harry, had worked at the naval station in Newport. His grandfather, William Spicer, had been a gunner’s mate in the Spanish-American War and was awarded the Medal of Honor for bravery. A natural sailor, Mike Spicer was more industrious than studious, and at thirteen he had already joined the boat business rebuilding outboard motors.

  Whenever he earned a pocketful of money, he’d get out on the water. Newport had two yacht clubs, the Ida Lewis Yacht Club, where the America’s Cup trophy had been showcased (on behalf of the New York Yacht Club), and the Newport Yacht Club, which sounds impressive but was really the working man’s club. It became my father’s second home. He once sailed on one of the trail boats for the America’s Cup competition. And after a succession of jobs working for boat builders, he launched his own yacht brokerage company.

  Yacht broker sounds fancier than it was. Our family income depended solely on how many people were buying boats. Some years weren’t so bad. But there were others you knew would be a struggle by the beginning of January. I still have no idea how my parents made ends meet during certain stretches, though I do know my dad took out credit cards to pay off other credit cards.

  When I was a kid, my family’s income fluctuated depending on the year and the market for yachts.

  While the market and the economy fluctuated, my dad’s work ethic never did. He was an entrepreneur by nature, a hardworking man, a disciplinarian, and a stickler for principle. He was also the kind of person who made time for others, looked you in the eye, and kept his word. No matter how tough of a day he had or how hard he had worked, he always had time to throw a ball, attend a practice, or review homework. And he always let you know he loved you.

  He was also the kind of father who led by example. If someone needed something, he gave it to them, whether it was advice or a helping hand. He often reminded me that life’s about taking care of people, being a good friend, and, above all, doing the right thing.

  Kathy Spicer, my mother, was the caregiver, the one who held everything together. She made sure every kid got to practice with the right uniform, every meal was prepared, and every elderly relative or close friend who needed help got it.

  In short, my parents were the kind of people you didn’t want to disappoint. If you did something wrong, they would give you that “let-down” look, which was much worse than any other kind of punishment. When I served as chief strategist of the RNC, I went on a cable show for a discussion that escalated into a battle of harsh words and insults. Later, when I was catching up with my dad, he said, “You’re better than that.”

  That soft rebuke hit me harder than anything the press has ever said.

  Father John Hugh Diman was an Episcopal priest who founded what is today St. George’s School in Rhode Island, a Middletown academy (although they like to use a Newport address) thick with many of America’s elite families—Astors, Biddles, Bushes, and Pells. Father Diman then converted to Roman Catholicism at age sixty-three and founded another preparatory school, Portsmouth Abbey School, run by Benedictine monks, just down the road on the other end of Aquidneck Island.

  When Portsmouth Abbey was smaller, it was named the Portsmouth Priory. And as I grew up, my grandmother would say, “All the really smart boys go to the Priory.” So, the idea of going to a rigorous, elite school stuck with me. As I prepared to go to high school, I started bugging my parents to send me to Portsmouth Abbey. I had no concept of the financial burden I was asking them to shoulder. To their credit, they said nothing about money, just, “Why don’t you look into it?”

  I did. Portsmouth Abbey’s tuition was as expensive as college, which was out of my family’s financial reach. But not all the boarding school’s students lived on campus. I discovered that I could live at home and attend as a day student. I put together a plan. From my home on Oak Manor Drive, I could walk a mile down the main road to “downtown” Barrington, buy a bus token, take a forty-minute bus ride to Portsmouth, and walk down Cory’s Lane to the school to begin my day. And I could do the reverse commute home after school in the afternoons. Realizing that I could make it all work, I went to Portsmouth Abbey’s open houses, sought financial aid, and got in at age thirteen.

  We went to school six days a week to obtain a Benedictine education that included a class in Christian doctrine taught by one of the institution’s monks. As I progressed through Portsmouth Abbey, I grew steadier in my faith and prayer life. Students went to Mass once a week and prayed every day in a morning assembly.

  The press occasionally describes me as a “devout Catholic.” I have never liked that designation. It sounds “holier-than-thou.” I would just say I am a practicing Catholic who strives to be
better every day and to listen to that still, small voice I find in prayer. I regularly ask the Lord for forgiveness and for the grace and strength to be a better follower.

  Throughout my father’s terminal illness and all the ups and downs I faced in Donald Trump’s White House, the two things that sustained me were my strong, loving family and the deep faith my parents instilled in me in Jesus and His Church with its steadfast catechism.

  After faith and family, the next most important thing to me as a young man was sports. Growing up, I played in Barrington’s town soccer league. Despite being five foot six (and a half, but who’s counting), I became the starting goalie on Portsmouth Abbey’s soccer team. And, like my father, I grew up sailing and became an avid and competitive sailor.

  The Abbey had a sailing team that competed in interscholastic regattas. We sailed in international 420 class dinghies, less than 14 feet in length, with a beam of just over 5 feet. Each 420 has a two-man crew for short, fast courses. I was on the Narragansett Bay almost every day in the spring, jibing, leaning over the water with my crew, and enjoying the sensation of cutting across the bay.

  The school’s academics were demanding, and order and discipline were expected in every class. Male students (while now coed, Portsmouth Abbey only admitted boys then) had to wear a coat and tie every day, though the school let us pare down to collared shirts in the late spring and early fall. And all students arrived on time for class, stood when a teacher entered the classroom, and started each class with a prayer.

  One teacher still stands out in my memory, and in the memory of everyone who attended Portsmouth Abbey—J. Clifford Hobbins. When the movie Dead Poets Society came out in 1989, the year I graduated from the Abbey, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the movie had been about Cliff, his Socratic challenges, and his unorthodox, disruptive style of teaching. He taught history, economics, and foreign affairs with animated storytelling that electrified us, making us look forward to his next class.