by Sean Spicer
I got the chance to work closely with other impressive people, many of them trade ministers, from Peru to Panama and South Korea.
Later, when I worked for Donald Trump, his critique of U.S. trade policy reminded me that the Republican Party might have strayed from Ronald Reagan’s balanced wisdom on free trade. Reagan was definitely in favor of free trade and unafraid of economic competition, but he always insisted that trade be “fair as well as free” and that American workers not get shortchanged, stating flatly: “I will not stand by and watch American businesses fail because of unfair trading practices abroad. I will not stand by and watch American workers lose their jobs because other nations do not play by the rules.”5 Somewhere along the way, Reagan’s sense of balance got lost, and free trade became an ideological commitment rather than a pragmatic political and economic decision.
American workers in industries slaughtered by foreign competition were too often treated as expendable by the Democrat and Republican establishments, and they noticed. While the vast majority of Americans have benefited from free trade agreements, Donald Trump gave a voice to those who did not, and they were electrified that a national politician finally noticed them and recognized their sense of abandonment.
Tied into this was U.S. policy with China. There was a bipartisan effort during the Clinton years to promote China’s admission to the World Trade Organization (WTO). It was believed this would normalize China’s trade practices and build a basis for the country to become more democratic. After China joined the WTO, the United States trade deficit with China mushroomed, and the Communist Party of China became even more powerful. The Chinese state was also involved in the rampant theft of Western industrial secrets and intellectual property, discriminatory tariffs, and restrictive internal policies.
Lenin famously said that capitalists would sell the rope that would hang them. In order to do business in China, the Chinese government forced U.S. companies to give away their most valuable intellectual property. Many took the deal in exchange for what would likely be a few good years in China. Now China has by some indices the world’s largest economy, but until the election of Donald Trump, we were still allowing it to be treated in trade and other international agreements as if it were a weak, developing country.
So, while I remain convinced that trade deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, can be hugely beneficial for the United States, Republicans need to do a better job of articulating the benefits of trade and making it clear that we’re watching out for American workers.
After the Bush administration ended, I became the cofounder of a small, successful public affairs firm in Old Town Alexandria with two of my former Hill colleagues, Gretchen Reiter and Nathan Imperiale. Our firm focused on helping companies communicate with the federal government, pointing out how their businesses might be harmed by unnecessary regulation and how they benefited consumers, workers, and the country. Executives of major companies and trade associations told me directly that the Obama administration was the most explicitly anti-business administration in U.S. history and was prolonging the great recession. I enjoyed helping these companies with strategy and communications, but the business side of it—like attracting new clients—was not really for me. While I was wondering what to do next, I was recalled for active duty in the U.S. Navy. My commission had come through the Direct Commission Officer program for people with specialized skill sets, including public affairs. I was sworn in as an ensign in September 1999 in the U.S. Capitol and sent to Pensacola for two weeks of training.
From the get-go, Marine “gunnies” who helped run the program saluted me. That took some getting used to. We had physical training and classroom study. Despite many reservists being called “weekend warriors,” we knew getting called up for war was always a possibility. The axiom of the old commercial, “one weekend a month, two weeks a year,” is not the reality of today’s reserve or National Guard. If anyone doubts their sacrifices, just consider the high cost they have paid in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In July 2009, I was recalled by the Navy to serve at the Criminal Investigation Task Force and had an opportunity to go to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. I was struck by the way our country treated suspected terrorists, accused of some of the most heinous crimes. They enjoyed twenty-first century comforts such as satellite television, a full library of DVD selections, healthcare, sporting gear, and a soccer field. These accused terrorists were receiving better treatment than many Americans will ever experience—and their accommodations were being footed by the American taxpayer. There are American veterans—who wore our country’s uniform and deployed to lands far away, leaving families behind, to fight on the front lines of wars—who are living on the streets, wondering where their next meal will come from or how they will receive healthcare. Yet here were these suspected terrorists—the most heinous of them all—living in very comfortable conditions.
When my tour of duty ended, I was presented with another opportunity—would I want to take a “follow-on” position in the Pentagon? I gave it some serious thought, but Rebecca—who grew up in a Navy family—said, “You need to get back into the mix of things.” She meant back into the mix of Washington and politics. And she was right. Day-to-day military life is not for me. I take pride in wearing the uniform and serving this great country, but there’s a reason why I am a reservist—I was meant to work in politics. I love the excitement of winning and losing, the fight for conservative policies I believe in, the idea of making our country even better, and helping my fellow citizens.
Around that time, I got a phone call out of the blue from Ed Gillespie. I had known Ed for years and always respected his work as chairman of the RNC, a Hill staffer, and counselor to President George W. Bush.
“Sean, would you be interested in meeting with Reince Priebus?” Ed said.
I knew that Reince was the newly-elected chairman of the RNC, but I didn’t know much about him other than he was highly respected by the GOP in Wisconsin.
“I’m certainly willing to meet with him,” I responded, not wanting to act too interested but also expressing some interest at the same time.
I had worked inside the RNC building on Capitol Hill years earlier when I was director of incumbent retention at the NRCC. Outside, the white, brick building still looked like a four-story wedding cake. But inside, it had become an empty shell filled with unoccupied offices and an uncomfortable level of silence in the halls. The RNC had been reduced to a skeleton staff because it had no money. I literally mean no money. The Grand Old Party was over $23 million dollars in debt.
I took Ed up on his offer and scheduled a meeting at the RNC in January 2011. After I checked in at the security desk in the RNC lobby, I was escorted up to the fourth floor, where the chairman’s office is. I was introduced to Reince and his chief of staff, Jeff Larson. Reince was a polite, professional, well-spoken Wisconsin lawyer, neat and impeccable in his dress, barely forty. A master of organization, Reince had served as chairman for the Republican Party of Wisconsin, building the state party that helped Scott Walker become such a transformative governor of Wisconsin. He also was a long-time friend of his hometown congressman, Representative Paul Ryan, who at the time was chairman of the influential House Ways and Means Committee.
It was well known throughout the Washington political circles, as well as in the Republican folds, that the RNC had a lot of work to do on many fronts in order to rebuild. The RNC was no longer trusted by many grassroots Republicans, and it didn’t have the talent, resources, or media savvy to compete against President Obama’s re-election campaign machine. Before my meeting with Reince, I had prepared a strategic plan with two goals: to rebuild the RNC communications operation and to make it competitive for the next presidential campaign. In organizational charts and planning documents, I laid out specific action items aimed at regaining Republican trust and modernizing the RNC’s communications strategy, especially when it came to social media and digital communications.
Rein
ce and Jeff liked what they heard, and in short order I was sitting in my first-floor, corner office leading a communications team. When I started, the team had fewer than ten people on it. I had my communications playbook in hand, but there was a big hiccup. We didn’t have any money to implement the plan. The RNC was so broke that we could barely afford the postage for our next direct-mail fundraising piece. Reince, Jeff, and I crouched around a table in the chairman’s office and went through every line in the communications budget, cutting every cost we could, right down to newspaper and magazine subscriptions.
We cut what we could live without and even pared down the basic essentials. We had to make some tough decisions, but we didn’t have a choice.
Our national finance chairman, Ron Weiser, and Reince challenged each other to see whose travel expenses would be cheaper—from dining off a piece of fruit from a hotel breakfast bar to making a lunch out of free pretzels saved from an airplane ride—as they traveled around the country hitting up big donors.
As RNC chairman, Reince presented a calm and reassuring face for the national party on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and other Sunday talk shows. But his greatest skill was fundraising, the lifeblood of politics. He actually enjoyed gathering people together and persuading them to donate their time and money to the party.
My job was to give the communications shop a makeover. Instead of just sending out traditional press releases, we hired a social media coordinator and a Hispanic media coordinator to cut into the big Democratic lead in both of those markets. I considered these moves strategic “investments” that would get big returns and show donors we were worthy of their support.
During my first few months at the RNC, it felt more like working in a startup company than at a national, established political party’s headquarters. We were on a tight timeline to get out of debt and up to speed in time for the 2012 election cycle. We ran lean and mean, and our small but growing communications staff worked seven days a week, doing multiple jobs from operating the RNC’s own TV studio, to booking Republican officials on shows, to working with regional media and social media. We kept at it because we knew how much was at stake. Our purpose was simple: raise the money and build the team necessary to get Republicans elected and re-elected.
Our pump-priming investments worked. Led by Angela Meyers and the finance team, donor support for the RNC grew, and we went from a barebones RNC staff of just over eighty to more than 250 at headquarters by election day in 2012.
We were still not where we needed to be—the timeline was too short for us to match what the Democrats had—but we had built and cemented a strong team that could offer significant help to the next Republican presidential candidate.
The Republican primary debates in 2012 were an ordeal—too many debates and too many candidates, many of them marginal.
Many tried to blame the RNC for this, but the truth is that the national party had relinquished any say in the process years earlier. It was the news media that ran the debates, working with universities and civic groups to hold one primary debate after another, whenever it wished, and no candidate wanted to forgo free, national air time.
There were some sterling moments. Newt Gingrich dazzled audiences with his witty intellectualism and snappy comebacks to media moderators. Herman Cain entertained us all with his “9-9-9” tax plan. And Rick Santorum identified the blue-collar conservatives that Donald Trump would later energize to such great effect. But it was clear, almost from the start, that there was one candidate who was more viable than the others—former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. The two most important things for a candidate’s success are time and money, and our best candidate was forced to fly around the country and spend both time and money at the media’s behest instead of in the service of his own strategy.
We at the RNC were, unfortunately, spectators with no involvement in choosing the format, moderators, timing, or anything else. We often had to beg the state parties for tickets to the debates. But whenever anything went wrong, the RNC was blamed. And a lot went wrong.
One sore point was the moderators who often seemed to prefer pontificating instead of asking the candidates fair and relevant questions. The ABC debate that year offered an especially egregious example. Rather than illuminate the differences between the candidates, moderator George Stephanopoulos tried to lure the Republican candidates into saying something that hardly reflected the main topics of concern to Republican primary voters.
“Governor Romney, do you believe that states have the right to ban contraception? Or is that trumped by a constitutional right to privacy?”
Romney was quick on the uptake.
“George, this is an unusual topic that you’re raising. Do states have a right to ban contraception? I can’t imagine a state banning contraception. I can’t imagine the circumstances where a state would want to do so . . .”
Stephanopoulos pressed on: “Do you believe states have that right or not?”
“George, I don’t know if the state has a right to ban contraception, no state wants to! The idea of you putting forward things that states might want to do, that no state wants to do, and then asking me whether they can do it or not is kind of a silly thing.”6 That was a hard punch back at the moderator by conventional standards.
Debates aside, by April, the delegate math had solidified, and Mitt Romney was destined to be the Republican nominee. But after spending so much time and money putting away Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, and all the rest, Romney now took one body blow after another from the well-rested, well-funded Obama campaign.
The Obama campaign had mastered the art of using social media for donations, volunteer recruitment, and votes—things I wished we could have done at the RNC. Though we lacked the time and money to fully catch up, the Romney campaign was full of former RNC staffers who understood and valued the help we could provide. I became a regular commuter between Washington, D.C., and Boston, Massachusetts. The Obama campaign targeted conservatives with front groups that railed against Mitt Romney as undeserving of any true conservative’s vote. It was fake news—aimed at discouraging Republican voters—but many fell for it and stayed at home.
Romney did the best he could. He was masterful in his first debate with Obama. By September, though, opinion had congealed against Romney. Our analysis showed that however well Romney did in substantive debate, it had little impact on the voters who thought he was wealthy and out of touch—an image that didn’t fade when he offered to make a $10,000 bet in one primary debate and when he was recorded saying that 47 percent of Americans would vote for Obama no matter what because they paid no federal income tax and were dependent on the government.
I liked and admired Romney, but he had run before in 2008. He knew that questions about his personal taxes and finances would come up, and he needed to have better answers. The Romney ad campaigns were equally lacking, almost from another era. They failed to include sports advertising and did not focus enough on reaching Hispanics. Four years later, Donald Trump would enormously outperform Romney, not only in chutzpah and in dominating media coverage but also in voicing the concerns of working-class voters.
“So waddya think happened?”
Donald Trump sat behind his desk, hands resting on its surface. A bank of large windows overlooked Fifth Avenue, with a view down the street to a nice green corner of Central Park.
Inside, Donald Trump’s office was a mélange of helmets, boxers’ belts, trophies, plaques, and awards. The walls were covered, floor to ceiling, with framed pictures, most of them magazine covers featuring the visage of Trump himself. Trump had run out of room on the walls, so more framed pictures populated the space around the floorboard. His desk housed columns of memos and blueprints.
After the election, Reince had agreed to run for a second term as chairman, and I had agreed to stay on as communications director. Now Reince and I and the staff from the RNC finance department were in New York to meet with big, loya
l Republican donors, one of whom resided in a tower that bore his name. We went to Trump Tower for constructive criticism and, we hoped, a large donation. Trump had been a big Romney supporter and was disappointed by his loss.
I told him that the Democrats had huge advantages in voter data and online messaging. He nodded and shot back an analysis of his own.
“Romney blew it,” Trump said. “He should have had me speak at the convention. He could have used me more.”
CHAPTER FOUR
MEETING TRUMP
One cool day in May 2016, I was summoned to the tarmac of Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to catch a ride to New York City with the presumptive Republican nominee for president.
I had seen the plane dubbed “Trump Force One” many times on television. But it was something else to see the famous Trump name in strong letters and imperial gold paint shining in the sun. I couldn’t help but notice each letter one by one. I started climbing the back stairs of the Boeing 757-200 leading to the exclusive world of Donald J. Trump, presidential candidate. Reality television had become reality for me, and I was finding it a little disorienting.
I was the first to arrive, ahead of the motorcade. As I continued my climb, a flight attendant greeted me and showed me the area where I would be sitting.
After a few moments of settling in, I relaxed in my chair and looked around. Donald Trump gets a lot of ribbing in the press for the over-the-top decor of his homes, but I found the interior of his jet to be tastefully appointed—high-back seats of cream-colored leather, polished panels of cherry wood with spotless brass accents.
Within a minute, the doors were sealed and the Rolls-Royce engines roared to life. We lifted upward in the air, five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand feet—bouncing through turbulence on our way to our cruising altitude. I was seated with other staff—I must have made small talk with some of them, but I don’t remember it because my focus settled forward, on the candidate’s head, bobbing as he spoke energetically to someone in the seat facing him.