By the third week of January 2018, the West Wing was finally settling into a post-holiday routine. After the health-care failure and tax reform success of 2017, our second-year legislative agenda was shaping up to be decidedly less ambitious. For Trump, this just meant looking for more opportunities to take executive actions wherever he felt inclined. During his first year in office, nothing made him happier than slashing executive branch regulations on business. He rolled back the most in history. In his second year, trade wars were his new favorite pastime.
On the afternoon of January 23, 2018, Trump was in a great mood after slapping tariffs on imported residential washing machines and solar products, something he had been wanting to do for a long time. But when Kellyanne Conway and I walked into the Oval Office that afternoon, we were coming to discuss another issue that needed additional attention: the opioid crisis.
Over two million Americans were suffering from an addiction to opioids, which were now killing more people on an annual basis than car accidents. Trump had campaigned on doing something about this epidemic, which he had already declared a national health emergency. Kellyanne was the White House’s point person on opioids—the rare occasion when she had a defined responsibility—and she was pushing for a massive public affairs campaign to raise awareness.
“We’re creating a website,” Kellyanne told the President, “and the centerpiece of it will be a video of you encouraging people to submit their personal stories about how the crisis has affected them, their family, or their friends.”
Trump thought about this concept for a moment, and then shook his head. “This isn’t going to work,” he said. “Me telling people to sign up on a website isn’t going to do anything.”
Kellyanne defended the idea, noting that it was a small part of a much bigger plan, but Trump was unmoved. He liked the idea of doing videos, but he had something much different in mind.
“We need to scare kids so much that they will never touch a single drug in their entire life,” he began, leaning back and rocking slowly. “What about ads? Can’t we make ads? I want to make ads. Just give this to Cliff and let him make the most horrifying ads you’ve ever seen. Could you do that?”
He looked at me and I just nodded. Sure, I mean, yeah, I could do that.
“No, I mean it,” he said, suddenly sitting up straight with a scowl across his face. “We need people dying in a ditch. I want bodies stacked on top of bodies.”
Whoa, that escalated quickly.
“Do it like they did with cigarettes,” he continued. “They had body bags piled all over the streets and ugly people with giant holes in their faces and necks.”
He leaned back in his chair again, like a confident attorney resting his case.
“Next thing you know, the kids don’t want to be ‘cool’ and smoke anymore,” he concluded. “If we don’t do that, then I don’t even know what we’re doing this for.”
The President was attuned to how the public reacted viscerally to certain images. His rhetoric often conjured up terrifying pictures of violent gang members, terrorists—and even scheming, biting snakes. The media recoiled at his appeals to the country’s basest instincts, but he was talking to Middle America the way that Middle America talked. And if there was any issue Middle America was struggling with, it was opioids.
He begrudgingly walked with me over to the residence to record the toned-down video Kellyanne was asking for, and he spent most of the walk railing to me about how drug kingpins should get the death penalty because “they’re killing way more people than one guy with a knife.” We would have to come back to this conversation later, though, because the White House was about to descend into a crisis of our own.
That evening, I got a phone call from a White House reporter working at one of the country’s largest newspapers. He had heard something so outrageous he didn’t believe it was true. But it was also salacious enough that he felt like he had to ask around anyway.
“So, have you heard anything disturbing about Rob Porter?”
Porter was the White House Staff Secretary and may have been second only to the Chief of Staff in terms of day-to-day proximity to the President. Every piece of paper the President saw was supposed to first go through Porter’s office. In a famously non-process-oriented White House, Porter viewed his operation as the thin line between controlled chaos and total anarchy. Senior aides sometimes griped that Porter was exceeding his mandate and becoming too overbearing. But everyone would concede that he was highly competent, and his team was one of the few in the building that had succeeded in developing some semblance of structure.
By all outward appearances, Porter was “central casting,” to borrow Trump’s favorite phrase. He was a clean-cut guy from a prominent Mormon family. His father had been a senior aide to President George H. W. Bush before becoming a professor at Harvard. His mom had been a faculty dean at Harvard prior to passing away in May 2017. Porter himself had done a two-year stint as a Mormon missionary in London between earning two degrees from Harvard and one from Oxford. He was a blue blood—a card-carrying member of the Ivy League elite. His hair was always gelled and crisply parted from left to right.
Handsome, Harvard, Oxford. Elite. There weren’t any more bells you could ring to receive star status from the President.
From the perspective of a coworker who didn’t know anything about Porter’s personal life, like me, he seemed like the most buttoned-up, low-key player in a White House full of oversized characters. But that was far from what the reporter was hearing.
“Look, man, I have no idea if this is true,” he said, hesitating. “In fact, I feel weird even saying it because it just seems like a nasty rumor.”
“Spit it out, dude,” I said, jokingly. “It’s Porter—it can’t be that bad.”
“Well, actually, it is—at least what I’ve been told,” he replied, clearing his throat. “Here’s the thing: I’ve been told that Porter abused his ex-wives, and that’s why they both divorced him. I was also told that this abuse popped up on his background check, so he hasn’t been able to get a full security clearance.”
My immediate reaction was, “Whoa, man. Definitely didn’t expect you to say that. I didn’t even know Rob had ever been married.”
I told the reporter off the record that it all sounded really far-fetched—the kind of rumor that could only be dreamt up by the demented minds of D.C. political operatives. “But more than that,” I said, “how could the guy do that job without a clearance? I mean, I don’t think they’d let someone like that work in the White House at all, much less that close to the President. It just doesn’t sound plausible.”
He agreed. “That’s what I thought, too. It’s probably not true. But the weird thing is that I trust the source I heard it from. Like, normally what they tell me turns out to be legit.”
The D.C. rumor mill can be like a cutthroat version of the old children’s game of “telephone”—the one where the first kid whispers something to the second, who whispers it to the third, and so on until it reaches the end of the line. The last kid then says the statement as he heard it, and everyone bursts out laughing because it’s unrecognizable from its original form. When I got off the phone with the reporter, that’s what I assumed was going on.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, another Trump ally was facing much more public accusations of his own. Billionaire casino mogul Steve Wynn was the focus of a shocking Wall Street Journal exposé detailing “a decades-long pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Wynn” that included accusations of “pressuring employees to perform sex acts.” Wynn was a former casino-business rival of Trump’s, but the President considered him a good friend. And since Trump had taken office, Wynn had become the Republican National Committee’s finance chairman.
The Wynn story broke in the midst of a national movement exposing powerful men for abusing their positions, especially in the workplace, to commit acts of sexual harassment and assault. Activists encouraged other women to share such stories online using the hashtag #MeToo.
A few days after the Wynn story came to light, Trump mentioned it to a handful of aides lingering in the Oval after an event. “You see this thing with Wynn?” he asked. We all had, of course. “Who knows, maybe he was out there forcing women into all kinds of stuff. If he did, well, then, that’s that. But I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve got friends—many friends, good guys, you would know them—and they’re scared to death about this ‘Me Too,’ as they’re calling it.” As was by now a common occurrence, the President was citing friends he would never name as validators of what he believed. In this case, I had no doubt he was reflecting genuine concerns. “There was a time in America when you were innocent until proven guilty. Now all it takes is for one anonymous person to say one disgusting thing and you’re finished.” He added, “Well, unless you pay them a fortune. Then when the lawyers find out you’re paying out, they find three or four more women to come after you. It’s a dirty business.” He didn’t mention Stormy Daniels, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the name crossed a few more minds in the room than my own.
Working himself up, the President continued, “So I’m telling you, this ‘Me Too’ thing might backfire, if you want to know the truth. Because now women aren’t getting the opportunities sometimes because the men are scared to death they’re gonna be marks. It’s a shame. No one will say it, but it’s true.” Trump would later express these sentiments publicly and acknowledge that his views were heavily influenced by his personal experiences with such allegations. But at the time we were glad he was just venting about it privately.
The Wynn story and my day-to-day work in the West Wing had put out of my mind the reporter’s phone call about Rob Porter. But not for long, because on February 1, the day after Trump’s #MeToo riff in the Oval, news broke publicly that Porter and Hope Hicks were dating. The Daily Mail, a U.K.-based tabloid that also dabbled in political coverage, released paparazzi-style photos of Porter and Hicks “canoodling” and “kissing in the back seat of a cab.” Their relationship was known to a small group of people in the White House, but would now be the talk of D.C., a famously chatty town, even when there aren’t pictures of a model involved.
I was bummed for Hope. Even though there wasn’t anything scandalous about two single adults going out on a date, no one wants to be clandestinely photographed and then wake up to find the pictures all over the internet. But she was more annoyed than angry, rolling her eyes at the office the next morning and shrugging it off. What can ya do, ya know?
But not long after the tabloid spread hit the internet, I got a call from another reporter. She described in gut-wrenching detail a story of Porter’s past domestic abuse. The story, she explained, had been relayed to her by a “somewhat trustworthy source,” but she had not yet seen any tangible proof that it was true or had any success getting it confirmed.
For a second time I dismissed the rumors as absurd, telling the reporter that it sounded like someone had an ax to grind. At this point, though, I was wrestling with what to do. Hope was plenty tough enough to take care of herself, but I felt a sense of loyalty—even affection—for her and everyone else with whom I’d been in a foxhole for well over a year now. I thought she should at least know what people were saying. I didn’t believe any of it, so I wasn’t concerned for her well-being as much as I just wanted to alert her that someone clearly had it out for Rob, and maybe her, too.
Sitting in a Cheesecake Factory in suburban D.C., I finally decided to call Josh Raffel. Josh was a former top-tier PR executive who had handled both the Trump and Kushner accounts for his firm. Like Kushner, and an earlier version of Trump himself, he had been a Democrat. He had supported Hillary Clinton, even donating to her campaign less than a month before Election Day. But once he agreed to enter the White House, no one was more fierce in his defense of the President, the White House, or the staff. His close relationship with many of the so-called Trump loyalists, myself included, was definitive proof in my mind that our biggest problem with so many of the former RNC aides was not their past lapses in loyalty, it was that they were awful at their jobs. Josh, on the other hand, was far and away the most experienced crisis communications manager in the administration, which earned him the unenviable task of handling some of the most difficult incoming stories. Ivanka—and all of us, really—almost always followed his guidance. He also happened to be Hope’s closest friend. I thought something like this would be better received coming from him.
Two reporters, I explained, had called with the same salacious story. Even they agreed that it seemed far-fetched. I had no idea if there was any truth to it and no sense of where it was coming from.
“Are they working on stories or just fishing?” he asked. I told him I thought they were just fishing, for now, and that I’d swatted down the gossip as best I could.
The following Monday morning, I was sitting at my desk in the West Wing press office when Porter came in. He walked across the room with purpose, looking me squarely in the eyes, reached over the computer screen, and held out his hand. “Thank you,” he said quietly, not adding any further explanation. I reached up and shook his hand and gave him a quick, downward head nod as if to say, Of course, this is what teammates do.
There was always foot traffic coming through the West Wing press office—staff, reporters, visitors—but by this point I could tell whenever there was a crisis situation unfolding. The routine of preparing Sarah for the press briefing was interrupted. Standing meetings were canceled without explanation. Senior press aides rushed in and out of Sarah’s office without knocking. And the following evening, on February 6, 2018, we were in comms crisis mode again. I watched my press colleagues like they were trapped inside of a snow globe. Someone had shaken it up and everything was swirling around them.
I was on the outside looking in, sitting comfortably at my desk, eating green apple slices and peanut butter and planning out some events the President would be traveling for in the coming months. Then I saw a flustered Rob Porter dart into Sarah’s office and quickly close the door behind him.
Well, that’s not normal, I thought. Could this be about…?
Shortly after 7 P.M., the Daily Mail published on-the-record accounts from Porter’s two ex-wives, both claiming that he had abused them. The article included detailed descriptions and documentation to support the accusations.
“He was verbally, emotionally and physically abusive and that is why I left,” said Porter’s first wife, Colbie Holderness. His second wife, Jennifer Willoughby, claimed “Porter pulled her naked from the shower by the shoulders and yelled at her.” Both wives described unpredictable fits of rage. They called him “oppressive,” and Willoughby produced a protective order she had obtained when Porter “punched in the glass” on her front door after she repeatedly asked him to leave.
I suddenly remembered I had once actually seen a flash of Porter’s anger—when he had berated Peter Navarro, accusing him of leaking to the press. When Navarro tried to defend himself, Porter began shouting.
“You’re a f—ing liar, Peter! You’re a f—ing liar and everyone knows it!” Tiny strands of his meticulously managed hair broke away from the pack as his head jerked around. A vein bulged on his temple as the blood rushed to his face.
Cooler heads ultimately prevailed, and Porter called me down to his office later that day to apologize for his “unprofessional behavior.” I laughed it off, told him not to worry about it. At that time it seemed to be an isolated incident in a tense working environment. What these women were alleging went well beyond that.
In the face of this sensational news, Porter was indignant. “I will not comment about these matters, beyond stating that many of these allegations are slanderous and simply false,” he told the Daily Mail.
Many? Not all? Yikes.
Everyone in the Trump White House had been buffeted by so many outrageous news stories and allegations—a fair number of them false or only partially true—that the temptation was to deny everything first and revise as needed. The President seemed to do that himself with some regularity. Also, since Porter was personally well-liked among most of the senior staff, they seemed to readily dismiss such awful allegations and to offer Rob their support without hesitation.
“Rob Porter is a man of true integrity and honor, and I can’t say enough good things about him,” General Kelly said in an on-the-record statement. “He is a friend, a confidant, and a trusted professional. I am proud to serve alongside him.”
Sarah backed Porter up, too. “I have worked directly with Rob Porter nearly every day for the last year and the person I know is someone of the highest integrity and exemplary character.”
I wasn’t sure if Porter had lied to Kelly and Sarah and they were acting on false information, or if they even truly believed what they were saying. I would soon learn the answer, and it wasn’t the same for both of them.
I was not high-profile enough for my support to have mattered, but I was nonetheless relieved I wasn’t asked to give it. No one wants to believe that a person they work with could have a dark side hidden just beneath their public persona. Then again, not all monsters look the part. In any event, I didn’t know Rob well enough to have an opinion on whether he was capable of what he was being accused of. I didn’t want to believe it—I had dismissed the rumors early on—but these accusations sure seemed credible to me. The allegations, Porter’s denial, and questions about his security clearance were the top story lines on cable news that evening. But the story didn’t really explode until late that night—at 12:53 A.M.—when Ryan Grim, a reporter for The Intercept, tweeted photos provided by Porter’s first wife, showing her with a black eye that she claimed Porter had given her.
Lying in bed, unable to sleep and scrolling through Twitter, I sat up when I saw the picture, startling our dog, who had been sleeping peacefully between Megan and me. The image was shocking. Porter’s then-wife was looking straight into the camera, her big brown eyes defiant, not betraying the pain she must be feeling from the crescent-shaped, purple-and-light-brown bruise swelling beneath her right eye.
Some of Porter’s closest friends in the White House began advising him that it was time to resign. Notably, however, General Kelly was not among them. “You should stay and fight,” he kept saying. The Chief seemed to be letting his personal relationship with Porter cloud his judgment. But I could also see why he found that impulse tempting. He viewed Porter as a sober, trustworthy deputy in a White House full of flighty, naïve, and sometimes nefarious characters.
However, what Kelly seemed to be forgetting in the moment was that our job as White House aides was to always put the President’s interests first. How did it serve the President to insist on keeping a credibly accused wife beater on staff? We didn’t have to go out of our way to kick the guy while he was down, but surely he couldn’t be allowed to stick around and drag the entire White House down with him. This was my view, but I didn’t share it with the President. That would have been veering too far out of my lane, a lesson I’d tried to learn from my earlier mistakes. Kelly had insisted on day one that the staff was his responsibility now. These decisions were on him.
The Chief seemed willing to keep propping Porter up, but Porter himself wasn’t cooperating. Perhaps in deference to the President, perhaps because he thought there might be more coming, perhaps out of guilt, he had come to the decision that it was time for him to step down. To make this announcement, the press team decided to bring in four reporters from top-tier news outlets. Each of them was chasing the story that Porter was on the brink of resigning. The idea was to allow him to tell his side of the story in his own words. So the following morning, Mike Bender from The Wall Street Journal, Josh Dawsey from The Washington Post, Maggie Haberman from The New York Times, and Jonathan Swan from Axios were all invited into the Press Secretary’s office.
When they walked in, Porter was there waiting for them. Haberman, Swan, and Dawsey sat down on the couch beneath a shelving unit that held pictures of Sanders’s family and a bottle of “Warrior Whiskey.” She displayed the bottle as a show of support for veterans—the company was founded by a Navy SEAL—but on days like this I’m sure she was tempted to crack it open. Bender sat down in a chair adjacent to the couch, across from Porter, and Sanders and Raffel laid out the ground rules. Porter would share his story—the “real” story—off the record. Then the press staff would provide background information and quotes they could use for their stories.
With the formalities out of the way, Porter was given the floor to explain himself. The stakes were high. These were four of the most influential journalists in Washington. If Porter could lay out a convincing case that he was not the terrible person he was being portrayed as, it wouldn’t save his job but could have a significant impact on his future prospects. He eased into the conversation, thanking the reporters for coming. He spoke methodically, as if each word needed to be precise and measured. He wasn’t a perfect person, he explained slowly. He had endured two failed marriages and bore much of the blame for their failures. As reported, he had indeed called his wife a “f—ing b—” on their honeymoon. He’d lashed out during verbal arguments. But he’d never been physically abusive.
Everyone in the room listened in complete silence. Rob’s body language made it seem like it was physically painful for him to concede that he had been verbally abusive. But he must have thought that admitting he had been a less-than-ideal husband might add credibility to his other denials. He haltingly continued on.
The allegations were part of a coordinated smear campaign, he intoned. The forces arrayed against him included disgruntled people in his personal life as well as political foes who were angry he was in the White House and they weren’t. While he didn’t name these people to the reporters, behind the scenes he had been much more direct in his conspiracy theorizing. At the top of the list was a woman named Samantha Dravis, a senior staffer at the Environmental Protection Agency. She and Porter had dated. At one point they had even lived together. Now she was apparently—in his mind at least—a woman scorned.
The other name Porter brought up privately was Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s onetime campaign manager who still maintained a place in his orbit. At various points throughout Trump’s first year in office, Lewandowski had been rumored to be on the verge of joining the White House staff. It was always hard to tell if there was legitimacy to these rumors or if Corey was just spreading them himself—or perhaps both. But Corey was notorious in media circles for spreading information, sometimes with questionable validity, about various Trump World rivals. By all accounts, he jealously guarded his closeness to the President like a treasure, and there was no denying he held a special place in Trump’s heart. Corey was one of his originals, on board in the early days when most other people thought it was a fool’s errand. One thing that had not changed in the transition from Reince Priebus to John Kelly was that Corey undercut the Chief of Staff to the President just about every chance he got. They weren’t loyal, they weren’t competent, and—implied in all of the criticisms—they weren’t Corey. Porter, being a Kelly acolyte, believed he might be a Lewandowski target as well. Once again, it wasn’t entirely clear to me whether Porter’s theory had merit or if he was just straining for an explanation.
One of the reporters asked Porter to discuss the photo showing his bruised ex-wife. Porter dismissed it, explaining that he himself had taken the picture to document the results of an unfortunate little accident. Nothing, he claimed, was as it was being portrayed. It was all character assassination, plain and simple.
He was gathered before some of the sharpest reporters in D.C. But it didn’t take a genius to wonder what sort of “unfortunate” accident could cause a black eye. One of those present pressed him on that very question.
Porter hesitated for a moment, looking around as if to say, This is all off the record, right? Then he leaned in.
He and his wife were vacationing in Venice, Italy, celebrating a birthday, he explained. While shopping one afternoon, they had purchased a fancy Murano glass vase. Once they made it back to their hotel room, an argument ensued. His wife was so angry, he said, that she grabbed the vase and threatened to smash it on the floor. He tried to stop her. There was a tug of war over the vase, and in the struggle she somehow ended up with an unintentional black eye.
The reporters in the room must have been wondering, How could it have gotten so violent that it led to an “accidental” black eye?
There was more uneasy silence. Then a reporter asked another question. What about the other accusations, like the restraining order alleging he had punched through the window of his wife’s door?
They were living apart at the time, he said. He came to her house and approached the front door, which was wooden on the bottom half with nine glass panes at the top. He tapped on one of the windowpanes with his index finger, and somehow—inexplicably—his hand broke through the glass. He started bleeding and asked if he could come inside to bandage it up. She wouldn’t let him, so he left. She called the police to report the incident, which led to the report. He was uncertain if an actual restraining order ever went through.
As the conversation wound down, Porter made it clear that he had not been asked to resign. In fact, he had been encouraged to stay. But out of a sense of duty to the President and the White House, he said, he had decided to remove himself as a distraction. He would not be leaving immediately, but would participate in a smooth and orderly transition of the Staff Secretary’s office over the coming days and weeks. With that, Porter exited the room, leaving the small group of reporters and press staff to digest what they had just been told. To my knowledge, it was the first time anyone in the room—staff included—had heard Porter’s full, sensational explanation.
Nobody had to say a word because everyone was thinking the same thing anyway. That was … really quite something. And could he possibly expect any of us to believe this?
I was once again thankful that my job did not require me to publicly explain or defend, well, anything. Sarah Sanders’s job, unfortunately, did not afford her that luxury.
Sarah’s entire approach to the job was different from Sean Spicer’s. The first half of every press secretary’s day revolves around preparation for the afternoon press briefing. Sean would have upward of twenty-five staff arrayed around his office, throwing out topics and questions while he chewed and swallowed about thirty-five pieces of gum before lunch. These prep sessions were disorganized free-for-alls, frequently derailed by a combination of Sean’s lack of discipline and staffers spitballing random thoughts.
Sarah, by contrast, organized and shrank these sessions to just a handful of people: two of her deputies, Raj Shah and Hogan Gidley, research director Adam Kennedy, and National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton. Hope Hicks and I would come in and out at various times, and Josh Raffel was always there to offer advice during crises—like the Porter situation—but other staff only came in to brief on their areas of expertise. My primary role was to write the prepared remarks Sarah would read at the top of each briefing.
Once she was behind the podium, Sarah’s approach continued to diverge from Sean’s. His instinct was to always be confrontational. When the temperature was running hot, Sean would crank it up even higher. Sarah, on the other hand, wanted to turn the temperature down, to see cooler heads prevail. That’s not to say that she totally shied away from confrontation; she got into her fair share of Briefing Room squabbles. But she was more inclined than Sean was to deflect and disarm, rather than unload. She also set aside time in the office every day to do a quick Bible study. Just before the briefing, she would go into one of the smaller press offices with a devotional book, close the door, and not come out until she had spent time praying. This was her routine even—or perhaps especially—on the most chaotic and stressful days, like during the Porter crisis.
A couple of hours after the sit-down with the four reporters, Sarah took the podium in the White House Briefing Room, where Porter was the only thing reporters wanted to ask about.
“Rob has been effective in his role as Staff Secretary, and the President and Chief of Staff have had full confidence and trust in his abilities and his performance,” she said. “He is going to be leaving the White House. It won’t be immediate, but he is resigning from the White House, but is going to stay on to ensure that there’s a smooth transition moving forward.”
NBC’s Hallie Jackson was the first reporter called on to ask a question.
“Less than eighteen hours ago, the White House released several statements praising Rob Porter and his service,” she began. “Obviously, he’s somebody who’s very close with the President. So why would the President accept his resignation if the President thinks he did nothing wrong?” Sarah tiptoed around the question. Porter, she said, had made a “personal decision,” but was “not pressured” to resign. As the press briefing continued, The Intercept published an article revealing that both of Porter’s ex-wives had informed the FBI about his abusive past in January 2017, when they were both interviewed as part of his background check to receive a security clearance.
This is how a story gets legs. The press is always searching for the next angle to keep it alive. First there were the accusations. Then there were the images. Now there was evidence that the White House knew about these issues all along, but chose not to do anything—a potential cover-up. Had the White House been aware of these allegations all along? Who made the decision to let him stay, to give him a security clearance, to let him handle some of the U.S. government’s most sensitive documents?
Porter retreated to his low-ceilinged office in the basement of the West Wing. He sat in a near catatonic state, contemplating how these events would change the course of his life forever. Senior aides sought to console him. Maybe he wouldn’t resign after all, he said at times. I went down to see him at one point, but the door was closed.
“Pop back by later, or whenever is convenient,” one of the staffers told me. “He’ll be around for the next couple of weeks, so there’s no rush.”
But while Porter pondered his future downstairs, the political calculus in other parts of the building was changing rapidly.
General Kelly finally started to feel the heat, and he wanted out of this particular kitchen—the one in which he was all but single-handedly defending an accused wife beater. At 9:31 P.M. that night, he released a new statement. “I was shocked by the new allegations released today against Rob Porter,” he said. “There is no place for domestic violence in our society.… I accepted his resignation earlier today and will ensure a swift and orderly transition.”
The following morning, Porter still showed up to work. But the media pressure had grown so intense that he was told he had to quickly pack up his stuff and leave. There would be no “smooth transition” over the course of days or weeks. His time in the White House had come to an end. His final exit was rushed so that Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah could say during the next press briefing that Porter had already left the building for good.
But there were still countless unanswered questions. Foremost among them, the media relentlessly pressed for an explanation of what so-called new allegations had surfaced, causing General Kelly to withdraw his staunch support. “So you’re saying the initial reports where two former wives accused him of violence, both physical and verbal abuse, were not sufficient?” NBC’s Peter Alexander asked, noting that even after that Kelly had called Porter “a man of honor.”
The following morning, General Kelly convened a senior staff meeting in the Roosevelt Room and laid out a strict timeline he expected everyone to stick to. With a straight face, according to several people who were there, Kelly claimed that within forty minutes of learning about the abuse allegations against Porter, he had taken action to have him removed from his job. The staff, many of whom had been following the crisis closely throughout the week, knew this was patently false. Several senior aides felt like they were being told to lie—a more generous interpretation was they were being brought into a new, more convenient reality—and the meeting quickly leaked to The Washington Post.
To understand why this was an important moment in Kelly’s tenure, you have to understand the psychology of leaks. More often than not, such leaks “from inside the room” are a direct reflection of how the staff perceives the person leading the meeting. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, but people tended not to leak against people they respected, even when they disagreed with them. Factionalism certainly contributed to the leakiness of Priebus’s and Spicer’s tenure in the White House, but it was the fact that no one respected them that made leaking so widespread. Leaks with details from internal meetings had slowed significantly under Kelly’s leadership, and to my recollection his senior staff meeting had never leaked—until then.
Kelly’s standing with the staff plummeted. Even long after the Porter saga moved off the front pages, he never fully regained the respect he had once engendered. His morale-building turn defending the President in the White House Briefing Room was now a distant memory.
And no one was buying his story—inside or outside the administration. “[Kelly’s] version of events contradicts both the public record and accounts from numerous other White House officials in recent days as the Porter drama unfolded,” the Post reported. Then, to make matters worse, FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before Congress and publicly contradicted the White House’s timeline on when they became aware of issues in Porter’s background check. The FBI, Wray said, had submitted a partial report on Porter in March 2017, then completed their investigation in July 2017. So, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for at least seven months the White House—or at least somebody in the White House—had total visibility on the Porter allegations and supporting evidence, but did nothing.
Sarah Sanders was shell-shocked. Anyone could see that. Porter had been a close personal friend. She had been completely blindsided by the abuse allegations. Then she had defended him, without all the facts, based on their relationship and his word. She had been burned. And now she was being sent out to defend the White House and Kelly, whom she was uncertain was being truthful.
The Chief remained defiant, even as it looked like his mishandling of the Porter situation could cost him his job. He later told me that everything that had been reported about his actions during the Porter crisis had been wrong. He blamed it all on a miscommunication between his office and the press team. Specifically, he blamed Jim Carroll, one of his deputies who had been acting as a liaison between the Chief’s office and the crisis communications team. When he put his name on the original statement defending Porter, Kelly said he intended for it to make clear that Porter was resigning, only adding in as a side note that he had never witnessed Porter conduct himself unprofessionally in any way. But somewhere between his office and the press shop, Carroll had failed to accurately articulate his intentions. Of course, that didn’t explain why he went out of his way to call Porter, who stood credibly accused of abusing multiple women, a man of integrity and honor. Maybe Jim Carroll got that wrong, too. For a Marine—and someone whom I had deeply respected up until that point—he sure did have a lot of excuses; it was everyone’s fault but his.
Regardless, Kelly never trusted the press team again. When he would personally come under fire in the future, he would circumvent the press office by sending his personal aide, Zach Fuentes, to defend him on the record instead. The Chief never wavered from his position that he had acted decisively. Soon thereafter he even shipped Jim Carroll out of the White House to work instead in the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Porter’s credibility had been eviscerated. Kelly, a four-star Marine general, was watching his credibility be tarnished beyond repair. And Sarah sensed that hers was not far behind. She couldn’t get clear information on when Kelly, White House Counsel Don McGahn, and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, who oversaw the Personnel Security Division, knew about the Porter allegations.
Many of us believed that Porter had been given a pass simply because he was “one of them”—the type of staffer that Kelly and Hagin in particular wished they could fill the White House with instead of the rest of us losers. And yet Sarah was expected to go out and defend them all? She couldn’t endure it any longer. Her frustration had finally reached a boiling point.
I know people out there—many people—have no sympathy for Sarah Sanders. In their view, she willingly excused, covered up for, and lied about the actions of the Trump administration. Sometimes spokespeople in any White House knowingly give misleading statements, other times they’re just left out of the loop or sent out with false or incomplete information to unwittingly bend the truth on someone else’s behalf. In my experience, Sarah typically endured the latter. But not always. Sometimes she knew she was being sent out to talk to the press with information that would likely prove to be inaccurate. She didn’t press as hard as she could have for the rock-bottom truth. That intentional lack of rigor allowed her to go out and tell reporters things like “That’s all I have” or “I’ve given you the best information I’ve got” or “I haven’t talked to the President about that in detail.” These gymnastics with the truth would tax even the nimblest of prevaricators, and Sarah was not that. She was not a natural liar and, I believe, in most cases she was not an intentional one.
During Spicer’s tenure behind the podium, the effects of this pirouette wore on him professionally—he was just holding on to his job for dear life as his decades of public affairs experience were being wiped from memory. For Sarah, it felt much more personal—the enduring questions about her character and trustworthiness hit her in a much deeper way. I believed—and still believe—she was a good person doing an impossible job. But on the other hand, everyone reserves the right to resign at any moment. The Porter situation could well have been one of those moments, but it wasn’t. Instead it pushed her boundaries in ways I wouldn’t fully appreciate until the days and weeks went on.
On the second floor of the West Wing, she confronted White House Counsel Don McGahn. She made it clear that she was no longer going to be fed to the wolves with inaccurate or partial information. The door to the White House Counsel’s Office is solid. It’s outfitted with a keypad lock and reinforced to make it one of the most secure rooms in the building. As the tense conversation came to a head, Sarah stormed out and slammed the heavy door behind her with a thunderous clap. From that point forward a representative from the White House Counsel’s Office attended all prep sessions for any spokespeople who might be forced to defend the White House’s handling of the Porter scandal.
We may never know the full truth. Had senior White House aides covered up the Porter allegations, assuming they would never be made public? That appears likely, but remains somewhat murky. What we do know is this: a story that started with a paparazzi-style photo spread of Washington, D.C.’s new “power couple” ended as the single most damaging hit to the White House’s credibility of the early Trump presidency—and it basically had nothing to do with the President. Even the media never really attempted to rope him into it. This was Kelly’s debacle—his lapse of judgment. And, increasingly, it looked like it was his job on the line.
One of the reasons that nothing—no scandal, no outrageous comment, etc.—ever seemed to stick to Trump was that the news cycle shifted too rapidly for anything to fully take hold. The average person casually following the news couldn’t keep up. Sometimes the outrage of the moment would be supplanted by something even more outrageous. Other times Trump would simply find a way to change the subject. That was the real power of his Twitter account—being able to seize control of the national conversation at any moment.
But with the Porter scandal, Trump was largely silent, letting it play out on its own. And there didn’t appear to be anything on the horizon that might change the subject. Kelly was dangling from a rope, and the tree limb was slowly bending, lowering him closer and closer to the snapping jaws of the press alligators below.
At 2:19 P.M. on Wednesday, February 14, 2018—a week after the Porter scandal first broke—I was in the Oval Office, where the President was hosting a working session on “Opportunity Zones,” a provision in the new tax law that was designed to drive investment into distressed communities. After he had remained silent on the Porter situation for the past week, the media had started pressing Trump to make a statement about domestic violence. We were planning to bring the press in for part of the Opportunity Zones meeting and knew at least one reporter would shout a question that would give Trump an opportunity to comment. Sure enough, right before the press was ushered out of the room, one of them called out, “Why have you not spoken out against domestic violence?”
Trump was ready for this, held his hand up to quiet the room, and made his statement. “I am opposed to domestic violence, and everybody here knows that,” he said. “I am totally opposed to domestic violence of any kind. Everyone knows that, and it almost wouldn’t even have to be said. So, now you hear it, but you all know it.”
Trump was visibly annoyed, not because he wasn’t opposed to domestic violence or anything like that, but because he loathed being dragged into commenting on issues he wasn’t directly involved with, at least from his perspective. Commenting was the right thing to do, a point that he would begrudgingly concede, but he also knew it would have the effect of prolonging the Porter story—and Kelly’s complicity in it—yet another day.
Kelly was already starting to lose his luster with the President anyway, as anyone who was getting credit for “managing” him eventually would. It wouldn’t have mattered to Trump much, or at all, if the Porter issue sent Kelly packing, too.
Except it didn’t, because at the moment the narrative changed in a shocking fashion.
Unbeknownst to us, at the exact moment we were standing in the Oval that day, a nineteen-year-old gunman had just opened fire on students and staff members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. When the carnage finally came to an end, seventeen people had lost their lives in the deadliest high school massacre in U.S. history. When I returned to my desk after the Oval Office event, horrifying images of children frantically running out of the school had just started to hit our television screens.
I never considered this until I worked in the West Wing, but staff in the White House experience such events much the same as the general public. Lines of communication are opened up between the administration and law enforcement officials on the ground, and the President is briefed with whatever information is available at the time, but it’s not like we have real-time visibility on every crisis situation as it happens. During such events, the Situation Room circulates regular email updates, but most of them include information from “open source intelligence” (OSINT), like news reports.
Staffers in the Homeland Security offices downstairs hustle to quickly gather whatever information they can, but most of us stand speechless in front of our TVs, watching in horror like millions of other Americans in homes and offices around the country. We would come to find out that a former student, who had previously threatened to carry out such an attack, had finally decided to do it.
The following morning, the President addressed the nation from the Diplomatic Reception Room on the ground floor of the White House. I stood in the back of the room, just behind a line of press and television cameras, dozens of cables snaking around my feet, and watched him deliver lines that would overwhelm the emotions of most parents if they tried to say them out loud.
“Our entire nation, with one heavy heart, is praying for the victims and their families,” he said. “To every parent, teacher, and child who is hurting so badly, we are here for you—whatever you need, whatever we can do, to ease your pain. We are all joined together as one American family, and your suffering is our burden also. No child, no teacher, should ever be in danger in an American school. No parent should ever have to fear for their sons and daughters when they kiss them good-bye in the morning.… I want to speak now directly to America’s children, especially those who feel lost, alone, confused, or even scared: I want you to know that you are never alone and you never will be. You have people who care about you, who love you, and who will do anything at all to protect you. If you need help, turn to a teacher, a family member, a local police officer, or a faith leader. Answer hate with love; answer cruelty with kindness.”
There’s a certain amount of detachment that any speaker has to take on to keep from breaking down while delivering remarks that are that emotionally charged. That was hard even for an unsentimental man like the President. But as he spoke, I could feel his deep sympathy for the victims and their families.
After he was done speaking, he walked out of the Diplomatic Reception Room and back into the Center Hall that runs the length of the residence’s ground floor. Turning left, he passed the Map Room and saw a small group of senior aides watching his remarks on a small television in the White House doctor’s office. There’s a slight delay in even “live” broadcasts, so he’d often stop in there to see the end of his remarks being aired. The entire team then walked with the President through the Palm Room and down the West Colonnade, parting ways as he and the Vice President turned left to go to the Oval, and everyone else continued straight into the West Wing.
I lagged behind the rest of the group and was the last staffer still outside when the President suddenly realized he had something he needed to say. Turning around, he saw me about twenty yards away.
“I’m going to Florida tomorrow,” he said emphatically. “I don’t care what they have to do. I’m going to Florida, okay? I want you to go right now, find Tony, and you tell him that I’m going to Florida. I’m sick of them telling me no. I want to go to Parkland. I want to see these people. And you go tell them right now that they better figure it out. Okay? That’s it.”
I nodded. “Yes, sir.”
He turned around without saying another word and walked toward the Oval with the Vice President.
I knew immediately that the “Tony” he was referring to was Tony Ornato, the head Secret Service agent on the President’s protective detail. As I would come to find out, the Secret Service was trying to pump the brakes on the President visiting Parkland. They were hoping to give themselves a little more time to iron out the logistical and security details. It’s a herculean task to move the President and his team safely and smoothly. The Secret Service are total pros, and the President treated them all with the utmost respect. But he would occasionally grow frustrated when he couldn’t do what he wanted on short notice. In this case, he was itching to show the people of Parkland that their President cared about them in their darkest hour.
I walked over to the Secret Service office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and delivered the message.
“He’s adamant about going tomorrow,” I told the agents on duty. “He said he doesn’t care what has to be done, he just wants to be on a plane to Parkland tomorrow afternoon.”
“Roger that,” one of them replied. “We’re on it.” They delivered, as they always did.
As the Parkland shooting justifiably consumed the news, a colleague quietly made an observation that no one else had yet stopped to consider. “This is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen,” he began, “so I don’t want anyone to take this the wrong way. But the fact that this will dominate news coverage for the foreseeable future could end up having the effect of saving Kelly his job.” This was the kind of comment that, while true, could only come out of the mouth of a political operative who had been conditioned to suppress human reactions and focus on cold political realities.
But as awful as it was to contemplate, especially at a moment like that, he was right. The Porter scandal would never again be the focus of media obsession the way it initially was.
In the coming days, the President held emotional listening sessions with students, teachers, parents, and other survivors. During my time in the White House, I saw him empathize with Gold Star families, survivors of natural disasters, crime victims, and countless others. It wasn’t always smooth—every interaction was conducted in his own unique, Trumpian way. But he was always sincere. Then, almost exactly two weeks later, another story would supplant the Parkland shooting. One far more personal to the President.
Hope Hicks had been spending hours preparing to testify before the House Intelligence Committee over Russian interference in the 2016 election. On Tuesday, February 27, she spent over nine hours in a secure committee meeting room being peppered with question after question.
I have no idea what happened during her testimony. One of the few hard-and-fast rules that everyone seemed to abide by was that no one dared discuss anything related to any investigations. We didn’t want to be subpoenaed next. However, nothing could stop members of the congressional committees from leaking about whatever happened behind closed doors, so once again most White House staffers were watching the drama unfold on TV, just like everyone else.
For Hope, the entire month of February was difficult on a deeply personal level. She had met a tall, brilliant, nice guy and was quietly experiencing the ride of a lifetime with him, working together during the day and walling themselves off from the world in the evenings. She was so private that she hadn’t even shared their relationship with most of her friends in the White House. Next thing she knew, her pictures were spread all over the television, magazines, and newspapers, paparazzi were staking out her apartment, and her boyfriend was being accused of some of the most vile abuses imaginable. On top of that she was enduring another round of blistering press coverage of her testimony, during which media reports claimed she had admitted to occasionally telling “white lies” on the President’s behalf. That was no revelation, not really—nearly everyone in a press role told “white lies” in this White House (and probably other White Houses, too).
She had also been considering for quite a while whether it was time for her to move on to a new adventure. Hope had not even turned thirty and she had seen more, experienced more—endured more—than most people would in a lifetime. But while being at the center of it all was exciting, even addicting, she also seemed to feel like it might be time for her to leave it all behind—to return to some sense of normalcy, even if anonymity was no longer possible.
I walked over to her office just outside the Oval one evening after most of the staff had gone home. I found her there sitting at her desk, leaning back in her office chair and staring at a muted television screen as the talking heads dissected everything from her relationship to her fashion choices to whether she might just be a traitor to her country.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
She smiled faintly, never diverting her eyes from the TV.
“I’m fine,” she said. “DJT and I talked about all of this coverage today and he just told me, you know, ‘If you’re going to be someone in this world, if you’re going to do something with your life, there are always going to be people who try to drag you down.’”
The changing images on the television screen were splashing different colors across Hope’s face in the dimly lit room. “I mean, just look at what he deals with,” she continued. “He’s done this for decades. Constant press, constant stories, people digging into his life, his family. If he can make it through all of that, I can deal with this. It’s little, it’s nothing.”
Mirroring is a phenomenon in which people subconsciously mimic each other in social settings—their body language, posture, and gestures. In Trump World, mirroring took on a life of its own. At home, I’d find myself repositioning my silverware the same way Trump would at the dinner table. While making speeches I would realize—sometimes in the moment, sometimes while watching video after the fact—that I was using certain Trumpian mannerisms. All of us on staff seemed to have adopted his counterpunching mentality, at various times deploying it against the press, our political adversaries, and even our colleagues. As I listened to Hope speak, I sensed her inherent toughness—she had been a college lacrosse player, after all—but also couldn’t help but see her mirroring Trump’s unflinching belief that he could endure anything, overcome any attack, and thrive in the midst of chaos that made others wilt.
But unlike the President, she still had almost her entire life ahead of her. There was so much more to do, so much left to experience, to preserve some energy for.
On February 28, three weeks after the Porter story hit the news, Hope resigned.
Trump was accustomed to staff turnover—we all were. I usually couldn’t tell if he cared at all when people came and went, even his closest aides. He maintained an unnatural emotional detachment from it all. But this was different, more personal. Hope wasn’t staff; she was family. I also got the sense that Trump was starting to look around and realize, There aren’t many of us left. The “loyalists” were slowly leaving, one by one.
The next day, after he had delivered remarks at an event in the East Room, I broached the subject with him for the first and only time. “Not going to be the same without Hope,” I said. “End of an era.”
For the first time ever, I sensed the slightest tinge of, I don’t know, almost sadness in the President’s demeanor. Which was something no one I knew had ever seen in Donald Trump.
“Hopey was the best,” he said, looking away. What was interesting to me was that Hope wasn’t gone quite yet, but he was already talking about her in the past tense.