BOULDER, COLORADO
Friday 15 January
In five days he would become the most powerful man on earth.
“How do you feel?” Quentin Phelps asked him.
Quent had come out of the cabin they were using as an office. He sat down in a rocker on the front porch next to the president-elect.
“Not ready,” Traynor said. “But better this afternoon.”
“It was a good day,” Quent agreed and smiled that familiar grin of anticipation they had shared over many years. It was good to be lost in the details again. This anticipation, however, was unlike any they had shared before, Traynor thought. The challenge more monumental. It was hard to grasp the geometry of it. You could break it down into smaller problems, but there were just so many pieces. You needed to divert people’s attention from most of them.
They were back at his friends’ estate in Boulder working—and hiding from the press. The Boulder compound had become his pre-inaugural headquarters. He had taken over one of the cabins as living quarters for himself and Mariette, and a second cabin for himself, Quent, and a few aides to use as an office. There was plenty of space at the estate’s big house and other cabins for any number of staff and any number of visitors. They had rooms for meetings large or small, and they could hike, run, play basketball, do anything they wanted to without leaving the grounds. They could bus the press in when it suited them and bus them out when it didn’t. The location was easy for visitors to get to, a half hour from the Denver airport, and a little less elitist than the Aspen house, which was not meant for anyone but him and Mariette.
He sat on the porch of the office cabin with a yellow legal pad on his lap, staring at the Rockies and the Continental Divide. He sat squarely in the middle between the East and the West of the country. It felt right.
“Yes, today was good,” Traynor said, but he was nervous, and Quent could hear it in his voice.
They were running out of time to have everything ready. Today they had settled on one of the biggest agenda items of his new presidency. Traynor had reassembled the climate team from last month, and they had arrived at a secret plan to radically address climate without Congress knowing. It was brilliant, bold, and could make or break his presidency. But he needed Upton on board and he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. He had asked her to stay behind at the big house after the afternoon meeting broke up so they could talk. But she said she needed to go back to her cabin to deal with something. She looked bothered. It worried him. He said he would come to her in a half hour.
So many details to worry about. He’d outsourced most of the inauguration day decisions to other people, especially Mariette, the most competent person he knew. Before they met, Mar had been an Olympian, a Stanford business grad, and had been the kind of competent executive whom bosses put in charge of whatever department was lagging. She’d run, at various companies, HR, Finance, Operations, and Logistics divisions and made them all better. That was how they met, when she was running one for him. She could handle his inauguration better than any of his staff. He knew the events around inauguration mattered, the galas and parties. “The spectacle of leadership,” Sterling Moss called it. But planning parties bored him. He didn’t have the patience.
He had much more to worry about. He had the first three months to accomplish a singular goal: how to utterly surprise his opponents the day he took office and not give them a chance to catch up. How to hit the ground faster than any president in history.
He and Quent had obsessed about it.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had transformed the country in eight days. Height of the Depression, 1933. When Franklin D. in his inaugural declared “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” his aide Tommy Corcoran said it was like Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone. Everything seemed to change in an instant. A week later, when FDR gave his first “fireside chat” and told people to put their money back into banks—not take it out—people actually freaking did it. The country started moving in a new direction. He was learning more about FDR, thanks to the historian he had hired for the West Wing, a woman Upton had introduced him to, someone she knew from Arizona. The historian was trying to teach him more about government leadership. John Kennedy had had an in-house historian, too.
He needed something stunning, something transformative. Something like FDR had.
He had surprised people by picking Upton, a Republican, as his running mate and doing so early, at the height of the primaries. Washington insiders said it was a stunt, but the public got it. Now he was committed once he became president to keeping the surprises coming almost continuously. And they had to be real. They had to add up to something. That was how he would keep his enemies afraid and his supporters cheering.
A lot hung on his inaugural address, the official first public act of a president. Sterling Moss was already referring to it as “The Seven Crises” speech—for the seven major problems Traynor’s administration would tackle on Day One. They hadn’t used the term before, seven crises, at least not since two years ago, when he had announced his candidacy. And he wanted the speech’s theme to remain a secret now—until the last minute. Only a few people knew about the speech’s content: Moss, Mariette, the speechwriter Will Gersch, and Quent.
The speech itself would be shy on details—purposely. They had all agreed on that. It was both a sleight of hand and a way to keep the focus on surprise. Put another way, he wanted to mislead his critics by reassuring them that he was a fraud and an empty suit. His critics considered him a showman and charlatan, a man with no patience for details. They would excoriate the speech for its grandiosity of ambition and its paucity of specifics, because that’s what they were expecting.
Seven crises? They couldn’t imagine David Traynor developing a serious plan to handle one—let alone seven. He’d heard it all his life. He talked like a frat dude, not a world leader. He was an overgrown “adolescent with ADD,” a man whose biggest strengths were “galling ambition and ruthless impatience,” who knew “just enough about engineering, marketing, and accounting” to have gotten into the customer-tracking software businesses “at just the right time.” But complicated global problems? Those were beyond his reach. Even if he made good appointments, the Week Ahead had editorialized last week, the country still needed a master at the helm, and “he was no master.” Deep down, his critics liked to joke, David Traynor was shallow.
In business, the Ivy MBAs and the Stanford engineers who worked for him usually thought him a sloppy thinker because he didn’t talk in jargon. They would come out of meetings wondering if he understood his own technology. Well, for all he could see, people in politics were even worse. He had never seen such arrogance, or so many people be so wrong so often. Maybe it was because politics was about belief and only occasionally about results. But most of the predictions he heard were ridiculous. People in politics, he found, tended to put way too much stock in their own rhetoric and too little on actual strategy. And they were often utterly out of their depth on execution.
He was counting on it. Just like he was counting on the spectacle of the inauguration Mariette was planning to help catch his opponents off guard. Everyone in Washington would be fixated on the day, the inaugural speech, the parade, the parties, the uber A-list celebrities, Mariette’s gowns, the amazing lineup of musical stars slated to perform at the different galas. And it wasn’t just the public. The press, too, always focused on the obvious, on what was arranged for it to see, and always imagined it could see more than it could. He was amazed that the press seemed capable of covering only one story at any given moment—a single plotline they shoved everything into, whether it fit or not. The media was a cyclops, a one-eyed monster.
That’s why the inauguration presented a perfect magician’s moment, a giant national sleight of hand, aired live on every news channel. While everyone was looking there, his presidency would have begun over here. And here. And here.
Everything had to be ready. At the moment of transfer of power, he wanted his administration moving at maximum speed. Bills prepared for Congress, meetings set, revised regulatory rules filed, and more. Much more.
His enemies would be irate; the news media shocked. Both drew their expertise and comfort from precedent. But their second reaction would be grudging admiration. And their third reaction would be the inkling of a new thought: maybe Traynor’s administration would be cleverer than they had imagined. The people who’d backed him, hoping he might shake things up, would begin to love him. And the people who despised him would begin to be fearful.
The seven crises themselves were not new. They were problems that had been ignored for generations. He had plans for all seven—and he would put parts of those plans in motion the day he took office. And from then on, people who were opposing rather than helping work to solve these crises could no longer credibly claim to be on the side of the American people. Didn’t matter which party you belonged or didn’t belong to; Americans knew when they were being lied to.
The list was simple. Introduce a plan to radically simplify the tax system. Secure the future of Social Security by significantly reforming it (unheard of from a Democrat). Rethink federal regulations from the ground up so everyone played by the same rules (again, surprising from a Democrat). Confront systemic racial inequities in criminal justice and judicial systems. Renew American manufacturing. (It could be done and Traynor loved the ideas they had so far.) Fix the country’s crumbling infrastructure (that, too, could be done). And attack the climate crisis as if it were a war to save the planet. The country, the whole damn world, would be reeling from the enormity of what they would send up in the first few days. No one would be able to keep up. They would think, finally, someone was doing something. Even those who thought him naive and certain to fail would have to admit it. Roosevelt hadn’t fixed the Depression. But he had made people believe they had finally started beating it back. And that was enough at the beginning.
IT WAS THE LAST PLAN, TO SAVE THE PLANET, THAT FASCINATED Traynor most. It involved the most secrecy, but if it succeeded, it would be the most important. That was what he and Kim Matsuda had just laid out all day long with a key group of advisors. It was what he wanted to talk to the vice president-elect about now.
Upton had spent only a few days here in Boulder in the last month. They needed time to catch up. Traynor made the hundred-yard walk to her cabin. She was waiting on the front porch.
He looked at her as he came up the steps. She could appear lovely when she wanted to, and always did in public. But in private, she hid herself in a hard shell of quiet intellect. He had seen that shell in the Senate. She used it to signal to colleagues, the vast majority of whom were male, not to push her around. She was like a lone redwood on a California hillside, he thought, that had rooted itself at an elevation where all the other trees were oaks and elms. Out of place. But a redwood would outlive them all.
“Everything all right?”
“Just a friend having a problem,” she said. “But he’s all right.”
Traynor plopped himself down in the chair next to her.
“So whaddya think about our secret plan to stop global warming?”