An Insider’s Look at a West Wing Dumpster
It’s not the battles we lose that bother me, it’s the ones we don’t suit up for.
—Toby Ziegler, The West Wing12
To lay the predicate for our discussion of the Five Strategic Failures that would lead to the Fall of the White House of Trump, how about you and I take a little Aaron Sorkin “life imitates art” tour of where much of the action will occur. In the spirit of that old sports stadium maxim, “You can’t tell the players without a program,” I will also offer you a brief look at some of the Trump administration’s key players as they take up residence in their West Wing haunts—or foxholes, as it will turn out to be.
Truth be told, the West Wing, glamorous though it may have seemed on the Martin Sheen TV series, is pretty much a dump. President Trump may or may not have once described it as such during a golf game; but there are humorously conflicting accounts of that particular alleged Trump double bogey in the press.13
The notable exceptions to the dumpster critique are the magnificent Oval Office, the history-drenched and regal Roosevelt Room, and the only slightly less splendid Cabinet Room in which the president’s chair is slightly taller than all others. There is also the chief of staff’s office if for no other reason than its comfortable size, high ceilings, and back door patio and pool.
Part of the reason why the West Wing is a such a dump is because it is so folded in upon itself. One journalist wryly dubbed it “a rabbit warren of cramped offices that seem inadequate for the powerful people who occupy them.”14 True that.
Everything small and claustrophobic about the West Wing architecture follows from the overly pragmatic goal of its 1933 renovator, New York architect Eric Gugler. That myopic goal was to simply maximize the West Wing office space.
Gugler, in his unwitting homage to the Dilbert cubicle, obviously never put himself in the shoes—or behind the desks—of the actual office occupants. Nor did Gugler ever consider in his West Wing designs the Eastern philosophy of feng shui, which involves harmonizing one’s own living and working environment—an oversight which may account for the lack of harmony that has so very often existed over the course of the multiple administrations.
These dumpster qualities notwithstanding, I still must say it never got old walking over to the West Wing from my perch in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building for a meeting in the Roosevelt Room or the Oval Office or to grab a very decent meal in the albeit drab and equally cramped Navy Mess dining room. So walk with me now as we take a tour of the office foxholes as they were initially set up for what soon would become a polarizing war amongst all the president’s men—and occasional women.
Where Situations Are Born
As you enter under the awning into the West Wing’s basement, you can walk to the right to the fabled and largely windowless Situation Room—really a maze of rooms and hermetically sealed communications nodes located on the southwest corner of the building.
The Situation Room was created by President John F. Kennedy’s National Security Council Director McGeorge Bundy after the 1961 Bay of Pigs Cuban invasion fiasco; and, for you Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy buffs, you should know that it literally sits on the footprint of an old bowling alley. Together with an adjacent briefing room, this “Sit Room,” as it is called, functions simultaneously as an intelligence support dispenser, a global communications hub, and the ultimate in crisis management theaters.
In the Sit Room, presidents and senior staff over the years have done everything from celebrating the capture of Saddam Hussein and the killing of Osama bin Laden to bungling the Iranian hostage crisis and managing the chaos after the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan.
The Sit Room is also the Cadillac of the White House “SCIFs”—the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities which seal off any eavesdroppers and are strategically placed throughout the West Wing and Eisenhower Building.15 And one of the fun things I learned early on about the Sit Room during one particular emergency is that you can ask the staff to hunt to ground just about anybody in the world on the phone, typically within minutes. I loved being able to do that.
Where Trade Actions Came to Die
On the opposite northwest corner of the basement are the offices of the staff secretary, who manages the paper flow throughout the White House—from the signings of presidential orders to the circulation of documents among staff and across the various agencies. It would be here where Rob Porter, a man with a perfect resume and perfect connections—Harvard, Oxford, classmate of Jared Kushner,16 close associate of Reince Priebus—would set up an extremely efficient Never-Trump bureaucratic operation to delay, deter, and derail the president’s trade agenda.
On this basement floor, in the center of the building, there were also the offices of Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert, and the executive secretary and chief of staff of the national security council, Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg. Among the West Wing senior staff, the youthful Bossert and grizzled veteran Kellogg were two of my most admired and respected colleagues.
Bossert’s favorite expression was “lead with intelligence.” He always kept his chin up and his head down, and when the hurricanes hit Houston, Florida, and Puerto Rico, all within twenty-five days,17 Bossert would shine like the noonday Caribbean sun in the eyes of said hurricanes.
As for Kellogg, he literally was a grizzled veteran. He won the Silver Star for gallantry in Vietnam and also served with distinction in 1990 during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm.
Kellogg’s favorite expression was: “If I’m not included on the takeoff, I won’t participate in the landing.” So when Kellogg’s boss H. R. McMaster would refuse to allow Kellogg to formally participate in any one of a number of policy debates—a poster child was McMaster’s globalist bid to increase troop strength in Afghanistan—Kellogg would refuse to publicly join any chorus of support after the fact.
Unlike McMaster, Kellogg was a true Trump believer on the need for trade reform. Dating back to his post-army days as a corporate executive for Oracle and the Cubic Corporation, Kellogg had witnessed firsthand the unfair trade practices Communist China and others had heaped on America’s heartland.
Most importantly, Kellogg was that rare breed of military man who totally understood this core Trump principle: never sacrifice America’s trade policy and the factories of Ohio or Michigan or Pennsylvania on the altar of national security goals. This was a principle that McMaster in his early days, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson up to his final days, and the Pentagon’s Jim Mattis in his obtuseness, would continually violate.
When Mike Flynn was fired in the first few weeks of the administration after being falsely ensnared by the FBI in a phony Russia Hoax, Kellogg would serve an ever so brief seven days as the interim NSC director. Keith was also one of the leading candidates for the permanent job, and the choice of McMaster rather than Kellogg to replace Flynn would turn out to be one of the biggest Bad Personnel mistakes of the administration.
That mistake would lead not only to more of America’s workers being laid off from the factory floors of the Midwest. It would result in more American soldiers being killed, maimed, or wounded in the desert battlefields of the Middle East. The haste in hiring the globalist McMaster would indeed lay waste to the Trump agenda.
The First Floor House of Cards
As to where McMaster would hang his hat in the West Wing, let’s walk now up the narrow staircase from the basement to the first floor. This is the floor where much of the administration’s House of Cards cum Game of Thrones drama would play out, and McMaster’s office on the northwest corner of the building would prove to be one of the busiest and most pivotal in pushing a foreign policy and trade agenda totally out of step with that of the president.
From his privileged perch, McMaster would often publicly contradict the president, effectively litigating issues through the press rather than privately in the Oval Office. A prime example was McMaster’s insistence that the US would pay for South Korea’s missile defense even as the president was asserting the opposite.18
As for the National Security Council itself, it was established by the National Security Act of 194719 and put under the umbrella of the White House in 1949.20 In these early Cold War days, the NSC’s primary mission was to add heft to the State Department’s attempt to contain a rising Soviet Union.
Over time, the NSC has morphed into one of the most powerful bureaucracies in government, with broad authority to integrate foreign and defense policies and to coordinate the air force, army, marine corps, and navy, along with other national security nodes like the Central Intelligence Agency.
The real power of the NSC lies in its sheer size. Its staff hovers around 400—up from only 40 during the Clinton presidency—and this compares to less than 50 for the National Economic Council, Domestic Policy Council, or Council of Economic Advisers.21
As was the common practice of new NSC directors, before his firing, Mike Flynn had intended to zero out the NSC’s staff of career bureaucrats detailed from various agencies like the Departments of State and Defense. Flynn would then quickly build that staff back up in the president’s America First, no nation-building, end to endless wars image.
Instead, in the chaos that followed Flynn’s abrupt departure, McMaster would engage in no such purge. This would prove to be a huge setback for the Trump agenda as it left McMaster in charge of a bureaucracy absolutely riddled with Obama loyalists and Never-Trumpers.
Not without irony, the only people McMaster would wind up firing would be several top NSC staff with loyalties to Trump nationalism. They included, most prominently, Derek Harvey, Rich Higgins, and Ezra Cohen-Watnick.22
The Priebus Daze
Just down the hall from McMaster’s office and on the opposite southwest corner of the first floor was the spacious suite and reception area of Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. It would be from this particular neck of the West Wing woods where Reince would create his own particular brand of chaos while perfecting one of his most endearing habits—the art of walking out the back door of his office to the presidential pool where he would take cell phone calls bouncing on the diving board in a pinstripe suit.
What would ultimately drown Priebus was not falling off that diving board, but rather a number of would-be chiefs of staff, including one in an office literally two doors away. This was the office of Trump son-in-law, political novice, and Rasputin in training, Jared Kushner.
Along with National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn, Kushner would constantly undermine Priebus’s authority by going around, through, or over Priebus to get right to the president. The practical effect was to create a weak and hydra-headed chief of staff.
The V.P. and Bushie of Operations
Between the suites of Priebus and McMaster was Vice President Mike Pence’s West Wing office. While this office was modest in size, the VP had a much more palatial setup in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. As VPOTUS would shuttle back and forth, I would bump into him frequently; and he would always lift my spirits with a smile and a handshake and a good word—and as you shall see, at least on one occasion, he even personally intervened to make sure Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin did not succeed in their demands to have me fired.
In the middle of the first floor, with nary a window in sight, there was the dark lair of the deputy chief of staff for operations, Joe Hagin. To me, the Darth Vader Hagin represented a microcosm of everything that was wrong with the initial staffing of the White House. This was because Hagin was the proverbial double whammy—both a former blue blood George W. Bushie AND a loyal soldier for Priebus’s anti-Trump Republican National Committee.
A soft and billowy marshmallow of a bureaucrat with all of the humor of Dick Cheney, Hagin had wormed his way into the halls of power with a frat boy BA from Kenyon College. He got his start by helping George H. W. Bush during his failed presidential bid in 1979 and then leveraged that stint into working as Bush’s personal assistant when he was vice president. After serving as George W. Bush’s deputy campaign manager during the 2000 presidential run, Hagin then latched on to the operations job for most of the Bush presidency.
That people like Hagin would wind up in positions of power within the Trump administration always boggled my mind, and during both the Priebus Daze and Kelly Interregnum, Hagin would use his not inconsiderable powers to subtly thwart the more transformational aspects of the Trump agenda. Most notably, this included trade and immigration policy reforms that were anathema to the Bushies and Republican National Committee crowd.
For example, Hagin could block the hiring of staff that he viewed as Trump subversives by pleading, as he often misleadingly did, a lack of budget. It was all so much Bushie BS—he was swimming in discretionary cash.
Never In My Wildest Dreams
Rounding out the first floor of the West Wing, there was the Oval Office, which we will talk much more about later, and the Roosevelt Room, where I lost many a battle in the trade wars. There were also the offices of the press secretary where Priebus ally and former RNC communications director Sean Spicer would preside over a decidedly not so merry band of support staff.
The collective foul mood and low morale in the press shop was the direct result of having to constantly shovel the angry manure Spicer would fertilize the downstairs press room with during what would soon become his infamously contentious and counterproductive daily briefings.
As for the Roosevelt Room itself, it sits windowless in almost the exact center of the West Wing’s first floor. Named for both Teddy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it is the room that originally housed Teddy’s West Wing office.
By the way, the Roosevelt Room is also the place Franklin Delano used to call the “fish room” because he kept his aquariums there. In an ever so subtle thumbing of his nose at FDR and his liberalism, President Richard Nixon would rechristen the Roosevelt room in honor of both FDR and Teddy.
In the battleground of the Roosevelt Room, I would often be the only person in a group of fifteen or more senior staff and cabinet secretaries who agreed with the president’s trade agenda. When the president himself was in the meeting, the two of us would have to fight the likes of Tillerson, Cohn, Mattis, McMaster, Mnuchin, and Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue on issues ranging from the imposition of steel tariffs to the termination of the NAFTA trade deal.
Most commonly, particularly in the early days of the administration, that globalist majority would carry the day in the Roosevelt room. They would simply wear the president down by coming at him from all angles. I simply didn’t have the firepower to give him the support he needed.
The first time this happened, I was flabbergasted. Never did I imagine in my wildest nightmares that the strongest opposition to the president’s trade agenda would come from inside the White House perimeter. However, as these fifth-columnist attacks by the president’s closest advisors happened time and time again, I came to understand that there is a not-so-fine line between loyalty to the president versus loyalty to the president’s agenda, and it was a line that far too many of POTUS’s senior staff and cabinet officials were willing to cross.
It is indeed a slippery slope to believe that to be loyal to a president, you must be disloyal to his agenda. But that is the slope far too many people in the Trump administration chose to toboggan down at breakneck speed.
A Globalist Dog of War
While the first floor of the West Wing was ground zero in the battle for the heart and mind of the president, the second floor of the West Wing was no less contentious. On one side of the building was Gary Cohn’s National Economic Council suite of offices. It was housed alongside a number of smaller suites for the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump, the administration’s most pugnacious media surrogate Kellyanne Conway, and one of the most nimble of bureaucratic infighters, the political seductress otherwise known as Dina Powell.
Cohn was pure Goldman Sachs testosterone, prone to putting his leg up on a chair like a dog. He would actually comically try that shtick right in the Oval Office during our infamous “fiery exchange” on day sixty-six of the administration—stay tuned for that account in all its slapstick comedy glory.
On the other side of the wall from Cohn’s foxholes, and light-years away from Cohn in both demeanor and ideology, was the president’s speechwriter and senior policy advisor, the thirty-something wunderkind Stephen Miller. By day one of the administration, the supremely devotional and introverted Miller had already made the perhaps forgivable but huge mistake of actually doing his duty—which in the run-up to Inauguration Day had been mostly to draft the president’s speech.
Through such devotion, Miller would take his eye off the power ball and wind up losing much of his turf to Cohn’s National Economic Council. In the first fifty days of the administration, I would personally suffer from Miller’s singular focus on his speechwriting while he ignored the ugly politics and turf battles swirling around him. By the time Miller woke up, it was too late, and Miller would later come to deeply regret this miscalculation.
Legal Eagles and Legislative Affairs
Rounding out the key offices on the second floor of the West Wing were those of the White House Legal Counsel, with Don McGahn at the helm, and the Office of Legislative Affairs, run by the oil and water dueling duo of Rick Dearborn and Marc Short.
McGahn is perhaps most famous for his quite successful efforts to eliminate any restrictions on campaign financing. McGahn thereby opened the door to the massive infusions of corporate cash into America’s elections that followed in the wake of the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision.23
While McGahn’s old law firm’s website describes him as one of the “architect(s) of the campaign finance revolution,”24 his detractors on the Common Cause side of the money aisle think of him as a Swamp Creature counter-revolutionary who opened the floodgates of Washington to even more dark special interest money.25 (Just for the record, I think Common Cause had it right.)
I would very quickly and quite unwittingly get blindsided by Don McGahn because I naively assumed his office would enthusiastically embrace the trade-related executive orders and presidential memoranda I had developed during the presidential transition and had ready for signing on the first business day of the administration. These presidential actions, which in hindsight were clearly alien to McGahn’s ideology, had been carefully vetted for what’s called “form and legality” by a walled-off compartment of the Obama Justice Department specifically assigned to the Trump transition team for such matters. However, McGahn viewed my orders like they were the plague, and along with Staff Secretary Rob Porter, Gary Cohn, and Reince Priebus, McGahn would be part of the institutional tonnage that would crush those Trumpian presidential actions faster than a Chinese tank running over a Tiananmen Square protester.
It would also be McGahn’s office that would let slip a poorly crafted and sparsely vetted immigrant ban executive order just one week into the administration. This order sought to temporarily suspend the entry of refugees and the re-entry of green card holders into the US from some of the worst incubators of Islamic extremism on the planet, including Iran, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen.26 However, the flawed order would get embarrassingly hung up in the courts for months.
This rookie mistake by the White House’s legal team had the practical and paralytic effect of making it far more difficult to get even the simplest executive order through the review process. It was a mistake that would haunt my own efforts to move executive orders through the review process for months—although in hindsight, I now strongly suspect McGahn might have made that alleged mistake on purpose to sabotage both Bannon’s efforts and the Boss’s actions.
As for the Office of Legislative Affairs just down the hall from McGahn, the décor for this bank of cubicles should have been early Titanic. It was here where the foolish idea to start the legislative agenda with the “repeal and replacement” of Obamacare was blessed. Priebus and Leg Affairs would, however, fail abysmally to deliver the requisite votes on Capitol Hill, and this crushing early Obamacare defeat would prove to be a millstone around the necks of both a Republican Congress wracked by infighting and a White House wondering what freight train just hit it.
At least part of this failure stemmed from the lack of anyone within Leg Affairs with the ability to actually cross the aisle and woo Democrats. The even bigger problem, however, was the inherent friction and blurred lines of authority between Rick Dearborn and Marc Short.
Dearborn was the former chief of staff to Alabama Republican senator Jeff Sessions. Sessions had been the very first Senator to endorse Candidate Trump, and that endorsement had come at a very critical time in the campaign. During that campaign, Dearborn would prove to be an indispensable soldier and an unimpeachable Trump loyalist and his cream would rise to the top in his role as executive director of the transition team.
In recognition of his service, Dearborn had originally been promised complete control of the Office of Legislative Affairs in his role as a White House deputy chief of staff. However, in yet another move to establish the primacy of the Republican National Committee over the Trump loyalists, Priebus had brought in Marc Short, fresh off campaign trail for Vice President Mike Pence.
Short was not just an RNC RINO blue blood. He was also a Koch network dark conservative money conduit who had as little affinity for the Trump trade agenda as the Koch brothers themselves. While Short would technically report to Dearborn, Priebus made sure that technicality was ignored, and Short was then free to rule the Leg Affairs roost.27 This would indeed turn out to be a train wreck for the Trump agenda.
And so, within the West Wing, the foxholes were manned and womanned on day one. The battle lines were clearly drawn, and the epic struggle that would be billed by the media without any appropriate nuance as a match between the globalist and nationalist wings of the Trump administration was about to unfold.