Graham urged as much bipartisanship as possible. Bring in the Democrats. He wanted to provide a roadmap to Trump for dealing with Congress. “Mr. President, you’ve got to buy some Democrats,” Graham said. “The good news is they come cheap.” He said that Trump needed to get to know key Republicans and Democrats. “Use your deal-making past and skills. You’ve got to put something on the table for these people. Look, I’ve been doing this with Republicans and Democrats for 10 years.”
Would there be disagreements? Yes, he said. Good friends disagree all the time. “Washington is always about the next thing. After something doesn’t work out, you’ve got to move on.”
The president had to knock off the tweeting. The week prior, on March 4, he had sent out four tweets accusing Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower.
“You got an upper cut to the jaw, delivered by you,” Graham said of the widespread negative reaction to the tweets. “They’re out to get you. Don’t help them.”
“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.”
* * *
Trump phoned Graham the next day to thank him for the discussion.
“Invite John McCain and his wife, Cindy, to dinner,” Graham said. “John is a good guy. You guys need to get along, and he can help you on lots of things.”
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.”
Graham knew McCain hated Trump. He knew that in Washington, you had to deal with people who hated you. But he did not impart that particular piece of advice to the president.
“My chief job is to keep John McCain calm,” Graham remarked. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was “scared to death of John McCain. Because John knows no boundaries. He’ll pop our leadership as much as he’ll pop their leadership. And I will, at times, but mine’s more calculated. John’s just purely John. He’s just the world’s nicest man. And a media whore like me. Anyway, he’s a much nicer guy than I am.”
The dinner with McCain and Cindy was arranged for April. Graham also attended. Cindy McCain had dedicated her life to fighting human trafficking, and Graham suggested that Trump make her his ambassador for that cause.
At the dinner in the Blue Room, Trump pulled out a letter. He read it to Cindy McCain line-by-line, drawing it out.
I would very much like you to be my ambassador at large for human trafficking, he read, noting that she had devoted her life to human rights causes.
“I’d be honored,” she said, and teared up.
McCain was visibly touched. As chairman of the Armed Services Committee, he also thanked the president for promising to rebuild the military.
What do you want us to do to help you? McCain asked.
“I just want to get to know you,” Trump said, laying it on very thick. “I admire you. You’re a very tough man. You’re a good man.”
It was as close as he might get to, I’m sorry.
McCain again seemed touched. “It’s a tough world out there,” he said. “We want to help you.”
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.
“Here’s the decision, Mr. President,” Graham said, repeating what he’d already told Trump. A containment strategy—let North Korea get the advanced missile with a nuclear weapon, betting you could shoot it down, or that they would be deterred and never shoot—or telling China that the United States would stop North Korea from getting the capability.
What do you think? Trump asked McCain.
“Very complicated,” he said. “They can kill a million people in Seoul with conventional artillery. That’s what makes it so hard.”
Graham offered a hawkish view: “If a million people are going to die, they’re going to die over there, not here.”
“That’s pretty cold,” Trump interjected. He said he believed that China loved him. He seemed to say it almost 10 times, and that it gave him great leverage.
* * *
During a spring meeting in the Oval Office, discussion turned to the 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.
“Have they already paid for it?” Trump asked.
“They didn’t pay for it,” McMaster said. “We paid for it.”
“That can’t be right,” Trump said. He wanted an explanation so McMaster set out to get some answers from the Pentagon.
“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!”
Trump was still outraged by the $18 billion trade deficit with South Korea and wanted to pull out of what he called the “horrible” KORUS trade deal.
Rising tensions around THAAD were bad enough. South Korea was a crucial ally and trade partner. Trump met with McMaster and Mattis. Both said that given the crisis with North Korea, it was not the time to bring up the trade deal.
“That’s exactly when you bring it up,” Trump said. “If they want protection, this is when we get to renegotiate the deal. We have leverage.”
Trump later told Reuters that the initial cost for THAAD was an estimated $1 billion. “I informed South Korea it would be appropriate if they paid,” he said. “It’s a billion-dollar system. It’s phenomenal, shoots missiles right out of the sky.”
On April 30, McMaster called the South Korean national security chief. He told Chris Wallace on Fox News, “What I told our South Korean counterpart is until any renegotiation, that the deals in place, we’ll adhere to our word.”
As a first step, the South Korean trade ministry later agreed to start to renegotiate the KORUS trade deal.
CHAPTER
14
In February, Derek Harvey, a former Army colonel—one of the premier fact-driven intelligence analysts in the U.S. government—was appointed director for the Middle East on the National Security Council staff. It was a plum position in a region that was on fire.
Harvey, a soft-spoken, driven legend, approached intelligence like a homicide detective—sifting through thousands of pages of interrogation reports, communications intercepts, battle reports, enemy documents, raw intelligence data and nontraditional sources such as tribal leaders.