Fear: Trump in the White House

by Bob Woodward

McMaster’s briefing style was all wrong for Trump. It was really the opposite of Trump in almost every way. McMaster was order and discipline, hierarchy and linear thinking. Trump would go from A to G to L to Z. Or double back into D or S. McMaster was incapable of going from A to C without hitting B.

“Let’s fucking kill him!” the president said. “Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.” The military had the capability to launch a covert top secret leadership air strike in Syria. Trump sounded personally attacked. Syria had promised not to use chemical weapons—an apparent reference to Syrian president Assad’s agreement to destroy all his chemical weapons. Yes, Mattis said. He would get right on it. He hung up the phone. “We’re not going to do any of that,” he told a senior aide. “We’re going to be much more measured.”

“A hundred countries have called,” Trump said. Graham thought, probably, maybe, 10. “They’re all calling me, patting me on the back. You know what the Chinese president told me? When I told him during dessert, we just shot 59 Tomahawks at Assad? Good, he deserved it!”

The president was serious again. Porter drafted a 180-day notification letter to be signed by Trump that the United States would withdraw from NAFTA. Porter was more and more convinced that it could trigger an economic and foreign relations crisis with Canada and Mexico. He went to see Cohn. “I can stop this,” Cohn said to Porter. “I’ll just take the paper off his desk before I leave.” And he later took it. “If he’s going to sign it, he’s going to need another piece of paper.”

In an Oval Office meeting February 14, while Comey was still FBI director, he wrote that the president had asked him about the investigation of Flynn and said: “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

At one point Priebus had a decision memo for the president to review and sign on the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Ivanka said to her father, “Mark Zuckerberg wants to talk to you.” She had lined up a call between her father and the founder and CEO of Facebook. Zuckerberg was an outspoken climate change advocate. She did the same with Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, and others. At one point she slipped a personal message from former vice president Al Gore, one of the foremost Paris advocates, into a stack of papers on the president’s desk.

Porter was taken aback. As staff secretary he knew there had been no process. No one had been consulted. There had been no legal review. Pruitt and Bannon had snuck into the Oval Office and wanted an instant decision on the major international and national environmental issue of the day.

Porter knew the paper on the president’s desk was incendiary. Trump could pick it up, decide to read it out loud to the press or take it to Press Secretary Sean Spicer and say, put this out. When he had a chance, Porter took Pruitt’s draft statement from Trump’s desk. Later he told Bannon and Pruitt they could not just walk into the Oval Office this way. It was a huge process foul. It was unacceptable.

The president and the first lady had separate bedrooms in the residence. Trump had a giant TV going much of the time, alone in his bedroom with the clicker, the TiVo and his Twitter account. Priebus called the presidential bedroom “the devil’s workshop” and the early mornings and dangerous Sunday nights “the witching hour.”

During the campaign, Trump had proclaimed himself a supporter of LGBT rights. Now he told Bannon, “What the fuck? They’re coming in here, they’re getting clipped”—a crude reference to gender reassignment surgery. Someone had told him that each surgery cost $250,000, an inflated number. “Not going to happen,” he said.

Gender reassignment surgery can be expensive but also is infrequent. In a Pentagon-commissioned study, the RAND Corporation “found that only a few hundred of the estimated 6,600 transgender troops would seek medical treatment in any year. RAND found those costs would total no more than $8 million per year.”

The four options: One was to retain the Obama policy that allowed transgender people to serve openly, two was to issue a directive to Secretary Mattis giving him leeway, three was a presidential order to end the program but come up with a plan for those transgender people already in the military, and four was to ban all transgender people from military service. The likelihood of being sued increased as they got to number four, Priebus explained. “When you come down, we want to walk you through on paper,” Priebus said. “I’ll be down at 10,” the president said. “Why don’t you guys come and see me then? We’ll figure it out.”

At 8:55 a.m., his phone signaled him that a presidential tweet had been sent. “After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow . . .”

In two more tweets following at 9:04 and 9:08 a.m., Trump finished his announcement: “. . . Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military. Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.” “What’d you think of my tweet?” the president asked Priebus later. “I think it would’ve been better if we had a decision memo, looped Mattis in,” Priebus answered.

The White House later issued formal guidance to the Pentagon. Mattis announced he would study the issue. In the meantime, transgender troops continued to serve. Lawsuits were filed, and four federal courts entered preliminary injunctions against the ban. On January 1, 2018, the Pentagon began accepting transgender recruits as required by the courts.

As an extreme measure, Hicks, Porter, Gary Cohn and White House social media director Dan Scavino proposed they set up a committee. They would draft some tweets that they believed Trump would like. If the president had an idea for a tweet, he could write it down or get one of them in and they would vet it. Was it factually accurate? Was it spelled correctly? Did it make sense? Did it serve his needs? “I guess you’re right,” Trump said several times. “We could do that.” But then he ignored most reviews or vetting and did what he wanted.

The tweets were not incidental to his presidency. They were central. He ordered printouts of his recent tweets that had received a high number of likes, 200,000 or more. He studied them to find the common themes in the most successful. He seemed to want to become more strategic, find out whether success was tied to the subject, the language or simply the surprise that the president was weighing in. The most effective tweets were often the most shocking.

Later, when Twitter announced the number of permissible characters in a single tweet was being doubled from 140 to 280, Trump told Porter he thought the change made sense on one level. Now he would be able to flesh out his thoughts and add more depth. “It’s a good thing,” Trump said, “but it’s a bit of a shame because I was the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.”

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.”

Before the president went up to the residence at the end of each day, Porter handed him a briefing book with background papers, policy memos and his schedule for the next day. The next morning he would come down to the Oval Office at 10 a.m. or 11 a.m., or even 11:30. “What’s on my schedule for the day?” he would ask, having perhaps glanced at the book, or maybe not at all.

“Reince,” Kelly said, “I’d never do this to you. I’d never been offered this job until the tweet came out. I would have told you.” It made no sense, Priebus realized, unless you understood the way Trump made decisions. “The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.”

News coverage zeroed in on Trump’s clear reluctance to condemn the white supremacists. Some noted he had squandered an opportunity to snuff out suspicions that he harbored sympathy for the white supremacists.

The suggestion that he had admitted doing wrong and was unsteady infuriated the president. “That was the biggest fucking mistake I’ve made,” the president told Porter. “You never make those concessions. You never apologize. I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Why look weak?” Though Porter had not written the original draft, he had spent almost four hours editing it with Trump, providing the accommodating language. But strangely Trump did not direct his rage at Porter. “I can’t believe I got forced to do that,” Trump said, apparently still not blaming Porter but venting directly to him. “That’s the worst speech I’ve ever given. I’m never going to do anything like that again.” He continued to stew about what he had said and how it was a huge mistake.

Don’t take any questions, all the staff told him with urgency. Trump said he did not plan on taking any. At the press briefing, he took questions, and the questions were about Charlottesville.

David Duke, the well-known former Ku Klux Klan leader, tweeted, “Thank you President Trump for your honesty & courage to tell the truth about #Charlottesville.” The leaders of each branch of the U.S. military went on a social media offensive against their commander in chief in a stunning rebuke.

On Friday, August 18, Gary Cohn flew by helicopter from East Hampton, Long Island, to Morristown, New Jersey, where it was raining heavily. He had to wait on the tarmac to get clearance to Bedminster. He was carrying a resignation letter. This was too much. Someone had put a swastika on his daughter’s college dorm room.

As Porter saw it from up close—perhaps as close as anyone on the staff except Hope Hicks—the Trump election had rekindled the divide in the country. There was a more hostile relationship with the media. The culture wars were reinvigorated. There was a racist tinge. Trump accelerated it.

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. The president would have an idea and say, “I want to sign something.” And Porter would have to explain that while Trump had broad authority to issue executive orders, for example, a president was frequently restricted by law.

Trump had no understanding of how government functioned. At times he would just start drafting orders himself or dictating. The basic tactic Porter had employed from the Priebus days until now was to stall and delay, mention the legal roadblocks and occasionally lift the drafts from the Resolute Desk.

On August 21, Kelly and Porter issued two memorandums to all cabinet officers and senior White House assistants. “The White House staff Secretary [Porter] serves as both the inbox and outbox for all presidential materials.” Every single piece of paper, including decision memos, every memo, press releases, even news articles had to go through Porter.

Executive orders would take “at least two weeks to complete” including required review by the White House counsel and the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, which provided legal interpretation to the White House.

“All paper leaving the Oval Office must be submitted to the Staff Secretary . . . for compliance with ...

A second memo (underlined in the original) said “Decisions are not final—and therefore may not be implemented—until the Staff Secretary secures a cleared Decision Memoranda that has been signed by the President.” This included all new policy initiatives such as “budget, health care, trade initiatives” and...

Oval Office business and decision making became increasingly haphazard. “The president just really doesn’t understand anything about that. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Kelly said.

As Trump redoubled on withdrawing from trade agreements or costly foreign policies, Kelly would say, “I can’t believe he’s thinking about doing this.” He made a personal appeal to Porter. “Rob, you’ve got to put a stop to this. Don’t write that [order] up. Don’t go down and do that. Can you go in and talk to him and just see if you can make any progress? I was on the phone with him this morning. I made these arguments. Can you go see what good you can do?”

They would get him on Air Force One to a rally. Leaving the plane for one rally, he said, “I think I’m going to spend the first 10 minutes just attacking the media.”

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.”

“I don’t know how much longer I can stay,” Gary Cohn told Porter, “because things are just crazy here. They’re so chaotic. He’s never going to change. It’s pointless to prepare a meaningful, substantive briefing for the president that’s organized, where you have a bunch of slides. Because you know he’s never going to listen. We’re never going to get through it. He’s going to get through the first 10 minutes and then he’s going to want to start talking about some other topic. And so we’re going to be there for an hour, but we’re never going to get through this briefing.”

Gary Cohn and Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative, had worked for months to get Trump to agree to authorize an intellectual property inquiry into China’s trade practices. It was a case where Trump could flex his antitrade muscle without blowing up a trade agreement. The authority came from section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which gave the president power to unilaterally institute punitive trade restrictions on countries that engage in unfair trading with the U.S.

The Chinese broke every rule. They stole everything, from tech companies’ trade secrets to pirated software, film and music, and counterfeited luxury goods and pharmaceuticals. They bought parts of companies and stole the technology. They stole intellectual property from American companies that had been required to move their technology to China to operate there. Cohn considered the Chinese dirty rotten scoundrels. The administration estimated China had committed $600 billion in intellectual property theft.

Trump had finally agreed to sign a memo and announce in a speech a year-long investigation of China’s intellectual property violations. It had been a long march to provide him with clear definable action on the trade front. During an August meeting in the residence with his economic and trade teams, Trump balked. He had just talked to President Xi. He didn’t want to target China. “We’re going to need their help for North Korea,” he said. “It’s not just one U.N. Security Council vote. We’ll need their help on an ongoing basis. I want to take all the references to China out of the speech.” He did not want to jeopardize his great relations with President Xi.

Whenever either of them would challenge Trump’s conviction on the importance of trade deficits and the need to impose tariffs, Trump was immovable. “I know I’m right,” he said. “If you disagree with me, you’re wrong.”

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.

“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.”

He delivered contradictory comments on North Korea from provocative and bombastic to assertions that he wanted peace. In May he said he would be “honored” to meet with Kim “under the right circumstances.” In August he told the press, “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

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.”

During the Bush and Obama years, dozens of large companies had moved their headquarters overseas to take advantage of lower foreign tax rates. This process was known as inversion because it typically entailed creating a new parent company in a low-tax country like Ireland and making the existing American company its subsidiary.

This was a big issue with Trump’s business friends. Lowering the corporate tax rate could bring trillions of dollars back to the United States.

“Trillions of dollars are parked offshore to avoid U.S. higher tax rates.” About $4 trillion, Trump said, even more—possibly $5 trillion. Cohn had a chart that showed it was $2.6 trillion.