Fear: Trump in the White House(65)
Withdrawing from the “terms” would technically leave the United States in the accord. “This will read like it’s tough enough,” Porter argued to McMaster. “He’ll feel like he’s getting the political bang for the buck. He’ll be fulfilling the campaign promise. It’ll excite the base.”
It was basically option two from the principals meeting—“Remain in the Paris Accord.” Porter thought he had found a way to minimize the damage.
Porter and McMaster presented the proposed language to the president. They talked until they were blue in the face, but it was clear they’d lost the fight.
No, no, no, Trump said. He was withdrawing full-scale. “That’s the only way that I can be true to my base.”
As Trump worked over the speech draft, he toughened the language further.
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In a late-afternoon Rose Garden appearance that day that included a brass band, the president praised the stock market and U.S. efforts to fight terrorism.
“On these issues and so many more, we’re following through on our commitments. And I don’t want anything to get in our way.” Then unburying the lead, he said, “Therefore in order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
“As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do, I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States—which is what it does—the world’s leader in environmental protection, while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters.
“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
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On June 15, 2017, The Washington Post ran a story by three of its top Justice Department and FBI reporters headlined “Special Counsel Is Investigating Jared Kushner’s Business Dealings.” Mueller wanted more and more records. Kushner hired Abbe Lowell, a top Washington criminal defense lawyer. Priebus could see the fires building around a string of troubled investments Jared was involved in. He decided to escalate, make a big play. He told Trump that Jared should not be in the White House in an official capacity. Nepotism laws existed for a reason. The Mueller investigation was going deeply into Jared’s finances. And it will jump to your finances if it hasn’t already.
Normally Trump would ignore or dismiss. This time he paused, slowed down, and became reflective. He looked at his chief of staff. The response was jarring, so different.
“You’re right,” the president said.
Priebus continued to tell Trump that as his son-in-law, Jared should not have an official position and office in the White House. But this suggestion would ricochet right back and get him in trouble with Jared, who wanted to stay. Jared remained a mission Priebus failed to accomplish.
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Having failed in efforts to control or curtail the president’s tweeting, Priebus searched for a way to have practical impact. Since the tweets were often triggered by the president’s obsessive TV watching, he looked for ways to shut off the television. But television was Trump’s default activity. Sunday nights were often the worst. Trump would come back to the White House from the weekend at one of his golf resorts just in time to catch political talk on his enemy networks, MSNBC and CNN.
The president and the first lady had separate bedrooms in the residence. Trump had a giant TV going much of the time, alone in his bedroom with the clicker, the TiVo and his Twitter account. Priebus called the presidential bedroom “the devil’s workshop” and the early mornings and dangerous Sunday nights “the witching hour.”
There was not much he could do about the mornings, but he had some control over the weekend schedule. He started scheduling Trump’s Sunday returns to the White House later in the afternoon. Trump would get to the White House just before 9 p.m. when MSNBC and CNN generally turned to softer programming that did not focus on the immediate political controversies and Trump’s inevitable role in them.
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Bannon realized that the cascade of NSC presentations about Afghanistan, Iran, China, Russia and North Korea was not really connecting with Trump. Without some organizing principle, it was too much for his attention span.
So he called Sally Donnelly, a key close adviser to Secretary Mattis. “Sally, you’ve got to talk to your boss. Here’s the problem.” One day the focus was Libya, the next it might be Syria. “I know this guy. He’s frustrated. It’s too disjointed. Besides what we are doing with the Saudis, everything else is kind of hodgepodge.
“I’ve got something I want to talk to Mattis about, and I’ll bring it over and diagram it for him.” Bannon had come up with what he called “the strategy of the United States.”
At 8 a.m. on a June Saturday, Bannon arrived at the Pentagon. He had coffee with Donnelly and Mattis’s chief of staff, retired Rear Admiral Kevin Sweeney. They then gathered with Mattis around the small conference table in the secretary’s office.
“Here’s my problem,” Bannon said. “You guys haven’t thought about the Pacific at all. You haven’t thought about China. There’s no in-depth. You are so tied to CentCom”—the Central Command that covered the Middle East and South Asia.
Since Mattis had been the CentCom commander from 2010 to 2013, Bannon thought that Mattis had brought that mind-set to the job of secretary of defense. He reminded Mattis that Chinese policy leaders and intellectuals were split on their views of the United States. One group saw the U.S. as an equal partner, a co-hegemon. The other, the hawks, looked at the United States as a lesser power and treated it like one.