McMaster seemed crestfallen. After six months as commander in chief, Trump wanted to sweep it all away and pull out.
After the president left, Jared and Ivanka seemed worried. They said they wanted to help McMaster. When we all get back, they said, why don’t you sit down with Porter and figure out a strategy, some way to withdraw some troops but also leave some? Find some way to talk to the president.
* * *
On July 25, the president again berated McMaster. He had no interest in allies, Trump said. He didn’t want any troops in South Korea even when reminded about the differential between the seven seconds to detect an ICBM launch from there as opposed to 15-minute detection from Alaska.
On the colonnade outside the Oval Office, McMaster spoke with Cohn and Porter.
McMaster said that at 6:03 a.m., Trump had tweeted: “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign—‘quietly working to boost Clinton.’ So where is the investigation A.G. [attorney general]”
It was clearly Russian propaganda, McMaster said. He and the NSC and intelligence experts had concluded that. But the president had picked it up and shot it out.
McMaster said he wasn’t sure how long he could stay.
In the Oval Office later that day, McMaster had a sensitive order he wanted the president to sign relating to Libya.
I’m not going to sign it, Trump said. The United States should be getting oil. The generals aren’t sufficiently focused on getting or making money. They don’t understand what our objectives should be and they have the United States engaged in all the wrong ways.
* * *
Before the president went up to the residence at the end of each day, Porter handed him a briefing book with background papers, policy memos and his schedule for the next day.
The next morning he would come down to the Oval Office at 10 a.m. or 11 a.m., or even 11:30.
“What’s on my schedule for the day?” he would ask, having perhaps glanced at the book, or maybe not at all. He conveyed the belief that improvising was his strength. He could read a situation. Or the room. Or the moment as he had during the presidential campaign.
Trump liked to do things spur of the moment, Porter concluded, to fly by the seat of his pants. He acted like doing too much advance preparation would diminish his skills in improvising. He did not want to be derailed by forethought. As if a plan would take away his power, his sixth sense.
What the president would bring up in the morning most often was what he had seen on television, especially Fox News, or something from the newspapers he read more thoroughly than the public generally knew.
Throughout the day Trump would seek opinions from anyone who might be around—from cabinet officials to security guards. It was his form of crowdsourcing.
He once asked Johnny McEntee, his 27-year-old body man, if he should send more troops to Afghanistan.
“It doesn’t make any sense to me,” McEntee said.
When Trump asked others in the West Wing, they often ducked: “I think you really ought to talk to H.R. about that because he’s the expert.”
“No, no, no,” Trump said once, “I want to know what you think.”
“I know what I read in the newspapers.”
That was insufficient for the president. “No, I want to know what you think.”
* * *
All presidencies are audience driven, but Trump’s central audience was often himself. He kept giving himself reviews. Most were passionately positive. Much of his brain was in the press box.
The operations of the Oval Office and White House were less the Art of the Deal and more often the Unraveling of the Deal. The unraveling was often right before your eyes, a Trump rally on continuous loop. There was no way not to look.
In foreign affairs, it was about personal relationships, Trump explained to those who spent the most time in the Oval Office. “I have really good relations with Xi,” he said about the Chinese president. “We have really good chemistry. Xi likes me. Xi rolled out the red carpet when I visited Beijing.” In November 2017, he had said publicly, “I consider him a friend. He considers me a friend.”
H. R. McMaster tried to explain that Xi was using the president. China was an economic aggressor, planning to become Number One in the world.
Trump said he understood all of that. But all of those problems were superseded by his rapport with Xi.
In the last four months of 2017, the United Nations Security Council had voted three times to impose stiffer economic sanctions on North Korea. On December 22, the vote was 15 to 0, including China. The sanctions were to cut the amount of petroleum that could be imported into North Korea by 89 percent. Trump was quite pleased.
“That’s because I developed such a great relationship with President Xi,” he said. “And because he respects me and I respect him. And isn’t it good that I’m friendly when all you guys say that we should be adversarial with them. Because if I didn’t have that great relationship with President Xi, they never would have done that.” It was the chemistry, the trust. “So that I can get them to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do.”
On matters in which Trump had developed decades of opinions, arguments were pointless. One of the most experienced West Wingers in 2017 and 2018 said, “There’s some things where he’s already reached the conclusion and it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter what arguments you offer. He’s not listening.”
* * *
At one point Trump said he had decided to impose tariffs.
“Great,” Cohn said. “The stock market will be down 1,000 or 2,000 points tomorrow, but you’ll be happy. Right, sir?”
“No, no, meeting’s over! Let’s not do anything.”
“Your biggest fear is being Herbert Hoover,” Cohn said.
It was Groundhog Day on trade again. Same arguments, same points, same certainty—on both sides. The next week or next month, they would have the same discussion.
Trump repeatedly said he was going to get out of the trade deals and impose tariffs. Several times he said, “Let’s do it,” and asked for an order to sign.
“We’ve got to distract him from KORUS,” Porter said to Cohn. “We’ve got to distract him from NAFTA.” Cohn agreed.
At least twice, Porter had the order drafted as the president had directed. And at least twice Cohn or Porter took it from his desk. Other times, they just delayed.
Trump seemed not to remember his own decision because he did not ask about it. He had no list—in his mind or anywhere else—of tasks to complete.
* * *
On July 12, 2017, 15 former chairs of the Council of Economic Advisers, the high-powered, formal advisory group of academic economists, had sent a letter to Trump urging him not to “initiate the process of imposing steel tariffs” because it would harm relations with key allies and “actually damage the U.S. economy.”
The letter’s signers included an all-star cast of Republicans and Democrats—former Federal Reserve chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, Laura Tyson, the top economic adviser in the Clinton administration, and Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz.
Across the top, in a handwritten note to Trump, Wilber Ross scrawled his disagreement: “Dear Mr. President, It is importantly the advice of the people on this list that resulted in our [trade] deficits. We cannot afford their policies. Best Regards, Wilbur.”
* * *
The final 10 days of July 2017 left scars. On Thursday, July 27, Trump had hired Anthony Scaramucci, a brash investment banker and another Goldman Sachs alumnus, as communications director over Priebus’s strong objections.
Scaramucci had done a victory lap of interviews and said publicly that Priebus would be asked to resign soon. “Reince is a fucking paranoid schizophrenic, paranoiac,” he said.