The Enemy of the People

by Jim Acosta

  As for my question to Sarah Sanders at the briefing, it was well within the bounds of fair reporting in the Trump era. Again, less pointed queries are likely to be met with more obfuscation and lies. When it comes to family separations, though, I’m sorry, but you have to hold their feet to the fire. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there are not two sides to a story when it is a matter of right versus wrong. Separating kids from their parents is just wrong. The White House finally backed down only after the press exposed the policy as the horror show it was.

  When the history of the Trump administration is written, I have every confidence that its zero-tolerance policy will be remembered for its inhumanity maybe more than any other Trump policy. What made it so deeply troubling, even more than the repulsiveness of the policy itself, was the knowledge that, if the administration hadn’t been challenged by journalists and activists on this issue, it’s very likely that most Americans would never have learned of this practice. Never mind my questions in the White House Briefing Room. Think of all the terrific reporting coming from my colleagues in the field, who were down on the border, talking to the migrants about missing children or missing parents. If ever there was a case for a robust and healthy media scrutiny of governmental policy, this was it. In exposing the family-separation policy, the free press in America lived up to its promise of holding our leaders accountable. Journalists had filled a void left by the GOP-led legislative branch of government, which was unwilling to fulfill its oversight duty when it came to Trump’s border madness.

  While Charlottesville had pulled back the curtain on just how far Republicans were willing to go in their acceptance of the president’s worst instincts, it was becoming increasingly clear that what had happened in Virginia was just a starting point. At the border, Trump was beginning to leave a legacy of cruelty that would be hard for the GOP to live down, and impossible for the country to forget. History won’t soon forget what happened to the migrant children. Those kids will have good reason to doubt America’s greatness.

  9

  Dictators over Democracies

  Radical as much of Trump’s domestic policy had been at times through his first eighteen months in office, his foreign policy was where the tectonic shifting was possibly more lasting, with the potential to damage American alliances for the foreseeable future. While this alienation of our closest allies had been going on since Trump first took office, it was in the summer of 2018 when we saw the culmination of his foreign policy in his first summit with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator: America was now a country that was not only comfortable with dictators, but friendlier to them in some cases than we were to our closest allies.

  This had the effect of fundamentally altering the foreign policy approach that had been pursued by both Democrats and Republicans since the beginning of the post–World War II era. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Trump’s moves were of great concern to some of the most experienced diplomatic and national security personnel in and around government. Even within the Trump administration, national security officials have found the president’s embrace of authoritarian regimes alarming, which explains the torrent of leaks of the president’s phone calls and his interactions with world leaders.

  “It doesn’t make a difference if you’re a Republican or a Democrat,” one former Trump national security official told me privately. Cozying up to the likes of Russian president Vladimir Putin while elbowing aside longtime allies such as Germany’s Angela Merkel is simply something a U.S. president shouldn’t do. This official told me he honestly couldn’t figure out whether Trump was fully committed to advancing U.S. interests. Long before Special Counsel Robert Mueller completed his investigation, this official confessed he really wasn’t sure why Trump was so cozy with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

  “I can’t answer that question,” the official told me, in what felt like an unbelievable admission from someone in the national security realm. “I really don’t know.”

  With the world in a constant state of Trump news overload, you will be forgiven if you’ve forgotten the early antics of the president’s first few weeks in office, when he would hop on the phone with foreign leaders, leaving those heads of state in something of a state of shock over his unconventional way of doing business. That official I just mentioned said that he and others were almost constantly rattled by Trump’s behavior in dealing with his foreign counterparts. For example, there were the conversations Trump had with the Australian prime minister and the Mexican president, which were revealed less than two weeks after he entered the Oval Office. Trump unloaded on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull about an Obama administration agreement to take in refugees from Australia, and he complained about immigration, of course, to Mexico’s president, Enrique Peña Nieto.

  Trump hated the leaks. They fueled his conspiracy theories about being the victim of a “deep state,” referring to a group of unelected officials actually in control of a government—a fear that his close advisers, including Steve Bannon, egged on behind the scenes. Having covered the White House for six years, including two years under Trump, I have never come across any evidence of a “deep state.” What I have come across—and this should encourage every American—are officials who have occasionally helped us reporters understand what is going on inside the government. They are dedicated public servants, folks who come forward with information that is vital to meeting the public’s expectation that we have good government.

  As much as I have seen obvious flaws in some members of the Trump team, I would be remiss if I didn’t report on the sizable number of officials in government who have attempted to help me and countless other reporters as we’ve grappled with the overwhelming task of covering Trump. (We can’t name them of course. Trump would run them out of town on a rail.) There were instances, yes, when Trump officials relayed information to reporters to exact revenge on rivals inside the White House. But those were usually the political folks inside the West Wing backstabbing one another over turf. We did our best to sort through some of that nastiness, and not just blurt it out on the air, unedited. But there were other officials who understood our need to get to the bottom of the president’s agenda, shining a light on some of Trump’s provocative conversations regarding policies and with world leaders that alarmed veterans in both the national security and domestic policy realm.

  When they found the occasional whistleblower, the Trump people swept many of them out of their official positions as best they could, but they couldn’t find them all. Whether they are still in place or have moved on, it should be noted that countless officials, who will go nameless here of course, deserve our gratitude. It’s not an easy thing, during any administration, to go to a reporter with sensitive information about what’s happening inside the White House. Trump likes to blast these anonymous sources as phony and “fake news,” but I’m here to tell you, and President Trump knows this: these sources are as real as you and me.

  Adding to the anxiety, particularly among national security staffers, Trump would occasionally bounce some pretty outlandish ideas off just about anyone in any setting. The same former national security official told me Trump talked up the idea of carrying out a military strike on Venezuela with participants at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2017.

  “The Chief of Staff told him it was not a good idea. The National Security Advisor told him it was not a good idea. He’s talking to foreign leaders and he keeps bringing it up,” the official said about Trump’s fixation on Venezuela at the United Nations General Assembly.

  This was the same meeting of the UNGA where Trump was already ridiculing North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un as “Little Rocket Man.” It was around this time, the official said, that Trump was also sounding out the idea of launching some kind of military action against North Korea. What disturbed some of the aides around him, the official added, was that the president seemed incapable of being discreet about such sensitive matters.

  “He doesn
’t have a filter of that sort,” the official said.

  Trump seemed intrigued by the idea of giving North Korea a “bloody nose,” a small-scale strike that would send a message of strength to Kim. Just about all Trump’s advisers at the time, the official said, cautioned against it, as the North Korean dictator could very well launch a counterstrike at South Korea, potentially triggering a larger war, with massive unintended consequences.

  “He was told all hell would break loose,” the official said.

  In October 2017, while viewing the damage in Puerto Rico left by Hurricane Maria, Trump continued to vent about Kim. Sources inside the Puerto Rican government told me the president seemed less interested in the storm’s aftermath than in the tempest brewing between the United States and North Korea over dictator Kim’s nuclear weapons program. Trump had been beating his chest for weeks, warning Kim of “fire and fury.”

  Meeting with Puerto Rican governor Ricardo Rosselló, sources told me, Trump boasted of his “nuclear football,” the briefcase used by American presidents to initiate a nuclear attack. Summoning the aide carrying the football to approach, so the governor could have a closer look, Trump told Rosselló that he was going to use it on Kim if he stepped out of line. Rosselló, the sources said, thought Trump was “fucking crazy.” After Trump failed to appreciate the level of devastation left by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico—at one point infamously tossing rolls of paper towels to storm survivors—Rosselló was no longer worried just about the future of his island. Now he was suddenly fearful of Trump’s handling of arguably the world’s most sensitive national security crisis.

  When I interviewed Rossello about this in March 2019, he wouldn’t elaborate on what Trump said. At the time of the interview, his team was being bullied by White House officials who were threatening the governor’s aides after Rossello criticized Trump for accusing the Puerto Ricans of wasting disaster relief money.

  “Your governor is fucking things up,” the aides quoted White House adviser Peter Navarro as saying during the meeting.

  “If the bully gets close, I’ll punch the bully in the mouth,” Rossello told me.

  As for Trump’s comments about using the nuclear football on Kim, Rossello would only say “there were other topics that were being discussed, and my view is that the sole focus of that trip should have been on Puerto Rico.

  “He was talking about a whole host of other issues, but I would rather leave those conversations internal,” the governor added.

  Later, in January 2018, Trump repeated much of this braggadocio when he boasted on Twitter that his nuclear arsenal was larger than Kim’s: Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works! he tweeted.

  Needless to say, all this rhetoric was highly unnerving to America’s closest allies. One of the side effects of my clashes with Trump was that I had become of interest to some of the embassies around Washington. Ambassadors and their staff were seeking to invite me over, mostly for off-the-record discussions, to get a sense of what I knew about Trump. The conversations almost always boiled down to questions about Trump’s mental state: “What’s he really like?” “Is he unstable?” As I have told countless people, U.S. citizen and non-U.S. citizen alike, I don’t have an answer to that question. I’m not a psychiatrist. Trump’s behavior is, to put it mildly, outside the spectrum of what we have come to expect from an American president. But I also thought Trump was more crazy like a fox.

  It was on this particular occasion, over drinks at the embassy of a key U.S. ally, that it was disclosed to me that there were concerns about whether Trump could initiate a sudden launch of America’s nuclear arsenal. This became a story for me, which I wrote, along with my colleague Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr. Multiple sources told us that these concerns had been raised with members of Congress. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker, a frequent Trump critic, eventually held a hearing on the presidential authority to launch nuclear weapons. I won’t go too deeply into how such launches are authorized, but the president cannot simply push a button on his desk and fire missiles across the globe. Still, as we reported at the time, at least one NATO partner country raised concerns with members of Congress about the president’s command of the U.S. launch system. A diplomatic source from the country whose embassy I visited that day said that they became more comfortable following a U.S. government briefing on the subject. Members of the administration tried to allay their fears by explaining that the existing launch process had sufficient checks in place to discourage Trump from doing anything rash. But none of this is really comforting, is it?

  Still, Trump continued to raise alarm bells on the world stage with his abnormal behavior right into 2018, when it was disclosed to me in May that Trump had clashed over the phone with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau. During the call, Trump and Trudeau argued over the steep and punitive tariffs the administration had imposed on Canadian steel and aluminum imports. Trump had imposed the new tariffs unilaterally—that is, without an okay from the legislative branch—citing national security reasons, something he needed to do in order to go around Congress. Senior administration officials had oddly justified the steel and aluminum tariffs to me as necessary to protect the U.S. steel industry so that—get this—there would be enough factories in the United States capable of producing the volume of military hardware needed in the event of a Third World War.

  Yes, they actually said that. This is a good case in point for why sources sometimes go on background, to tell us things anonymously they’d be embarrassed to say publicly.

  When Trudeau asked Trump how he could justify the tariffs on national security grounds, the president did not mention a Third World War; he tried a different argument, and made an erroneous historical reference (to put it mildly).

  “Didn’t you guys burn down the White House?” Trump asked a puzzled Trudeau.

  It was a reference to the War of 1812, except Trump had his facts wrong. The Canadians didn’t burn down the White House. That was the British. Canadian sources confirmed this part of the conversation to my colleague Paula Newton, who covers Canada for CNN.

  After that leaked call, I’m told, Trump and his team decided that enough was enough. They began to shrink the circle of officials brought into the loop on such calls.

  Since our reporting on the War of 1812 phone call, I have come to learn some of the difficulties encountered by these officials who struggled to stay abreast of Trump’s conversations with other world leaders. One serious complication, according to a well-placed administration official, was that Trump preferred to conduct these calls from inside the Executive Residence of the White House, which was off-limits to many staffers. So, some officials, rather than being in the room with the president, would have to monitor the calls from the Situation Room, far away from Trump. That’s a problem, as such officials are often needed in the room to guide the president through complicated issues on a phone call with a foreign leader, not something you can do if you’re in another part of the White House.

  And when it comes to our neighbors and allies, Trump is not only skeptical of them but also downright hostile—curious behavior for any government official, but positively baffling for the sitting U.S. president.

  * * *

  PERHAPS MOST STRIKING ABOUT TRUMP’S APPROACH TO FOREIGN policy was not just whom he attacked, but also whom he cozied up to. In retrospect, it should come as no surprise, given the president’s treatment of the free press and his willingness to interfere with the independence of the judiciary, that Trump befriended some of the most notorious autocrats and human rights violators in the world.

  Around the time of Putin’s reelection in March 2018, I was told, Trump wanted to send the Russian president a news clipping, signed by him, to wish him good luck.

  “Vladimir, you’re going to do great,” Trump was going to tell Putin, according to an administr
ation official who saw what happened and then raised the concern with other aides.

  “Other people were aware,” the official said.

  It was something Trump used to do during his campaign for president: mail off a news article to a reporter, as a way of saying he liked the piece. Trump’s oversize squiggly signature would be scrawled across the clipping. That Trump wanted to make the same gesture to Putin worried some West Wing aides. The official who told me about this said it’s not clear whether Trump ultimately sent off the clipping to the Russian president.

  Still, as has been reported, Trump ignored the warnings of national security officials when they urged him not to congratulate Putin during a phone call between the two leaders after the Russian president was reelected to a fourth term in office, as the election was essentially a sham. The phrase “Do not congratulate” was written on briefing materials that Trump apparently had not read or disregarded altogether. A senior administration official confirmed for me the “Do not congratulate” story, first reported by the Washington Post.

  Trump routinely confounded his own national security team with this sort of behavior. That same former member of the team told me it wasn’t clear if any of this was proof that Trump had been “compromised” by the Russians, but the official couldn’t rule out that possibility, a disturbing bit of analysis from someone who had worked so closely with the president. Still, the official said, it could also be that Trump can’t control his impulses. Either way, it’s a stunning admission from a top official who worked in the Trump administration.