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At a meeting in the Oval Office, Trump wanted to know what the new individual income tax rates would be. “I like these big round numbers,” he said. “Ten percent, 20 percent, 25 percent.” Good, solid numbers that would be easy to sell. Mnuchin, Cohn and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said there needed to be analysis, study and discussion on the impact on revenue, the deficit and the relation to expected federal spending. “I want to know what the numbers are going to be,” Trump said, throwing out numbers again. “I think they ought to be 10, 20 and 25.” He dismissed any
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Trump had a marketing idea: “Call it the ‘Cut, Cut, Cut Bill.’ ” He loved the idea, and had a long phone call with Ryan and Brady to sell this name. After the phone call, Trump was under the impression that it would be called the “Cut, Cut, Cut Bill” in the House. The House called it “The Tax Cut and Jobs Act.” But because of ancient Senate rules, that title was too short, and rather unbelievably it was finalized as “An Act to Provide for Reconciliation Pursuant to Titles II and V of the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget for Fiscal Year 2018.”
In the end, the law would add an estimated $1.5 trillion to the annual deficit over 10 years. Republican leaders and Trump celebrated with self-congratulatory speeches on the South Portico of the White House. Trump said, “Ultimately what does it mean? It means jobs, jobs, jobs.” Tax reform was the only major legislation passed in his first year.
During Trump’s first six months in the White House, few understood how much media he consumed. It was scary. Trump didn’t show up for work until 11:00 in the morning. Many times he watched six to eight hours of television in a day. Think what your brain would be like if you did that? Bannon asked. Bannon claimed he used to say to Trump, “Cut the fucking thing off.”
That evening, Trump sent a taunting, mine-is-bigger-than-yours tweet that shook the White House and the diplomatic community: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times,” Trump wrote on Twitter at 7:49 p.m. “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!”
It played on Kim’s insecurities. In the last six years, 18 of Kim’s 86 missile tests had failed, according to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies. The president of the United States was practicing a scene out of Dr. Strangelove. The Internet lost its collective mind. The Washington Post’s Twitter account rushed to clarify: “There is no button.” 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.”
Others recalled Hillary Clinton’s line from her July 2016 convention speech: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
Within the White House but not publicly, Trump proposed sending a tweet declaring that he was ordering all U.S. military dependents—thousands of the family members of 28,500 troops—out of South Korea. The act of removing the dependents would almost certainly be read in North Korea as a signal that the United States was seriously preparing for war.
He had always seen this as a worldwide problem: the United States paying for the defense of others in Asia, the Middle East and NATO. Why are we even friends with South Korea? he wanted to know. What do we get out of this? He had been fuming for a year. The answers were insufficient. Mattis and General Dunford once more explained that the benefit was immense. We get a stable democracy in a part of the world where we really need it, Mattis said. South Korea was one of the strongest bastions—free elections and a vibrant capitalism.
One person present said Mattis’s message was clear: Stop fucking around with this. We’re doing this because we’ve got to prevent World War III. This isn’t some business gamble where if you happen to go bankrupt or whatever, it’s not a big deal. It seemed Mattis and others were at the end of their rope with the president. How are you possibly questioning these things that are obvious and so fundamental?
General Dunford learned that the Air Force had planned some research and design tests of its nuclear-capable ballistic missiles from California into the Pacific Ocean, scheduled right before and after the Olympics. They were the kind of tests that the United States was pressuring North Korea to stop. They were provocative. He stepped in and the Air Force held off on the tests.
“We need to get a company in there,” Trump said. “Put it out for bid.” This was a giant opportunity, capitalism, building and development at its best. “Why aren’t we in there taking it?” “Who’s we?” Cohn asked. “We should just be in there taking it,” Trump said, as if there were a national mining company to move into Afghanistan.
“We’re running it through the NSC process,” McMaster said. “I don’t need it done through a fucking process!” Trump yelled. “I need you guys to go in there and get this stuff. It’s free! Who wants to do this?” It was a free-for-all. Who wanted this bonanza?
At that and the mention of immigrants from African countries, Trump said, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” He had just met with the prime minister of Norway. Why not more Norwegians? Or Asians who could help the economy? Durbin was sickened. Graham was floored.
“You will have protection for the first time in a long while,” Trump told the executives. “And you’re going to regrow your industries,” he said, even though all the data Cohn had gathered showed it was not practical or even possible.
Trump’s action and mounting threats on tariffs were jarring. Cohn thought that Trump had to know. “But he’s not man enough to admit it. He’s never been wrong yet. He’s 71. He’s not going to admit he’s wrong, ever.”
But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”
National Economic Council Chairman Gary Cohn formed an alliance with Staff Secretary Rob Porter and at times Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to curb some of Trump’s most dangerous impulses. “It’s not what we did for the country,” Cohn said. “It’s what we saved him from doing.”
Ivanka Trump, the president’s 36-year-old daughter, was a senior White House adviser whose influence with her father was resented and resisted by others in the White House. Chief strategist Steve Bannon got into a screaming match with her. “You’re a goddamn staffer!” Bannon yelled. “You’re nothing but a f---ing staffer! You walk around this place and act like you’re in charge, and you’re not. You’re on staff!” Ivanka shouted back, “I’m not a staffer! I’ll never be a staffer. I’m the first daughter.”
As Staff Secretary, Rob Porter briefed Trump on decision memos and other important presidential documents. In alliance with Gary Cohn, he attempted to block Trump’s most dangerous economic and foreign policy impulses. Porter told an associate, “A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.”
FBI director James Comey was fired by Trump in May 2017. “Don’t try to talk me out of it,” Trump told his White House counsel, Don McGahn, and his chief of staff, Reince Priebus. “Because I’ve made my decision, so don’t even try.” He believed Comey was a grandstander and out of control. Trump seized on allegations that Comey had mishandled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails as grounds for his firing.
Alice understood immediately, in the midst of the Trump presidency with all its controversies and investigations, the importance of finding out what Trump actually did as president in foreign and domestic policy.
