Late in the summer of 2018, several weeks after I left the White House, I was in a taxicab making my way to a meeting at Trump’s Washington hotel. Downtown D.C. seemed to be in a state of almost total gridlock, and my taxi’s air-conditioning wasn’t working very well. I was starting to get carsick, so I got out and walked the remaining few blocks.
As I got closer to the Trump Hotel, I realized what was going on. The Secret Service had created a perimeter around the building and shuttered the roughly five-block stretch of Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House complex to the hotel. The President would be arriving soon.
As I walked toward the perimeter, hoping there was at least one entrance open so I could make it to my meeting on time, I was repeatedly blocked by D.C. police officers. There was no way in. About thirty yards away from me, though, I saw a Secret Service agent I had gotten to know while working in the White House. A few minutes later he looked in my direction and I flagged him down. He jogged over with a big smile on his face, shook my hand, and asked how I was doing.
“I’m good, man,” I said. “Just trying to get in there ’cause I’ve got a meeting, but you guys have it locked down. Any chance I could…”
The agent laughed apologetically. “You know better than that,” he said, smiling. “Welcome to life outside the bubble.”
A few minutes later the President’s motorcade rumbled by. Supporters cheered and strained to catch a glimpse of Trump. Protesters waved impeachment signs and held up their middle fingers. I soaked it all in like a dramatic, slow-motion scene in a movie. Life outside the bubble.
Working in the White House gives you the sense that you are at the center of the universe. You casually walk through the world’s most heavily guarded gates as tourists watch and wonder what you must do inside those walls. Your work plays out on television screens around the world. Everyone you meet wants to hear “what it’s like.” For the first couple of months I was on the outside, I would glance at TV screens in restaurants or airports, see the latest crisis playing out at the White House, and get depressed. What must I be missing? But over time this feeling faded away. Other than scrolling through my Twitter feed, I quit following along with the play-by-play. One of the remarkable things about the Trump era is that if you unplug for a week, you’ll miss a dozen wild plot twists, and nothing, all at the same time.
It took some time, but eventually I remembered that for most Americans the White House is not the center of their universe. That distinction is held by their family dinner table, their kids’ Little League games, their church, their community, their jobs—real life. And that’s how it should be. After a while, I remembered what it was like for my life to be my own. I stayed up late watching movies and slept in on weekdays whenever I felt like it. I traveled. Megan and I laughed that we spent more time together in the two months after I left the White House than we had in the entire two whirlwind years before.
Every now and then I would get sucked back in. A White House aide would call for feedback on how they were handling a certain issue with the press or the President. A journalist would ask if I could offer any insight into the way the President thought about a certain person or policy. And occasionally a reporter would call to ask for a comment on a ridiculous hit piece one of my former colleagues had tried to plant on me (some things never change).
Then I started getting approached with job offers and consulting requests. I turned down the former but decided to launch a consulting firm to take advantage of the latter. And the money being thrown around quickly made me realize why so many people who come to D.C. end up getting stuck in the swamp. But I wanted something more for my life; I wanted to do something meaningful, something with a purpose. However, I first needed closure on the Trump season of my life. I wanted to spend time deeply considering what it all meant and where I wanted to go from there. That’s where this book comes in. I wrote it cover-to-cover over a roughly two-month span in the fall of 2018.
So what did I learn? What did it all mean? To some extent, I still don’t know. Would a single significant outcome have been different had I not been there? Would some meaningful accomplishment have been left just out of reach? It’s impossible to say, but I tend to doubt it. I do know that I am proud to have worked in the White House, to have served my country. I’m proud to have worked for the President of the United States. And in spite of the frustrations and misgivings laid out in this book, I’m proud that the president I served was Donald Trump.
In a sense, my time in the White House could serve as a cautionary tale of the corrosive effects of power. I do believe that power can corrupt, that our moral compass becomes less trustworthy the closer it gets to the magnetic pole of absolute power. But the further removed I am from the West Wing, the more convinced I become that what power really does, more than corrupt, is reveal—it exposes our true colors, uncovers or magnifies the flaws that already existed. As the nineteenth-century orator Robert G. Ingersoll wrote, reflecting on the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, “Most people can bear adversity. But if you wish to know what a man really is, give him power. This is the supreme test.”
My test results revealed that while I was by disposition a polite person, I was not by nature a kind one. I was quick to seek revenge and slow to offer forgiveness. I had a warrior spirit, but lacked a servant heart. I was too quick to pass judgment on the motives of my “enemies,” while granting myself moral superiority in the process. None of this would have made my family or friends proud. It didn’t make me proud of myself, that’s for sure. And worst of all, I knew it didn’t please my God, from whom I spent less and less time seeking direction. I continued to wrestle with these moral failings, even long after leaving the White House. On the other hand, I took the fact that I wrestled with these shortcomings at all as a sign that I did not totally lose myself in it all. I learned from it. And because of these experiences—and a lot of self-reflection—I will be far better prepared for the next test, perhaps a bigger one.
On a practical level, the greatest takeaway from working in the White House was that I want to make sure my life’s priorities are in order. God created work. I know it is a huge part of his plan for my life and he can be glorified in it and through it. But I don’t want to be consumed by it. Bronnie Ware, a nurse who spent years of her life caring for patients in their final days and wrote a book titled The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, found that many of them simply wished they had not been so consumed by their careers. “They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship,” she explained. “All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.” The first time I read that, I wondered if Donald Trump will one day feel that way, too.
When I’d occasionally stumble across one of his rally speeches on TV or streaming online, I’d feel the adrenaline flow again. I’d remember how it felt in Trump Tower when we were a gang of bandits with nothing to lose. And I’d sense the tension that I believe nags Trump the most, at least subconsciously: nothing about being President has ever reached the high of becoming President. This is one of the reasons he loves to relive Election Night 2016 over and over again.
There is a vague sense of dissatisfaction—of hollowness—that sometimes accompanies what most of the world views as success. There will always be something missing. I personally believe there’s a God-shaped void inside us all—one that only he can fill. But I’ve also come to believe that it’s the journey, the long ride between milestones, where life really happens. I plan to enjoy that journey more in the future.
As for my friends, most of them have moved on from Trump World, replaced by a new cast of characters. As the President looks around, the familiar faces—the ones who were with him before the presidency—are fewer and fewer. Jared and Ivanka, of course, stayed in the West Wing and may end up being in there until Trump takes his last flight on Marine One. Dan Scavino became the last remaining one of the “originals,” the small group of staff who were with Trump when he launched his campaign and rode the wave all the way into the White House.
Through it all, my perception of the President has remained largely unchanged—a man of extraordinary talents and stunning shortcomings. But anyone who attempts to deny his accomplishments in office—whether they are in spite of or because of his methods—at this point cannot be taken seriously. His greatest accomplishment of all may be somehow getting his opponents to expose themselves to be—or to turn themselves into—exactly what he says they are. Members of Congress largely proved to be the spineless opportunists he had always contended—putting their loyalty or opposition to Trump ahead of doing their jobs. The “fake news” media has gotten so outraged at his broadsides—and committed to showing Trump to be unfit for office—that they peddle half-truths and manufactured narratives. The “deep state” bureaucrats, especially in the Justice Department, were so offended by his rise that they actually abused their power in ham-handed attempts to take him down. The “mob” of left-wing activists resorted to openly calling for anyone associated with Trump to never again be allowed to live in peace. Even Hillary Clinton said in October 2018, “You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about,” barely concealing the underlying assertion—that Trump, his allies, and his supporters must be stopped by whatever tactics are necessary. It’s almost like the entire nation has descended into an ends-justify-the-means dystopia.
The country has always swung back and forth—left to right, party to party—ever since the Democratic Republicans crushed the Federalists in the election of 1800, in what Thomas Jefferson viewed as tantamount to a second American revolution. While reflecting on this later in life, Jefferson wrote John Adams, “Every one takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few.” Trump, like Bernie Sanders on the other side of the aisle, played to “the many.” In 2016, they both tapped into the feeling—shared by millions of Americans across party lines—that our economic and political systems are stacked against them. Where they diverge is in the solution to this problem: individual freedom and less government intervention vs. collectivism and centralized control.
There is nothing wrong with honest populism. But people often forget that while the Founders were repulsed by monarchy, they feared pure democracy. There are some hints of Trump in Alexander Hamilton’s description of a dangerous man who would “mount the hobby horse of popularity,” take opportunities to “embarrass the General Government and bring it under suspicion” and “throw things into confusion that he may ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.” Self-government is an experiment that is not immune to failure. Watching Trump undermine long-standing institutions has been uncomfortable at times. But he also exposed what we already suspected: many of them were rotten to their core. The question is, does he have it in him to build them back up, or will that task be left to whoever comes next? That remains to be seen. But to paraphrase Jefferson again, I prefer this dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.
Prior to Trump’s rise, Republican Party leaders were convinced that abandoning the so-called culture wars was the only way the party could survive. As usual, Trump took the opposite approach; now everything is a culture war. Looking toward 2020, this will likely continue.
In September 2017, the President seized upon protests by some NFL players who refused to stand for the national anthem to raise awareness about racial injustices and police treatment of African Americans. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a b— off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!’” Trump said during a rally in my home state of Alabama. “You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s going to say, ‘That guy that disrespects our flag, he’s fired.’ And that owner, they don’t know it. They don’t know it. They’ll be the most popular person, for a week. They’ll be the most popular person in this country.”
The media backlash was predictably severe. At the height of the furor, I got a phone call from Jim McLaughlin, a pollster who, along with his brother John, had known Trump for decades. Jim explained that public polling on the issue was starting to come out and it was very positive for the President’s position. “The country overwhelmingly agrees with him on this,” Jim said. “They just want to watch sports. They want it to be an escape from the nonsense. And next thing you know they’ve got to watch people kneeling for the national anthem. It’s offensive, and that’s what the polling numbers show.”
At the end of an afternoon video recording session in the Diplomatic Reception Room, I pulled the President aside, told him what Jim had said, and showed him some of the polling numbers.
“Of course I’m right about this,” the President said, his voice dripping with righteous indignation. “I knew it from the moment I said it; everyone’s going to agree with me on this—most everyone. It’s about our country. People are sick of their country being disrespected.” He then switched gears, and with a wily grin began considering how this would play out during his reelection campaign.
“The Democrats—you watch—they’re going to nominate a kneeler,” he crowed. “They’re going to nominate a kneeler and I’m going to beat the hell out of them.” He bit his bottom lip as he slowly punched the air with his right hand, like a champion boxer readying for another match. “You can’t win a Democrat primary anymore unless you’re a kneeler. But you can’t win a general election if you hate the flag and the national anthem.”
We walked off down the hallway back toward the West Wing and he tied a bow on his line of thought. “2020 will be fun, that I can tell you—a lot of fun,” he said. “The kneelers! Just watch.”
Just watch.
I will. And so will you. Because the fact of the matter is, when it comes to Trump, we just can’t look away.