“You can go on in,” Chief of Staff John Kelly’s executive assistant told me. “He’ll join you shortly.”
I walked into the Chief’s office and made my way over to the conference table running along the far wall. By West Wing standards, the office was downright palatial. The half-dozen floor-to-ceiling windows were covered by sheer—almost translucent—white curtains, allowing the outside light to stream into the room. That, combined with the fifteen-foot-tall ceilings, made it one of the few spaces in the building that actually felt open and airy. The chief typically worked behind an L-shaped desk, with the computer elevated, allowing him to stand as he scanned his emails. The north end of the room included built-in shelving and one of the West Wing’s finest old fireplaces. A large flat-screen TV hung on the wall above it, with a spacious sitting area out in front. French doors on the south side of the room opened out onto a patio, which led down to a large swimming pool with a standalone pool house. It was good to be the Chief.
It was March 2018, and Kelly seemed like he was finally emerging from the Porter scandal to catch his second wind, even though he would never again be revered by the staff. He had called me in to discuss a job opening he was looking to fill—Director of the Office of Public Liaison (OPL). This was the role that Priebus had blocked Scaramucci from filling in the early days of the administration. In a highly functioning White House, OPL leads the effort to build coalitions of support for the President and his agenda. Needless to say, we weren’t a highly functioning White House, and OPL had been a virtual nonentity to that point.
The Chief walked into the room, along with his deputy Zach Fuentes and Johnny DeStefano, a former aide to House Speaker John Boehner who was now Counselor to the President, overseeing the White House political and external affairs operation. Kelly was relaxed. He maintained an air of confidence—perhaps arrogance—that was reminiscent of a small-town high school quarterback who wasn’t quite as good as he thought he was. Normally he liked to get right to the point, but on this particular day he wanted to chat—about the inept press and communications teams, the Porter debacle, the media, and how much he hated his job.
“What do you think is wrong with the comms shop?” he asked, seemingly baffled by the dysfunction. I told him I saw two primary issues. First, due to a failure of leadership early on, warring factions had never jelled into a single team. And even though the old leaders were long gone, the bad blood remained. Second, I told him we were victims of the “tyranny of the urgent,” as the late author Charles Hummel called it. Everyone was sucked into the crisis of the moment, and no one was planning ahead, strategizing, or really thinking through how to win the battle of ideas. Addressing those two issues is what made our tax “tiger team” successful, while the day-to-day operations remained a disaster.
Now he was intrigued. He set his pen down on the table, pushed his chair back slightly, and crossed one leg over the other. “So what would you have done differently with the Rob Porter issue?”
This question was trickier. I was very interested in the OPL job, and the last thing I wanted to do in that moment was re-litigate all of the ways I thought the Chief had mishandled the situation. As I’ve mentioned, I knew he blamed everyone in the building but himself, and at this point it wouldn’t do anything for me to suggest otherwise.
“Well, unfortunately, the public will never be able to fully understand how that played out behind the scenes,” I said. This was true, but also ambiguous enough to be safe ground. And to my great relief, Kelly jumped back in before I had to elaborate further.
“Everything that’s been reported about that was a lie,” he grumbled, furrowing his brow even more than usual. “I took immediate action. Within an hour of learning about the issue, it was addressed, he was gone. The only problem was miscommunication.” I wasn’t sure if he was telling me what he actually thought or what I was supposed to believe from here on out. Probably both. Of course, this comment was absurd on its face. Miscommunication? You mean putting your name on a statement praising the character and integrity of a credibly accused wife beater? Or do you mean telling him to “stay and fight,” then turning around twenty-four hours later and saying his resignation was effective immediately?
Of course, I didn’t say any of that, but it was impossible not to think it.
“This is the worst f—ing job I’ve ever had,” Kelly continued in a sudden spurt of exasperation. “People apparently think that I care when they write that I might be fired. If that ever happened, it would be the best day I’ve had since I walked into this place. And the President knows it, too. It’s a liberating feeling when no one has any power over you—when you don’t care if you get fired.”
On one hand I understood where he was coming from. Working in the West Wing had been the most trying professional experience of my life as well—by far. But I was struck by the disdain he seemed to harbor for both the extraordinary honor he had been given and even for the President himself. It also was clear despite his bravado that he did care what people wrote about him—who wouldn’t?
But I tried to relate, in my own way. I told him that in my experience, people in Washington tended to be defined by their job. It becomes much more than what they do—it becomes who they are. I told him I struggled with that, too, but that I ultimately knew my identity was found in my faith. So, yeah, there is liberty in knowing who you are, regardless of what your job is.
The Chief nodded earnestly; he at least seemed to agree with the sentiment. From there we spent the next twenty minutes working through what I would do with OPL, if I was named director.
I told him the first priority would be to lead organizational change, to motivate team members to become a highly functioning unit that produced top-quality results. We would focus on “keeping the turnstiles spinning,” I explained, a reference to the southwest entrance where guests entered. There would not be a single day when the White House didn’t engage with key outside groups or host working sessions, policy and communications briefings, or meet and greets. I ran through how we would coordinate with other White House offices to develop deep support among influential parts of the Trump coalition, like conservatives, the faith community, veterans, and law enforcement groups, among others. And I told him we had to make a serious effort to reach various ethnic groups that had either been ignored or spurned by earlier bad experiences. To measure our progress, I told him we would develop key performance indicators, like the number of groups and individuals we had engaged, the number of sessions we had hosted, and particularly how we were engaging on the President’s top agenda items.
I closed with a list of eight core values that would guide everything we did:
1. We are people of character.
2. We never settle for anything less than excellence.
3. We deliver a consistent experience.
4. We take extreme ownership of our responsibilities.
5. We always present a unified front.
6. We put our agendas aside, because the President’s agenda is the only one that matters.
7. We are humbled by our small role in shaping the course of history.
8. We never quit.
I wanted to show Kelly—the military man—that I understood that everything rises and falls on leadership. This was something I believed deep in my bones, and it also happened to be at the core of every frustration I experienced in the White House. I thought this was something he would connect with.
When our meeting finished, DeStefano called me up to his office upstairs. “That was really impressive, man,” he said. “No matter what ends up happening with OPL, that was good for you. You made a big impression.”
I went home that evening feeling good. I told my wife, Megan, that I was ready to move on from the daily nightmares of the White House communications team. For the first time since we passed tax reform, I felt like there was light at the end of the tunnel—I may survive this after all.
Oh, how wrong I would be.
A little over a week after my meeting with the Chief about OPL, his deputy Zach Fuentes asked me to come down to his new office—the one that Steve Bannon once occupied. It was almost unrecognizable. The dark lord’s lair had been turned into a run-of-the-mill West Wing office instead of HQ for a historic insurrection against global elites. Fuentes and DeStefano were in there waiting for me.
“So here’s the thing,” Fuentes said. “You blew the Chief away in your meeting with him. I mean, really blew him away. He’s brought it up several times since then. But we think we’ve come up with a better idea for you than OPL.”
“Yeah, I agree,” DeStefano chimed in. “We’re going to give OPL to Justin Clark,” who at that point was Director of Intergovernmental Affairs. “You don’t want it,” he continued. “Believe me, it’s a huge mess and you’re just going to get yourself shot up if you move over there.”
I liked Justin. He was a great guy, a staunch Trump loyalist from the campaign, hardworking and competent. But where’s this going? And why am I already being sold so hard on whatever it is being better than what I wanted?
“We’ve got a much better spot for you,” Fuentes said, jumping back in. “What do you think about being Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs? It’s the second biggest government department, and it needs someone the President trusts to go in and help fix it.”
Whoa, I didn’t see this coming.
At the time, the VA Secretary, Dr. David Shulkin, was in hot water for using taxpayer money to cover his wife’s airfare to fly with him to Europe. Once they got there, they had improperly accepted tickets to the Wimbledon tennis tournament. The VA’s internal watchdog uncovered the impropriety and was accusing Shulkin’s Chief of Staff of making false statements to try to cover it all up. Meanwhile, Shulkin’s current Assistant Secretary, a former Trump campaign staffer, was openly trying to orchestrate his ouster. My immediate reaction was to point out that the VA was making the West Wing look tame by comparison. “I just don’t know if that’s a situation I want to get into the middle of right now,” I said.
“That’s going to take care of itself very soon,” Fuentes said. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was right about that. Shulkin would get pushed out, along with many of the other appointees, in a matter of weeks. “Think about it. You can go over there and build it back up. The vets need someone who knows what they’re doing.”
I spent the weekend mulling it over. I called Jared Kushner that Sunday afternoon to see what he thought about it. He had taken a keen interest in overhauling the VA, and he was one of the few people in the West Wing who I trusted to have a confidential conversation. He was surprised by Kelly’s offer, but said he’d support the move. He said he knew how frustrated I had become in my current role and thought it might be a massive undertaking that I could really own. I did feel flattered that they thought I was up to the task. But ultimately I just couldn’t get excited about the challenge.
On Monday morning, I told the Chief my decision.
“I’m honored you guys thought of me for this,” I said. “But I didn’t come to Washington to work for the government, I came here to work for the President.” He told me he was disappointed but understood. “We’ll keep coming up with ideas,” he said.
But before they even had a chance, a new idea landed in my lap a couple of days later.
The President was bringing in economist and longtime CNBC host Larry Kudlow to replace Gary Cohn, who had announced he was resigning as Trump’s top economic adviser. We had a lot of mutual friends, and once we met we hit it off right away. He knew I had run the messaging on tax reform, and he made it clear that he wanted me on his team. Within a few hours of meeting for the first time, he offered me a job as Deputy Director of the National Economic Council, where my job would be coordinating communications on the President’s entire economic agenda, across the whole administration.
This is perfect, I thought to myself. I already know all of these issues. I can get out of the mess in the comms shop. I can once again work alongside my old tax teammate Tony Sayegh at Treasury. And I’ll still be close to the President.
“The President told me I can hire whoever I want,” Larry said. “You’re my guy.”
I accepted the job without hesitation. But there was another, unspoken reason why I thought this was a good job for me: Larry didn’t know it yet, but he was going to need a knife fighter in his corner.
Larry had seen a lot. He had worked in the Reagan White House three decades before, albeit at a much lower level. He had fought addictions to cocaine and alcohol in the mid-1990s, crediting his Catholic faith with saving him. He had made himself a legend in conservative—“supply-side”—economics. And he had become a regular TV commentator. He was the sweetest, most genuinely kind man I had met since coming to the White House, and he was so grateful to be back there himself and so excited to work for Trump that he rekindled the feeling that I had when I had walked into the West Wing for the first time—before I let the game suck the joy out of the job. I vowed to myself to protect him from that game.
I realized in that moment that Larry was like a minnow going for a happy little swim in what was—unbeknownst to him—a tank full of hungry piranhas. I barely knew him, but I already felt protective. I knew what it took to survive in this place—at least I did to that point. And in that moment, I decided that I would metaphorically bite the head off anyone who threatened to steal a single moment of Larry’s enjoyment in the White House.
I once again went home that evening and told Megan the good news. Everything had come together perfectly. This was a far better fit for me than either the OPL or VA job would have been.
On the afternoon of Thursday, March 29, I was sitting in the back hallway of the West Wing, outside Jared’s office, waiting to fill him in on my impending move to the NEC. The President was in Richfield, Ohio, announcing plans to “rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure,” so in his absence, the West Wing was uncharacteristically quiet. But since he was flying straight from Ohio to Mar-a-Lago for a long Easter weekend, most of the staff had stayed behind, including General Kelly and Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin.
The back hallway of the West Wing is a roughly twenty-five-yard straight shot from the Oval on one end to the Vice President’s suite on the other. Working your way down the hallway from the Oval, on the left side was the President’s private dining room, Jared’s office, then the Chief’s suite. On the right side were the Roosevelt Room; the scheduler, Michael Haidet; and Hagin. This was the most prime real estate in the entire building. In an environment where proximity to the President was power, this was the inner sanctum. The hallway was lined with the usual combination of historical paintings, antique cabinetry, and famous busts and sculptures. The ceiling was slightly curved, like the top of the number zero. While the upper press office, where I worked, was the bustling center of activity, not to mention accessible to the media, this place was almost serene.
About fifteen feet down the hallway from where I was sitting, I could hear the TV inside the Chief’s suite airing coverage from Trump’s Ohio event, which was set to begin any minute. Hagin sauntered out of his office and across the hall, where he found Kelly standing in front of the TV with a couple of other close aides. Though I hadn’t intended to, I overheard their entire, unguarded conversation.
“I talked to the President on the plane and he swore to me that he wouldn’t announce anything about Syria,” Kelly said, in an exasperated tone. I knew immediately what he was talking about. The President had for some time been privately expressing a desire to pull U.S. troops out of Syria. I wasn’t involved in the national security decision-making process, but his inclination to pull out was well known throughout the building. Top military officials were urging him to keep a couple of thousand troops in the country to clear out the last remnants of the so-called Islamic State. To that point he had begrudgingly acquiesced, but his patience was running thin. Kelly clearly was expecting him to say something about the topic anyway.
“We won’t know until he walks offstage,” Hagin replied with a resigned chuckle. This was a common sentiment among staffers who bristled at Trump’s tendency to go off script during his remarks. It also happened to be what made him interesting to watch—no one knew what he would say, not even the staff.
“He d— well better know not to screw us on this,” Kelly growled. I was taken aback by this brief but revealing exchange, which seemed to encapsulate Kelly’s view of his job and of the President himself: which was that Trump was a missile of chaos and Kelly was the general trying to keep him in the silo. Many reporters over the years reported that this was Kelly’s view of the job—to various denials from the White House—but we all knew it was true.
In fact, there was a pervasive view among some of the President’s most senior aides that there was something patriotic about undermining Trump’s most disruptive impulses. I know that many people reading this will say, “Thank God.” And if I give them the benefit of the doubt, it may have been a sincere effort to do what they thought was in the best interest of the country. But whether they were sincere or not, I found it cowardly. There’s nothing patriotic about being a part of “the resistance” inside the building. Imagine the arrogance of saying, “I know sixty-three million of my fellow Americans voted for this guy, but I’m going to sabotage him anyway because I know better.”
At that moment, Jared popped his head out of his office and nodded his head back, signaling me to come in. So I wasn’t around to hear Kelly’s reaction a few minutes later when Trump told the Ohio crowd, “We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon.”
Once in Jared’s office, I grabbed a silver-wrapped Hershey’s Kiss out of the bowl on his conference table, which took up about half the room. He had the closest office to the Oval, but what it had in proximity it lacked in size. I told Jared about Kudlow’s offer for me to join his NEC team and he was immediately enthusiastic. “This is going to be great and the President is going to love it,” he said. “But are you sure they’re not going to try to stop it?” He nodded his head in the direction of Kelly’s office next door. He had grown deeply distrustful of the Kelly regime. A month earlier, Kelly had downgraded Jared’s security clearance, a slight that Jared viewed as an unnecessary power play designed to embarrass him. He was quietly fuming about it, and knowing Jared, I figured he would one day extract his pound of flesh. But not until the timing was just right.
“I don’t know why they would,” I said. “The Chief can fully hand over the comms operation to Mercedes and I can go about my business in another part of the building. The President will be happy with it. Everyone wins.”
He nodded. “Well, I hope that’s true,” he said. But he was skeptical.
A couple of days later, Larry Kudlow called me back upstairs. When I got to his office suite—which he was sharing with Gary Cohn, who had resigned but not yet departed—he looked worried. He had just come from the Oval, he explained, and the President was railing against a “special deal” Amazon was getting from the U.S. Postal Service that he wanted Kudlow to somehow stop. This “deal” was one of Trump’s perennial hobbyhorses. Someone had told him that Amazon, personified by presidential nemesis Jeff Bezos, the Amazon CEO, was getting some perk from the government that the company didn’t deserve. And Trump just couldn’t let it go.
As Larry recounted the conversation and Trump’s order to “do something” about Amazon, Gary laughed loudly. “Welcome to the White House,” he said, shaking Larry’s hand. Larry, for his part, appeared totally confused.
“It’s total bulls—,” Gary told him. A giant smile spread across his face, as if he was silently saying Thank goodness I don’t have to deal with this nonsense anymore. “He’s been trying to get me to do something about this for months,” Cohn explained. “Amazon’s not getting some special deal. USPS is mandated to go to every house, every day, no matter what. The Amazon contract is paying them extra to take their packages ‘the last mile’ from the distro center to the front door. They’d have to go to these houses anyway.” Shaking his head, he finished, “Amazon may actually be saving the Postal Service, not killing it.”
Then Cohn got to the real motivation behind this latest Trump obsession. “He’s just mad at Bezos for owning The Washington Post.”
That explanation didn’t help Kudlow any. He’d just been given a direct order from the President of the United States. You’d better believe that back in the day, if Ronald Reagan had told young Kudlow to jump in a lake, he’d be treading water until Reagan told him to get out.
“So…” Larry replied hesitantly, “I shouldn’t do anything about this?”
I could see what he was thinking: Is this how it always works around here?
“Don’t worry about it,” Gary told him. “Cliff will help you figure it out. But now you know why I’m so happy to be leaving.”
For now, anyway, Amazon would have to wait. After that perplexing encounter, Kudlow pulled me into his private office and closed the door. The wood-paneled walls were now bare. Gary’s pictures, paintings, and other personal items had been removed, and Larry had not yet made the space his own. He had a grim look on his face.
“You’re not going to be able to work for me on NEC,” he said.
I shot him a confused look. Wasn’t this already worked out?
He explained that he’d met with Sarah Sanders and Mercedes Schlapp and brought up my move. It had not gone over well, especially with Mercedes. “She said, ‘He doesn’t play well with the other children and can’t be trusted,’” he continued.
This was the same Mercedes who, to my face, called me “the President’s spirit animal” and raved about how no one “got the President” or his “voice” like I did. Which, in hindsight, was my undoing.
Kudlow, the poor guy, had no idea about the vicious infighting in the press office, but I knew what was really going on. That morning, the Washington Examiner had published a story about Mercedes and my tax team colleague Tony Sayegh both angling to succeed the outgoing Hope Hicks as White House comms director. In the story, anonymous sources claimed that Tony had a tendency to “boss people around” and to “manipulate others for his own benefit.” They also said he was a “terrible bully,” and one “senior administration official” said “such behavior has been particularly noticeable in Sayegh’s interactions with female staff.” I thought back to Mercedes’s blowup on Tony in the Treasury Dining Room months before, where I’d been an innocent bystander. Was I now catching shrapnel because she wanted to blow up Tony and anyone close to him? All of this for a stupid job title?
The accusations against Tony were particularly malicious, even by Trump White House standards. Not only were they untrue—to the point of absurdity—they more than implied that Tony had a problem with women, at a time when there was a heightened sensitivity about such allegations. I remained close to Tony after tax reform, and while turning down the VA job, I had told Fuentes and DeStefano I thought he would be a great choice to succeed Hope. Hope happened to agree with this assessment. Since I was a fan of Tony’s, I instantly became an enemy of Mercedes.
It also didn’t help matters that I was friends with Hope, who, for her part, didn’t have much use for Mercedes, either. She viewed Mercedes as a self-promoter, especially after CNN published an article praising her for being “the adult in the room” and “a godsend” for a chaotic comms department. In reality, although my desk was ten feet from Mercedes’s, I had no idea what occupied most of her time. She had exasperated the entire West Wing by hosting a weekly “planning meeting,” during which decisions would supposedly be made on the President’s calendar. But nothing decided in the meeting ever seemed to come to fruition. And there was no rhyme or reason—no discernible strategy—to what the “Director of Strategic Communications” was doing.
The President could not have cared less about what Mercedes had to say. But weirdly, he left these sorts of personnel decisions almost entirely to Kelly, even when he vehemently disagreed with him. And the Chief was a different story.
Larry went on to tell me that the day after he met with Mercedes and Sarah, he also met with Kelly and Hagin. Mercedes and Hagin had served together in the Bush White House—and all the Bushies stuck together. So when Kudlow brought up bringing me in as his deputy on the NEC, Kelly and Hagin shot it down. Whatever new respect I’d won with Kelly hadn’t amounted to much.
“Kelly told me, ‘Nope, that’s not going to happen,’” a bewildered Kudlow said. “I told him, ‘Well, the President said I could hire my people,’ and he said, ‘Not this one you can’t.’”
Kudlow was clearly annoyed by this, and a little embarrassed that he’d offered me a job he wasn’t allowed to bestow. But he wasn’t going to fight the Chief of Staff over it. I understood that. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “This was a perfect fit, and I don’t know all the backstory. I just know there’s nothing I can do about it.”
As I walked back down the West Wing’s narrow stairwell, I tried to make sense of the animosity, especially Joe Hagin’s. I’d barely even talked to the guy in the past year. Then I suddenly remembered that the only substantive interaction I’d had with him was during the Scaramucci debacle. Hagin was Mooch’s polar opposite—a low-key, do-it-by-the-book, process-oriented professional. Is he holding it against me that I was Mooch’s guy? If he was, it wasn’t entirely unreasonable. But it still felt petty. And how did it come to this so quickly with the Chief, after he had been so “blown away” by my OPL interview?
That’s when it really hit me.
Paradoxically, one of the advantages I had enjoyed in past turf wars was that I had always “punched up.” I maintained a low enough public profile that my enemies had a hard time convincing reporters to waste their time writing hit pieces on someone whose name their readers wouldn’t recognize. They also couldn’t go to the President directly, mainly because he would view it as weakness, but also because my good relationship with him was well known. This was a source of resentment in some corners of the building, but it was also the ultimate air cover for me.
I had ruffled some feathers by carving out such a large role for myself in the tax reform push, but I was still just a comms staffer who wasn’t threatening to move too far into other people’s territory. Either the OPL job or the NEC job would be different. I would have a bigger title to match my standing with the President—more latitude to spread my wings. So when word got around that I was in consideration for these jobs, the knives came out for me. I just wasn’t perceptive enough—and probably too arrogant—to realize it at first.
Later that day, I was in the East Wing venting my frustrations to members of the First Lady’s staff when I got a cryptic phone call from Sarah Sanders, asking me to come meet with her and Hope in her office. When I arrived, the mood was strange, almost somber. The good humor that I was accustomed to was nonexistent.
The two women were there with a warning.
Sarah was a different person since the Porter debacle. She appeared more resigned, more beaten down by the impossible demands of her job. I could see that now in her expression, which was both weary and wary. “We know how frustrated you are,” Sarah began. “But there’s just no way you’re going to rise any higher in the West Wing. You’re going to keep getting blocked.”
Then Hope, my friend, jumped in. She was finished with this place, too, before it ruined her. “I’ve always done everything I could to protect you,” she said. “But I’m going to be gone soon and I just don’t want you to be left in here totally fending for yourself. They’re going to come for you.”
Well, that sounds ominous.
I knew Hope had my best interests at heart. I wasn’t so sure about Sarah. I didn’t necessarily think she had it out for me, but I also knew she wouldn’t go to bat for me the way Hope would. Then again, maybe I was letting the paranoia that had built up over the last year finally consume me. I was perplexed. I had played a major leadership role in the White House’s only long-term communications success: tax reform. The President loved me. What’s the deal? Who’s got it out for me?
Sarah finally conceded it was Joe Hagin. “He claims people told him you aren’t trustworthy and that you’ve been in rooms you shouldn’t have been in,” she said. On the first point I told her I thought it was nonsense that such an ambiguous accusation could somehow be held against me. On the second, I noted that no one had ever said a word to me about being in any room or meeting, and I got the impression that while he—or whoever else—might not want me there, the President obviously did. And that’s probably what the real problem was. Regardless, I thought I deserved a chance to answer whatever specific accusations were being made against me. This was how dangerous and toxic the Trump White House had become. Outright hostility between various factions was standard. Any false rumor or sometimes even the whisper of a rumor could sink anyone at any time.
“It could be a silly misunderstanding,” I said. “Or maybe I genuinely did somebody wrong and I need to make it right. Either way, it’s unprofessional to handle it this way.” This was obvious to everyone in the room. But there was little anyone could do.
Still, I had to try. I asked Sarah if she would set up a conversation between Hagin and me, and she said she would. In the meantime, Hope and Sarah both asked me to run comms on CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s nomination for Secretary of State. Rex Tillerson had been fired in March 2018—and Kelly had inexplicably leaked to the press that Tillerson was sitting on the toilet when he called to tell him he was being pushed out.
Months before, I had told Hope that State was the only department I would seriously considering moving to—but only for the right job. “Go work with Pompeo for a few weeks and see what you think,” she said. “And that’ll give some time for all of this to work itself out.”
I agreed, but only if I was doing it as a White House employee just temporarily detailed to State. I would still have my desk in the West Wing and go back and forth between the two buildings as needed. With that agreed upon, there was one more thing I needed to make clear: “The Alabama football team is coming here on the tenth to celebrate their national championship,” I said. “I’m writing the President’s remarks, and I’m going to be there for that, no matter what else is going on.” Everyone laughed and agreed, ending the meeting on a light note.
When April 10, 2018, arrived, just a few days later, I woke up in my apartment with a rare sense of excitement. I had invited over fifty guests from my home state to attend the Alabama event, so with great anticipation, I put on my crimson tie and socks and made the five-minute walk from my apartment to the East Gate of the White House complex. Upon entering, I could already see preparations being made for the event, which would take place on the South Lawn. Every presidential event is a massive logistical undertaking. This one was no exception. No fewer than two dozen staffers were involved in the planning and execution of the event.
I had obsessed over the President’s remarks. In fact, of all the untold thousands of words I had drafted for him—from speeches to talking points to tweets, and everything in between—I don’t think there were any remarks on which I spent more time per word. But what I spent the most time considering was what deeper lesson or meaning I could include in the remarks that would make them more than just a rehashing of a great team’s on-field exploits.
The idea I came up with was very personal to me. I titled it “Work While You Wait.”
During one of my darkest nights in the White House, I stumbled across a video while scrolling through my Twitter feed that completely changed my perspective. In the video, University of Louisiana baseball coach Tony Robichaux expressed dismay at the culture surrounding modern youth sports.
“Most people—even in their personal life—they stop working until the door opens,” he explained. “Then they want to work again now that the door’s open.… But you’ve got to work while you wait.
“That’s why the [current youth baseball model] is such a bad model,” he continued. “Nobody sits the bench. But in high school you’re going to sit the bench. Then in college you’re going to sit the bench. And in rookie ball you’re going to sit the bench. And in low-A and high-A you’re going to sit the bench. In double-A you’re going to sit the bench. In triple-A you’re going to sit the bench. And at the big-league level you’re going to sit the bench. Why would we go down and create a stupid model that doesn’t allow people to sit the bench, when every other model after that you’re going to sit the bench?
“That’s why so many kids quit,” he concluded. “That’s also why they stop working while they wait, because somebody created a model that promised them that they would never sit. And then they get out into the real world—they get out of ‘Daddy Ball’—and they get into big-boy baseball and they can’t handle it.”
The fiery coach went on to praise a player on his team who had maintained his work ethic, even while sitting the bench, and then rose to the occasion when he was given an opportunity.
“He had to work while he waited,” he said, “and he finally had a chance to get in and try to do some damage, and he did it.… Be a warrior, not a worrier.”
I’ve generally found Twitter to be a vitriolic place where time is wasted and constructive public discourse goes to die. But that short video, which I randomly stumbled across at just the right moment, totally changed my mind-set. And I watched it come true for someone else during Alabama’s national championship game.
Down 13–0 at halftime, Alabama’s head football coach, Nick Saban, made an extraordinary decision to bench his starting quarterback, Jalen Hurts, the reigning SEC offensive player of the year. Sitting on the bench behind Hurts all year had been Tua Tagovailoa, a freshman phenom from Hawaii with a big arm and an even bigger faith in Jesus Christ. Tua had not started a game all year, and pretty much all of his playing time had come late in games where the team was blowing out its opponent.
But on January 8, 2018, Tua was suddenly thrust into the middle of the action, on the biggest stage in college football. And as the old Louisiana baseball coach said, “He finally had a chance to get in and try to do some damage, and he did it.” Alabama roared back and ultimately won the game in overtime on a game-winning pass by—you guessed it—Tua Tagovailoa.
Andrew Giuliani, the son of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was in charge of championship team visits to the White House. Trump loved the guy, having had a close personal relationship with him that preceded Trump’s rise in politics. When Rudy and his wife Donna Hanover, Andrew’s mother, went through a messy and very public divorce in the early 2000s, Trump took Andrew under his wing. The two played hundreds of rounds of golf together in subsequent years—Andrew was at one point a professional golfer—and Trump perked up every time he walked into the room. Perhaps unsurprisingly, none of this sat well with General Kelly, who loathed anyone whose access to the President seemed disproportionate to their station. A couple of months later, Trump would explicitly order for Andrew to be promoted. Kelly would respond by doing the exact opposite and revoking Andrew’s coveted blue White House badge, which granted access to the West Wing. This relegated him to the EEOB, where he wouldn’t ever see the President. Kelly seemed to think such moves projected his total power over staffing decisions. And maybe they did. But most of us thought it just made him look like a small, petty man. Strangest of all, though, was that the President seemed wholly unwilling to confront his Chief over his insubordination.
In any event, knowing that I was an Alabama grad, Andrew had made sure I was included in the group going into the Oval with the coaches and team captains.
As we walked from the residence to the West Wing with the group, I grabbed a football that the team and coaches had autographed so that the President could sign it as well. It was intended to be a gift to the Alabama Governor, since she couldn’t attend the event in person. We laughed that we couldn’t decide whether it was a kind gesture by us and the university, or an epic troll, since she was a graduate and fan of ’Bama’s sworn enemy, Auburn University.
A few minutes later we were in the Roosevelt Room, waiting to be brought into the Oval, and I had a few minutes to talk to Coach Saban. Indisputably one of the greatest coaches of all time, he had developed a reputation as the no-nonsense builder of a college football dynasty and as a molder of men. In spite of the countless times I’d seen him explode on the sideline during games—on referees, players, and coaches alike—I found him to be quiet, almost shy in person. He was walking around with an easy smile and placid demeanor, perhaps because he was being accompanied by his wife, the legendary “Miss Terry,” as she was known in Alabama.
Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg, the Chief of Staff of the National Security Council, saw us chatting and walked over to meet Saban.
“What is it that you think has made you so successful?” Kellogg asked Saban. “I don’t mean this year; I mean year after year after year. Plenty of coaches have a special team and everything happens to go their way one season, but you do it over and over. How? What’s different about what you do?”
Seeming slightly embarrassed by the praise, Saban politely said, “Well, I don’t really know, because I don’t know what other people do.
“But one thing I did learn working for [New England Patriots coach] Bill Belichick,” he continued, “is that everyone in an organization has to have clear roles, clear objectives, and they have to be held accountable. It was like that for everyone in the organization, top to bottom—the ball boys to the star quarterback. You’ve got to have that. Everyone in an organization has to know exactly what is expected of them. We try to do that.”
General Kellogg and I shot each other a knowing glance and he thanked Coach Saban, congratulated him on his success, and went back to work. Alone with Saban, I told him what had gone unsaid by General Kellogg.
“What you just explained is the exact opposite of what happens here,” I said, testing the bounds of how candid Saban might get with me.
“It sounds simple, but it’s not easy,” he replied without hesitation. “But working here, with everything you guys deal with, it’s a learning experience, man, no matter what. It’ll pay off for the rest of your life. It will have been worth it.”
He was right about this, but I wouldn’t fully realize it until long after I walked out of the West Wing for the last time.
“Yeah, but from a leadership perspective—particularly at the staff level—this has been a master class in what not to do,” I replied with a chuckle.
He smiled and shrugged. “Well, that counts as learning, too.”
Moments later we were called into the Oval Office. Saban led the way with a beautiful golden putter, ready to be gifted to the golfer in chief. But as we walked in, Jordan Karem, the President’s body man, stopped me.
“There are enough people in here already, you need to get out,” he said quietly.
“What?” I whispered back. “What’s your deal? I was invited to this, and we’ve had three times this many people in here before. Plus you know the President won’t care one bit if I’m in here.”
Karem ignored my response and took the football out of my hands.
“What’s this for?” he said in an unusually angry tone.
“It’s for the President to sign, what do you think?” I snapped back.
“We can’t do this right now,” he said, turning around and taking the ball with him.
This was a bizarre interaction, for numerous reasons. I’d gotten dozens of things signed by the President during my time in the White House. I had also gone out of my way to do this by the book—the ultimate rarity in the Trump White House. I had received approval from the White House Counsel’s Office to get the ball signed for the Governor, and Andrew Giuliani, who was in charge of the event, had included me on the list of people coming into the Oval.
But rather than press the issue, I watched for a few minutes from the Outer Oval, then headed out to the South Lawn, where the President would soon deliver remarks to the team and hundreds of Alabama fans.
While I had never before had any type of run-in with Karem, I was aware of his personal animus toward me.
He had replaced Johnny McEntee, who had been with the President a long time and had known his likes and dislikes. He understood who Trump wanted to see and who he wanted to avoid at any given moment. I never abused the fact that I could ask Johnny to bring me in to see the President. But the fact that I had that direct pipeline bred resentment among some of the staff.
As noted, when General Kelly became Chief of Staff, one of his first orders of business was to choke off all direct access to the President. I kept my head down, but others—including the President himself—chafed at the sudden clampdown. Trump, one of the world’s most social creatures, began going around Kelly’s blockade by making calls to friends and allies after hours and from his cell phone. And McEntee, his trusted personal aide, was one of the primary conduits for circumventing the Kelly system.
As a result, the Kelly regime got rid of him the first chance they got.
Less than a month earlier, McEntee had been frog-marched out of the White House after being accused of having issues with his background check. He’d been by Trump’s side for years, from the campaign to the White House, but was suddenly deemed untrustworthy. And rather than do it quietly, Kelly publicly humiliated him, then leaked to CNN that Johnny was “under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security for serious financial crimes.”
Those of us who knew Johnny—and even many casual observers—viewed the event as a disgraceful and callous abuse of power. Reporters were telling me that even Stephen Miller, who typically buddied up to whatever regime was empowered, was telling them off the record that they should call out Kelly and Hagin for bullying McEntee and manipulating the President. But Kelly and Hagin got what they wanted: Johnny gone and the opportunity to plug their own spy—Jordan Karem—into that job. By any historical measure, he was a strange fit for the role, which usually goes to a single young man in his twenties. Karem was in his mid-thirties and recently married. But he fit the one description that Kelly and Hagin cared about: he was loyal to them over the President. He kept them updated on the President’s movements, conversations, and activities. He also eliminated the casual interactions with trusted friends and aides that the President thrived on.
Finally out on the South Lawn, the President entertained the crowd like only he could.
“They are extraordinary and they’re going to be very rich!” he said of the massive football players standing behind him as the entire crowd broke into laughter.
“Anyone who wants to know how Alabama does it should study Coach Saban’s simple philosophy. It’s called ‘The Process.’ Coach tells his players, ‘Don’t look at the scoreboard; don’t look at any external factors.’ Just focus ‘all your efforts, all your toughness, and all your discipline’ on executing … one play at a time. And by doing that, by focusing on ‘The Process,’ the outcome—winning—will take care of itself. It’s a great philosophy.
“In the national championship game, you stuck to ‘The Process,’ even when it was looking pretty tough.… On the first play of overtime, Georgia sacked Tua for a big loss.… But the Crimson Tide never gave in—never even a little bit.… On the very next play, Tua dropped back to pass, launched the ball from near midfield … and DeVonta Smith caught that ball for the win.…
“Every moment of hard work and preparation for Alabama paid off,” Trump concluded.
Work while you wait, I thought.
As the event finished up and everyone began to leave, JK Scott, the team’s All-American punter, asked the President if he could pray for him, which Trump readily agreed to. It was a perfect conclusion, or at least it could have been. Unfortunately, the day’s events weren’t over for me.
Upon returning to the West Wing, I got a phone call from the Chief’s office saying Kelly wanted to see me immediately. When I walked into his office, he was standing at his conference table with his back to the door.
“Hey, Chief,” I said. The camaraderie from a few weeks before—when he was friendly and considering me for an array of jobs—was gone. The room seemed darker and colder—although the darkness and the chill were more of a feeling than an actuality.
“Cliff, in the past forty years, I don’t think I’ve ever had a subordinate whose reputation is worse than yours. In every single context that your name comes up, it’s always negative—always. It’s going to follow you for the rest of your life. Allow me to give you some advice. Take this to heart, from an old guy to a young guy, ’cause I’ve been around a lot longer than you have. Reputation is all we have in this world. That’s it. All we have is our reputation.”
Wow. I was reeling. He fired off words at me like bullets from an M4 rifle. I had the worst reputation of anyone he’d ever known? In forty years?
He apparently had a complete lack of awareness that his own reputation was in tatters.
I held my shoulders back and stood my ground. I told him I thought that his assessment was unfair and misinformed. I told him it made no sense that I had sat in this very office less than a month before and won his praise, only to see his opinion changed by cowardly gossip. And so quickly.
“Well, then, what the hell is this football thing?” he shot back. “Jordan’s already told me all about you trying to force your way into the Oval.”
By the way he said it, you would have thought I’d kneecapped a Secret Service agent, clotheslined Jordan, and thrown the football at the President’s face. But it was pointless to explain. I remembered Hope’s warning, “They are coming for you.” He was just looking for a reason—any reason. It was personal, and I no longer felt like I had anything to lose.
“This all boils down to two things,” I said. “Number one, resentment over my personal relationship with the President. And number two, the lack of clearly defined roles and responsibilities in this White House.”
I realized in the moment that he was likely to take number two as a direct shot at his leadership, but he didn’t immediately respond. So I recounted my conversation with Coach Saban from earlier in the day and explained how the lack of clearly defined roles in the White House had led to people veering in and out of different lanes, sparking territorial disputes and breeding rivalries. I conceded that I had been an active participant in some of those disputes, but I was far from unique in that.
Kelly was now fuming even more. I had just confessed to bad-mouthing Kelly’s management style to the most revered college football coach in America.
“If I had been here from the beginning, it never would have been like this,” he retorted, his jaw flexing. Then he bemoaned his own fate, which he had done repeatedly, it seemed, to anyone who would listen. “I should have stayed at DHS and never come to this place. Either that or I should have been brought here right from the beginning. Everything would be different.” Why he was sharing this with me—the most reprehensible character he’d encountered in forty years—was just another mystery to add to a long list of them in the Trump White House.
This was much deeper than whatever problem he had with me. He was in denial about his own failures. And he was now fully consumed by the culture he had been brought in to change. In that moment, something about this exchange made me no longer care a whit what he did to me. He was a damaged character, and many of his wounds were self-inflicted. His scowl and dominating demeanor masked an obvious and deep insecurity. I suddenly didn’t fear him anymore.
“Do you want my resignation?” I asked him. The words seemed to just jump out of my mouth, without any real forethought. But at that moment I was more than ready to tender it. I didn’t need this insanity anymore. Strangely enough, that offer seemed to break the tension.
“No, no, don’t do that,” he replied, softening his tone. “No one believes resignations around here. Everyone will assume you were fired.” I thought he was firing me—or at least wanted to. None of this conversation made any sense. People told me all the time that staying in Trump World too long would make anyone crazy. I started to wonder if that was what had happened to John Kelly, who was now paranoid, easily angered, at war with everyone, and whining to a staff member he apparently didn’t even like. He was a shell of the man I’d first encountered a year and a half earlier.
“Just go to the State Department for a couple of weeks, get Pompeo confirmed, and see what happens,” he concluded. “But don’t forget what I told you; reputation is everything.”
We shook hands and I left his office. He was wrong about me, but there was no use in pressing the issue. He had a small group of aides around him that he trusted implicitly. He couldn’t delve into the details of every disagreement or the backstory of every frayed relationship, so he had to just take their word for it. If they said I was a problem, I was a problem. And I already fit the description of someone he wouldn’t like—a Trump loyalist who disregarded the traditional hierarchy because my relationship with the President was closer than my title should have allowed.
In any conversation like the one I had with Kelly, there are always things you think of later that you wish you had said in the moment. In this instance, it hit me about ten minutes after I left. As I walked along the north front of the White House, through a ground-floor hallway typically used by Secret Service agents and culinary staff, I realized he wasn’t just wrong about me personally; he was wrong about the entire premise of his “advice.” Reputation is not, in fact, the most important thing. As famed UCLA basketball coach John Wooden once explained: “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”
I found solace in those words, and for the next several weeks I threw myself into the daunting task of getting Mike Pompeo confirmed to be the country’s seventieth Secretary of State. It shouldn’t have been a heavy lift. Pompeo had graduated first in his class at West Point. He patrolled the Iron Curtain during the Cold War as an Army cavalry officer. He was elected to Congress and served as a member of the House Intelligence Committee. The President then appointed him his first CIA Director, and had trusted him with some of his most sensitive national security and foreign policy issues. On top of that, secretaries of state are typically confirmed by wide, bipartisan majorities, because national security is the one area in which Democrats and Republicans typically put politics aside. But this wasn’t a typical time in American politics.
We had a razor-thin GOP majority in the Senate, and libertarian-leaning Republican Rand Paul was holding out his vote for Pompeo, citing Pompeo’s past support for the Iraq War and the “failed” policy of “regime change” in the Middle East.
With that in mind, our strategy was simple: let the President handle Senator Paul, and we’d go after the handful of red-state Democrats who were facing difficult reelections in states that Trump had won. That meant flooding regional media markets in states like North Dakota, West Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, Florida, Maine, and Alabama.
A handful of White House aides, including Director of Legislative Affairs Marc Short, who was leading the overall confirmation effort, Sarah Sanders, the deputy press secretaries, and myself fanned out to do media hits on targeted local and regional news outlets.
The President, meanwhile, turned up the heat on Senator Paul.
“I will say this about Rand Paul: he’s never let me down,” the President told reporters. “Rand Paul is a very special guy as far as I’m concerned. He’s never let me down and I don’t think he’ll let us down again. So let’s see what happens.”
While that was happening, Brett O’Donnell, Pompeo’s longtime political adviser, and I pushed back on negative stories and worked to shape the overall press coverage. The clown show in the West Wing was the furthest thing from my mind. I was having a blast. On the day of Pompeo’s confirmation hearing, I led a staff of about a dozen in a makeshift war room in the State Department, monitoring coverage on television and online, and working to build momentum from Pompeo’s masterful performance.
Ultimately, our plan worked exactly how we hoped it would, with a little help from the news of the day. A week before his confirmation vote The Washington Post broke the blockbuster story that Pompeo had conducted a secret mission to North Korea to meet with the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. While we did not leak the story—in fact, Pompeo was frustrated by its release—it worked to our advantage. The President already had entrusted Pompeo to go on the most sensitive diplomatic mission in recent memory; how was anyone going to say he shouldn’t be Trump’s Secretary of State? The safety and security of the entire world was on the line. We cranked up the heat on red-state Democrats even further. Brett O’Donnell, Marc Short, fellow Legislative Affairs aide Mary Elizabeth Taylor, State Department press staffer Matt Lloyd, and I sat in the gallery of the Senate and watched as Pompeo was confirmed by a 57–42 vote.
Coming after tax reform, it was the second major legislative victory in which I had played a significant part. At least they can never take this moment away from me, I thought. And for the first time, I really started considering what life might look like after the White House.
Right on cue, Secretary Pompeo asked to see me in his new, mahogany-paneled office on the seventh floor of the State Department.
The Secretary of State’s suite makes the West Wing truly look like a dump by comparison. There were receiving rooms, conference rooms, and waiting rooms that led into lobbies. Every space was well appointed—everything just felt important. A large wooden door slid open to reveal the Secretary waiting for me behind it, like Willy Wonka—and I was a wide-eyed kid from Alabama with a golden ticket. My name had been beautifully written on a card and placed neatly on a small table beside the chair where I was to sit. The Secretary greeted me with a firm handshake and a smile, and invited me to sit down with him. A small bottle of water was waiting for me, with the State Department seal imprinted on its white label.
He had a role in mind for me on his senior staff, he explained. But before he offered me a job, he wanted to know why I wanted to leave the White House for State.
This was an easy question to answer. I had two main reasons, I explained.
First of all, it was an incredible time to be working in foreign policy and international affairs. We were angling for a breakthrough with North Korea that could literally change the course of history. The President’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem was sparking new challenges and opportunities in the Middle East. We had to figure out how to counter China’s aggressive rise. We were wiping ISIS off the face of the earth while facing an uncertain future in Syria. The President was preparing to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, setting up another high-stakes showdown in the Gulf tinderbox. Our European allies were still adjusting to Trump’s disruptive approach. The list could go on and on.
Second—and I didn’t hold back on this one—I was ready to turn the page on fifteen months in the most cutthroat, toxic, mean-spirited, draining working environment I had ever encountered. (As I’ve noted, I was part of this problem—a willing combatant, too.) I wanted to be a part of a team with a strong esprit de corps. I wanted to play an important leadership role. I wanted to be a part of something special, something I could look back on and be proud of, a winning culture.
Pompeo got it immediately. A self-described “talent hawk,” he said he was bringing in his own team of killers to fill the upper ranks of the State Department. He had heard all he needed to hear, and he’d seen my work during his confirmation. He wanted me on his team. I’d be a senior adviser to the Secretary with a portfolio focusing on strategic communications. My office would be right next to his. He offered me the job and I accepted it on the spot.
I was elated. I was so close to escaping the Trump White House relatively unscathed and moving on to one of the most coveted jobs in U.S. national security and foreign policy. But as I checked my email to see what I’d missed while inside the State Department—where cell phone signals go to die—my heart sank. In my in-box was a curt email from Deputy White House Counsel Uttam Dhillon explaining that he needed to meet with me immediately about an issue that had arisen in my background check. I had heard this before. This is the same thing they’d said to Johnny McEntee and other Trump loyalists right before they kicked them off campus before the President could find out and intervene.
I’d had one interaction with Dhillon before. After the Rob Porter debacle, security clearances were a hot topic. Since the security clearance process could take many months, it was not unusual for senior White House aides to start their tenure with a provisional clearance, giving them access to classified information even though they hadn’t been fully cleared. What was unusual, however, was that top aides like Porter—who handled sensitive information constantly—had not received their permanent clearance (or been let go for not being able to obtain one) even a year into the administration.
The buzz about clearances made me wonder about my own. I had completed my “Standard Form 86,” the questionnaire everyone seeking a clearance must fill out. I had sat for a lengthy interview with FBI investigators. Federal agents had conducted my background check investigation, which I knew because they talked to numerous people from my past. Over a year had gone by, but no one had said anything else to me about it. I assumed this meant everything was fine. After all, although I wasn’t working in national security policy, I was in plenty of meetings in classified settings, including in the Situation Room and Oval Office. But after the Chief had revoked Jared Kushner’s security clearance and gotten rid of several other Trump loyalists because of supposed issues in their background checks, I wanted some peace of mind. So I emailed the White House Counsel’s office.
An assistant emailed me back and asked me to come upstairs in the West Wing to meet with Uttam Dhillon. When I got there, he brusquely informed me that I did not have a security clearance, like, at all—neither provisional nor permanent. I asked him how on earth that could even be possible.
He told me they—it was unclear who “they” were—had “just never activated” my clearance, and told me I shouldn’t be involved in any more classified discussions from that point forward. I was rattled, and I wasn’t sure what to say. I knew what I thought, though:
Okay, so for the past year I’ve been in numerous bilateral meetings with foreign leaders, sat next to the Deputy National Security Advisor during an Oval Office meeting with the Secretary General of NATO, been around the President nearly every day and heard him discuss just about every topic under the sun, and now you tell me this? Could the White House really work this way?
“You will need to be debriefed on whatever classified information you heard,” he told me, with a tone suggesting that somehow this was all my fault. As I was walking out, he asked me to keep the conversation between the two of us. Not to protect me, I realized. But to protect himself, or perhaps whoever “they” were.
It took me a while to figure out what was really going on, though I could never prove it. I suspected that certain White House officials whose purview included the murky world of background checks and security clearances were abusing this power to manipulate personnel decisions in the administration. This potentially dangerous game did not come into full view for me until long after I left the White House. In late 2018, The Wall Street Journal broke a bombshell story that Dhillon “had urged several candidates for Drug Enforcement Administration chief to withdraw from consideration, citing concerns about their background checks. Then he accepted the job himself.” During the selection process, he had handled candidate vetting, then personally “called multiple candidates to inform them they were out of the running or to encourage them to withdraw from the process,” a move that was described as “unusual for someone in Mr. Dhillon’s role.” And he apparently did all of this to get them out of the way so he could take the job himself.
But at the time I received my email to meet Dhillon, the Journal story was months away from publication. And even though I was suspicious of what had been done to some of my colleagues, it was difficult in the moment to make sense of it all.
No matter, I thought. I’m leaving anyway, regardless of what nonsense they’re trying to pull. Dhillon and I exchanged a couple of emails and agreed to meet several hours later.
In the meantime, I typed out a brief resignation letter:
Serving the President in the White House for the past 15 months has been an extraordinary privilege. I will cherish the time I have been honored to spend working alongside the team here.
However, today I have been presented with another opportunity to serve that I feel I must pursue. Therefore, it is incumbent upon me to submit my resignation from the White House, with a heavy heart.
I will, of course, assist in any way I can to ensure a smooth transition.
Respectfully,
Cliff Sims
Special Assistant to the President for Communications
I walked into Sarah’s office and submitted it. She congratulated me—she knew what I’d been through. This was the third big job I had been offered in the past month, and it looked like the third time was going to be the charm. But I also told her about the email I had received from the Deputy White House Counsel, and noted with trepidation that I was going to meet with him shortly.
When I walked into a ground floor office of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Uttam Dhillon was waiting for me. And he wasn’t alone; he was flanked by three Secret Service agents.
“You guys know I already resigned from the White House, right?” I joked. They didn’t laugh.
“Take a seat,” Dhillon said. “These gentlemen have some questions they’d like to ask you.”
With that, one of the agents, a tall, well-built man in his late thirties who, as the President would say, looked like he was straight out of central casting, asked me why I had recently emailed a video file from my government email address to my personal Gmail.
I paused, confused. What in the world is this guy talking about? Then I realized what he must be referencing.
“You mean the video of me briefing the President?” I asked.
“Yes, that’s the one,” he replied. “Talk to me about what that was, where it came from, and why you emailed it to a personal email address.”
A great sense of relief washed over me. If this is what you’ve brought me here for, then I know it’s not a big deal.
Among my various responsibilities in the White House, I explained, was briefing the President before certain public events. One such event took place on January 24, when mayors from all over the country were assembled in the East Room to hear remarks from the President.
Waiting just down the hall in the Green Room, I chatted with one of the residence staff who was raving about the kind and generous treatment he received from the Trump family. I told him my experience had always been the same, and remarked how incredible it would be to one day tell my kids about interacting with the President. It was the rare time when I mentally stepped back and considered just how dang cool it all was. The butler agreed, but pointed out that the staff had an advantage because we got our pictures taken with the President, so at least we had mementos. The residence staff didn’t really get that opportunity. “I’d love to have a picture or a video or something with him,” he said.
I did have a lot of pictures of us together, but I told him I didn’t have a video. In fact, I thought I’d take that opportunity to take one that I could hold on to for posterity. So with President Trump coming down the corridor toward us, I pulled out my government cell phone, propped it up, and recorded a short video of the pre-event briefing. Like the dozens of such mundane interactions we’d had before, this one included me telling him his prepared remarks were in a binder, rather than on a teleprompter. I handed him a note card with the names of three people he’d be recognizing, and explained why they were important. Then I laid out a quick run of show—how he’d be announced, where he’d walk, and how he’d exit the room at the end. The President then noted that he was going to make a comment about “sanctuary cities,” since they had been in the news so much recently. We agreed this was a good idea. The whole conversation lasted about ninety seconds. And with that, the President was introduced and left the room, and I walked over and picked up my cell phone.
Walking back to the West Wing later, I showed a clip from the video to the President’s personal aide, prompting the President to ask what we were looking at. I told him what it was. He nodded and pivoted the conversation to other topics.
I didn’t even think about the video until about three months later when I accepted the job at State. Knowing I was preparing to leave the White House, I looked through my government cell phone to see if there were any images I wanted to preserve before turning it back in. Seeing the video of the briefing, I emailed it to my personal email account.
After that explanation, the Secret Service agents spent another few minutes peppering me with questions.
“Have you ever recorded any other interactions with the President?”
No.
“Did you share this video with anyone outside of the White House, other than emailing it to yourself?”
No.
“Do you understand why you shouldn’t have recorded this and sent it to a personal email?”
I told them that while it did not even cross my mind at the time, I understood why they needed to check into this kind of stuff. And I told them that, in hindsight, I should not have done it. What if he had said something controversial or sensitive and my phone had been hacked? I voluntarily deleted the video from my personal phone and email account as they watched.
The agents told me they believed I had been honest and forthcoming with them. We exchanged a few jokes about the Alabama-Auburn football rivalry, with me saying that they could grill me as long as they wanted but I would never say “War Eagle,” and the meeting came to an end. That was it. It wasn’t very dramatic. It was clear to them that my intentions weren’t nefarious, and they wished me well in my new job.
In the spirit of openness and transparency, I informed Secretary Pompeo about the incident and included it on my updated security clearance forms. He wasn’t concerned; it was no big deal.
When I walked out of the White House that day, it was the best I had felt in months. I was reinvigorated and ready to tackle a new challenge. I was going to get a couple of weeks off while the State Department paperwork was processed. And then I’d hit the ground running. I was already helping Pompeo with his introductory speech to the State Department staff.
But first, since this was the Trump White House, it was only a matter of hours before the news of my departure leaked to the press.
In spite of early attempts by anonymous sources inside the White House to frame my departure as me being “forced out,” most of the reports were relatively neutral. I preferred for my name to never appear in the news—I had been pretty successful in keeping it that way for months—but this wasn’t that bad.
But a few days later I read a line in The New York Times that jumped out at me.
There was “a crackdown” after an “aide was found to be taping meetings with Mr. Trump and playing them to impress friends,” the Times’s Maggie Haberman wrote.
My immediate reaction, much like everyone else’s, was “Whoa, is this true? Who did that?!” But then my second reaction was, “Wait, is that supposed to be about me?” I called Sarah, who confirmed my suspicion and apologized.
“The Chief said that in senior staff the other day,” she said, clearly annoyed. “He didn’t say your name, but of course what he said leaked almost immediately.”
Whether he said my name or not, it was an outlandish misrepresentation of what had actually happened. In addition to that, making that remark in a room full of other staff shows just how flippant Kelly was about besmirching other people’s character.
I realized then, if I hadn’t fully before, that Kelly was bent on my demise. His—or his minions’—next move was to leak the bizarre Alabama football story to Politico, framing it as if I had been fired over it. This backfired on them in a way, because the story quoted former chiefs of staff belittling Kelly for involving himself in such petty squabbles.
As the Kelly regime spread lies about me in the press, Sarah went on the record in my defense, telling Alabama Daily News that I “was a valuable member of President Trump’s team on the campaign and for 15 months in the White House. I worked with him on both and he is talented, smart, and worked hard for the President. We hated to see him resign from the White House, but know he will continue to be a loyal supporter for the President and impactful for him in the future.”
But ultimately Kelly & Co. got what they wanted.
On a rainy afternoon several weeks after I’d left the White House, Ulrich Brechbühl, Pompeo’s former West Point classmate turned State Department Counselor, called me with the last bad news I’d ever have to endure in the Trump administration.
“We’ve been working this from every possible angle,” he explained, “but at every turn they’re putting up roadblocks to you coming in here. There’s just nothing else we can do about it. I’m sorry—and the Secretary is very disappointed—but we’re just not going to be able to make it happen.”
When we hung up the phone, I sat back on my couch and closed my eyes. I wasn’t angry, but I did feel crushed. My first thought was that Kelly had been fully consumed by the darkness. He had become everything he claimed to hate about this administration—vindictive, unhinged, and prone to abuse his power. There was zero chance he had discussed this with the President. He didn’t care what he thought about it anyway. He had been totally neutered in his role as Trump’s self-appointed babysitter, but he still maintained massive power because of the President’s aversion to actually managing the staff. I never wanted to bring Trump into my fights, but this was the one time I decided to call him.
When the White House switchboard operator answered, she told me the President was on the other line, but added something I’d never heard before: I was now on a “screen” list that required her to refer my calls “to staff.” I told her not to bother. I had plenty of other ways to get to him anyway. Over the next few weeks, several of his closest friends, advisers, and even family members spoke to him about my situation. According to each of them, he repeated the same basic thing. I’d stuck with him through a lot. Kelly had told him I was untrustworthy. But he didn’t know whether to believe him because I’d always been so loyal.
All he had to do was say, “Hey, leave Cliff alone, okay? He’s going to State, he’s out of your hair. But he’s my guy. So let him go.”
But he chose not to do that. And not just for me. This wasn’t personal to him. And in a way I didn’t take it personally, either. He hadn’t lifted a finger for countless loyal aides before me, and I’m sure he wouldn’t for countless loyal aides to come. It was well known that in Trump World, loyalty was mostly a one-way street. But it’s one thing to know that, another thing entirely to experience it firsthand—to be unceremoniously abandoned by the President of the United States. I had let my personal relationship with the President blind me to the one unfailing truth that applied to anyone with whom he didn’t share a last name: we were all disposable.