Porter said that several of the actions on the poster required congressional authorization. “You don’t have authority,” he told the president.
There had been no attempt to coordinate the arguments. “Peter and Bob represent one viewpoint,” Porter said. “You need to get the viewpoint of Commerce [Wilbur Ross]. You need to get the viewpoint of Treasury [Mnuchin]. You need to get the viewpoint of the National Economic Council [Cohn]. We need to vet and have a process.”
For the moment, but only for that moment, the trade issues gave way to process. Nothing moved forward.
CHAPTER
18
By spring, Bannon saw that the constant disorder at the White House wasn’t helping him or anyone. “You’re in charge,” Bannon told Priebus. “I’m going through you. No more of me doing my own thing.” A chief of staff who was not in charge had become too disruptive even for certified disrupter and loner Steve Bannon.
It was a major concession that Jared and Ivanka would not make. They were their own silo in Priebus’s view. He could not get them into some orderly program. The whole arrangement was hurting everyone. It was hurting him. Hurting them.
“You don’t think they should be here?” Trump asked several times.
No, they shouldn’t, Priebus answered each time. But nothing happened. He believed he could go no further to try to oust Trump’s daughter and son-in-law from the West Wing. No one could fire the family. That was not going to happen.
The president would go as far as to say a number of times, “Jared and Ivanka are moderate Democrats from New York.” It was more description than complaint.
Bannon was convinced that Jared had leaked a recent story to Britain’s Daily Mail about Trump blowing up at him and Priebus and blocking them from traveling on Air Force One to Florida. It wasn’t true they had been kicked off the trip. Both had declined to travel that day. “You fucking set me up,” he said to Kushner. “You trashed Reince in this story. And I know you did it.”
Kushner vehemently denied it, and seemed offended at the accusation. For his part, he was convinced that Bannon had leaked a story to The New York Times about his December 2016 meeting with the Russian ambassador, adding fuel to the allegations that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia.
During a meeting in Priebus’s corner office Bannon and Ivanka got into an altercation.
“You’re a goddamn staffer!” Bannon finally screamed at Ivanka. “You’re nothing but a fucking staffer!” She had to work through the chief of staff like everyone else, he said. There needed to be some order. “You walk around this place and act like you’re in charge, and you’re not. You’re on staff!”
“I’m not a staffer!” she shouted. “I’ll never be a staffer. I’m the first daughter”—she really used the title—“and I’m never going to be a staffer!”
The rift widened.
Bossie, Trump’s deputy campaign manager, still kept in close touch with Bannon even though he had not received a White House appointment. Bannon was running a full-frontal assault against Kushner in the White House, and Bossie offered some advice.
“Steve,” Bossie said, “one of you is the father of his grandchildren and the other is not. If you put yourself in the president’s shoes, which one of you guys is he siding with?”
Priebus had his troubles with Bannon but Bannon had fallen in line and was 10 times the unifier that Jared and Ivanka were.
* * *
Priebus was still having trouble getting McMaster to click with Trump. When the national security adviser came to the Oval Office for scheduled meetings, the president would often say, “You again? I just saw you.” McMaster’s briefing style was all wrong for Trump. It was really the opposite of Trump in almost every way. McMaster was order and discipline, hierarchy and linear thinking. Trump would go from A to G to L to Z. Or double back into D or S. McMaster was incapable of going from A to C without hitting B.
Priebus found that McMaster was also a bit of a hothead. The prime minster of India, Narendra Modi, who had been courted assiduously by Obama, was coming for a visit to the United States in June to see Trump. India was the counterweight to Pakistan, which was giving the new administration as much trouble as it had given previous ones by hedging maddeningly on terrorism. Modi wanted to go to Camp David and have dinner, bond with Trump.
It’s not in the cards, Priebus told McMaster. “We’re just going to do dinner here. It’s what the president wants.”
“What the fuck?” McMaster blew up. “It’s India, man. It’s fucking India.” He understood the strategic importance of India, a sworn enemy of Pakistan. Outreach and strong relations were essential.
The later event for Modi was a “no-frills” cocktail reception. The working dinner was at the White House.
* * *
Donald Trump, full of emotion, phoned his secretary of defense James Mattis at the Pentagon on the morning of Tuesday, April 4. It was the third month of his presidency. Pictures and videos of a sarin gas attack on Syrian rebels were flooding into the White House.
It was a gruesome, brutal attack, killing dozens. Among the dead were women and children—babies, beautiful babies. Choking, mouths foaming, parents stricken with grief and despair. This was the work of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad on his own people.
“Let’s fucking kill him!” the president said. “Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them.”
The military had the capability to launch a covert top secret leadership air strike in Syria.
Trump sounded personally attacked. Syria had promised not to use chemical weapons—an apparent reference to Syrian president Assad’s agreement to destroy all his chemical weapons.
Yes, Mattis said. He would get right on it.
He hung up the phone.
“We’re not going to do any of that,” he told a senior aide. “We’re going to be much more measured.”
They would develop small, medium and large options for a conventional air strike, the standard three tiers.
Mattis saw that the administration had been presented with a rare golden opportunity to do something without doing too much, but certainly more than Obama.
In 2012, Obama had announced that chemical weapons use by Assad would be a red line. The next year, Assad killed 1,400 civilians with chemical weapons. Obama had the military prepare a strike plan, but he equivocated. He wanted to avoid another armed conflict and quagmire.
It was Vladimir Putin, of all people, who came to Obama’s rescue. The Russian leader brokered an agreement under which Assad would agree to destroy all his chemical weapons. An astonishing 1,300 tons of chemical weapons were removed from Syria.
Obama basked in the success. In 2014 he said, “We mark an important achievement in our ongoing effort to counter the spread of weapons of mass destruction by eliminating Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpile.” Secretary of State John Kerry went further. “We got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out.”
Classified intelligence reports dispute this. In 2016, DNI Clapper said publicly, “Syria has not declared all the elements of its chemical weapons program.”
As the Syrian civil war ground on, Obama was tagged with a strategic failure. The war had left more than 400,000 killed and millions of refugees.
After the chemical attack, McMaster and his NSC Mideast chief Derek Harvey went into action at the White House to develop options.
Bannon got word of what was in progress. It was impossible to miss. When Trump was on fire, everyone in his orbit could feel the heat. Bannon confronted Harvey in a West Wing hallway.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.
“Developing options for the president,” Harvey replied. “He asked for options, and this is how the process works.”