On April 3, 2017, I sat quietly in the southwest corner of the Cabinet Room as senior national security and foreign policy officials filed in one by one for a bilateral meeting between Trump and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Egypt was one of our most important Arab allies in the fight against ISIS, but this was the first time its head of state had been to the West Wing since 2009. Sisi and President Obama had endured a tense relationship, to say the least. Outside of Israel, no country received more military aid from the United States than Egypt, about $1.3 billion annually. But at one point, Obama sought to punish Sisi’s government for human rights abuses—of which it was no doubt guilty—by halting the delivery of U.S. military hardware and cash. Obama ultimately relented, but he never invited Sisi to the White House.
Trump was determined to prioritize America’s strategic interests over such humanitarian concerns. His intentions were never stated in quite those terms, but the shift was clear. This was a departure from recent iterations of U.S. foreign policy, which Trump believed focused too much on lecturing other countries about how they should conduct themselves. Trump’s approach to geopolitics was still developing but was actually pretty well summed up by one of his campaign slogans: America First. He represented a return to realpolitik: blunt, hard-charging, and transactional pragmatism on the world stage. Whatever the faults with his approach, he proudly owned them.
Of course, the fact that Sisi and Obama had not gotten along made Trump even more excited to meet with him. They were huddling one-on-one in the Oval while their top aides waited in the Cabinet Room next door.
One side of the table, with the Rose Garden visible through the windows behind them, was designated for the American delegation. On the other side a half-dozen Egyptian advisers, one of them in an ornate military uniform, stood behind their chairs. The small talk was minimal. The language barrier may have contributed to this, but neither side was really talking among themselves either. I was sitting alone along the wall, behind the rest of the American team, and thinking through the Arabic phrases I had picked up during my travels in the Middle East, including Egypt. I squinted to see the antique clock sitting on the mantel at the other end of the room. Was it afternoon yet? I figured I should know for sure, just in case I got brave and decided to greet anyone from the foreign delegation with “Sabah al-khair” (good morning) or “Masaa al-khair” (good afternoon/evening).
Click. Whoosh.
A Secret Service agent swung open the Cabinet Room door, bringing everyone to attention. Sisi entered, followed by Trump, and the two leaders took their places across from each other at the center of the table, flanked by their aides. Keith Schiller, the Director of Oval Office Operations, trailed the President into the room and took a seat right next to me along the wall. Charles Willson Peale’s 1776 portrait of General George Washington, commissioned by John Hancock, hung just above our heads.
“Well, we just had a wonderful conversation,” the President began. “There were some problems with the people who were here before us. But we’re looking forward to no more problems, right, Mr. President? No more problems.”
There was a bit of a delay in Sisi’s reaction as the translator relayed Trump’s words. But after a few seconds, a tight smile appeared on his face, and he gave the President a slow, downward head nod of approval.
“Now, I’d like to start by introducing everyone,” Trump continued, “so you all know who you’re dealing with.” If this were a basketball game, the lights would have dimmed and the fog machines and dramatic music would have kicked in.
“This is General Mattis, my Secretary of Defense,” Trump began, looking at Mattis, seated to his right. The general sat there expressionless. “They call him ‘Mad Dog,’ even though he doesn’t really go by that name. Honestly, I don’t even think he likes that name, do you, General?” Trump didn’t wait for a response. “But he’s never lost a battle, and I’m sure you all know how much we love winning around here.”
The group laughed, with a few seconds’ delay for the Egyptians waiting on the translation. They had either seen Trump’s campaign rallies, during which he would memorably declare, “We’re gonna win so much, you may even get tired of winning,” or they did a good job pretending they understood the reference.
All joking aside, Mattis’s battlefield exploits genuinely were the stuff of legend—he was one of the few Trump Cabinet officials who garnered respect and acclaim across party lines—and I was confident that at least the gentleman sitting across the table in the military uniform was aware of his reputation.
“That’s Gary Cohn,” the President continued, pointing to his left toward the former Goldman Sachs president sitting near the end of the table. “He made a few hundred million dollars and had to pay a lot of taxes to come work here, but he did it. Thanks, Gary, the U.S. Treasury appreciates it.” The President smiled, as Cohn laughed and nodded.
“There’s Jared,” the President said, looking toward his son-in-law and senior adviser. “We’re very proud of him—a great talent. He did his first big deal while he was still in his twenties. We’re very proud. And he’s done not so bad for himself in the family department, I have to add.”
Jared smiled politely, turning his head but never seeming to move his perfectly postured torso.
As Trump continued working his way around the room, I watched Sisi closely. He had a pleasant disposition, which I found interesting because of how it contrasted with his well-earned reputation as a strongman. There was something chilling to me about the apparent likability of a man who’d been known to have his enemies killed. Maybe it was the Arab version of walk softly but carry a big stick. Maybe it was deference in the presence of superior leverage and firepower. Or maybe it was just good diplomacy. Regardless, here he was, getting along swimmingly with the American President who had once said, “Islam hates us,” and called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” This phrase shot to the front of my mind when I noticed the bump on Sisi’s forehead. It was slightly darker than the rest of his skin. Known as a zebibah in Arabic, the mark was a point of pride among some Muslim men, who developed it through repeated contact with their prayer mat. Politically, it was a symbol to the 90 percent of Egypt’s population who were Muslims that he was one of them.
Trump continued on making his introductions.
“This is Rex Tillerson,” he said, nodding toward the Texan with his gray hair brushed back. “He ran a little company you’ve probably heard of…” Trump paused slightly and exaggerated the next two words. “Exxon … Mobil. Also known as the largest company in the world. Is it the largest, Rex? I think it probably is, or at least close, but it probably is. He knows everyone. If they’ve got oil in their country, he knows them, isn’t that right, Rex? Now he’s my Secretary of State.”
After a couple more introductions, the President finally ended by reaching his hand over to the man beside him, patting his arm.
“And this is my Wilbur.”
Having your name referenced in the first-person possessive by the President was a distinction for people with whom he felt a special connection. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross certainly fit into that category. Trump viewed him as a peer—a wealthy industrialist, approaching eighty years old, who had clawed his way to a fortune through grit and determination. He came across as mild-mannered and kind, and was “just the cutest old man,” according to one of the young executive assistants in the West Wing. But he was also a tough-as-nails executive who had made his money through leveraged buyouts of distressed steel, textile, and coal corporations.
Trump was clearly proud this guy had joined his Cabinet. “He’s so famous on Wall Street, all you have to say is ‘Wilbur,’ and everyone knows who you’re talking about,” the President raved. “No last name! You don’t need it! Because everyone knows he’s a total killer. He doesn’t look like it, right? Look at him, he’s a nice guy—one of the nicest. But he’s a killer.”
The President looked across the table at the foreign military leader who was smiling and nodding, with the translator in his earpiece trying to keep up. “And that’s the only kind we deal with—killers. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you, General?”
It’s hard to say whether “killer” translated effectively into Arabic—alqatil could also be taken as “murderer” or “assassin,” after all—but they seemed to at least understand that Trump was saying it all in good fun. Then again, I also couldn’t help but wonder if there was a hidden subtext. We’re glad to reboot this relationship. But don’t mess with us.
Killer. This was the single highest compliment that Donald Trump—not the President, but the man—could pay another human being, and it had been for decades.
In 1980, a half decade before I was even born, Trump sat down with entertainment reporter Rona Barrett for his first-ever network television interview. “I think that the world is made up of people with either killer instincts or without killer instincts,” Trump told her. “The people that seem to emerge all the time—it doesn’t mean they’re the best … are the people that are competitive and driven and with a certain instinct to win.” In short, killers. And this was a mind-set that had been instilled in Trump since childhood.
In Harry Hurt III’s Trump biography, Lost Tycoon, he wrote that Trump’s father, Fred, used to tell his sons, “You are a killer … You are a king … You are a killer … You are a king.” He’d gotten it honestly. It was deeply ingrained in his psyche since childhood. So if you’re trying to make sense of almost any action he took as President, this is the prism through which everything should be viewed.
For instance, Trump would at one point publicly declare that if North Korea did not stop threatening the United States, they would be “met with fire, fury and, frankly, power the likes of which the world has never seen before.” The entire planet—including many of us in the West Wing—were taken aback, uncertain of whether we were now lurching toward a potential nuclear conflict.
Trump, for his part, felt totally in control. Part of the Trumpian killer mentality was to negotiate by dragging an adversary into chaos and uncertainty and bet that they wouldn’t be able to operate comfortably in that environment for as long as he could.
Sitting in the Oval one afternoon, he casually reflected on how he’d turned the tables after years of U.S. officials debating whether North Korea’s leaders were rational actors.
“Now they don’t know what to make of me,” he said of the North Koreans. “Maybe I’ll do it, maybe I won’t.” Will or won’t what? I definitely wasn’t going to ask. “They don’t have any idea. No one does. And that’s a good thing. That’s how it should be.” But what if there’s a misunderstanding that leads to war? I thought to myself, but Trump kept riffing. “It’s negotiation, and you can’t be any good at it if you’re afraid. And why would you be when you have the upper hand? At some point they say, ‘That’s enough,’ and you win. We’re going to win this one, believe me.”
Some months later, during a lull in the conversation as I walked with the President from the Oval Office over to the residence, I asked him what it took, in his view, to be a killer. He smirked, like Einstein being asked to explain the theory of relativity or da Vinci being asked to reveal the secret behind the Mona Lisa’s smile. But he didn’t hesitate for a second with his answer.
“Extreme competence,” he said, stopping for a moment to drive home his point. “And you’ve got to be relentless—totally relentless. You’ve got to be a winner. And, really, I think you’ve got to love the fight. You’ve got to have fun with it, in a way. I think that’s important. Killers have a certain way about them where they’re out there getting the hell knocked out of them and they still love the game. Now they’d rather be doing the knocking, but they can take it, too.”
This was, in a nutshell, Donald Trump’s theory of life. And throughout my time in the West Wing, there were plenty of killers rolling through.
One of the truly extraordinary things about working at the White House is the people you have an opportunity to meet. One day it’s the wealthiest person in human history. The next day it’s the king of an ancient country. The following week it’s a world champion athlete, or Grammy-winning musician, or Medal of Honor recipient.
Early in the administration, the White House assembled several “advisory councils”—private-sector leaders who would lend their expertise to various pieces of Trump’s agenda. The President loved these meetings, because it meant many of the world’s wealthiest, most powerful—and often famous—businessmen would come together for an audience with him.
After one of these meetings, I walked from the State Dining Room back to the West Wing with legendary General Electric CEO Jack Welch. The octogenarian leadership icon was wearing a black overcoat with the collar flipped up to face the biting winter cold, but he had a spring in his step after meeting with the President.
“I’ve been coming to this place since 1980 and I’ve never seen anything like that,” he said. “They can say what they want about him, but I don’t know if any president has been more prepared to sit in that room and talk business. It was like talking to a peer, not a politician. Hell of a meeting.” Maybe he was simply saying this for my benefit, hoping I’d tell Trump. But he seemed sincere.
In any event, I did tell Trump about the comments a few minutes later. He didn’t even take time to fully absorb the information before saying, “Get Jack Welch booked on television to do as many interviews as he’ll do.” It wasn’t technically my job to do this, but that didn’t matter. And we made it happen.
On a different occasion, the President convened another of these types of meetings—this one an infrastructure advisory council—led by billionaire New York real estate tycoons (and stone-cold Trumpian killers) Richard LeFrak and Steven Roth.
We met in the Cabinet Room and I sat against the wall opposite Trump, toward the end of the room where the busts of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington sat silently, filling the niches on either side of the fireplace. I chose that seat, rather than my usual spot behind the President, because there was another guest in the meeting who had piqued my interest. I’ve noticed that when there’s a gathering of powerful and important people, there’s typically an individual or two in the group who are a big deal, even among people who are a big deal in their own right. Apple CEO Tim Cook, for instance, stood out among tech leaders, as did all-pro tight end Rob Gronkowski when the New England Patriots visited. Among the infrastructure group, however, one billionaire stood out among the others: Elon Musk.
He was worth about twenty billion dollars and had captured the public’s imagination with his grand visions of human exploration and technological revolution. In the infrastructure meeting, Musk’s presence was a point of fascination for several reasons. First, and perhaps most obviously, he was famous. Not famous, like, in the business community, but in pop culture. Second, he was doing massive things—humanity-changing things—like sending people into space and attempting to end our century-plus reliance on the internal combustion engine. And third, he was viewed as a bona fide genius, someone who was actually inventing and engineering this crazy stuff, not just marketing it or selling it.
As the infrastructure advisory council settled into their chairs, Trump kicked off the meeting.
“It’s wonderful to have everyone here,” he said. “Steve and Richard are the best in the world at this—real pros. We’ve been friends and competitors for a long time. We’ve done some big deals, right? But what we’re doing now is a little bigger, wouldn’t you say? We were dealing in billions, now it’s trillions, right? So we’re going to do something really special together.”
Once the pleasantries were out of the way, Trump went around the room soliciting ideas and feedback from his guests. There were ideas for how to fund a giant infrastructure plan. There were thoughts on what and where to build. And Trump would periodically veer into rants about how U.S. leaders had allowed the country to fall into a state of disrepair, or how we didn’t “do big things anymore.”
Musk sat quietly—probably the only person in the room not wearing a tie—as other advisers shared their ideas for traditional building projects. When it was his turn to share, the President introduced him softly. “Elon, what do you have for us?” he asked, giving Musk the floor.
“Mr. President, I’d like to discuss a way to take people from Washington, D.C., to New York City in twenty-nine minutes by tunneling,” Musk began. He spoke with a slight stutter, never in the middle of sentences, but occasionally at the beginning, as if his mouth couldn’t quite form the words as quickly as his brain could transmit them. “Just imagine how much this would improve people’s lives. There’s no reason we should be okay with sitting in traffic all day, which is what people do, especially where I live in California. We can fix this.”
He went on to explain that he had founded the Boring Company, which was developing technology to dig faster and more economically, and to transport people at up to seven hundred miles per hour in tubes known as hyperloops.
“It’s a high-density area, so we’ll want to remain underground the entire way,” he concluded. “It will take right at twenty-nine minutes.”
All eyes in the room swung back to the President to see how he would react to a proposal that was so wildly different from any other ideas that had been thrown out so far.
“Everyone else is talking about bridges and roads, and this guy comes in here talking about tunnels and this and that!” the President exclaimed, sitting back in his chair and drawing laughter from the group. He wasn’t mocking Musk; he seemed to be both making a joke and acknowledging the fact that Musk was operating on an entirely different intellectual plane than most everyone else in the room.
“That’s good, Elon,” he concluded. “Do it. I wish you the best of luck. Do it.”
And with that, Musk got the blessing of the President of the United States to build a tunnel from Washington, D.C., to New York City, or at least it seemed like he did.
In any event, while the President enjoyed surrounding himself with killers—whether they were military generals or titans of industry—the White House staff seemed to subconsciously adopt a certain killer instinct as well. But instead of focusing it on accomplishing policy goals or desired political outcomes, we far too often focused on devouring one another.
Cutthroat doesn’t even begin to describe it. In Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward’s book Fear: Trump in the White House, Reince Priebus was quoted as saying of the West Wing dynamic, “When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody. That’s what happens.”
This was sometimes a good thing. Pitting staffers with wildly divergent viewpoints against one another sometimes led to better policy outcomes. But more often than not the culture of ruthlessness—starting at the very top—was so all-consuming that survival became a full-time job unto itself.
In our first year in the White House, no group of people attracted more of the President’s ire than “the leakers.” Attending meetings in the West Wing was accompanied by the anxiety of feeling like everything that was said was likely to find its way into the press. Often the leaks were incomplete versions of the truth, one-sided and self-serving. Regardless, they made the President furious.
For instance, one unnamed White House official told Politico, “We are kind of helpless. And we are hoping the President doesn’t tweet. Fingers crossed.”
When The Washington Post declared working for Trump “the worst job in Washington,” anonymous White House officials said, “The problem is not an incompetent communications shop, as the President sometimes gripes, or an ineffectual Chief of Staff, as friends and outside operatives repeatedly warn, but the man in the Oval Office.” The Post reported that “impromptu support groups of friends, confidants and acquaintances [had] materialized” for Trump aides, who had also “started reaching out to consultants, shopping their résumé.”
These are but two examples among the dozens of times White House officials were granted anonymity to trash their boss. I found these comments to be especially disgraceful. I understood the rationale of some people simply not wanting to work for Donald Trump. But what kind of person did it anyway, only to spend their entire time there taking anonymous shots at the President they were supposedly serving?
On April 10, 2017, Politico published a story by its chief White House correspondent, Shane Goldmacher, eviscerating the White House communications team.
The most brutal part of the story took aim at Mike Dubke, who had recently signed on as Communications Director, finally relieving Spicer from overseeing both press and comms. He had been a campaign consultant and an ad buyer, but he didn’t have any high-level communications experience. No matter. He met the only discernible criterion: loyalty to Sean and Reince.
Dubke had assembled a large group strategy session on how to best promote the President’s first hundred days in office. He
kicked off the discussion of how to package Trump’s tumultuous first 100 days by pitching the need for a “rebranding” to get Trump back on track.…
Staffers, including counselor Kellyanne Conway, were broken into three groups, complete with whiteboards, markers and giant butcher-block-type paper to brainstorm lists of early successes.…
Dubke, who did not work on the campaign, told the assembled aides that international affairs would present a messaging challenge because the president lacks a coherent foreign policy.… “There is no Trump doctrine,” Dubke declared.…
Right after the story popped online, Dubke was torpedoed by a very unexpected source. Unexpected, at least, to those who didn’t know her. The First Lady.
I know there are many outside the White House who have become invested in the mythology, often backed by anonymous sources, that Melania secretly hated her husband, or was planning to divorce him, or had some business arrangement that kept them together. As with every marriage, they had their good days and bad days, often centering around times when accusations of past infidelity were in the news. But from what I saw she never wavered in her support, and she was serious about her official role as First Lady and her self-appointed role as her husband’s fiercest protector.
She obsessed over every detail of White House social events, such as the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, an event that attracts more external visitors than any other one-day event throughout the year. In 2017, twenty-one thousand people were invited to the event, which takes place on a packed South Lawn, with musical entertainment, refreshments, and games. Press coverage leading up to the event that year had noted that it was the East Wing’s first big test, and ominously warned that they had gotten a late start on the planning.
On the day of the event, everything was in place—the staging, the decorations, the eighteen thousand colored Easter eggs, the band. Stephanie Grisham, her Communications Director, had mapped out all of the camera angles and movements. Mrs. Trump was wearing an elegant light pink silk dress. She looked at ease, as if the whole thing had come together without much effort. She and Barron were preparing to accompany the President out onto the balcony with a junior staffer dressed in an Easter Bunny costume when Melania froze. Her lips formed into a judgmental frown.
“That needs to be taken off,” she said.
She wasn’t talking to Barron or her husband, but the Easter Bunny. He was wearing a light blue vest, and for whatever reason the color or the fabric intruded on the First Lady’s milieu. With seconds to go, staffers jumped into action, scrambling to undress the white bunny in full view of a slightly perplexed President.
“That’s much better,” she said. Now everything was perfect. And they walked together out of the Blue Room and onto the balcony to be received by the crowd below.
Mrs. Trump was also a savvy consumer of news, and her quiet work as the President’s protector in chief was never fully appreciated by most people, either inside or outside the White House. She spent hours each day consuming the television coverage and tracking the palace intrigue inside the West Wing. That’s how Dubke caught her attention.
Appalled by the Politico story, the First Lady rang the President in the Oval Office. He put her on speakerphone and listened with increasing alarm as she explained that he had serious issues within his communications team, particularly with this new guy Mike Dubke. She told him he needed to read the Politico story immediately. Hanging up the phone, he demanded for the story to be printed out and brought to him. Minutes later it was in his hands and he was stunned to see his communications director—whom he’d barely gotten to know—declaring to his staff that the President needed a “rebrand” and that he didn’t have a coherent foreign policy.
Dubke told the President the article was false. Having been in the meeting and witnessed it myself, I thought it was pretty much accurate, although it did come across more dramatic in print than it had in person. Every detail wasn’t presented in its precise context, but it certainly captured the sentiments Dubke had expressed to the team.
Instead of owning up to his comments, Dubke excoriated the “leakers” in our midst. It was a totally reasonable frustration, but not an excuse for what he said. With the article citing “six sources” who were in the room, we knew a crackdown was coming, we just weren’t sure what it would look like.
When Politico had previously written a story critical of the press team, Spicer had brought all forty of us into his office, asked us to put both our government and personal phones on a table, then informed us that he was going to have lawyers from the White House Counsel’s Office go through them to find out who had spoken to Politico reporter Alex Isenstadt.
They didn’t find anything, and the entire absurd exercise promptly leaked to Politico. Spicer would later write in his memoir that the President had scolded him for employing such a bumbling tactic.
“Sean, what were you thinking?” he recalled the President saying.
“Of all my experiences with the President,” he concluded, “that one was the worst.”
This time, though, it felt like they were likely to go even further. Perhaps a lie detector test? I’m not sure what it says about our work environment that it seemed totally plausible that we might get polygraphed over a Politico story, but at that point it wouldn’t have surprised anyone. This was a hot topic among communications aides, and everyone had their own opinion about how to handle such a situation. I figured I’d just tell the truth, and if they fired me for it, then so be it.
Sure enough, I got a cryptic phone call the next day from a lawyer in the White House Counsel’s Office asking me to come upstairs. When I got there, Priebus, Dubke, and White House Counsel Don McGahn were all seated behind a conference table.
I didn’t know McGahn well, but I liked the fact that he had long hair—falling over his ears and stopping just above his shoulders—and that he played the guitar in a rock band. As I walked into his office, McGahn was sitting back, one leg crossed over the other, with both hands holding up his top leg by the knee.
“Come on in,” Priebus said. “Have a seat.
“Have you seen this story by Shane Goldmacher—the one about the ‘One Hundred Days’ communications meeting?” he asked.
I told him everyone in the building had seen it.
“Did you talk to the reporter? Were you one of his sources?”
I told him I had not given the story to Goldmacher, but that he had indeed called me about it.
I explained that Goldmacher had called and said he was writing the story based on the firsthand accounts of numerous other people who were in the room. But the part he wanted to talk to me about was that he’d heard the President was frustrated with Dubke and longing to bring back Jason Miller, the senior communications adviser from the campaign. He also said he’d heard Miller had been quietly advising Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon on communications strategy and had written a memo about how the White House should be communicating about the health-care bill, which had stalled in Congress.
Everything Goldmacher was laying out to me on the phone was true, but I knew it wouldn’t be helpful for anyone. So I enlisted Miller’s help and together we convinced Goldmacher to tone down that portion of the story. There was nothing I could do about everything else he had been told. He wasn’t asking me to confirm it. He already had it from a half-dozen sources.
Fortunately, Miller had also called Priebus to give him a heads-up, so I assumed he knew that everything I was telling him was true. Priebus then moved on to asking who else might have leaked it.
“What about Kellyanne?” he asked. I told him that plenty of people viewed Kellyanne as a leaker, but then again plenty of people suspected their enemies in the White House of being leakers. No one had any hard evidence, so there was no way of really knowing. Plus, in this particular story Politico had six sources—six—so it was a bigger issue than just one person talking out of turn.
Priebus’s one comment was that I should have called Dubke to alert him. Fair enough. I conceded that point. Then they let me go.
I considered it another example of Priebus and his allies being more concerned with bad press for themselves than they were about the fact that they’d hired a Communications Director who didn’t believe in the President.
After leaving the Counsel’s office, Dubke threatened me, saying that if word got out that I had been summoned to the Counsel’s office for this, I would be fired. I told him he could rest assured that I’d come to him directly if I had a problem. But in retrospect it was that willingness to express my concerns directly that put me under suspicion in the first place. Because I was the only one openly expressing frustration, they assumed every negative story was a hit job planted by me. At the time I was sick of being suspected, but looking back I’m flattered they thought I was that prolific.
Keith Schiller, always a barometer of Trump’s level of aggravation, talked to me about the leaking problem one day when we were gathered outside of the Oval Office. “Who do you think is doing it?” he asked, channeling the President’s exasperation.
I told him there was really no way to know for sure but that everyone had theories, including me.
“We need to talk more about this,” he said. “Let’s catch up later.”
That evening, Keith texted and asked me to come to his apartment, just off McPherson Square, about two blocks from the White House. When I came over, we walked to a nearby pharmacy so Keith could pick up some household items, and I laid out a simple theory.
When things got tough during the campaign—particularly after the release of the Access Hollywood tape—there were people who bailed and people who stuck it out. And even among those who stuck it out, there was a group from the RNC who seemed to spend their time talking to members of the press, trying to convince them that when Trump lost, it would not be their fault. And yet some of those same people somehow found their way into the White House.
The best-known example of this among former campaign staffers was Michael Short. Even before Access Hollywood, Short—on loan from the RNC—had left his computer sitting open on his desk in the Trump Tower war room, walked out of the building, and never returned. Once back at the RNC, he had cursed out campaign staffer Chris Byrne in a shouting match at one of the debates, berated Stephen Miller over email for insisting the RNC defend Trump against the Washington Post fact-checker, and was generally confrontational with every Trump aide he encountered. And yet Priebus and Spicer had tapped him to be an assistant press secretary in the White House, with a portfolio that included national security issues and foreign policy. Additionally, Raj Shah, whom Priebus and Spicer had named Deputy White House Communications Director, had been offered the research director job during the campaign, but turned it down to stay at the RNC. Several people close to him told campaign aides that he had decided not to let his reputation be tarnished by what was sure to be a crushing electoral defeat.
Keith was surprised by these stories, which had somehow never made it back to him and presumably never made it back to the President, either.
We were enduring another difficult period. The push to repeal Obamacare had turned into a debacle, and there was a nonstop torrent of damaging leaks. My theory was that the same people who had bailed and leaked during the campaign were probably doing the same thing again. When we made it back to Keith’s apartment, he told me he wanted to share my thoughts—especially the Michael Short story—with the President.
He called an aide in the White House residence and told him he wanted to bring me up to see the boss first thing in the morning to talk about the leaking.
“Actually, he wants to talk to you right now,” the aide replied. “Here’s the President.”
With Trump on the phone, at about eight o’clock at night, Keith quickly told him I had some insight into the staffing issues that he would want to hear.
I could tell the President was agitated and annoyed about all of this. He wanted answers from people he felt he could trust. This, of course, was not the first president to be concerned about leakers. Every president in recent history has been upset about anonymous sources within their team criticizing his leadership in the press. But few presidents were as immersed in the media as the current one. “Bring him to see me first thing tomorrow,” he ordered.
The following morning, Keith called me and asked me to meet him in the hall between the Oval Office and the Roosevelt Room. This was unusual, since our desks were about twenty yards apart and he could just walk over and talk to me. This time, he didn’t want to risk anyone overhearing what we were doing. It was pure palace intrigue. There was no one we could trust.
Thirty seconds later I was at our appointed rendezvous point. Unfortunately, so were Reince Priebus and several other members of the staff who were walking toward their offices just down the hall. Once they had cleared out of the hallway, Keith slipped me through the President’s private dining room and into his private study. At this point I probably don’t have to keep writing “in a normal White House, that’s not how any of this would work.” But normally staffers are not slipped in past the front office reception staff or without the approval of the Chief of Staff or their bosses in the chain of command.
A few moments later he brought the President into the famous “Bill and Monica” study.
“What do you have for me?” he asked.
“Tell him exactly what you told me,” Keith said before closing the door and waiting outside.
I felt like this was an important moment in my relationship with the President. We spoke often, as I’ve noted, and he would frequently ask my thoughts on the news of the day as we walked between the residence and the West Wing before or after recording videos. He loved to ask about how other members of the staff were performing, especially Spicer. His assessments increasingly had turned sour.
“He couldn’t even complete a sentence today without stuttering,” Trump had complained during a recent conversation. “What do you think about Sarah Sanders? Would she be better?”
Those types of questions, which the President was known to ask of various staffers and friends, always put me in a tough spot. While anyone outside of Spicer’s RNC loyalists conceded privately that it was probably time for a change behind the podium, I still had to work with Sean. Every day. I didn’t love criticizing him behind his back. But when the President wanted my opinion I gave it to him.
“He’s struggling out there every day, and sometimes it’s tough to watch,” I’d tell the President. “But he’s probably got the toughest job in the building, other than yours.”
Trump would generally agree whenever I said something like this and we would move on to other topics. But this time, this conversation, was different. The President was frustrated and wanted the unvarnished truth not only about Sean but about the never-ending problems in the press and communications shop.
Several months of events in the West Wing flooded into my mind.
Reince and Sean had marginalized almost every member of the campaign team who had come into the White House. I believed their staffers were the ones anonymously disparaging the President in the press. They occasionally mocked him in closed-door meetings. They had blocked former campaign aides from taking a leading role on any of the top projects or issues. And it wasn’t like Reince and Sean were having success. They had botched nearly every major communications rollout or crisis management situation. And they had somehow made working at the White House—the honor of a lifetime—a miserable experience that left many of us dreading the walk into work each morning.
As I sat in front of the President of the United States, also exasperated with the state of play, I figured I didn’t have anything to lose by just telling him the truth as I saw it. Besides, he was my boss, the ultimate boss, and my loyalty was, as it always had been, to him first.
“Mr. President,” I began, “I remember what it felt like the night the Access Hollywood video came out. We all do. It was a gut-check moment for all of us. Everyone counted us out. But the next morning, I woke up at six A.M. and came into the Tower and went to work. We all did, except for a couple of people. One of them is named Michael Short. He quit even before Access Hollywood, and I didn’t see him again for months. Until we showed up on our first day and he was here, too, because he’s Sean and Reince’s guy and they decided to bring him into your White House.”
“Wait,” the President interjected. “He quit on us, but they still brought him here?” That Trump didn’t know this story—which had long since become a part of 2016 campaign lore—wasn’t a surprise. During the campaign, he hardly interacted with most of the people working there, other than the top dogs like Bannon or Kellyanne.
“Yes, sir,” I replied. “And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Stunned, the President called out for Keith, who was standing just outside the door, and asked him to bring in a pen and a piece of paper. After returning with a Sharpie and White House note card, Keith stayed in the room. “I told you, sir,” Keith said. “These are the kind of people we’re dealing with.”
“Give me their names,” the President intoned. Only in retrospect did I see how remarkable this was. I was sitting there with the President of the United States basically compiling an enemies list—but these enemies were within his own administration. If it had been a horror movie, this would have been the moment when everyone suddenly realizes the call is coming from inside the house.
“Is there anyone in particular you’re interested in?” I asked.
“Well, first, tell me who are our people from the campaign.” I knew what he meant. People who weren’t brought in by Priebus, Spicer, and the RNC.
I began listing campaign staffers from the fourteenth floor of Trump Tower, with whom I had spent countless hours in the trenches—people like Steven Cheung, Andy Surabian, and Kaelan Dorr, who had worked sixteen-hour days for months.
“Stephanie Grisham is another one,” I said. I knew very well that the President loved Stephanie. While he didn’t recognize some of the other names I was giving him, Stephanie was the traveling Press Secretary on the campaign and he loved her toughness. She had come into the White House as a Deputy Press Secretary under Spicer, but quickly left to join the First Lady’s staff a couple of months in. “She’s happy now,” I said, “but Sean kept her out of everything because she wasn’t one of his people from the RNC.”
I knew this one would stick with the President because it directly impacted him. Stephanie used to hurry members of the media in and out of press gaggles. She had a good relationship with them—a mutual respect—but they tended not to break decorum when she was around. Since she’d left for the East Wing, the press seemed to cast etiquette aside more frequently. In one memorable example that would come later that summer, the press corps got so aggressive jockeying for position in the Oval that they knocked a golden lamp off an end table, sending Keith lunging to catch it before it hit the ground.
“Easy, fellas,” Trump said, totally appalled. “Hey, fellas. Fellas, easy. Fellas—easy!”
“Guys, you’re knocking the furniture down,” Keith finally said in frustration.
They kept pushing.
“Stop it!” Johnny McEntee, the President’s body man, demanded. “It’s the Oval Office. Stop it.”
These scrums drove Trump crazy and sometimes sent him into a rant about how “this never happened when Stephanie was here.”
As I continued to tick off names, Trump would occasionally interject to ask about other members of the staff.
“Hope Hicks?”
“She’s the best—rock solid.”
“What about Keith?” he asked, both of us clearly aware of Keith standing right there.
I smiled. “Everyone knows Keith is with you one hundred percent.”
He wasn’t actually concerned about Hope or Keith. They’d long since proven themselves to be beyond reproach—certainly far more than I had. I assumed questions about them were more of a test of me. I wouldn’t have been stupid enough to disparage either one of them anyway. But of course I meant what I told the President.
Then his tone changed.
“What about Mike Dubke?”
Already a dead man walking thanks to the First Lady, Dubke had spent the last several weeks spinning himself into a lather in a daily fit of incompetence, and he had inherited Spicer’s animosity toward former campaign aides. In fairness to him, he had inherited our contempt as well. Neither side gave the other much of a chance.
“He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing,” I told the President.
“And Sean?”
“At this point he spends more time fighting for his job than he does fighting for you. I think it’s really worth considering giving Sarah a shot behind the podium full-time.”
“What about Reince?”
I paused.
“Just between you and me,” the President said, leaning in. “I want to know exactly what you think.”
“Mr. President, let me first say that I don’t work closely with Reince, so I want to be fair to him. He’s got a tough job and has to deal with a lot more than just problems with the communications team.”
The President shifted in his chair. He didn’t care to sit through people hedging before stating their opinions. Just say it.
“But I do remember when he told you that you should quit the campaign and allow Pence to take over,” I continued. “When things got tough, his instinct was to tell you to quit. Your instinct was to fight. I don’t have any reason to believe that Reince is a bad guy, but I do have reason to believe he’s not a fighter, and he’s filled your White House with an entire team of people who either aren’t fighters or aren’t loyal to you—or both. That’s a recipe for disaster.”
The President shot Keith a look that said, It’s hard to argue with that, so I kept going.
“Ask any reporter in the White House press corps and they will tell you the same thing: If you want to get a response, write a story about Reince or Sean. The press shop will be all-hands-on-deck for the rest of the day pushing back. But if someone’s working on a story about you, very few people over there even lift a finger.
“The reason for that,” I concluded, “is that Reince and Sean have filled their staffs with people who are loyal to them, not you.”
By that point the President was indignant.
“Keith, I want these people out of here,” he said, “starting with”—he looked down at his note card—“Michael Short. Go fire him right now and throw him out of here. We’ll take care of the rest later.”
Keith agreed, but wanted to “do it by the book.”
“There’s Secret Service protocol for this type of thing,” he said. “They walk them out. I’ll go ask about the process.”
The President stood up and shook my hand.
“I’m going to take care of this,” he said. “We’re going to get rid of all the snakes, even the bottom-feeders.”
The President walked out of the private study and back into the Oval Office, and Keith shuttled me out into the back hallway. I went back to my desk on the other side of the Roosevelt Room and exhaled.
I felt relieved, but I also felt—I don’t know—something very close to guilt. I had told the President the truth. I wasn’t making up lies about anyone. He had asked and I had given my sincere opinions. But in doing this I sensed that I was losing myself in what I had rationalized as a necessary struggle for survival.
I missed Alabama. I missed my friends from church. The ones who couldn’t care less about politics or where I worked. The ones who would come over to our house every Tuesday night for Bible study. We still went to church faithfully every Sunday. But I had lost the support of a community that made sure I wasn’t finding my identity in a job. After all, to paraphrase the Gospel of Mark, What does it profit a man to survive in Trump’s White House but forfeit his soul?
The whole Dubke/Politico episode had put me on Priebus’s radar, and several subsequent run-ins with Dubke only heightened their desire to push me out. So when Trump confronted Priebus with a list of his allies who the President was suddenly wanting to get rid of, I immediately came to mind.
The President agreed to hold off on making any moves with regard to staff until he came back from his first foreign trip, about a week and a half later, but the wheels had been set in motion. Something was going to change.
Sure enough, just two weeks after the President invited me into his private study to give my thoughts on the communications operation, news broke in Axios that Dubke was resigning. This stoked speculation that more changes were on the way.
“Bring in the killers,” Axios’s Mike Allen wrote. “Trump is considering much broader changes.”
Priebus and Spicer were on the defensive, and I witnessed this firsthand. The day after Dubke’s resignation, I was sitting at my desk when I noticed Reince flagging down Time magazine reporter Zeke Miller in the hallway. I stepped into the hallway, just close enough to overhear Reince around the corner telling him that no more changes were imminent; everyone was safe. He then told him he should tweet it out.
When I returned to my desk, I waited a few minutes and then pulled up Miller’s twitter account.
“Snr White House official to me a few min ago,” he’d written. “‘There’s no shake-up coming. You should tweet that. It’s also true.’”
A few short weeks later, that tweet would be proven wrong.