Fear: Trump in the White House

by Bob Woodward

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.”

“Mr. President,” he said, “Kim Jong Un poses the most immediate threat to our national security. We need South Korea as an ally. It may not seem like trade is related to all this, but it’s central.” American military and intelligence assets in South Korea are the backbone of our ability to defend ourselves from North Korea. Please don’t leave the deal.

Why is the U.S. paying $1 billion a year for an anti-ballistic missile system in South Korea? Trump asked. He was furious about the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system, and had threatened to pull it out of South Korea and move it to Portland, Oregon. “We’re not doing this for South Korea,” Mattis said. “We’re helping South Korea because it helps us.”

The September 5, 2017, draft letter to the South Korean president withdrawing from the trade agreement.

“Number one,” Bannon went on, “we’re going to stop mass illegal immigration and start to limit legal immigration to get our sovereignty back. Number two, you are going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the country. And number three, we’re going to get out of these pointless foreign wars.”

Intelligence about Russian meddling caused deep concern in Obama’s National Security Council. Over time, the intel got better and more convincing.

I agree, Trump said. “We should just go borrow a lot of money right now, hold it, and then sell it and make money.” Cohn was astounded at Trump’s lack of basic understanding. He tried to explain. If you as the federal government borrow money through issuing bonds, you are increasing the U.S. deficit. What do you mean? Trump asked. Just run the presses—print money.

Turning to taxes, Cohn said, “The 35 percent corporate tax rate has been great for my business for the last decade. We’ve been inverting companies to 10 percent tax jurisdictions and they pay us enormous fees.” He was speaking as a Goldman president. An inversion refers to relocating a corporation’s legal home to a low-tax country such as Ireland or Bermuda in the form of a new parent company while retaining operations and management as a subsidiary in the higher-tax country.

Congress had a debt ceiling which set a cap on how much money the federal government could borrow, and it was legally binding. It was clear that Trump did not understand the way the U.S. government debt cycle balance sheet worked.

The CIA’s mission is to gather intelligence and disseminate it to the White House and the rest of the federal government. It does not have to be as solid because normally it would not be used in a criminal trial.

The alleged presence of WMD was the key justification for the Iraq invasion. No WMD were found, an acute embarrassment for the president and the CIA.

What has not been previously reported: One source was in such jeopardy that the CIA wanted to exfiltrate that person from Russia to safety abroad or in the United States. The source refused to leave, apparently out of fear of repercussions against the person’s family if the source suddenly left Russia or disappeared.

The CIA believed they had at least six human sources supporting this finding. One person with access to the full top secret report later told me he believed that only two were solid.

During the campaign, Trump disparaged the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the 68-year-old alliance with Europe. NATO is often considered the most successful effort to counter the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and a foundation of Western unity. The members pledged collective defense, meaning an attack on one would be considered an attack against all. Trump had argued that NATO might be obsolete. Much of his criticism had to do with money. NATO’s goal was for each member nation eventually to spend 2 percent of its GDP on defense. The United States spent 3.5 percent of its GDP, while Germany spent only 1.2 percent.

Trump lashed out, suggesting that McCain had taken the coward’s way out of Vietnam as a prisoner of war. He said that as a Navy pilot during the Vietnam War McCain, whose father was Admiral John McCain, the Pacific commander, had been offered and taken early release, leaving other POWs behind. “No, Mr. President,” Mattis said quickly, “I think you’ve got it reversed.” McCain had turned down early release and been brutally tortured and held five years in the Hanoi Hilton. “Oh, okay,” Trump said.

In one of his last acts as president, Obama had imposed sanctions on Russia on December 29 in retaliation for Russian meddling in the election. He expelled 35 suspected Russian spies and ordered the closure of two Russian-owned compounds in Maryland and New York believed to be involved in espionage.

In the end the Combat ISIS strategy was a continuation of the strategy under Obama but with bombing and other authorities granted to the local commanders. Mattis was worried about Iranian expansion. At one point he later referred to “those idiot raghead mullahs.”

Bannon met with him at Mar-a-Lago and offered his usual advice: Don’t lecture Trump. He doesn’t like professors. He doesn’t like intellectuals. Trump was a guy who “never went to class. Never got the syllabus. Never took a note. Never went to a lecture. The night before the final, he comes in at midnight from the fraternity house, puts on a pot of coffee, takes your notes, memorizes as much as he can, walks in at 8 in the morning and gets a C. And that’s good enough. He’s going to be a billionaire.” Final advice: “Show up in your uniform.” McMaster wore a suit.

“Just play it by ear,” Bannon said. “We’ll figure it out.” That was the Trump way. Playing by ear, acting on impulse. Pure Trump.

McMaster knew the biggest national security challenge would be North Korea. It had been on the most difficult list for years. Six months earlier, on September 9, 2016, President Obama had received unsettling news as he entered the final months of his eight years. North Korea had detonated a nuclear weapon in an underground test, the fifth in a decade, and the largest.

Even with his intense desire to avoid a war, Obama decided the time had come to consider whether the North Korean nuclear threat could be eliminated in a surgical military strike. As he prepared to hand over the presidency, he knew he needed to address the North Korea mess head-on.

From the outset President Obama had authorized several Special Access Programs (SAP), the most classified and compartmented operations conducted by the military and intelligence, to deter North Korean missiles. One program pinpointed cyber attacks on the command, control, telemetry and guidance systems before or during a North Korean missile test launch. These high-risk cyber attacks had begun in his first year as president. Their success rate was mixed.

Another highly secret operation focused on obtaining North Korean missiles. And a third enabled the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds. Officials have asked that I not describe the details in order to protect national security operations deemed vital to the interests of the United States.

The intelligence assessment showed an increasing level of effort, strongly suggesting that Kim Jong Un was building a fighting force of nuclear weapons, or at least he wanted to make it appear that way. Despite the public cartoon that cast him as an unstable madman, sensitive intelligence reporting showed that Kim, now age 34, was a much more effective leader of the North’s nuclear weapons and missiles programs than his father, Kim Jong Il, who had ruled for 17 years from 1994 to 2011.

Obama tasked the Pentagon and intelligence agencies with examining whether it would be possible to take out all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and related facilities. Could they effectively target all of this? They would need to update the satellite, signals and human intelligence. So much was not known or certain. Pakistan, which had nuclear weapons since 1998, had miniaturized their nukes and put them in mines and artillery shells. Did North Korea have that capability? Current intelligence assessments could not answer definitively.

The Pentagon reported that the only way “to locate and destroy—with complete certainty—all components of North Korea’s nuclear program” was through a ground invasion. A ground invasion would trigger a North Korean response, likely with a nuclear weapon. That was unthinkable to Obama. In his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 2009 he said, “War promises human tragedy,” and “War at some level is an expression of human folly.”

One intelligence analyst with vast experience and who also had served in South Korea said, “I’m shocked that the Obama administration closed their eyes and acted like the deaf, mute and blind monkey on this issue. And now I understand why the Obama team said to Trump that the major problem you have is North Korean nukes. They’ve been hiding the problem.”

Graham was pounding Trump pretty hard, especially on the first executive order, on the Muslim ban. “Some third grader wrote it on the back of an envelope,” he said. Graham and McCain had released a joint statement: “We fear this executive order will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism. This executive order sends a signal, intended or not, that America does not want Muslims coming into our country. That is why we fear this executive order may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security.”

“Tweeting,” the president said, “that’s the way I operate.” “It’s okay to tweet to your advantage, Mr. President. Don’t tweet to your disadvantage. They’re always trying to drag you into their swamp. You’ve got to have the discipline not to take the bait.”

In 2015, Trump had made one of his most cruel and thoughtless comments about McCain. “He’s not a war hero. He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”

What about North Korea? Trump asked. “Everybody screwed this up,” McCain said. Democrats, Republicans—the last three presidents over 24 years, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

controversy in South Korea about the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system, which had become an issue in the South Korean presidential race. The system would help protect South Korea from a North Korea missile attack. More crucially, it could be used to help protect the United States.

“It’s actually a very good deal for us,” McMaster said when he returned in the afternoon. “They gave us the land in a 99-year lease for free. But we pay for the system, the installation and the operations.” Trump went wild. “I want to see where it is going,” he said. Finally some maps came in that showed the location. Some of the land included a former golf course. “This is a piece of shit land,” said the former golf course and real estate developer. “This is a terrible deal. Who negotiated this deal? What genius? Take it out. I don’t want the land.” The major missile defense system might cost $10 billion over 10 years, and it wasn’t even physically in the United States, Trump said. “Fuck it, pull it back and put it in Portland!”

Harvey’s number-one worry in the Middle East was Hezbollah, the Iranian-supported terrorist organization. The sensitive intelligence showed that Hezbollah had more than 48,000 full-time military in Lebanon, where they presented an existential threat to the Jewish state.

They had 8,000 expeditionary forces in Syria, Yemen and region-wide commando units. In addition, they had people worldwide—30 to 50 each in Colombia, Venezuela, South Africa, Mozambique and Kenya. Hezbollah had a stunning 150,000 rockets. In the 2006 war with Israel they’d had only 4,500.

Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders were integrated into the Hezbollah structure. Iran was paying Hezbollah’s bills—at a staggering $1 billion a year. That did not include what Hezbollah made from money laundering, human trafficking, the c...

Harvey believed that Obama had spent too much time on mollifying Iran with the nuclear deal and neglecting, even scorning, relations with the Saudis and Israel. Making Saudi Arabia the first presidential trip could go a long way to signaling that the Trump administration had new priorities.

Like all presidents, Trump was living with the unfinished business of his predecessors. In the 21st-century presidency, nothing illustrated this more clearly than Afghanistan. The war, begun after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when Afghanistan had been the sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, was a thicket of high expectations, setbacks, misunderstandings and massive commitments of money, troops and lives.

After 9/11, the CIA and military had paid off the Afghan warlords to go after the Taliban. Some of that money had been used to target political opposition. Now the U.S. was spending about $50 billion a year in Afghanistan. Was the government, which was deeply corrupt, just taking money from the U.S. and the allies to fund themselves? Was the large level of assistance taking away the Afghan government’s incentive to develop real reforms and the political will to take on opium and profits from mining? American money was one of the poisons in the Afghan system.

McMaster laid out his four frames or goals: 1. Achieve political stability that will include a political settlement with the insurgent Taliban. 2. Push for institutional actions by the Afghan government to counter the Taliban. 3. Increase pressure on neighboring Pakistan, which was playing a double game—nominally allied with the United States, but also supporting terrorists and the Taliban. 4. Maintain international support from the 39 countries allied with the United States in a coalition.

It was not enough for McMaster to declare the objective was to prevent another terrorist attack. The question was simple: How would several thousand more troops help to achieve that? There were four missions in Afghanistan: train and advise the Afghan Army and police; logistical support; counterterrorism; and the intelligence mission. McMaster had to craft a strategy that avoided escalation, or the appearance of escalation. It could not directly or brazenly challenge Trump’s stated desire to get out, but had to softly market a new approach that soon would be called “stay the course.”

“It never ends,” Graham said. “It’s good versus evil. Good versus evil never ends. It’s just like the Nazis. It’s now radical Islam. It will be something else one day. So our goal is to make sure the homeland never gets attacked from Afghanistan. Look at the thousands of extra troops as an insurance policy against another 9/11. Listen to your generals.”

When McMaster tried to sell a slimmed-down version of concepts like “frames” or the R4s, Trump was cruelly dismissive. He had one question: “What the fuck are we doing there?”

Afterward, Trump summed up their views for Bannon: “Unanimous. We’ve got to figure out how to get the fuck out of there. Totally corrupt. The people are not worth fighting for . . . NATO does nothing. They’re a hindrance. Don’t let anybody tell you how great they are. It’s all bullshit.”

The National Security Council gathered in the Situation Room at 10:00 the next morning, July 19, to brief Trump on the Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy. McMaster spent the initial part of the meeting identifying objectives and framing issues for discussion. Trump looked bored and seemed disengaged. After about five minutes, he interrupted. “I’ve been hearing about this nonsense about Afghanistan for 17 years with no success,” he said before McMaster had finished laying out the issues. We’ve got a bunch of inconsistent, short-term strategies. We can’t continue with the same old strategy.

He brought up his meeting with the troops the previous day. The best information I’ve gotten was from a couple of those line soldiers, not the generals, he said. “I don’t care about...

“But how many more deaths?” Trump asked. “How many more lost limbs? How much longer are we going to be there?” His antiwar argument, practically ripped from a Bob Dylan song lyric, reflected the desires of his political base whose families were overrepresented in the military forces. “The quickest way out is to lose,” Mattis said.

“The problem,” Cohn said, “is that Peter comes in here and says all this stuff and doesn’t have any facts to back it up. I have the facts.” He had sent Trump a heavily researched paper on the service economy. He knew Trump had never read it and probably never would. Trump hated homework.

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.”

Knowing how the Trump White House worked, the memo also said in bold, “On-the-fly decisions are strictly provisional.”