There were moments when Wendy Upton wondered what she had done.
How was it she had lashed her future—and the country’s—to this man she barely knew?
In more rational moments, of course, she knew the answer. The presidential campaign had been a months-long nightmare of fearmongering and promises. She was genuinely anxious for the country’s future. Her own party seemed to have gone mad. When Democratic presidential candidate David Traynor, an outsider who didn’t like party orthodoxy and promised reform but not revolution, had asked whether she would consider being his vice president, she had allowed herself a day to entertain the hopelessly naive and politically suicidal idea: perhaps, just perhaps, a bipartisan ticket might heal the country.
Gil Sedaka, her chief of staff and closest friend, had encouraged her, thinking the rumors of her being sought out would help her politically, never imagining the offer would actually come through.
Then she’d been threatened by a conservative billionaire who’d gotten wind of the offer. Through intermediaries, her unknown antagonist promised to destroy her career if she accepted the vice presidency. The person making threats should have done his homework better. Once challenged, Upton was unlikely to back down. She said yes to Traynor out of defiance more than reason. And it had made her vice president.
This evening, about a month after the election and a month before taking office, she was full of new doubts. Buyer’s remorse? Was her optimism, she wondered now at stray moments, an act of political vision or epic delusion? History was littered with people who had once been considered serious and had made themselves ridiculous.
Sitting in the middle of the huge dinner table at Traynor’s magnificent Arts and Crafts–style house in the Colorado mountains—the enormous outdoor chimney was a climbing wall—she watched the president-elect. If they won, she had told him during the campaign, her role would be to watch, listen, and advise him honestly. And she would remain with him as long as he would take her advice seriously. If he were sincere about trying to realign his party and reshape the country—and would listen to her—she would join him. If not, she would resign. They both knew that would wound his presidency.
Now he was going to reveal his plan, outlining it for the first time, even to her. She was irked not to have heard it sooner—but not entirely surprised. For all his promises to treat her as a partner, Traynor kept things to himself. Upton now knew that he was a complicated amalgam of obsessive-compulsive, insecure, and improvisational; he may not have entirely finalized all he had to say tonight until an hour ago.
In that way, as in so many others, they could not have been more different. She was methodical, a planner, a list maker. She not only worked out her plans ahead of time. She also studied how each different person in the room might react to what would happen and prepared answers to them on index cards. Though she appreciated the value of surprise, she found Traynor’s manic style and bold instincts bewildering. Yet she had to admit there was something exciting about it—even if she sometimes worried he was part illusionist.
“First, unlike others, we’re not gonna go for one big win,” Traynor said. “Instead we’re gonna do the opposite. We’re gonna do all the things the American people hired us to do, all at once—and faster than any one has ever tried before. The reason is simple: if we move fast on everything, our enemies will be unable to concentrate their opposition in one place. That’s what they’ve done before to stop presidents trying to make change. Now they won’t know where to turn.
“And as we succeed, the public will gather to us.” He paused, his eyes moving across different faces around the table.
Upton felt a creeping sense of doubt already rising. This idea, which she’d heard bandied about but not settled on, struck her as foolish. Moving on everything at once could easily mean failing at all of them and quickly dooming Traynor’s presidency before it had begun. She knew the Senate far better than Traynor. It was a place designed to never be caught off guard and to easily stop things in their tracks. Why not move more carefully, taking time to learn first? Test the waters? A couple of quick failures could be fatal.
“How do we do everything at once? We start with a list of the biggest problems facing the country. For each, we will identify two or three things we can make progress on immediately. Start small and move fast. Franklin Roosevelt didn’t solve the Great Depression in a few months. But he made people feel the government was finally doing something. And he did so almost immediately.”
Traynor paused again as he moved on to the next point.
“Second, we’re gonna write laws differently than before. Government usually fails because it tries to solve every damn thing around a problem in a single massive god-awful bill. Everyone marshals their complaints. The bill gets watered down. It takes years to pass. And it’s obsolete on day one. We’re not gonna do that.”
Traynor moved his eyes around the room again, stopping briefly on Upton.
“How do you solve problems in real life? You start small, go one step at a time, learn as you go, fail, and get better. And delegate.
“That’s how we’re going to write laws and make the government work again. Tell Congress which problems to solve but not precisely how, mandate they start small and move fast. We’re gonna build in frequent checkpoints and require that progress be proven before any new money is provided. And we’re gonna do things in months, not years.
“What do I mean? Find a broken bridge. Rebuild it in a month. See it’s done right. Fix anything done wrong. Then take what you’ve learned and rebuild another bridge. And don’t go big until you know what you’re doing.”
This, Upton recognized, was agile management brought to government, ideas from Scandinavia and China that had gained popularity among academics.
The Scandinavians charged their bureaucracy with solving problems, but did not dictate precisely how they do so. Their laws were written in brief and described needs without detailing every aspect of the solution. And no new money was spent unless the agency could prove concrete progress. The approach developed accountability, saved money, and avoided prolonged political fights up front. It was massively different from the rule-laden way American legislation was written.
The Chinese, meanwhile, used huge work crews to get work done with impressive speed, constructing bridges or erecting buildings in weeks rather than years.
“Third, we’re gonna tell Congress if they can’t do it—if they don’t pass these bills by a certain time—we will declare national emergencies on any of the issues on which Congress failed to take action. And we will make sure they are blamed for the failure. This will not be executive overreach. It will be the executive branch rescuing the country from a broken legislature. And we believe we have sound constitutional arguments that will prevail in court.”
The doubt Upton had been feeling was hardening into dread. This part, about threatening to declare national emergencies, was new; she had not been consulted on it. Congress would consider it a major threat to congressional independence and a massive overreach of executive power. If Traynor did this—used the threat of declaring multiple national emergencies to grant himself extraordinary powers to evade Congress—it would change the presidency forever. It would also threaten what little was left of balanced government in the United States.
She glanced at faces in the room. Friends, but also many outsiders, sat transfixed. And Upton began to feel more alone than before.
Traynor wasn’t finished. He had saved, she saw, the most dramatic parts of his plan for last.
“Fourth, I’m gonna bring these guys from Congress to me—the Senate majority leader and the Speaker of the House—and I’m gonna tell ’em they have to change their rules. They both have these little internal party rules that they won’t bring a bill to the floor unless a majority of Republicans supports it. The ‘majority of the majority’ rule they call it in the House. But what it really means is that they’re practicing one-party rule.
“I believe this practice is unconstitutional. If the majority of members of Congress support something, I believe they have an obligation to let the people’s representatives have a vote on it on the floor. If Congress doesn’t voluntarily abandon these little tricks that ensure party unity, I will direct the Justice Department to bring suit. And I believe—based on the interpretations of scholars we have consulted—we will win.
“More important, I will lay all this out to the public. They don’t give a damn about internal congressional rules. They just want their government to work again.”
This, too, was an unprecedented act of war that crossed historic lines. No president had ever sued Congress over the constitutionality of its internal rules, let alone private internal party procedures. And she had most definitely not been consulted on it. She would have opposed it.
“Oh, and one more thing,” Traynor added.
This, Upton recognized, was the old Steve Jobs phrase. At the end of his annual presentations, the Apple CEO used to announce the year’s biggest product with that modest phrase, “oh, and one more thing.”
“So maybe I have five points, not four,” Traynor said with an apologetic smile, as if he had just realized it. “If they agree, if they pass these laws in new ways and abandon their obstructionist rules, I will promise to serve only a single term.”
Traynor let that sink in.
“But if they resist, not only will I sue, I will promise to serve eight years and dedicate myself to ensuring that Congress and its leaders are blamed for the failures of the government. And I will use all my power to see them defeated.
“That will be my deal with them. Do this, work with me, make the government functional, and I will be gone. Resist, and I will dedicate my presidency to ending their careers and replacing them with leaders who can make the government work. It will be very, very personal. They can submit or go to war.”
The room was quiet. The pledge of serving a single term as chief executive was unprecedented. So was the idea that it was a bargain in exchange for legislative cooperation. And if Congress refused, the bargain would be replaced by a personal vendetta and a massive assertion of the power to declare national emergencies.
Traynor was proposing that he would creep further out on the edge than any president in history.
He also had not warned her in advance. She had been blindsided by this.
Traynor, a galvanic smile lifting his whole face, studied the room one more time.
“What I have told you must be confidential. I want your reaction and your thoughts. But, for obvious reasons, I cannot let this be known until after I have been sworn in. I have taken you into my trust.”
How did she feel about all this? She was angry about being left in the dark. But she was also intrigued—and a little enthralled—by the boldness of Traynor’s plan. A promise to take action on all of the country’s biggest problems immediately, to make progress one decrepit bridge at a time. A plan to write laws in new ways that started small and pushed responsibility down. And this bill writing would include triggers where no new money was dispersed unless real progress was made—the equivalent of agile management applied to government. And if congressional leaders continued to insist on internal procedures that amounted to one-party rule, Traynor would threaten to sue. But if they relented, he would agree to serve only a single term.
It was complex and hard to fathom. A little despotic perhaps. Daring and disruptive.
And it would impact her. If in four years he stepped down, would she be a political orphan? Or a national figure in line to run for the presidency? It was too soon to have any idea.
Upton had seen parts of the plan floated as ideas over the last few weeks. But she had not seen the whole. She wondered who in the room had.
A month before they took office and she was already being kept at some distance, already wondering if she was losing Traynor’s trust. It couldn’t be just Traynor keeping her in the dark, it had to be his people, too. Sterling Moss, his strategist. Almost certainly Quentin Phelps, his friend and partner. They might feel threatened by having to share the role of being Traynor’s close confidantes.
She had always been an outsider. An orphan since sixteen, when her parents had died in a car crash, she had acted as a teenage parent to her younger sister, Emily. She’d even sued the state in order to be an emancipated minor and run her parents’ restaurant tavern. She missed the rest of high school and had taken the GED for her diploma; then she’d rushed through college in two years, then law school and the army. She always did things on her own terms. She would be an outsider here, too. She hadn’t felt the whole full weight of it until now.
People around the table looked a little shocked, trying to process, too, wondering if Traynor was about to set off a constitutional crisis.
“Questions?” Traynor asked, smiling. At first, no one seemed to want to ask one, perhaps stunned or afraid. “Come now,” Traynor scolded.
“Doesn’t your threat of national emergencies set up a constitutional crisis?” asked the scholar who, in his books, argued democracy had played itself out.
“I’m not going to tell them what to do. Just declare that these are emergencies and they must do something—if they haven’t acted already.”
“What are these problems?” asked the presidential scholar from Harvard.
“You know the list, Nina. We campaigned on it. Rebuild crumbling infrastructure. Fix taxes so big corporations actually pay what they owe. Reform entitlement funding. Get serious about climate. Rebuild manufacturing. Criminal justice reform.”
It was mishmash, a wish list, Upton thought, two generations of problems deferred, tossed off now by Traynor as if they were easy. She liked the list, but she wasn’t sure what came first or how sincere he was about any of it. Besides, it was a list many candidates from both parties had used for years in different combinations. David’s flavor mix had been unusual—a populist businessman, but pro tax and pro union at the same time, embracing regulatory reform and tariffs—someone hard to classify.
“You’re going to propose all that in ninety days?” the Harvard professor asked.
“And more. A hell of a lot more. There are thousands of good ideas in the can and money to spend. We’ve identified almost twenty-five billion we can redirect on Day One. And if we start small, we can make progress on all of them, meaningful visible progress, in three months. That much is clear.”
Really? She had been involved in the conversations about how quickly they could make progress on different fronts. The answer was hardly “clear.” Hearing him now, she felt various words were better choices: idiotic; naive; visionary.
There was a vocabulary for this kind of magical thinking, a vocabulary that Traynor knew well. Martin Luther King Jr. had called it “the audacity to believe”; those words were carved on his memorial back in D.C. People around Steve Jobs called it his “reality distortion field,” an ability to just say things were possible that had never been done. Ronald Reagan confused old movie scenes with reality and believed the Star Wars defense umbrella his scientists dreamed about had already been built.
“There is more I can’t tell you,” Traynor said. “Some of it will not be legislative.” He took a deep breath. “Now, I asked you here tonight to tell me what was wrong with this plan. So I expect harder questions.”