It was clear that Bannon was not going to play the Cheney role in the Trump administration, since he was a rogue operator at heart, one who hated organizational charts as much as he hated wearing ties. Close as they were to Trump, Jared and Ivanka lacked the experience. That left Priebus.
Even people who liked him would quickly come to see him as an unsound guardian of the Oval Office. The importance of the position could not be overstated, especially for a president with no experience in politics. “Without a great chief of staff, a president frankly doesn’t know what he is doing,” Bill Clinton’s labor secretary Robert B. Reich told the historian Chris Whipple.
One veteran of both the Trump campaign and the Trump administration tried to explain just how preposterous the Priebus pick was. Priebus should have had the wisdom to turn the job down, said the Trump veteran, who had worked for other Republican presidents and knew how things were supposed to run. It was winter, and it was dusk, and we were sitting in a bar in Northern Virginia. The gruff GOP hand pointed out the window, where commuters were on their way home. Imagine, he said, if a nurse came through that door and demanded we go with her to a hospital to perform heart surgery. We would have to beg off, the reason being that we knew nothing of cardiology. Only she would insist: We had to be the ones. She would drag us to the hospital, into the operating room. She would hand us scalpels, instruct us to get on with the quadruple bypass. And we would cut into the flesh, because either too much vanity or too little courage kept us from stepping away. That, he said, was what it was like to have Reince Priebus as the White House chief of staff.
The best chiefs of staff understood the mechanics of governing, which gears depended on each other, as well as where the machinery of policy overlapped with the machinery of politics. This was not Priebus’s expertise. “The guy couldn’t tell you how a bill becomes a law,” scoffed another Republican operative, a top Trump campaign and transition official.
It would not be fair to blame Priebus entirely for the chaos of Trump’s first year. Some of that chaos was natural to a new administration. But some of it—particularly on the cabinet level—resulted from inattention, an inability to tame eruptions of self-importance, carelessness, and greed. This would have been Priebus’s job, as it had been the job of previous chiefs of staff. Eisenhower’s cabinet was counterbalanced by a powerful chief of staff in Sherman Adams, the first man to officially hold that position. Adams wielded so much power in the West Wing that he became the subject of a joke: What if Adams should die and Eisenhower becomes president of the United States?
Nobody was going to mistake Reince Priebus for Sherman Adams. He was a fund-raiser, and fund-raising was courtship, not management. He quickly set about transfusing as much of the RNC as he could into the West Wing. He hired Katie Walsh, a high-ranking RNC deputy, and Sean Spicer, an RNC spokesman. The communications shop quickly became a refuge for young RNC alumni. A joke about Priebus went around the building, much as there had once been a joke about Adams: If a journalist wanted a reaction from one of the White House press staffers, she needed to write a hit piece not on Trump, but on Priebus. If the Adams joke was about power, the Priebus joke was about petulance.
As for that cabinet itself, it came into focus in the weeks following the election. And as it did, it also came to look suspiciously like Trump himself. His cabinet was 85 percent white and 75 percent male, with an average age of sixty-two, according to Politico’s calculations. It appeared to have been constructed in intentional opposition to the cabinet of Barack Obama, who had tried to inject a measure of multiculturalism into the upper ranks of the executive branch. Trump got rid of all that, dispensing with even the most remote pretense of gender or ethnic parity.
The cabinet was stocked with men and women of terrific wealth—DeVos, Mnuchin, Ross, McMahon—but they were not captains of industry or brilliant innovators, men and women whose wealth was a mark of singular achievement. DeVos had inherited her wealth, while McMahon and her husband Vince presided over WWE, the gaudy professional wrestling concern that was little more than a pageant of steroidal muscles and unhinged theatrics (Trump would sometimes appear at their matches, honing his dramaturgic skills). Mnuchin and Ross were both finance bottom-feeders, neither particularly respected in Wall Street’s highest echelons. They would not command much respect in the Trump administration, either. It was a cabinet of wealth that was tacky and vulgar, wealth desperate for recognition, wealth that could only have been an insult to the average citizens whose tribune Trump vowed to be in Washington.
Senate hearings for cabinet nominees had not made for compelling television in the past. In the Trump administration, they were riveting, constituting the first real battle between Trump and Senate Democrats. They were a minority party without the power to block a nominee on their own. Their only hope was to seriously damage a nominee, causing him or her to withdraw, or to raise so many doubts that moderate Republicans may decide to cast a “nay” vote.
They succeeded most clearly in the case of Andrew F. Puzder, who withdrew his nomination to head the Department of Labor in mid-February. Puzder was the chief executive of Carl’s Jr., the fast-food chain best known for advertisements featuring voluptuous women performing fellatio on hamburgers. “I like beautiful women eating burgers in bikinis. I think it’s very American,” Puzder once explained.
Puzder never even got to a Senate hearing. Unflattering reports hounded his nomination from the start, and the salacious ads that once seemed genius were now marshaled as evidence that Trump was hiring men just as blasé about sexual harassment as he was.
The “slutburger” ads, as they came to be known, portended greater troubles for Puzder. In a divorce filing from 1988, Puzder’s then-wife testified that he had assaulted her. Just a few days before his nomination hearing, Politico unearthed an interview that ex-wife, Lisa Fierstein, had given to Oprah Winfrey in 1990. It was a sickening conversation. “The damage that I sustained you can’t see. It’s permanent,” Fierstein said. “They don’t hit you in the face. They’re too smart. They don’t hit you in front of everyone.”
There were other embarrassments, too, of the sort that would plague many other Trump nominees in the weeks to come. During the presidential campaign, Trump had boasted of an unrivaled toughness on undocumented immigration, whereas Puzder once employed an undocumented woman at his Southern California mansion. And he was against increasing the minimum wage, even as Trump promised economic salvation to low-income Americans.
In a book he published in 2018, Puzder blamed his downfall on a popular Trump-era enemy: the media. He dismissed the allegations of spousal assault, writing that his ex-wife “acknowledged that the charges she had made were wholly untrue.” Those charges, Puzder argued, should never have become a story. But they did, because of “the Left’s attack campaign,” which was “designed to defame and disparage.”
Puzder withdrew his nomination two days after Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn resigned as the national security advisor. Flynn had been a close Trump adviser during the campaign. Before that, he had been head of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Obama administration, only to be fired from that position. Obama warned Trump against hiring Flynn, but as with so much else, the cocksure new president ignored his predecessor’s advice. It took only twenty-four days for Flynn’s return to public service to unravel, with reports of mystifyingly improper calls to the Russian ambassador outside the usual diplomatic channels, as well as lobbying work on behalf of foreign governments, work that Flynn did not see fit to report.
Puzder’s withdrawal and Flynn’s resignation refuted Trump’s claims that his administration was coming together smoothly. If anything, the exact opposite was true.
Puzder aside, the Democrats at least partly succeeded in arguing to the American public that Trump was making poor choices. They did so by subjecting nominees to intense scrutiny before Senate committees, even if they knew that Republicans would ultimately move the nomination forward, and that the entire chambe
r, narrowly controlled by Republicans, would confirm that nominee. The question was how much the nominee could be wounded before he or she became a cabinet member, how much the nominee could be shamed, interrogated, and browbeaten, so that he or she never afterward had the feeling of job security.
Trump’s people knew this, of course. The transition headquarters on F Street, moribund in the weeks and days before the presidential election, came to life as winter settled over Washington. In a wood-paneled room that resembled a Senate hearing chamber, transition officials conducted intense preparation sessions—known as murder boards—for the nominees. They had Republicans familiar with the confirmation process ask the nominees the kinds of difficult, uncomfortable questions they could expect from Democrats; one person who was there even remembers a few former U.S. senators taking part.
Not everyone took the murder boards seriously. Jeff Sessions, who was nominated to be the U.S. attorney general, spurned invitations to come to F Street, instead conducting his own preparations, with his own staff. Much later, it became clear that Sessions lied to the Senate about the extent of his contact with the Russians. Would having gone to the murder boards have changed that? Maybe not. But people did not forget that he had failed to show.
Nominees were encouraged to bring family members to the murder boards, in order to simulate the sensation of having your spouse and children sit behind you as political adversaries delved into your history, holding every potential embarrassment, no matter how small, up to the light. Wilbur Ross brought his wife to the murder boards, but also a younger man. Someone asked who this younger man was. As one person who was there remembers, Ross answered that it was his tennis trainer. They were scheduled to play later, so it only made sense to bring his tennis pro to the murder boards. It was a hint that Ross would do things his own way, as he had always done them. He was too old, and too rich, to do them any other way.
Nominees were also dispatched to Capitol Hill to meet with senators to build support and quell incipient anxieties. The importance of these meetings was directly related to the level of unease transition officials expected from Democrats. Among those who worried the transition most was Scott Pruitt, a favorite of energy executives and climate-change deniers. Concerned that his extreme anti-environmentalism might lead some Republicans to drop support, the transition sent him to meet with forty-two senators.
The nominee was usually ferried to Capitol Hill by a “sherpa,” a liaison who had the requisite congressional experience, from a knowledge of what legislators wanted, or feared, to a mastery of the labyrinthine underground passageways beneath the U.S. Capitol. For some reason, Pruitt did not like his original sherpa, so he went to the transition offices and picked another. This new sherpa, who would accompany Pruitt to his meetings with senators, was Rob Porter, who at the time was chief of staff to Orrin G. Hatch, the senior Republican senator from Utah.
Working on Pruitt’s confirmation was the first step in Porter’s elevation within the still largely unformed Trump administration. Porter would be a key White House figure in the second half of 2017, as the White House struggled to curb the disorder of the administration’s first months. But then he would be undone by a scandal that prompted him to leave the White House, and some of that disorder would return.
The confirmation hearings began on January 10, with Sessions facing the Senate Judiciary Committee. It was a tough hearing; Sessions was asked about his views on race, his contacts with Russia, and his independence (or lack thereof) from Trump. Most of the hearings that followed did not get much easier, with Democrats doing their best to override the triumphalist narrative of Fox News and Breitbart, to portray the incoming department chiefs as incompetent and unprepared.
Education secretary Betsy DeVos proved the most confounding of Trump’s nominees. Some of the intense dislike she engendered was probably the result of sexism, as well as some bias against her conservative brand of Christianity. It did not help that her brother Erik Prince was the founder of Blackwater, the infamous military contractor responsible for several bloody excesses during the war in Iraq.
But most of all, it was DeVos who hurt herself. Asked by Senator Christopher S. Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, about guns in schools (he had become a ferocious gun control advocate after the 2012 shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, which left twenty children dead), she said that was “best left to locales and states to decide,” like a woman ordered not to stray from Republican dogma on the Second Amendment. Pressed to explain, she referenced rural schools in Wyoming and the need “to protect from potential grizzlies,” thus inadvertently giving birth to one of the first great memes of the Trump presidency (there would be many more in the months to come).
Questions from Senator Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, revealed that DeVos was totally unfamiliar with the difference between measuring student growth and student proficiency, a crucial distinction in the debates over standardized testing and teacher effectiveness. “It surprises me that you don’t know this issue,” Franken said sourly. DeVos kept on smiling.
There were many things DeVos did not know. In an exchange with Senator Maggie Hassan, she failed to grasp that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was a federal law, meaning it could not be selectively applied. DeVos pledged her “sensitivity,” but that hardly allayed Hassan. “With all due respect, it’s not about sensitivity,” the Democrat from New Hampshire retorted. “Although that helps.” (The sensitivity would turn out to be a ruse; the following fall, her Department of Education canceled seventy-two guidances for special education and disabled students because they were supposedly “outdated, unnecessary, or ineffective.”)
Not every nomination hearing went quite so badly, but enough did to make one wonder if they were being staged by the comedic minds of Saturday Night Live, especially since Senator Franken of Minnesota was an alumnus of the program.
“Did you enjoy meeting me?” Franken drily asked Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas nominated to head the Department of Energy.
“I hope you are as much fun on that dais,” a beaming Perry answered, “as you were on your couch.” The salacious implications being rather blatant, Perry pleaded to “rephrase that.” He was easily confirmed, the Senate untroubled by recent reports that Perry had no clue that the Department of Energy oversaw all of the nation’s nuclear facilities and was responsible for the management of some ninety thousand metric tons of nuclear waste, which could leak into the groundwater or fall into the hands of terrorists. That he would have to learn on the job, along with much else.
By and large, the Senate was powerless to properly take stock of Trump’s cabinet choices, with all their conflicts of interest and ethical lapses. Republicans didn’t have the courage to oppose Trump, and Democrats didn’t have the numbers. And no one with access to the Oval Office pointed out to the president that bad advice, or an errantly wired decision-making process, was leading him to select people who were far more likely to subvert his agenda than to execute it. He was draining the swamp by filling it with sewage, but there would be no reward in blaming him for the stench.
Wilbur Ross was the perfect embodiment of the power elite Trump had run against. His key trait was loyalty to Trump, or at least loyalty perceived. “Wilbur maxed out,” Bannon said of his contributions to the Trump campaign. That earned him the distinction of being nominated for the Department of Commerce, which would in effect make him the nation’s chief negotiator on a potential trade war with China, which Trump promised was coming, or a reworking of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Trump had labeled a “disaster” during the campaign.
In 2009, Ross had invested $100 million in Longyuan Power, a Chinese wind power producer. He was also an investor in Diamond S Shipping Group, Inc., a Chinese concern that would benefit from continued open trade with the United States. And a ProPublica investigation published that December found he had invested in and sat on the board of ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel producer.
He would therefore have a personal stake in any tariffs the Trump administration decided to levy.
“It’s never happened that a Commerce secretary has been so directly involved in the fallout, and rewards, from previous trade deals,” one former treasury official told ProPublica.
This did not subject Ross to the scrutiny he deserved. Sitting in front of the Commerce Committee, he mumbled his way through his testimony in the manner of a municipal accountant reading from his ledger before a deserted city council hearing. No one who hoped that Trump would rebalance the American economy through better trade deals could have been heartened by the droning performance.
Maria E. Cantwell, the junior Democratic senator from Washington State, and one of the youngest members in the chamber, teased out the problem with magically converting billionaires like Ross into public servants. “The President-elect’s administration is trying to bring in a lot of private sector experience,” Cantwell said as Ross sat before her. “I appreciate private sector experience, but oftentimes that experience is about answering to shareholders and other special interests. This is about answering to the public interest.” Her analysis of the tension between private wants and public needs would haunt Trump’s administration in the months to come. Ross promised to be “quite scrupulous about recusal and any topic where there is the slightest scintilla of doubt.” Soon enough, this assurance would prove to be disingenuous.
Ross and other nominees benefited from the crosswinds buffeting Capitol Hill that winter of 2017. Republicans were eager to confirm Trump’s cabinet and begin the business of government. They weren’t thrilled by some of Trump’s choices, and they were confused by others, but if they wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and install conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, they needed to get through this awkward first round of dating.
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