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These programs enabled the United States to detect an ICBM launch in North Korea within seven seconds. The equivalent capability in Alaska took 15 minutes—an astonishing time differential. The ability to detect a launch in seven seconds would give the United States military the time to shoot down a North Korean missile. It is perhaps the most important and most secret operation in the United States government. The American presence in South Korea represents the essence of national security.
Cohn and Porter worked together to derail what they believed were Trump’s most impulsive and dangerous orders. That document and others like it just disappeared. When Trump had a draft on his desk to proofread, Cohn at times would just yank it, and the president would forget about it. But if it was on his desk, he’d sign it. “It’s not what we did for the country,” Cohn said privately. “It’s what we saved him from doing.”
The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.
Bannon was convinced that Trump himself was stunned. “He has no earthly idea he’s going to win,” Bannon said later. “And he had done no preparation. He never thought he would lose, but he didn’t think he would win. There’s a difference. And you’ve got to remember, no preparation, no transition team.”
“It’s finally dawning on him,” Bannon recalled, “that this is the real deal. This is a guy totally unprepared. Hillary Clinton spent her entire adult life getting ready for this moment. Trump hasn’t spent a second getting ready for this moment.”
“Mistakes on the domestic side have a correcting mechanism. You can get a do-over. There are no do-overs” in national security. “When we make mistakes, it has huge consequences.”
“By our actions or lack of actions, we can actually destabilize part of the world and cause enormous problems,” Keane warned.
Cohn didn’t mention a report that had come out during the campaign which said the Trump Organization’s business credit score was a 19 out of 100, below the national average by 30 points, and that it could have difficulty borrowing money.
Priebus, who was in the meeting, worried about the on-the-spot hires. He later said to Trump, “We’re going to hire the guy, a Democrat who voted for Hillary Clinton, to run our economic council? Why? Shouldn’t we talk about this? I’m sure he’s really smart. Shouldn’t we have a conversation before we offer a job like this?” “Oh,” Trump said, “we don’t need to talk about it.” Besides, the job had been offered and accepted. “He’s going to be great.”
No WMD were found, an acute embarrassment for the president and the CIA.
Chief Special Warfare Operator William “Ryan” Owens, 36, from Peoria, Illinois, was the first combat casualty in Trump’s presidency.
Some in the Oval Office had copies of the service records. None of what Trump cited was there. He was just making it up. He knew what the families wanted to hear.
“This is the president’s vision,” Navarro publicly said. “My function really as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/justinwolfers/status/972220271389302784?lang=en
Cohn and Navarro clashed. At one meeting in the Oval Office with Trump and Navarro, Cohn said that 99.9999 percent of the world’s economists agreed with him. It was basically true. Navarro stood virtually alone.
Several times Cohn just asked the president, “Why do you have these views?” “I just do,” Trump replied. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.” “That doesn’t mean they’re right,” Cohn said. “I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.”
As far as Porter was concerned Navarro was a member of the Flat Earth Society on trade deficits, like the president himself.
About 15 minutes before the Tomahawks would hit, a warning was sent to the Russians at the airfield. When the call was made, the Russian who picked up the phone at the airfield sounded intoxicated.
Bannon realized that the cascade of NSC presentations about Afghanistan, Iran, China, Russia and North Korea was not really connecting with Trump. Without some organizing principle, it was too much for his attention span.
Only those with the highest U.S. security clearances for Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information were allowed in the SCIF. It was an absolute rule, intended to prevent someone planting listening devices.
“Mr. President,” Cohn said, “the first thing he’s going to bring up is the steel tariffs. And he’s going to remind you that you let him out.” “I don’t remember,” Trump said, sitting behind the Resolute Desk. “Well, sir,” Cohn said, “you had the conversation with him . . .” “I’m going to deny it,” Trump replied. “I never had that conversation with him.” “Okay, sir, just reminding you that it’s going to come up.” Cohn had witnessed this for over a year—denial when needed or useful or more convenient. “He’s a professional liar,” Cohn told an associate.
Mattis couldn’t understand why the U.S. would want to pick a fight with allies, whether it was NATO, or friends in the Middle East, or Japan—or particularly with South Korea.
All the air seemed to have come out of Tillerson. He could not abide Trump’s attack on the generals. The president was speaking as if the U.S. military was a mercenary force for hire. If a country wouldn’t pay us to be there, then we didn’t want to be there. As if there were no American interests in forging and keeping a peaceful world order, as if the American organizing principle was money. “Are you okay?” Cohn asked him. “He’s a fucking moron,” Tillerson said so everyone heard.
A senior White House official who spoke contemporaneously with participants in the meeting recorded this summary: “The president proceeded to lecture and insult the entire group about how they didn’t know anything when it came to defense or national security. It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views.”
“There’s some things where he’s already reached the conclusion and it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter what arguments you offer. He’s not listening.”
Trump seemed not to remember his own decision because he did not ask about it. He had no list—in his mind or anywhere else—of tasks to complete.
“The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.”
“If you have natural predators at the table,” Priebus said, “things don’t move.” So the White House was not leading on key issues like health care and tax reform. Foreign policy was not coherent and often contradictory. “Why?” asked Priebus. “Because when you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody. That’s what happens.”
In a statement, Senator John McCain called Charlottesville “a confrontation between our better angels and our worst demons. White supremacists and neo-Nazis are, by definition, opposed to American patriotism and the ideals that define us.”
Republican senator Lindsey Graham appeared on Fox News Sunday and said that the president needs “to correct the record here. These groups seem to believe they have a friend in Donald Trump in the White House,” and “I would urge the president to dissuade these groups that he’s their friend.”
“anger serves as a way to manage staff, express his displeasure or simply as an outlet that soothes him.”
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/16/trump-charlottesville-temper-chaos-241721
Ideas from the session were never taken seriously. The president often made decisions with only one or two or three people involved. There was no process for making and coordinating decisions. Chaos and disorder were inadequate to describe the situation. It was a free-for-all.
Trump had no understanding of how government functioned.
For the first weeks the new system annoyed the president. Eventually Porter developed a routine and would bring in two to 10 decision memos for him to sign each day. Trump liked signing. It meant he was doing things, and he had an up-and-down penmanship that looked authoritative in black Magic Marker.
“The president’s unhinged,” Kelly said. There would be something, especially about trade agreements or the U.S. troops in South Korea. “We all need to try to talk him out of it,” Kelly said. They needed to stand up to the president. He wasn’t listening.
When Trump’s personal attorney came to talk about matters relating to Special Counsel Mueller, Trump at times asked Porter to join in. “Rob, I want you to stay. You’ve got to be a part of this.” “I’m not your lawyer,” Porter said. “I’m not acting as a lawyer. But even if I was, I’d be a government lawyer, not one of your personal lawyers and that would break attorney-client privilege. And so I can’t be in here.” “No, no, no,” Trump said, “that doesn’t matter.” It would take one of Trump’s personal lawyers, like John Dowd, saying, “Rob needs to go.”
Trump was determined to impose steel tariffs. “Look,” Trump said, “we’ll try it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll undo it.” “Mr. President,” Cohn said, “that’s not what you do with the U.S. economy.” Because the stakes were so high, it was crucial to be conservative. “You do something when you’re 100 percent certain it will work, and then you pray like hell that you’re right. You don’t do 50/50s with the U.S. economy.” “If we’re not right,” Trump repeated, “we roll them back.”
“Once you blow it up,” Cohn replied, “it may be over. That’s the most high-risk strategy. That either works or you go bankrupt.” Cohn realized that Trump had gone bankrupt six times and seemed not to mind. Bankruptcy was just another business strategy. Walk away, threaten to blow up the deal. Real power is fear.
“Sir, so when mothers’ babies are dying of strep throat, what are you going to say to them?” Cohn asked Trump if he would tell them, “Trade deficits matter”? “We’ll buy it from another country,” Trump proposed. “So now the Chinese are going to sell it [antibiotics] to the Germans, and the Germans are going to mark it up and sell it to us. So our trade deficit will go down with the Chinese, up with the Germans.” U.S. consumers would be paying a markup. “Is that good for our economy?” Navarro said they would buy it through some country other than Germany. Same problem, Cohn said. “You’re just
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“This is bullshit,” Trump replied. “This is wrong.” “This is not wrong. This is data from the United States trade representative. Call Lighthizer and see if he agrees.” “I’m not calling Lighthizer,” Trump said. “Well,” Cohn said, “I’ll call Lighthizer. This is the factual data. There’s no one that’s going to disagree with this data.” Then he added, “Data is data.”
Months went by. “Where the hell is my Peter?” the president asked one day. “I haven’t talked to Peter Navarro in two months.” But, as was often the case, he did not follow up.
Kim fired back three days later. “A frightened dog barks louder,” and said Trump is “surely a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire. I will surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U.S. dotard.”
In a small group meeting in his office one day, Kelly said of the president, “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in crazytown. “I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.”
Cohn found out that getting votes in the Senate was all about giving individual senators their favorite loopholes or tax breaks. “It’s a candy store,” he said.
The final bill was a dizzying labyrinth of numbers, rules and categories. There was no doubt that it was a Republican tax bill, benefiting corporations and the wealthy most.
The budget, adding $1.5 trillion to the deficit, was the worst part of the permanent political-class, boomtown mentality where every lobbyist got their deal for their clients. There was no wall. The swamp had won.
Grievance was a big part of Trump’s core, very much like a 14-year-old boy who felt he was being picked on unfairly. You couldn’t talk to him in adult logic. Teenage logic was necessary.
The #TimesUp and #MeToo movements of women and feminists would create an alternative to end the male-dominated patriarchy, Bannon believed. “Trump is the perfect foil,” he summarized. “He’s the bad father, the terrible first husband, the boyfriend that fucked you over and wasted all those years, and [you] gave up your youth for, and then dumped you. And the terrible boss that grabbed you by the pussy all the time and demeaned you.”
Colin Kahl, Obama’s former deputy assistant secretary of defense, tweeted, “Folks aren’t freaking out about a literal button. They are freaking out about the mental instability of a man who can kill millions without permission from anybody.”
“A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
Trump seemed to love the adulation but said to Graham, “You’re a middle-of-the-road guy. I want you to be 100 percent for Trump.” This resembled the loyalty pledge that then FBI director James Comey said that Trump had asked of him. According to Comey, Trump had said, “I need loyalty. I expect loyalty,” during their now famous one-on-one Green Room dinner in the White House during the first week of the Trump presidency. “Okay, what’s the issue?” Graham asked, “and I’ll tell you whether I’m 100 percent for you or not.” “You’re like 82 percent,” Trump said. “Well, some days I’m 100 percent. Some
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