by Jim Acosta
On November 9, 2017, the Washington Post broke the story alleging that Moore, while a thirty-two-year-old assistant district attorney in Alabama, had molested a fourteen-year old girl, an accusation the GOP Senate candidate blasted as—you guessed it—“Fake news.” In addition to that allegation, the Post had found other women who said that, when they were in their teens, Moore asked them out on dates and made other appalling, untoward advances. Following the bombshell in the Post, much of the GOP establishment immediately abandoned Moore, who had beaten Trump-supported sitting Republican senator Luther Strange in the primary.
The Moore story exploded toward the end of Trump’s eleven-day trip to Asia, in the fall of 2017. Having traveled on a number of these excursions, I can tell you that they are almost always interrupted by news back home, and not in a good way. It happened to Obama, and with the Roy Moore scandal, it was happening to Trump. On November 11, Trump tried to sidestep questions from reporters about the Moore story while on Air Force One.
“Honestly, I’d have to look at it and I’d have to see. Because, again, I’m dealing with the president of China, the president of Russia. I’m dealing with the folks over here,” he told reporters. “I haven’t been able to devote very much time to it.”
What’s astounding is that some in the GOP were giving Trump every opportunity he needed to abandon Moore. On November 13, Colorado senator Cory Gardner, head of the National Republican Senate Committee, recommended that Moore be expelled from the Senate should the Alabama Republican win the race.
“I believe the individuals speaking out against Roy Moore spoke with courage and truth, proving he is unfit to serve in the United States Senate and he should not run for office. If he refuses to withdraw and wins, the Senate should vote to expel him, because he does not meet the ethical and moral requirements of the United States Senate,” Gardner said in his statement.
Yet, once Trump and his team had returned to the White House from their foreign trip, it became evident they had other plans. The wheels were in motion for the president instead to do the unthinkable: not only endorse Moore but also campaign for him in the Alabama election. At a press briefing on November 16, Sarah Sanders did not rule out the possibility that Trump could hit the trail for an accused child molester.
“Do you think he’s a creep?” I asked Sarah at the briefing.
“Do I?” Sanders responded. “Look, I don’t know Roy Moore. I haven’t met him in person, so I wouldn’t be able to respond to that.”
Five days later, Trump disregarded the condemnations of Moore’s behavior coming from his own party and signaled that he would back the GOP contender.
“He denies it. Look, he denies it,” Trump said of Moore. “If you look at all the things that have happened over the last 48 hours. He totally denies it. He says it didn’t happen. And look, you have to look at him also.”
As the race between Roy Moore and his Democratic challenger, Doug Jones, tightened, Trump finally made the decision to endorse the GOP candidate. In an attempt to lure more Republicans to adopt his way of thinking, he said that Moore could be counted on to support the GOP tax-cut package that had been making its way through Congress. In December, Trump would take his support one step further, holding a rally in Pensacola, Florida, a city on the state’s panhandle, where local TV coverage of the event would be seen in Mobile, Alabama. The president, perhaps a bit too embarrassed actually to campaign for Moore in Alabama, was doing the next best thing.
“We can’t afford to have a liberal Democrat who is completely controlled by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. We can’t do it,” Trump told the crowd in Pensacola. Never one to hold back, he would go on to poke fun at one of the women who had accused Moore of sexual misconduct.
In the end, Trump’s craven endorsement was not enough to pull Moore across the finish line. It was a humiliating defeat for Trump, who could hear the “I told ya so”s coming from Congress, where more experienced operatives had been proven correct about Moore’s chances. A source close to Trump offered a candid assessment of the damage done to the president’s standing.
“It’s devastating for the president. . . . This is an earthquake,” the source told me.
The Alabama race demonstrated vividly that Trump could be beaten, even in one of the most conservative states in the country. He had disregarded the wishes of his own party, thinking somehow that he had the Midas touch every time he entered the fray. But the voters, even in deep-red Alabama, had their limits.
GOP operatives across Washington, especially in the Senate, were furious with Trump’s decision to embrace an accused child molester. Yes, before the Alabama race, they had feared Trump—incumbent GOP lawmakers and their political teams constantly worried about the prospect of Trump riding into their states or districts to back a more conservative rival during the primary process. That had kept these members and the rest of the party in line, to some extent. The Moore debacle shattered that, revealing that there was in fact a risk to being too closely tied to Trump, particularly in swing districts in the House, a key battleground for the upcoming 2018 midterms. With Moore, Trump had been amateurish and reckless, and more than a few GOP operatives were beginning to think they could all pay a price for that when the midterms rolled around.
Indeed, it was also another gut-check moment for the people around the president. As with Charlottesville, though, there were no mass resignations. The president’s aides kept right on whistling past the graveyard. All this was baffling to me. If the Moore allegations don’t disgust you, nothing will. But, for Trump, a Senate seat was more important, obviously, than doing the right thing. Much of the White House team around him apparently agreed.
As destructive as the Roy Moore debacle had been for Trump and the GOP, the Republicans were able to steady themselves just days later with the passage of a massive tax-cut package that delivered a tremendous windfall for Wall Street and wealthier Americans. Moore’s vote wasn’t needed after all; the bill passed anyway. The tax cuts represented one of the largest transfers of wealth from one generation to another. As deficits began to skyrocket in 2018 and into the next decade, the Millennials and younger generations would sink deeper into debt.
On December 20, 2017, roughly one week after Moore’s loss, nearly the entire Republican Party in Congress gathered on the South Lawn of the White House to heap praise on Trump and celebrate the passage of the tax-cut plan. There was no mention of Trump’s endorsement of an alleged child molester. I remember being struck by the rather emotional statement delivered by Utah Republican senator Orrin Hatch, the former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, who all but described Trump as the second coming of Lincoln:
“All I can say is that God loves this country,” Hatch said. “We all know it. We wouldn’t be where we are without Him. And we love all of you. And we’re going to keep fighting, and we’re going to make this the greatest presidency that we’ve seen, not only in generations, but maybe ever.”
The greatest presidency ever? I remember asking myself. Trump had just endorsed Roy Moore, only months after equivocating over the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville amid a constant campaign of demonizing immigrants—that assessment seemed a stretch.
The South Lawn celebration’s coming on the heels of the Moore debacle was stunning. In a presidency littered with news-making events, this bit of political pomp barely registered for many, but as I sat there watching, I felt it was a key moment in the Trump presidency, cementing in my mind one of the important aspects of the curious relationship between Trump and the rest of the Republican Party. Portions of the GOP, it seemed, were willing to compromise themselves in favor of achieving long-term party goals. If you wanted your tax cuts, you had to swallow Trump’s highly questionable behavior. Same thing if you wanted conservative judges. Trump and the Republicans may not believe in compromising with Democrats, but there was compromising going on inside their own party. They were horse trading, all right. The party was achieving a few of its policy goals i
n exchange for looking the other way.
In nearly all the episodes of Republican inaction, a familiar pattern would emerge: Trump would take things too far, and much of the GOP would do little or nothing to challenge his behavior. That dynamic is principally why the press found itself, over and over, in Trump’s crosshairs. GOP members of Congress had largely given up on calling the president out on his behavior, which meant that task fell to us reporters.
This was one reason it became harder and harder to keep up the faux collegiality of such formalities as the annual White House holiday party for the press corps. It was during the Roy Moore saga that CNN had announced it would not attend this reception, and after being called “fake news” and the “enemy of the people,” we had good reason to decline the invitation.
“In light of the President’s continued attacks on freedom of the press and CNN, we do not feel it is appropriate to celebrate with him as his invited guests,” a network spokesperson said.
Sarah Sanders, who can work in a dig at the press while brushing her teeth, couldn’t resist poking CNN in the eye. Christmas comes early! Finally, good news from @CNN, she tweeted at the time.
Declining the invitation was a good call for CNN, even if some of our colleagues in the press believed we were playing into Trump’s hands. My sense of it was that we couldn’t criticize Trump’s demonization of the press while drinking eggnog and posing for pictures with him. Others in the press were comfortable doing this; I was not. Such photos could easily be released and posted on social media, thus sending the wrong message: enemies of the people by day, drinking buddies at night.
As if to confirm that we had made the right decision, the White House made a point of not inviting certain reporters to the reception (not exactly in keeping with the holiday spirit). April Ryan, of American Urban Radio Network, was on the Trump naughty list. How could I attend a White House holiday reception to which April, in obvious retaliation for her coverage, hadn’t even been invited? But this is how the White House played the game. By inviting some outlets and not others, Trump was encouraging media organizations to make a choice: to show solidarity either with the White House or with their fellow journalists. It was pure divide and conquer, even at Christmastime.
“They have a disdain for me,” April said about the snub to the Washington Post.
It was a terrible development in relations between the press and the White House. The holiday reception for the press was canceled altogether in 2018, ending a tradition that had gone on for decades under Republican and Democratic administrations alike. I had taken my own children to these events when Obama was in the White House; so had many other journalists. It was a small way to repay our kids for enduring the headache of having a parent working in the White House press corps.
* * *
OVERLOOKING A ROY MOORE ENDORSEMENT IN EXCHANGE FOR TAX cuts certainly demonstrated that Republicans enjoyed reaping the benefits of having Trump in the White House. But there were many in the GOP who initially turned down the idea of crafting policy in the administration. Part of the problem was that so many Republicans had been deeply critical of Trump during the campaign. Most of these “Never Trumpers” had been cast aside as insufficiently loyal, and disqualified from working at the White House. This meant that many of the people willing to work for Trump were inexperienced in running a government. Several solid GOP operatives who were Trump critics from the campaign, such as political strategist R. C. Hammond, did join the Trump administration, but most have since left for the private sector. Few, if any, openly die-hard Never Trumpers ended up working inside the White House, because the environment favored Trump loyalists and those who would always have the president’s back.
The staff woes of the Trump White House reached their lowest point during the Rob Porter saga. Porter was the personal staff secretary to the president, a coveted position in any administration. Wherever Trump went, Porter was almost always close behind, preparing documents for him to sign and keeping him on schedule. It’s an important job in any White House, certainly not a position you hand out to just anyone. That was made all too clear when the British tabloid the Daily Mail first broke the news about disturbing allegations of marital abuse leveled against Porter. Trump, who liked to brag that he hired only the best people, obviously had a major problem on his hands in Porter: despite accusations from two ex-wives that he had beaten them, the White House aide had been authorized to work closely with the president of the United States.
Strangely, Porter announced his resignation in a statement that seemed to acknowledge the allegations while also denying them. Despite that giant red flag, the White House Press Office still thought it was a good idea to produce testimonials praising the staff secretary, including one from the chief of staff, General John Kelly, who described Porter as “a man of true integrity and honor.” It was a major blunder that most press offices at the city or state level would have avoided.
Part of the reason the Porter scandal was so devastating for the White House was that the staff was frozen in just how to handle the embarrassing revelations. As many of us in the press were already aware, Porter at that time was dating a key staffer inside the West Wing, Hope Hicks, Trump’s glamorous communications director and one of the “originals” from the campaign. Hicks could be shy around certain reporters, but she had no problem drawing attention to herself. A former model, she often dressed more like a political spouse than a press aide, and was often snapped wearing designer clothes and expensive sunglasses as she descended from Air Force One on official trips with the president. It was no secret that she was seeing Rob Porter. During Trump’s trip to Asia in the fall of 2017, I ran into both of them while on a hike in Vietnam in between Trump events. Hope was showing off her Lululemon attire while Rob was sporting a Harvard T-shirt. They didn’t have any Vietnamese money on them and were trying to figure out how to pay the admission fee to hike around a touristy site outside Da Nang. White House staffers were aware of the couple’s cozy relationship, which added to the difficulty of simply kicking Porter to the curb. He was Hope’s boyfriend, after all.
But Porter had other allies in the White House.
“There certainly was a clique around” Porter, a senior White House official told me. “A protective clique.”
Part of the reason for that “protective clique” was that so many people inside the West Wing saw Porter as a rising star in Trumpworld. Porter had big plans, the official told me.
“Here’s a guy who thought he was going to be on the Supreme Court one day,” the official said.
But this official insisted Porter destroyed all of that himself, in part, by not coming clean when confronted by top White House officials about the allegations. He lied to everybody about his past, the senior official told me.
“The president was literally shocked” when he learned the truth, the official added.
The Porter saga was a useful window into just how far the Trump White House was willing to go to fill its ranks with loyalists. As it turns out, Porter lacked the full security clearance that seemed vital for a job that included the handling of classified documents for the president. Instead, he was working with a temporary security clearance. He was not alone in this category. One week after Porter’s resignation, I broke the news that well over a hundred staffers at the White House, including some senior officials, were working with only temporary security clearances. This was disturbing one full year after Trump was elected president. Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Rob Porter were all on the list we obtained of West Wing aides who lacked full clearance. If there was a silver lining to the Porter saga, it was that the White House had to start addressing what was a pretty embarrassing lapse in security. But other dramatic changes were on the way.
Three weeks after Porter resigned, Hicks stepped down. Hope’s resignation was no small thing. Outside the Trump family, she had come to understand the president better than anyone in the West Wing. She was a fierce Trump defender behind the scenes, ofte
n becoming emotional with reporters who doubted Trump’s sincerity in his promise to “Make America Great Again.” We just didn’t know the real Trump, she continually told us. Trump had complete trust in Hicks, frequently putting her on the phone with reporters to praise or critique stories he didn’t like. She was an extension of the president, practically part of the Trump family. One clear sign of her status in the Trump White House was that she could often be found in the residence, a privilege not granted to most other staffers.
Others embroiled in the Porter saga, such as Chief of Staff John Kelly, would stay on, but badly damaged. Kelly confided to other officials in the White House that he felt he had been unfairly blamed for the Porter fiasco. But there were serious questions inside the West Wing as to how long the chief of staff was aware of the problems with Porter’s background check. (Indeed, Kelly had discussed with the president whether he should resign.) The accomplished retired general, it appeared, lacked the political skills needed to run the White House, especially one as chaotic as this one. He couldn’t see the error of praising Porter even as the aide was facing allegations of marital abuse. The general did walk back that statement in which he gushed about Porter’s character, but it took hard evidence to change his mind. As soon as he saw one of the photographs published in the Daily Mail depicting one of Porter’s ex-wives with a black eye, we reported, Kelly then decided he could no longer defend a young staffer he clearly liked.
The chief of staff tried to bring military-style discipline to the West Wing, keeping lists of items on note cards that we could occasionally spot him carrying from one event to another. He was exasperated with Trump’s antics, frequently clashing with the president behind the scenes as he tried to curb his erratic behavior. His efforts to clamp down on Trumpworld did not always go over well with the president, but Trump, who enjoyed surrounding himself with generals in the early months of his administration, found a kindred spirit of sorts in Kelly. Also appealing to Trump, no doubt: the “chief,” as Kelly was called behind the scenes, was a hard-liner on the issue of immigration dating back to his days as secretary of homeland security. Still, with the Porter fiasco, Kelly had become vulnerable to the more troublesome forces of Trumpworld. The same people who had been iced out by him after he restricted access to the West Wing were now whispering to reporters that the general’s days were numbered. And as if that weren’t enough, the “Corey stories” were back in the news: palace intrigue articles mentioning Lewandowski as being back in the mix to take over as chief of staff were plaguing Kelly, just as they had Reince Priebus when he was on thin ice.