The Room Where It Happened

by John Bolton;

  “What’s a win in Afghanistan?” Trump asked.

  Mattis correctly responded, “The United States doesn’t get attacked.” Finally switching his tack, Mattis offered, “Let’s say we’re ending the war, not that we’re withdrawing.”

  “Okay, you ready?” Trump asked no one in particular, but using this favorite phrase indicating something big was coming. “Say we have been there for eighteen years. We did a great job. If anybody comes here, they will be met like never before. That’s what we say,” he said, although Trump then expanded the withdrawal to include Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. Then Trump came back at Mattis: “I gave you what you asked for. Unlimited authority, no holds barred. You’re losing. You’re getting your ass kicked. You failed.” This painful repetition demonstrates that Trump, who endlessly stresses he is the only one who makes decisions, had trouble taking responsibility for them.

  “Can we delay it [the withdrawal] so we don’t lose more men and diplomats?” Mattis asked.

  Trump roared back, “We can’t afford it. We’ve failed. If it were turning out differently, I wouldn’t do it.”

  We wandered disconsolately down to Kelly’s office, where we reconnoitered what to do next. Dunford, who had been largely silent, said there was no way to withdraw everyone safely in the time frame Trump wanted, and he would insist on another meeting to explain why. Kelly, totally fed up by this point, said Trump cared only about himself (he was thinking at least in part about Trump’s unwillingness, up until that point, to visit Iraq or Afghanistan). Mattis then told Dunford to withdraw everyone from the Afghan boonies back to four or five key bases, from which they would depart the country, and to secure the landing and takeoff flight paths of the planes that would lift the men and equipment, as if another four-star Marine general couldn’t figure that out on his own. I honestly do not know how Kelly and Dunford restrained themselves from telling Mattis what he could do with his withdrawal plan, but this was the “five-star general” phenomenon at work. Mattis should have worried about persuading Trump, not nitty-gritty plans on the ground in Afghanistan.

  Afterward, I walked Pompeo to his car outside the West Wing, agreeing that Trump’s assessment of Republican views on Afghanistan was completely wrong. “He’s going to get crushed politically,” said Pompeo, “and deservedly so.” I concluded the generals really were in a cliché, fighting the last war, not dealing effectively with Trump’s attitude, which they were partly responsible for. As a latecomer, I saw that what seemed like successes to Mattis and his colleagues, such as the August 2017 Afghanistan speech, were, in retrospect, mistakes. Trump had been pushed far beyond where he wanted to go, and now he was overreacting in the other direction. The media’s hallowed “axis of adults” was not alone in this mistake, but before we could recover, we had to admit the misperception of Trump it rested upon. Khalilzad could pick up the pace of his negotiations, but his efforts were disconnected from what was happening on the ground in his country. It looked like there were a grim couple of months ahead.

  On December 20, as Pompeo later told me, just hours before his resignation, Mattis gave Pompeo not only his resignation letter but also other documents, one particularly important here. This was a draft public statement on the operational plans for the Afghan withdrawal, which basically preempted whatever Trump might say about it in his January State of the Union speech. Stunned, Pompeo told Mattis he simply could not release such a document and that there was no way to edit it to make it acceptable. Mattis asked if he would at least send it along to me, and Pompeo said he knew I would agree with him. Neither Pompeo nor I knew at the time that the Defense Department had drafted an “execute order” elaborating what the draft statement said, and distributed it to US commanders and embassies worldwide, all part of Mattis’s resignation scenario. We obviously understood this only hazily in all the confusion, but it produced an explosion of press stories. It reflected a common Mattis tactic, one of spite, to say, in effect, “You want withdrawal? You’ve got withdrawal.” They didn’t call him “Chaos” for nothing.

  Even after Mattis’s departure, Shanahan, Pompeo, and I continued the weekly breakfasts. On January 24, reflecting our divergent views on key points, Shanahan and I worried that Khalilzad was giving away too much, not because he was a poor negotiator, but because those were Pompeo’s instructions. The Taliban was insisting that the draft US-Taliban statement (itself a troubling concept) under negotiation say that all foreign forces (meaning us) would withdraw from Afghanistan.33 That certainly wouldn’t leave room for the counterterrorism capabilities, even though Trump said he wanted them. I worried that State was so wrapped up in getting a deal, it was losing the bigger picture—a congenital department problem. Pompeo vigorously disagreed, although he readily conceded the negotiations could go into a ditch at any point, hardly a vote of confidence in the Taliban as a “negotiating partner,” a term they like at State. The central problem with the diplomatic strategy was that if the Taliban really thought we were leaving, they had no incentive to talk seriously; they could simply wait, as they had often done before, and as Afghans had done for millennia. As the Taliban saying went, “You have the watches, we have the time.” The breakfast ended inconclusively, but Shanahan called later saying he remained very nervous about both the pace of the negotiations, which seemed to have picked up considerably, and their substance. Pompeo just wanted to negotiate a deal and declare success, without much more. This dichotomy characterized the internal debate for months to come.

  The State of the Union was delayed for weeks due to the acrimonious budget fight and partial government shutdown. It was finally scheduled for February 5, and the key passage on Afghanistan was mercifully brief: “In Afghanistan, my Administration is holding constructive talks with a number of Afghan groups, including the Taliban. As we make progress in these negotiations, we will be able to reduce our troop presence and focus on counter-terrorism.”34 This comment received little attention, but it embodied struggles that persisted until my final days in the White House. At least at this point there was still hope.

  CHAPTER 8 CHAOS AS A WAY OF LIFE

  If you can keep your head when all about you

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…

  RUDYARD KIPLING, “IF—”

  It took me about a month after my arrival at the Trump White House to have any chance to assess systematically how things worked inside. Dysfunctionality arose in many ways, often unfolding through specific policy issues, some of which I have described throughout this work.

  There were many more. During the last months of 2018 and early 2019, as Trump’s second year in office came to an end—roughly eight to nine months after my arrival—several seemingly disparate issues and individuals converged to push the Administration even deeper into uncharted territory.

  In early June 2018, for example, Kelly tried a new tactic on Trump’s schedule, beginning each day in the Oval, at eleven a.m., with “Chief of Staff” time, hoping to minimize the rambling lectures he delivered during his twice-weekly intelligence briefings. Of course, what most people found striking was that Trump’s “official” day didn’t start until almost lunchtime. Trump was not loafing during the morning. Instead, he spent considerable time working the phones in the Residence. He talked to all manner of people, sometimes US government officials (I spoke with him by phone before he arrived in the Oval nearly every day due to the press of events he needed to know about or I needed direction on), but he also spoke at length to people outside the government. It was an anomaly among contemporary Presidents by any definition.

  By contrast, a regular day for President George H. W. Bush, described by his first Chief of Staff, former Governor John Sununu, started like this:

  The president began his formal day in the Oval Office with an 8:00 a.m. intelligence briefing that would include the president, the vice president, National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and me. That meeting, the President’s Daily Briefing (PDB), was presented by the CIA and would take ten to fi
fteen minutes. Following that, always on the calendar for 8:15, was a separate half hour for Scowcroft to bring the president and us up to date on all foreign policy issues arising from the events that occurred overnight or were expected during the course of the upcoming day. That briefing segued into a similar one at 8:45 that I would lead, addressing all other issues beyond foreign policy. Scowcroft usually stayed for that as well. My meeting was scheduled to end at 9:15.1

  I would have thought I had died and gone to heaven to have had such an orderly approach to preparing for an upcoming day. As it was, Trump generally had only two intelligence briefings per week, and in most of those, he spoke at greater length than the briefers, often on matters completely unrelated to the subjects at hand.

  Trump’s schedule was the easiest anomaly to deal with. One of the hardest was his vindictiveness, as demonstrated by the constant eruptions against John McCain, even after McCain died and could do Trump no more harm. Another example of his vindictiveness was Trump’s August 15 decision to revoke former CIA Director John Brennan’s security clearance. Now, Brennan was no prize, and during his tenure the CIA became more politicized than at any other time in its history. He denied any improper behavior, but Trump was convinced Brennan was deeply implicated in abusing the FISA surveillance process to spy on his 2016 campaign, all of which was exacerbated by his constant presence in the media criticizing Trump after he took office.

  The press fastened on the revocation immediately after Sanders announced it during her daily noon briefing. Kelly said to me, “This Brennan thing is exploding,” having spent much of the afternoon on it. “This is big.” In an hour-long conversation just between the two of us, we went over what had happened. Kelly said that by mid to late July he thought he had gotten Trump off the idea of taking away people’s clearances, but Trump returned to it because his favorite media sources kept pounding away on it. Earlier in the day, Trump had wanted to revoke clearances from a longer list of names but had settled for Sanders reading the names out at the briefing, implicitly threatening to revoke the clearances at some point in the future. I pointed out that the whole idea had started with Rand Paul. It was largely symbolic, because having a security clearance didn’t mean Brennan or anyone else could just walk into the CIA and read whatever interested him. He had to have a “need to know,” and, for anything really important, would have to be read into the appropriate “compartments.”

  Kelly said he had had an argument with Trump about it, not the first such confrontation, but one that had obviously been harsher than previous ones. Kelly told Trump it was “not presidential,” which was true, and he told me it was “Nixonian,” also true. “Has there ever been a presidency like this?” Kelly asked me, and I assured him there had not. I thought there was a case against Brennan for politicizing the CIA, but Trump had obscured it by the blatantly political approach he took. It would only get worse if more clearances were lifted. Kelly agreed.

  In what by this point was already an emotional discussion for both of us, Kelly showed me a picture of his son, killed in Afghanistan in 2010. Trump had referred to him earlier that day, saying to Kelly, “You suffered the worst.” Since Trump was disparaging the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the time, he had seemingly implied that Kelly’s son had died needlessly. “Trump doesn’t care what happens to these guys,” Kelly said. “He says it would be ‘cool’ to invade Venezuela.” I said relatively little during the conversation, which was mostly Kelly venting his frustrations, very few of which I disagreed with. I couldn’t see how it was possible he would stay through the 2020 elections, though Trump had announced a few weeks before that he would. When I left Kelly’s office, I said nothing to anyone else.

  Perhaps uniquely in presidential history, Trump engendered controversy over attendance at funerals, starting with Barbara Bush’s in April 2018, which Trump did not attend (although four former Presidents and the First Lady did), and then at John McCain’s in late August. Kelly opened the weekly White House staff meeting on August 27 by saying, “I’m in a bad place today,” because of ongoing disagreements with Trump over whether to fly US government flags at half-mast and who would attend which services. McCain’s family didn’t want Trump at the services either, so the feeling was mutual. The final decision was that Pence would lead the Administration’s representation at both the Capitol Rotunda ceremony and the funeral service at Washington National Cathedral. The service was extremely well attended, with all the socializing that routinely accompanies even moments of passing. Among others I greeted were Bush 43 and Mrs. Bush, with Bush asking cheerily, “Still got a job, Bolton?” “For now,” I answered, and we all laughed. When George H. W. Bush later died during the Buenos Aires G20, Trump declared a national day of mourning, issued a fitting presidential statement, and spoke cordially with both George W. and Jeb Bush during the morning. He and the First Lady attended the National Cathedral service on December 5 without incident. It wasn’t so hard to do after all.

  During the controversy over McCain’s funeral, Trump tweeted that White House Counsel Don McGahn was leaving at the end of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation battle. Although McGahn had often joked to me, “We’re all only one tweet away,” this was a classic example of Trump’s announcing something already decided, without giving McGahn a chance to announce it first. I should have paid closer heed. As Kelly confirmed to me later, tensions between Trump and McGahn had become unsustainable because of McGahn’s (truthful) testimony to, and cooperation with, Mueller’s investigation. Even though Trump’s outside attorneys had approved McGahn’s role, they were all reportedly surprised by just how candid he was. In any event, the search for a replacement was immediately on.

  * * *

  Illegal immigration, a key Trump initiative, was a shambles. White House lawyer John Eisenberg approached me in mid-May 2018 to see if I had any interest in trying to repair the collapsed White House policy process on immigration generally and at the Mexican border in particular. I had no interest entering that arena without the White House Counsel’s office and Justice fully on board. Don McGahn, who for the best of reasons focused every waking moment on judicial nominations, saw immigration policy for the swamp it was and decided to stay out of it. Justice had its own problems. Now alerted, however, I kept my eye on the issue but followed McGahn’s example.

  I saw the problem firsthand at a Cabinet meeting on immigration, held on May 9, the day after we escaped the Iran nuclear deal. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Jeff Sessions were to report on what their respective departments were doing to close the Mexican border, followed by other Cabinet members discussing their areas. But this was not to be a “briefing” where Trump listened appreciatively to his team’s efforts, asked a few questions, and then patted them on their backs. Things went downhill after Sessions concluded, just as Nielsen was starting. Trump asked her why we couldn’t close the border, and Nielsen answered by listing all the difficulties she and her department faced. Trump interrupted, saying in front of the entire Cabinet and a coterie of White House aides, his voice rising, “You’re wrong. There’s no way we can’t close the border. Tell them the country is closed. We don’t have the people [such as immigration judges] to do all these things. That’s it. It’s like a movie theater when it gets filled.”

  This was already bad, but it got worse. Kelly tried to support Nielsen, who was effectively his protégé, but that was a mistake. Everyone knew Nielsen had the Homeland Security job largely because of Kelly, and his intervention made it look like she couldn’t defend herself, which was unfortunately proving to be true before a packed Cabinet Room. Kelly and Nielsen tried to turn things back toward Sessions, who appeared to say something new and different about the Department of Homeland Security’s authority at the border. He was uncomfortable discussing the issue and seemingly reversed himself, basically saying the department did not have the authority he had just explained it did. Kelly fired back, “We’re going to do what the Attorney General says is illegal and send the
m [the immigrants] back,” and Sessions twisted a little more. But Trump was still after Nielsen, and she didn’t have the wit to either remain silent or say, “We’ll get back to you in a few days with a better answer.” Finally, as if anyone could have missed the point, Trump said, “I got elected on this issue, and now I’m going to get unelected,” which might not have been far from the political truth. I thought as the meeting drew to a close it was only a matter of time before both Nielsen and Kelly resigned. And, according to numerous press reports, Nielsen came very close in Kelly’s office right afterward. This issue was a total mess, and unnecessary, because there was much that could be done to tighten up on fraudulent, unjustifiable, and made-up claims for asylum in the United States.