Just as Donald Trump was directing his “fire and fury” threat against North Korea in rambling remarks after a luncheon at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club in the summer of 2017, his son-in-law began a very different conversation.
The Chinese—aided by Henry Kissinger and deeply concerned about Trump’s fixation on North Korea, while also aware of the leverage the North Korea situation might give them—reached out to Jared Kushner. The young man, absent any obvious experience, had quietly established himself with many world leaders and, similarly, with his father-in-law, as the brains, such as they were, behind the Trump foreign policy.
The president had often threatened to “dump” his secretary of state Rex Tillerson, whom he had quickly soured on, and replace him with Kushner. Kushner told friends he thought it was too soon; Kissinger had advised him to wait, counseling him to first put his name on a major initiative.
That summer, the Chinese put Kushner in touch with Gabriel Schulze, a U.S. investor. Schulze was part of a new class of international fortune hunters working at the intersection of international financial markets and troublesome regimes, including North Korea. Personal relationships, especially in parts of the world with autocratic rulers, were the most valuable currency. Since arriving in the White House, Kushner had worked hard at developing his own relationships with leaders who, with a word, could alter the shape of the world stage. These kinds of men could make things happen in a hurry, and both Kushner and Trump wanted to override the slow and cautious pace of the international world order.
Schulze was the emissary of a backdoor opening, encouraged by the Chinese, from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Trump had declared a virtual death match against the young despot. But the Chinese saw opportunity: during the meeting in April 2017 at Mar-a-Lago between Trump and President Xi—a meeting shepherded by Kissinger and Kushner—they had been amazed at Trump’s openness, capriciousness, and lack of basic information.
The Chinese believed that Trump’s stated views should not be taken all that seriously. Indeed, the Schulze initiative represented a sophisticated understanding of the new Trump diplomatic reality. In Trump’s Washington it was possible to avoid the State Department, the foreign policy establishment, the intelligence community, and virtually every other normal diplomatic process or restraint. The chief work-around to institutional diplomacy was through Kushner, the self-appointed foreign policy expert. The White House joke, said with an amazed slap to the face, was that Kushner was a modern-day Metternich.
Through the fall of 2017 and into the winter, Kushner quietly urged his father-in-law to take a different view of the North Korea issue. He told Trump that if he made peace, he could win the Nobel Peace Prize, just like Obama.
Hence, on June 10, 2018, a bit less than a year after Schulze’s approach to Kushner, the president arrived in Singapore to meet Kim Jong-un. The previous summer, all but unaware of the issues involved in the long stalemate with North Korea, Trump had threatened imminent war. Now, hardly better informed, he offered the North Korean leader one of the most fawning and peculiar embraces in diplomatic history.
Not long after his father-in-law’s election, Kushner—encouraged by Rupert Murdoch, whom he had befriended when they were neighbors in a Trump-branded building on Park Avenue—reached out to Henry Kissinger for advice and counsel. Kushner had decided that he would take an official position in the Trump White House and that, given his family ties, he would be able to forge a role for himself as a direct conduit to the president. In this, he imagined that a new kind of clarity and efficiency could be brought to bear on the world’s most pressing issues—the personal touch. It seemed of no significance that he knew very little about these issues beyond what he read in the New York Times.
Kushner saw Kissinger as a key to his great leap forward. The older man—he was then ninety-four—was flattered by the younger man’s attentions. Kushner was not just deferential and solicitous, he enthusiastically embraced the Kissinger doctrine—the belief that mutual interest ought to form the basis for sagacious moves on the international chess board in the quest for ultimate advantage.
Kushner, without illusions about his father-in-law’s lack of interest in foreign policy matters, saw himself, just as Kissinger had once seen himself, as the wiser and more focused adviser to a less sophisticated president. And while others might think Kissinger had become an elderly gas bag—and that he was, as ever, a shameless social climber—Kushner believed that Kissinger could provide him with special advantage in his new Washington world.
Kushner dropped his new friend’s name shamelessly: “Henry says…” “I was just talking to Henry…” “I’d like to get Henry’s take on that…” “Let’s loop Henry in…”
“Jared’s Uncle Henry” was Ivanka’s perhaps not entirely approving designation.
For Kissinger—still globe-trotting, still at work at Kissinger Associates most days, still social climbing—the startling opportunity at his advanced age was to become the key adviser to one of the most significant foreign policy players, perhaps the most significant foreign policy player, in the U.S. government. And the essential point, as Kissinger explained to friends, was that Kushner, with zero experience in international relations, was a blank slate.
In the weeks after the election, Kissinger went out of his way to widely praise Jared’s willingness to listen and the quickness with which he learned. Kushner, for his part, praised Kissinger’s unfaltering acuity and renewed relevance in a complicated world. Kushner even floated the suggestion of Kissinger as secretary of state, relaying this idea back to Kissinger.
Trump told people that Kissinger was in full support of his hope for a new friendship with Russia, saying that Kissinger regarded Vladimir Putin with “fantastic respect—loves him.”
Through much of the first year of the new administration, Jared continued to call on Kissinger. Even as Trump’s foreign policy began to careen in uncharted directions—casual saber rattling, daily tariff threats, slavish embrace of despotic figures—Kissinger, enjoying his heightened prestige, remained tempered and supportive, reassuring his wide circle of concerned foreign policy experts and international businessmen that the drama and the tweets were irrelevant, that an impulsive Trump was contained by a thoughtful Kushner.
But in early 2017, Kissinger, lobbied by Kushner to write an encomium about the young man for Time’s annual list of the hundred most influential people, seemed forced to balance his own status-seeking inclinations against Kushner’s lack of foreign policy bona fides.
As part of the Trump family, Jared is familiar with the intangibles of the president. As a graduate of Harvard and NYU, he has a broad education; as a businessman, a knowledge of administration. All this should help him make a success of his daunting role flying close to the sun.
The subtle hedging of his bet on Kushner did not go unnoticed by the foreign policy professionals in the new Trump administration.
Through much of their first year in Washington, Jared and Ivanka seemed often to regret their move into official positions. The president too seemed to have frequent second thoughts. A beleaguered Kushner was perceived as having been blamed by his father-in-law for myriad bad decisions, including the Comey firing. He had been pummeled by Steve Bannon, viciously in public and murderously in private. In short order, Kushner had become one of the least sympathetic figures in modern politics. (Don Jr. had become quite a sought-after surrogate for his father in right-wing circles, whereas an effort to enhance Jared’s public face had ended very quickly.) The once-golden couple had, in the eyes of many, hopelessly lost their social cachet. Even their neighbors gave them the cold shoulder. “I don’t know if anyone will ever understand what we’ve been through,” Ivanka told friends.
But in the administration’s second year, there began to be a new perception of what Rex Tillerson, the then secretary of state, called “the curious case of Jared Kushner.” Tillerson had come to detest Kushner for his meddling, leaking, and personal agenda. Yet along with administration officials, as well as people in law enforcement, he had begun to notice that callow Jared Kushner, once an obvious victim of his own ineptness and hubris, seemed to be pursuing a much more calculated plan.
Kushner’s personal wealth depended on a shaky business whose precarious financial foundation rested on less-than-creditworthy loans. These were the kinds of loans secured through personal relationships and, not unusually, the trading of favors and influence. Often, they were obtained from countries with lax regulatory rules.
Kushner’s father, Charlie, famously malevolent and brutish, had gone to federal prison for tax fraud and witness tampering; he had tried to blackmail his own brother-in-law with a prostitute. But the sins of the father—whom Trump derided as a crook with no money—had largely been judged as having no bearing on Jared’s nature as infinitely modulated and sober-minded.
Yet Jared’s temperament did not change the fact that the family business was sorely overextended. Real estate development businesses frequently are, but the Kushner family’s leap from garden-apartment builder in New Jersey to Manhattan tower owner and New York City landlord had been particularly headlong, much of it happening under Jared’s titular leadership while his father was in prison. As the Trump administration began, the Kushners faced a looming refinancing of their premier property, 666 Fifth Avenue, and a strained market for their plan to build a tech center in the vast square footage they held in Brooklyn.
Jared’s decision to enter the White House left the Kushner family business all the more public and exposed. What’s more, it put his father-in-law in a terrible position. Powerful men are, inevitably, vulnerable through their families. Not only did Trump have myriad problems of his own, he now had the Kushners’ problems.
Still, what initially seemed like naïveté and bad judgment began to seem like the moves of a high-risk player. Perhaps Kushner’s seeming equanimity and restraint were just a proper poker face. Whatever you could say by the spring of 2018 about the Trump White House, Jared had, for the most part, successfully navigated it—the only person, other than his wife, to have done so. And in the back channels of a world that he was counting on to play an essential role in securing his wealth, he had had a singular impact.
Outside of Western democracies, much of the world’s foreign policy was transactional in nature. Personal enrichment and an individual’s hold on power were ruling concerns in all but the most stable states and regions. This had become more pronounced as private fortunes vied with governments or collaborated with them. The oligarch-billionaire world—from Russia to China, from South Asia to the Gulf states—ran its own diplomatic missions. People who had the money to bribe, who fundamentally believed that anyone could be bribed, and who had outsize influence on the legal structures that might otherwise restrict bribery, had become major foreign policy players in key parts of the world.
For decades, the United States had reliably frustrated transactional and freelance diplomatic efforts. The American government was too big, its institutions too entrenched, its bureaucracy too powerful, its foreign policy establishment too influential. The international world of fixers and operators, often referred to euphemistically as “investors” and “representatives,” had to toil long and hard to be heard in Washington.
Enter Jared Kushner.
Almost immediately after his father-in-law’s election, Kushner became the sought-after point man for any foreign government inclined to deal with a family rather than an array of institutions. Instead of depending on a vast and frequently unresponsive bureaucracy to arbitrate and process your concerns, you could go directly to Kushner, and Kushner could go to the president-elect. Once Trump was inaugurated, you had, through Kushner, an all but direct line to the president.
Side deals, personal introductions, quid pro quos, agents and subagents—all these quickly spawned a parallel diplomatic force, a legion of people representing themselves as having a direct relationship with the president. Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal lawyer, opened for business and began collecting money from dubious characters and regimes. Chris Ruddy, who ran a conservative news site that marketed vitamin supplements and was a Palm Beach confidant of the president’s, suddenly, in May 2018, had a $90 million investment offer from Qatar. David Pecker, the president’s friend who ran the supermarket tabloid the National Enquirer, walked a high-placed Saudi intermediary into the White House and was suddenly talking to the Saudis about backing his quixotic, if not screwball, effort to acquire Time magazine.
But the most efficient point of contact was Trump’s son-in-law. Russian, Chinese, and Middle Eastern diplomatic strategy centered on Kushner. European, Canadian, and British efforts did not, and they seemed to suffer for it.
In a side deal that was unprecedented in modern diplomatic history, intermediaries from Saudi Arabia’s deputy Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), approached Kushner during the transition period before the Trump administration entered the White House. The key issue for the House of Saud was financial—specifically, declining oil prices and an ever growing and more demanding royal family supported by oil output. The thirty-one-year-old deputy Crown Prince’s solution was economic diversification. This would be funded by taking the Saudi-owned oil company Aramco public, at an anticipated $2 trillion valuation.
But first the plan would have to surmount a not inconsiderable obstacle: JASTA, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which was expressly written to make it possible for 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia. If Aramco were listed on a foreign exchange, it would be particularly vulnerable to anyone taking advantage of the opening provided by JASTA; in fact, Aramco’s liability would be virtually unlimited. Hence, who would invest?
Not to worry: Kushner was on the case. If MBS would help Jared with a menu of items, including pressuring the Palestinians, Jared would help MBS. Indeed, MBS, to the consternation of the State Department—who backed his cousin the Crown Prince Muhammed bin Nayef (MBN)—would be one of the first state visitors to the White House. Three months later, without any White House objections, MBS ousted his cousin and became Crown Prince, the presumptive heir to the throne and the effective day-to-day Saudi leader.
It was the Trump administration’s first coup.
To win favor with Kushner, the rich Gulf states—Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia—competed with each other or partnered with each other. In this, Kushner found himself, or had positioned himself, as one of the essential players in one of the world’s largest pools of unregulated free cash flow.
The Trump White House had, in an almost formal way, designated China as the number one enemy, replacing Russia and the former Soviet Union. Trump had a personal antipathy to the Chinese—not only were they the “yellow peril,” they were unfair competitors. This complemented Bannon’s unified field theory of the twenty-first century: China was both the rising power that would swamp the United States and the economic bubble that would burst, pulling the world into a fearful vortex.
Kushner’s position was much less clear.
A key Kushner connection was Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the Blackstone Group, one of the world’s largest private equity funds, whose business view was significantly predicated on the continued growth of the Chinese consumer market. Kushner brought Schwarzman into the White House to head one of its business advisory groups; as a consequence, Schwarzman became Trump’s most important blue-chip business contact.
Kushner and Schwarzman, along with other Wall Street figures in the administration, formed the opposition to Bannon and the architects of the Trump trade policy, Peter Navarro and Robert Lighthizer. The anti-China group proposed an all-out trade war with China. The Kushner group, with its deep and growing ties to China, sought to make a softer deal.
In early 2017, U.S. intelligence officials secretly briefed Kushner about Rupert Murdoch’s former wife Wendi Deng. A decade earlier, Deng had facilitated both Kushner’s relationship with Murdoch and Kushner’s relationship with Ivanka, one of Deng’s close friends. The Murdoch–Deng and Kushner–Trump relationships continued to blossom when they were neighbors in the Trump building on Park Avenue. Now, in the White House, Kushner was told that there was good reason to believe Deng was a spy for the Chinese. She was, Kushner was informed, regularly supplying information gleaned from her social and political contacts to Chinese officials and business figures.
This was, as it happened, just what her former husband was saying to almost anyone who would listen: Wendi was working for the Chinese, and she’d probably always been working for the Chinese. (“I knew it,” declared Trump.) Kushner dismissed the intelligence assessment and said, confidently, that Murdoch was going a little senile.
Eight days after the election, Kushner, in an introduction aided by Deng, had had dinner with Wu Xiaohui, the chairman of Anbang Insurance Group, the Chinese financial conglomerate. Wu, who had partnered with Schwarzman on a variety of deals, was a close associate of the Chinese leadership—Wu’s wife was the granddaughter of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. One of the current financial era’s most successful global tycoons, Wu had built Anbang from a company with an annual turnover of a few million dollars to one with $300 billion in assets in just ten years.
The Kushner family, through the early months of the administration, negotiated with Wu and pushed for a bailout deal for 666 Fifth Avenue. In March 2017, following negative publicity about the deal, both sides backed away. In June, the Chinese government removed Wu from the company and later sentenced him to prison on financial corruption charges.
In the White House, Kushner and Bannon represented the opposite polls of liberal globalism and right-wing nationalism. Bannon, for one, believed that Kushner showed the true and deeply self-interested face of liberal globalism. The Kushner family’s desperate need for cash was turning U.S. foreign policy into an investment banking scheme dedicated to the refinancing of the Kushner family debt. Government service regularly greased the wheels for future private careers and wealth, but Kushner, in Bannon’s view, was taking this to astounding new levels of self-dealing.
The personal and ideological blood score between Bannon and Kushner had continued even after Bannon was pushed out of the White House. Indeed, many believed that Bannon was merely waiting for Kushner to be exposed and exiled, thus opening the door to his own return. But Bannon had come to believe that you could not separate Jared from the president, and that Jared was now one more point of mortal exposure for Trump. “They would gladly throw each other under the bus,” said Bannon, “but they are so in each other’s business that if one gets run over so does the other.”
The Trump–Kushner family soap opera played out on multiple levels of exposure, even beyond the constant attention to business opportunities. There was former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who had prosecuted Charlie Kushner. Jared and Ivanka, urged on by Charlie Kushner, had blocked Christie’s expected appointment to a high position in the Trump administration. Christie, well versed in Kushner family business practices, was—or so both the pro- and anti-Jared forces believed—eagerly and pitilessly talking to former colleagues in the Justice Department about the pressure points that might be applied to the family and its princeling. Christie was also supplying to journalists details of his investigation of the Kushner family while he had been a federal prosecutor.
Jared saw himself as a problem solver. He was clear-eyed and methodical. Success was all about pushing through the challenges. Be clear about what you want. Be clear about what you can get. Focus on where you can make a difference. “Jared’s self-help, business-book-leadership talk was one of the things that attracted Ivanka to him,” said a friend of the couple.
By the spring of 2018, however, Jared Kushner had become another front in the president’s legal problems. He was a subject of the special counsel’s investigation; he was being looked at by federal prosecutors in both the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York (the Eastern District was claiming its primacy in “all things Kushner”); and the Manhattan district attorney was fishing for its piece of the action.
One curious aspect of the investigation of Kushner involved Ken Kurson, a Kushner crony and lieutenant who in 2013 had stepped in to edit Kushner’s newspaper, the New York Observer, after a string of editors had clashed with Kushner over his desire to use the paper to support his family’s financial interests. More recently, Kushner had helped Kurson secure the offer of an appointment to the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The FBI’s background check on Kurson during the spring of 2018 had focused on a string of allegations following the breakup of his marriage in 2013–14, including spousal abuse, stalking, and the targeting of his wife’s best friend, a doctor at Mt. Sinai Hospital. The doctor was holding emails and other electronic information that might be damaging to Kurson, information related not only to the marriage but potentially to the New York Observer and Kushner.
Kurson’s troubles then become an issue in Kushner’s own security clearance background check. The Eastern District and the FBI were pursuing reports that Kushner had taken extreme measures to help his friend. The Mt. Sinai doctor had an apartment in the same building in which Kushner lived—a Trump building. (The doctor’s presence in the building had, in better days, been facilitated by Kurson’s wife through Kushner.) Prosecutors and the FBI had been told that Kushner, using a pass key from the building, had entered the doctor’s apartment seeking to take her computer.
The quest to get Kushner had become almost as intense as the quest to get Trump. In addition to reviewing the Anbang deal, prosecutors were taking a close look at a $285 million 2016 Deutsche Bank loan to Kushner and his father, and at a direct pitch for a bailout made to the Qatar minister of finance in 2017.
By now it had become a constant topic of discussion and calculation among many media people and Democrats, not to mention all but the most buttoned-up Trump hands: the possible indictment of the president’s son-in-law. And if the indictment came down, would it land before or after the indictment of the president’s son Don Jr.?
Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell, a renowned gossip, speculated to friends about what could become an exquisitely difficult dilemma: having to choose between one’s father and one’s father-in-law, who happened to be the president. Lowell quite seemed to relish that devil’s choice. At the same time, Lowell was everywhere, it seemed, saying that Kushner was out of danger—and claiming credit for it. Lowell had become one of the key advisers on not just Kushner legal issues, but Jared and Ivanka’s larger political strategy.
For Kushner, the long game was the 2020 campaign. He was convinced the Republicans would lose the House in November 2018; so be it. But no matter who became the Democratic nominee in 2020, it would likely be a very close electoral race. That prospect could prove to be an advantage during the campaign: tight numbers would keep the party in line. As long as the Republican Party held, they could block the Democratic venom. And with a majority in the Senate, impeachment was a toothless threat.
Kushner’s model, he told friends, was Israeli prime minister and family friend “Bibi” Netanyahu. Whatever charges were leveled against him, Bibi, ever attentive to his base, was able to fend them off because he could always be counted on to win his next election. Early in 2018, Kushner had installed his ally Brad Parscale—who had run the data effort for the 2016 presidential campaign—as the head of the 2020 campaign. Looking forward, Kushner planned, at the appropriate moment, to take the reins of the campaign himself.
What stood between now and then was his father-in-law’s volatility. It was only inside the Kushner family, particularly in conversations with his father and brother, that Jared discussed the extraordinary challenges of working with and trying to manage Trump. Kushner’s analysis was the same as nearly everyone’s who spent a significant amount of time around the president. He was childlike—a hyperactive child at that. There was no clear reason for why something caught his interest, nor was there any way to predict his reaction or modulate his response to it. He had no ability to distinguish the important from the less important. There seemed to be no such thing as objective reality.
Kushner’s brother Josh, fervently anti-Trump, was always trying to explain his brother’s involvement in the Trump administration to friends. He feels the same way as everyone else, Josh emphasized. He sees it clearly.
But Jared’s future depended on managing Trump. He would have to accomplish the near impossible—which, in fact, he believed he could do. The downside was great, but so was the upside. He and his wife saw a future in which they would parlay their moment in the international sun into something of stupendous value to them.
It was a central attribute of the Trump White House. To fully comprehend the desire of the first couple to advance, you had to appreciate their belief that, in front of them, they had an open path to their own White House. This Trump White House was merely their stepping-stone.
Although Kushner had been a prime mover in Comey’s dismissal—the move that precipitated almost all of the crises that followed—he now had become a strong advocate for not firing Mueller or Rosenstein. Under Abbe Lowell’s tutelage—“Jared loves a tutor,” said one friend—he had come to see the legal process as one of containment and management.
What you did not want to do is give clarity to the issues, and here Trump’s constant diversions were of considerable help. But you also did not want to increase the level of conflict, which was Trump’s natural response to any problem. In Kushner’s mind, his father Charlie’s battle to upend the investigation undertaken by federal prosecutors became the model of what not to do.
“Let’s not break anything,” became Kushner’s constant advice to his bull-in-a-china-shop father-in-law.
Where Bannon believed, more and more, that the longevity of the Trump administration would depend on the outcome of the midterm elections, Kushner believed that his father-in-law’s fortunes—and his own as well—depended on successfully preparing for and participating in the 2020 campaign. You just had to get there, to keep moving Trump forward.
The key to managing his father-in-law—as everyone in Trump’s family, in the Trump Organization, on The Apprentice, and now in the White House understood—was distraction. The more, for instance, Kushner could persuade Trump to get involved in foreign policy, the less he would obsess about his own more immediate political and legal issues. This became, too, a proof-positive aspect of Kushner’s belief that he could in fact engage his father-in-law, that he, above everyone else in the White House, could understand and tap into Trump’s real desires and agenda. Or, with more cunning yet, that he could make his agenda Trump’s agenda.
In early 2018, as Kushner refined his strategy for shifting Trump’s focus from his present troubles, his thinking reflected advice he had received from Kissinger, who had served as Nixon’s national security advisor and secretary of state. Nixon had been distracted from his legal problems by foreign policy excursions, and, Kissinger noted, this had distracted the media, too.
Over lunch at Bedminster shortly after the New Year, Kushner told his father-in-law that he should completely rethink his approach to North Korea. Kushner sketched out the favorable consequences: not only would he change the world opinion of his presidency, he could rub the noses of so many Trump haters in his accomplishment. Taking on one of the world’s most volatile situations and reversing it was a PR no-brainer.
It would be like Nixon going to China, Kushner told the president, a major historical development. One for the history books—a favorite Trump phrase and standard.
Kushner assured his father-in-law that he could declare victory in his campaign against North Korea and proclaim peace. Kushner had been told—or at least this is what he told his father-in-law—that not only was Kim ready to deal, he personally admired Trump. Flattery was flowing through the backdoor channels.
Over the course of that lunch—hamburgers were served—Trump’s yearlong campaign to confront, demonize, and provoke North Korea, a personal enterprise supported by no one in the White House, was entirely put aside.
Bannon believed that Kushner and Trump were being duped by the Chinese. Keeping his eye on Kim’s train rides from Pyongyang to Beijing, Bannon concluded that the Chinese client state would provide Trump with a great public relations opportunity, but this would also give China more leverage. After negotiating a flimsy handshake deal with Kim, Trump would be beholden to the Chinese, whom he would need to make the North Koreans deliver on their promises, such as they were.
News of the proposed summit with Kim broke in early March. Trump’s foreign policy team—Tillerson, Mattis, McMaster, even the wholeheartedly loyal Pompeo—was relieved that the president was no longer issuing reckless threats, but confused and appalled that, in place of his taunts, he seemed ready to give away the store. With no revision of policy, no change in anything other than mood music, Trump had agreed to a radical alteration in the country’s posture toward North Korea.
It was Mattis who was said to have identified the reverse Wag the Dog theory. In 1998, the Clinton administration sent air strikes against purported Osama bin Laden training camps, a largely pointless attack that, critics charged, was meant solely to draw attention away from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and an event that eerily mirrored the plot of a recently released movie, Wag the Dog. The North Korea gambit might work equally well: it would offer up a phony peace that would distract the media and the opposition. But that was not all. Trump’s foreign policy team also concluded that, although there would be no real alteration in the threat capabilities of North Korea, a hostile regime would nevertheless be converted to a seemingly much less hostile one. It would be an ass-backward but significant triumph of diplomacy.
A new theory, one that Kushner seemed to be acting on, began to emerge in the White House. The fear that Trump might go to war—that in a temper tantrum or a fit of megalomania, he would release the awesome power of the U.S. military—was misplaced. Modern warfare was data-driven; going to war required a decision tree involving ever more complex data points, meaning not just many hours but many months of meetings and PowerPoint presentations. But Trump had no patience for such meetings. Since he had begun to inveigh against North Korea, no one had been able to get him to spend more than a few minutes on the long-studied cause-and-effect matrix of what might happen in the event of military moves against North Korea.
The issue was not that he might act precipitously and recklessly because he didn’t understand the consequences of doing so. The issue was that he could not comprehend the actual choices that needed to be made in order to act; indeed, he could not even stay in the room long enough to decide on a course of action. For Trump, the fog of war would waylay him before the first command could be given.
In the weeks before the grand trip to Singapore, worries about the difficulty of briefing the president became both a critical concern and a topic of high comedy. There was almost no particular—not geographic, not economic, not military, not historical—that he seemed to grasp. Could he even identify the Korean peninsula on a map?
But as the trip approached, Trump was full of increasing confidence and brio. He acted like a commander. He was inside the role. He seemed to feel not one iota of hesitation about how he would handle himself, even though, as the entire White House seemed to appreciate, he knew nothing whatsoever about the situation at hand.
For Mattis, incredulity battled with disgust. He began to tell people that he doubted he could make any contribution to the process, in terms of either how to restrain the president or how to move him.
Trump was promising “denuclearization,” while the White House and foreign policy people trailed behind him and tried to clarify a nonexistent process for achieving this end, as well as the terms for this sometime-in-the-future denuclearization status. Then, in defiance of the most basic North and South Korean norms and assumptions—or, perhaps, just to fuck with the foreign policy people and, especially, Mattis, who increasingly irked him—Trump suddenly began talking about withdrawing U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula. That is, for perhaps nothing in return, he might give China and North Korea what they most wanted: the transformative change that would remove the United States from the region’s power equation. Shortstopping this disaster quickly became the central goal of the foreign policy team. A successful summit would be one that did not permit China and North Korea to achieve total victory.
In the annals of American foreign policy, this might have been one of the most peculiar moments ever. The pugnacious president of the United States had abruptly begun to sound like a latter-day peacenik; soon he would be embracing his mortal enemy and, perhaps, talking about turning the other cheek. The media, having bitterly criticized Trump for his warlike posture, now, in confusion, appeared to decide that they must praise him for his new and sudden language of tolerance, patience, tranquility, and even affection.
The president arrived in Singapore on June 10. Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, John Kelly, Stephen Miller, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and National Security Council aide Matt Pottinger accompanied him. Trump had invited Hannity to come; he would be something like the summit’s official broadcaster. Almost as soon as it began, the trip was wholly celebratory—marred only by Trump’s complaints about having to meet with the prime minister of Singapore, Lee Hsien Loong, the day after his arrival.
“As you know, we’ve got a very interesting meeting tomorrow,” Trump said in his public remarks to Prime Minister Lee. “We’ve got a very interesting meeting in particular tomorrow, and I just think it’s going to work out very nicely.”
“The president is well-prepared for tomorrow’s engagement with Chairman Kim,” said Pompeo to reporters, even as he privately told friends that Trump had avoided anything beyond the most superficial preparation.
On June 12, the president and Chairman Kim convened shortly after 9:00 a.m.
“I feel really great,” said the president at a photo op with Kim before their meeting. “We’re going to have a great discussion and, I think, tremendous success. It will be tremendously successful. And it’s my honor. And we will have a terrific relationship, I have no doubt.”
“Well, it was not easy to get here,” said Kim through his interpreter. “The past worked as fetters on our limbs, and the old prejudices and practices worked as obstacles on our way forward. But we overcame all of them, and we are here today.”
They met for thirty-eight minutes.
This was not a summit in which the relationship between two nations would turn on the fine print of any ultimate agreement. Instead, this meeting marked the beginning of the new inverted relationship between two men, neither of whom spoke the other’s language. Prior to the summit, they were hard-core enemies; afterward, they would become sincerely respectful friends. Any substantive policy discussion, even among aides, was largely dispensed with. Both men merely wanted to ratify their new relationship and their status as ultimate leaders.
“Brilliant,” said Bannon, appreciating the Trump moment. “He achieves total command presence. Here’s a thing he knows nothing about. He can’t be briefed because he can’t understand any of it. So they just give up trying. They tell him that nuclear is worse than all of them and hope he gets it. But he’s got command presence. He looks the part.”
It was, too, the moment when any pretense of an ordered, structured, cause-and-effect, expert-focused, process-led foreign policy went out the window. And it was also the moment that Trump appeared to have lost Jim Mattis, the last bridge to establishment thinking in the administration.
Mattis had begun to think that in Trump he had met his Captain Queeg.