The Best People

by Alexander Nazaryan

  After Michael Flynn resigned from his role as the national security advisor in mid-February, Trump gave the post to Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, a choice many cheered because the scholarly McMaster was seen as an antidote to Flynn, with his wild conspiratorial flights and troubling allegiances. Trump took a visceral dislike to McMaster. He hated the way McMaster looked, the way McMaster spoke. And how long McMaster spoke when he was invited to brief the president. One briefing lasted over an hour. Trump begged for relief.

  About four months into the new presidency, Porter approached Priebus with the idea of giving Trump condensed briefing materials—“decision memos”—that Porter would present to the president each day. These decision memoranda would encapsulate all the arguments and counterarguments Trump would have otherwise heard from the people who had taken to walking unannounced into the Oval Office. Once Trump made a decision by signing the memorandum, the decision would be implemented by the appropriate agency or office.

  Priebus liked the idea, but he was not around long enough to see it through. Yet he did show his own confidence in Porter by naming him assistant to the president for policy coordination in addition to his staff secretary role. If this was not technically a promotion, it was a significant expansion of Porter’s portfolio, one that cemented his growing influence on policy. (Priebus did not publicize the upgrade of Porter’s title because he feared that he would be accused of trying to consolidate power within the West Wing.)

  Kelly was enthusiastic about Porter’s efforts to organize information flow in the West Wing and helped him turn it into reality. On August 21, 2017, Kelly and Porter sent a memorandum to all cabinet officials and senior White House officials. “Securing Presidential Decisions” was its subject.

  “The President will make all decisions on public-facing policy matters by signature and on the basis of decision memoranda (DMs) that have been vetted through the White House Staff Secretary,” the memorandum read. “Decisions are not final—and therefore may not be implemented—until the Staff Secretary secures a cleared DM that has been signed by the President.”

  Anticipating resistance from those who benefited from disorder, Kelly and Porter called the new system a “required process” that would help “avoid unforced legal, policy, and political errors.” They warned of any decision Trump made without a signed memo: “such decisions are provisional only.”

  Another memorandum sent that day by Kelly and Porter, this one on “paper flow to and from the president,” clarified Porter’s role for those who were apt to question it: “The White House Staff Secretary serves as both the inbox and the outbox for all Presidential materials.” The memorandum also said that news articles had to “first be submitted to the Staff Secretary.” This would make it more difficult to influence Trump by slipping him an item from Fox News or Breitbart.

  Porter, who was Trump’s opposite in every way imaginable, now became the president’s daily cheat sheet to the business of presidential decision-making. Each day, Porter would brief the president, bringing into the Oval Office memos that would compress a complex debate on an issue into a single page, with accompanying materials. Sometimes, Trump would read the memorandum. More often, he would say to Porter, “Tell me about this,” after which Porter would do his best to summarize the alternatives and the arguments on each side. Trump would listen, then make his decision and sign.

  Not everyone trusted Porter, suspecting that he was not the “policy neutral” adviser he made himself out to be. Critics charged that he was “picking winners and losers,” not dispassionately presenting different options to the president.

  But to a certain extent the process worked, and it worked especially well when Trump was confronted with a decision too significant to make without presidential input but not significant enough to require extensive consultation with congressional allies or other advisers. And Porter knew, just as Kelly did, that he could never change the president. He would never be Eisenhower or Reagan. What advisers could do was shape how the president was informed and how issues were presented to him, largely by insisting that no decision reached the Oval without Porter’s approval.

  The clampdown enraged those who liked the old, informal way of doing things, which was the way Trump had done things as a businessman. Wilbur Ross, used to being an executive, bristled at being subjected to a process that put a layer of bureaucracy between him and the president. He continued to try to sneak his own memos to Trump. It did not work.

  Scott Pruitt, who lusted for power shamelessly, tried his own runaround. As a decision on the Paris climate change accords loomed, Pruitt—nobody’s idea of a deep thinker—tried to present an amateurish memo to the president. Bannon had a memo of his own. Porter told them what he told everyone: this has to go through the required process.

  Throughout the spring and summer of 2017, Porter also convened a high-level weekly meeting on trade. At 9:30 a.m. every Tuesday, Porter gathered the principals—Ross, Mnuchin, Cohn, Kushner, China hawk Peter Navarro, U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer, and others—in the Roosevelt Room, to work together on an issue that was central to the administration but which, until then, had suffered from a total lack of coordination.

  Porter later told friends that that time—between September 2017 and February 2018—was a kind of brief golden age for the Trump West Wing. The historical lessons of presidential power were finally being put to use. Process snuck into the Oval Office. Some days, it even managed to linger there for a while, if never for all that long.

  It would be an overstatement to say that the process Porter sought to implement was alone responsible for steadying the West Wing during the summer and fall of 2017. But he did use his knowledge of White House organization and presidential power to carve out channels through which decisions could flow more efficiently and effectively than they had before.

  Porter had his detractors, in particular among Bannon and his allies. “Obsequious,” one of those allies said. “Not my kind of guy” came the verdict from Bannon, who called people he was fond of “shipmates.” He did not see Porter as a shipmate and refused to attend his meetings on trade, not wanting to legitimize a process he disapproved of. Most others, however, approved of the monumental task he had decided to take on.

  “He tried,” one person who worked with him said.

  In the end, Porter was undone by his own past. Back in April 2017, just as his own influence in the White House was increasing the second of Porter’s two former wives, Jennifer Willoughby, published a post on her personal blog in which she alleged that a former husband had been abusive. She did not name him, but as her only ex-husband, Porter asked her to take the post down. She refused.

  Porter remained virtually unknown to the public until February 1, 2018, when the Daily Mail, a British tabloid with an established presence in the United States, revealed that he was dating Hope Hicks, the White House communications director. The article included photographs of Porter and Hicks out for dinner in Washington, apparently unaware that they were being tracked.

  Five days later came another Daily Mail story, this one as disturbing as the first had been trivial. It included a recounting of domestic abuse allegations made against Porter by Willoughby and his first wife, Colbie Holderness. Soon there were pictures, too, namely a photograph of Holderness with a black eye, which she said Porter gave her on a vacation in Italy.

  Several other men in the Trump administration had either been accused of sexual misconduct, as Trump was, or domestic abuse, as Bannon had once been. But Porter was younger, and he was more obviously the child of privilege—white privilege, in the parlance of social justice—a beneficiary of seemingly every boost the power elite could offer one of its own most promising scions.

  Porter strenuously denied the allegations, and would continue to do so in the months to come. But it was largely fruitless, made worse by the bungled White House response. Nobody in the West Wing could explain definitively the status of Porter’s security clearance, w
hen Kelly learned about the allegations, who else knew about those allegations, when they had come to know, what they did with that knowledge.

  Among those who believed that Porter should keep his job was Willoughby, his second wife. She made clear that she found Porter abusive. She also said he belonged in the White House. “I don’t want to be married to him,” she told the Daily Mail. “But I definitely want him in the White House and the position he is in. I think his integrity and ability to do his job is impeccable.”

  It was a striking statement, one that like Porter himself seemed to belong to another time. But it didn’t help. Shortly after the Daily Mail story was published, Rob Porter elected to leave the White House.

  This cheered the enemies of process. Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross once again enjoyed access to the Oval Office, and just days later prevailed on Trump to launch steel and aluminum tariffs, the boldest salvo yet in the trade war on China. A White House official told Politico that the tariffs “never would have happened” if Porter, who had been closely coordinating the administration’s trade policy, were still there.

  Seeing his own influence wane, Gary Cohn also left the administration. Chaos, which had been barely held at bay, returned to the West Wing.

  Part Two: The Occupation

  Chapter 9

  Turbulence

  They left Washington early and headed west, through Fairfax County, Virginia, where office towers rose like mountain peaks above the tree line, the highway whisking them past some of the wealthiest suburbs in the nation. The two reporters, Dan Diamond and Rachana Pradhan of Politico, were going to Dulles International Airport. They were not, however, planning to take a trip.

  About four months earlier, in May 2017, someone had told Diamond and Pradhan something that was more than a rumor but less than a story: Tom Price, the health and human services secretary, was traveling around the nation—and on some occasions, internationally—on private and government jets. While government officials were sometimes allowed to use chartered or military aircraft, rules tightly circumscribed when they were able to do so. Politico’s tipster suggested that Price, who had been confirmed by the Senate just three months earlier, had been using this privilege in ways that were way outside the limits.

  Until that moment, Price had not emerged as an especially worrying member of the cabinet, if only because there were so many cabinet members to worry about. Suddenly, the silver-haired doctor with the wavering smile was the main character in a play that was bound to not have a happy ending.

  During his twelve years in Washington as a Republican congressman representing Georgia’s sixth district, Price had been a classic party man, one who was confident that his ambition would eventually be rewarded, not because of his brilliance as a politician—brilliance was more likely to be an impediment—but because he had staying power. He would say what party leaders wanted him to say until he could best those leaders, scramble over them somehow. Both parties were full of such men, loyal until loyalty no longer suited their ends.

  By the time he came to be a national figure, Price was completely associated with Georgia. When he spoke, you heard the South. But he was actually a native of Michigan, one who earned his undergraduate and medical degrees from that state’s prestigious flagship public university. In the early 1980s, he went to Atlanta for a residency at Emory; he would stay in the burgeoning Atlanta suburbs, devoting himself to his orthopedic practice.

  In 1993, President Clinton implored Congress to pass his plan for “universal, comprehensive health care.” Conservatives called this Hillarycare, because the First Lady took charge in crafting the proposal. They hated her, and they hated the plan she presented that November. Among those radicalized by opposition to Hillarycare was a thirty-nine-year-old orthopedic surgeon from the Atlanta suburbs. Price campaigned stridently against the Clinton proposal, which he argued would limit patients’ freedom to make choices about the medical attention they received. The specter of “socialized medicine” would not return for another fifteen years, but in conservatives’ successful fight against the Clinton health plan, the milquetoast surgeon got his first taste of politics. He was the college kid in a bar for the first time, putting his virginal lips to a frothy pint of beer. He loved it.

  The following year, another creature of the Atlanta suburbs became the most prominent Republican on the national scene. He was round, with boyish cheeks, and his smile was also boyish, though with a touch of the malicious, the smile of someone who knew he was getting away with something. He had a doctorate in history from Tulane—his dissertation was titled “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo: 1945–1960”—but since the late 1970s, the would-be historian had served in Congress. His aim there was to rescue Republicans from the minority status they had been relegated to in the House for decades. Salvation was coming for the GOP, and it was named Newt Gingrich.

  Gingrich capped an ambitious political ascent by becoming the House speaker in 1994. He did so by leveling withering attacks on the Clintons and congressional Democrats, the sort of attacks that would have been unbecoming only a few years before, back when Speaker Tip O’Neill, the Massachusetts liberal, and President Reagan, the conservative from California, could be genuine friends even as they remained political rivals. That had been a time when Democrats and Republicans did not disagree on everything but the days of the week, when how you voted did not always depend on where you sat.

  More than any other political figure of the late twentieth century, Gingrich realized that the era of political comity was increasingly the stuff of the past, to be venerated by wistful historians and self-righteous pundits. You could govern still, but only in monochrome: all red, or all blue. “People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz,” he said in 1994. “I see evil all around me every day.”

  Though his political career had begun in 1993, with opposition to the Clinton healthcare law, Price did not seek elected office until 1996, when he won a seat from the Atlanta suburbs to the Georgia Senate. The seat was easy to defend, and so Price defended it easily. Even as he became the state senate’s minority whip, he seemed to retain a gentle demeanor. Because he had a mustache, some staffers nicknamed him “Ned Flanders,” after the mustachioed, religious, totally harmless next-door neighbor on The Simpsons.

  Price was transparently ambitious, but he was also serious and smart. In 2002, Price became majority leader in the Georgia Senate. In 2004, he announced that he was running for the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia’s sixth congressional district. It was the seat Gingrich held for twenty years before resigning from the House over ethics violations. Price won once again. Now, he was on his way to Washington. Airport security would not allow him to travel with his favored mustache trimmer in those anxious post-9/11 days, so the mustache went. Soon enough, the Ned Flanders image would go, too.

  The congressional seat was as safe as the one he had held in the Georgia State Senate, and Price kept winning reelection by casting himself as a reliable conservative. As one Republican from the district told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in 2009 “We don’t think Tom Price is being too conservative. We think some of the more moderate Republicans are being way too liberal.”

  Opposition to the Affordable Care Act, which Obama signed into law in 2009, was the bond that held the Republican conference together. And it was an issue on which Price, as a doctor, could credibly cast himself as an expert. Only this was expertise in the service of GOP dogma, not health policy. Shortly after the bill became law, Price called it “a costly and misguided encroachment of government that will destroy jobs and drive our nation further toward a fiscal crisis,” a hyperbolic assertion that time would prove to be inaccurate. In a 2012 op-ed for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Price predicted that “we will see health care costs rise while diminishing quality and accessibility,” once again proving himself a poor clairvoyant.

  In 2015, Price introduced the Empowering Patients First Act, among the more serious of the mostly unserious Repu
blican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Its primary feature was the health savings account, a class of tax-exempt fund that tended to benefit people of higher income. The bill also created high-risk pools for people who required more healthcare than average healthy persons. The bill went nowhere, as Price had to know it would. The House was on its way to passing seventy ACA repeals, political gestures that stood no chance of becoming law under Obama. Still, Price’s halfway credible plan did bolster the conviction that the surgeon from Georgia was a deep thinker on the GOP’s most pressing issue.

  In the spring of 2016, Price became one of nine House committee chairmen (he chaired the House Budget Committee, a powerful post that reflected how much his stock had risen) to sign a letter endorsing Donald Trump, who the week before had become the presumptive Republican nominee for president. In their endorsement of Trump, Price and his colleagues warned that the nation stood “on the precipice of one of the most important elections of our lifetime. This great nation cannot endure eight more years of Democrat-control of the White House.” A Clinton victory, the signers warned, “enshrines ObamaCare as the law of the land,” while a Republican one would finally bring about the ACA coup de grâce the GOP had been promising for years.

  Price deftly positioned himself as the man who would help Trump do just that. Trump announced him as the new health and human services secretary on the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Among those offering praise for the selection was Newt Gingrich, who said on Twitter that Price would be the “right leader to help Congress replace Obamacare.” There was little pretense that he had been picked to do anything else.

  During the confirmation process came the first hint that Price was not quite the morally upright, hardworking doctor-politician of soft-focus media reports. As a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, he had made legislative decisions that seemed to benefit biomedical companies in which he had rather enthusiastically invested. The Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating Ways and Means in 2013. Five years later, Representative Christopher Collins, a Republican from New York, was charged with insider trading related to stock he had purchased in Innate Immunotherapeutics, an Australian biotechnology company. While still in Congress, Price allegedly bought Innate stock on advice from Collins. The advice was good, if not exactly legal, and Price made $225,000 on the investment.