The Fifth Risk(4)

That had been the first hint Christie had of trouble. He’d asked Jared Kushner what that was about, and Jared had simply said, Donald ran a very unconventional campaign, and he’s not going to follow any of the protocols. The next hint that the transition might not go as planned came from Mike Pence. Now, incredibly, Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Christie met with Pence the day after the election, to discuss the previous lists of people who had been vetted for jobs. The meeting began with a prayer, followed by Pence’s first, ominous question: Why isn’t Puzder on the list for Labor? Andrew Puzder, the head of CKE Restaurants, the holding company for Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr., wanted to be the secretary of labor. Christie explained that Puzder’s ex-wife had accused him of abuse, and his fast-food restaurant employees had complained of mistreatment. Even if he was somehow the ideal candidate to become the next secretary of labor, he wouldn’t survive his Senate confirmation hearings. (Trump ignored the advice and nominated Puzder. In the controversy that followed, Puzder not only failed to be confirmed but stepped down from his job at the fast-food company.)

After meeting with Pence, Christie was scheduled to brief the Trump children and Jared and the other members of Trump’s inner circle. He was surprised to find, suddenly included in this group, retired army lieutenant general Michael Flynn. Flynn was a job seeker the transition team had found reasons to be extremely wary of. Now he wanted to be named Trump’s national security adviser, which was maybe the most important job in the entire national security apparatus. The national security team inside the Trump transition—staffed with senior former military and intelligence officials—had thought that an especially bad idea. Flynn’s name wasn’t on the list. But here he was, in the meeting to decide who would do what in the Trump administration, and Ivanka was asking him which job he’d like to have.

Before Christie could intercede, Steve Bannon grabbed him and asked to see him privately. Christie followed Bannon to his office impatiently. Hey, this is going to have to be quick, said Christie.

It’s really quick, said Bannon. You’re out.

Why? asked Christie, stunned.

We’re making a change.

Okay, what are we changing?

You.

Why?

It’s really not important.

The method of his execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man who played Mr. You’re Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life. The surprise was that it was being done now, just when the work of the transition team was most critical. Only when Christie threatened to go down and tell reporters that Steve Bannon had fired him did Bannon concede, “It was Jared.”

In the days after the election, the people in the building on Seventeenth and Pennsylvania were meant to move to another building in downtown Washington, a kind of White House-in-waiting. They soon discovered that the lists that they had created of people to staff the Trump administration were not the lists that mattered. There was now this other list, of people allowed into the new building, and most of their names weren’t on it. “People would show up to the new building and say, ‘Let me in,’ and the Secret Service would say,” Sorry, you’re not on the list,’” said a civil servant who worked in the new building. It wasn’t just Chris Christie who’d been fired. It was the entire transition team—though no one ever told them so directly. As Nancy Cook later reported in Politico, Bannon visited the transition headquarters a few days after he’d given Christie the news, and made a show of tossing the work the people there had done for Donald Trump into the garbage can. Trump was going to handle the transition more or less by himself. Not even Steve Bannon thought this was a good idea. “I was fucking nervous as shit,” Bannon later told friends. “I go,” Holy fuck, this guy [Trump] doesn’t know anything. And he doesn’t give a shit.’”





I

TAIL RISK

ON THE MORNING after the election, November 9, 2016, the people who ran the U.S. Department of Energy turned up in their offices and waited. They had cleared thirty desks and freed up thirty parking spaces. They didn’t know exactly how many people they’d host that day, but whoever won the election would surely be sending a small army into the Department of Energy, and to every other federal agency. The morning after he was elected president, eight years earlier, Barack Obama had sent between thirty and forty people into the Department of Energy. The Department of Energy staff planned to deliver to Trump’s people the same talks, from the same five-inch-thick three-ring binders with the Department of Energy seal on them, that they would have given to the Clinton people. “Nothing had to be changed,” said one former Department of Energy staffer. “They’d be done always with the intention that, either party wins, nothing changes.”

By afternoon the silence was deafening. “Day 1, we’re ready to go,” says a former senior White House official. “Day 2 it was,” Maybe they’ll call us?’”

“Teams were going around,‘Have you heard from them?’” recalls another staffer who had prepared for the transition. “‘Have you gotten anything? I haven’t got anything.’”

“The election happened,” remembers Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, then deputy secretary of the DOE. “And he won. And then there was radio silence. We were prepared for the next day. And nothing happened.” Across the federal government the Trump people weren’t anywhere to be found. The few places they did turn up, they appeared confused and unprepared. A small group attended a briefing at the State Department, for instance, only to learn that the briefings they needed to hear were classified. None of the Trump people had security clearance—or, for that matter, any experience in foreign policy—and so they weren’t allowed to receive an education. On his visits to the White House soon after the election, Jared Kushner expressed surprise that so much of its staff seemed to be leaving. “It was like he thought it was a corporate acquisition or something,” says an Obama White House staffer. “He thought everyone just stayed.”