H. R. McMASTER HAD barely settled into his West Wing office at the beginning of March when he gathered the president’s foreign policy team around his desk for a lecture. Mike Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser, had been pushed out after it was discovered that he had lied about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States. McMaster’s books had not even arrived at the White House yet, and the only picture in the room was of McMaster and Najim Abdullah al Jabouri, the onetime mayor of Tal Afar, an Iraqi city in northern Iraq near the Syrian border that McMaster’s 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment helped to liberate in 2005. A West Point graduate and decorated Army commander, Trump’s second national security adviser had spent years in Iraq building the delicate relationships that allowed American troops to carefully navigate the sectarian crosscurrents in the dangerous civil war. Now, after just days in the White House, McMaster was not about to be part of an executive order that banned the country’s Iraqi allies from traveling to the United States. Mattis was there, along with Sessions, Kelly, and Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state.
Iraq has to be excluded from the travel ban, McMaster told them. On a practical level, it will complicate cooperation with Iraqi allies still in the field fighting insurgents. Banning Iraqis will play into the hands of jihadists who want to portray America as waging a war against the Islamic religion. McMaster was blunt about his disdain for a policy that seemed to focus on the dangers posed by Muslims to the United States. That doesn’t acknowledge the fact that the vast majority of victims of terror are Muslims themselves, he said.
Sessions was unmoved. “I’m not impressed,” he told the group.
“Well, Mr. Attorney General, you should be impressed,” McMaster snapped, grabbing the photo of himself and al Jabouri. The Iraqi mayor was a Sunni Arab who had worked side by side with McMaster and the Americans as they fought to defeat al Qaeda and create stability in Tal Afar. When it was over, and Shia militias targeted al Jabouri for death, McMaster sponsored green cards for al Jabouri and his family, who came to live in McMaster’s home for six months, eventually buying a house and settling in Virginia. More recently, al Jabouri had been going back to Iraq to continue the fight against ISIS, returning frequently to his family in the United States. It was unthinkable, McMaster told Sessions and the others, that any new policy would bar al Jabouri from returning to his family.
Sessions backed down. “Okay, okay,” he told McMaster, “we’ll take Iraq off.” McMaster was relieved and invited the group to go to the chief of staff’s office to tell Reince Priebus of the decision. As they walked down the hall, McMaster put his arm around Sessions. “I’m really going to appreciate working with you,” he told the attorney general.
But the warm feelings didn’t last for long. Bannon and Miller were in Priebus’s office, and they were not backing down on keeping Iraq in the order. What began as a discussion devolved into a heated argument. “They’re not an ally. They’re a fucking protectorate,” Bannon yelled. “I don’t want to hear this shit.” Bannon did not want the president to take Iraq, or any country, off his travel ban list. Trump’s over-the-top rhetoric had won him the presidency. Backing off now would just make him look weak and feckless to the people who supported him. And anyway, he insisted, the Iraqi government couldn’t even vet the people coming to the United States. Who the hell knows what kind of terrorists might be coming to America from Iraq? Miller jumped in, citing statistics about the number of Iraqis who had stayed in the United States longer than their visas allowed. His voice rising into the usual rat-a-tat-tat as he threw out facts and figures, Miller railed about the Iraqi government’s lack of the proper “chain of title” in determining the real identity of people applying for visas. Maybe, he told Mattis, McMaster, and Tillerson, the United States should just pull out of Iraq altogether.
McMaster was furious. “Iraqi boys are putting their lives on the line,” he yelled. For years, the United States had granted Iraqis a Special Immigrant Visa, under a program signed into law by President George W. Bush and aimed specifically at recognizing Iraqi nationals who worked on behalf of the U.S. government. In the immediate aftermath of the president’s travel ban, Iraqis with those visas had been told they were no longer eligible to enter the United States. It was an outrage, and must be reversed, McMaster said. Tillerson agreed. “The international community is going to go crazy,” the secretary of state insisted. Mattis, normally taciturn, could hardly contain himself. Like McMaster, much of his military career had been spent working with the Iraqi people in the fight against terrorists. The Iraqis who were being blocked by Trump’s order were the good guys, not the bad guys, and everyone around the world except the president and his White House aides seemed to know it. Mattis had gotten an earful about banning entry from Iraqis while he was at the Munich Security Conference in mid-February. Paul Wolfowitz, who was deputy secretary of defense during Bush’s first term, had called Mattis to complain, too.
The pissing match was going nowhere. Trump needed to decide. The next morning, the group convened again in the Oval Office and reprised the fight for the president. Iraq is our ally, McMaster and Mattis told Trump, who was hearing none of it. “We shouldn’t even be there.” He asked Mattis how many American troops were in Iraq. “What the fuck? Why the fuck are we all over the place? This has got to stop. You generals just want to bomb everything,” Trump said. Mattis, Kelly, McMaster, and Tillerson were rattled but unmoved, continuing to try to press the president to remove Iraq from the order. It was clear that Trump agreed with Miller and Bannon, but he always found it difficult to say no to “my generals,” as he often referred to them. Iraq could come off the banned list, but the president wasn’t going to be happy about it.
Opposition to the president’s travel ban order was coming from everywhere. But nowhere was the reaction as fierce as it was inside the government itself.
Almost immediately after the president signed the executive order, the staff at the DHS intelligence office prepared an analysis of the travel ban. The three-page analysis that the office produced was completely off message. Its title was: “Citizenship Likely an Unreliable Indicator of Terrorist Threat to the United States.” Using publicly available data, the report undercut the entire premise of the president’s travel ban. Out of eighty-two people convicted of terrorism in the U.S. since the start of the Syrian War in 2011, it found, about half were native-born Americans. And the rest came from twenty-six different countries, most of which were not part of Trump’s travel ban, including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cuba, Ethiopia, and Uzbekistan. Hamilton and Miller were furious at the report’s conclusions, saying it was flawed because it did not take into account classified intelligence data. When it became clear that the report was never going to be released, someone leaked it to the Associated Press and it generated headlines in newspapers across the country: “DHS Report Casts Doubt on Need for Trump Travel Ban,” The Washington Post wrote.
At the Refugee Affairs offices, Barbara Strack was trying to console her staff. During an all-hands meeting in the lobby area of the program’s eighth-floor headquarters at 111 Massachusetts Avenue, she delivered a just-the-facts speech about the impact the ban would have on their efforts to help refugees reach the United States. We didn’t see this thing ahead of time, and we know there are a lot of questions, but we are coordinating with the State Department and we’re trying to get it under control, she told her staff. But despite her efforts at reassurance, Strack recalled later, “There certainly was a sense of the program being under siege, and a sense of concern and unfairness.” A short time later, Strack led another, more emotional meeting at a second office, which housed many of the circuit riders who had been grounded, along with several newly minted refugee corps officers. They had been part of a hiring and training spree under Obama, who had made a push late in his final term to ramp up the number of refugees, especially Syrians, admitted to the United States. Many of them were angry at the situation, and deeply worried.
From the back, a man had the question on everybody’s mind. The travel ban executive order said that when the refugee program restarted, priority for admittance to the United States was to be given to religious minorities, which—given that the ban targeted majority-Muslim countries—was understood as a mandate to give preference to Christians. “If we’re asked to discriminate in favor of Christians, what are we supposed to do?” the man said. “How can I, as a person of conscience, be a party to that?” Strack urged her staff not to panic. “We don’t need to go to the darkest interpretation prematurely,” she told them. “Don’t assume the worst.” But privately, she was glad that someone had had the guts to say out loud what everyone was thinking: this was a Muslim ban dolled up to look like a legitimate national security directive. They did not want to be instruments of a discriminatory policy.
Inside the State Department, career officials were just as amped up against the order. Foreign service officers circulated a “dissent channel” memo, a rarely used form of internal protest designed to give diplomats a safe and private way to express their frustration to the secretary of state. Officials in American embassies around the world started signing the five-page memo to Secretary Tillerson just days after Trump signed his order. “A policy which closes our doors to over 200 million legitimate travelers in the hopes of preventing a small number of travelers who intend to harm Americans from using the visa system to enter the United States will not achieve its aim of making our country safer,” they wrote. “Moreover, such a policy runs counter to core American values of nondiscrimination, fair play and extending a warm welcome to foreign visitors and immigrants.” The memo warned that the ban would sour relations with the Muslim world, increase anti-American sentiment around the globe, impose “terrible humanitarian burdens,” and harm the economy. All while not preventing terror. The authors of the memo compared the travel ban to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. “We do not need to sacrifice our reputation as a nation which is open and welcoming to protect our families,” the memo concluded.
For Miller, Bannon, and the others in the White House, the nearly open revolt was confirmation of what they had suspected even before the president took office. They were convinced that career bureaucrats, especially at Citizenship and Immigration Services and the State Department, were actively sabotaging the Trump agenda—slow-walking memos, leaking unflattering documents, refusing to implement the president’s new policies. It was bad enough that lower court judges were blocking Trump’s executive order by substituting their own judgments in place of the president’s. And the liberal judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had unsurprisingly upheld the lower courts. But the resistance inside the administration was even more infuriating. Elections were supposed to have consequences, and insubordinate actions by some of the bureaucrats were providing ammunition to Miller, Bannon, and other White House aides who insisted that nothing be shared widely out of a fear that it would leak to the press. “We were getting bled out by the leaks in DHS, Justice, etc.—the Obama crowd—I mean, it’s unbelievable,” Bannon said. “Guys are breaking scoops on us nonstop, and Trump’s head is blowing up.”
Trump was already in a rhetorical war with his intelligence and law enforcement community, and his early interactions with them added to the strains. On February 14, about a dozen officials, including the attorney general, the deputy director of the CIA, the FBI director, and the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, gathered in the Oval Office at about 4:15 in the afternoon to deliver their first briefing for Trump about the overall terror threat facing the country. Top White House officials were there, too: Bannon, Kushner, Priebus, and homeland security adviser Tom Bossert. When someone in the group mentioned the existence of about one thousand domestic terrorism investigations, Trump interrupted. “Well, why don’t you just kick those people out of the country?” he asked. It was clear to everyone in the room that Trump assumed all of the people under investigation in those thousand cases were foreign-born nationals who could be deported. In fact, as the intelligence officials patiently explained, many of the subjects of those inquiries were native-born Americans or legal permanent residents—not foreign terrorists. For some of the officials in the room, the president’s remark was a stark reminder about how little he understood the real threats from abroad, and how many erroneous assumptions he made about the dangers from immigrants. After the meeting ended, Trump asked James Comey, the FBI director, to stay behind. According to Comey’s recollection in a contemporaneous memo, the president railed about leaks in his administration and urged Comey to drop the investigation of Mike Flynn.
The president’s annoyance was on public display two days later, when he abruptly decided to hold his first news conference. Standing in front of golden curtains at one end of the East Room, Trump mounted a vigorous defense of the first three weeks of his presidency. The rollout of his travel ban, he said, had been “very smooth.” He claimed that he had originally wanted to give people from the seven banned countries a month to prepare before the ban took effect, but that Kelly had told him that would allow “the bad ones” to come in. “Kelly said you can’t do that. And he was right,” Trump told the reporters. “As soon as he said it, I said, ‘Wow, never thought of it.’ I said, ‘How about one week?’ He said no good. You’ve got to do it immediately because if you do it immediately, they don’t have time to come in. Now nobody ever reports that. But that’s why we did it quickly.” If he’d have allowed a month as he originally suggested, Trump said, “everything would’ve been perfect.”
The problem, Trump insisted, was not with the travel ban itself, but with the courts that had blocked it with injunctions. Trump was furious that an appeals court had upheld the decisions of the lower courts, and even more furious that his lawyers were urging him to give up. Sessions and lawyers at the White House and Justice Department had decided that waging an uphill legal battle to defend the directive in the Supreme Court would fail. Instead, they wanted to devise a narrower travel ban that could pass legal muster. Earlier that same day, the Justice Department had informed the Ninth Circuit that the president planned to issue a new, modified order to take the place of his original travel ban. “Rather than continuing this litigation,” the lawyers said in their brief, “the president intends in the near future to rescind the order and replace it with a new, substantially revised executive order to eliminate what the panel erroneously thought were constitutional concerns.” Trump thought that it was a mistake to give up on the first one, repeatedly telling anyone who would listen that they should continue to fight for it. Publicly, though, the president appeared ready to move on.
“We’re going to put in a new executive order next week sometime. But we had a bad decision,” he said at his news conference. “The only problem that we had is we had a bad court. We had a court that gave us what I consider to be, with great respect, a very bad decision. Very bad for the safety and security of our country. The rollout was perfect.”
“I don’t want a fucking watered-down version!” the president yelled at his lawyer.
It was March 3, fifteen days after the president’s news conference, and the people around Trump had rarely seen him angrier. A day earlier, the president had been touring the USS Gerald R. Ford, a 100,000-ton aircraft carrier, when news broke that Jeff Sessions had recused himself from overseeing the investigation into Russian election meddling. That sent Trump into a rage. This Friday morning, the already seething president was in the Oval Office, surrounded by his top advisers, as White House Counsel Don McGahn reminded Trump that he had to sign a new travel ban to replace the original one. The ban had never gone into effect, blocked by court actions that Trump saw as legal obstructionism on the part of Democratic judges and immigration advocates. Activists were crowing that they had thwarted the new president and Mr. Trump was furious about being forced to back down to politically correct adversaries. It was a familiar moment for his advisers. The president could sometimes accept being told no in private and would occasionally relent. But he couldn’t abide a public turnabout, a retreat. “As long as he doesn’t lose face publicly, he’s okay,” one former top adviser later recalled.
At the news conference, Trump had said he would abandon his original travel ban. But with Marine One waiting on the South Lawn that Friday so Trump could begin his weekend in Palm Beach, he refused. “I want to fight in court,” he barked at McGahn as the confrontation escalated. Trump was seated at the Resolute Desk, surrounded by Bannon, Miller, Priebus, Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Spicer, and Mike Dubke, his new communications director. Outside the Oval Office, reporters waiting in the Rose Garden could see Trump’s top aides yelling and waving their arms. Bannon was in Trump’s face and McGahn refused to back down. We don’t have a choice, the president’s lawyer insisted. The Justice Department had already promised the court that Trump would issue a new order; we ran that by you, and you signed off! They had no choice but to follow through.
At the Justice Department, Sessions was trying in vain to get through to Trump on the telephone, hoping to make the case for the revised directive and persuade him to sign it. But Trump, livid about the recusal, refused to take Sessions’s calls.
“This is bullshit,” the president exclaimed repeatedly, ranting in the Oval Office surrounded by his staff. “I don’t want a fucking watered-down version!” He lashed out at McGahn, calling him incompetent. You’ve fucked everything up! Rather than try to talk Trump down, Bannon got in his face and shouted back at him. You can’t rewrite history here, Bannon said to the president. We all knew this recusal was coming, and it’s done, we’ve got to move on. As Trump railed about the recusal and berated McGahn, Priebus was getting pings from the Secret Service. The president had to go. The helicopters had been idling for so long there was a risk they might run out of fuel. Neither the travel ban nor Sessions’s recusal was going to be resolved right now. Priebus and Bannon said they would stay back, but the president had to get going. As Trump stormed out to Marine One at 10:45 for the ten-minute helicopter ride to Joint Base Andrews, Spicer tapped out a quick note of warning to one of his deputies who was waiting on Air Force One. Trump, he wrote, is “coming in hot!”
The next day, Bannon, McGahn, and Sessions boarded the attorney general’s plane and headed to Palm Beach. They had no choice, Bannon told the attorney general. Trump was refusing to take calls from Sessions, but they had to convince Trump to sign the new order, and Sessions had to be the one to do it. The president was a bully and a coward, Bannon told Sessions, and you can’t let his rage fester; you have to stand up to him right away and make your case. “You have to bring it today,” Bannon told Sessions as the pair flew south to Florida, preparing for what both of them knew would be a difficult and contentious argument with the president. “You’ve got to stand up to this guy. You’re executing his entire program. This is everything.” Sessions agreed with Trump that the first version of the travel ban was stronger, and he thought it was ridiculous that courts were using what Trump said in speeches or on Twitter to claim that the order was unconstitutional. But he also understood the argument by the top lawyers at the department that a revised ban would strengthen their appeal. And they had already told the court they would submit one.
If there was any doubt about what the president’s mood would be when Sessions and Bannon arrived, it was erased at 6:35 a.m. when Trump tweeted a stunning accusation against his predecessor. “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” In three more tweets over the next twenty-seven minutes, Trump repeated the unsubstantiated charge, compared former President Obama to Nixon during Watergate, and called Obama a “bad (or sick) guy!” That afternoon, as the rest of the world scrambled to try to understand the basis of Trump’s accusation, Sessions, Bannon, McGahn, Miller, and Kelly met with the president in the enclosed sunroom at Mar-a-Lago. For five hours, Sessions led a painstaking discussion with Trump of everything his administration had planned on immigration, and how vital the travel ban was to the agenda. He explained why revisions were needed and swore that it would not weaken Trump’s restrictions; if anything, Sessions argued, it would strengthen the president’s hand. Trump was grumpy and angry, lashing out at Sessions repeatedly for the recusal, which he said was unnecessary. The session extended to dinner on the patio, and at one point Trump even took Sessions aside and asked him whether he could un-recuse himself—just take it back and say he would oversee the Russia investigations after all. By the end of the meeting, Trump had relented. He would sign the new order, even though he didn’t want to.
On Monday, March 6, 2017, after returning to Washington, Trump signed the revised order in the Oval Office, with no press present. He left it to Sessions, Kelly, and Tillerson to make the announcement at the Customs and Border Protection headquarters later that day. One senior adviser later recalled never having seen a president so angry signing anything. It would take almost sixteen months and a third, modified version before the president’s travel ban would go into full effect, winning the blessing of the Supreme Court. That version was based on specific risk factors for evaluating which countries should be barred. The final list included Chad, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. But in the meantime, Trump’s anger about the resistance to his immigration agenda—from the courts, the Democrats, and his own bureaucracy—continued to fester.