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Kelly did not help matters when a few days later he told Fox News that “Robert E. Lee was an honorable man” and that “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,” as if there were an acceptable compromise version of slavery.[27] It was a reminder that, as one presidential adviser put it, “there are no heroes” in Trump’s White House.
In the end, it would be Trump’s most important legislative achievement, but one he had very little to do with. Which may be why it passed in the first place.
Trump remained aloof. All he really seemed to care about was what to call the bill—branding was his specialty, after all. He hated the term “tax reform.” “No one knows what tax reform is,” he complained to aides. “No one knows whether their taxes are going to go up or down during tax reform.” As far as he was concerned, it was a tax cut. He told Republican congressional leaders he wanted to name the bill the “Cut Cut Cut Act,” which even allies considered too cartoonish.[28]
but in fact the bulk of it would be added to the already considerable national debt.
Many Trump critics assumed the first lady despised her husband as much as they did and was all but held hostage by him, coining the online hashtag #FreeMelania. Theirs, after all, often seemed to be a transactional partnership. Asked once if she would be with Trump if he were not rich, she retorted, “If I weren’t beautiful, do you think he’d be with me?”[42]
On the one-year anniversary of the inauguration, which came a few days after the Daniels story, she edited the tweet that her staff had written for her to delete any mention of her husband and tweeted a photo of herself on the arm of a good-looking young military aide.
Trump, for his part, seemed less concerned that he would be seen as a cheat than a not-particularly-well-endowed cheat. A few months later, when Stormy Daniels published a book in which she said he had a small and oddly shaped penis, the president called Grisham from Air Force One to deny it. “Did you see what she said about me?” Trump said. “All lies. All lies.”
“Everything down there is fine,” he insisted.
For Kelly and other advisers, deflecting the constant stream of wild demands was exhausting. Gary Cohn would stop by Porter’s office at the end of the afternoon after the latest Groundhog Day debate, collapse on the couch, and exclaim, “I thought we did this two weeks ago!”
In fact, Jared and Ivanka had initially pushed not for Pompeo to replace Tillerson but for Nikki Haley, the U.N. ambassador. Trump, however, balked. Some in the White House thought it was because Haley was too tough on Vladimir Putin, but the president, who made no secret of judging even the most senior female officials on their looks, told John Kelly the real reason was the blotch marks on her cheeks, which were neither particularly visible nor in any way a reason not to pick someone for secretary of state. “She’s not good for me. She’s got that complexion problem,” he told Kelly. “She’ll be
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“The president thought, ‘If we’re going to do this, I’m going to do this,’ ” a senior State Department official said. “ ‘The secretary’s not going to get the Nobel Peace Prize, I am.’ ”
There was only one person in Trump’s orbit allowed to be in constant transmit mode: Trump himself.
Jackson, a Navy doctor, had little managerial experience beyond the White House Medical Unit, where he had a propensity for heavy drinking and freely dispensing prescription drugs to White House aides. But he had forever endeared himself to Trump by holding a news conference after the president’s annual physical exam that January, at which he claimed the obese septuagenarian president was in “excellent” health, enthused about Trump’s “incredible genes,” failed to mention his cardiac disease, and said that “absolutely he is fit for duty.”[21]
George Will, the conservative columnist who considered Trump a malignant buffoon, wrote a savage epitaph for Ryan, calling him just another one of the “abject careerists” who had become “the president’s poodles.”
“Policy doesn’t matter. Principles don’t matter. It’s totally cult of personality and he can do no wrong and he can’t make a mistake, so like what are you supposed to do?”
The Republican House had been on a sharp descent into performative anarchy ever since the Tea Party election of 2010 swept the party back to power two years into the Obama presidency. Legislating was rarely the goal of this new breed of legislators and indeed the volume of bills passed fell significantly. Rebellion was an end in itself.
In fact, only a single member of the group that was now the president’s main congressional support base had endorsed Trump in the primaries, Scott DesJarlais, a doctor who had had sex with patients and pressured a mistress and an ex-wife to have abortions.
The Koch network had found its way into the Trump camp after all.
“This is what I get for letting Pence pick everyone.”[16]
The senior White House official who watched Pompeo with Trump found him to be, aside from Mike Pence, perhaps “the most sycophantic and obsequious” of Trump’s advisers.[25]
He was, according to an American ambassador who worked with Pompeo during this period, “like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.”[26]
former government official close to Mattis joked that the fearsome retired Marine was now the lone “peacenik” in Trump’s inner councils.[33]
He explained to Bolton that this had also been his preferred model in dealing with women he was dating—break up first before they could beat him to it.
In private with the allies, Trump was even more insistent, telling them that Crimea was by rights Russian and that Ukraine was a corrupt state not worth defending. Once again, it was not his enemies but Trump himself putting the Russia issue front and center. Just why was he so insistent on doing a favor for Vladimir Putin?
Back on the ground in Quebec, meanwhile, the Germans exacted a bit of revenge for all those Trump Twitter blasts, releasing on Instagram a soon-to-be-iconic photograph of a scowling Trump, sitting with his arms crossed, as he was confronted by Merkel, who stood over him surrounded by the world’s other democratic leaders. She seemed the very picture of determination in a pale-blue silk jacket, intently trying to talk some sense into the petulant president.
It did not matter that Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, and John Kelly never let Trump out of their sight in Singapore. In the end, he did what he came to do while they were sitting right next to him and none of them could stop him. Soon after landing, in fact, when Pompeo briefed the president on the pre-summit negotiations and acknowledged they were at an “impasse,” Trump revealed his plan.[55] He would declare a great diplomatic coup regardless of what actually happened. “This is an exercise in publicity,” Trump told his team, vowing that Singapore would “be a success no matter what.”[56]
So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.
But Trump was hardly sympathetic to Ukraine. In June of 2017, Trump even told the president, Petro Poroshenko, to his face in an Oval Office meeting that he considered Ukraine a corrupt country—“because a Ukrainian friend at Mar-a-Lago had told him,” as the American ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, who sat listening in stunned silence, later recounted—and also that Crimea was really Russian anyway, because the locals spoke the Russian language.[9]
At a televised pre-summit breakfast with Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general, Trump opened his attack. “Germany is totally controlled by Russia,” he announced. “Germany is a captive of Russia.”[17] As he said it, John Kelly, sitting two places down from Trump, was caught on camera grimacing.
The resulting furor over the video gave rise to one of the great attempted spins of the Trump era, when Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, told reporters that Kelly had looked so “displeased because he was expecting a full breakfast and there were only pastries and cheese.”[18]
until suddenly he did not.
Graham flew on Air Force One with the president and was such a frequent presence at Trump’s summer retreat in New Jersey that some White House aides began referring to him as “Senator Freeloader.”
“We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness,” Meghan said as Graham sat stone-faced in the audience, “the real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”
“He’s not a war hero,” declared the tycoon, who had avoided the draft in Vietnam with the questionable bone spurs claim. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”[11]
His antipathy for the senator was so unrelenting that when he traveled to Japan and visited a naval base, the White House even asked the Navy to move or hide the destroyer USS John S. McCain so Trump would not notice
Graham’s attitude, Salter said, was, “I’m doing the best I can to make him 10 percent less nuts”—although Salter, like McCain, thought he was “doing a piss-poor job of it.”
“If you don’t support John McCain’s funeral, when you die, the public will come to your grave and piss on it,” an angry Kelly told the president.
“We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of our ideals, rather than trust them to be the great force for change they have always been.”[26]
But Trump rarely made decisions based on tactical calculations.
At five-foot-six, she was dwarfed by Trump, who towered over her and condescended to her the way he did to so many women. “Oh honey, you look so tired,” he would say if she appeared anything other than camera-ready in the heavily made-up style favored by his wife and daughter.
But that only spurred more outrage as the first lady disingenuously blamed “both sides,” as if the horrific pictures were not a consequence of action taken by her husband’s administration.[7]
There was little talk of accomplishments like tax cuts. Instead, it was the all-purpose Trump formula: anger, fear, and resentment.
But coming barely a week before the election, the troop deployment allowed Trump to look like he was taking muscular action to defend America against brown-skinned “invaders” from the south.
Shoot to kill, shoot in the leg—Trump had long entertained the harshest methods to stop immigrants, no matter how extreme, medieval, or even comical. This was the administration that was considering heat rays to burn border crossers. At one point, Trump suggested digging a moat along the border and even populating it with alligators. It became such a joke that one homeland security official noted wryly in a meeting that “it’s not a greatest hits until he brings up sharks and alligators.”
But Acosta was on point. With the election over, Trump abruptly stopped talking and tweeting about the menacing caravan. So did Fox News. Within weeks, the troops sent to guard the border started coming home. When some migrants eventually tried to cross into the United States, American border forces used tear gas to disperse the group. There never was an invasion.
The Divider became more firmly convinced that divisiveness was the way to go.
Finally, White House officials figured a way around the problem. They simply told the president that Isgur had been fired, even though she had not. To sell the ruse, Isgur was instructed by Rosenstein not to put her name on further media statements so as not to draw Trump’s attention. In a plot line right out of a Washington satire, the president’s team concluded that lying to him was the only way to placate him.
Trump did visit another cemetery the next day, but it was too late. The damage was done, and he raged that no one had told him he should go, which infuriated Kelly even more because of course he had.
“Patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism,”
“Anyone who went to that war was a sucker,” Trump had once said about Vietnam, as Kelly recounted it to colleagues. “I don’t know why you guys think these guys who get killed or wounded are heroes. They’re losers.”
