Christie relished this disorder. “I think what folks who were involved in that transition have now painfully learned at the expense of the country is that experience matters,” he said in early December 2017, as the president-elect’s harrowing reality show lurched in any number of directions but forward. The following spring, Christie leveled an even more damaging accusation at the transition: “brutally unprofessional.”
Even as he gloated, Christie continued to yearn for a role in the Trump administration. The perfect opportunity finally came in December 2018, after Trump announced that John Kelly would be leaving his position as White House chief of staff. The president’s top choice to replace Kelly was Nick Ayers, the thirty-six-year-old chief of staff to Vice President Pence. Notoriously ambitious, Ayers surprised Washington by turning down the job. Maybe he really did want to spend more time with his family, though he may have also wanted to avoid potential scrutiny of his fortune—somewhere between $12 and $55 million—as well as questions about his ties to Missouri governor Eric Greitens, who resigned in 2018 amid allegations of sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations.
Others also indicated they had no interest in the position, which is how Trump alighted on Christie. Some reports had him as the top candidate, but then the former New Jersey governor, who wanted power so badly, who sought it out so shamelessly, declared that he did not want the job after all.
Some thought they knew what had actually transpired. Still stewing about his ouster from the transition, Christie had spent some of 2018 writing a book, Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics. Tightly held by the publisher until its January 2019 release date, the book charged that Trump was surrounded by “amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons.” The obvious implication was that Christie, and Christie alone, could have stopped this calamity. And so the governor publicly exacted revenge on the men he believed to have ousted him from the transition, Bannon and Kushner in particular. But in doing so, Chris Christie ensured that he would never work in the Trump administration, that he would be relegated to cable news, where the grim-faced governor would shake his head at what was while hinting at what could have been.
Things seemed to be headed in the other direction for Bannon. He and Trump had had a falling out in early 2018, over some rather too frank comments Bannon had made to Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff. But if Trump was quick to anger, he was also quick to forget. When I asked Trump, about a year after their spat, whether he would hire Bannon for his 2020 presidential campaign, Trump did not reject the idea. In fact, he almost welcomed it.
“I watched Bannon a few times, four or five times over the last six months,” Trump said. “Nobody says anything better about me right now than Bannon.” This was a certain sign that Bannon was back in the president’s good graces, though of course it also did not mean that he would be running the president’s re-election campaign.
Trump was certainly open to it. “I will say this,” he said, returning to a subject to which he had clearly given some thought. “Bannon, there is nobody that has been more respectful of the job I’m doing than Steve Bannon.”
And maybe Christie could have come back into the fold, too. Only he had books to sell and cable news appearances to make.
Chapter 3
The Strongest Men of the Party
Every new presidential administration had to pay debts: to the donors who contributed millions of dollars to the campaign, to elected officials who made endorsements and accompanied the candidate to fish fries and town halls; finally, to the voters who voted for him or her because they had seen something good, heard something true, found something to believe.
One promise Trump had made during the campaign was unusual and dangerously superlative, to a degree he did not grasp at the time. It didn’t just tether him to a specific policy promise, or to an influential think tank that provided critical support, but, rather, to the explicit vow that his government would be unlike any other, in the grandest way possible.
Relatively early in the Republican primary, Trump fired his longtime adviser Roger J. Stone Jr., the former Nixon operative who had been urging Trump to run for the presidency since the late 1980s. Trump explained to the Washington Post why Stone had to go: “I’m going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people. We want top of the line professionals.”
“The best people” became shorthand for the unconventional administration over which Trump would preside: skilled corporate swashbucklers, not process-obsessed bureaucrats writing reports that nobody read. “I would use the greatest minds,” he told Sean Hannity of Fox News right around the time of the Stone firing. “I know the best negotiators. I know the ones that are no good that people think are good. I know people that you’ve never heard of that are better than all of them.”
This continued into 2016. “I am self-funding and will hire the best people, not the biggest donors!” he wrote on Facebook in April, as primary challengers fell away and the battle against Hillary Clinton neared. It was unusual for a president to brand his own cabinet, especially before that cabinet had been chosen. History usually did that work, though most cabinets were too lackluster and transitory to collectively demand much more than a passing note in the historical record.
Once in a while, the members of a cabinet did rise collectively out of obscurity and take a place in the national imagination, alongside the president himself. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin famously branded Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet a “team of rivals” because he selected three formidable political adversaries—William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates—to important posts in his administration. Asked about the wisdom of this choice, Lincoln answered, “We need the strongest men of the party in the Cabinet. We needed to hold our own people together.”
The politics of a presidential cabinet could be as complex as a French ballet (and to a certain breed of person, a lot more riveting). Few understood the intricacies of the dance as well as James P. Pfiffner, a scholar of the presidency at George Mason University. In 1986, Pfiffner published a paper, “White House Staff Versus the Cabinet: Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces,” that meticulously combed through the historical record to discover the forces that could either elevate or ruin a presidency.
Pfiffner, who served in Vietnam before becoming an expert on government, argued that there were “strong centrifugal forces at work pulling the cabinet secretary away from the president.” Pfiffner wrote that those forces included “the cabinet secretary’s duties to the law and to Congress and their dependency on their career bureaucracies and the constituencies their departments represent.”
The lack of a formal organization for the cabinet meant that every president got to have his own way, which he assured himself and those around him would harness the power of government as no previous administration had. Every president was intent on making his own mistakes, in learning the lessons of history anew.
Franklin D. Roosevelt assembled a “brain trust” during his first presidential campaign. (It was initially “the brains trust,” an offhand reference to FDR’s advisers made by New York Times reporter James Kieran in 1932.) Headed by Columbia University economist Raymond C. Moley, the brain trust would guide FDR’s response to the Great Depression, helping to implement new regulations aimed at banks, market stimulations to promote economic growth and jobs programs that returned millions of Americans to employment. They were a shadow cabinet, leading one journalist to observe that on “a routine administrative matter you go to a Cabinet member, but on matters of policy and the higher statesmanship you consult the professoriat.”
Even though the New Deal policies implemented by the brain trust rescued the nation from its greatest economic calamity, there was also a populist backlash to this injection of professorial expertise into a government that had previously been—in image, if not always reality—the domain of rough-hewn men who fought in wars and tilled the land. As the polit
ical historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in his 1963 classic Anti-intellectualism in American Life, “the notion became widely current that the professors were running things, and a veritable brain-trust war began which reawakened and quickened the old traditions of anti-intellectualism,” a suspicion of learning and expertise that, Hofstadter argued with cutting eloquence, had informed the American experiment from its inception.
It was not lost on FDR’s opponents that many of his advisers were Jewish, leading some to dub his programs “the Jew Deal.” A writer in the Saturday Evening Post posited that no “thoughtful man can escape the conclusion that many of the brain trust ideas and plans are based on Russian ideology.”
Dwight D. Eisenhower, president from 1953 until 1961, probably ran the most disciplined cabinet in modern White House history. Eisenhower earned fame as a military commander, but his cabinet was stocked with business executives, leading Richard Strout of the New Republic to call it “eight millionaires and a plumber,” the latter being Martin P. Durkin of the Journeymen Plumbers and Steamfitters Union, who was to head Eisenhower’s Department of Labor.
Under Eisenhower, cabinet “meetings were relatively formal, with fixed agendas and focused discussions and follow through,” Pfiffner wrote. “Eisenhower used his cabinet by delegating as much as possible to his cabinet secretaries and by using the collective cabinet as a deliberative, though not a decision making, body.”
John F. Kennedy’s cabinet was less military band and more freewheeling jazz quartet. He presided over a “loosely structured White House,” as Pfiffner described it, one in which intelligence, grace, wit, and breeding were more important than anything to be found on an organizational chart. It was an administration in love with intelligence, principally its own. Like Kennedy himself, many of the best and brightest—as that cabinet would come to be known, in a sobriquet loaded with tragic irony—were bred in the boarding schools of the East Coast and, after that, the Ivy League. If they were not born into the highest reaches of society, like Secretary of State Dean Rusk, they had long ago assimilated into the ruling class and adapted its affects, from the Brooks Brothers suits to a paternalism about the affairs of government.
The best and the brightest would be principally remembered as the flawed heroes of David Halberstam’s 1972 book, where that phrase originated (there was also an 1811 Christian hymn, “Brightest and Best,” but Halberstam claimed he was not trying to play on its title). Convinced that the world was precisely as they believed it to be, even as the world offered increasing evidence to the contrary, they walked into a Southeast Asian trap just as the French—humiliated at Dien Bien Phu—were slinking out of it. By the time we walked out, 58,000 Americans, and perhaps as many as two million Vietnamese civilians, would be dead.
None of that was apparent on January 20, 1961, as John F. Kennedy stood on the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol and, taking the oath of office, vowed an end to “tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” Coming from the handsome and articulate young president, this seemed a credible promise. Halberstam told the story of how impressed Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had emerged untutored from the Texas scrublands, was by the men whom Kennedy had hired to bring the nation across the New Frontier. “After attending his first Cabinet meeting,” Halberstam wrote, Johnson “went back to his mentor [fellow Texan and Speaker of the House] Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next.”
Rayburn was less impressed. “You may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say,” he told Johnson, “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”
Tellingly, Steve Bannon was spotted reading The Best and the Brightest by an observant New York Times college sports reporter while waiting to board a flight at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta. This was in late December 2016, about a month before Trump’s inauguration. “I’m having everyone in the transition read it,” Bannon said to the reporter about Halberstam’s book. “It’s great for seeing how little mistakes early on can lead to big ones later.” (He subsequently explained that, actually, only some people on the transition were made to read The Best and the Brightest. Maybe more should have.)
Nixon, like Trump, governed without seeking advice from his cabinet members, especially since much of the cabinet was focused on domestic policy, and Nixon found domestic policy beneath him. Accordingly, the cabinet was beneath him, too. “I am only interested when we make a major breakthrough or have a major failure,” Nixon decreed. “Otherwise don’t bother me.” To make sure he wasn’t bothered, he had chief of staff H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, who said of his job, “Every President needs a son of a bitch, and I’m Nixon’s. I’m his buffer and I’m his bastard. I get done what he wants done and I take the heat instead of him.”
Shielding a president from lower-level administrative disagreements was a crucial task, as some in the Trump administration would discover. Haldeman may have done it too well. He and another top Nixon aide, John D. Ehrlichman, were accused of forming a “Berlin Wall” around the Oval Office, isolating Nixon by severely restricting the flow of information to him. Both men went to prison for their involvement in Watergate. Their boss did not.
Gerald R. Ford, who became president after Nixon resigned, kept most of his predecessor’s cabinet, in what proved an unwelcome continuity. In 1975, he fired several members of that cabinet, which had succumbed to vicious rivalries. The most notable victim of what came to be known as the Halloween Massacre was Henry A. Kissinger, who was deposed from his position as national security advisor (though he stayed secretary of state). Ford also named Dick Cheney his chief of staff. Cheney worked quietly but efficiently to consolidate power. “Somebody has to be in charge,” he explained. Cheney was happy to be that somebody.
Jimmy Carter’s management of the executive branch was much like the rest of his administration: high-toned, idealistic, and hopelessly ineffective. Coming into office, the former Georgia governor vowed a definitive break with the administrations of Nixon and Ford. “I believe in Cabinet administration of our government,” Carter said. “There will never be an instance while I am President when the members of the White House staff dominate or act in a superior position to the members of our cabinet.” This did not work out as planned. In July 1979, Jimmy Carter accepted the resignations of six cabinet members during a national crisis of confidence that many charged the White House had done too little to quell. The dismissals did nothing to rescue Carter’s prospects for a second term.
Ronald Reagan won the presidency at least in part on the promise of a conservative revolution, but his cabinet lacked the ideological warriors some yearned for and others feared. That infuriated evangelicals, who had been disappointed with the liberalism of Carter, a practicing Baptist, and had gone with Reagan less out of conviction than convenience. His cabinet choices felt like a betrayal. Complained Patrick J. Buchanan, “Where is the dash, color, and controversy—the customary concomitants of a Reagan campaign?”
Reagan was a famous delegator of responsibility; his White House was largely run by the “troika” of Edwin Meese III, James A. Baker III, and Michael K. Deaver. This arrangement seemed to function for much of the first term, though signs of breakdown became increasingly evident by 1983. “I’ve never worked in an organization like this,” one White House staffer complained. “There is no one person to give orders, except the President. This lends itself to jockeying for position and not letting anyone else get too far ahead.”
Bill Clinton’s cabinet was centrist and cerebral, but the West Wing mythology obscured the chaos of the early years of his presidency. There were remarkable similarities to the Trump administration. For one, Clinton had invested too little in the transition, which “led to a White House staff that was constructed late, on the fly and almost by remainder,” as adviser William A. Galston would remember in 2004. In the summer of 1994, Clinton replaced chief of staff Thomas F. “Mack�
�� McLarty III with Leon E. Panetta, which he hoped would, as the New York Times put it, “dispel the notion around the country that the White House is a chaotic operation in which decisions are made largely on impulse.” Things did get better after that, though then Monica Lewinsky came along, and Clinton succumbed to something worse than impulse, causing something worse than chaos.
The cabinet of George W. Bush seemed to largely reflect the desires of Dick Cheney, probably the most powerful vice president in the history of the United States. Naming him as a running mate was Bush’s “most remarkable organizational achievement” in the words of Fred I. Greenstein, one of the great scholars of presidential power. Bush was the first president to hold a graduate business degree, which led him to govern by what Greenstein generously called “a corporate model” of promiscuous delegation. Others were less generous. After he left the administration, Treasury Secretary Paul H. O’Neill would describe Bush at cabinet meetings as “a blind man in a room full of deaf people.” O’Neill complained that cabinet members had “little more than hunches about what the president might think.”
Trump desperately needed a Cheney of his own, who would guide his thinking on unfamiliar topics, translate inchoate wishes into policy goals and make sure that even in the far-flung reaches of the administrative empire, presidential directives were being followed.
Trump proved his own best saboteur. On November 13, he announced that Reince Priebus would serve as his chief of staff, making the Republican National Committee chairman from Wisconsin the air traffic controller of the incoming administration. The same announcement declared that Bannon would serve as the White House “chief political strategist.” Was this a power-sharing agreement? Nobody knew, including, it would quickly become clear, Trump himself.
The Best People Page 7