“Those arguments would not fly” with the president, Priebus said. Tillerson held his ground. “We’ve got a problem then,” Priebus said. He felt he had to remind Tillerson. “The president is the decision maker here.” He took himself off the hook. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time.”
Tillerson went to see the president. “This is one of my core principles,” Trump said. “I’m not in favor of this deal. This is the worst deal that we have ever made, and here we are renewing this deal.” Since it was only for 90 days, he would go along. “This is the last time. Don’t come back to me and try to renew this thing again. There’s going to be no more renewals. It’s a shitty deal.”
Mattis found a diplomatic, quieter way to agree with Tillerson. “Well, Mr. President,” Mattis said, “I think they are probably in technical compliance.”
Priebus watched in admiration. Mattis was not meek but he sure knew how to handle Trump.
* * *
Tillerson had to send a letter to Speaker Paul Ryan by April 18. Trump didn’t like the first draft. He directed that the short letter include that Iran was “a leading state sponsor of terror” and that the NSC would review whether to continue the suspension of economic sanctions that were part of the deal.
When the letter was first released, television commentators pounded Trump. Watching this made him more upset. He ordered Tillerson to hold a press conference to denounce both the deal, which had just been renewed, and Iran. It was extraordinary to unleash an attack within hours of renewing a landmark diplomatic agreement.
In a five-minute presentation, Tillerson read a prepared list of all the grievances against Iran: ballistic missile testing, “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism,” threats to Israel, human rights violations, cyber attacks, arbitrary detention of foreigners including U.S. citizens, harassing U.S. Navy ships, jailing or executing political opponents, “reaching the agonizing low point of executing juveniles,” and support to the “brutal Assad regime in Syria.”
The Iran deal, Tillerson said, “fails to achieve the objective of a non-nuclear Iran. It only delays their goal of becoming a nuclear state.”
Obama had defined the deal as a “nonbinding agreement” rather than a treaty which requires Senate ratification. “Perhaps,” Priebus said to Trump, “we can declare this a document that needs to be sent to the Senate for approval. Just take it out of our hands. Give it to the Senate and say, you pass it with two thirds and declare it a treaty.”
Trump seemed intrigued but soon understood he would be giving up authority by sending it to the Senate. He agreed that for the moment they were stuck with it. Only for the moment.
* * *
Priebus and Tillerson and McMaster made sure they were “calendaring”—as they say in the White House—when the next 90-day renewal would come up.
“They’re in violation,” Trump said in a meeting before the July 17 deadline, “and you need to figure out how the argument is going to be made to declare that.”
One day Tillerson came to the dining room next to the Oval Office to see Trump and Priebus and explain to the president again that there was no violation.
“They are in violation,” Trump insisted, “and you should make the case that this agreement is done and finished.” He suggested they might consider reopening the terms of the deal. “And that maybe we’d be willing to renegotiate.”
“Mr. President,” Tillerson said in exasperation, “you have the authority. You’re the president. You just tell me what you want me to do. You call the shots. I’ll do what you say.”
He was getting dangerously close to violating the protocols of dealing with a president.
CIA Director Pompeo did not disagree with Tillerson’s arguments on Iran and the reality of the Iran deal, but he, like Mattis, handled it more softly with the president. “Well, Mr. President this is how I understand it works technically.”
Mattis still saw Iran as the key destabilizing influence in the region. In private, he could be pretty hard-line, but he had mellowed. Push them back, screw with them, drive a wedge between the Russians and Iranians, but no war.
Russia had privately warned Mattis that if there was a war in the Baltics, Russia would not hesitate to use tactical nuclear weapons against NATO. Mattis, with agreement from Dunford, began saying that Russia was an existential threat to the United States.
Mattis had formed a close relationship with Tillerson. They tried to have lunch most weeks. Mattis’s house was near the State Department and several times Mattis told his staff, “I’ll walk down and say hello to him.”
McMaster considered Mattis and Tillerson “the team of two” and found himself outside their orbit, which was exactly the way they wanted it.
* * *
To complicate things, Tillerson was having rows with the White House over personnel for the State Department. Priebus called a meeting with Tillerson and half a dozen White House staffers on the patio outside the chief of staff’s corner office. At one point Tillerson had adamantly opposed the person suggested by the White House for a senior post and he had hired his own person.
Johnny DeStefano, the director of personnel for the White House, objected. Tillerson erupted. “No one’s going to tell me who to hire and not to hire. When I got this job I was told I got to hire my people.”
“You get to hire your people,” Priebus said, intervening. “But the problem we’ve got here is that it’s going so slowly. Number one, we’re bogged down not having personnel where they need to be. Number two, it’s making us look like fools. You need to either hire these people by the end of July, or I’m going to have to start picking people.”
Tillerson soon engaged in another fight, this time in the Oval Office and in front of the president. He belittled policy adviser Stephen Miller, a Trump favorite, charging he didn’t know what he was talking about. “What did you ever really run?” he asked Miller condescendingly.
* * *
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who was a commander in the Naval Reserves, tried several times to persuade Mattis to appear on Sunday talk shows on behalf of the administration. The answer was always no.
“Sean,” Mattis finally said, “I’ve killed people for a living. If you call me again, I’m going to fucking send you to Afghanistan. Are we clear?”
* * *
“I’m never signing one of these recertifications again,” Trump said. “I can’t believe I’m signing this one. There’s no way you’re going to get me to sign another one.”
McMaster later signed and put out a 27-page methodical Iran strategy with two prongs. The first was engagement, which was really a subversion campaign to influence Iran’s population. The second was confrontation for their malign actions.
CHAPTER
17
During the campaign, Trump had pounded almost as hard on U.S. trade agreements as he had on Hillary Clinton. As far as he was concerned, the current U.S. trade agreements allowed cheaper foreign goods to flood into the United States, which took away jobs from American workers.
At a rally in June 2016 at a Pennsylvania scrap metal facility, he said the loss of industrial jobs was a “politician-made disaster” and “the consequence of a leadership class that worships globalism over Americanism.” The result was that “Our politicians took away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families . . . moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas.” He blasted Clinton “and her friends in global finance [who] want to scare America into thinking small.”