In mid-August 2017, I jumped through the open doors of an Acela passenger train moments before it left Washington’s Union Station bound for New Jersey. It was summertime in the swamp. The heat was sweltering, and my rush to make the train had left me drenched in sweat underneath my dark blue suit.
Growing up in the South, I saw trains as more of a novelty than a legitimate mode of transportation. Some of my friends enjoyed a tradition of riding an Amtrak train from Birmingham to New Orleans to watch the Alabama Crimson Tide football team play in the Sugar Bowl, but that’s about it. I’d completely avoided the subway in New York during the campaign, and had rarely ridden the Metro since moving to D.C. But if the President was at his private club in Bedminster, New Jersey, and you didn’t catch a ride on Air Force One, the train was the next-best option.
The Acela train jolted to a start before I’d found my seat, briefly knocking me off balance. But I couldn’t sit down yet. I was looking for Tony Sayegh, the former Fox News personality who’d been named Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. Tony, a New York native with a dark tan and perfectly coiffed hair, ran the Treasury Department’s comms operation. Although we didn’t yet know each other, a mutual friend had connected us upon finding out we’d be on the same train—and as fate would have it, with the same mission.
When I finally found Tony, I sat down across a table from him, plopped my bag down beside me, and shook his hand. We immediately hit it off. We both were on the way to Bedminster to meet with Hope Hicks for a communications strategy meeting. The President and congressional leaders were discussing a massive overhaul of the tax code. Everyone knew the stakes, and Tony and I had both put together plans that would put us in the middle of the action.
A buzz was building in the press that in spite of Republicans controlling the entire government, Trump might end his first year as President with no major legislative accomplishments. Passing major legislation is a herculean task. The wildly unpredictable—and sometimes violent—swings of democracy had scared the Founders as much as monarchy, so they’d designed our republican system of government to make sweeping changes nearly impossible. This is a good thing for stability. But in the summer of 2017 I wanted to grab James Madison by his tiny shoulders, shake him as hard as I could, and yell at him for making our lives so difficult. We really needed to pass this dang bill.
By the time we arrived at the train station in New Jersey, Tony and I had combined our plans. We were going to pitch the idea of us partnering up to design and implement a communications strategy that would culminate with Congress overhauling the tax code for the first time since Ronald Reagan was President.
The plan was almost derailed before it even had a chance, though. When we got off the train, Tony asked me where the proposal was. I’d left it in the overhead storage compartment. I sprinted back into the train car and found it sitting right where I’d left it. Mini disaster averted.
As a staffer drove us slowly around the Bedminster golf course toward the President’s villa, it was easy to see why Trump loved the property. The trees lining the driveway were swaying in the light breeze, with the immaculate grass on one of the fairways visible through their leafy branches. The rolling New Jersey countryside served as the perfect backdrop for the Georgian-style clubhouse, which was once the home of John DeLorean, whose namesake car was made famous by the Back to the Future movies. A few hundred yards past the clubhouse, we arrived at Trump’s luxury cottage, a white brick home with a steep pitched roof. The backside of the house included a two-story, cylindrical tower overlooking a large swimming pool. That’s where Hope was waiting for us.
She was seated under an awning outside of the snack shop by the pool, and much more relaxed than I was accustomed to seeing her. She was wearing a skirt and a white blouse with her hair pulled back.
Hope was a little bit of a conundrum. She could be vulnerable, down-home, a Southerner in spirit. She listened to country music. But she could also be aggressive—even cold—sophisticated and elusive. Her mom was from the South and her dad was a Northerner. She’d attended college at Southern Methodist University, but she’d lived most of her life in the Northeast. Her personality was part New York City and part front porch of a country farmhouse—all mixed into one.
No one I knew hated living in D.C. more than Hope. In a city where the most highly anticipated annual event is literally nicknamed “Nerd Prom,” she, Ivanka, and the First Lady had burst onto the scene looking like they’d been torn out of the pages of Vogue. But while FLOTUS was living in the world’s most secure building and Ivanka seemed to generally enjoy the attention, Hope longed for Manhattan, where, as she put it to me, “no one cares who you are.”
After we finished up our tax reform planning, Hope and I stuck around and talked awhile longer. Scaramucci’s implosion had left the comms team with a lot of uncertainty. To that point, Hope’s job—Director of Strategic Communications—had given her unfettered access to the President without the day-to-day responsibilities of managing a large staff. But Trump was nudging her to take over the entire department. She was apprehensive about it. In truth, there wasn’t much upside for her, just more headaches. But she also seemed anxious to take on a new challenge that might prepare her for whatever she’d go on to do next. She was still only twenty-eight years old.
As we talked, Jared Kushner walked through the pool area and spotted us. Normally in a perfectly tailored suit, Kushner was now wearing lightweight dark pants, a gray T-shirt, and sunglasses.
“Take your tie off, Cliff!” he called out to me. “This is Bedminster—you can relax here!”
I smiled, flashed a thumbs-up, and loosened up my Carolina blue tie.
Jared and Ivanka shared a cottage right across from Trump’s, and it looked very similar, although it did not have the two-story tower on the back side. Jared walked into the snack shop and sat down at a table with Jason Greenblatt, a former Trump Organization attorney turned White House Special Representative for International Negotiations. I assumed they were huddling about the administration’s Middle East peace efforts, in which they were both integrally involved.
General Kelly, settling into his new job, walked through not long after that, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, ever-present scowl still on his face. He didn’t seem to notice us.
“You have to take this job,” I finally told Hope. “First, it’s the best thing for the President. He’s not going to trust anyone to do that job like he trusts you. Second, it’s a good thing for you—a new experience. And third, and I know this is selfish, but it’d make the campaign folks feel a lot better about everything. A lot of them have been completely screwed to this point.”
She didn’t seem to disagree with any of those points.
“Do you know who Mercedes Schlapp is?” she asked toward the end of the conversation. I had to google her, but when her picture came up I recognized her from Fox News. She and her husband, Matt, were both former Bush administration officials. He had been Bush’s political director and she had served as a spokesperson to Spanish-language media.
“There’s some discussion about her coming into the White House, too,” Hope explained. “What do you think?”
What did I think? The guy who pushed the President to hire the Mooch? Let’s just say that I didn’t feel inclined to get involved in any more staffing decisions for the time being. Still, I liked Hope a lot and wanted to be of help to her.
I noted that it could be helpful to have another experienced spokesperson who could go on TV and defend the President. Hope was uninterested in brawling in the rough-and-tumble world of television punditry. That wasn’t the value she brought to the table anyway; she was comfortable enough in her own skin to acknowledge that she was a novice when it came to policy and politics. And there were other people—like Kellyanne—to toss into the shark tank. Hope’s value was that she knew Trump, all of his likes, dislikes, quirks, and eccentricities. In planning meetings she was the authority on what events, interviews, or settings he would and wouldn’t feel comfortable with. A single word from Hope could squash weeks of planning if she felt like it wasn’t up to snuff or sufficiently on brand. However, there was always room in Trump World for a telegenic female surrogate willing to fight it out on the airwaves, and maybe Mercedes fit that bill. I didn’t know. On the flip side, if she wasn’t a team player, she’d be yet another senior comms official elbowing around, trying to carve out space for herself.
We would soon learn there was a deeper motive behind this selection. Factionalism didn’t end just because there was a new Chief of Staff in charge. In some ways, it only got worse.
Several weeks later, Tony Sayegh and I were sitting among staff assistants on the top floor of the West Wing. The ceilings were low and the wood paneling in some of the rooms made it feel a little bit like the executive suite of a 1960s law firm. But this was prime real estate, because the offices were generally larger than ours down on the main floor below.
The National Economic Council was given internal supremacy over all other White House departments when it came to getting the tax bill passed. Gary Cohn, the Director, was leading the charge, along with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, another Goldman Sachs alumnus. Cohn and Mnuchin shared a friendly rivalry. This sometimes put Tony Sayegh in an awkward position. As Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, he worked directly for Mnuchin. But when it came to the tax push, Cohn wasn’t going to subordinate himself to anyone other than Donald J. Trump.
The door to Cohn’s office swung open and a handful of aides streamed out. Peering in, I could see Gary sitting at the head of his conference table. He was leaning back, with his chair on two legs, and glancing at CNBC airing on a small flat-screen TV set up in the corner beside him.
“You guys can go on in,” his assistant, Kaitlyn Eisner-Poor, said.
In the weeks since we had hatched our plan with Hope at Bedminster, Tony had become known as “Tax Man” to most of the staff. But to Gary, he was always “Taxing Tony.”
“Get in here, Taxing Tony,” Cohn said as we walked in the door.
I took a seat at the end of the table opposite from Cohn, and Tony sat midway down the table, closer to him. I glanced at the opposite corner of the room and saw the gray Ohio State University football helmet sitting on the shelf. We’d often go back and forth about which college football program was better, his Buckeyes or my Tide. But not today.
“Tony, let me ask you a question,” Cohn began. Tony nodded his head, put his pen down on the table, and leaned back in his chair.
“Am I a co-principal in tax reform?” he asked.
“Of course,” Tony replied. “You and the Secretary are co-principals leading the team.”
“Is that right?” Cohn replied sarcastically. “Because I’ve got to tell you, Tony, I’m not feeling like a co-principal right now.”
I laughed quietly at the other end of the table. I genuinely thought he was joking. He wasn’t, and Tony knew it. As it turns out, Mnuchin had released a statement about one of the negotiating points on the tax bill, but Cohn’s statement had somehow not gone out from the White House. As a result, Gary felt like he was being given second billing.
“I take responsibility for that,” Tony said, taking the heat like a pro. “I approved the release of the Secretary’s statement. I’ll make sure everything is perfectly coordinated going forward so these types of things happen simultaneously.”
Gary had a habit of pushing his tongue into the side of his mouth as he listened, causing his cheek to bulge out on one side. That, combined with his furrowed brow, created an even more intimidating persona, on top of his imposing size. He finally sat forward, bringing his chair back down onto all four feet, and leaned across the table.
“You work for me, too, now, Tony, and so do you,” he said, looking down at me. “So I just want to make sure everyone’s clear on that.”
We were. In truth, this was a conversation that probably would have happened at some point anyway, so it was better to get it out of the way early on.
Every other interaction I ever had with Gary was positive. All he really cared about was performance, and you can bet we wouldn’t have lasted if we weren’t at the top of our game. But he made it clear from that point forward that he and Mnuchin were going to be on equal footing in every way. He’d left one of the top jobs in the finance world because he saw a chance to overhaul the tax code, which could impact the economy for decades. He hadn’t done that to take a backseat to anyone.
If you want to identify a White House’s priorities, look no further than the President’s schedule. Who’s he meeting with? Where’s he traveling? His time is the single most valuable asset any administration has, and everyone wants a piece of it. So whatever—or whoever—actually makes it onto his calendar must be important. And anything that pops up on a recurring basis must be really important.
Word went out across the entire White House that our tax team had top billing on the President’s schedule for the rest of the year. We worked closely with the NEC and the political and legislative affairs teams to map out a schedule that included consistent travel to targeted districts and states. This meant a lot of traversing the country on Air Force One.
Most of these flights were relatively uneventful. The President typically stayed up front in his office, rolling through phone calls and chatting with senior aides popping in and out. Otherwise we were in the staff cabin working, chatting, watching TV, or taking full advantage of the top-notch food service (we had to pay for it individually). The best recurring prank, though, was compliments of Johnny McEntee. During his countless hours of downtime waiting for the President to finish up meetings, he’d become a master at forging Trump’s signature. He’d come rushing back to the staff cabin with a “message from the President” scrawled on a piece of paper folded in half. The unsuspecting victim would open it up to find a note—usually angry, occasionally laudatory—in Trump’s recognizable, all-caps penmanship.
I was the target of one of Johnny’s best schemes. He passed me a note during one flight that said, “Cliff—Print out today’s top Breitbart stories and bring them to me. Do not tell Gen. Kelly.” Upon his arrival in the West Wing, Kelly had famously choked off the information flow to the President. No articles, proposals, or ideas were supposed to reach Trump without first going through the Staff Secretary’s office and then receiving final sign-off from the Chief. The last thing I wanted to do was run afoul of Kelly’s explicit directive, but what was I supposed to do if the President of the United States was giving me a direct order? My heart rate was rising, and the look of horror on my face made Johnny crack. He burst out laughing, and to my great relief I realized I was his latest victim. The funniest and most brilliant part of it all was how realistic it was. Of course, issuing such an order was exactly something Trump would do.
Long flights also offered great opportunities to get to know people, from colleagues and Cabinet secretaries to members of Congress. Much as Tony had to get acquainted with the White House staff when he first came over from the Treasury Department, I wanted to get to know the Treasury team, including Secretary Mnuchin. And I thought I had come up with a pretty good icebreaker for him whenever the time came for us to get to know each other—a reference to one of his movies.
From the staff cabin on one tax reform trip, Tony saw Mnuchin standing in the hallway just outside the conference room and motioned for me to follow him. The Secretary was making small talk with his Chief of Staff, Eli Miller, and Tony interjected, “Mr. Secretary, this is Cliff Sims. He’s running the messaging for tax reform and I wanted you guys to get better acquainted.” We exchanged pleasantries, and when there was a brief lull, my icebreaker idea popped into my head.
“Mr. Secretary,” I began, “there was a small group of us on the campaign in Trump Tower who basically spent all day fighting with the press over their coverage. It was such a ragtag group of characters and our mission was so impossible that we jokingly started calling ourselves ‘The Suicide Squad’ … I figured you might get a kick out of that.”
He didn’t.
After a moment of awkward silence, Mnuchin looked at Tony and said, “Mmm, Tony, let’s get together in a few minutes to talk about this event.” He walked away without acknowledging what I’d said. Maybe he didn’t like the movie? Maybe he thought I was making fun of his work? Maybe he hadn’t even been listening to what I was saying? Regardless of the reason for his reaction, Tony and I were left walking back to the staff cabin, laughing so hysterically at my epic embarrassment that we were gasping for air.
Back at the White House, Tony developed a “playbook”—managed by my old campaign war room colleague Kaelan Dorr—that acted as a checklist for every event and ensured every member of the team was engaged, knew their role, and was held accountable for executing it. I sat down with three of the President’s top speechwriters—Vince Haley, Ross Worthington, and Ted Royer—and built what we called the “messaging architecture” for tax reform. These were the words everyone used to sell the plan to the public. Meanwhile, Cohn and Mnuchin—along with their top tax policy aides, Shahira Knight and Justin Muzinich—hammered out the details of the legislation with their counterparts on Capitol Hill.
For the first time since I’d been at the White House, it felt like the staff machine was actually working, even humming. And we were having fun. Well, some of us were. In other parts of the White House, resentment was growing.
Along with Hope’s elevation to comms director, Mercedes Schlapp joined the staff, at General Kelly’s behest, with the title of Senior Adviser for Strategic Communications. Kelly clearly viewed Hope as an inexperienced, naïve young girl who could not be fully trusted to oversee the embattled comms team. He also knew that there was no way on earth that he could push Hope out; the President loved her too much. Instead Schlapp was brought in to be his eyes and ears. The Schlapp hire seemed to contradict the Chief’s goal of eliminating overlapping and ill-defined jobs, but it was totally in keeping with existing White House modus operandi—surround yourself with allies.
It wasn’t entirely clear to anyone what was included in Schlapp’s portfolio, but what was clear to everyone was that being left out of tax reform—the administration’s number-one priority—was driving her up the wall. She would constantly insert herself into the process of planning tax events around the country or at the White House, often setting various departments in motion, only to have to tell them “never mind” once it became clear that what she was doing was not part of the tax team’s plan.
In an effort to diffuse the growing tension, Tony and I invited Mercedes to the Treasury Department’s dining room for lunch. The dining room was a small but well-appointed space on the west side of the building, with an outdoor balcony overlooking the East Wing of the White House. The waitstaff was hospitable, and Tony and I ate there so much that they knew our names and regular orders by heart. We got a kick out of the fact that they would place nameplates atop the white-linened tables to signify who from the Treasury Department’s senior staff was dining there that day. Tony would jokingly turn his nameplate toward me when we’d sit down, lest I forgot how big a deal he was.
When we sat down to dine with Mercedes, the conversation began cordially. Like a large number of Trump appointees, Tony and Mercedes had both been Fox News contributors. As a result, they had been friendly for years. But Mercedes wasn’t even halfway through her salad when her anger boiled over.
As I sat there awkwardly, her face reddened and she launched in at Tony. Who did he think he was to come in and take over tax reform? He was arrogant, a bull in a china shop, not a team player. For a minute I forgot whether I was having lunch with the affable Tony Sayegh that I knew—the guy who literally made it a game to greet every single person as he walked back in the EEOB, whether he knew them or not—or the maniacal Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. Tony took it all in stride, much as he had when Gary lit into him before.
During a rare moment when Mercedes took a breath, in an admittedly lame attempt to ease tensions, I commented on the food. “I think this is the best salmon I’ve had since we started coming here,” I said earnestly. “The glaze is perfect.”
Tony looked at me across the table in utter disbelief. He was getting accused of all kinds of nonsense, and the best I could muster was a compliment on the salmon glaze? In every subsequent retelling of that story, Tony would refer to me as “Foxhole Sims,” the last guy you wanted to be in a foxhole with when the bullets started flying. We’d laugh, genuinely befuddled by Mercedes’s outburst. But it would later become a serious problem.
The fact of the matter was that the tax team was operating outside of the formal White House structure. This was a mandate from the Chief. He called us the “tiger team,” a military term for a small group of handpicked specialists brought together to plan and execute a specific mission. Regardless, good staff work wasn’t going to be nearly enough to pass the largest tax reform package in thirty years. Pulling that off was going to require the President to put himself out there in a way he had not needed to up until that point. He was going to have to risk something.
After a messaging briefing with some of the White House’s top outside allies, Newt Gingrich cornered me. The seventy-four-year-old former Speaker of the House was a fascinating character. I’d found his reputation as an idea machine to be generally accurate—a lot of them were genuinely brilliant, a fair number of them were borderline crazy, but no matter what, they were always interesting. As he approached me, his chin was tucked and his facial expression suggested he was in a serious mood. If he’d been wearing glasses, he would have been looking at me over the top of them.
“We’re about to have a serious problem on our hands,” he said right away.
“What’s going on?” I asked intently.
“You guys have got to start pushing Congress to get this tax bill done this year—it has to be this year. You should start publicly calling for them to do it by Thanksgiving in hopes that it forces them to finish by the end of the year. Otherwise they’re going to try to slow the momentum down and ask for more time.”
Gingrich had served in Congress for twenty years, including four years as Speaker of the House. If anyone could forecast the whims of 435 politicians whose only sense of urgency seemed to revolve around the date of their next election, it was Newt. And his prediction proved prescient. Days later I got a phone call from one of Paul Ryan’s top aides. “Our members are expressing some concerns about setting expectations too high in terms of timeline on the tax bill,” he said. “We’re going to go as fast as we can, but realistically it’s going to be tough to get it done this year.”
I exhaled in a long, quiet sigh. Gingrich had called it, but I was still annoyed. In fairness, though, I had been there when they’d set the timelines for the health-care bill, only to watch them all get blown up. Perhaps their concerns were well founded. “Is there any way you could talk to the President about not being too vocal about timing?” Ryan’s aide asked. “It’d obviously look bad for him—for all of us—if Congress wasn’t able to meet an arbitrary deadline.”
Walking from the West Wing toward the residence, I broached the subject with the President. I told him the Speaker’s office had expressed concerns with him publicly putting a hard deadline on passing tax reform. He wasn’t even slightly interested in what some staff member in Ryan’s office was suggesting. Before I’d even finished my explanation—in which I planned to lay out their reasoning, then say I thought he should actually push harder—he had an idea.
“Tax cuts for Christmas,” he said. “That’s what it’s going to be.”
Not long after that conversation, Trump hosted Republican congressional leaders for a lunch in the Cabinet Room. With Paul Ryan sitting to his right and Kevin Brady, chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, sitting to his left, Trump declared, “We’ll have it done before Christmas, and that will be one of the great Christmas presents.”
I jumped into hyperdrive making sure news outlets latched on to this comment. TRUMP PROMISES “BIG, BEAUTIFUL” TAX CUTS FOR CHRISTMAS, read the Washington Examiner headline later that day. TRUMP: TAX CUT IS MY GIFT TO YOU and TRUMP SEES TAX PLAN AS CHRISTMAS GIFT added CNN and The Wall Street Journal. Expectations were set. The Speaker’s office never mentioned delaying the date again.
Meanwhile, I was continuously huddling with the President’s speechwriting team to keep the messaging fresh. As we all know, no two Trump speeches were the same—not even close. But in terms of the prepared remarks, the outline was the same. So we tried to add a new element each time, whether it was a specific policy announcement or a new headline-grabbing quip—and hoped that Trump would decide to use it.
I spent a weekend watching every speech Ronald Reagan gave selling his tax overhaul in the early 1980s. While Reagan and Trump were stylistically far apart, the way they spoke directly to blue-collar workers and families in Middle America was remarkably similar. A phrase popped into my head, “middle-class miracle”—that’s what we believed this tax cut was going to produce. During a speech in Indiana, Trump rolled it out.
“Democrats and Republicans in Congress should come together finally,” he said, “and deliver this giant win for the American people, and begin the middle-class miracle—it’s called a middle-class miracle—once again.”
I made another round of phone calls and fired off texts and emails encouraging news outlets to pick up on this new phrase. ABC, NBC, CNBC, Roll Call, the Washington Examiner, and numerous others all used it in their headlines. But it didn’t always work exactly as planned, as we found out with our next messaging creation—that the tax cuts would be “rocket fuel for the economy.”
We’d had so much success with securing glowing headlines before, I was hoping to repeat the process again: Trump delivers the remark, I highlight it to reporters, positive headlines come flowing in.
During an event in St. Charles, Missouri, I was scrolling through the prepared remarks on my phone as Trump delivered them. “The tax cut will mean more companies moving to America, staying in America, and hiring American workers right here. So that’s so important, right?”
The crowd applauded. Okay, here we go … “Because these massive tax cuts will be rocket fuel…” The President paused midsentence for no apparent reason. I looked up from my phone to see if something had gone wrong with the teleprompter. It hadn’t. But now the crowd had begun to chuckle. They could sense what was coming, and suddenly so could I. Days before, Trump had dubbed North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un “Little Rocket Man,” sending the foreign policy world—well, the whole world, really—into a frenzy. Our decision to include the word “rocket” in his remarks had triggered this memory and brought a mischievous smile to his face.
“Little Rocket Man!” he declared, giving the crowd exactly what they wanted and sending them into hysterics, before finishing the original sentence. “Rocket fuel for the American economy.” The crowd cheered, before Trump added one more barb at Kim. “He is a sick puppy.” Thankfully, plenty of news outlets—the Associated Press and The New York Times among them—still put “rocket fuel for the economy” in their headlines. Our good run continued.
Back at the White House, Trump worked the phones constantly. If someone mentioned in a meeting that a lawmaker was waffling or didn’t like a part of the tax plan, the President would call out for his assistant Madeleine to call them up. If a policy briefing alerted him to something he wanted the bill writers to take a look at, he’d have her get them on the line right away. The same for television hosts or guests, if he saw something that piqued his interest. In one memorable instance, I was with him in the private dining room when an obscure economist came on Fox News to talk about how Trump was right, the tax bill would spur economic growth. He paused our conversation and watched the segment intently.
“This guy’s great!” he said, jotting down the man’s name with a black Sharpie. “Who is he?”
I didn’t know; neither of us had ever heard of him. The President shouted for Madeleine to come in, and she didn’t let her stilettos slow her down as she speed-walked through the Oval Office and down the hall to where the President was sitting. “I want to talk to this gentleman as soon as possible,” he said, handing her the note with his name on it. I didn’t hang around long enough to hear the call, but I assume a relatively unknown economist—whose name I still can’t remember—received a very unexpected call that day from the President of the United States.
In mid-October, as our tax reform push was in full swing, the White House was suddenly pulled into another unexpected media firestorm. Earlier in the month, four American service members had been killed during an ambush in Niger. The death of U.S. military personnel always hit the President hard, going back to the first one, Navy SEAL Ryan Owens, who was killed during a firefight with al-Qaeda militants in Yemen about a week after he took office.
Trump was one of the least sentimental individuals I had ever met. But when it came to military service members and their families, he had a soft spot. When people serving under him as commander in chief gave their lives, he seemed to feel a sense of duty to make sure their families knew he personally cared about them, that their loved one’s sacrifice was not in vain.
So on a Monday afternoon, he picked up the phone in the Oval Office and called family members of the four American soldiers killed in Niger, including Myeshia Johnson, the widow of Sergeant La David T. Johnson, a twenty-five-year-old African American war hero from Miami. Unbeknownst to the President, Democratic Congresswoman Frederica Wilson was also listening in on the call. And within a matter of hours, she was publicly slamming the President for being insensitive, claiming he had callously told the Gold Star widow that her husband—whom he only referred to as “your guy”—“knew what he signed up for.”
As I stood watching the drama unfold on TV in the West Wing press office, I couldn’t think of anything to say about it other than, “This is messed up.” Trump was not always innocent in such dust-ups. He was, after all, the same man who’d questioned former POW John McCain’s military service during the campaign and attacked a Gold Star family during the Democratic National Convention. But in this particular instance, I had no doubt in my mind that Trump had done his best, undoubtedly in his own awkward way, to console a grieving widow, and a Democratic Congresswoman was cynically twisting it for political gain.
This was the kind of public spectacle that made my stomach churn. “Imagine what’s going through the Chief’s mind right now,” Tony said, as we continued watching the fallout on TV. Whoa, I hadn’t thought about that.
The Chief’s son, Second Lieutenant Robert Kelly, had been killed in action in 2010 in Afghanistan, giving Kelly the tragic distinction of being the highest-ranking American military officer to lose a child in the conflict. I could only imagine how he must be feeling as mean-spirited politicians stirred up some of his most heartbreaking memories.
But as was often the case in the White House, we had to just put our heads down and keep working. We were preparing for a “radio row” event the following day, during which dozens of local, regional, and national radio hosts would descend on the White House for a chance to interview senior officials, including the President himself. The purpose of the event was to promote the President’s tax plan, but when Trump arrived and sat down for an interview with Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, it didn’t take long for the topic to turn to the controversy surrounding his phone call with the Gold Star widow.
“I mean, you could ask General Kelly did he get a call from Obama,” Trump quipped. “You could ask other people, I don’t know what Obama’s policy was. I write letters and I also call.”
I was standing right behind the President, tasked with guiding him from interview to interview, when he made the comment. And I immediately knew this was going to bring the most sensitive time of General Kelly’s life into the world’s most glaring spotlight—the last place he wanted it to be.
The following day, however, he tackled the issue head-on, and accomplished something I had not experienced before: he brought the entire White House to a standstill.
He wanted to speak out publicly, and decided to do it from the White House’s biggest stage: the Press Briefing Room.
As he stepped behind the podium, even the usually rambunctious press corps took on a more somber mood. White House aides throughout the building stopped what they were doing, gathered around the nearest TV and turned up the volume. In the press office, we stood spellbound as Kelly explained in excruciating detail “what happens when we lose one of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, or Coast Guardsmen in combat.
“Their buddies wrap them up in whatever passes as a shroud, put them on a helicopter … and send them home,” he explained. “Their first stop along the way is when they’re packed in ice, typically at the airhead. And then they’re flown to, usually, Europe, where they’re then packed in ice again and flown to Dover Air Force Base, where Dover takes care of the remains, embalms them, meticulously dresses them in their uniform with the medals that they’ve earned, the emblems of their service, and then puts them on another airplane, linked up with a casualty officer escort, that takes them home.”
Staffers were already fighting back tears as Kelly, the Gold Star father, continued his clinical description, trying to keep himself emotionally detached from his words.
“While that’s happening, a casualty officer typically goes to the home very early in the morning and waits for the first lights to come on. And then he knocks on the door; typically a mom and dad will answer, a wife.… And the casualty officer proceeds to break the heart of a family member, then stays with that family until—well, for a long, long time, even after the interment.”
I stepped out into the West Wing lobby for a moment to grab anyone who might not be aware of what was taking place, only to find uniformed Secret Service agents, staffers, and even a handful of guests huddled around a tiny TV facing out to the lobby from a coat closet.
It was beginning to feel like a moment everyone would remember about their time in the White House. From there, Kelly turned to the topic of the day—the phone calls.
“I said to [the President], ‘Sir, there’s nothing you can do to lighten the burden on these families.… Let me tell you what my best friend, Joe Dunford, told me.”
Kelly’s voice cracked softly. The corners of his mouth dipped, and for the briefest moment it felt like the battle-hardened Marine might break down. He quickly composed himself, biting his bottom lip and looking down for a half second before continuing on.
“He said, ‘Kel, he was doing exactly what he wanted to do when he was killed. He knew what he was getting into by joining that one percent [who serve in the military]. He knew what the possibilities were because we’re at war. And when he died,’ in the four cases we’re talking about in Niger, and my son’s case in Afghanistan, ‘when he died, he was surrounded by the best men on this earth: his friends.’
“That’s what the President tried to say to four families the other day.”
Numerous White House aides were now in tears, and for perhaps the first time since we’d been there, it felt like an unexplainable sense of camaraderie was engulfing the building.
I emailed the Chief later that day—the only time I ever sent him a one-on-one email—and told him that, for many of us, it had been our proudest moment in the White House.
This is what it’s supposed to feel like, I thought.
He never replied, and I never expected him to on such a busy and emotional day. Still, I was glad I told him that and I hoped he had a chance to read it.
As the tax push continued, and the House Ways and Means Committee inched closer to rolling out their version of the tax bill, Tony Sayegh called and mentioned that the Speaker’s office wanted the President’s input on naming the bill.
“What do you think about getting the brander-in-chief involved in coming up with the name?” Sayegh asked.
“Oh, I think he’d love that,” I replied with a laugh. “I’ll talk to him about it tomorrow.”
The next day I walked with the President from the Oval Office to the State Dining Room to film the weekly address, which we were planning to film unscripted for the first time.
The President had grown frustrated reading from the teleprompter each week, and he felt the videos lacked the energy and improvisation that made him such a compelling figure to watch. We discussed various topics he could riff on and ultimately landed on teasing out his soon-to-be-announced decision on who he would appoint to be the new Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
After the recording sessions, we walked out of the State Dining Room into the Cross Hall and I mentioned to him that the Speaker’s office wanted help naming the tax bill.
“They wanted to see if you’d like to put your branding genius to use,” I told him.
His eyes lit up and a subtle smile appeared on his face. “They say I might be the world’s greatest brander. I don’t say that necessarily, but some people have said that.”
The President gripped his belt buckle with both hands, leaned back on his heels, tilted his head back slightly, closed his eyes, and drew in a deep breath. For a few brief moments he stood silently, then his eyes opened and he drew his right hand up to shoulder height and held it in his patented “okay” sign.
“I’ve got it,” he said, releasing his index finger and thumb. “We’re going to call it ‘the Cutting Cutting Cutting Bill.’”
I paused for a moment and considered. “Well, it definitely gets the point across,” I said with a subtle laugh.
“People have got to quit calling it ‘tax reform,’” he continued. “No one knows what that even means—‘reform.’ People think that’s not going to help them. It might even be a tax increase. We’ve got to call it a tax ‘cut’ instead. And that’s exactly what it is, it’s a tax cut. Yeah, we are reforming, but mainly we’re cutting. Make sure everyone knows that.”
Having fully explained his view, the President decided he wanted to record a video announcing the name of the bill immediately. So we walked back into the State Dining Room, where the video crew was still set up, and explained that we were going to record one more message.
“My fellow Americans,” the President began. “Many members of Congress have been asking me, ‘Mr. President, what are we going to name the tax bill?’ And I’m proud to announce today that we are naming it the Cutting Cutting Cutting Bill!”
As I looked around the room, every cameraman, teleprompter operator, lighting tech, photographer, and Secret Service agent had a giant smile on their face. They knew what a bizarre idea it was. However, I thought to myself, it might also have a grain of genius in it.
Ultimately, Trump seemed pleased, and that’s all that really mattered, so we walked back over to the Oval Office, where I left the President to continue his work and went about informing our team about his bill-naming epiphany. As I recounted the story, the reactions varied from hysterical laughter, to confusion, to full-throated support, to vehement opposition.
“Wow, it sounds kind of violent,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Tony and me in the Outer Oval as Hope sat laughing behind her desk.
But the President wasn’t done. After sleeping on it, he came back with an updated version.
“I’ve given it some more thought,” he said, smiling ear to ear. “It’s too long. It’s going to be ‘the Cuts Cuts Cuts Bill.”’
I told him I’d found out that the bill’s name actually needed to have “Act” at the end of it, and he came back one final time.
“Actually, it’s still too long,” he concluded. “This is it, make note of this: it’s the Cut Cut Cut Act—no ‘s’ at the end of ‘cut.’” I told him I would let everyone know, and immediately started making phone calls, first to our team, and then to our counterparts on Capitol Hill.
Over the next several days, it became clear that Republican congressional leaders—or perhaps more accurately their staffs—were very much opposed to the President’s recommendation. “We just can’t do that,” one Hill aide told me. “It’s got to be more serious. You guys understand that, right?”
The more they pushed back, the more I grew to like the name. And they were the ones who had asked for his help in the first place. What’d they think they were going to get? This is the “Make America Great Again,” “Drain the Swamp,” and “Build the Wall” guy, after all.
When it became clear that Hill staffers would not relent, we set up a call with House Speaker Paul Ryan, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, and the President. Hope Hicks, Tony Sayegh, Joyce Meyer from Legislative Affairs, and I sat around the Resolute desk as the President discussed the bill name with the two lawmakers.
“I’m surrounded right now by my marketing geniuses,” the President said, winking to the group. “And I’ve got to tell you, I think I’ve got a great name for this bill—it’s going to be really cool. We need to call it ‘The Cut Cut Cut Act,’ because this is a tax cut. When people hear the name, that’s what we want people to know. And that’s what they’re going to know.”
He paused. There was silence on the other end of the line.
“Now, I know what you guys like to do,” he continued. “You like to name these bills something like ‘The Economic Revitalization and Reforming…’” The President slumped in his chair and let out a giant snore. “Guys, people fall asleep before you can even get to the end of your bill names.”
By that point, as Trump ridiculed senior Republican members of Congress, we were just trying not to be heard laughing in the background.
“So I really think if we name this thing ‘The Cut Cut Cut Act,’ people will love it and everyone will be talking about it. And best of all, everyone will remember what we’re doing here—we’re cutting taxes.”
There was another brief moment of silence on the phone and then Brady spoke up. “You know, I think that’s fine, Mr. President,” he said. “Plus, people are always going to remember this as the Trump tax cuts when it’s all over with, so I don’t see a problem with us doing something a little different with the name.”
The Speaker didn’t interject, at least not then, so the issue seemed to be resolved, and the President hung up.
“These guys are going to learn one day,” he told us. “Everyone’s going to love it. They’ve really got to lighten up.”
But at the staff level, the issue was most certainly not resolved. The Speaker’s staff in particular was indignant that such an unserious name would be attached to such a serious bill. Their boss presumably agreed, although he did not have it in him to tell the President directly.
Within a matter of days the disagreements over the name leaked to the press and “Cut Cut Cut” immediately became the top trending topic on Twitter. Plenty of people derided the name and made fun of it. Of course, these were many of the same people who scoffed at “Make America Great Again.” But others immediately got it. “Let’s be real,” tweeted conservative commentator and frequent Trump critic Ben Shapiro, “The Cut Cut Cut Act is better branding than anything the GOP has come up with in 20 years.” Even the liberal publication The Atlantic declared it “effective branding,” adding that “Congress is manifestly awful at naming its own bills.”
But in the end the House rolled out a bill officially named The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—the kind of snoozefest the President warned about. “They don’t get it,” the President later told me aboard Air Force One on the way to our next tax event. “Then again, maybe they were right on this one, who knows. We’ll get it done anyway.”
On December 6, 2017—as the tax push was entering the home stretch—I stood in the back of the Diplomatic Reception Room as Trump delivered remarks that sent shock waves around the world, particularly in the Middle East.
“I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. While previous presidents have made this a major campaign promise, they failed to deliver. Today, I am delivering.”
The day after the announcement was made, the President walked out of the Oval Office into the Outer Oval, where I was waiting to walk him into the Cabinet Room to record a video. His attention immediately went to the muted television hanging on the wall. Images of Palestinians protesting the Jerusalem decision were flashing across the screen.
“How widespread is it?” Trump asked.
“It’s hard to tell,” I replied. “They always just show footage from the hot spots.”
Some protesters screamed “Down with America!” and “Down with Israel!” while others chanted in rhythm, “Trump, Trump, you will see—Palestine will be free.”
They torched American flags and burned posters of the President’s face. Angry mobs stomped on his picture and others hanged him in effigy. As we continued to watch, I felt an urge to look away. It reminded me of the feeling I get when I see someone trip and stumble in public. Their instinct is to immediately look around to see if anyone noticed; my instinct is to look away so they won’t feel embarrassed.
The President had done nothing wrong. He had taken a stand and made good on a promise that Clinton, Bush, and Obama had all bailed on. I was proud of what he had done—we all were. But I could not help but feel uncomfortable as he calmly watched a mob carry a stuffed Trump through the streets hanging on a cross.
I find it difficult to explain what it feels like to watch that level of hatred being displayed on TV screens all over the world while standing right next to the person at whom the hatred is being directed. And yet the President was the calm in the eye of the storm. He watched the segment casually but intently, without his usual running commentary. And when it concluded, he turned to me without seeming to have been affected negatively in any way and asked—à la President Jed Bartlet in The West Wing—“What’s next?”
I learned something important from the President that day—something that I have tried to make a core operating principle in my life: you have to make peace with being misunderstood.
Disruption always brings out critics. Some of them will be well-meaning critics who have a different perspective or opinion. Others will be not-so-well-meaning critics with ulterior, selfish motives. Either way, the longer you’re willing to be misunderstood, the bigger, more disruptive change you can deliver. I often feel an insatiable desire to be understood, to explain myself. Even as I write these words, I cringe at the thought of people misjudging my motives. I marveled at Trump’s willingness to endure a seemingly limitless amount of criticism and never waver. He was fearless—the rarest of traits among politicians. If he believed he was doing the right thing, he was willing to weather any storm.
And yet Trump always remained a walking contradiction. He was the bravest person I’d ever seen in the face of public scrutiny, but resented relatively mild critiques from his aides. He was arguably the toughest political combatant in modern American history, but often shied away from making much-needed staff changes that would cause conflict in private. He was an idealist—a true believer in his populist, nationalist worldview—but pragmatically cut deals with anyone willing to make an interesting offer. He was less afraid to do the right thing—the difficult thing—than anyone I’d ever met, but sometimes seemed to lack the guiding principles that could lead him to what exactly the “right thing” was.
As winter descended on Washington, the President’s self-imposed Christmas deadline was fast approaching and our operation had a lot of moving pieces. Among the most important of those moving pieces was Ivanka.
The press emptied countless barrels of ink analyzing the role of the First Daughter—and she was the first in every sense of the word, even though the President had other children and a second female child. To many, her appointment to the White House staff reeked of nepotism. What does she know about running a country? When she briefly filled the President’s seat among world leaders at the G-20 summit, the internet outrage machine kicked into high gear. UNELECTED, UNQUALIFIED, a Washington Post headline noted. Her ceremonial duties and their family’s occasional vacations also earned them some additional critics inside the West Wing who accused them of “playing government.” Kellyanne was predictably resentful of both Ivanka’s and Jared’s immovable status in Trump’s orbit. And Bannon used to occasionally rant about her “going into Daddy’s office and putting her head down on his desk” to try to get what she wanted.
In fairness, as she would herself acknowledge, Ivanka had very little experience in politics and government. And at times I sensed a fair amount of naïveté, which, on the other hand, could have been explained away as an absence of D.C. cynicism. After all, in many instances I could easily be accused of being naïve, too. An unprecedented number of us, in fact, had come into government from the private sector, having experienced success at various scales, and we were applying our skills to new challenges, in a new setting.
The Washington establishment from both parties wants the country to think “governing” is some kind of superhuman skill that the rest of us mere mortals could never understand. During my time in D.C., I met kings, conversed with princes, dined with diplomats, and shook hands with some of the wealthiest people in human history. In every one of those experiences, even when I walked away impressed, I harbored the same nagging feeling: they’re not any smarter than me—or you, or most people that I hang out with or work alongside. This experience is both horrifying and liberating—realizing that, as Apple founder Steve Jobs once said, “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people who were no smarter than you.”
Ivanka was and is a valuable asset to the President for a simple reason: he trusts her. This was the kind of trust John F. Kennedy had in his brother, Bobby, when he was nominated for Attorney General. Or Bill and Hillary had in Chelsea when they let her run a two-hundred-million-dollar enterprise, the Clinton Foundation. He wasn’t acquiescing to her every wish, especially on policy issues. Quite the opposite, in fact. But at the very least she eased his moods and made him happy. And for a mercurial leader like Trump, that’s not nothing. No one wants the alternative.
In my experience, Ivanka also happened to be one of the most persuasive surrogates the President had, both in terms of selling his agenda to the public and in twisting the arms of wavering members of Congress. On tax reform, both of those talents proved valuable.
The main issue we were facing at the time was that the President was preparing to spend almost two weeks in Asia. There was nothing we could do about the fact that this long-scheduled trip was happening right in the middle of the biggest legislative push of his young presidency. We had to be able to juggle both foreign and domestic affairs. While he was gone, we knew that Ivanka was one of the few people we could deploy to targeted districts and states around the country and generate enough news coverage that it would have a real impact. So we mapped out an aggressive travel schedule that would send her into the suburban areas where she was extraordinarily popular.
Tony and I then went into the Chief’s office to get his sign-off on the plan, which included extensive travel for both Cabinet secretaries and Ivanka. “Fine,” he said. “But Ivanka needs to understand that this isn’t just one of her pet projects. And she needs to stay in her lane and not start talking about whatever else it is that she likes to say in these interviews.”
Ummmm, okay?
We didn’t react to this comment—we both considered Ivanka a friend, in addition to being our colleague—but it told us all we needed to know about how Kelly regarded her and viewed her role in the West Wing. The look he had on his face while talking about her made it seem like there was a dead skunk somewhere in the room. His tone was dripping with contempt. And we weren’t even close with the Chief; there’s no telling what he was saying to his confidants.
In any event, Ivanka was all-in and traversed the country on commercial flights and trains, surrounded by her Secret Service detail, selling the tax bill in any venue she could. She and Secretary Mnuchin also traveled together to an event at the Reagan Library in California, invoking the memory of the last time a Republican-led tax cut triggered an economic boom.
In addition to her public sales role, Ivanka worked behind the scenes to leverage the personal relationships she had developed with some of the Republican senators who were the most at odds with her father. This group included moderate Susan Collins of Maine and Bob Corker of Tennessee, a prickly senator who had called the Trump White House an “adult day-care center.”
Ivanka and Jared hosted them and other senators for dinner at their opulent eighty-two-hundred-square-foot home in Kalorama, and she spoke to them frequently, both in their Capitol Hill offices and on the phone. She also deployed to high-tax states—mostly in the Northeast—where the tax bill was particularly controversial because it eliminated federal deductions for state and local taxes.
In early December, we experienced a major setback when Corker announced he would not support the bill. This set off a mad scramble to address his concerns, with Ivanka as the tip of the spear. We might be able to pass the bill without him, but in a Senate that had only fifty-two Republicans, that would be cutting it way too close.
In the second week of December, while he was walking up the West Wing driveway, Tony Sayegh’s phone rang. It was Ivanka.
Tony stopped walking, leaned up against the fence in front of the West Wing, and answered the call. This was a somewhat risky move. The driveway on the North Lawn is one of the few areas of the White House where press are allowed to roam freely, back and forth between the press room and the tents where they record their TV hits with the White House residence in the background. But he was immediately engrossed in whatever Ivanka was saying and oblivious to whatever might be happening around him.
Suddenly, Tony bit his bottom lip and pumped his right fist in the air. Covering the phone with one hand, he said the words that very likely meant we were going to get the bill across the finish line: “Corker’s a yes.” Ivanka—along with Secretary Mnuchin spending a great deal of time walking him through the numbers—had won him over.
Hanging up the phone with Ivanka, Tony rushed across the street to the Treasury Department, where Mnuchin was taking pictures with staff at their annual holiday party. He whispered the news in his ear, and Mnuchin slowly pulled back to look him in the eye. He knew victory was within reach. In the end, lawmakers in every district Ivanka targeted voted in favor of the bill, a fact that contradicted blanket criticisms of her time in the White House as being substance free.
On December 13, with less than two weeks to go before the Christmas deadline, we were on the one-yard line and Trump was about to deliver his final speech on tax reform—his “closing argument,” as we were framing it to reporters.
It was a cold, crisp Wednesday afternoon, and Tony and I were waiting for Trump in the State Dining Room. This was the second-largest room on the State Floor of the White House and one of my personal favorites because it had been Thomas Jefferson’s primary office. As we waited, I looked over to the southwest corner of the room, where Jefferson’s desk once sat. I could almost picture my favorite Founder reading dispatches from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, or weighing whether to approve Napoleon’s offer to sell the Louisiana Territory. After being in the White House for ten months, it wasn’t often anymore that I was cognizant of the history I was living. This was different. The Reagan tax cuts, and the subsequent economic explosion, were the stuff of legend in Republican circles. I couldn’t help but wonder if the Trump tax cuts would be that for the next generation.
My phone vibrated in my pocket—“Unknown,” the screen said. This almost always meant a White House number; some senior staff maintained the caller ID screening function for their outgoing calls. Sure enough, it was Marc Short, the Director of Legislative Affairs.
“Are you briefing the President for this event?” he asked. I was. “Okay, you should consider updating the remarks, because we’ve got a deal. The bill is going to pass. He should announce it first, before anyone on the Hill can.”
Short and his team had spent every waking moment for the past five months trying to get this bill passed, and they’d just had the final breakthrough they had been working toward.
I hung up and looked over at Tony, who was pacing nervously while reading a copy of the President’s prepared remarks. Through an open door I heard three buzzes, signaling that the President was about to get on his private elevator and come up to where we were. My heart rate picked up slightly.
In the thirty seconds between that moment and the President’s walking in the room, I filled Tony in and he identified the key line in the speech that needed tweaking: “As we speak, Congress is putting the finishing touches on a plan” needed to be changed to “Congress has reached an agreement on tax legislation.…”
The President glided into the room as Tony marked through the old line and scribbled in the updated language. He was wearing a cobalt-blue tie with tiny circle accents that created a subtle, textured look. I noticed his hair right away. Maybe it was because of all the filming sessions I had been in with him, or the handful of times I had helped tame stray hairs trying to fly away, but I noticed he was having a good hair day. The left-to-right swoop was hugging close to his head. On top of that, he was in a cheerful mood. He shook my hand—which wasn’t typical for these briefings—and gave me a swift smack on my left arm with his other hand.
“What’ve we got, guys?” he said, looking back and forth between Tony and me.
“Mr. President, this is going to be the speech everyone remembers about the tax bill,” I began. “There are two things you will be saying for the first time today. Number one, the IRS has confirmed that if this bill is enacted before Christmas, people will start seeing a change in their paychecks beginning in February.”
The President nodded his head. This was something the Treasury team had pushed hard for, and he was pleased.
“That’s going to come late in your remarks,” I continued. “But before that, right near the top, you’re going to be the first to announce that Congress has reached an agreement on the final bill. It’s going to pass.”
Tony handed him his copy of the remarks with the updated language, and Trump squinted to read Tony’s chicken-scratch handwriting.
“You okay with this?” I asked.
He nodded his approval, and I ran off to have the sentence updated in the teleprompter.
Minutes later, Trump stepped up to the podium centered between four towering white marble columns. To his left and right were a dozen perfectly triangular Christmas trees, covered in silver tinsel and faux white snow. Directly behind him, the door leading into the Blue Room was left open so the official White House Christmas tree could be seen inside.
As he began speaking, I ducked into the White House Usher’s office to see what it looked like on their small flat-screen television monitor. People all over the country must have thought the President was delivering his remarks from some kind of winter wonderland. Tax cuts for Christmas. It was perfect. General Kelly, who was watching as well, agreed. “This is great staging,” he said. “Very well done.”
I walked back out to the Cross Hall to watch from the President’s left, just out of sight of the cameras. It was the most exciting moment of my entire time in the White House, but it was accompanied by an unexpected—and frankly, unexplainable—air of melancholy.
Looking back, I still can’t exactly put my finger on it. I slowly surveyed the scene I was standing in—one that very few kids from Alabama will ever get to witness—and I distinctly remember thinking to myself that I might never be a part of something of this magnitude ever again. It’s a strange thing to ponder the very real possibility that your professional career has peaked in your early thirties.
And just that quickly it was over. The event was finished and the President was about to walk by me. As he stepped back onto the elevator, he flashed a thumbs-up at me before the doors slid shut.
The following day, The New York Times’s front page was a work of art. The picture above the fold was of the President delivering remarks from our makeshift winter wonderland, with the all-caps headline G.O.P. AGREES ON FINAL TAX BILL.
The President loved it.
“This is spectacular,” he said. “We need to get this framed. Put it in a nice gold one.” Then he had another thought. “In fact, any good articles you see—on anything, not just the taxes, on anything—go ahead and get them framed and we’ll put them here and there. People like that.”
By people, I’m pretty sure he meant himself.
On December 22, three days before our deadline, Trump signed into law one of the largest tax cuts in American history. After he signed the bill, I walked back to my desk and noticed there was a newspaper sitting on top of my computer keyboard. It was the iconic New York Times front page the President loved so much. And just to the left of the picture, written in all-caps with a black Sharpie, was the following inscription:
CLIFF, GREAT JOB! THANKS - DONALD J. TRUMP
If this was indeed the pinnacle, I’d take it.
“Is Melania already here?” Those were the first words out of the President’s mouth when he stepped off the elevator on the State Floor of the White House. “Yes, sir,” I replied as we walked out of the elevator vestibule into the Cross Hall. “She’s waiting for you in the Blue Room.”
The atmosphere in the White House at Christmastime is kind of like Buddy the Elf being at the North Pole—the magic of the holidays is magnified tenfold. On the ground floor, decorators had positioned dozens of pots full of leafless tree branches, all painted stark white. It created an effect I referred to as “Jack Frost’s Tunnel,” which I traversed every day walking to and from work. Just down the hall on the ground floor of the residence, President Reagan’s china was set up as if for a family Christmas dinner in the China Room. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1866 edition of A Christmas Carol was displayed in the Library. Upstairs on the State Floor, a 350-pound gingerbread house was sitting in the State Dining Room. A giant nativity scene was displayed in the East Room below the famous painting of George Washington, the one Dolley Madison saved when the British burned down the house during the War of 1812. Lining the Cross Hall were about a dozen frosted Christmas trees, all decked out in thousands of white lights and gleaming silver tinsel. In total, fifty-three Christmas trees throughout the executive residence were adorned with twelve thousand ornaments. Seventy-one wreaths were positioned throughout the White House complex. The whole place radiated with the soft glow of over eighteen thousand feet of Christmas lights.
President Trump was feeling the spirit—humming bits of Christmas carols and remarking on the decorations—although there were days when his ceremonial duties almost sucked it out of him. A few days before, my wife, Megan, and I had stood in line to have our picture taken with him and the First Lady at the staff Christmas party. When one of the First Lady’s aides saw us, she warned that his mood had turned sour about an hour before. “Watch out,” she said with a smirk. “He’s had about all he can stand, but the line just keeps going and going.” Thankfully, his eyes lit up when he saw me. “Oh, honey, it’s my Cliff,” he said to the First Lady. “Oh, my,” he said as his eyes shifted to Megan. It was the first time they had met. “Cliff, I knew there was a reason I respected you so much!” We all laughed and the President flashed his famous thumbs-up as the photographer snapped our picture.
Today he had walked over from the West Wing to perform another one of his ceremonial duties: recording a Christmas video message to the nation. Such recording sessions were far from his favorite task, but he was looking forward to this one because he and Mrs. Trump were doing it together.
As we breezed through the Red Room, he straightened his tie and looked down to make sure his flag lapel pin was perfectly positioned. Walking into the Blue Room, directly in front of us stood the centerpiece of all the immaculate decorations: the official White House Christmas tree. The enormous evergreen from Wisconsin stretched all the way to the ceiling and was decorated with glass ornaments depicting the seal of each U.S. state. But none of that mattered to the President, because the only thing he cared to see at that moment was his wife.
“Hey, baby,” he said as he walked over and kissed her on the cheek. “Are we ready to do some recording?” She looked stunning in a red lace dress that couldn’t have fit better if she had been born wearing it. “No one’s even going to be paying attention to me in this video!” the President said to the crew. “Do we agree, guys, no one’s even going to know that I’m here!” He leaned over and nudged the First Lady with his shoulder and she smiled shyly.
She was a bit nervous ahead of video recordings and public appearances in which she would speak. She occasionally expressed concerns that her accent was too strong and made her hard to understand. So she practiced relentlessly for any speaking role she needed to play. This stood in stark contrast to her gregarious husband, of course, who never met a crowd he didn’t want to entertain and loved nothing more than shooting from the hip. But when the First Lady was around, she was always the focus of his attention.
As the recording session began, he was clearly trying to impress her. He was focused. He wanted to nail his lines on the first take. When it was her turn to speak and she’d make a mistake, he’d encourage her. “You sound like you’re from New York, honey,” he said. “Can’t even tell you have an accent.”
Her Secret Service code name was “Muse,” which fit with the way the President viewed her.
The President was affectionate with all of his family. He’d beam with pride in Ivanka any time he’d introduce her to guests at the White House. “She gets so much better coverage than I do,” he’d laugh. He’d praise Don Jr.’s skills as a retail politician—“The base loves him”—even though practically speaking he was rarely involved in the governing decisions like Ivanka was. And one day, in a scramble through the ground floor of the residence on the way to board Marine One on the South Lawn, the entire entourage screeched to a halt when the President spotted one of his grandchildren. He rushed over, swept him up in his arms, and kissed him on the forehead, just like any doting grandfather would, before rushing off to the chopper.
These were helpful reminders that as abnormal as the Trump administration—and the President himself—often seemed, he could be normal, too. At least relatively normal. And he had a reason for his festive mood. Just as the President had vowed, he got his tax cuts for Christmas.
As our first year in the White House came to an end, I thought back over everything that had happened. In addition to slashing taxes for most American families and businesses, the tax bill repealed Obamacare’s individual mandate, delivering on a key Republican promise even though members of Congress couldn’t get it done earlier in the year. The bill also opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for energy exploration, something Republicans had tried and failed to accomplish for nearly forty years. After pledging to roll back two government regulations for every new one created, the actual ratio ended up being about 22–1. As a result, unemployment plummeted among every demographic and the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit record highs nearly seventy times, creating over six trillion dollars in new wealth.
Justice Neil Gorsuch was confirmed to a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court and Trump set a record for first-year judicial appointments to federal appellate courts, moving the federal judiciary to the right for a generation.
ISIS’s once-expanding caliphate was almost completely eradicated after Trump approved Mattis’s plan to move from “attrition tactics to annihilation tactics.” He enforced the “red line” in Syria that Obama hadn’t. He moved the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, making good on a pledge that Clinton, Bush, and Obama had each abandoned.
He kept promise after promise, from withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, to cracking down on illegal immigration, to leading a resurgence of the U.S. economy. But the greatest accomplishment of all may have been revitalizing what he called “the American Spirit.” Manufacturing confidence was at an all-time record high, and optimism among consumers and businesses had skyrocketed.
Reading this, you may think that some, or much, or perhaps almost all of Trump’s first-year policies were bad. But in spite of all of the mayhem, it’s hard to deny that he was getting things—even some big things—done. And for a wide swath of the country, it was more than they ever thought possible. They may have bristled at the tweets. They may not have always liked the methods. They probably felt like the White House had turned into some kind of bizarre reality television show. And in this, of course, they wouldn’t be entirely off base. But they also probably had more money in their bank accounts. Their 401(k)s were going through the roof. Their wages were rising. And we were experiencing a time of relative peace around the globe, even if not in the West Wing.
I wasn’t proud of everything the President had done, said, or tweeted. I wasn’t always proud of the way I had conducted myself, either. It’s impossible to deny how absolutely out of control the White House staff—again, myself included—was at times. But I was proud of what we had somehow accomplished, often in spite of ourselves. I was reminded again of Kellyanne’s line from the darkest moments of the campaign: “There’s a difference … between what offends you and what affects you.” I truly believe we were affecting people’s lives in a positive way. And I wanted to keep going.