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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Baker
Read between
January 26 - February 16, 2024
He was skinny to the point of wraithlike,
The senator did not bother to say another word for the remainder of the meeting but dined out on that anecdote for the rest of his life, regularly offering a devastating impersonation of Kushner for the benefit of friends.
He once said in front of his adviser Brad Parscale, “There’s no bad press unless you’re a pedophile.”
When Obama asked him his priorities in the new role, Mattis famously replied: “I have three: Iran, Iran, and Iran.”[5]
Obama had initially expanded forces in Afghanistan to 100,000 troops in hopes of establishing a secure state and finishing off the Taliban. But Obama’s reinforcements came with a two-year expiration date, a crucial mistake, McMaster and other generals believed, that allowed the Taliban to wait out the surge.
After one too many entreaties from Sean Spicer, who served in the Navy Reserve, Mattis reportedly told him, “Sean, I’ve killed people for a living. If you call
me again, I’m going to fucking send you to Afghanistan. Are we clear?”[14]
He grabbed Trump’s attention with a proposal from the security contractor Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, that would, in effect, privatize the war in Afghanistan by sending in 5,500 of Prince’s mercenaries to fight alongside the Afghan military and appointing an American “viceroy” to oversee the war.
One Republican senator recalled Trump calling to ask him about proposed military strikes in Syria. The senator begged Trump not to talk on the unsecured line and simply to listen. “He just can’t help himself,” the national security official said.
They both met the definition for adhocracy that Porter came up with in 1980, a White House that “minimizes regularized and systematic patterns of providing advice and instead relies heavily on the President distributing assignments and selecting whom he listens to and when.”[3]
Still, he took credit with those who mattered to him. That night, after flying to Florida for the holidays, he told wealthy guests over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, “You all just got a lot richer.”[35]
For years afterward, Trump would randomly disparage Trudeau during unrelated conversations. Once, flying on Air Force One, he turned to Stephanie Grisham, then his White House press secretary. “Trudeau’s mom,” he said out of the blue. “She fucked all of the Rolling Stones.”[54]
Among those upset at his flat performance was Trump, who was especially flabbergasted that Kavanaugh claimed to have still been a virgin when he went to college. Who’s still a virgin in college? Trump asked. And who would admit it?
When his family talked him into hosting a holiday party for top FBI staff at his house, he tolerated the soirée for exactly two hours before flicking the lights on and off to indicate that it was time to go home.
The final vote that day was 230 to 197 with one abstention from Tulsi Gabbard, a Putin-admiring Fox News regular from Hawaii who was nominally a Democrat.[50]
Ben Sasse, another sometime Trump critic, told reporters, “Lamar speaks for lots and lots of us.”[34]
But as Trump moved to end the call, Azar interrupted. “There’s this new virus out of China that could be extremely dangerous,” the health secretary said. “It could be the kind of thing we have been preparing for and worried about.” Trump seemed disinterested. “Yeah, okay,” he said before hanging up.
One time he visited the president shortly after appearing on a cable news show. “That was a great hit,” Trump said, evidently having just seen it. The president pointed to the television. “Here, let’s watch,” Trump said as he hit rewind to play the interview again and give Azar tips to improve his performance.
