The Best People

by Alexander Nazaryan

  Whether intentionally or not, corporate interests did stand to gain from Trump’s aggressive use of the CRA. Industry groups poured money into the presidential transition, which received $6.5 million from “private sources,” including those tied to American Resort Development Association, Caesars Entertainment, Philip Morris International, Uranium Producers of America, and the Pipe Line Contractors Association. A spokesman for one of those groups, Associated Builders and Contractors, explained to the Center for Public Integrity that his group’s members were looking for “a regulatory environment that will encourage greater business investment in the economy.” In other words, they were engaging in the most basic of transactional politics, paying into Trump’s fund in hopes that Trump would pay them back by undoing Obama’s legacy.

  The new president did not disappoint. With the help of a friendly Congress, Trump used the CRA to kill an Obama rule that mandated employers to report workplace injuries. That rule would have been helpful to construction workers, who might well have wanted to know whether a builder had a poor safety record. Among those seeking repeal of the worker safety rule was Associated Builders and Contractors, the lobbying group that had donated to the Trump transition with the stated expectation of gaining something in return. Now, that wish was granted. “Just because you have an injury in the workplace doesn’t mean you have the [sic] bad employer,” reassured an official from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a pro-business group.

  Trump undid the Stream Protection Rule, which was intended to keep surface coal mines from polluting waterways with the potential toxic by-products of their activities. “This is one very, very important step to get coal back on its feet,” said a spokesman for the National Mining Association, a lobbying group loyal to the Republican Party.

  During the campaign, Trump had railed against Goldman Sachs and “hedge-fund guys.” But as president, he used the CRA to repeal a rule issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that prevented discriminatory lending in the automotive industry. “A good day for American consumers,” declared Representative Jeb Hensarling, the Texas Republican who chaired the House Financial Services Committee and who thought the CFPB was a “rogue bureau.” It was certainly a good day for Hensarling, who received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds from banks and financial institutions. That proved money well spent. And despite his own penchant for suing adversaries and critics, Trump did away with a CFPB rule that had made it easier for individuals to join class-action lawsuits against credit card companies and banks.

  Among the rules jettisoned by the Trump administration were some that seemed to bear little connection to his broader policy program. Trump rescinded a rule that pertained to hunting in sixteen federal wildlife refuges in Alaska. The rule, issued by the National Park Service and relevant only in that state, forbade inhumane and unsportsmanlike practices, including hunting from airplanes and motorboats, using steel-jaw traps, and killing bears in hibernation. Representative Don Young, a crusty Republican from Alaska announced that he was “pleased by this decision to correct an illegal Obama-era power grab.” Others saw only cruelty at work. The president of the Humane Society complained to Politico: “The drama in the White House sucked up all the oxygen in the press room. This should be a national embarrassment, but it got no attention.”

  Trump used the CRA sixteen times in his first two years in office, far more than any other president. Though he would use it once in the fall of 2017 and once more the following May, both times on the aforementioned Consumer Financial Protection Bureau rules, the vast majority of his CRA rollbacks came that first winter and spring, the last of them on May 17, 2017, regarding a Department of Labor rule about pensions.

  The shitshow strategy could only achieve so much, but in those first months of the Trump administration, it achieved plenty. And then an unlikely concept visited the White House: order.

  Chapter 8

  Better People

  On July 28, 2017, President Trump flew to Long Island to give a speech to law enforcement officers, whom he encouraged to be “rough” with suspected gang members. After the speech, Trump flew back to Washington, landing at Andrews Air Force Base a little before 2 p.m.

  Reince Priebus walked out of the plane and into a waiting car with several colleagues. They sat there, waiting for the president to emerge from Air Force One. Suddenly, there was a commotion, the telltale consulting of smartphones, an indication that something was amiss.

  Still aboard Air Force One, the president had just sent a tweet that announced that John F. Kelly, the marine general, would be his new chief of staff. This was news to everyone, including Priebus. Everyone knew it was coming, they just didn’t know it was coming like this. The other staffers got out of the car. It drove away with Priebus alone, newly out of a job, humiliated by the president before the entire nation.

  Exactly a week before Priebus was fired, Sean Spicer resigned his position as White House spokesman in protest over the hiring of slick New York hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci, who would famously last ten days as Trump’s communications director (Scaramucci delighted in arguing that it was actually eleven days). By this time, Katie Walsh had already left the White House. Many of the junior RNC-linked aides in “lower press” (the ones who sat in a narrow suite separated by a sliding blue door from the Brady Briefing Room, while their more senior colleagues in “upper press” were on the first floor of the White House, much closer to the Oval Office) had also been pushed out of the building.

  Priebus’s replacement, Kelly, had been serving as the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security since the beginning of the Trump presidency. He had retired from the U.S. Marine Corps in early 2016, having risen from a grunt in 1970 to a four-star general in charge of the military’s Southern Command, which oversaw operations in Latin and South America. Tom Cotton, the ambitious young Republican senator from Arkansas, initially suggested Kelly to Bannon as a potential secretary of state during the presidential transition. Bannon knew of Kelly; he also knew that Kelly had lost a son serving in Afghanistan and was eager to get on with civilian life. When he called Kelly, the retired general did not seem especially enthusiastic about joining the administration, though he did agree to meet with Trump out of a sense of duty.

  Not a year later, he was being celebrated as the disciplinarian who would finally bring Trump to heel.

  The hope would not prove entirely unfounded. For one, there were “a lot fewer on the fly meetings,” said one of his closest aides in the West Wing. The door Priebus kept open, Kelly closed. Priebus had been obsessed with the building’s power politics; Kelly happily delegated responsibility to trusted subordinates. Unlike the subordinates Priebus brought to the White House, Kelly’s deputies did not care if they were liked.

  Kelly’s top staffers made the trip with him from the secluded DHS headquarters at a former girls’ seminary on Nebraska Avenue, in upper Northwest Washington, to an office suite five doors from the Oval Office. Joining Kelly in the White House was Zachary D. Fuentes, an aide of such imperious manner, he came to be known as Zachary of the United States. An even more influential aide was Kirstjen M. Nielsen, whom Kelly trusted above all others. She was in her mid-forties, her only experience in the White House having come when she spent five years as an assistant to George W. Bush. Seen as arrogant and abrasive by some, Nielsen let it be known that the level of disarray in the White House was unacceptable.

  After grueling days of putting out fires, Kelly, Nielsen, and Fuentes would retreat to their quarters and complain about Trump with open disdain. When, in September 2018, an anonymous Trump administration official published an op-ed in the New York Times claiming that they were doing everything possible to subvert Trump’s destructive impulses, some thought Fuentes was the author. (Asked over email if he wrote the op-ed, Fuentes responded to me with the following message: “NOT TRUE!!”)

  Bannon’s influence would never be as great as during the first month of the Trump presidency. As time wen
t on, he became concerned that congressional Republicans were distracting the president from the populist and nationalist agenda that had distinguished Trump from every other Republican candidate for president. A conventional Trump would be no better than Marco Rubio come 2020.

  In his office, Bannon had a whiteboard on which he listed presidential agenda items: “Pledges on Infrastructure,” “Pledges on Immigration,” “Pledges on Obamacare.” To Bannon, this was a daily reminder of what he and Trump promised the American people. It was cluttered and ambitious, maybe even delusive, but it was what they said they were going to do, and now they had better do it. Others saw it as hopelessly unrealistic, even naïve, premised on a faulty understanding of the political perils Trump faced. “Ivanka hated it,” Bannon would later recall with something approaching relish. “She didn’t want to build the wall. She didn’t want to drain the swamp. She doesn’t want to do that. She’s a progressive Democrat.”

  Walking into Bannon’s office, the president’s daughter touted her own priorities. “This is the program,” she would say, “not your program. This is the program.” She and her husband Jared Kushner wanted to work on prison reform and paid family leave. They wanted the United States to stay in the Paris climate accord. Bannon thought it was all insanity, but his own allies in the White House were few and growing fewer. And he was growing frustrated, exhausted. By the time Kelly dismissed Bannon in mid-August, both men knew it was time for him to go.

  That left Stephen Miller as the “keeper of the president’s commitments,” as one person who worked with him in the West Wing put it. Miller surprised many by showing himself a deft navigator of the building’s treacherous political currents. Though he was a Bannon protégé, he saw that it was more expedient to align himself with Kushner. He poached staffers from the Domestic Policy Council, which was headed by Bremberg, for his own outfit, which was focused on speechwriting and immigration.

  Despite his almost singular focus on immigration, Miller saw himself as a free agent who could capably insert himself into any high-level policy discussion. This confidence was not widely shared. Miller would sometimes offer his opinions on economic matters, which would earn scorn from Gary D. Cohn, head of the National Economic Council.

  The fight over who would steer policymaking in the White House did not receive nearly as much attention as personality clashes involving figures like Conway and Bannon. Those clashes were enormously entertaining, but they were also largely irrelevant because they involved characters who were either losing influence (Bannon) or never had influence to begin with (Conway).

  When the Trump presidency began, Bremberg was touted as Trump’s “details man,” as Amie Parnes of The Hill wrote. “There aren’t too many people in Trump’s senior circle who have done this before,” an unnamed former Bremberg colleague told Parnes. Bremberg was to be one of the quiet, efficient men who pushed Trump’s agenda through Congress.

  At first, this seemed true enough. He did engineer use of the Congressional Review Act, even if this ultimately involved little more than taking instruction from Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell about which Obama rules they wanted to abrogate. But over time, Bremberg would see his influence in the West Wing curbed. Miller vitiated the Domestic Policy Council, though he was by no means the only one. Kushner took on criminal justice, an issue in which he was profoundly invested. Cohn considered the economy his own domain. H. R. McMaster may not have been Trump’s favorite person, but he was not going to let anyone intrude on the National Security Council.

  Bremberg further harmed his reputation during the failed effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Healthcare policy was supposed to be Bremberg’s expertise; most media autopsies of the anti-ACA push made little or no mention of his role, but his colleagues in the West Wing knew that he bore at least some of the responsibility for Trump’s biggest domestic policy failure during his first year in office.

  Bremberg and Miller were among the most promising of Trump’s advisers. But by becoming embroiled in battles of their own, they never quite rose above the daily struggles of the administration. They retained significant influence, but that influence would remain circumscribed. Neither could play the role of the indispensable younger man who could win the president’s confidence by curbing his passions instead of inflaming them.

  That role would instead be filled by an unlikely candidate.

  After serving as a congressional sherpa for Scott Pruitt during the transition, Rob Porter was appointed Trump’s staff secretary, a position whose title did no justice to its importance. If the chief of staff managed the flow of people, the staff secretary managed the flow of counsel and information. Frequently, the position was held by someone young and ambitious whose career was clearly on the ascent. John D. Podesta, guardian of the Democratic establishment, had been “staff sec” to Bill Clinton in his first years as president before ultimately becoming his chief of staff. Brett Kavanaugh, the future Supreme Court justice, had served in the same role for George W. Bush before being appointed to the immensely influential D.C. Circuit court of appeals.

  Porter had been steeped in presidential politics from youth. He was the son of Roger B. Porter, a Mormon who served in the White House for Ford, Reagan, and Bush. One photo showed Porter with his wife Ann and their three children in the Oval Office with Reagan. Profiling him in 1990 for the New York Times, Maureen Dowd called Porter “amiable, meticulous and tenacious,” adding that in the George H. W. Bush administration, he was “regarded as the perfect person to run the domestic policy shop at a time when the President is focusing on the more heady foreign policy agenda.” To underscore Porter’s influence, Dowd reported that he played tennis with the president.

  Roger Porter also taught at Harvard, where he would come to hold an endowed chair at the Kennedy School of Government. Rob took his undergraduate degree at Harvard, where he overlapped with Jared Kushner. He was the center of the school’s tight conservative circle: a 2000 article in the Harvard Crimson was headlined “The Zealot,” identifying Porter as the leader of campus Republicans and describing him as above obsessing over the trivialities of electoral politics, more interested in substantive policy matters.

  Rob won a Rhodes Scholarship to study political theory at Oxford, then went to Harvard Law before moving to Washington and beginning a career in politics. His last job before joining the Trump transition was as chief of staff to Orrin G. Hatch, the U.S. senator from Utah who cast himself as a principled conservative but could be craftily transactional in his politics. His junior Republican colleague from Utah, Senator Mike Lee, was frank in his abhorrence for Trump during the presidential campaign. Hatch, a practicing Mormon, stood by Trump even after the Access Hollywood tape. Having his own chief of staff named a high-ranking West Winger could be seen as a sign of confidence from Trump. It was also a potential means to influence the Oval that few of Hatch’s colleagues would enjoy.

  Porter was not one of the disturbingly colorful Trump characters who ordinary Americans came to know in the winter and spring of 2017. Porter did not tweet or make appearances on Fox News. His hair brushed back meticulously in the Princeton style, his voice fine but not fragile, he seemed to belong to another Washington. He radiated a cold intelligence that could be an affront to those who did not have his Harvard and Oxford pedigree. Imperious in bearing and manner, he recalled McGeorge Bundy, the haughtily brilliant adviser to Kennedy and Johnson. It was not Porter’s lot, however, to work in the White House of Kennedy or Johnson.

  Many of Trump’s top aides were students of politics, the tactics of how campaigns were won or lost; Porter was a student of policy and governing institutions, of how political promises annealed into something real. He was particularly interested in how a president wielded his power: what kind of organization would allow him to be an effective manager, what kind of approach was bound to frustrate. He read scholars like Pfiffner and Kamarck, who were among the best thinkers on the presidency. He was also an admirer of Fred I. Greenstein,
whose 1982 book The Hidden-Hand Presidency was a favorable study of Eisenhower’s leadership and a kind of guidebook to presidential politics, and Richard E. Neustadt, whose 1960 Presidential Power was another classic of the genre.

  As he prepared to join the White House in January 2017, Porter reached out to previous staff secretaries. He had a two-hour lunch with John Podesta. Porter was among those who saw the several similarities between early Clinton and early Trump. The question was whether Trump would be able to transcend his federal government inexperience, as Clinton did.

  The signs were not encouraging. Porter told friends he was dismayed by the lack of organizational capacity in the new administration. He thought his colleagues—Bannon, Kelly, Kushner, Miller—were intelligent, but it was impossible not to notice that most of them had no history whatsoever of government service. This was an administration not out of its element but out of its galaxy.

  Because Don McGahn was often absent from the Oval Office, Porter was left to explain to Trump why he lacked legal authority for a proposed executive order or why, even if signed, it would be met with a quick and probably successful court challenge.

  “You’re always telling me ‘no,’” Trump would grumble. But he also started to take notice of the tall, impressively educated, meticulously mannered aide who seemed unconcerned by the skirmishes that broke out daily in the West Wing.