It’s nearly impossible to have a conversation while waiting on the President to make an appearance. Instead, everyone steals glances at the closed door, waiting for it to open, and converses in short, substance-free sentences that are all but forgotten as soon as they are uttered. Such was the case in February 2017 as I stood in the Roosevelt Room making small talk with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, who, along with other Republican leaders, had arrived for their first legislative strategy session with the new President.
Compliments about neckties were exchanged, which led to a discussion about socks. I enjoyed wearing socks that matched my colorful ties, and lifted my pants leg to reveal University of Alabama crimson socks matching my tie of the same color. They seemed to prefer a more traditional approach. Before long we were talking about the weather, always a sure sign that a conversation is going nowhere. We were all looking toward the door.
Doors to the major rooms in the West Wing—such as the Oval Office, Cabinet Room, and Roosevelt Room—are all outfitted with sturdy, gold-plated hardware. When the knobs turn there’s a loud click, followed by the quiet whoosh of a heavy door swinging smoothly on its gilded hinges.
Every presidential movement in the West Wing was preceded by an appearance by Johnny McEntee, the President’s body man. Johnny would pop his head in to make sure everything was prepared in advance of the President, so Trump was never left waiting.
As he did—and that familiar click, whoosh sounded—conversation briefly stopped. When the men—they were almost all white, middle-aged men—saw that Johnny was alone, their faces dropped slightly and they returned to their chitchat. Johnny was becoming accustomed to appearing before crestfallen faces.
But the false alarm only added to the nervous energy that seemed to envelop the Roosevelt Room, where Republican leaders from both chambers of Congress were encircling the conference table. In addition to Ryan and Cornyn, Senate and House Majority Leaders Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy were present, along with House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. After eight years of President Obama occupying the White House, the entire group was still growing accustomed to regular visits to the West Wing as the people fully in charge of the governance of the nation. After 2016, Republicans were in their best position in about a century, with control of a majority of state governorships, the United States Congress, the United States Senate, and now the White House. This was a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the GOP, and you could tell the members in the room sensed it. But they’d also have to work with a most unlikely President who had spent almost his entire campaign railing against them and seemed to them to have, at best, a glancing understanding of federal policy.
There were deep fissures between them and the President on certain issues. Perhaps most notably, Trump had won the presidency by bucking decades of Republican orthodoxy on free trade. He’d also shunned the business wing of the GOP—of which Ryan and McConnell were both card-carrying members—because he believed they preferred lax immigration laws that undercut the wages of American workers. Trump was malleable in many policy areas, but not on immigration and trade. On those two issues, he had been remarkably consistent for decades. He believed deep in his bones that he was right and viewed his election—with those two issues front and center—as his vindication.
There was also a personal concern, shared by many of the men in the room. They had all but left Trump for dead a few months earlier. And Trump didn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d forget something like that. How was this going to work?
Click. Whoosh.
The President marched into the room like a man on a mission.
“My team,” he said warmly, holding out his hand to begin greeting the lawmakers. “Hello, Paul … Mitch. Great to see everyone.” They responded in kind, but their body language was stiff, uncomfortable, especially Paul Ryan’s. If there was any Republican in Washington who looked to be Donald Trump’s polar opposite—at least in personality, temperament, and background—it was the trim, earnest forty-seven-year-old from Janesville, Wisconsin. During the campaign, Ryan had made plain that he was not a Trump devotee. After Access Hollywood, Ryan broke with his party’s nominee altogether, saying that he was “sickened” by Trump’s comments, and declined to defend Trump or campaign with him from that point forward.
Chief of Staff Reince Priebus entered just behind the President. A much smaller figure than Trump—in both physical stature and personality—Priebus had billed himself as Trump’s bridge to the GOP establishment in Congress. And he was clearly a bridge to at least one of them. Upon seeing his fellow Wisconsinite, Ryan’s entire body seemed to loosen up. His shoulders relaxed, his face softened, and he greeted Priebus with a friendly handshake and a slap on his left shoulder.
“Take a seat, everyone,” Trump said. “Let’s talk.”
The President, whose chair was a few inches taller than everyone else’s, as is tradition, sat at the middle of the table. Following his lead, Ryan sat to his left and McConnell pulled up directly to his right. Priebus sat at the end of the table, and the rest of the lawmakers, along with a handful of additional White House aides, found their way into the remaining vacant chairs.
The purpose of the meeting was for all parties to agree on a timeline for delivering on one of the President’s biggest campaign promises: to repeal President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, commonly known as Obamacare, and to replace it with a Republican health-care plan to drive down costs and increase competition. Priebus opened the meeting, speaking confidently but glancing periodically at his notebook sitting on the table in front of him. Before long, the President cut him off with a look of impatience. This was a small but telling sign of how the Trump-Priebus relationship would work.
“We want to do Obamacare first, then tax cuts second, is that right?” he asked the room.
There was a moment of silence. The lawmakers exchanged glances, unsure about who should answer for them.
“Yes sir, Mr. President,” Speaker Ryan finally said. “There are policy reasons for that, which we are happy to get into.”
“But we can get it done, right?” the President asked. “We need to get this done. You guys have been promising for a long time—longer than I’ve been in politics, really. But I promised it, too, so we need no mistakes.”
The President thought like a normal Washington outsider might think. House Republicans had made a great show out of voting more than sixty times to repeal Obamacare, a statistic they cited on the campaign trail all the time. How hard could repeal possibly be now that the GOP was in charge of everything?
I also saw his comment as a subtle indication that Trump was personally much more excited about cutting taxes. The prospect of eroding Obama’s signature legacy was appealing, of course. But health-care policy was foreign to him. Taxes—now, that’s a topic a billionaire businessman knows a thing or two about.
“We’re going to get it done, Mr. President,” Ryan said confidently. The rest of the men around the table seemed to be in agreement, so the conversation moved quickly into laying out a timeline.
In rapid succession, Priebus, Ryan, and McConnell threw out timetables for introducing bills and committee votes, and target dates for final passage. The conversation seemed choreographed. I was confident, based on the lack of pauses to consider what the others were saying, that they had orchestrated it all before this meeting. If they had, that was probably a smart approach. That all sounded fine to Trump. The President wasn’t interested in getting down into the weeds. He just wanted Obamacare repealed. The commander’s intent was clear. The details were left to the lieutenants. And they seemed to like that approach anyway. They were the professionals. They could take it from here. This was, in its way, astounding, since these same people, their consultants, their pollsters, and their aides had guided Congress to historic levels of unpopularity.
As the meeting was coming to an end, an offhand comment piqued the President’s interest.
“We’re going to have to keep everyone together, because we’re going to be doing this without any Democratic votes,” McConnell said.
“Really?” Trump replied, suddenly intrigued. “You don’t think we’ll get any?”
The owlish, placid Senate Majority Leader spoke quietly but firmly. “No, Mr. President,” McConnell said. “Not one.” Democrats had passed Obamacare without any Republican votes. If Republicans were going to repeal it, McConnell believed they’d have to do it in the same way.
“What about Joe Manchin?” Trump asked, as if McConnell must have forgotten him. Manchin, a sixty-nine-year-old West Virginia Democrat who liked to position himself as above partisan politics and willing to work with the GOP, was coming up for reelection in 2018 in a state that Trump had won by forty-two points. On top of that, Trump viewed him as a personal friend. Surely his buddy Joe would play ball.
“Absolutely not, Mr. President,” McConnell said in a tone that seemed designed to end the debate.
“Really?” the President asked. Often the contrarian, he seemed to view this as a personal challenge as well as a test of his persuasiveness. “I have a wonderful relationship with him; I think he might come around.”
McConnell didn’t flinch. He stayed sitting upright in his brown leather chair, elbows on the armrests and hands clasped underneath his chin.
“Mr. President,” he began, “he’ll never be with us when it counts. I’ve seen this time and time again. We’re going to do everything in our power to beat him when he comes up for reelection in 2018.”
Trump seemed taken aback. He cut his eyes at Priebus, as if to say, Why did no one tell me this was an issue? He didn’t seem angry, just befuddled.
“Well, Joe’s been a friend of mine, so we’ll have to see,” Trump said, turning his attention back to McConnell. “Do we have to go after him like that?”
“Absolutely, Mr. President,” McConnell shot back without a moment’s hesitation. “We’re going to crush him like a grape.” Outside the walls of the Roosevelt Room, the conventional wisdom was that men like McConnell would temper Trump’s aggressive impulses. Just the opposite was happening right now.
There was a brief silence—maybe a half second—when the atmosphere in the room felt like the scene in Goodfellas when no one can tell how Joe Pesci is going to react to Ray Liotta calling him “funny.” Would he freak out? Would he laugh it off? Finally Trump broke the tension.
“This guy’s mean as a snake!” he said, pointing at McConnell and looking around the room. The entire group burst out laughing.
“I like it, though, Mitch,” he continued, giving McConnell two quick pats on the back. “If that’s what you think we need to do.”
“I do,” McConnell said, never breaking his steely-eyed character.
I saw a side of Mitch McConnell that day that I’d never appreciated as an outside observer. To many conservatives, myself included, McConnell had always been a symbol of what a loathsome place Washington is. He was too quick to compromise his principles, if he had any at all. He was a total squish with no ideological core. And he was first elected to the Senate the same year I was born, for heaven’s sake. Wasn’t it time to consider doing something else? When Trump supporters chanted “drain the swamp” during his campaign rallies, just as many of them—if not more—were picturing Mitch McConnell as they were Democrats like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer. The President also sometimes expressed frustration with his strict adherence to the Senate’s antiquated rules. Most notably, McConnell refused to do away with the filibuster, which allowed Democrats to obstruct on almost every issue.
But his cold-blooded response to the President’s Manchin questions revealed an underlying toughness that earned him a new respect and appreciation in the President’s eyes, particularly compared to many of the more weak-willed, equivocating members of Congress he’d encounter. In 2016 his outright refusal to bring President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee up for a vote had given Trump a chance to preserve the conservative court for a generation. In 2017 he would go on to ensure the confirmation of the most federal judges in history. I still don’t believe anyone should stay in office for decades the way he has, but he wasn’t soft like I’d always thought he was, that’s for sure.
The President’s relationship with Republicans in Congress developed through a series of fits and starts. In reality, the reasons they had trouble working together were deeper and more personal than differences in political ideology. They were cut from totally different cloth, not just as politicians, but as people.
In the 1950s, British philosopher Isaiah Berlin published a popular essay called “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” designed to categorize writers and thinkers throughout history. The essay expanded on a sentence attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus: “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing.”
Hedgehogs, Berlin explained, “relate everything to a single, universal, organizing principle.” They view the world through the lens of a single defining idea, which they apply to every problem they face. Foxes, on the other hand, seize “upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects,” and approach each new problem with a new idea. For a fox, every situation is viewed through a new lens.
I was first exposed to “The Hedgehog and the Fox” by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich as a way to understand Trump during the campaign.
“Clinton is a fox who knows many things you can fact check,” he tweeted in September 2016. “Trump is a hedgehog who knows one very big thing: We need change.”
The more time I spent with Trump, and the more I considered it, the more I believed this was correct: Trump is a hedgehog, viewing all of the world’s problems through the lens that he is the agent who will deliver the needed change.
But to really understand how Trump sees the world, you have to layer multiple lenses on top of each other. Trump believes he alone, often through sheer force of will, can solve certain problems. That’s one lens. Layered on top of that is his belief that all of life is a negotiation, and that every negotiation is a zero-sum game. There’s no such thing as a “win-win”; someone will win and someone will lose. Layered on top of that is his belief that personal relationships are paramount, taking precedence in all negotiations, even over mutual interests. And layered on top of that is his belief that creating chaos gives him an advantage, because he’s more comfortable in the mayhem than anyone else.
Remembering all of this helped me see the world as Trump must have, especially when his actions didn’t seem to make sense.
Trump had a certain single-mindedness about him. The left derided this as ignorance, even stupidity. But in my experience it was, for lack of a better word, hedgehoggishness.
Members of Congress, on the other hand, were mostly foxes, bouncing from one topic—or bill, or election cycle—to the next, trying to cobble together a majority coalition of support based on shared interests.
Paul Ryan, for example. He was a brilliant guy, a serious policy wonk. He had an affinity for the granular details of complex issues and could go on—and on, and on—at length about the nuances of legislation. In contrast, Trump was a big-picture guy, the captain who charted the course and expected his sailors to navigate around the smaller obstacles. To shift the metaphor slightly, Trump was the guy who punched his ultimate destination into the GPS, then sat back and turned up the radio. Paul Ryan was the computerized voice in the GPS, reciting every detail of every exit, turn, and lane change just loud enough to be heard and hopefully acknowledged.
This tendency in Ryan could come across as either earnest or condescending, and sometimes both. As a result, the relationship between the Speaker and the President would be awkward at best and, at times, overtly hostile.
Several weeks after the meeting with congressional leaders in the Roosevelt Room, Ryan was back at the White House for another conversation/tutorial on how things in Washington were done. I don’t recall why I was even in this meeting. It might have been because I’d just finished filming something with the President and stuck around. It could have been because he saw me standing in the Outer Oval and waved me in. In a normal White House I probably wouldn’t have been in there. Or there would have at least been others—like someone from the Legislative Affairs office or the Chief of Staff—in there as well. But this, of course, was not a normal White House, and my presence in this meeting could serve as Exhibit A of why some other—particularly more senior—White House aides came to resent me. But I didn’t work for them.
“Mr. President,” Ryan said, holding out his hand and walking ahead of Vice President Pence as the two of them entered the Oval Office.
The Resolute desk was piled high with newspapers and nylon courier bags of classified documents with locks holding their zippers shut. Trump motioned for an aide to clear them away as he rose to shake Ryan’s hand, and the Speaker and Vice President sat down in front of the desk. I sat down in a chair against the wall, taking notes in case there were any notable developments to pass along to the legislative affairs, policy, or communications teams.
Trump seemed distracted. He wasn’t rude, but his body language suggested he had other matters on his mind. Pence sensed this immediately. He was a master of reading the President’s moods—an essential survival skill for anyone serving with Trump and wanting to stay in his good graces. He knew when to sit back and let Trump go on a storytelling tangent, which often included detailed recollections of his real estate conquests. But he could also sense when Trump was ready to get down to business.
Ryan, on the other hand, wasn’t particularly interested in Trump’s frequent asides—about real estate, or golf, or a recent TV segment he’d seen. Ryan didn’t own commercial real estate and was more a gym rat than a golfer, fond of the P90X craze and in search of killer abs. The last TV program he’d seen was probably on C-SPAN.
Instead he launched into a detailed explanation of recent developments on the health-care bill. Impressively, he wasn’t reading from any notes; he knew it all off the top of his head. Occasionally, after multiparagraph explanations, there would be a moment of silence. Then Pence would attentively jump in to nudge the conversation along.
As I sat there, I struggled not to shake my head in disbelief. It was hard to imagine a worse way to brief someone like Donald Trump. The President’s short attention span was the stuff of legend. If he wasn’t fully engrossed in what you were saying, you could lose his interest in a matter of seconds. Everyone, from the comms team preparing him for interviews to national security aides briefing him on the latest intelligence to trade advisers discussing ongoing negotiations, had to learn to keep the information tight, to the point, and engaging.
Welcome to the club, I thought to myself as Ryan droned on. Maybe he’d eventually figure this out.
For fifteen minutes, Ryan detailed the advantages of tackling health care before tax reform. His arguments were sound. Everything he was saying made perfect sense. The problem was that the President had already agreed to this approach. He was fully on board. There was no need to continue making the case.
The President’s mind had started to wander—gallop, even—to something, anything, else in his line of view. Trump was leaning back casually, sipping on a glass of Diet Coke. He would occasionally glance up toward the Outer Oval, or out at the Rose Garden, or over at me sitting inconspicuously along the wall. I felt like I could see what he was thinking. Jeez, can you believe this guy?
Finally, in mid-Ryan-ramble, Trump set down his drink, placed his palms on the desk, and slowly stood up. His movements were leisurely enough that Ryan just continued on, turning his head toward Pence as he spoke. But it quickly became apparent that Trump was not just stretching his legs or repositioning himself. Instead, and without a word, he walked right past me, out of the Oval, and down the hall toward his private study.
I looked at the door and then at Ryan, who looked at Pence. What just happened?
But the VP just nodded, and the Speaker just kept on talking.
Just down the hall, I could hear that the President had turned on the giant flat-screen TV in his private dining room. He’d had enough of the ramble. He had agreed with the approach. He’d heard it all before. What was the point?
The quiet dialogue between Pence and Ryan waned after a few minutes, and even the Vice President was now facing the reality that this awkward moment would not resolve itself. Pence finally stood up and asked the Speaker to give him a second. Patting Ryan on the shoulder as he passed by, Pence walked into the dining room and briefly watched a TV news segment with the President. They mumbled in a low volume to each other, and I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Meanwhile, the Speaker sat wordlessly in front of the Resolute desk, and I did the same in my chair along the wall, both of us ignoring the awkwardness.
It wasn’t long, maybe ninety seconds or so, before Trump, looking somewhat rejuvenated, and Pence returned to the Oval. The President sat back down. With no explanation, apology, or acknowledgment of what had just happened, he resumed the conversation as if he hadn’t just walked out of the room to catch up on TV. What a power move.
What was perhaps most telling was that Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, second in line to the presidency, a former vice presidential nominee of his party, just rolled with it, too. In fact, he didn’t seem bothered or bewildered at all. It’s hard to imagine that legendary pols like Sam Rayburn or Tip O’Neill would have just let it go down like that. Congress, after all, was intended to be a coequal branch of government. Only a few weeks in, it was clear Ryan had power that he seemed either uncomfortable with or incapable of wielding. That was a sign of weakness to a man like Donald Trump, and weakness was a quality he could never abide. In fact, it was clear that most of the “leaders” of Congress weren’t really leaders at all. To them, courage was a risk. Which is why Trump dominated them all so easily.
The meeting came to an end shortly thereafter.
Days later, House leadership released their bill—the American Health Care Act—and it was a disaster.
Democrats screamed bloody murder that Republicans were trying to throw poor people off the health-care rolls, and conservatives slammed the bill for being “Obamacare in a different form.” No one seemed happy, including the President, who was fielding angry phone calls from his hard-right allies in Congress.
Ryan’s response was to hold a press conference and deliver a thirty-minute-long PowerPoint presentation explaining the bill. If only they understood, he seemed to be thinking, everyone would agree that this is a reasonable proposal.
The first several minutes of the presentation were devoted to laying out a “three-pronged approach” to “repealing and replacing Obamacare.”
“Prong” number one meant the House approving a watered-down bill that the Senate could pass on a simple majority vote. It didn’t include some of the major reforms Trump wanted—like allowing people to buy health insurance across state lines—because Senate rules would require sixty votes, and that would never happen with only fifty-two Republican senators.
Then, in the second “prong,” Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price would use his power to roll back Obamacare’s onerous “rules and regulations.” Obamacare had granted wide powers to the HHS Secretary, which could now be turned against it.
And finally, the third “prong” would include new legislation that could garner Democratic support and reach the sixty-vote threshold in the Senate. These smaller bills would make narrow, popular reforms that would be tough for red-state Democrats to vote against.
Theoretically, it all kind of made sense, but it was hard to imagine that it could actually come to fruition.
The President was aghast. In true Trumpian fashion, his first criticisms weren’t about the complicated, difficult-to-follow policy, but about the branding.
“‘Prongs’—such a terrible word to use,” he said in one moment of frustration after Ryan’s press conference. “Is anyone listening to this stuff? Does anyone even think about what they’re saying? ‘Prongs’—it’s just bad.”
Ryan, the fox, knew many things—he was taking a complex approach to solving a complex problem. Trump, the hedgehog, knew one important thing—people need to understand the big idea you’re selling, or they’re not going to buy in.
A week after Ryan’s ill-advised PowerPoint presentation, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report estimating that the Republican health-care bill would leave twenty-three million fewer people with insurance over the next decade. The headlines were devastating, regardless of the CBO’s history of getting pretty much everything wrong, as the White House pointed out in a press release. As the saying goes, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.
The President fumed, privately and sometimes publicly, that he’d listened to these geniuses tell him this would all be done easily. After all, the Republicans had ostensibly been planning this for years. Surely they had some sort of plan. Now “repeal and replace” was blowing up in their faces. More to the point—it was blowing up in his face.
Annoyed and frustrated, the President horrified Republicans in Congress by seeking input from the unlikeliest of sources: Zeke Emanuel, one of the architects of Obamacare, who also happened to be the brother of one of Trump’s favorite punching bags, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. I’m not sure if he took the meeting genuinely seeking new ideas, or if he just wanted to shock Republicans into getting their act together. But this was how Trump liked to do business: bring in people with opposing views and let them fight it out while he refereed. Although, much like the referees in professional wrestling—don’t forget, Trump is in the WWE Hall of Fame—he would occasionally throw punches for one side or the other to either level the playing field or pile on.
Emanuel was an oncologist and bioethicist in his late fifties. His gray hair had almost completely thinned out on top, and one of the first things I noticed was that it had been a long time since the hair on the back of his neck had been cleaned up.
But Emanuel did have one thing going for him, at least as far as the President was concerned. He had advanced degrees from both Harvard and Oxford. Trump was an anti-elitist in his rhetoric and policies, but he was a hard-core credentialist. He loved to tout his own degree from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. And he had privately raved about his Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s education. “He went to both Harvard and Oxford,” Trump told a small group of us right after announcing his nomination. “Harvard’s pretty good, right? But he says Oxford was actually harder, if you can believe it.”
When Emanuel arrived in the West Wing, a large contingent of Trump officials was already waiting for him in the Oval. Vice President Pence, HHS Secretary Tom Price, Priebus, Bannon, Kushner, and Director of the Domestic Policy Council Andrew Bremberg were all there, along with Speaker Ryan. There was no way they would leave Trump and Emanuel to their own devices. Who knew what the President—who was always looking to make a deal—might agree to?
I stood along the wall with Kushner and Bannon, watching the drama unfold among the rest of the group seated around the Resolute desk.
Emanuel came to the meeting ready to make a simple argument.
“There are Democrats who want to improve Obamacare,” he claimed. This prompted sarcastic laughter from Paul Ryan, who was sitting right next to him, and a smirk from Vice President Pence. “We can do this on a bipartisan basis,” Emanuel continued, undeterred by the scoffing. “But they’re not going to go along with repealing it. You have to quit saying ‘repeal and replace.’”
“Stop saying ‘repeal and replace’?” the President asked incredulously. “People hate it, doc. Honestly, you weren’t out on the road in the campaign. People hate it—I mean hate it.”
The President straightened his back and began imitating himself out on the campaign trail.
“We are going to repeal and replace the disaster known as Obamacare!” he said slowly, with his right index finger emphasizing each word. “And the people would scream like nothing you’ve ever heard.”
Emanuel was unfazed. He spewed out a torrent of suggestions, assertions, ideas, and theories, leaving the President shrugging and not sure what to make of it all.
Bannon was now pacing along the wall and growing increasingly frustrated. He finally got the attention of Bremberg, the White House’s health-care policy expert, and motioned for him to come over to him.
“He needs you right now,” he told Bremberg sternly, pointing at Trump. Bremberg had been waiting patiently for the President to ask his opinion, as is the historical custom in such settings. We were still new in the White House, and aides who hadn’t spent a lot of time around Trump were still getting used to brawling in front of him unprompted. But that is no doubt what he wanted.
“Yeah, you’ve got to get in there,” Priebus urged. “You’re his guy on this. Back him up.”
Bremberg returned to his chair and asserted himself, teaming up with Ryan to push back on Emanuel’s attempts to nudge Trump toward a more accommodating posture with Democrats. It quickly became clear that there was very little common ground from a policy perspective. And politically, Democrats had rammed Obamacare through without a single Republican vote. It was hard to imagine Republicans letting them have a seat at the table now that the GOP was in charge.
The entire episode foreshadowed a long-running challenge in the policy fights ahead. Trump was a dynamo as a pitchman. If you’ve got something to sell, there’s no one on earth you’d rather have out there doing the selling. But he—being the one-big-idea hedgehog that he was—showed very little interest in the finer details of complex policies.
In the coming weeks, Republican members of Congress were brought in by the dozens so Trump could lock in their support for the Ryan plan. Some meetings included members of the staunchly conservative Freedom Caucus, who felt like the bill didn’t go far enough to truly repeal Obamacare. Other meetings included the moderate Tuesday Group, as they were known, who thought the bill went too far. Other groups included waffling members who were somewhere in between the two.
Sometimes the meetings went off without a hitch. Many of the members couldn’t wait to walk out and tell their constituents they had spent time with the larger-than-life President, whose influence among the conservative base could single-handedly swing primary elections. When he’d enter the room, they’d often burst into applause.
In one particular meeting in the Cabinet Room, Congressman Scalise pulled out his cell phone and asked the President to deliver a happy birthday message to his son.
“Your dad is a very powerful man,” the President said into the tiny camera as the room erupted in laughter. It was a very Trumpian compliment. If there was anything this young man should know on his birthday, the President must have thought, it’s that his dad was wielding enormous influence in the halls of power—so he should be proud and listen to him. Scalise captured a priceless moment that his family would watch for generations, and the entire room ate it up.
But many of the meetings also included some tense moments.
At one point, roughly thirty Republican members were brought into the Oval Office to express their concerns with the bill. The goal was for all of them to walk out having committed to vote “yes.” It was the President’s job to get them there, but he was going to have all the help he wanted from a diminutive Congressman from North Carolina named Patrick McHenry.
McHenry, who stood no taller than five foot five and almost always wore a bow tie, was House Republicans’ Chief Deputy Whip. The whip team, led by Majority Whip Steve Scalise, was tasked with rounding up votes for bills being put forward by party leadership. As Scalise’s top deputy, McHenry’s job was to impose party discipline—to crack the whip, so to speak. And he clearly loved it. He had a note card in his hand with the names of lawmakers who hadn’t yet committed to support the bill. He was geared up to put them on the spot in front of the President.
Trump was in a relaxed mood, seated in front of the Oval Office fireplace, a painting of George Washington hanging above the mantel just over his right shoulder. The members of Congress piled in around him like schoolchildren. Ten or twelve of them squeezed onto the two couches. The wooden chairs in front of the Resolute desk were scooped up and turned to face the other direction. Extra chairs from around the wall were dragged into the giant circle. It was a chaotic scene, which left the President’s personal aide shaking his head, but Trump didn’t seem to mind. After all, he was the one they were all scrambling to get closer to.
“Mr. President,” McHenry interjected as the scrum died down. “If it’s all right with you, why don’t we go around the room and let people commit to you that they’re going to support the bill?”
The President agreed, and one by one, members pledged their support. But to McHenry’s enormous—and growing—frustration, most of them also wanted to take their rare moment in the Oval Office to add in personal anecdotes, or ask questions, or just about whatever else they could come up with that would give them a story to tell their constituents back home.
McHenry, knowing the group had a limited amount of time with the President, was desperately trying to move things along, until he finally reached his boiling point.
Congressman Robert Aderholt from my home state of Alabama remained noncommittal.
“Mr. President,” he began when it was his turn to speak. “I have the privilege of serving the people of Alabama’s Fourth Congressional District, who supported you by the widest margin of any district in the country. You won it with eighty percent of the vote, to just eighteen percent for Hillary.”
He was speaking Trump’s language. Reliving his glorious election victory remained a favorite pastime of his for the entire time I was in the White House.
“I like that!” the President said. “I love the people of Alabama—a truly great state. Go ahead, Robert.”
“Thank you, Mr. President,” Aderholt continued humbly. “But I have to say that I am hearing a lot of concerns about this bill. And these are your people, Mr. President. They are very worried about what this bill does to Medicare, and I’m just having a hard time.”
“Robert,” McHenry said tersely, “the President is asking you for your support.”
“Are you, Mr. President?” Aderholt said, looking back at Trump. “Because if you are, it would be important for me to be able to go back and tell my constituents that you did that.”
Trump nodded and leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees.
“Look, we need everyone in here. I’m asking for all of your support for this. We’re going to do such incredible things—we’re going to do taxes and so much more. All of those things are going to be easy. But we’ve got to do this first.”
Aderholt thanked the President, but McHenry wasn’t leaving anything to chance.
“Robert, I need you to look your President in the eye and tell him that you’re going to support him on this.”
Aderholt looked back at the President.
“You have my support.”
Finally getting what he wanted, McHenry buried his head back in his note card and placed a check mark beside Aderholt’s name.
Trump was clearly amused, now sitting back with his arms folded and a half smile.
“Look at him,” the President said, nodding toward McHenry. “Straight out of central casting.”
The group laughed, and McHenry smiled sheepishly. This was high praise from Trump. Looking the part was every bit as important as doing a good job. McHenry was getting high marks from the Big Guy on both.
By the end of the meeting, every member in the room had committed to support the bill. Trump was thrilled, and his new friend Patrick McHenry could breathe a sigh of relief.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite as well when another group of approximately thirty Republican lawmakers were brought into the Cabinet Room.
Trump’s pitch on the Republican health-care plan boiled down to the two key points he’d made to Aderholt:
Number one, all of us said we were going to do this. You all have been promising to do it for years. You’ve already voted to repeal Obamacare dozens of times in “show votes.” I promised to do it during the campaign. We’ve just got to do it.
Number two, we’ve got to stick together. This is the first of many big things we’re going to do. Republicans control the White House, the Senate, and the House. If we don’t band together and deliver what we promised, we’re not going to have any excuses. Democrats always stick together; we’d better do the same.
They were both compelling arguments. But as the Zeke Emanuel meeting showed, things could go sideways when the debate turned to the finer details of the policy.
When Trump walked into the Cabinet Room, he was riding high from his previous success in getting lawmakers to commit to supporting the bill. As he went around the table, he continued to secure support, this time from the more moderate wing of the party.
Then he came to Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania.
Dent, who was first elected to the House in 2005 and had risen to Chair of the House Ethics Committee, was seated across the table from the President and several seats to his right. No one knew it yet, but Dent was planning to retire from Congress and would not be running for reelection. When it came his turn to talk, he leaned forward slightly but kept his hands in his lap, rather than placing them on the table.
“I’m a no, Mr. President,” he said quietly, without elaborating.
Trump folded his arms in front of him, left over right, as he always did. His jacket sleeves rose slightly, exposing his diamond-encrusted cuff links. Such body language is universally read as defensive or negative. That’s not always what it meant coming from Trump—sometimes he’d sit that way in even the most positive meetings. But in this case, it almost felt like he was hugging himself in hopes of holding in an explosion.
“You’re hurting your party, Charlie,” the President said like a disappointed father, launching into a lengthy recitation of his go-to arguments. We’ve got to do this. We’ve got to stick together.
Dent’s eyes stayed steady on the President. He wasn’t glaring. He was calm, his shoulders slumping slightly. And his slow, measured response once Trump stopped talking made it clear that he was hoping to avoid a big blow-up.
Leaning forward slightly, hands remaining in his lap, Dent calmly replied, “I’m still a no, Mr. President.
“I’m very concerned about the Medicaid changes in this bill,” he continued, subtly raising his eyebrows as he spoke, causing three deep wrinkles in his forehead to become more pronounced. “I just feel like we need to slow down and make sure we get this right.”
Trump’s arms were still folded in front of him as he listened, but his frustration was becoming more evident. His lips were slightly pursed and he was no longer looking directly at Dent as he spoke.
“Charlie, I don’t think you understand,” Trump interrupted. “We need a win here, Charlie.”
As Trump made his points, he was now gesturing with his right hand, although it was still tucked under his left elbow.
“We need to repeal Obamacare, okay?” he said. “Everyone here knows that. But you’ve got to think about this in a bigger way—it’s so much bigger, there’s a much bigger way of thinking about it. We’re talking taxes, we’re talking so many other bills that are going to come, but we need this first.”
Trump was now leaning forward in Dent’s direction, with his hands folded on the table in front of him. He emphasized his most important points by tapping his right index finger on the table or subtly pointing it toward Dent in sync with his words. Everyone else in the room was awkwardly silent.
Dent’s jaw tightened.
“I just wish we could hear more from states like mine that have expanded Medicaid,” he said. “If you’d be willing to consider some changes to the bill, Mr. President—”
“We can’t,” Trump stopped him. He then laid out the challenge of trying to negotiate major legislation through a Republican-controlled Congress.
“Charlie, you understand this,” he said. “I give you something and I lose twenty votes from somewhere else.”
Trump’s hands were now out in front of him, palms up, like scales trying to balance.
“I met with conservatives earlier,” he continued. “They all wanted something, and I told them—and look, you’re getting more than they are—but I told them, ‘Guys, we can’t do it.’”
He flipped both of his hands over in a quick swipe.
“Because I knew I’d lose everyone in this room. Now, if I give you what you want, I’m going to go back to them and they’re all going to say, ‘Well, then, we need this,’ and we start all over again.”
All of this was true. House Republicans were an ideologically diverse group. A moderate like Dent had more in common with a lot of the Democrats than he did with the thirty to forty members of the staunchly conservative Freedom Caucus. Sometimes the only thing they seemed to have in common was the “R” beside their names, but that wasn’t enough to keep them together.
Dent didn’t respond, and there were a few seconds of quiet. His silence spoke louder than anything he could have said in the moment: he wasn’t budging. Now Trump was mad. He’d successfully persuaded dozens of lawmakers in previous meetings, but he knew Dent’s refusal to come on board would be a problem because it would lead to other defections.
“You’re destroying your party,” he said angrily. “We were going to do this, we were going to do taxes, we were going to do infrastructure—so many things. Big things. But we needed a win on this. And it’s a very selfish thing to do. Very selfish. It’s very selfish.
“I’m done with him,” Trump said, turning his attention back to the rest of the room.
The next day, Trump had Speaker Ryan pull the health-care bill off the floor of the House, just moments before it was scheduled to receive a vote. It wasn’t going to pass.
It was a devastating blow, capped by Ryan’s public statement: “Obamacare is the law of the land.”
Trump was enraged. This flop convinced him more than ever that he’d been right about GOP leaders all along. He had acquiesced to their approach—at least as much as he was capable of doing. Yet these guys were as ineffective as he’d been saying they were. From that point forward, he was driving the train, and they either needed to get on board or get out of the way.