The Briefing

by Sean Spicer

  While the administration has caught a lot of flak for its turnover of personnel, that’s largely because it took a while for the president to realize what sort of people he needed in which positions. Remember, he wasn’t hanging curtains in the Oval Office before election day, and he wasn’t lining up a White House roster during the campaign months either. But once we started building a roster, the discipline and thoroughness with which we prepared cabinet nominees and senior agency appointments was unprecedented. Unfortunately, we were unprepared for the Democrats’ obstruction of nominees, slowing the process of Senate confirmations as much as they possibly could. Sixteen of President Trump’s nominees to head major departments or agencies were still waiting to be confirmed at the end of January 2017—that was nine more than President Obama had at the end of January 2009 and fourteen more than President Bush had at the end of January 2001.15

  The leaks, which were an annoyance during the transition, took a more serious turn within the White House. Rough drafts of domestic policies were handed to the media. Worse, the details of the president’s private phone calls with the prime minister of Australia and the president of Mexico were leaked. This release of the call transcripts was far worse than an embarrassment; it was a major hindrance to the president’s ability to conduct foreign policy. It signaled to foreign leaders that the United States could not be trusted to keep leader-to-leader conversations private. It undermined the president’s ability to have candid conversations with top alliance leaders and adversaries. It threatened to shut down candor on both sides. The person who leaked transcripts of the president’s calls committed a serious crime—embarrassing the administration is bad enough, but undermining this country is dangerous.

  Trump’s opinions on controversial issues were pretty transparent. Anyone who wanted to know what he was thinking only had to read his tweets. Keeping an eye out for his early morning, late-night, and weekend tweets was part of my new world order. I soon learned that there were two kinds of Trump tweets. There were the early morning and late-night tweets that were pure and unfiltered Trump when he had no staff around him. Then there were the business-hour tweets that were filtered through or drafted by the social media director, Dan Scavino. The former often caused me trouble because the press would latch onto any statements they saw as potentially embarrassing or controversial. The latter, on the other hand, were typically incisive and confrontational, but constructive. Dan Scavino was an invaluable editor for Trump, but he couldn’t be on call twenty-four hours a day. One example of a late-night tweet that got a lot of media, but was really rather harmless and amusing, was this famous fragment, issued at 12:06 a.m. from the president: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.”

  I assumed he meant “coverage,” and his thumbs simply hit the wrong button. But the minute I saw it, I said to myself, “Oh brother, here we go.” I would later see how even the most trivial events could go viral in the media. I later assured reporters in the most serious tone, “Only the president and other select people know what that means.”

  But then there were many things that went right, at least from a media standpoint, where Donald Trump spoke with the most convincing language of all—action.

  At the end of January, acting Attorney General Sally Yates—a holdover from the Obama administration—refused to enforce the administration’s call to enhance the vetting of visa applicants from seven countries that were either known sponsors of terrorism or that had unstable governments endangered by terrorists. It is understandable why Yates, one of the luminaries of the liberal legal establishment, would find executing a Trump order distasteful. But the Constitution doesn’t give law enforcement officers leeway to veto legally binding instructions they do not like.

  Sally Yates was setting herself up to be a liberal martyr. She got what she wanted. She was fired. In my press briefing on January 31, I broke through the media hysteria by calmly and rationally explaining why firing Sally Yates was a constitutional necessity, not a choice. That same day, I also announced, speaking of the constitution, that the president had nominated Neil Gorsuch to the open seat on the Supreme Court.

  Former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had established the precedent that the Senate could not filibuster a Supreme Court nominee. When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Republicans, holding a majority in the Senate, decided to hold the seat open until the November presidential election. President Obama disagreed with that decision and nominated D.C. Circuit Court Chief Judge Merrick Garland for the seat.

  Neil Gorsuch ticked all the boxes—Columbia, Harvard, Oxford, a Supreme Court clerkship, U.S. circuit court judge—and was well respected.

  And yet, with a thin Republican majority in the Senate and Democrats feeling that Judge Garland had been wronged, Neil Gorsuch was not a shoo-in.

  Jason Miller, originally slated to be our communications director, had resigned for personal reasons, and for a while I doubled as White House communications director and press secretary. That was a challenge, but in the Gorsuch nomination, my team and I managed to get everything just about right.

  Our White House communications team worked hand in glove with Judge Gorsuch, the Office of White House Counsel, and key staff on Capitol Hill. We developed a thorough media plan. We armed surrogate speakers with talking points and deployed them on cable shows. We briefed legal organizations. We blanketed the Hill with information about why Gorsuch was an excellent pick for the Supreme Court. We worked with all our usual conservative allies—including The Heritage Foundation and Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society—to energize conservatives in support of Gorsuch.

  The media stumbled in its reporting, and this only added to the drama of our initial announcement of Gorsuch. The media was keeping tabs on the short list of potential nominees. One strong potential nominee, Judge Thomas Hardiman of Pennsylvania, had been seen jumping into his car to go to a meeting. The rumor circuit assured Washington that Judge Hardiman was heading to D.C. to meet the president. Even though Hardiman never left Pennsylvania, there were rumors that he had been seen around the White House. The media’s obsession with this rumor provided us with the perfect foil to keep Neil Gorsuch under wraps, a secret that did not begin to leak until after 6:00 p.m. on the East Coast, less than three hours before our announcement.

  The president entered the East Room at precisely 9:02 p.m. at the request of the broadcast networks. We had invited senators from both parties to the East Room, but only Republicans accepted. And we arranged for the media to interview them in the East Room immediately following the announcement, allowing us not to miss a single beat. That way many Americans could and did see their home state senator praising the nomination of Judge Gorsuch. Our rollout and execution of Gorsuch’s confirmation was pure teamwork, and it showed.

  In the end, Neil Gorsuch was confirmed as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. For millions of Trump voters, this was easily the president’s most important accomplishment of his first year in office.

  On January 29, 2017, I donned a tux to attend the Alfalfa Club’s annual, black-tie banquet, an evening in which establishment Washington lets its hair down and presents mild roasts of senators, the president, and media figures. Once I got there, I was called away by Reince Priebus.

  “We’ve just conducted a special forces operation against a terrorist base in central Yemen,” the chief of staff told me. “A U.S. Navy SEAL was killed during the operation.”

  This was the first military operation of the new administration. The president had ordered men into harm’s way, and we had lost one of our best. I knew the media would treat this as a test case of our competence, and I knew that the president would want to speak to the brave Navy SEAL’s widow.

  Days later, I listened as Donald Trump called Carryn Owens, the widow of Senior Chief Petty Officer William Ryan Owens. I had known Donald Trump as a billionaire, a reality TV show host, a Republican donor, a celebrity, a Republican candidate for president, and now
I saw him truly as the commander in chief, a man who cares deeply about our troops, a man who knows how tragic it is to see loved ones lost, and a man who has—as I learned when my own father passed away—a deep vein of compassion and sympathy. The president joined the family at Dover Air Force Base for the return of Chief Owens.

  The media inevitably questioned the success of the mission of which Owens had been a part. I walked them though the history that led up to the raid on the terrorist compound. On November 7, 2016, the United States Central Command (CENTCOM) submitted a plan for the raid to the Department of Defense. The raid was subjected to immediate legal analysis. On December 19, the Department of Defense recommended that the plan be moved ahead. It was sent then to the National Security Council staff.

  On January 6, 2017, an interagency deputies meeting was held. The deputies approved the military action for the next “moonless night,” which wouldn’t occur until after Donald Trump was sworn in as president. On January 24, President Trump’s secretary of defense, Jim Mattis, read the memo authorizing the raid and submitted it to the White House, saying he supported the action. The next day, the president was briefed by General Flynn on the potential operation.

  The president wanted to discuss the matter further with his top advisers, so he held a dinner meeting whose attendees included Vice President Pence, Secretary Mattis, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Joseph Dunford Jr., Reince Priebus, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, and others. The planned operation was laid out and analyzed in great detail.

  In the morning, the interagency deputies reaffirmed their support of the mission. On January 26, President Trump signed the memo authorizing the action.

  I thought the process behind the mission was important, but the press didn’t care about that. They only wanted to know whether the White House considered the mission a “success” and were clearly trying to maneuver me into implying that Chief Owen’s life was expendable. I explained in the briefings and in private, as patiently as I could, that 1) the mission was strategically a success; 2) it would not have been allowed to proceed if we had known in advance we would lose a sailor; 3) in the fog of war, you never know how even the best planned operation will play out.

  Barbara Starr, CNN’s Pentagon correspondent, saw our point.

  She reported that, during the raid, Special Forces had seized laptops and cell phones that allowed U.S. intelligence to identify hundreds of al-Qaeda contacts, including potential terrorists in the West.16

  Holding two, high-profile jobs in the White House meant a lot of pressure, but it had its rewards. I was in the Oval Office when Vice President Pence told President Trump that he planned to attend the Super Bowl and watch the New England Patriots take on the Atlanta Falcons.

  Growing up in Rhode Island, I had been a Patriots fan my entire life—even during the team’s lean years.

  “Sean’s a big Patriots fan,” the president said. “He should fly down with you.”

  After scrupulously making sure that I complied with government ethics rules, I splurged and spent $2,000 of my own money to purchase two Super Bowl tickets (one for a friend) and flew down to Houston, Texas, on Air Force Two. After we landed, the vice president made an impromptu stop at a barbecue spot. It is always fun to watch people’s eyes light up when they see the president or vice president walk in unannounced on a spontaneous visit.

  Even with the money I had invested in game tickets, I had the last seat in the last row of the stadium, section 400, above the end zone. My head almost touched the fencing at the top of the stadium. In the third quarter, when defeat looked inevitable for the Patriots, the vice president, out of respect for the fans, decided to leave the stadium early, lest fans get snarled up in his security detail. The entire ride back to Air Force Two, we listened on AM radio as the game tightened up and the Patriots staged one of the greatest comebacks of all time. The Patriots won 34–28.

  When the motorcade pulled up to the plane on the tarmac, the vice president jumped out of his limo, looked around, and shouted, “Where’s Sean?”

  I walked up and gave Mike Pence my hardest high five.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  TURBULENCE, INSIDE AND OUT

  By February, I had settled into the routine of my new job.

  Most mornings, I rose just after 5:00 a.m., checked Twitter (I had notifications set up from @realDonaldTrump so that I knew in real time when tweets happened), drove the seven miles from Alexandria, Virginia, to the White House, drove through two sets of gates and Secret Service checkpoints, and parked my car on West Executive Avenue (just a few spaces from the vice president’s limo). My first stop each morning was the gym on the first floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a fifty-minute workout on the elliptical while taking in the morning news. In between commercial breaks, I would multitask on my iPhones, looking at emails, Twitter feeds, and transcripts of overnight news. To say that I “worked out” in the morning was truly an insult to working out, but it got me moving and was better than nothing.

  Just before 7:00 a.m., after shaving, showering, and getting dressed, I would drop off my gym bag in my car as I crossed back over to the West Wing to meet Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah, a former research director at the RNC. Raj would be ready to brief me on the stories and issues he thought were popping that morning. I would read his digests until about 7:20 a.m. The top members of our press team would join us, and we would create an informal first draft of the day’s briefing. We wanted to get a handle on the day’s big stories and issues and decide whether we could play offense or, more likely, if we had to play defense. After a while, we had a pretty good sense of which stories would pick up steam and dominate our day and which stories would dissipate.

  The press staff had specific issue areas they focused on, and they kept me briefed on news involving their respective departments and agencies so that I could avoid being blindsided.

  At 8:00 a.m., I went to the senior staff meeting where I briefed Reince and the other senior staffers—Steve Bannon, Jared, and Kellyanne, in addition to people in institutional positions such as the national security advisor, the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, the White House counsel, the director of legislative affairs, the head of scheduling, the political director, and the head of presidential personnel—about what they could expect over the course of the day. They, in turn, informed me about things we might have missed, especially changes to the president’s schedule or late-night developments in Congress or with foreign governments.

  At 9:30 a.m., I met with my staff for more in-depth briefings, often with experts from, say, the Afghan desk of the National Security Council or the Office Legislative Affairs who would discuss legislation pending on the Hill. Sometimes, these briefings included a member of the Office of White House Counsel who would advise us on what we could or could not comment on.

  At some time between 10:00 a.m. and noon, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and I would poke our heads into the Oval Office and get the president’s take on the issues of the day.

  He was always full of questions, wanting background on where a story came from and, of course, curious to know what we were going to say about it. And he was never shy about giving us directions. I’d be peppered throughout the day with calls from the president as stories evolved. He was extremely engaged, very particular, and insistent about how he wanted his points delivered. The more time I spent with him, the more I came to understand that President Trump wanted me to repeat his answers to the press verbatim.

  Sometimes I referred these responses to a lawyer in the Office of White House Counsel. If that attorney told us, “Hey, you can’t say that,” we’d meet with President Trump in the Oval Office to hash out what we could say.

  At 12:30 p.m., I’d have lunch. Most days, I ate at my desk. I would call the White House Mess, a small dining facility operated by the Navy and located on the lower level of the West Wing across the hall from the Situation Room, and order blackened salmon and salad with oil and vinegar. (If I was f
eeling a bit wild, I’d order chicken tenders.) While I ate, I read reports and long articles. After lunch, I would take meetings with staff members, conduct interviews, and prepare for the afternoon briefing. I would then review all that I had heard and read, finalize any last-minute changes in my opening statement with Assistant Press Secretary Natalie Strom, leave my office, and walk down the hall about fifty feet to face the harsh lights of the briefing. Before I walked out, I would try and have a moment of reflection and read a daily passage from the book Jesus Calling for inspiration. I mentioned a version of the book during a Fox and Friends segment with Abby Huntsman, and a viewer of the segment sent a shipment of the book so that everyone in our office could have a copy. Behind my desk was a wooden table with two drawers. On top of the table sat a box with a picture of St. Gabriel on it that Rebecca had given me as a gift when I took the job. In the box, I had two medals that I would slip into my pocket: one of St. Michael in honor of my dad and another of Mother Teresa—now Saint Teresa of Calcutta—that was blessed by the Holy Father and given to me early in my tenure by John Gizzi of Newsmax. In his note to me, John wrote, “it will guide you through times.” Man, was he right.

  After the briefing, I typically felt drained, but there was no time to relax. There were always loose ends to tie up—answers I had promised reporters, official statements that needed elaboration or clarification, and phone calls that needed to be returned.