On March 22, 2017, the leaders of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) came to the White House to meet with the President for the first time since he’d taken office. There were seven members of Congress present, all of them Democrats, none of them Trump supporters, including CBC Chairman Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, Karen Bass of California, and André Carson, a former law enforcement officer from Indiana and the second Muslim elected to Congress.
The weather outside was beautiful, and I had lingered by the Rose Garden a little longer than usual on my way into work that morning. Waiting in the Cabinet Room for the meeting to begin, I took my usual position behind the President’s chair to his left.
At some point, I said hello to one of my friends at the White House, who made sure she was in the middle of this action.
No matter what else she had going on, you could be sure of one thing: if there was any meeting, event, or policy specifically relating to the African American community, Omarosa would make sure she was right in the middle of it. She prided herself on being the President’s only African American senior adviser. That was her calling card, her legitimacy in the White House.
Omarosa was wearing a deep blue dress with black accents.
“Nice dress, O,” I said with a smile.
“Trump doesn’t like frumpy, honey,” she said, smiling as she gave me a hug. A thin silver necklace with a tiny cross dangled around her neck. Affixed to her dress, just below her right shoulder, was a white Secret Service “hard pin.” Such pins were designed to help agents quickly identify staff who could enter the President’s protective bubble while traveling outside of the White House. They also became something of a status symbol in the West Wing. If you were “hard-pinned,” as I was, too, that typically meant you were someone who had direct access to the Boss.
Dan Scavino, the White House Social Media Director and one of Trump’s longest serving aides, sat down to my right. “What’s up, brother?” he whispered. “It’s quiet in here.”
Dan was right; it was very quiet. There was a nervous tension in the air. On the other side of the room, the seven CBC members were speaking to one another in hushed tones, and the handful of Trump aides weren’t talking at all. We were all a little nervous and a little uncomfortable. A meeting between the CBC and a Republican president is probably never without its tensions. But in this case, some of Trump’s comments on the campaign trail—some clumsy, some hostile, and some insensitive—bore a lot of the blame for the atmosphere.
In the summer of 2016, Trump had traveled to Michigan for a campaign stop in Dimondale, just outside of Lansing. Speaking directly to black voters, Trump unloaded on what he described as the failed policies of Democratic politicians. “You’re living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, fifty-eight percent of your youth [are] unemployed.” And then he delivered the line that became most associated with his pitch to African Americans: “What the hell do you have to lose?” Democrats were incensed by the suggestion that they didn’t care about African American voters, a core constituency. “This is so ignorant it’s staggering,” Hillary Clinton tweeted.
The CBC didn’t forget those comments, even seven months later. When the members showed up at the White House, they were carrying thick binders prominently titled “We Have a Lot to Lose.” The stage seemed to be set for a contentious meeting.
The President was running about ten minutes behind schedule, per the usual, but when he arrived he seemed to be in a good mood. Trump prided himself on his ability to charm visitors, any visitors. And in some ways, he had an advantage with the CBC. Almost certainly its leaders expected him to be hostile, ignorant, even stupid. That was, after all, how he was often portrayed in various media reports.
“Hello, everybody,” he said as he breezed into the room, along with Vice President Pence, whose Zen-like expression of total support for what Trump was saying was once again affixed to his face.
“Good afternoon, Mr. President,” replied CBC Chairman Cedric Richmond. Richmond was a four-term Congressman from Louisiana’s Second Congressional District. A New Orleans native, in addition to being a seasoned legislator, he was a former college baseball player and a polished communicator.
As the President sat down, the rest of the group followed his lead. Joyce Meyer, a top legislative affairs aide, and Ja’Ron Smith, who led urban affairs and revitalization policy for the White House, sat to his left. The Vice President and Deputy Chief of Staff Rick Dearborn sat to Trump’s right, and in between Pence and Dearborn sat Omarosa.
With everyone now seated, Congressman Richmond presented the President with the CBC’s “130-page policy document” meant to educate him and his administration “on the difficult history of black people in this country, the history of the CBC, and solutions to advance black families in the twenty-first century.” The President accepted it and promised his staff would dig through it. The group discussed ways to bring down the costs of prescription drugs. They chatted about the importance of historically black colleges and universities. They expressed mutual support for rebuilding the country’s crumbling infrastructure and revitalizing urban communities.
Trump was Trump. He was open and direct, and rambled in a way that made it clear he had no filter between the thoughts in his head and the words coming out of his mouth. I can’t imagine that the CBC members had ever experienced an encounter with any head of government remotely close to this. They may have found it strange, but I’d also guess it was refreshing. Before long they came to the same realization I had seen so many others come to before: it’s dang near impossible to spend one-on-one time with Donald Trump and not end up liking him.
In about twenty minutes, the atmosphere had completely shifted from anxious to relaxed. They talked, shared ideas, and laughed together.
At one point in the meeting, Congressman Richmond said something to the President directly that appeared totally sincere.
“Mr. President,” he began slowly, “I believe you have the ability to be one of the best presidents this nation has ever had.”
That’s the kind of thing Trump always liked to hear, even if the source was a surprise.
“I mean that,” Richmond continued. “I don’t always agree with the things you say. In fact, sometimes I think you say things that you don’t even realize are offensive. But I also think there’s something special about you. And I want to work with you to make your presidency a success.”
It was the kind of earnestness that is rarely heard across party lines in Washington, D.C. I had no idea if he meant that, or if he said something like that to every president. But he looked like he meant it. Trump certainly thought so.
“I’d love that, Cedric,” the President said as he stood up, extended his arm across the table, and shook Richmond’s hand. Trump had a triumphant look—he’d talked again and again about how he wanted to meet with the CBC and now it looked like it was paying off. He believed he shared policy views with African Americans, if only they’d give him a chance. Of course, he hadn’t made it easy for them. These were, after all, some of the Democrats he’d slammed on the campaign trail for taking black votes for granted while not helping to improve their lives.
As the meeting broke up, a CBC staffer told me they wanted to hold a press gaggle outside the West Wing to discuss what happened in the meeting. This was a routine request, one we’d allowed for other groups, and we agreed to help facilitate it. As a White House press aide alerted the media and gathered them outside, I continued to chat with the CBC members and their staff in the West Wing lobby. Everyone was in good spirits, and they seemed hopeful that this was the beginning of a positive working relationship with the President and his staff. After all, there were a number of issues on which the CBC and Trump could find agreement—repairing roads and bridges among them. If the members would just say that—that this was a good start—that would be a huge win for the Trump White House. That would go a long way to repairing some of the damage Trump’s rhetoric had done over the past year. I, for one, was pleasantly surprised by how it all seemed to be coming together.
One of the young White House press aides poked her head in and told me the press was ready for them outside.
“All right, are you guys ready to go out?” I asked. A few other White House staffers were standing alongside me, including Omarosa.
“Actually, would it be possible for us to have a few moments in private before we go out?” one of the CBC members asked.
That seemed fine to me. I assumed they wanted to plan out who would talk and agree on what they would say. But before I could respond, Omarosa—who had been mostly silent during the meeting while Trump was still present—spoke up. I had always heard she was like a hand grenade without a pin—able to blow up at any moment—and now the Omarosa I’d long feared had rolled into the room. You could see the transformation in seconds—her composed, almost regal bearing gave way to a narrowed glare and a menacing scowl.
“Privacy?!” she exclaimed. “You think you can come up in our house and demand f—ing privacy? Hell, no! You must be outta your d— mind.”
Uh-oh.
I was so stunned by this out-of-nowhere response that I’m still surprised my eyes didn’t pop out of my head and roll onto the floor.
Equally stunned by the outburst, one of the female CBC members shot back, “See, this is why we can’t deal with you.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I interjected as calmly as I could. I turned to my colleague and tried to soothe her. “O, it’s all right, no biggie. Let’s just give them a second to get on the same page before they go out.”
“I just don’t think they should be coming in here making demands,” she said, flipping her hair back over her right shoulder. “The President of the United States met with them in his house and they’re still making demands!”
I hurriedly corralled the CBC members and their press staffer into a small foyer and walked back into the lobby, closing the double doors behind me.
Omarosa was still fuming.
“We’re the ones in f—ing power now,” she said as I walked toward her. “They’ve gotta learn to deal with it.” She sounded like she was reliving a scene from Celebrity Apprentice, screaming at Gary Busey, or whoever else was in her way to the top.
“Eh, it’s all right,” I said, laughing, trying to lighten the mood. “I think you’ve scared them enough for one day.” She had scared me, too.
A few minutes later, a CBC staffer told me they were ready, and a now clearly offended Congressman Richmond led their group outside, where about a dozen reporters were waiting on the driveway. I followed them out the door, along with their press aide, and walked around behind the media to ensure we were out of the camera shot.
Omarosa, on the other hand, walked out of the West Wing’s front doors and positioned herself about twenty feet directly behind the CBC members, ensuring that she would be clearly visible, lording over them like she was queen of the manor. She displayed a villainous grin from ear to ear.
Had she been plotting to sabotage this event all along? Was this some sort of psychological power play? Who knew what the heck was going on.
Congressman Richmond expressed his appreciation to the President for taking the time to meet, calling it “a meeting where both sides listened.” He called the President “receptive” and said “the surprising part was that when we talked about the goals, there were more similarities than there were differences.” He also said he looked forward to “further engagement on a consistent basis.” So far, so good. But then he departed from that script. He claimed to have confronted the President about his past comments alleging President Obama wasn’t born in the United States. I looked over at the CBC’s press aide. To my recollection, that topic had never come up during the meeting. And I had taken notes.
Then came the question everyone had been waiting for.
“[The President’s] been accused of being a racist, a bigot, encouraging white supremacists,” a reporter said. “Coming out of this meeting with him, do you believe those things to be true?”
The meeting had gone so well, and Congressman Richmond had been so sincere and complimentary of him behind closed doors, I thought he might at least be willing to say he didn’t personally believe Trump was racist. But he didn’t.
“You’d have to talk to the people who made those allegations and ask them what they would say about it,” he said. “I will tell you that he’s the forty-fifth President of the United States…”
I looked over at the CBC press aide who was standing right beside me. The subtle smirk on his face reminded me of a card shark at the moment he revealed his winning hand to a befuddled mark.
I whispered to him. “After everything he said in that meeting when no cameras were around, he’s still going to stand in front of the White House and suggest the President might be a racist?”
He shrugged. “Tell Omarosa to keep up the great work.”
I walked back into the West Wing. There was no need to watch the rest of the press conference. It’s impossible to know whether they were actually getting back at Omarosa, or if the entire thing had been some kind of setup from the beginning.
Three months later, Omarosa invited the CBC leadership back to the White House “to continue the discussion of issues presented in our previous meeting.”
In a letter released publicly, Congressman Richmond declined. “Based on actions taken by you and your administration since that meeting,” he wrote, “it appears that our concerns, and your stated receptiveness to them, fell on deaf ears.”
With that, what started as a hopeful effort to improve race relations was officially crushed under the weight of hard feelings, pettiness, mistrust, and the cynicism of Washington, D.C. The whole episode was a metaphor for the Trump administration on race. Even when the intentions were good, the end result was almost always a mess. And then, of course, sometimes the wounds were needlessly self-inflicted.
On June 3, 2017, my wife, Megan, and I were sitting in McLean Bible Church in northern Virginia, attending the Saturday-evening service. The preacher, Dr. David Platt, had been our pastor back in Alabama. He had gone on to become president of the International Mission Board, the largest Christian mission organization in the world, and was now the pastor at McLean, where he counted the Vice President and numerous White House aides among his regular congregants.
Platt’s sermon that evening encouraged us to approach the world’s growing migration crises from a biblical perspective. It wasn’t a political statement; he wasn’t advocating for specific policies. In fact, he went out of his way not to. “We know that there is much debate in our country today surrounding these issues, so we pray for wisdom in the leaders of our government, many of whom are in this church,” he said. “My aim is to help us see that far before we listen to what the world says about refugees, or even immigrants, we must listen to what the Word says.”
At the precise moment I was listening to this thoughtful approach to a complicated issue, my Apple Watch buzzed with an alert—a tweet by @realDonaldTrump. “We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” he tweeted. The President was referring, of course, to his famous “Muslim ban,” just the latest White House controversy that brought to the fore difficult racial and cultural issues—and caused me to yet again struggle to reconcile the President’s statements with Christian teachings.
As I felt this tension, my mind was transported six thousand miles away to a village in northern Jordan, a forty-five-mile drive down Damascus Highway from the Syrian border. That’s where I was in the summer of 2015, sitting on the floor of a 550-square-foot apartment. The concrete walls were painted a dingy off-white. The floors were covered in thin, cracking gray tiles, and rust was beginning to corrode the apartment’s heavy metal door around its edges. A thin silver tray sat on the ground in the middle of the room holding miniature cups of coffee. An early-2000s black TV sat in the corner on a wooden stand—the only piece of furniture in the entire apartment—airing Al Jazeera news reports on mute.
That tiny apartment was home to a family of seven. Two sisters—both in their thirties and wearing hijabs—lived together with five children between them: four boys, ages fourteen, twelve, seven, and two, and a three-year-old little girl. My wife, Megan, played with the younger kids, blowing bubbles and bouncing an inflatable ball as we talked. Until recently, they had been living in the Syrian city of Daraa, just north of the Jordanian border. They were all, of course, Muslims and their story was far more complicated, and tragic, than America’s future president—or most of the rest of us—seemed to believe.
In 2010, as the so-called Arab Spring swept the Middle East, forcing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Tunisian leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali from office, many Syrians hoped their president—ophthalmologist turned dictator Bashar al-Assad—might be next. In early 2011, a group of boys in Daraa graffitied three words on the wall of their school: YOUR TURN DOCTOR. The “doctor,” of course, was Assad. At the time, the teenage prank hardly seemed like the type of event that could spark a revolution, but Assad wasn’t taking any chances. The regime arrested, imprisoned, and tortured twenty-three boys who were believed to have been involved in the graffiti incident. This prompted local protests, which led to a government crackdown and killings, which only spurred more protests. Eventually the government released the boys in an attempt to ease tensions. This worked, but only briefly. In the coming months, as the Syrian people revolted against their oppressors in greater and greater numbers, Daraa became a rebel stronghold, commonly known as “the cradle of the revolution.”
One of the sisters, named Qamar, explained to me through a translator that even as the fighting grew more intense, they remained in their homes. “Our family had lived there for generations,” she said. “It’s our home. We didn’t want to leave.”
In April and May 2011, the Assad regime laid siege to Daraa. At one point, Qamar explained to me, tanks rolled through their neighborhood and the battalion commander demanded that every fighting-age male renounce the revolution and join them, or face death. Her husband and other men in the neighborhood refused, prompting the Assad forces to bind them and lay them in the middle of the street in the path of the tanks. “We were pleading with the soldiers to let them live,” she said, fighting back tears. “By the grace of God, the commander realized that my husband was his cousin, so he let him get up.” The others were not so fortunate. The tanks slowly rolled over them all, one by one, leaving their lifeless bodies sunk into the gravel and mud below. The siege of Daraa ultimately left hundreds of protesters dead and as many as a thousand more in prison. Dozens of defected soldiers, who could not bring themselves to carry out such atrocities, were slaughtered as well.
In the coming years, Daraa would remain a rebel stronghold during the ever-expanding Syrian civil war. ISIS overtook roughly half the country. Proxy battles broke out between Russian-, Iranian-, and American-backed forces, but the sisters and their families remained in Daraa. That is, until they just couldn’t anymore.
“We stayed right up until the bombs reached our neighborhood,” Qamar told me. The day they decided to leave, they rushed to pack whatever belongings they could carry. They hoped to catch a ride that evening on a flatbed truck bound for a refugee camp on the other side of the Jordanian border. They didn’t make it in time, but this turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
“A bomb hit the truck,” Qamar said, stone-faced. “Everyone was killed.” Nearly the entire population of their neighborhood—all of their friends, and many of their family members—was lost in an instant.
They did catch a ride the following day, though, and made it to the Zaatari refugee camp. At the time, they were a group of ten. In addition to the seven I had met, the sisters were accompanied by their husbands and Qamar’s elderly mother. Living conditions were deplorable. They were piled on top of one another in white tents without air-conditioning, at a time of year when daytime temperatures could hover as high as 113 degrees. Tragically, Qamar’s mother succumbed to heatstroke just days after they had escaped the bombs.
Realizing they could no longer withstand the camp, they fled into Zarqa, a city of roughly a half-million people, where displaced Syrian refugees were pouring into urban neighborhoods by the thousands. Qamar’s husband, Ali, found work as a cook in a local restaurant, being paid under the table as an illegal. This type of arrangement bred intense resentment among the local population, whose jobs and wages were being undercut by the growing population of refugees desperate for work. I was immediately conscious of the parallels between this situation and the debate over illegal immigrant labor in the United States.
But Qamar was struggling to stretch her husband’s income into even one meal a day for her family; they were withering away. Desperate and unable to find formula for their baby, Ali approached an imam at the neighborhood mosque and asked for help. That evening, Ali came home with a hopeful message for his wife: “The imam is going to help us find food.” With their children sleeping on makeshift pallets across the room, empty stomachs growling with hunger, Qamar and Ali hugged each other a little closer that night, clinging to the hope that help was on the way. It wasn’t. The following day, as Ali arrived for work at the restaurant, Jordanian security forces arrested him. As it turns out, the imam had not only decided he wouldn’t help, he had turned Ali in to the police as an illegal worker, getting him deported back to Syria. The only reason his family had been able to stay was that Ali lied to the police, telling them he had no family in the country.
“What about your sister’s husband?” I asked.
“He left the apartment one day and never came back,” she said through the translator, rolling her eyes. “Jaban,” she added with greater feeling. Coward.
At that point, my translator, Hasan, a Christian Jordanian national in his early thirties, interjected, first in Arabic and then in English. “And this is when we met,” he said.
Qamar smiled and nodded, then explained that she had asked one of her neighbors—there were hundreds of Syrian refugees in their apartment complex—how they were making ends meet. They somehow always seemed to have food, and their kids even had a soccer ball to play with. With a mixture of bewilderment and awe, the neighbor explained that Hasan had been regularly bringing them enough food to get by. She offered to give Qamar his number, and later that afternoon, she skeptically reached out to him.
The following day, Hasan arrived on their doorstep with enough food and baby formula to last them for two weeks. And for the first time since she’d left her Syrian home behind, she broke down in tears. She’d always wanted to stay strong for their children, she explained, so she refused to let herself cry—even as they lost their home and her mother, were betrayed by their imam and separated from her husband. But the kindness of a total stranger, with whom she didn’t share a nationality or religion, overwhelmed her emotions.
In the following months, she explained, Hasan and a small group of Jordanian Christians had taken care of them. They had spent countless hours talking about their families, their governments, and their dreams. Yes, even in the depths of despair, Qamar still had dreams. She dreamed of returning to her home. She dreamed of her children going back to school and playing soccer in the streets with their friends. She dreamed of going to sleep in a real bed, beside the husband she had not seen in over a year. They talked about their different faiths, and why a Christian was doing so much to help Muslims. And at some point, Qamar said, she had a revelation.
“My government failed me, my religion failed me,” she said, “and when my family had no one else to turn to, the Christians were the only ones who didn’t let us down.” As a result of this entire experience, she asked Hasan how she could become a Christian. He told her, and now, months later, her entire family—including her husband back home in Syria—had converted.
This story—and others like it—was the reason that Megan and I, and a small group of others from our church in Alabama, had traveled to the Middle East. We wanted to support the work that Hasan and his team were doing in Jordan. We wanted to help meet their physical needs, and hoped that by doing that, doors would be opened to meet their deeper, spiritual needs as well.
In the year between that first trip to Jordan and joining the Trump campaign, I traveled to various countries in the Middle East—sometimes with a group, sometimes alone. There’s nothing quite like stepping out of a Middle Eastern airport by yourself as a lily-white, blond-haired, blue-eyed American, knowing just enough Arabic to get by. Those experiences changed my life. And I didn’t realize it at the time, but they would later make me one of the few people in the West Wing with a firsthand perspective on the refugee and migration crises that would so often be the focus of an intense and often painful political, cultural, and national security debate.
In the first week of April 2017, innocent Syrian citizens were bombed with toxic gas, including sarin, killing dozens and injuring hundreds more. The U.S. government, along with many of our allies and humanitarian organizations, attributed the attack to the Assad regime. The regime, however, claimed it was a “fabrication,” and its Russian allies said the whole attack was staged.
As images of dead and wounded children flooded our TV screens and newspapers, I thought about my Syrian friends, and the President grew increasingly angry.
“This guy is a sick son of a b——,” he said as I entered the Oval after his national security team had briefed him and left. He tossed a New York Times newspaper on the corner of the Resolute desk and pointed his finger at the headline CHEMICAL ATTACK ON SYRIANS IGNITES WORLD’S OUTRAGE. As I walked closer, I could see the image of a child clinging to life with an oxygen mask covering his mouth and nose.
“What do you even do when you’ve got animals like this running a country?” Trump wondered aloud.
“I don’t know, Mr. President,” I said, not knowing what more to add. The unusual grimace on his face told me he was deeply affected by what he was seeing. And while I didn’t know what his national security team was telling him, it was clearly weighing on his mind.
Shortly thereafter, the USS Ross and USS Porter unleashed Tomahawk missile strikes on a Syrian air base, with fifty-eight out of fifty-nine missiles hitting their intended target.
Trump was pleased with the military precision. “Congratulations to our great military men and women for representing the United States, and the world, so well in the Syria attack,” he tweeted. But privately he also kept reiterating his belief that President Obama had in 2012 set the stage for the Syrian mess we were dealing with almost five years later.
“I’m having to enforce ‘red lines’ he drew and then wouldn’t enforce himself,” he would say, seemingly frustrated at the need to put aside his noninterventionist instincts.
He had a point. In August 2012, Obama told reporters assembled in the Press Briefing Room that “a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.… We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that’s a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons.”
A year later, almost to the day, the Syrian government unleashed a gruesome chemical weapons attack that killed fourteen hundred civilians and caused thousands more to endure paralysis and violent convulsions.
In spite of the clear threat, the Obama administration did nothing militarily, choosing instead months later to cut a deal with the Russians and Syrians to remove or destroy six hundred metric tons of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile.
One of the Syrian men I had met in Jordan remembered this vividly. He was in his mid-forties and had lost his home and much of his family in the war. “Bashar killed us,” he said through a translator. “Obama abandoned us.”
I shared the President’s aversion to military adventurism in the Middle East. But for all of Obama’s nonstop moralizing, it was Trump, not he, who took a stand against the evil the Syrian people were enduring. For this, I was proud of the President for having the courage to do the right thing. But when it came to refugees, I was more conflicted.
My firsthand experience led me to believe that Trump had a valid point from an abstract policy perspective, which many on the left seemed incapable of acknowledging. The President’s first duty is to protect the American people. Refugees are often impossible to vet. Many of the refugees I met had no identification other than what they received when being processed into a camp. They openly discussed their fears that ISIS had infiltrated the camps, and bristled at the violence and drug use that had become so prevalent. Some of them also talked about how they did not want to be relocated to the West. They hoped to one day return to their homes, and they wanted to maintain their culture, rather than assimilate somewhere else. All of these realities seemed to support Trump’s stated desire to relocate refugees as close to their homes as possible. I sometimes cringed at the rhetoric he used to make his case, which totally lacked nuance. But more than that, I felt like we were not keeping our commitment to persecuted Christians.
A week after his inauguration, Trump sat down for an interview in the Blue Room with Christian Broadcasting Network reporter David Brody. Brody specifically asked Trump if persecuted Christians would receive priority status in the refugee program. “Yes,” Trump replied. “They’ve been horribly treated.… So we are going to help them.” Yet statistics in 2018 showed that the number of Christian refugees admitted to the United States had fallen more than 40 percent under Trump. And as I write this, the State Department’s Refugee Processing Center says that the U.S. is only admitting an average of about one Christian refugee from Syria per month.
At the same time, some members of the administration downplayed the successes of immigrants who came to America, assimilated, and made remarkable contributions to society, while going out of their way to vilify all immigrants with the stories of the bad apples. Any time a refugee or immigrant committed a gruesome crime in the United States, for example, Stephen Miller would come down to the comms office demanding a press release about it. Normally I would help make that happen. I was and am a hard-liner on the issue of illegal immigration. I wholeheartedly supported the President’s proposals to crack down on illegal border crossings and to ratchet up internal enforcement. I viewed it as an issue of both national security and of basic fairness. I supported moving to a merit-based system, rather than a random visa lottery, and I pushed as hard as anyone to deliver on Trump’s promise to build a border wall. I wanted the President to keep all of his promises, and usually he did. But not the ones he made to persecuted Christians.
I once took this concern to Stephen Miller, who was in the middle of every immigration or refugee debate. Sitting outside of his office upstairs in the West Wing, I kept the conversation casual so as not to push myself too aggressively into an area outside of my purview. It was a fool’s errand. “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil,” Miller said dismissively. I didn’t press the issue with him; there was no use.
Unfortunately, while the plight of Christian refugees got a lot of traction in faith-based news outlets, I never heard any of the faith leaders who actually had access to the President mention the issue to him. Trump’s evangelical advisory board was an eclectic mix of characters. There were Christian pastors with impeccable credentials built over a lifetime of faithful service, and televangelists frequently accused of being charlatans while raking in millions of dollars, flying around in private jets and living in luxurious mansions. The latter group made me uncomfortable, but I knew exactly why Trump had brought them on board. In his mind, people on television were at the pinnacle of their field, so the same must be true for pastors, right? Maybe he didn’t know about the reputations of many televangelists. Maybe he didn’t care, as long as they supported him and had a platform to exert their influence.
In fairness to members of the board, I don’t want to paint them all with a broad brush. Some of them were humbly willing to offer biblical advice if asked. Eric Metaxas, for example, is a brilliant Christian author whose books have had a great deal of influence on my life, and I was impressed by him in our interactions at the White House; he seemed like the real deal. While I was there for many of the advisory board’s interactions with the President, I wasn’t there for all of them. But based on what I did see, I would be surprised if most of them pressed him on, well, anything.
One particular experience illustrates why I grew skeptical of some of their motives and doubted their ability to be a positive moral and spiritual influence on the President.
Not long after Trump’s inauguration, Sarah Sanders and I started working on continuing the tradition of hosting an Easter Prayer Breakfast at the White House. This wasn’t a long tradition; it had actually been started in 2010 by President Obama. But it seemed like the perfect opportunity for the President to assemble, early in his administration, the evangelical leaders who had been integral to his electoral victory. Christians had voted for Trump in record numbers. We wanted to send a message that they had a seat at the table in a big way, and I had an idea for a keynote speaker: Dr. David Platt, our pastor from McLean Bible Church.
Platt was the New York Times bestselling author of a book titled Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. The book is an indictment of materialism and encourages readers to use the resources God has given them to spread the Gospel message. It’s not a guilt trip for the wealthy and successful; it’s a challenge to fulfill God’s purpose, rather than just buy more/bigger/better stuff. And it’s not just talking about how to allocate money, but also time. This concept is what initially compelled my wife and me to organize mission trips in Latin America and the Middle East.
Platt was the most gifted preacher I had ever heard, so I knew he would do an outstanding job at the prayer breakfast. Sarah liked this idea, so I started working to set it up, while we both worked our contacts to line up some well-known Christian musicians to be a part of the event.
Unfortunately, Platt’s approach was the polar opposite to that of Paula White, the de facto leader of Trump’s evangelical advisory board. White was among the country’s most famous purveyors of the so-called “prosperity gospel,” which can be summed up by the frequent TV pitches to send me your money and God will bless you with your own health and wealth because of it. Prosperity gospel preachers tend to use the false premise that wealth is the surest sign of God’s blessing to justify their own lavish lifestyles. White’s teachings frequently got her labeled as a “charlatan” and “heretic” by mainstream evangelical leaders, but she had her hooks set in Trump, and she wasn’t going to let anyone threaten her position.
As preparations for the Easter Prayer Breakfast continued, she came to the EEOB to meet with Jenny Korn, who was the administration’s liaison to faith groups. As usual, White dressed in a form-fitting dress that accentuated her curvy figure, and designer leather pumps. I didn’t go into the meeting. This was politics, not theology class, and I didn’t want to let my personal feelings about White interfere with anything. So after the meeting, Jenny came over to the West Wing to recount what had happened.
“Pastor Paula said inviting Dr. Platt would be a big mistake because he’s too controversial,” Jenny told me. I was immediately annoyed. Controversial? The thrice-married televangelist who refused to cooperate with a Senate investigation into her moneymaking operation is worried about controversy? But I kept that to myself. “She said he believes the American dream is evil,” Jenny continued. “Then she asked, ‘Would the President really want to associate with someone who thinks it’s bad for people to be prosperous and provide better lives for their families?’”
I rolled my eyes. “Give me a break,” I said. In hindsight I shouldn’t have been surprised. White made a living convincing mostly lower-income people to send in money in exchange for a blessing, so of course she would be willing to disingenuously go after another pastor.
As it turned out, Platt was planning to decline my invitation anyway, hoping to stay more behind the scenes and quietly offer input if asked—again, in contrast to White and others who nudged their way as close to Trump as possible during photo ops.
The Easter Prayer Breakfast fizzled. But in early May, we did manage to host a private dinner for evangelical leaders in the Blue Room. Standing in the back of the room as Trump spoke, I could feel the mutual affection in the room. “I just want you to know this,” Trump said. “I’m with you. You were with me during the election. And I’m with you now.”
The alliance between Trump and evangelicals was powerful, and both sides reaped the political benefits. Trump was propelled into the world’s most powerful office. Evangelicals immediately got a dream Supreme Court nominee in Neil Gorsuch. But when the President occasionally struggled to lead with moral clarity, to unify the country on divisive cultural issues, the silence of his “spiritual advisers” was deafening. What is the point of having moral authority, as all of these pastors claimed to, if you don’t stand up for morality? But as is so often the case, when I point my accusatory finger at someone else, I have three more pointing back at me. My greatest regret from my time in the White House is that I wasn’t a better picture of my faith to the President and my colleagues. I’m haunted by the late author Brennan Manning’s quote, “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”
Donald Trump is not a religious man—that’s no secret to anyone. He viewed the faith community as a political constituency. In that regard, he was as committed as any church member. He delivered massive political results. I’d argue that no president has done more to advance the policy agenda of evangelicals than Donald Trump. For that, I—and millions of Christians around the country—will be eternally grateful. But I still wonder what could have been. With unprecedented access to the Oval Office, what if these pastors had provided private counsel, as men like Billy Graham reportedly did for other commanders in chief? At no time was their absence felt more than in the summer of 2017.
In George Stephanopoulos’s White House memoir, he referred to his rival political consultant Dick Morris as “the dark buddha whose belly Clinton rubbed in desperate times.” For the first six months of Trump’s presidency, Steve Bannon filled that role, but he was more like a nesting doll. Even after the President had put him on the shelf for a while, a moment of uncertainty would find Trump reaching for him again—opening him up, with each layer revealing a familiar message: double down, triple down, quadruple down.
In early August 2017, the President was pretty much fed up with Bannon. Trump thought he was a leaker and an attention hound. Bannon increasingly felt like the last remnant of a bygone era—the chaos before the Kelly crackdown. Kelly was kind of like the good girl that your mom wants you to settle down with, while Bannon was the edgy, wild one that drove you crazy but could also be a heck of a lot of fun. Trump knew in his mind that he needed the former, but his heart couldn’t quite let the latter go.
Friday, August 11, 2017, was as quiet as any day in the Trump White House had ever been. The President was enjoying a working vacation (never just a vacation; he insisted on trying to maintain the public perception that he was always working) at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. There was a dramatic difference in the atmosphere on campus when the President was gone. The entire operation slowed down and much more closely resembled the nine-to-five jobs that were familiar to many in corporate America. Some of the staff had even taken advantage of the President’s absence to go on vacations of their own.
The laid-back mood was enhanced by the fact that the remaining staff had all been moved over to the EEOB while the West Wing underwent renovations. This meant rather than being stacked on top of one another in the White House, we were all spread out across the EEOB’s roughly ten acres of floor space. I was taking advantage of the rare absence of urgency to plan ahead for the fall, when the President was hoping to overhaul the tax code. But I also looked for reasons to take breaks throughout the day and catch up with friends in the building. I left campus for a long lunch and went out of my way to stroll under the trees in Lafayette Square on the walk back. That afternoon the press and communications teams huddled briefly for our usual evening “wrap-up” meeting. It was totally uneventful. I walked home in the rarest of all moods: relaxed.
That evening after dinner, I scrolled through my Twitter feed and watched in horror as pictures and videos showed what appeared to be a torch-wielding mob of white supremacists marching through the University of Virginia. This is what lynch mobs must have looked like, I thought to myself as I kept scrolling. I went to bed that night feeling relieved that I wasn’t staffing the President in Bedminster. Any planned response to the madness taking place in Charlottesville was someone else’s problem.
The following day was one of the few Saturdays when I didn’t go into the office. That afternoon I jogged from my apartment a block from the White House down to the Jefferson Memorial and around the Tidal Basin, and stopped for a break along the water, about fifty yards from the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. Pulling out my phone as I sat on a bench underneath the low-hanging branches of a cherry tree, I opened Twitter to see that the situation in Charlottesville had escalated. There were Nazi flags being paraded through the streets. White supremacists with homemade wooden shields and clubs were brawling with black-clad counterprotesters with masks over their faces. Some guy proudly proclaiming his allegiance to the Confederate White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was brandishing a pistol, and others in Confederate flag T-shirts were walking around with assault rifles. Most tragically, some lunatic had driven his car into a crowd, sending bodies flying into the air, killing a young woman and injuring nineteen others. The City of Charlottesville and the State of Virginia had both declared a state of emergency.
I came to find out that the mayhem began with a group of white nationalists planning to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue from a local park. Hearing about the event, militant left-wing activists known as “antifa” (short for “antifascist”) had organized to physically resist the protesters. The entire city of Charlottesville—one of the country’s most idyllic communities—had descended into chaos that looked more like the streets of Gaza than Virginia.
No one in the White House had anticipated any of this. In fact, my former campaign colleague Steven Cheung, who was now the White House’s Director of Strategic Response, was the only staffer I saw being proactive in any way. The night before, he had sent around some recommended talking points and a draft tweet to go out on the @PressSec Twitter account. No one else responded or acknowledged what he had sent.
There was no doubt the President was going to have to weigh in now. I tucked my phone back into my pocket and began the jog back home. I made it back to my apartment just in time to see the President speak live from Bedminster. Backed by a row of perfectly aligned American flags, Trump stepped behind a microphone wearing a black suit and bright red tie. There looked to be pent-up stress in his shoulders as he lifted them slightly and gripped the edges of the podium with both hands.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence—on many sides, on many sides,” the President said. I had written enough remarks for him, and been in enough video recording sessions, to recognize when he was reading the prepared text and when he was ad-libbing. He tended to end sentences by throwing in Trumpian expressions, the unique phrases that gave him one of the world’s most recognizable speaking styles. “On many sides, on many sides” was obviously an ad-lib, but I’d be lying if I said it stuck out to me in the moment. He went on to say that hatred, bigotry, and violence had “no place in America.… The hate and the division must stop.… We have to come together as Americans with love for our nation, and true affection—and really, I say this so strongly—true affection for each other.”
In the coming hours, Republicans and Democrats alike condemned the President’s remarks and harshly criticized him for not calling out Nazis, white supremacists, and the KKK by name. The following day, talking heads on the Sunday-morning political shows were in a full-on meltdown. What had started as a bunch of idiots causing problems for local law enforcement had turned into a nationwide outcry causing problems for the White House.
I wasn’t in Bedminster to see the President’s reaction to the backlash, but I’d spent enough time with him to know how he generally approached such situations. He never said it in quite these terms, but it goes something like this:
Don’t give an inch. If I give in and give my critics what they’re demanding, the media won’t give me credit for it anyway. So what’s the point? Better to power through it, show no weakness. I might even throw out something new and irresistible for the media beast to feed on—change the subject. Regardless, everyone will move on.
For Trump, the general effectiveness of this approach was hard to deny. After all, during the campaign it had propelled him through countless mini scandals, any one of which could have ruined most candidates. So why change now? By this point, most aides had accepted this as standard operating procedure, but not the new Chief of Staff. General Kelly wanted Trump to deliver a second statement, and he wanted it to happen at the White House. So he got the President on Air Force One, returned to D.C., and sent him out in front of the press pool assembled in the Diplomatic Reception Room.
“To anyone who acted criminally in this weekend’s racist violence, you will be held fully accountable,” Trump declared. “Justice will be delivered.… Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
The Los Angeles Times editorial board summed up the prevailing reaction to the second statement: “Trump’s first response to Charlottesville was tepid and mealymouthed. His second was too late.” I told you so, he was no doubt thinking as other outlets echoed the same sentiment.
“Made additional remarks on Charlottesville and realize once again that the #Fake News Media will never be satisfied,” he tweeted. “Truly bad people!”
I called Bannon to see what he thought and found him maniacally insisting that this was “a moment” that had to be seized upon. “They have no idea what they’ve just done,” he said. I wasn’t exactly sure who “they” were, other than the enemy. “This is a winning issue for us.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, genuinely curious.
Bannon, who grew up in southern Virginia, replied, “Our heritage, our statues—I told the President to stand up for who we are. They want to take it all away. That’s what this is about. The freaks running around with torches are a sideshow, they’re irrelevant, they’re losers. We can own the real issue. We’ve got to take control of the narrative. This is a winner.”
He got off the phone suddenly with another call coming in. I wasn’t clear on exactly what he was planning. Was he sensing “a moment” for the President, or a moment for himself? By this point I’m fairly certain those two things were indistinguishable in Bannon’s mind.
After a few days spent bottling up his frustration—and apparently being nudged by Bannon—Trump let it all out at once during a press conference in the Trump Tower lobby. He defended his original statement, claiming there was “blame on both sides,” and then went a step further, saying there were also “very fine people on both sides.” As he spoke, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao dutifully maintained a pleasant smile and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin stood motionless and stone-faced. But NEC Director Gary Cohn was visibly uncomfortable. Usually the most self-assured person in the room, Cohn delicately clasped his hands in front of him at his waist. He shifted his weight back and forth and seemed to be subconsciously moving farther and farther out of the camera shot.
“Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me,” Trump continued. “Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.” He went on to decry the push to tear down historical monuments, saying it was an effort to “change history.”
As the Charlottesville fallout continued, there was deep anxiety among Trump’s staff, unlike anything I had felt since Access Hollywood. I overheard some younger staffers discussing whether they should take this “off-ramp” to protect themselves from damaging their future careers.
“None of us are going to be able to get a job in this town after all this,” one former RNC aide in the EEOB said fatalistically.
“I’m going to try to go to an agency,” said another. “I talked to a friend from the Bush White House and they said that’s the way you exit—go to an agency for a while, then leave for whatever part of the private sector your agency dealt with.”
A third staffer laughed and said, “Sounds good, but you’re forgetting that everyone thinks we’re racists.”
These conversations became even more widespread as business leaders began resigning one by one from the President’s American Manufacturing Council, and reached their peak when Cohn—a corporate titan in his own right—publicly distanced himself from Trump.
“This administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups and do everything we can to heal the deep divisions that exist in our communities,” Cohn told the Financial Times. “I have come under enormous pressure both to resign and to remain in my current position. As a patriotic American, I am reluctant to leave my post.… But I also feel compelled to voice my distress over the events of the last two weeks.… Citizens standing up for equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK.”
This was the dance that many prominent staffers did, although usually behind closed doors, off the record to reporters or friends. I’m repulsed by what’s happening here, but if good people like me don’t stay, just imagine who will replace me. It was an irresistible mix of moral superiority and personal ego-stroking all wrapped into one.
Months later, when Gary left over policy differences with the President on trade, some White House staff joked that the neo-Nazis made Gary uncomfortable, but it was the tariffs that were truly a bridge too far. Like many jokes, it was funny because it exposed an underlying truth, and not just for Gary, but for most of us. We were willing to pay a steep price to get what we really wanted: proximity to power, and maybe a little of it for ourselves.
The only person who seemed entirely comfortable—thrilled, really—with the Charlottesville debacle was Bannon. “That press conference was a defining moment,” he declared. “Our guy refused to back down to the mob. The opposition party,” the media, “doesn’t know what to do with themselves. A total win for the good guys.” He gleefully added in for good measure that Cohn, his sworn enemy, had “pissed himself.”
But of all the things Bannon said, one stuck out to me more than any other. A couple of weeks after Charlottesville, he sat down with journalist Charlie Rose to discuss his tenure in the White House. But as it so often did, the conversation turned to the defining moment for anyone in Trump’s orbit: Access Hollywood. “[That] Saturday showed me who really had Donald Trump’s back,” Bannon said, “to play to his better angels.” It seemed like a strange, almost warped comment in that context. But I recognized the reference immediately, as I’m sure Bannon, an avid student of history, did as well. It was from Lincoln’s first inaugural address.
“We are not enemies but friends,” Lincoln said, laboring to keep his nation from plunging into civil war. “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
It’s little remembered now, but this is exactly the tone that Trump struck at 3 A.M. on Election Night, when he finally took the stage to announce that Clinton had conceded and he was victorious. He threw out the original remarks that had been prepared for him; he knew what he wanted to say. His instinct was to bring the country together.
“Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division,” he said. “To all Republicans and Democrats and Independents across this nation, I say it is time for us to come together as one united people.… I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be President for all Americans.… For those who have chosen not to support me in the past … I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.… Working together, we will begin the urgent task of rebuilding our nation and renewing the American dream.… The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”
For someone whose reputation was built on viciously tearing down his opponents, his instinct in victory was to be a uniting figure. But for reasons I cannot fully understand, when the most perilous moments came in the White House, the better angels—the impulse toward unity, harmony, positivity—rarely prevailed over the demons of division, discord, and negativity.
Nonetheless, the Charlottesville response did not cause me to reconsider working in the White House, the way it seemed to with others. Part of it may have been that I was battle hardened after a year in the foxhole. But I also just flat-out did not think he was racist. I know many people reading this book think otherwise, but I personally never witnessed a single thing behind closed doors that gave me any reason to believe Trump was consciously, overtly racist. If I had, I could not have possibly worked for him. Of course, it’s easy for me to say that now.
As the media firestorm continued, Trump’s frustrations kept growing. And eleven days after the Charlottesville protests began, I finally saw him come unglued.
As noted, the President and House Speaker Paul Ryan had always maintained a tenuous relationship, one based largely on political necessity and mutual disdain. Even after Trump walked out on him in the middle of one of their first Oval Office meetings, they at least held on to some cordiality. They occasionally joked with each other and had come to something of an understanding. Unlike McConnell, who Trump eventually seemed to like, he still thought Ryan a weak man.
Ryan, for his part, was under constant pressure to hold together his slender GOP majority in Congress and to respond to endless questions from Capitol Hill reporters about the latest Trump tweet or statement that had outraged them. The Speaker walked that tightrope with something less than a gymnast’s finesse, although he clearly tried. In Ryan’s initial statement about Charlottesville, he didn’t even mention Trump by name, but under criticism, the Speaker later conceded that the President had “messed up” in his comments and needed to communicate with greater “moral clarity.” As criticism of Trump went, this was rather mild.
But Ryan’s comments only kept the Charlottesville story alive—a story that, despite all of the President’s efforts to push past it, clearly upset him on a personal level. I happened to have just walked into the President’s private dining room off the Oval when he first saw Ryan’s comments on television. You could see fall across Trump’s face every frustration he’d ever had with the Speaker, and with the Charlottesville crisis in general. His eyes narrowed. His jaw clenched.
“Get me Paul Ryan on the phone right now,” he barked out loud enough for his secretary, who was sitting down the hall, all the way on the other side of the Oval Office, to hear clearly.
He was now standing. The remote control for the television was in his left hand, like a pistol. On the table in front of him rested a stack of newspapers. On top of that pile sat a landline phone. His right hand hovered just above it.
Within seconds a shout came back from his secretary. “I have the Speaker for you.” Ryan had just made his statement about Trump, so it couldn’t possibly be a mystery as to why the President was calling him. I imagined Ryan somewhere in the U.S. Capitol taking a deep breath with his eyes closed while he waited for Trump to get on the line.
The President pressed the flashing button, snatched up the phone, and put it to his ear. There was no opening greeting, no small talk, no prelude.
“Paul, do you know why Democrats have been kicking your a— for decades?” He didn’t wait for a reply.
“Because they know a little word called ‘loyalty.’ Why do you think Nancy has held on this long? Have you seen her? She’s a disaster. Every time she opens her mouth another Republican gets elected. But they stick with her. She got them to vote for Obamacare and half of them thought it was the dumbest bill ever written.” His voice was loud and getting louder. “But they’re loyal. They stick together. Why can’t you be loyal to your President, Paul? I even went along with your ‘Repeal and Replace’ plan.”
As he spoke, I slowly stepped back from the table and stood in the entryway to the dining room. I kept my eyes fixed on the TV to avoid distracting him or inadvertently becoming the target of his ire myself. I couldn’t make out anything the Speaker was saying on the other end of the phone. It was like a much quieter version of the adults on the old Charlie Brown “Peanuts” cartoons. Whatever it was, though, it was brief and unpersuasive, because the President jumped right back into it.
“You know what else I remember?” he snapped at the Speaker of the House of Representatives, next in line to the presidency after the Vice President. “I remember being in Wisconsin and your own people were booing you. You were out there dying like a dog, Paul. Like a dog! And what’d I do? I saved your a—. I said, ‘Oh, c’mon, Paul’s going to be with us.’ Maybe they were right, though, who knows? But I’ll tell you this, Republicans better figure out loyalty or we’re not going to get anything done.”
At that point I felt like it was best to exit, so I gave the President a nod and took my leave. He was still yelling as I walked down the hall and out of earshot.