Next up was Sean Doocey, deputy assistant in the beleaguered Presidential Personnel Office. “We’re looking to staff the president for the next six and a half years,” he told the job-seekers. The prospect of a second Trump term garnered limited applause.
An hour into the three-hour event, the job fair became insufferably crowded, the Senate briefing room seemingly filled well beyond capacity. Lines grew long and melded into each other, so that an applicant to the Department of Commerce might suddenly find herself in line to join the ranks of the Treasury.
“I’ve only managed to get to one table so far,” a young man complained. He eyed the equally young man who stood behind the Department of Labor table, surmising that he was an intern: “Is he gonna give me a job?”
“This is a little bit of…” one attendee began, as he pushed through the increasingly thick crowd. He stopped himself. “I can’t say the word.”
Someone nearby offered to help: “Cluster?” There were four more letters, but there was no need to say them.
And yet things must be said about this administration, about the promises it has made but failed to keep, the people it promised to uplift, only to forget them all over again. Much of this blame belongs to Trump, for the lackadaisical management style that kept him from evaluating cabinet members and political appointees with the dispassionate analysis their respective jobs deserved. His refusal to take counsel, to listen to people who knew better than he did, led both his genuinely best and his most loyal—they were almost never the same—to either flee or fall.
Nikki Haley decided to leave her post at the United Nations in October; two months later, Trump announced that he would replace her with Heather Nauert, who until 2017—when she was appointed a spokesperson for the State Department—was a Fox News host. Though never destined for greatness, Attorney General Jeff Sessions engendered sympathy even from his political opponents for the months of abuse he withstood from Trump. That ended in November, when Trump finally fired him. Sessions was replaced by Matthew G. Whitaker, a thick-necked former University of Iowa tight end who once worked as an adviser for a Florida company that marketed a toilet for men who “measured” long in the pants.
Blaming Trump is always easy. Often, it is justified. But just as often, it obscures ailments of which he is the symptom, not the cause. If there is a moment when the sickness began, then it is probably October 27, 1964. On that evening, a B-movie actor who had formerly been a Democrat gave a speech to bolster Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Goldwater would lose the election to Lyndon B. Johnson, but the former actor would go on to become governor of California, before training his ambitions on the White House.
The speech Ronald Reagan delivered that day was called “A Time for Choosing,” and in it outlined the principles that Trump’s presidency represents, however luridly it does so. Goldwater, after all, was the godfather of the limited-government conservative, while Reagan was the most forceful—and convincing—messenger of that idea to the American public. That effort, which culminated in his eight-year presidency, began with the Goldwater speech, in which the former Hollywood unionist summoned the fear of socialism.
“Governments don’t control things,” Reagan lectured. “A government can’t control the economy without controlling people.” As evidence, he summoned the plight of the American farmer, and also alluded to “urban renewal” programs, a subtle reference to white fears and resentments of inner-city African Americans. “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size,” Reagan warned. “Government programs, once launched, never disappear.”
He would vividly echo that very same theme at his presidential inauguration in 1981: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” It was a problem he was all too happy to perpetuate. The national debt increased by $1.86 trillion during his eight years in office, while government spending increased by an annual average of 2.5 percent.
Nevertheless, the Reaganite philosophy of limited government is now one of the pillars of faith of the Republican Party. Nothing will shake it loose. In 2009, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal delivered the response to President Obama’s first State of the Union address. In his remarks, Jindal referenced the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. He told the story of an irate sheriff who was informed by “some bureaucrat” that private rescue boats had to show proof of insurance and registration.
From this, Jindal drew a lesson: “The strength of America is not found in our government.” This is a popular conservative refrain, but also an ironic one, given the right’s veneration for the U.S. Constitution, a document that guarantees liberty but also circumscribes liberty within a system of laws made and enforced by Washington. The conservative fantasy of limited government relies on an unrealistic conception of civil society, one that is more useful as a campaign slogan than an ideal to be devoutly wished for.
It has taken the Trump presidency for that much to become obvious. In many ways, he has been the most valuable argument liberals have had in at least a generation. By actually executing, however haltingly and crudely, on beloved conservative ideas—deregulation, limited government, judicial “originalism”—he has shown precisely how preposterous those ideas are, how much better they fare on Fox News than in the Oval Office. George W. Bush certainly understood as much, his “compassionate conservatism” a concession to conservatism’s own failures.
It’s not only that Trump didn’t know what sort of president he wanted to be; he plainly didn’t want to be president, at least not in the early, farcical days of his quixotic campaign. But then the farce became something more, to the consternation of millions, and to Trump himself. Still, even after he managed to wrest the presidency from Hillary Clinton, he had preciously few clues about what that presidency should look like. He rejected Chris Christie’s transition plan, but also minimized the influence of Steve Bannon and his populist forces. The lack of a governing idea about how to govern, and where government should head, exposed Trump to competing influences from within a hopelessly fractured Republican Party that no longer knew what it stood for and no longer cared whom it stood with. Unaccustomed to managing anything larger than his relatively small marketing business, Trump succumbed to these influences, thus becoming a president held hostage by a political party to which he barely belonged.
The best people—Mnuchin, Kushner, Zinke, Pruitt, Ross drooling on himself at meetings, Carson offering bizarre homilies on people in housing projects, Price flying around the country like a Saudi prince—represent Reaganism gone metastatic. This is what selfishness elevated to a political philosophy looks like. For decades, the public was taught to fear “unelected bureaucrats,” a clever phrase that subtly but unmistakably summoned the image of a black woman in a Washington office building, doing nothing as she collected a government paycheck. But the true grifters had degrees from Wharton and Yale. They lived on Capitol Hill, and they flew first class. They collected paychecks many times greater than anything the unelected bureaucrat would ever see in her lifetime.
It is difficult to feel sorry for Donald Trump, but there are moments when it is impossible not to. Here is a man who fashions himself a figure of historic importance, who openly compares himself to Roosevelt and Lincoln. And yet on a daily basis, he is undone by his own courtiers. And while the American people sent him to the White House, nobody sent Scott Pruitt to Washington in search of a used mattress. Nobody wanted to pay $31,000 for Ben Carson’s office furniture.
But we did, because we were told they were the best people. And the best people must have the best things. Only we were supposed to get something in return, were we not? The best people were supposed to work for us, were they not? That was what the president promised. Some will say that, on the whole, Trump has kept the promises he made to the American people. Maybe so. But this one he has frequently and flagrantly broken.
Washington, D.C.
February 2019
Acknowledgments
Many people took a significant risk in speaking to me for this book. I hope to have done their recollections and convictions justice.
I hope to have also reciprocated the confidence of those who envisioned this project and saw it through. They are truly some of the last best people in the publishing industry.
I first learned to be a journalist at the New York Daily News, then at Newsweek and Yahoo News. I hope that the above is a testament to the quality of that education, which not infrequently has come from men and women who may rightly be called journalistic legends.
My parents and brother have endured me far longer than anyone else. I don’t quite know how, but I am grateful all the same. My in-laws have shown similar endurance, while having to countenance the fact of their daughter and grandchildren living 3,000 miles away.
Which brings me to the most important acknowledgment of all. Only one person left her native California and moved back east so I could report more thoroughly on the Trump administration; who chased after the children as I hunched over my laptop; who ate many a dinner alone because I was interviewing, reporting, editing, fact-checking. That was my wife Maia. Somehow my wife she remains, a model of fortitude and patience. Words cannot convey my gratitude to her.
For months, my six-year-old daughter would ask, “Daddy, is your book ever going to be done?” What a relief it was to finally answer the question in the affirmative. This is for you, Hannah, and for you, Ezra. May you find here, in due time, an honest chronicle of the strange land into which you were born, and the strange city called Washington where you live.
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A Note on Sources and
Reporting Methods
To write this book, I spoke to people who were friends of President Trump long before he’d entertained thoughts of the presidency; people who stoked those thoughts, then worked on his campaign to make those thoughts, once a seeming impossibility, a reality; people who stood and sat next to him on the evening of November 8, 2016; people who huddled with him in Trump Tower on those weird, cold November days after the impossible had transpired; people who managed his move from New York to Washington, from private citizen to public servant—and who helped prepare the federal government for his presidency. Several of the people I spoke to for this book spent significant time in the Oval Office. Some worked next door to the White House, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The vast majority of these people continue to support President Trump, even as they harbor criticisms of how he managed the executive branch. Some bear resentment toward peers they saw as selfish, disloyal, or incompetent. Whatever the case, most of them asked that I not name them in this book. In return, they spoke honestly and at length about what they witnessed.
This seemed to me an entirely fair exchange. I hate to resort to anonymity because it has served, on occasion, as a refuge for the unscrupulous and the dishonest. At the same time, it is a tool that has allowed serious journalists to burrow into institutions that thrive on secrecy and silence, as well as the punishment and expulsion of those who dare speak the troubling truths they witnessed.
I also spoke to people who served in the federal government both under presidents Obama and Trump. Some witnessed the transition and left thereafter. Some left a few months into the Trump presidency. Some are still there. They were cabinet secretaries, deputy and assistant-level officials, and career staffers who’d spent decades working for the federal government. They did not want their professional or personal reputations harmed for having graciously offered me their views of the Trump administration. Again, this felt like a fair exchange.
I also relied on the excellent journalism of my peers at publications like the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Yahoo News, ProPublica, Politico, the Center for Responsive Politics, and other outlets. What follows is as detailed and clear an acknowledgment of journalistic debts as I could muster. As this is not an academic book, I make no attempt at an academic bibliography. Nor did I think a jumble of URLs would prove especially enlightening. I do, however, hope to have acknowledged every journalist on whose work I relied in order to complete my own.
If a source is named in the text itself, it is not named below. If the source is very clearly part of the public record, like a presidential speech, I also did not name it. My goal here is to be transparent and hopefully illuminating, but not necessarily exhaustive. If any journalist is not fully credited for his or her work, the mistake is entirely accidental and will be corrected in subsequent editions of this book, should such editions be demanded by the reading public.
I reserve the right to correct any omission or mistake in my sourcing by purchasing the offended party a beer.
PROLOGUE: “Get the hell out of here now”
I conducted an interview with President Trump on the afternoon of February 19, 2019, in the Oval Office. Sitting in were press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway.
Preface: The End of Something
This chapter was based almost exclusively on my conversations with a former high-ranking Department of Commerce official, who was able to confirm the details of Penny Pritzker’s election night party from the notes they took that evening. Washington is the sort of place, I should say, where people take notes at parties. The individual was also able to provide me with a copy of the letter Pritzker wrote to her successor, Wilbur Ross.
The American Federation of Government Employees connected me with several employees of federal agencies; their accounts of life in the Trump administration are also included in this and other chapters.
Introduction: The Best People
My understanding of how a presidential cabinet functions was based in good part on Mary Louise Hinsdale’s 1911 A History of the President’s Cabinet. I can’t say it is a lost classic, but it has all the information one might hope for. Andrew Rudalevige, the Bowdoin professor, supplied the necessary context. As for Trump’s first cabinet meeting, recordings are available online. Viewer discretion is advised.
I interviewed Joel Clement, the Department of Interior whistleblower, in the summer of 2018. His account is represented here, as well as in subsequent chapters.
Jared Kushner’s tangled finances were the subject of a Financial Times article: “The crises engulfing Jared Kushner” (Edward Luce, 03/01/18).
For reporting on Steve Mnuchin’s missing $100 million, see “Mnuchin Calls Failure to Disclose $100M in Assets an ‘Oversight’” (Peter Schroeder, The Hill, 01/19/17). For reporting on Steve Mnuchin’s career as a Hollywood producer, see “39 Movies Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin Executive Produced, from Lego Batman to CHIPS” (Phil Hornshaw, The Wrap, 03/24/17).
For Sonny Perdue’s colorful political history, see “5 Sketchy Facts about Trump’s Pick for USDA Chief” (Tom Philpott, Mother Jones, 01/23/17).
The estimate of a cabinet worth $4.5 million comes from Forbes (“Here’s What Each Member of Trump’s $4.5 Billion Cabinet Is Worth,” Chase Peterson-Withorn, 12/22/16). Others pegged the cabinet’s total worth at a lower figure.
My reporting on Reince Priebus’s time as White House chief of staff comes from several West Wing sources, all of whom were consistently critical of his tenure. I asked Priebus on several occasions to offer his own recollections for this book. Those entreaties went unanswered.
The poll about Trump’s best people was conducted by Monmouth University. (“Poll: Most Americans Think Trump Doesn’t ‘Hire the Best People,’” Caitlin Oprysko, Politico, 08/20/18).
Chapter 1: The Accidental Victor
I attended CPAC in 2018 and, having somehow survived, wrote about it for Newsweek. Some of that reporting appears here.
Clinton’s six-point lead over Trump on October 18 is based on the results of a Quinnipiac poll.
John DiIulio is an unusual, brilliant, fascinating character, and
I only wish I could have spoken to him for this book. Alas, he was unavailable, so I had to make do with Bring Back the Bureaucrats, his seminal 2014 study on federal government. DiIulio also summarized his ideas in a 2014 op-ed for the Washington Post, which the headline more or less gives away: “Want Better, Smaller Government? Hire Another Million Federal Bureaucrats” (08/29/14).
The history of Trump’s promise to “drain the swamp” comes from reporting I did for Newsweek.
I interviewed presidential historian Elaine Kamarck at her wonderfully decorated Brookings office on November 20, 2018.
Chapter 2: “I Wipe My Ass with Their Thing”
Politico’s Katie Glueck reported on the influence of the Heritage Foundation on Trump’s transition, while her colleagues Andrew Restuccia and Nancy Cook expertly covered the political machinations taking place in Trump Tower throughout November.
Francis Romero of Time wrote about the history of presidential transitions in 2008.
I spoke to several high-ranking members of the transition who were sympathetic to Governor Christie and others who were extremely critical of him. I have done my best to delineate the tension between these views, which reflects fissures at work in the late fall and winter of 2016.
Scott Amey of the Project on Government Oversight and Max Stier of the Partnership for Public Service both spoke to me on the record in the summer of 2016.
My colleague Hunter Walker of Yahoo News related the “fucking phone” incident from election night, though it was also told to me by one high-ranking campaign official who was by Trump’s side most of that night.
The Best People Page 26