The Best People

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The Best People Page 12

by Alexander Nazaryan


  Throughout the winter and spring, First Lady Melania Trump remained in New York. There was much gossip about the Trumps’ marriage, about her perceived coldness toward the president. But more important was the fact that she was simply not there. Elaine Kamarck, the Clinton veteran and Brookings scholar, thought the lack of a “functioning political wife” was even more detrimental to the Trump administration than Reince Priebus’s ineffectual turn as chief of staff.

  A first lady was the only adviser who could not be fired, Kamarck reasoned, the only one who could see the president in the residence as she wished. Ivanka Trump had her father’s ear, but also an official position, from which she could be dismissed. She also had an inheritance to think about. She was his favorite child, but breaking with the president too strongly could ultimately cost her hundreds of millions of dollars.

  Even if Melania did come to Washington earlier (she finally moved there in June 2017), she was not likely to have filled the role of trusted adviser the way Eleanor Roosevelt or Hillary Clinton had. “This first lady, whose clothes I admire terrifically, she doesn’t know anything,” Kamarck said. She did not say this cuttingly. She said it with compassion. “She has no instinct for this business. She is not a help,” nor ever would be.

  Priebus and his RNC allies made things worse. People who worked with him liked him, but that work was in the service of the presidency, which demanded qualities other than likability. “The guy you want to be your neighbor, but not your chief of staff.” That was the verdict delivered by one senior administration official. Another person, who was in the Oval Office daily, saw Priebus as perpetually skittish, his time occupied by “daily survival stuff.” That often involved leaking to the press, not to bolster the president, but to weaken his own enemies in the West Wing.

  It didn’t help. He was caught between Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, unable to ever gain sufficient trust from the president. With his flappy suits and wan smile, Priebus was a man desperately out of his element. People noticed. During staff meetings held in his office, others would openly make jokes at his expense. They would mock the president’s chief of staff, and he would do nothing to rebuke them. It was stunning stuff, remembered one person who witnessed this brutally impudent behavior.

  Priebus’s deputies leaked incessantly to the press to protect his reputation and their own. Katie Walsh was a source for Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, a bracingly unflattering portrayal of the first months of the Trump administration. Yet some colleagues in the West Wing saw her own reputation for competence as entirely undeserved.

  Sean Spicer had no such reputation. His own leaking was well known and perplexing to those who knew how a White House was supposed to work. A press secretary was indeed supposed to have off-the-record and background conversations with journalists, but only on behalf of the president, either to boost a favorable story or knock down a malicious rumor. That was how it had been done for generations. Spicer leaked for an entirely different reason: to protect himself and Priebus, most often by casting aspersions on their West Wing rivals.

  It was all so knotted and confusing, bewildering even to Americans who wanted to support Trump, had supported Trump, but could not make sense of what this administration was turning out to be. While Spicer barked at reporters in the Brady Briefing Room, on Fox News, emissaries like Kellyanne Conway and Sebastian Gorka portrayed themselves as close confidants of the president. Often, they gave their interviews from Pebble Beach, a space near the northwest gate where administration members conducted interviews with the press. That gave the impression that they had just stepped out of the Oval Office, even though that was almost certainly not the case.

  “I’m not entirely sure what Kellyanne did,” one person said contemptuously of Conway, who graced the English language with “alternative facts” but did little else of note. Charged with solving the opioid crisis, she dispensed nutritional advice: “Eat the ice cream, have the French fry, don’t buy the street drug.” (I asked Conway for interviews several times, but all she would say is that she was “not a leaker.” I suppose that settles it, then.)

  As for Gorka, the notion that he was a bearded Kissinger was “bullshit.” He was rarely in the Oval, and he had no evident duties, no portfolio to work on, other than meddling in the National Security Council at Bannon’s behest. His greatest contribution to the Trump administration was finally leaving it, in typically graceless fashion, during the summer of 2017.

  Groveling courtiers at a madcap court, Gorka and Conway generated pointless controversy, then retreated into the shadows, only to return for another round a few days later, like addicts looking for a fresh fix. Much as with the RNC whisper campaign, this self-promotion infuriated the serious men and women in the White House who wanted to get things done, who understood that publicity was the enemy of productivity. And there were such people, only one never heard their names, for they had not come to the White House to make their names known.

  Whether they were products of the RNC or Fox News, it was the insecure and the incompetent who frustrated the president’s own agenda—however scattershot that agenda was—often because it suited their own ends to do so. If they formed an “internal resistance” to Trump, they did so inadvertently and vaingloriously.

  As they frequently would do in the months to come, Trump’s allies tried to cover up disorder in the White House with groundless accusations of conspiracy. Speaking at a Republican Party event in early March, Representative Mike Kelly, a Republican from Pennsylvania, alleged that President Obama was maintaining his family’s residence in Washington—the first president to do so since Woodrow Wilson—“for one purpose and one purpose only, and that is to run a shadow government that is going to totally upset the new agenda.” His staff retracted the impolitic remark, but only after it had been made public. Kelly’s silly insinuation offered a revealing look at the contradictory Republican mind-set: broadly suspicious of all government, but wanting the Trump government to succeed, so that Trump could dismantle government once and for all. It was, understandably enough, much easier to engage in conspiracy theories than try to honestly resolve these contradictions.

  The utter unpredictability of the new administration meant that little could be taken for granted in Washington. On any given day, the city might wake to a sense of stability, however modest and hard-won, only to plunge into disorder by afternoon. In early April, the Trump administration dismissed many of the onetime campaign workers who had come to Washington and been placed in various federal agency beachhead teams. The White House said that it was merely reorganizing staffers, but this was not an especially convincing explanation, including to those who were being pushed out of jobs they thought were permanent. As one of the dismissed complained to CBS News, “The perception is, we were Mr. Trump’s goons who were good at knocking on doors, but can’t do much else.”

  That was the perception. Career staffers at Treasury were not thrilled to be working for Steve Mnuchin. But they were glad that he got rid of the beachhead team, which signaled some measure of independence from the White House. “They weren’t his people,” one top treasury staffer explained, and Mnuchin “didn’t have much patience” with them. He may not have had much patience with career staffers, either—many found him arrogant and aloof—but at least the new secretary had a couple of vertebrae, if not a full spine.

  Trump kept complaining, looking for someone to blame. “I am waiting right now for so many people,” he said on Fox Business a week after the dismissal of some of the original beachhead teams. “Hundreds and hundreds of people. And then they’ll say ‘why isn’t Trump doing this faster?’ You can’t do it faster because they’re obstructing. They’re obstructionists.” This was an attack on congressional Democrats, who lacked the necessary power in the Senate to “obstruct” his nominees. Trump also blamed the “lousy process,” by which he meant the legal and legislative procedures involved in hiring people for prominent federal positions.

  If anyone could be directly
blamed for the chronic staffing problems of the Trump administration—which continued well into 2019—then it was the Presidential Personnel Office, which oversaw hiring for executive branch jobs. The office was miserably understaffed from the beginning, a Washington Post investigation in early 2018 found, “with only about 30 employees on hand.” Documents obtained by the Post showed that Chris Christie had wanted Presidential Personnel to be staffed by some hundred people.

  Most of these gatekeepers to the Trump administration were young and content to act their age. As the Post reported, PPO’s quarters “became something of a social hub, where young staffers from throughout the administration stopped by to hang out on couches and smoke electronic cigarettes,” as well as to play drinking games of the sort one generally left behind halfway through a college career.

  The office was headed by John “Johnny” DeStefano, an amiable former staffer to House Speaker John A. Boehner, the wine-loving Republican from Ohio. DeStefano was a typical Trump hire: well liked, but not well suited. His experience in high-level management was nonexistent. A person who also worked on campus said that DeStefano’s defining characteristic was an ability to come out of any situation, no matter how politically fraught, without any visible scars. He did not mean this as a compliment.

  DeStefano did not fill PPO with capable Capitol Hill staffers, as few skilled congressional aides saw such a move helping their career ambitions. Sean E. Doocey, DeStefano’s top deputy, was twenty-eight years old, a veteran of the Trump campaign. Another hire from the Trump campaign was thirty-year-old Caroline Wiles, who the Post found falsified the extent of her education at Flagler College in her native Florida. She had been apprehended twice for drunken driving. Max Miller, a twenty-nine-year-old whose arrest record included violence and alcohol abuse, had similarly misrepresented his educational history.

  Katja Bullock, a veteran of previous Republican administrations was, at seventy-five, three times older than many of her peers. As the Post reported, four of her family members had gotten jobs in the Trump administration, which Bullock claimed, rather incredibly, had nothing to do with her own position.

  A West Winger who observed the PPO at work was left with the impression of a “totally disorganized” and “totally haphazard” agency. Like a virus, its disorder wafted from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building into the White House and the rest of the executive branch. DeStefano and his staffers were obsessed with loyalty, to Trump but also to the RNC. That resulted in them hiring what the West Winger derisively referred to as “RNC kids.” They were ambitious but inexperienced, mercenary with their fealty, ready to profess loyalty to anyone who might help with their political ascent.

  After the unflattering Post report was published, the Trump administration did what it always did when confronted with its own shortcomings. Instead of acknowledging mistakes and trying to correct them, it argued that there had been no mistakes at all, as if an admission of error was itself the most unpardonable sin. Raj Shah, the deputy White House press secretary, stayed true to form, blaming “historic obstruction from Democrats in Congress” and praising PPO for helping hire “the best and brightest appointees.” He did not seem to realize where “the best and the brightest” came from, or what it meant.

  As spring turned to summer, the Trump administration remained an archipelago of empty offices. Between the agency heads and career staffers, there was an enormous gap that should have been filled by deputies and assistant secretaries.

  Some noticed, and were troubled. William “Bill” J. McGinley was a Republican lawyer who had worked for Jones Day and Patton Boggs before joining the administration. Affable and without pretense, he loved to annoy his staffers with sports metaphors. Among his favorite was that the administration was fielding only pitchers and catchers. There was no outfield, no infield. That left some department heads with the impression that nobody was watching and that they could do as they pleased. By the time McGinley understood what an enormous problem that was turning out to be, it was too late.

  The Senate was more dilatory with Trump nominees (forty-three days) than it had been with Obama’s (thirty-five days). Democratic intransigence may have been responsible, but not to any significant extent. The nominees were often poorly vetted or failed to submit the proper financial disclosure forms, making the delay a procedural necessity. Some seemed so spectacularly unsuited for federal employ, one wondered if they had been submitted by Trump solely to irritate Democrats.

  Monica Crowley, a Fox News pundit, had to withdraw her nomination to the National Security Council after it was found that she plagiarized parts of her 2000 doctoral dissertation at Columbia, as well as parts of her 2012 book What the (Bleep) Just Happened?; Mark E. Green was not to be the secretary of the army, as he had made hateful comments about transgender people (he also was not a fan of evolution); Samuel H. Clovis Jr., a Trump campaign veteran named the chief scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, withdrew because he had encouraged a campaign aide to reach out to Russian officials in 2016; Tom Marino, who was to administer the Office of National Drug Control Policy at the White House, once helped pass legislation that made it more difficult to prosecute companies that were profiting from the opioid crisis; Kathleen Hartnett White ended her bid to become head of the Council on Environmental Quality after it came to light that the former beef industry lobbyist and Koch-funded think-tanker praised carbon dioxide as “a necessary nutrient for plant life” while lambasting climate change as “the Left’s secular religion.”

  By late 2018, Senate records included the names of sixty-one nominees who had withdrawn their nominations from the Trump administration. Not all of them did so because of unflattering revelations made during the nominating process, but that was the case for many, and it did slow the pace of hiring, as well as the pace of governing.

  There was one key respect in which the president did succeed in installing people who shared his vision of a smaller, weaker federal government. During the presidential campaign, Trump had promised to remake the federal judiciary in the image of the Federalist Society and Heritage Foundation, which had happily supplied him with a list of palatable Supreme Court justices.

  Even more important, he had Don McGahn. If McGahn was deficient as a White House counsel in other respects, he compensated for his shortcomings by ensuring that whatever else Trump did or did not accomplish, his legacy on the federal bench would last for at least a generation.

  There were the two Supreme Court justices—Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the latter practically resuscitated by McGahn after credible allegations of sexual assault—but they were almost beside the point in the project conservatives had envisioned. Supreme Court nominations inevitably attracted the vast majority of media attention, but lower-court appointments tended to be of greater consequence, as these judges would prove either the keepers or, more likely, destroyers of the administrative state. The Supreme Court took few cases each year: about one percent of the seven or eight thousand cases submitted to the court were granted certiorari status, meaning that the nine justices would hear the arguments. The rest were fated to remain in the lower courts, which were increasingly coming to look just as Trump promised they would.

  Unsparingly critical as he could be of many former West Wing colleagues, Bannon would grow effusive in praising McGahn, whom he called “the most significant White House counsel in the history of the republic” but for Samuel I. Rosenman, the influential consigliere to Franklin Roosevelt and later Truman (he was the first to hold the position, under Roosevelt, though it was known as “special counsel” at that time). Rosenman, Bannon explained, was responsible for helping Roosevelt build the administrative state through the New Deal. Trump’s conservative judges would undo Rosenman’s work. “McGahn was like the bookend,” Bannon gushed. “The alpha and the omega.”

  McGahn looked for judges who shared his view on the Chevron deference, a statute key to deconstructionists like him and Bannon. Stemming from a 1984 case, the Chevro
n deference became “a central pillar of the modern administrative state,” a Hoover Institution scholar wrote, because it dictated that regulatory agencies—in the 1984 suit, the EPA—had primacy over the courts in determining how their rules were interpreted. That, in conservatives’ view, was what endowed “unelected bureaucrats” with such terrific power.

  Both of Trump’s nominees to the Supreme Court were opposed to the Chevron deference. Kavanaugh—an unoriginal, unimpressive thinker but an able predictor of what conservative activists would want from him—had criticized the Chevron deference in a Notre Dame speech just months before he was nominated to the high bench.

  The lower-court nominees shared this view. Sent in tranches to Capitol Hill, where they faced a generally friendly Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee, the vast majority of these nominees were confirmed.

  There were a few exceptions. Among these was Matthew S. Petersen, of the Federal Election Commission, who under questioning from Senator John N. Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, admitted he had never tried a case, in a brutally uncomfortable four-minute exchange that became an unlikely social media sensation. Brett J. Talley, a Harvard Law graduate, was rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association. He had written several horror novels, yet had failed to try a single case; Jeff Mateer had branded transgender youth as instruments of “Satan’s plan” while also condemning same-sex marriage.

  These three jurists withdrew their nominations, but most did not. By the end of 2018, Trump had confirmed 85 judges across the federal judiciary, providing what Garrett Ventry, a former adviser to the Senate Judiciary Committee on judicial nominations, called “a unifying theme for all Republicans.” Those judges were young: the youngest, Allison Jones Rushing, was only thirty-six at the time of her nomination to a federal appellate court (she had not yet been confirmed as of early 2019, but would almost certainly get there in time). With their youth and ideological zeal, these judges would continue to wage Trump’s war long after it had been conceded on other fronts.

 

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