The Best People

by Alexander Nazaryan

  “There was no prep for this or advanced warning,” later confided one of the department chiefs seated at that table. “So I was just watching with amazement as people answered like they did, trying to figure out if this was [as] unusual as I thought it was.”

  After Pence, Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke about the rising crime rate, even though violent crime was actually on a decades-long downward trajectory, with very minor upticks in the recent past. Sessions had been the first senator to endorse Trump, back when that chamber was uniformly skeptical of the Manhattan billionaire. Now he had the job he long coveted, only it would later come with unimaginable humiliation, most of it orchestrated by the man who hired him, a needy man who demanded loyalty but gave no loyalty in return.

  The cabinet members who followed strove to outdo each other in their groveling. R. Alexander Acosta, the labor secretary, said he was “deeply honored” to serve Trump. It was a “great honor” for Ben Carson, who headed Housing and Urban Development, and who had only recently said that he did not think he had the capacity to lead a federal department. Earlier, during the Republican presidential primary, when Carson was an unlikely front-runner, Trump had impugned the former neurosurgeon’s honesty and even compared him to a child molester. That slight was forgotten, at least for now.

  Rick Perry, the energy secretary, was merely “honored” to be part of Trump’s team, but he made sure to laud Trump because he was “not going to be held hostage to some executive order that was ill thought out,” a reference to the Paris accords on climate change, which Trump had recently announced the United States would be leaving.

  “I can’t thank you enough for the privileges you’ve given me and the leadership that you’ve shown,” said Price, the new Health and Human Services secretary, who as a Georgia congressman had been an avid assailant of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature achievement. Now, five months into full Republican control of Washington, efforts to repeal the health law were as inauspicious as they had ever been, because neither Trump nor Price had shown the ability to persuade recalcitrant legislators or to convince a skeptical public.

  Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, immediately referenced his service in the Navy SEALs—“Mr. President, as your SEAL on your staff…”—just as he had done during his political rise in Montana some years before. He was chastised back then by members of the military for unseemly self-promotion. Luckily, he found a presidential administration where self-promotion was a virtue.

  “I want to congratulate you on the men and women you’ve placed around this table,” said Sonny Perdue, the new head of the Department of Agriculture. “This is the team you’ve assembled that’s working hand in glove with—for—the men and women of America, and I want to, I want to thank you for that. These are great team members and we’re on your team,” continued Perdue, who as governor of Georgia had signed a tax bill that seemed to benefit him personally and once supported a proposal to return Confederate iconography to the state flag. Now he was in the White House.

  The cabinet itself was very much unusual, though not quite for its record of altruism or public service. It was the whitest in generations, with one African American and one Hispanic. It was overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly old, with an average age exceeding sixty. Trump had never shown much curiosity about the world outside Trump Tower, and the people he surrounded himself with in Washington were a reflection of his self-centered outlook: white men grown thick around the waist with the comforts of middle age, rich but not especially cultured, married but trailed by divorce. The sport of the Obama administration had been basketball. Trump guys played golf.

  Many of them were not just rich, but quite a bit richer than Trump. Shoddy financial reporting by Trump’s cabinet made its collective wealth difficult to estimate, but some credible news outlets said the aggregate number was as high as $4.5 billion. Some of these riches were inherited, as in the case of Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, whose father had built an auto-parts fortune in Michigan. But some were also ill-gotten gains. During the financial crisis of 2008, Mnuchin’s bank, OneWest, relentlessly pursued homeowners delinquent on their mortgage payments. This earned him the nickname “Foreclosure King.”

  Among the richest of Trump’s cabinet members was Wilbur Ross, who like Trump was given to inflating his wealth. “Mr. President, thank you for the opportunity to help fix the trade deficit and other things,” said the new chief of the Commerce Department. He added that “other countries are gradually getting used” to the fact that “the free rides are somewhat over with.” Somewhat? The month before, he had managed a deal with China involving chicken and beef. It would remain his greatest accomplishment.

  So it went for eleven minutes, a gathering that was the equivalent of cotton candy: high in sugar, light on substance. The high (or low) point was Chief of Staff Reince Priebus telling Trump, “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda and the American people.”

  Priebus was the former Republican National Committee chairman who had been installed in the West Wing to pacify mainstream Republicans and ensure that Trump didn’t stray too far from party dogma. He was an emissary from the very establishment Trump had come to slay. And even as he sat there in the Cabinet Room, as he praised the president, everyone in Washington knew what a miserable time he was having in the White House, what a nightmare the babysitting gig at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was turning out to be.

  By the time Trump held another cabinet meeting on December 20, several of the best people who had gathered in that room six months earlier were already gone. Bannon would be forced to leave by Priebus’s replacement, General John F. Kelly, who was himself constantly fighting for influence in a West Wing that both badly needed a military discipline like his and desperately resisted it. Shortly after that, Tom Price became the first departmental chief to resign, after his penchant for travel on private and government jets came under unrelenting scrutiny.

  More than a half dozen other of the best people were under investigation for ethical lapses. Scott Pruitt alone would face some sixteen different inquiries, from a variety of different agencies, including his own. Ryan Zinke, by one count, was the subject of eighteen. The previously anonymous figure of the agency inspector general suddenly became a Washington heroic archetype to some, a defender of American democracy whose secret weapon was the annotated and appendicised report.

  Trump’s supporters tried to dismiss these controversies, sometimes suggesting they were part of a “Deep State” plan to undermine the president. But this was becoming increasingly hard to do, especially since many of Trump’s best people were just as eager for publicity as he was. Pruitt provided his most disastrous interview, in which he lied about giving raises to political appointees, with the most friendly outlet imaginable: Fox News. His minders in the White House had advised him against it, but Pruitt refused to listen. Watching him, they knew he was done.

  This was all a remarkable turn for a president who pitched himself to the American people as a singularly skilled chief executive, one with an uncanny ability to spot and cultivate talent. He promised to untether the federal government from the bureaucrats and their crusted-over bureaucracy, to run it as profitably and efficiently as he did his family business, the Trump Organization. Trump was precisely as competent and successful as he said he was, at least according to many of his supporters.

  Reality told a different story. As shocked by his election night win as many of his most strident foes, Trump had done little to prepare for becoming the leader of an enterprise that employed two million people, owned or leased 361,000 buildings and operated on a $4 trillion budget. At times, he did not seem especially interested in learning.

  Was the president erratic? A person who spent time with him daily had to think about that for a while. No, that was too strong, he finally concluded. But Trump was undisciplined, he said, and he was
unpredictable, and he would take the federal government where he wanted it to go. He would visit the Bastille Day procession in Paris and decide that Washington, too, must have a military parade, that it was outrageous that France showed off its military might but the United States did not. The issue of whether to hold a military parade, which no one had been seriously considering, became a matter of national debate. Eventually, the Pentagon concluded that a military parade would incur the obscene expense of $92 million. Trump raged, blamed Washington’s mayor for her supposed lack of enthusiasm. Then he, too, dropped the issue, and just like that the matter of a military parade, which had occupied the nation for months, was entirely forgotten.

  Trump allowed various factions—wealthy donors, establishment Republicans, his friends at Fox News, the conservative Heritage Foundation—to dictate who was going to carry out the various imperatives he so expertly packaged into slogans during the presidential contest. Foremost among these was his promise to “drain the swamp” that was Washington, D.C., a cesspool of former politicians and congressional aides who’d turned to the far more lucrative business of lobbying, the lawyers who enabled it, and the members of the media who eagerly accepted free drinks from them. Republicans desperate to intellectualize Trump’s appeal arrived at the image of an enthralling iconoclast who would do to Washington’s permanent class what Jesus Christ had done to the money changers in the temple.

  Now, more than halfway through Trump’s term, it is clear that this promise has remained unrealized. He said he would usher in a political revolution; what we have instead is a national twilight in which lurid things thrive. The swamp runneth over, and the federal government is more dysfunctional than it has ever been. Where the government does still work, it works principally because it has been left alone.

  What follows is a story of how a presidential campaign that promised nothing short of radical transformation of the American political system succumbed so frequently to its own worst impulses. The administration’s staunchest critics will allege that Trump did so intentionally. And in some cases, perhaps that is true. But more often than not, inattention was at work, a collective carelessness that allowed the likes of Pruitt and Zinke to turn the Trump administration into a low-class orgy of first-class kleptocrats.

  Some in the White House began to understand, by mid-2017, that they had not paid enough attention to the executive branch outside the campus of the White House and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where the president’s top advisers worked behind a black iron fence (West Wingers referred to “the building,” as opposed to “the campus,” a pointed reminder that they worked in the White House itself). There were earnest efforts to curb the abuses, and though these were made in earnest, they were also delinquent.

  This administration has included some thoroughly decent, highly capable people, including Secretary of Defense General James N. Mattis, who resigned in December 2018, and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki R. Haley, who announced two months before Mattis that she was leaving. Mike Pompeo has been a steady, relatively reassuring presence as the secretary of state. Ask administration officials about cabinet members who haven’t caused them grief, and they will cite Linda McMahon of the Small Business Administration and Elaine L. Chao, the transportation secretary.

  But they are the exception. Too many of Trump’s cabinet members took to behaving like middle managers let loose in the supply closet for the first time, stuffing their pockets with notepads and pens, hoping the stern secretary doesn’t notice. A few learned their lessons. The highest praise that could be lavished on Steve Mnuchin was that, after a colorful dalliance with scandal, he went to ground and disappeared from the news. History will have to judge if that qualifies him as truly one of the best people.

  Before history has her say, the electorate will. Come the 2020 presidential election, Americans will want to know how and why their government was turned over to men and women with a profound antipathy to government, not to mention a disconcerting ignorance about how government works. They will marvel at scandals like Carson ordering a $31,000 dining room set or Mnuchin arranging government travel in order to witness a solar eclipse at taxpayers’ expense. They will surely wonder how these people did it and, even worse, why they thought they could.

  The many scandals of the Trump administration have been a boon to late-night comedians and writers of newspaper headlines. At the same time, those scandals obscure some disconcerting truths. Bumbling and inept as it may be, the Trump administration has undertaken a project that would shrink the federal government and its role in American citizens’ lives. For the most part, that project has been clumsy and poorly articulated, if articulated at all, so that its contours can get lost in the daily haze of outrage. And yet the project continues, even if its executors do not always understand quite what they are doing.

  Joel Clement, a Department of Interior whistleblower, figured a grand design informed all this. He had been driven out of government, as had hundreds of federal employees at agencies like the EPA and the Department of Education, where once meaningful work had become meaningless. And that was the intent, as Clement saw it. “They’re put in there to screw up,” he said of his former boss Zinke and other department heads. “You don’t want people respecting or trusting government,” he continued. So you install people who will break government, thus confirming the conservative view that government is broken.

  “That’ll take decades to repair,” Clement offered. Some believe that it will take longer. Some believe that no repair will be possible, so thorough is the damage Trump is doing to the federal government. His strongest critics believe the only America that will ever be possible again is the America remade by Trump.

  Things could have gone differently. Trump could have declared war on Washington’s entrenched interests—the lobbyists, the lawyers, the think-tankers, the numberless other peddlers of influence and opinion—while undertaking a whittling-down of the federal government that even some liberals know is necessary. But this would have required enormous courage and discipline, an ability to stick to conviction even when every pundit and poll screamed for that conviction to be cast aside. Few presidents have had such conviction, and most of them hailed from a time before focus groups directed every policy decision.

  Long after he’d left the White House, Bannon remembered how and why the promise to “drain the swamp” went awry. It was a winter morning in New York City in late 2018, and he was lounging in his top-floor suite at the Loews Regency Hotel. This was the city he loved. Washington, he hated. Washington, he could not fix. Now, he was fomenting populist revolution in Europe while continuing to push for a confrontation with China over trade. The war over Washington itself he knew was lost.

  “The swamp draining…we had all these potential things,” Bannon reminisced. “They just got ground up and it just turned out not to be a priority.” And so Trump’s promise to remake government went unfulfilled. He would have successes, just as he would have failures. But this was less a failure than a promise broken, both by Trump himself and the people he charged with running the federal government. They did not share his populist convictions, or his iconoclastic impulses. Some seemed to have no conviction of any kind, aside from personal glorification and enrichment.

  Trump understood as much, even if he would never say it. Speaking at a Rose Garden event in the spring of 2018, he said that he had “been fighting to drain the swamp,” adding that “sometimes it may not look like it, but believe me, we are draining the swamp.” As a matter of fact, evidence strongly contradicted Trump’s assertion.

  Even as the swamp-drainers turned out to be swamp creatures, they managed to inflict harm on the people they were charged with protecting.

  Under the leadership of Betsy DeVos, the Department of Education drastically reduced its oversight of for-profit colleges, allowing them to prey on unsuspecting Americans once again. Scott Pruitt directed the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back dozens of Obama-era rule
s, including those involving the regulation of toxic pesticides and the health of the nation’s waterways. Carson has scaled back enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, allowing housing discrimination to flourish once again. Ross, at the Commerce Department, has perverted the census into a weapon of political warfare.

  As 2018 came to an end, Trump signed an executive order freezing the pay of federal workers. They were responsible for none of the scandals and abuses of his administration, yet they were taking all of the blame. How galling it was for them to languish amid a government shutdown as men like Mnuchin and Ross, men with no business in Washington, continued to ape the role of the public servant, and to convince the president of their act.

  Few others were convinced. These were the best people, Trump said, but by the summer of 2018, only 30 percent of Americans agreed with him. The best people failed on Trump’s own terms, not to mention the terms on which public servants were judged before Trump. They failed, yet they kept smiling. They failed, but they called it victory. They failed and, finally, Americans saw them for who they were.

  Part One: The Siege

  Chapter 1

  The Accidental Victor

  National Harbor, Maryland, was an unlikely cradle for revolution. Ten miles south of Washington, on the eastern bank of the Potomac River, it was essentially an open-air mall built on the site of a former plantation. A Ferris wheel rose from a river dock, while outlet stores clustered on the land below. Ersatz statues of historical figures like Frederick Douglass lined the insipidly named American Way, the figures looking like they’d been petrified while hawking trinkets and sweets.

  For several days each winter, National Harbor became the most compelling place in American politics, a mecca for the adherents of Ronald Reagan, for the believers in limited government and personal liberty. For several years, the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, a boxy behemoth on the edge of what passed for National Harbor’s downtown, had been home to the Conservative Political Action Conference. Hosted by the American Conservative Union, CPAC had come to be regarded as an audition for Republican presidential candidates looking to make overtures to movement conservatives. The centerpiece of the conference was a straw poll that crowned the right’s favored rising star. In the eyes of many attendees, the more at odds that star was with establishment Republicans, the better. These were the faithful, only it was a faith that called for Washington’s demise.