“We need a strategy,” Priebus had said. “What are the priorities? How are we going to sequence them?” He wrote the ideas on whiteboards that lined the walls of the strategy room. It was like a SCIF for the most highly classified discussions. It was filled with computers and video teleconferencing equipment.
Ideas from the session were never taken seriously. The president often made decisions with only one or two or three people involved. There was no process for making and coordinating decisions. Chaos and disorder were inadequate to describe the situation. It was a free-for-all. The president would have an idea and say, “I want to sign something.” And Porter would have to explain that while Trump had broad authority to issue executive orders, for example, a president was frequently restricted by law. Trump had no understanding of how government functioned. At times he would just start drafting orders himself or dictating. The basic tactic Porter had employed from the Priebus days until now was to stall and delay, mention the legal roadblocks and occasionally lift the drafts from the Resolute Desk.
Porter had been “screaming bloody process” as he called it every day for months. They needed an iron grip on what was signed and ordered. If not iron, they needed at least something, a thread of control.
On August 21, Kelly and Porter issued two memorandums to all cabinet officers and senior White House assistants. “The White House staff Secretary [Porter] serves as both the inbox and outbox for all presidential materials.” Every single piece of paper, including decision memos, every memo, press releases, even news articles had to go through Porter.
Executive orders would take “at least two weeks to complete” including required review by the White House counsel and the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, which provided legal interpretation to the White House.
“All paper leaving the Oval Office must be submitted to the Staff Secretary . . . for compliance with the Presidential Records Act.”
A second memo (underlined in the original) said “Decisions are not final—and therefore may not be implemented—until the Staff Secretary secures a cleared Decision Memoranda that has been signed by the President.” This included all new policy initiatives such as “budget, health care, trade initiatives” and government operations such as “diplomatic, intelligence or military operations.”
“A decision made following an oral briefing is not final until” there was a formal decision memo.
It was a fantasy.
Kelly and Porter sat down with the president to explain the revamped process.
“You can’t make decisions unless you sign a decision memo,” Porter said. The memo did not have to be long. “I’ll keep it to a page.” Porter noted that decision memos would have supporting materials, “but I won’t ever make you read more than a page on any decision. I’ll come in and I’ll brief you on it as well, so we can talk through it. Sometimes you’ll need to have a full meeting with five or six or seven advisers. A lot of times we can just do it on the basis of a decision memo.”
Okay, Trump said.
For the first weeks the new system annoyed the president. Eventually Porter developed a routine and would bring in two to 10 decision memos for him to sign each day. Trump liked signing. It meant he was doing things, and he had an up-and-down penmanship that looked authoritative in black Magic Marker.
Kelly was very chummy with the president in the first weeks, Porter noticed. They were peers. Kelly always seemed to have a smile on his face when he was around the president. He would joke around with Trump. He would give advice and offer his reaction. “Mr. President I think we ought to do this.” He was deferential. “I’m just a staffer. You’re the boss. We want to try to get you the best information.” The perfect chief of staff. “You’re the decider. And I’m not trying to sway you one way or the other.”
The honeymoon was soon over. Beginning in September, Kelly and Porter would be together alone, or with a few senior staffers.
“The president’s unhinged,” Kelly said. There would be something, especially about trade agreements or the U.S. troops in South Korea. “We all need to try to talk him out of it,” Kelly said. They needed to stand up to the president. He wasn’t listening.
Oval Office business and decision making became increasingly haphazard. “The president just really doesn’t understand anything about that. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Kelly said.
As Trump redoubled on withdrawing from trade agreements or costly foreign policies, Kelly would say, “I can’t believe he’s thinking about doing this.” He made a personal appeal to Porter.
“Rob, you’ve got to put a stop to this. Don’t write that [order] up. Don’t go down and do that. Can you go in and talk to him and just see if you can make any progress? I was on the phone with him this morning. I made these arguments. Can you go see what good you can do?”
The U.S. troop presence in South Korea continued to be a constant theme with Trump. We are subsidizing South Korea, he insisted. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
Porter reminded him that Mattis and many others had told him these were possibly the best national security dollars that the United States spent. The troop presence provided the indispensable top secret intelligence that was vital to detecting and deterring North Korean missile launches.
On August 25, the president decided he was going to make a sweeping decision on NAFTA, KORUS and the World Trade Organization. “We’ve talked about this ad nauseam,” Trump said. “Just do it. Just do it. Get out of NAFTA. Get out of KORUS. And get out of the WTO. We’re withdrawing from all three.”
Cohn and Porter enlisted Kelly, who didn’t want trade to roil national security. Kelly and Porter went to the Oval Office. “South Korea is an ally,” Kelly told Trump. “The KORUS deal is actually better than you think.”
Porter presented some studies showing that KORUS kept the trade deficit down.
“This is a really important time with North Korea and that whole region,” Kelly said. “We don’t want to do anything on the trade side, especially given how peanuts this is in the grand scheme of things. It’s going to blow things up.” He recommended that the president call Tillerson. Tillerson made the same arguments.
Tillerson, Mattis, McMaster, Kelly—everyone on the national security side—agreed that if the trade deficit with South Korea had been 10 times greater, it still wouldn’t justify withdrawing. It was insane to even be thinking of that, they agreed.
“All right,” Trump finally said on Friday, September 1, “we’re not going to do the KORUS 180-day thing today. It’s not that we’re not going to do it, but all right, we won’t do it today.”
Porter put out the word to the legislative staff, the White House lawyers and the NSC staff to rest easy for at least that day. He made sure there was nothing drafted that the President could sign.
Four days later, on September 5, Cohn, Porter and the others went to the Oval Office. Trump had in his hands a draft letter giving notice of the required 180 days that the United States was withdrawing from KORUS. Porter had not written it and he was never sure who had, probably Navarro or Ross, but he never found out for sure.
“I’ve got a draft,” Trump said. “We’re going to withdraw from this. I just need to wordsmith this and we’re going to get it on official stationery and send this off. We need to do it today.”
McMaster made the national security arguments. Cohn and Porter made the trade and economic arguments.
“Until I actually take some action to demonstrate my threats are real and need to be taken seriously,” Trump said, “then we’re going to have less leverage in these things.” He then left the Oval Office.
Now that the president had gone outside of the staff secretary process that Porter controlled to get a new draft letter, Cohn was really worried. He removed it from the president’s desk.I
* * *