The Best People

by Alexander Nazaryan

  Trump had cast Hillary Clinton as hopelessly corrupt, while arguing that his own wealth insulated him from influence. And maybe it did, or could. But there were men and women in his cabinet who, while rich by any normal standard, did not have his wealth. How were they to play the part of government officials in a government headed by a billionaire? Tom Price’s plight hinted at how difficult that would prove, how the seductive perfume of luxury would float through the halls of government buildings.

  Trump’s cabinet had a lone Obama holdover: Secretary of Veterans Affairs David J. Shulkin. Shulkin was, like Price, a doctor; unlike Price, he was neither an ideologue nor someone who harbored any political ambitions. Appointed by Obama in 2015 to serve as the department’s undersecretary for health, he took over a department that one high-ranking official said was “a mess.” There was “no strategic direction” for improving care for the men and women returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. The year before Shulkin joined the department, investigators found that officials at the Phoenix VA were reporting false wait times for veterans to receive care. In reality, receiving medical attention took an average of four months, as evidenced by a secret list that chronicled the grim reality. Perhaps as many as forty people died as a result of these delays. And this in a department whose Washington headquarters bore a quote from Lincoln engraved near the entrance: “To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan.”

  Shulkin’s efforts at the VA were encouraging, and though he was not Trump’s top choice to lead the department, the Senate confirmed Shulkin 100 to 0. He was the only Trump cabinet nominee to receive unanimous support from the Senate.

  The beachhead team arrived at the VA on the third week of November. “They really didn’t want to have a lot of input or interaction” with political appointees of the previous administration, one Obama-appointed official recalled. As at EPA, there was a complete ideological rupture at work. Democrats wanted to improve the VA system, while Republicans argued that the only way to improve the VA was to privatize it.

  The beachhead team had no interest in healing this rift. The former VA official, who was part of and supported the Obama reform efforts, remembered that one of the beachhead team members inadvertently left a memorandum on a public printer. The memo, which was supposed to be private, instructed the Trump people not to have any interaction with the Obama people.

  This wasn’t a transition, but a standoff. “There really weren’t a lot of openings for us to engage,” the former top VA administrator complained. “We weren’t invited to meetings.” Things got worse when members of the transition became political appointees, which gave them a permanent power base from which to assail Shulkin, who advocated for reform but not privatization. Among those most intent on undermining Shulkin were Darin Selnick, who had been a senior official at Concerned Veterans for America, a group funded by the Koch brothers that wanted to circumvent the VA and make veterans’ care a matter of the private marketplace; Peter O’Rourke, who was nominally Shulkin’s chief of staff but who routinely communicated about privatization efforts with Trump allies at Mar-a-Lago; Thomas “Jake” Leinenkugel, the scion of a Wisconsin beer family who looked for ways to undermine Shulkin; Camilo J. Sandoval, who while working on the Trump campaign had allegedly harassed and bullied a female staffer.

  Most people could not be expected to grasp the byzantine rivalries of the Trump administration, of the battles between beachhead teams and career staffers, lifers, and politicals. What the public saw was the bloodied corpses of those who were on those rivalries’ losing ends. Shulkin was one of these.

  On June 29, 2017, Shulkin sent a memorandum to top managers in his department. In the memo, “Essential Employee Travel,” Shulkin outlined a new process by which travel would be approved and documented. “I expect this will result in decreased employee travel and generate savings,” he wrote.

  Two weeks later, Shulkin and his wife, Merle Bari, got on a plane and flew from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Copenhagen. With them were three VA staffers and one staffer’s husband. There was also a six-person security detail. “The 10-day trip was not entirely a vacation,” the Washington Post would report several months later, when details of the trip first became public. There were some who believed that the story was leaked to the Post as part of a “deliberate strategy” to discredit Shulkin. Whether he deserved to be discredited or not, the strategy worked.

  Shulkin planned the trip so that it began with meetings in Denmark and ended about a week later with meetings in London. In between, there was watching tennis at Wimbledon, visiting medieval castles, dining, and shopping. A tourist from Madison, Wisconsin, told the Post she spotted Shulkin and company “whisked to the front of the line” at an attraction in Copenhagen. One of Shulkin’s taxpayer-funded security guards, she said, was hauling a “large number of shopping bags.”

  Shulkin called this “poor reporting,” though no significant errors of fact came to light. The true error, as he saw it, was not in fact but in focus. After his ouster, there continued to be dispute over whether Shulkin really did use security guards as shopping sherpas. And his supporters said that Shulkin and his wife did not enjoy an expensive jaunt on the taxpayers’ dime, that the costs were exaggerated and misrepresented, to make decent people look indecent, to push the last of the Obama people out of the Trump administration.

  The Washington Post broke the story of Shulkin’s trip on September 29. That same day, Tom Price resigned for having spent his tenure at HHS on luxurious travel, and little else. Shulkin lasted through the winter of 2018, his firing announced by a tweet from Trump on March 28. As he departed the Trump administration, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times arguing that he had been forced out for opposing the privatization of veterans’ healthcare services. There was compelling evidence to support Shulkin’s charge. Yet the wounds of scandal never fully healed.

  Shulkin did have some accomplishments during his three years at the VA, including offering same-day urgent-care services, starting to integrate medical records with the Department of Defense and allowing veterans who had “bad paper” (that is, other than honorable discharge) to receive mental health services from the VA. In the summer of 2017, Shulkin stood next to Trump as the president signed the Department of Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act of 2017, which made it easier to root out malefactors while protecting those who reported wrongdoing to the government.

  Ultimately, however, Shulkin could not escape the ethical morass of becoming a Trump official. John Kelly, the president’s chief of staff, strongly decried the decision to let Shulkin go, according to a person familiar with (and sympathetic to) Shulkin’s situation.

  “He took his own agenda off the tracks” that person said of Trump. This was an assessment particular to the VA, but it was true of most other agencies in the federal government. If the forces working on an ordinary presidential cabinet were centrifugal, as James Pfiffner of George Mason argued in his influential paper, the forces working on the Trump administration looked like a Jackson Pollock action painting. In that confusion, the selfish thrived.

  Things were not looking good for the president who promised the most ethical and competent administration in history. His supporters began to downplay the promise. “I don’t think it’s like they wake up in the morning and say, ‘How can we drain the swamp today?’” conceded Christopher Ruddy, the publisher of conservative site Newsmax and a close friend of the president, in the fall of 2017. “At the end of the day, the swamp rules,” added Ruddy with a measure of resignation. Like most of Trump’s closest associates, he tended to stay far from Washington; they feared the swamp’s malarial rot, not realizing how many of their own were carriers of the disease.

  The disease was spreading. By November 2017, several of Trump’s cabinet members were under investigation, whether by the inspectors general of their own agencies, the Office of Management and Budget, or the rare congressional committee
that discovered its conscience in the age of Trump.

  Shulkin’s abuse of government funds, whether minor or not, was inexplicable because he had never been known as a grifter. Steve Mnuchin was another matter. Having amassed a fortune of $400 million, in part through foreclosing on homeowners, Trump’s treasury secretary was not known as a man of scruples. Nor was he regarded as a serious thinker by the serious people in Washington and New York. He became treasury secretary by sticking with Trump as national finance chairman throughout the presidential campaign. “Mnuchin won the Treasury on the getting the money into the campaign,” Bannon said. He had told Mnuchin, “When we win, you are Secretary of Treasury.”

  He may not have been Nobel material, but he also was not an utter clown. Career staffers praised Mnuchin for dismissing members of the beachhead teams, who he understood were supposed to watch over the department and report anything untoward to Trump. “He had a very serious approach,” one top treasury staffer remembered. “He was a very self-confident guy. Not a lot of patience.” If he was short on patience, the staffer said, he was long on haughtiness. Yet he did command respect from career staff who saw that he was “somebody who obviously understood markets” and was not, like other Trump cabinet members, intent on destroying the agency he was charged with leading.

  Mnuchin was on his third wife, like Trump. His was the Scottish actress Louise Linton, an eternally pouting blonde. She had attracted attention—not the good kind—for a memoir she self-published about a trip to Africa at the age of eighteen. The book, In Congo’s Shadow described a continent “rife with hidden danger” and relied on crude, outdated stereotypes of Africa and its people. Linton’s vanity and indiscretion would help bring shame on her husband, and herself.

  After the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act failed, the White House turned to its second-most important priority, which was cutting taxes. Mnuchin was expected to be central to this effort. But then the motion of the planets got in the way.

  On August 21, 2017, Mnuchin and Linton traveled to Louisville, Kentucky. There, he and Senate Majority Leader McConnell, the senior senator from that state, addressed a local chamber of commerce. Mnuchin touted Trump’s proposed tax cuts as benefiting ordinary workers, though virtually all macroeconomists agreed they would do the exact opposite. After the luncheon with McConnell, Mnuchin and Linton toured Fort Knox, where the U.S. government held 4,600 metric tons of gold.

  There was another reason for the trip, what many suspected later was the main reason for Mnuchin to travel to sweltering Kentucky in late August. The day that Mnuchin and Linton visited Kentucky, the rare spectacle of a total solar eclipse was to take place. The eclipse would only be visible in certain locations. The western tip of Kentucky happened to be one of these. (As for the risible notion that Mnuchin was legitimately pushing the president’s tax cuts: if that were really the case, he would have been better off trying to influence sometimes-renegade Republicans like Bob Corker of Tennessee or Jeff Flake of Arizona. The two votes from Kentucky were as secure as the gold in Fort Knox.)

  The public may never have learned about the trip—or about the couple’s broader penchant for military jets—if not for Linton’s fabulous Instagram account. For the enlightenment of the social network’s 700 million users, Linton posted an image of herself descending the steps of an aircraft clearly marked as belonging to the U.S. government. There was something resplendent and glamorous about Linton, dressed in white, her rich, golden hair falling below her shoulders. She was a first lady, not a cabinet secretary’s wife. She knew it, and she wanted others to know too: “Great #daytrip to #Kentucky!” the Instagram post said. This was amended with a grating cavalcade of fashion-label hashtags: “#rolandmouret pants, #tomford sunnies, #hermesscarf, #valentinorockstudheels #valentino.” The post concluded with a self-righteous “#usa.”

  Linton may not have known that most in the #usa could not afford $445 sunglasses by Tom Ford, or the rest of her outfit, which Vanity Fair calculated to have cost $13,775 (a “low estimate,” according to the fashion-savvy magazine). It was just as likely that she knew but did not care.

  Among those infuriated by Linton’s post was Jennifer Miller, a forty-four-year-old mother of three from Lake Oswego, Oregon. Miller had this to say: “Glad we could pay for your little getaway. #deplorable.” The whole episode could have been just another forgettable Internet skirmish, except that Linton decided to respond to Miller in a lengthy post packed with sarcasm and grandiloquence. “I’m pretty sure we paid more taxes toward our day ‘trip’ than you did,” the post said in part. “Pretty sure the amount we sacrifice per year is a lot more than you’d be willing to sacrifice if the choice was yours.” She ended the post by suggesting that Miller relax by watching the latest episode of Game of Thrones.

  Linton and Mnuchin were pilloried as clueless kleptocrats, but there was nothing new about that charge, nor any sense that its validity would shame the shameless couple. The more observant of her critics deduced from public reports, and the Instagram post, that Mnuchin and Linton had used flimsy pretenses—the luncheon with McConnell—to travel to see the eclipse. They could have done that, of course, without using military aircraft, which cost the American taxpayer $33,000.

  When there was smoke in the Trump administration, there was usually a nuclear meltdown. It soon came to light that Mnuchin had taken another flight from Washington to New York and back for $15,000. An ordinary person might have paid about $200 for the flight. To this category of spendthrifts belonged Mnuchin’s predecessor Tim Geithner, who regularly flew between Washington and New York in coach. This did not hamper his efforts in helping the Obama administration successfully rescue the economy from the housing crisis of 2008.

  On October 5, after Price had been fired and Shulkin thoroughly embarrassed, the Treasury’s inspector general revealed that Mnuchin had already used military craft seven times during his brief time as a federal employee, for a total cost of $800,000, about fourteen times what the average American family made in a year. And this was supposed to be the presidency of average Americans.

  It was now just about a year since Trump had first made his drain-the-swamp promise in the final lap of the 2016 presidential campaign, and the swamp was taking on historic proportions. In addition to Price, Shulkin, and Mnuchin, there was Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who had built himself a $43,000 private communications booth and pulled high-ranking EPA agents off assignment to serve as his personal bodyguards, in addition to incurring what was reported at the time to be $58,000 in travel costs (and his troubles were only beginning); Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, was being investigated for travel expenses that included a $12,375 chartered flight to Montana from Las Vegas, where he had attended an event for a hockey team owned by one of his benefactors. “A little B.S. over travel,” Zinke said, before things got much more serious, ending with his departure from the Trump cabinet in late 2018.

  Elaine Chao, who headed the Transportation Department, had used government planes on at least seven occasions, according to the Washington Post. She was also facing questions about her ownership of stock in Vulcan Materials, a building company that would likely benefit from a $1 trillion infrastructure plan Trump touted but never came close to implementing; Rick Perry, the energy secretary, took a private plane to visit “a uranium facility in Piketon, Ohio,” in late September 2017, according to Reuters. He once also, the same outlet reported, flew into “a private airport in Kansas that was within a 45-minute drive of Kansas City International Airport.”

  The Trump administration was not yet a year old, and already several of its top cabinet officials were the subjects of multiple investigations. And many more were about to come, now that the extent of the cabinet’s selfishness and corruption were becoming known. Representative Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, then the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, put the matter bluntly: “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

/>   Neither had some of the Republican old-timers in the White House, many of whom had last worked for George W. Bush and remembered a competent operation overseen by Dick Cheney. Among these was Joseph “Joe” W. Hagin, who had worked for both Bush the father and Bush the son. Hagin, who was a deputy chief of staff for operations in the White House, tried to run things as he knew them, but some bristled, finding him too much a “43 guy” who didn’t understand the way 45—Trump—wanted to do things. Still, Hagin garnered respect from most of his colleagues. And he was among the first to notice that cabinet members were plainly not listening to the directives they had been given.

  Those directives were coming from Bill McGinley, a veteran Washington lawyer with expertise in compliance. He was also in that class of administration officials who shunned self-promotion and approached his work with a genuine sense of duty. Only he had no idea what he had signed up for.

  McGinley’s initial approach was to invite the chiefs of staff of the executive departments to his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a weekly seminar. Each week, the seminar would offer instruction on the finer points of public service. The main problem was that it was one thing to tell something to Ryan Jackson, quite another to say it to the man he worked for, Scott Pruitt. Not all the chiefs of staff had the influence with their department heads to keep them out of trouble (Jackson was among those who did not). And not all the chiefs took McGinley’s seminars seriously, further undermining their intent.

  McGinley’s strongest critics said he was too much the “concierge,” a go-between for the cabinet members and the White House, as opposed to a White House enforcer who made sure the cabinet chiefs did not stray. Hagin had similar critics, though his broad portfolio would have made it difficult for him to provide the tough oversight that the best people desperately demanded.