Fear: Trump in the White House

by Bob Woodward

McMaster broke his silence and raged at the secretary of state.

  “You don’t work with the White House,” McMaster said. “You never consult me or anybody on the NSC staff. You blow us off constantly.” He cited examples when he tried to set up calls or meetings or breakfasts with Tillerson. “You are off doing your own thing” and communicate directly with the president, Mattis, Priebus or Porter. “But it’s never with the National Security Council,” and “that’s what we’re here to do.” Then he issued his most dramatic charge. “You’re affirmatively seeking to undermine the national security process.”

  “That’s not true,” Tillerson replied. “I’m available anytime. I talk to you all the time. We just had a conference call yesterday. We do these morning calls three times a week. What are you talking about, H.R.? I’ve worked with you. I’ll work with anybody.”

  Tillerson continued, “I’ve also got to be secretary of state. Sometimes I’m traveling. Sometimes I’m in a different time zone. I can’t always take your calls.”

  McMaster said he consulted with the relevant assistant secretaries of state if the positions were filled.

  “I don’t have assistant secretaries,” Tillerson said, coldly, “because I haven’t picked them, or the ones that I have, I don’t like and I don’t trust and I don’t work with. So you can check with whoever you want. That has no bearing on me.” The rest of the State Department didn’t matter; if you didn’t go through him, it didn’t count.

  * * *

  After the meeting, Tillerson, still steaming, came down to Porter’s office. “The White House is such a disaster,” he said. “So many of those guys upstairs, they just don’t have a clue what’s going on.”

  Tillerson said that Johnny DeStefano, the 39-year-old director of personnel, couldn’t pick someone for a key State Department post if they hit him in the nose. DeStefano had worked as a Hill staffer and knew nothing about foreign policy. “You wouldn’t believe this guy he sent over for me to interview” to be an assistant secretary of state.

  “It was a joke. I don’t know in what possible universe anybody could have thought that he could possibly be qualified for this job.”

  Priebus later said to Porter, “Oh wow, fireworks! It seems like Rex is really upset about a lot of stuff right now. He’s just sort of ill-tempered.”

  Porter believed that McMaster absolutely had a point, though his meetings and calls could be tedious and not always necessary. But the breakdown between Tillerson and McMaster proved the general dysfunction.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, July 19, 2017, Trump granted an unusual interview to The New York Times and launched a head-spinning attack on Jeff Sessions.

  He said he would never have appointed Sessions if he had known he would recuse himself from overseeing the Russia investigation. “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’ It’s extremely unfair—and that’s a mild word—to the president.”

  Trump was still stewing about Sessions three days later, Saturday morning, July 22, when he boarded Marine One to head to Norfolk, Virginia. He was speaking at the commissioning ceremony of the USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), a $13 billion warship.

  Trump and Priebus were chatting. Trump said he had always admired Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder. Though he disagreed with their policies, of course, Holder had stuck with Obama no matter what came up or whatever the controversy for eight years. There had been no recusals and no dodging the political crossfire. Holder had been willing to take the hit for his president.

  “Jeff isn’t a guy that, through thick and thin, is willing to stick with me,” he said.

  Sessions, Trump said, could have declined to recuse himself in the Russia investigation by saying he had nothing to do with the day-to-day operations of the Trump campaign. He had been on the campaign plane and gone to rallies but he had nothing to do with strategy—the ground game, the persuasion mail or the digital operations.

  He was also unhappy with Sessions’s testimony before various congressional committees about meetings or discussions with Russians.

  “Get his resignation,” Trump ordered Priebus.

  Stephen Miller, who was a former Sessions staffer and big supporter, later told Priebus, “We’re in real trouble. Because if you don’t get the resignation, he’s going to think you’re weak. If you get it, you’re going to be part of a downward-spiral calamity.”

  Priebus spoke to Sessions several times. The attorney general did not want to resign. If the president doesn’t want you to serve, Priebus said, then you ought not to serve.

  No, he wouldn’t go.

  Eventually, Trump agreed to hold off. He did not want an immediate resignation because he said he wanted them to get through the Sunday talk shows the next day.

  Two days later Trump continued the barrage on Sessions, calling him “our beleaguered A.G.” on Twitter.

  In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he dismissed Sessions’s endorsement during the presidential campaign. “When they say he endorsed me, I went to Alabama. I had 40,000 people. He was a senator from Alabama. I won the state by a lot, massive numbers. A lot of states I won by massive numbers. But he was a senator, he looks at 40,000 people and he probably says, ‘What do I have to lose?’ And he endorsed me. So it’s not like a great loyal thing about the endorsement.”

  Bannon asked Sessions to come to the White House. Sessions took a chair in what Bannon called his war room, the walls lined with whiteboards listing Trump’s campaign promises. The attorney general, small in stature, was nervous but pleasant.

  “Look,” Bannon said, “you were there through the whole time” of the campaign. “You knew this thing was a shit show, totally disorganized.”

  Sessions could not dispute that.

  Bannon turned to what was perhaps the fondest memory of their political lives—when Trump had won the presidency on November 9. Victory was as sweet as it got.

  “Is there any doubt in your mind on the 9th, when it was called, that it was the hand?” Bannon asked, dipping into a shared religious belief system. “That divine providence that worked through Trump to win this?”

  “No,” Sessions said.

  “You mean that?”

  Sessions said he did.

  “It was the hand of God, right? You and I were there. We know there’s no other way it could’ve happened than the hand of God.”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine,” Bannon said. “You’re never going to quit, are you?”

  “I’m never quitting.” Trump would have to fire him.

  “You promise me you’ll never quit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because it’s going to get worse.”

  “What do you mean?” Sessions asked.

  “It’s all a diversion.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Jared’s testifying.” Trump’s son-in-law was appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday and the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. “They didn’t think they had enough cover.”

  “He wouldn’t do that to me,” Sessions said.

  “He’d fucking do that to you in a second. He’s doing it to you! You watch! When Jared finishes testifying, if they think it’s good testimony, he’ll stop tweeting.”

  On July 24 Kushner released a long, carefully lawyered statement ahead of his congressional appearance. “I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government. I had no improper contacts. I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector.”

  The Trump attacks on Sessions subsided for a while. It was a sideshow, a diversion. He did believe Sessions had failed him, though, so it was a diversion with conviction.

&
nbsp; * * *

  Trump’s attacks on Sessions awakened Republicans in the U.S. Senate. Graham said Sessions “believes in the rule of law.” Other Republicans defended their former colleague and said it would not be easy to get a replacement confirmed by the Senate. Deputy Rod Rosenstein might resign. It could cascade into a Watergate-like situation reminiscent of the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon fired the special prosecutor and the attorney general and his deputy both resigned. Priebus worried that could make the Comey problem look like child’s play.

  Trump subjected Sessions to a withering attack in the Oval Office, calling him an “idiot.” Despite his promise to Bannon, Sessions sent a resignation letter to Trump. Priebus talked the president out of accepting it.

  Recusing himself made the attorney general a “traitor,” Trump said to Porter. The president made fun of his Southern accent. “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner.” Trump even did a little impression of a Southern accent, mimicking how Sessions got all mixed up in his confirmation hearings, denying that he had talked to the Russian ambassador.

  “How in the world was I ever persuaded to pick him for my attorney general?” Trump asked Porter. “He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama. What business does he have being attorney general?”

  Trump would not stop. He told Porter, “If he was going to recuse himself from this, why did he let himself be picked attorney general? That was the ultimate betrayal. How could he have done that?”

  Porter had an answer, which he presented as gently as he could. “There are well-established rules and guidelines for when you have to recuse yourself. And he met those. This wasn’t a political decision on his part. This wasn’t something he wanted to do. He consulted the relevant experts at the Department of Justice and was told you meet the criteria, so you have to.”

  “Well,” Trump said angrily, “he never should have taken the job. He’s the attorney general. He can make these decisions on his own. He doesn’t have to listen to his staff. If he was that smart of a lawyer and he knew he was going to have to recuse himself, he should’ve told me and I never would’ve picked him. But he’s slow. He probably didn’t even know.”

  CHAPTER

  27

  Priebus called a full senior staff meeting at 8 a.m. on July 20 on immigration. Stephen Miller made a presentation. To some, it amounted to a shopping list of issues—the border wall, border enforcement, catch and release, immigration judges, the diversity lottery, sanctuary cities, Kate’s Law—which would increase penalties for people who attempted to illegally reenter the U.S. after having been deported—and chain migration.

  We need to select the winning issues, Miller said, the ones that are bad issues for the Democrats. We need to then convince the Senate to take on tough wedge issue votes such as defunding sanctuary cities.

  Kushner strongly disagreed with Miller’s strategy. We need to focus on bipartisan, constructive things, and even find things we could give the Democrats—“a few of our priorities, a couple of theirs.” He wanted “a path forward so we can actually get something done.”

  Priebus disagreed with Kushner. “I know the Hill. I know what’s going to be good in terms of these messaging votes.” A real estate developer from New York City like Jared didn’t know much about politics.

  Jared protested. “I know how to get things done and be constructive and take people with disagreements and get them in the same place.”

  Kushner said that most of the legislative discussions in the White House involved Priebus acolytes from the combative Republican National Committee, or from former senator Sessions’s office or from Pence’s stable of conservatives. None of them had experience negotiating bipartisan agreements or getting deals done. Extremists and people trying to score political points were running the legislative agenda.

  * * *

  Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.

  They met for lunch at the Pentagon to develop an action plan.

  One cause of the problem was the president’s fervent belief that annual trade deficits of about $500 billion harmed the American economy. He was on a crusade to impose tariffs and quotas despite Cohn’s best efforts to educate him about the benefits of free trade.

  How could they convince and, in their frank view, educate the president? Cohn and Mattis realized they were nowhere close to persuading him. The Groundhog Day–like meetings on trade continued and the acrimony only grew.

  “Let’s get him over here to the Tank,” Mattis proposed. The Tank is the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It might focus him.

  “Great idea,” Cohn said. “Let’s get him out of the White House.” No press; no TVs; no Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s personal secretary, who worked within shouting distance of the Oval Office. There wouldn’t even be any looking out the window, because there were no windows in the Tank.

  Getting Trump out of his natural environment could do the trick. The idea was straight from the corporate playbook—a retreat or off-site meeting. They would get Trump to the Tank with his key national security and economic team to discuss worldwide strategic relations.

  Mattis and Cohn agreed. Together they would fight Trump on this. Trade wars or disruptions in the global markets could savage and undermine the precarious stability in the world. The threat could spill over to the military and intelligence community.

  Mattis couldn’t understand why the U.S. would want to pick a fight with allies, whether it was NATO, or friends in the Middle East, or Japan—or particularly with South Korea.

  * * *

  Just before 10 a.m. on July 20, a stifling, cloudless summer Thursday six months into his presidency, Donald Trump crossed the Potomac River to the Pentagon.

  The Tank had its appeal. Trump loved the room. Sometimes known as the Gold Room for its carpet and curtains, it is ornate and solemn, essentially a private, high-security retreat reflecting decades of history.

  Mattis and Cohn organized the presentations as part history lesson and part geostrategic showdown. It was also a belated effort to address the looming question: How does this administration establish its policy priorities and stick to them?

  McMaster did not attend because he had a family obligation.

  Maps depicting American commitments around the world—military deployments, troops, nuclear weapons, diplomatic posts, ports, intelligence assets, treaties and even trade deals—filled two large wall screens, telling the story of the United States in the world. Even countries where the U.S. had ports and flyover rights were shown, as were key radar and other surveillance installations.

  “The great gift of the greatest generation to us,” Mattis opened, “is the rules-based, international democratic order.” This global architecture brought security, stability and prosperity.

  Bannon sat off to the side, a backbencher with a line of sight to the president. He knew this globalist worldview too well. He viewed it as a kind of fetish. His own obsession was still America First.

  This is going to be fun, Bannon thought, as Mattis made the case that the organizing principles of the past were still workable and necessary.

  There it was—the beating heart of the problem, Bannon thought.

  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson followed.

  “This is what has kept the peace for 70 years,” the former Texas oilman said.

  It was more of the old world order to Bannon: expensive, limitless engagements, promises made and kept.

  Trump was shaking his head, disagreeing, although he did not say anything.

  Cohn spoke next. He made the case for free trade: Mexico. Canada. Japan. Europe. South Korea. He presented the import and export data. We’re a huge exporter of agriculture products, about $130 billion a year, he noted. W
e need these countries to buy our agricultural products. The whole middle of the United States is basically farmers, he said.

  Most of them were Trump voters.

  U.S. arms deals abroad amounted to $75.9 billion in fiscal year 2017. It’s no mistake that we’ve got a lot of military aircraft at the same airport in Singapore where they buy a lot of Boeing aircraft, Cohn said. It’s no mistake that we’ve got enormous intelligence operations out of Singapore. It’s no mistake that our naval fleet goes in and out of there to refuel and resupply.

  Trade deficits were growing the U.S. economy, Cohn asserted.

  “I don’t want to hear that,” Trump said. “It’s all bullshit!”

  Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, another Goldman veteran, spoke about the importance of the security allies and trading partners.

  Trump turned to look at Bannon. Then he looked again. Bannon took this as a signal.

  “Hang on for a second,” Bannon said to everyone as he stood up. “Let’s get real.”

  He picked one of the most controversial international agreements that bound the United States to this global order. “The president wants to decertify the Iranian deal and you guys are slow-walking it. It’s a terrible deal. He wants to decertify so he can renegotiate.” Trump would not just tear it up, as he’d promised in the campaign.

  “One of the things he wants to do is” impose sanctions on Iran, the chief strategist said. “Is one of your fucking great allies up in the European Union” going to back the president? All this talk about how they are our partners. “Give me one that’s going to back the president on sanctions?”

  Mnuchin attempted to answer on the importance of the allies.

  “Give me one guy,” Bannon said. “One country. One company. Who’s going to back sanctions?”

  Nobody answered.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Trump said. “He just made my point. You talk about all these guys as allies. There’s not an ally up there. Answer Steve’s question. Who’s going to back us?”