Bannon was annoyed at having to play “father confessor” to a man he did not know well or hold in especially high regard. “You’re not getting fired for the work,” Bannon told Christie, desperate to have this uncomfortable episode over with. “Trump doesn’t want you around, and Kushner can’t stand the sight of you. You’re gone.”
That Friday, vice president–elect Pence was named to head the transition. This was only a nominal designation. In truth, a triumvirate would oversee the process: Bannon on the cabinet, Priebus on the White House, Kushner on foreign policy.
They had to start somewhere. That starting point would be the binders Christie compiled in the months before the election. It may not have been the soundest of foundations, but they figured there would be something there to work with.
The Christie binders would take on a mythic quality, like a lost ancient scroll. To some, they were symbols of work needlessly squandered. “Leave aside their decision to fire Christie, but their decision essentially to ignore all the work was a big mistake,” said Stier of the Partnership for Public Service, who called what Christie compiled “a very credible set of preparations.” By ignoring these, Stier was convinced, Trump “fell behind from the very beginning.”
Others bristled at the notion that Christie was a savior banished by jealous rivals from the king’s court. One staffer involved with the transition said that Christie’s effort amounted to a “shallow hole.” He said that when he and others looked at the documents Christie had put together they were left with a single question: “What the fuck is this shit?”
Bannon may not have known Christie personally, but he knew the man’s work, and that was all he needed to know. To him, the transition plan reflected not only a lack of effort but a lack of expertise, a crippling unfamiliarity with national Republican politics. “Christie doesn’t know anything about the federal government,” Bannon complained later. “He just doesn’t. He’s not a Washington guy.”
Christie’s not being a Washington guy was apparent in the appointments he recommended. In top national security positions, he had General Stanley A. McChrystal, who had already said he wanted nothing to do with Trump, and Admiral William H. McRaven, who, although he did not endorse anyone in the 2016 election, was considered a potential vice president for Clinton and later came out as a Trump critic. Another spot in the national security pantheon would have gone to a relatively minor defense manufacturer in New Hampshire who happened to have been a major Christie campaign donor.
“He’s a joke and his fucking transition was a joke,” Bannon said. “I wipe my ass with their thing.” (He asked this author to convey the message to Palatucci, precisely in those terms.)
Bannon liked to tell a story that in his view perfectly captured the imperatives of Christie’s transition team. The day after the election, he said he called one of Christie’s top men and told him he was needed at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
That was going to be impossible. Why? Bannon delivered the punch line. “He’s in the Bahamas. What the fuck? Been there for five days, been there for the weekend before, because they didn’t think we were going to win. Now the thing is a joke.” Others said that Bannon got this wrong, that if there was a vacation on the part of the transition figure—who later became a U.S. ambassador to an Asian nation—it had been long planned and not intended as a slight to Trump. But as a slight is precisely how Bannon saw it.
There was another problem. “Drain the swamp” had been the popular closing refrain of the Trump campaign, only Christie had stocked the transition team with lobbyists. Rich Bagger, the governor’s New Jersey confidant, was a pharmaceutical lobbyist. Just days before the election, he had convened a meeting for the transition team with some of Washington’s top lobbyists. The meeting took place at the offices of BakerHostetler, the immensely influential law firm whose Washington offices were steps from K Street, a thoroughfare synonymous with the influence trade. (Among those present was J. Steven Hart, who would figure in the undoing of Scott Pruitt.) This was the swamp in all its fetid glory. It would not do.
Bannon’s complaints aside, others within the transition found plenty to dislike about the work Christie and his associates did. Another top transition staffer, who was by no means a Bannon ally, took issue with the legal documents Palatucci drafted, which he described as bordering on the imbecilic. So poor was the work, incoming White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II had to spend considerable time doing it all over again.
A person who worked on the transition from Washington was stunned by how little work Christie had done beyond compiling lists of names. He was young, this person, and he was new to Trump’s staff, but he was also a Republican who wanted the president to succeed. How could you succeed under conditions like these? Christie’s vision of a Trump administration consisted mostly of scraps from the outdated Romney transition plan.
That was only a small part of the problem. As this newcomer saw it, the transition was “absolute chaos,” with no clear lines of authority.
The Washington transition was led by Rick A. Dearborn, who had been chief of staff to Senator Jeff Sessions, the Republican from Alabama. Sessions was small and talked slow. Dearborn had presence and intensity. He was known to show little patience for fools. He ran the show as best as he could, but with limited powers and with little sense that the work in Washington was being taken seriously by the people in New York.
Another powerful figure in the transition was Stephen Miller, also a former Sessions aide, though one who was much closer than Dearborn to Trump. Jewish though he was, hailing from Santa Monica and educated at Duke, Miller could channel Trump’s lunch pail nativism better than anyone. “A weird little guy,” one campaign veteran called him, reflecting a popular view. Slight in stature, perhaps, but not in influence. During the transition, Miller gave off the impression of wielding power without having to fight for it. “Everything will flow through me,” he declared.
As the transition careened toward January, pundits and columnists grasped desperately for every sign of normalcy, trying to convince themselves that a “presidential pivot” was imminent—even as others noted, correctly, that a polar bear was more likely to pivot toward the tropics. Sure enough, as November turned into December, it was clear that the Trump transition would have no stability, and no peace.
As agencies in Washington awaited the arrival of Trump “beachhead teams” to begin the changeover, Trump remained sequestered in Trump Tower, high above Manhattan. Protesters gathered below, as did tourists, who suddenly had an entirely new attraction during their visits to New York. Meanwhile, a variety of factions jostled for the attentions of the supremely impressionable neophyte, who—and all his courtiers understood this—could be prevailed upon quite easily, as long as his own vanities were nurtured. Christie, for all his faults, had at least erected the scaffolding of an administration around Trump. That was torn down, and what now went up was a teetering edifice held together by duct tape.
In those weeks between the election and the inauguration, Trump received Peter Thiel, the libertarian cofounder of PayPal, and Tulsi Gabbard, the far-left U.S. representative from Hawaii. To Trump Tower came Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the former chief of the American International Group, and Larry King, the CNN host who had been married five more times than thrice-wedded Trump. Kanye West came, Bill Gates came, Elon Musk came, and Tommy Hilfiger came. Why they came nobody knew, though they seemed happy enough to do so. Al Gore came, and suddenly environmentalists were cheered. A few days later Scott Pruitt came, and was announced as the new head of the EPA, and environmentalists knew they were in for a long, cold winter.
Eventually, Bannon prevailed on Trump to conduct his transition meetings from the president-elect’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. If a photograph was framed just so, the colonnaded entrance resembled that of 10 Downing Street, the London address that was the residence of the United Kingdom’s prime minister. The resemblance wasn’t much, but Bannon would take it over the hordes foi
sting anti-Trump signs on Fifth Avenue, providing television audiences with endless evidence of a furious anti-Trump resistance.
To Trump, whose starring turn in The Apprentice thirteen years before had revived his flagging business fortunes, theatrics were an imperative, though he also knew the show would get bad ratings if it tipped too quickly into the absurd. As television crews camped out in Bedminster and midtown Manhattan, the president-elect used his Twitter feed to push back against a procession of reports about the transition team’s dysfunction and inaction, while promoting the selection of cabinet members as if they were reality television contestants:
November 15: “Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions. I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!”
November 17 (at 4:45 a.m.): “My transition team, which is working long hours and doing a fantastic job, will be seeing many great candidates today.”
November 22: “Great meetings will take place today at Trump Tower concerning the formation of the people who will run our government for the next 8 years.”
December 11: “Whether I choose him or not for ‘State’—Rex Tillerson, the Chairman & CEO of ExxonMobil, is a world class player and dealmaker. Stay tuned!”
January 13: “All of my Cabinet nominees are looking good and doing a great job. I want them to be themselves and express their own thoughts, not mine.”
These exhortations could only have reassured his true believers, the ones who had already been sold on the myth of the ruthlessly capable chief executive. To the liberal opposition, the situation was closer to that of a jester thrust into the royal chamber. The president-elect seemed especially fixated on candidates for office who were, in his words, “out of central casting,” a phrase at once hopelessly outdated and fully tethered to the superficial. Mitt Romney called Trump a “fraud” in an eviscerating speech delivered during the Republican presidential primary. Because he had the look of an elder statesman, Trump considered him for secretary of state. The two had an immensely awkward dinner at Jean-Georges, an upscale restaurant located in the Trump International Hotel and Tower that featured a $138-per-person tasting menu. The job would eventually go to Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of ExxonMobil.
Ben Carson, the pediatric neurosurgeon turned conservative commentator, had no experience administering public housing programs; he even admitted that he was not prepared to take on a cabinet post, a disquieting truth coming from someone who had just run for president. Bannon loved Carson and wanted him for Health and Human Services, but congressional Republicans had other ideas, so Housing and Urban Development was “the thing he got,” as Bannon put it. “He was going to be in the cabinet from the beginning. It was just finding a slot for him.”
Nikki Haley was an unexpected choice to join Trump’s cabinet. The South Carolina governor had earned plaudits for calling to have the Confederate flag removed from the statehouse grounds in Columbia after a white supremacist slaughtered nine people in an African-American church in Charleston. Haley’s principled stance earned favorable national attention. So did her criticism of Trump during the Republican national primary race (which some wanted her to join). She once said that Trump was “everything a governor doesn’t want in a president,” an opinion many Republicans shared but few uttered. Never one to hold back a counterpunch, Trump claimed that South Carolina was “embarrassed” by her, which was untrue: Haley’s near 60 percent approval rating from South Carolinians ahead of the presidential election made her significantly more popular than Trump would ever be in his first two years as president.
When it came time to nominate an ambassador to the United Nations, Trump picked Haley. She had no diplomatic experience, having spent her entire career in South Carolina. Then again, Nimrata Randhawa was the daughter of Indian Sikhs who had moved to the United States in 1969. That was enough. Central casting had done its work.
John R. Bolton was not a central casting standout, looking rather like an aging adjunct professor annoyed at having to still teach undergraduates. Bolton was a frequent presence on Fox News, where he attacked Obama, Clinton, and the Democrats with such zeal, you might have thought they had conspired to kill his hamster. Because of his prolific punditry, Trump considered Bolton for secretary of state. When the job went to Tillerson, it was not because Trump was a protectionist and Bolton was an interventionist. It was because Bolton had a mustache. Mustaches looked sloppy. Trump had to find someone else.
While Trump was holding auditions at Trump Tower and Bedminster, Washington waited for the transition to begin. One member of President Obama’s 2008 transition team issued a warning: “It is hard to get the government to do things. It’s not like you flip a switch. Even reversing regulations, as Trump has said he wants to do, is a long process.” Deconstructing the administrative state was not quite the same thing as letting the administrative state languish under a cloud of ineptitude. The warning was a sound one. Only nobody heard it. Or, if they heard it, if they knew that the transition was faltering badly, they also knew they couldn’t tell Trump.
Trump’s management style in private business was autocratic. But this imperious manner masked what many who had worked with him believed to be an insecure and anxious personality. Barbara A. Res saw Trump’s character at a proximity few outside his family were afforded. In 1980, he hired her as the head of construction for Trump Tower, making her the most influential woman in the building trade in New York. The Trump she knew was the same man who now sat in the Oval Office. “He would pit people against one another,” she said, playing divide and conquer with his own staff. One usually divided and conquered enemies, not allies, but Trump had no allies other than himself. If his subordinates were fighting, it meant they were not conspiring against him.
Much as he loved to insult people, he did everything he could to avoid direct confrontation.
One episode in particular stayed with Res. Trump Tower needed a residential manager, and she found a German who seemed up to the task. He was not, it quickly turned out. The German proved inexperienced and unpleasant, so as a senior executive, Res did the natural thing: she fired him.
Upon learning of his dismissal, the German promptly went to Trump himself, who offered him another chance. The German returned to work at Trump Tower, where he showed himself to be no more capable than he had been before. Again, Res fired him. Again, the German went back to Trump, who again gave him his job back.
“Took us three times to get rid of the guy,” Res said with disbelief. The act of recollecting all this pointless back-and-forth exasperated her, even many years after the fact. Exasperating others was always part of Trump’s style. He ran people ragged. He used them, and after they were all used up, he sent them away.
One day, someone called in a bomb threat to Trump Tower. Res went to Trump, asking if they should evacuate the building. Trump Tower had just opened; evacuating a skyscraper because of a potential terrorism threat was not the kind of publicity one wanted. Except thousands of lives could be in danger if the threat were genuine.
Trump did not know what to do. He was the chief executive, only he wanted the chief’s trappings without the chief’s responsibilities. The responsibilities, someone else could have. He told Res that she would be the one to decide whether an evacuation was necessary. Res thought it “crazy” that he would leave her with a decision that significant. Decades later, she thought that still.
Trump retained many of the character traits Res saw in the eighteen years she worked for him. But like instruments in an orchestra, some of those traits would grow quieter, while others would grow louder. Res remembered that when she knew him, he was a “borderline human being,” which were about the kindest words she could summon for her former boss. The figure arriving in the White House was someone else entirely: as careless a manager as the budding real estate tycoon of 1986, but much more deluded about his own powers, much less able to summon equanimity when the alarm went off.
As would be the
case so often during the Trump administration, the transition proceeded along two tracks, the real and the illusory. In the illusory transition, Trump was stocking his administration with the most able men and women the Republican ranks had to offer. In reality, he and his top advisers were completely overwhelmed, happy to take recommendations from anyone. Those who grasped this, like the Heritage Foundation, were eager to supply him with names. He would get to tout the selection, while their influence in the new administration would increase.
“I wouldn’t say that I agreed with all of the people,” Trump told me, “but I let them make their decision. In some cases, I was right.”
In the early months of his presidency, Trump would routinely blame Democrats for delay in staffing his government, though his own party, the Republicans, controlled both chambers of Congress until the 2018 midterm election. But he also did not think he needed to staff up, because all policy emanated from his own person, as if he were not president but king. In late 2017, the president was asked by Laura Ingraham of Fox News about understaffing at the State Department. He responded with a cross between confidence and contempt. “Let me tell you, the one that matters is me. I’m the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be,” the president said. This outlook governed the Trump administration from the start.
When I spoke to him in 2019, Trump put it differently. “Everybody wants to work here,” he said, though only months before he had struggled to find a chief of staff before finally prevailing on Mick Mulvaney to take the job. “I have so many people that want jobs here.” Those people had a funny way of showing their desire for an executive branch job. This was as true in 2019 as it had been in 2017.
Trump’s hubris doomed his own transition more than any Democrat ever could. “The process he ran can pick your twenty,” said Stier of the Partnership for Public Service, “but can’t pick your four thousand.” Four thousand was the total number of political appointments a president had to make. Of those, the Partnership for Public Service deemed 706 to be “key positions.” As of January 2019, only 433 of those positions had been confirmed by the Senate, while another 264 positions had no nominee at all. At the departments of Interior and Justice, only 41 percent of key positions had a Senate-confirmed official.
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