The Best People

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The Best People Page 2

by Alexander Nazaryan


  These were questions for another time. I rose to go.

  “Get the hell out of here, now,” the president told me. “All right. Good. Have a good time.”

  Preface: The End

  of Something

  What a happy night it was supposed to be for the people who gathered at the mansion in Massachusetts Avenue Heights on November 8, 2016. They were immensely accomplished, and they had gathered to celebrate the handing-over of the federal government to people just as accomplished as they, people who harbored the same convictions, people who were colleagues and friends, people who were going to serve President Clinton as ably as the men and women now congregating at the elegant Georgian manor in Northwest Washington had served President Obama.

  Few suspected they were about to witness the end of something, and the beginning of something else, something they could have scarcely imagined only hours before. That the night would attain a mythic quality, that people would talk about where they were the way an earlier generation remembered the precise details of learning that Kennedy had been shot.

  That day in November had transformed the nation. And so would this one.

  The Trump people knew, or so they would later claim. Speaking almost exactly two years after the election, someone who had been with Trump from the very start said he awoke that Tuesday without any doubt about who the victor would be. He said he’d known as far back as August 2015, when Trump held a rally in Mobile, Alabama. The campaign initially estimated that a couple thousand might show. Instead, they got thirty thousand.

  As for the polls? The Trump veteran took the suggestion with something like disgust. Fuck the polls. That was precisely what the establishment had never understood, what the prattling pundits on cable news failed to grasp. This was never about the polls.

  Relatively early in the evening, a few White House staffers decided to leave 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and troop up to the party in Massachusetts Avenue Heights, a small neighborhood of large homes sitting beneath the three soaring towers of the National Cathedral.

  The host of this affair was Penny S. Pritzker, the commerce secretary. Pritzker was not an ordinary government official: Ordinary government officials, even high-ranking ones, did not buy 1929 mansions for $7.95 million. A member of the Chicago family that founded the hotel company Hyatt, she had gone to Stanford and Harvard, becoming an accomplished entrepreneur in her own right. In 2008, she served as Obama’s campaign finance chair. By the time he selected her as his commerce secretary in the summer of 2013, she was worth close to $2 billion.

  Obama staffers—young, well educated, diverse—were known to like a party, and they had enlivened a city that had grown dull during the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency. The party at Penny Pritzker’s house was not, however, a beer-fueled affair of the kind one might have found that evening in an Adams Morgan row house. This was instead a sumptuous, catered evening, with a buffet dinner and large-screen televisions set up in every room to show the results of the presidential election.

  Several top Obama administration officials were present: Susan E. Rice, the national security advisor who had struggled to formulate the administration’s response to the killing of four Americans at the consulate in Benghazi, Libya; Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew, who had continued the work of his predecessor Timothy F. Geithner in keeping the nation from backsliding into financial calamity; Sally Jewell, the secretary of the interior, one of several cabinet members to advance the administration’s focus on global warming; W. Neil Eggleston, a veteran of Democratic politics who was finishing a term as White House counsel; Michael Froman, the U.S. trade representative, who’d recently helped negotiate the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

  The men and women who had come to mark the night with Pritzker, in other words, were custodians of the order Obama had ushered in. That order was not always popular, even among some liberal Democrats, but it was based on empirical observations conducted by people who were certain that reason and data would triumph over feeling and fear. Among these officials, there was little argument: The future was going to be neoliberal, technocratic, inclusive, and diverse. The GOP was dying, the conservative movement stuck in a rut roughly corresponding to the length of the George W. Bush administration. All this was obvious, at least to the columnists and commentators who repeated it incessantly in late October and early November, in the days leading up to the presidential election.

  The several people who came from the White House reported that Obama was upbeat about the prospects for Clinton, whom he defeated in 2008 and endorsed in 2016. Later, he would voice public complaint about how Clinton ran her campaign, which employed data scientists who could tailor an appeal precisely to one Cleveland suburb or another, a campaign that could summon Jay-Z or Bruce Springsteen to headline rallies. But the Clinton campaign’s impressive mechanics disguised the fact that this was a machine. It lacked heart. It knew everything about the voters in suburban Cleveland, but it could not tell those voters a story they wanted or needed to hear.

  None of this was apparent yet, in the early evening of November 8, or at least not as apparent as it would become in the days and months to come.

  The first signs of trouble came around 10:39 p.m., when Ohio was called for Trump. It wasn’t close, either, with Trump up by nearly nine percentage points. “It is remarkable, what we’re seeing here,” Jake Tapper said on CNN. Tapper observed that in the reliably Democratic suburbs of Philadelphia where he had been raised, the margins for Clinton were also not as high as they should have been. Something was amiss.

  And there it was, the thing they feared, now upon them. Florida went to Trump, as did North Carolina. Michigan should not have gone, but there it went, right along with Pennsylvania. At 2:30 a.m., Trump won Wisconsin. It was all over but the shouting. And there would be plenty of shouting to come.

  At Penny Pritzker’s house in Washington, a few senior commerce officials gathered in a room once it was clear that Trump was going to win. These officials routinely made decisions of consequence, and there would be time later to wonder if some of those decisions had led to the night’s result. For now, one question haunted them, demanding an immediate answer: “What do we say to our career professionals the next day?”

  Only the upper ranks of the federal government were filled by political appointees. Of approximately two million jobs in the federal government, only four thousand were appointed positions. Most “politicals,” as they were known in Washington, expected to be out of a job when a new president came into office, even if that president was of the same party as her predecessor. Experts in their fields who had enjoyed at least some proximity to state power, they were likely to find easy work on Wall Street or K Street. Some got teaching jobs. A few got book deals. Most would be fine.

  For career employees of the federal government, Trump’s victory was ominous not just politically but professionally. Often depicted as gray pixels in a featureless bureaucracy, these employees included paleontologists working for the Department of the Interior, civil rights lawyers at the Department of Education, financial investigators at the Department of the Treasury unraveling transnational money-laundering schemes. Throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump had explicitly and implicitly threatened their jobs, suggesting that he might get rid of certain agencies altogether. He had showed open contempt for government work, for government workers, and for the notion of government itself. He was coming not to save Washington, but to destroy it.

  Introduction:

  The Best People

  They were the best people, the finest in the land, tasked with returning the nation to greatness. It was June 2017, and for the first time, they sat in a room together, the principals around a table, some others in chairs along the walls. And at center table sat the man who brought them together, the general who had recruited this elite unit, the man who had introduced the very idea that the nation had fallen from greatness and needed him to return it to glory, the forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald
J. Trump.

  By and large, these best people were also new people as far as the public sector was concerned. In this, they were just like the man who selected them and who himself had performed no public service until taking the oath of the presidency five months before. There was the producer of films that included Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. There was a former Navy SEAL who tried to take credit for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. There was also, in that crowded room, a former second baseman for the University of Kentucky baseball team. Soon, he would be the target of a dozen investigations into his penchant for first-class flights, top-notch restaurants, and other benefits not generally available to government bureaucrats, or to middling second basemen.

  But these were not regular government bureaucrats, as the confirmation hearings of the previous winter had made so vividly clear. There was a fundamentalist from Michigan who, during her Senate hearing, warned about “potential grizzlies” when asked about arming school staff. There was a former U.S. senator from Alabama who had been deemed too extreme for the federal bench during the Reagan administration. Now, he was the top law enforcement officer in the land, even as he struggled to say just how many times he had met with the Russian ambassador when he was Trump’s campaign surrogate, or why he needed to meet with the Russian ambassador at all.

  In the chairs along the wall sat other members of the retinue Trump had assembled to serve as his White House advisers. There was the potentially sociopathic former contestant from The Apprentice, and there was the right-wing media impresario who owned enough of the Seinfeld back catalog to have become very rich, who had a thing for obscure philosophers, and who did not like to wear ties, which men in the White House were expected to do. Then again, this was going to be a White House outside the bounds of the expected and not just when it came to neckwear.

  There was a thirty-six-year-old of vague accomplishment and faltering voice whose father had paid $2.5 million to help get him into Harvard, despite an academic record any admissions counselor would have regarded as significantly beneath the Ivy League. That father went to prison on a variety of tax-related charges, one of which involved him covertly taping his brother-in-law’s encounter with a prostitute.

  It was June 12, 2017, and President Trump was holding his first full cabinet meeting, in the same Cabinet Room of the White House where Franklin D. Roosevelt convened his “war cabinet” in the 1940s. Here, John F. Kennedy and his advisers searched with increasing desperation for ways to defuse a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union during the Cuban Missile Crisis and, half a decade later, Lyndon B. Johnson tried and failed to contain the escalating war in Vietnam. And now it was Trump’s turn to wage his own battles, whether against Mexican gangs, Middle Eastern terrorists, or liberals from San Francisco.

  No concrete code dictated who belonged in that room. “The cabinet itself is not defined in statute,” explained Andrew Rudalevige, a presidential historian at Bowdoin College in Maine. “It’s really at the discretion of the president.” At its most basic, it was the fifteen heads of the executive departments. Then there were cabinet-level positions like director of national intelligence and ambassador to the United Nations, as well as high-ranking assistants to the president, the top layer of advisers within the White House itself who formed a crucial membrane between the chief executive and the rest of the executive branch.

  Unlike other aspects of the American system of government—the Congress, for example, to which sixty-five chapters were devoted in the U.S. Code of Laws—the cabinet was not narrowly circumscribed by settled law, tending to evolve (or devolve) with each new administration. The vagaries of who belonged in a presidential cabinet, and what the responsibilities of cabinet members were, could sometimes play to presidents’ strengths. Just as often, the uncertainty played to their weaknesses.

  The first cabinet meeting was convened on February 25, 1793, by the first president, George Washington, who desired input on “interesting questions of national importance.” Those questions were put to only four cabinet members, two of whom were Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Departments were added as the federal government’s role in everyday life grew. The most recent addition came in 2002, with the advent of the Department of Homeland Security. There were subtractions, too, like that of the postmaster general, who left the cabinet after Richard M. Nixon reorganized the nation’s postal operations in 1970.

  Sitting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on that June afternoon in 2017, at a table that had been a gift from Nixon to the U.S. government in 1970, Trump looked pleased, even as his approval rating earlier that month had slipped to a precarious 34 percent. Those dismal polling numbers made him the least popular president in modern American history at this point in his term, confirmation to his critics that he was simply incapable of holding the most challenging elective office in the world. To supporters, however, he was still learning, and this first cabinet meeting was a sign of progress, a much-needed team huddle.

  “This is our first cabinet meeting with the entire cabinet present,” Trump said in the flat monotone he tended to reserve for prepared remarks, which he clearly disliked delivering. “The confirmation process has been record-setting long—and I mean record-setting long—with some of the finest people in our country being delayed and delayed and delayed.” He blamed those delays on Senate Democrats, whom he called “the obstructionists.”

  Trump also complained that “the ethics committee” had become “very difficult to deal with,” by which he meant the Office of Government Ethics, a federal agency that reviewed financial disclosures for potential conflicts of interest. Conflicts of interest were practically a job requirement in this administration. Jared Kushner, the senior White House adviser, presidential son-in-law, and Harvard alumnus, would eventually update his financial disclosures more than forty times, so knotted were his family’s real estate dealings with entanglements in Qatar and Israel, not to mention in Russia and China.

  Wilbur L. Ross Jr., the crusty corporate raider who had been named commerce secretary, neglected to mention that he had investments in a Russian shipping company with ties to Russian neo-czar Vladimir V. Putin. Treasury Secretary Steven T. Mnuchin, he of Batman v Superman fame, somehow left off $95 million worth of real estate. Tom Price had traded medical stock even when, as a member of Congress, he’d pushed for legislation that would benefit the companies in question. Now he was the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. That controversy, like most others involving Trump’s cabinet, had proved inconsequential during Price’s confirmation process. Not only had the Republicans won the White House the previous November, but they’d maintained their majority in the Senate. That ensured safe passage for Trump’s nominees, relegating the Democrats to a bound-and-gagged minority that watched helplessly as the man responsible for Get Hard assumed the office once occupied by Hamilton.

  But on that humid day in Washington, D.C., all the struggles of the previous months could be set aside, however fleetingly. Here was reason to rejoice, at least as far as the man responsible for that odd and improbable conclave was concerned. “There’s an incredible, talented group of people in this room: generals, governors, congressmen, entrepreneurs, business leaders, and many, many others,” Trump said in the crowded Cabinet Room, as cameras clicked away like crickets on a summer night. He had personally chosen all of them, he said, to achieve a “very simple, but very beautiful, goal: serving and defending our beloved nation.”

  Eight years before, President Barack Obama had opened his first cabinet meeting by soberly discussing the ramifications of the financial crisis, which he had inherited from President George W. Bush. As was custom, the secretary of state was seated to his right (each cabinet member had an assigned seat at the table). In that case, it was Hillary Clinton. For the portion of the meeting that was open to the press, Obama spoke in the clipped, confident tone that would be a hallmark of his public persona. He asked his cabinet chiefs to find $100 million in savings. He kn
ew it would not be much, given the hundreds of billions of dollars involved in the response to the Great Recession. Still, it would show that the federal government was a responsible steward of taxpayer money, not the profligate spender some conservatives claimed it was. Obama’s remarks lasted about six minutes. Then the cameras went away.

  Trump’s first cabinet meeting had a distinctly different feel, something closer to nervous children gathering together on their first night at sleepaway camp, aware that they are under enormous scrutiny, desperate to make themselves liked.

  Vice President Mike Pence went first. “It is just the greatest privilege of my life” to serve in the Trump administration, said the former governor of Indiana. Pence added that the women and men seated around the table were “bringing real change, real prosperity, real strength back to our nation,” echoing the central (and errant) Trump conviction that Obama had left him with an ailing economy, a country in the grips of malaise.

  So they went around the table, saying little about what they planned to do, revealing much about the devotion with which they would treat Trump, who had improbably won the presidency and, in doing so, had suddenly elevated these backbenchers of public and private life to powerful posts they could have scarcely imagined back when it seemed that a Clinton rout was imminent.

 

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