A Two-Day Big Apple Popover Turns Into a Five-Year Tour
Gilligan: Hiya, Professor. What are you doing?
Professor Roy Hinkley: I’m making notes for a book. It’s to be a chronicle of our adventures on the island…I think it’s a book people will want to buy, don’t you?
Gilligan: Sure, I’ll buy one. I’m dying to find out what happens to us.
Gilligan’s Island, 1964
So just before noon on September 16, 2016, I get into the back of a black SUV and sit behind the Boss. It will be my first face-to-face meeting with him—but I don’t quite see his face yet.
He’s talking on his cell phone first to Rupert Murdoch. “How we doing Rupert? How are we doing? What are you hearing?”
And then as the SUV begins bobbing and weaving on our way out to LaGuardia Airport to board Trump Force One, he’s talking rapid-fire to Roger Ailes: “How are the polls looking Roger? I think they are looking good. I’m feeling good.”
Then Donald John Trump ends the call and looks back at me. I’m speechless as he tries to figure out who the hell I am. Then, he puts two and two and The Coming China Wars together, and he hits me with a big welcome-aboard smile.
Yes, welcome to the Big Apple you Laguna Beach rube. And welcome to the big time.
And the big time it was. But in a peculiarly small way.
It was twenty people on an airplane. One hundred more in the Trump Tower War Room, working seven days a week. A few money guys upstairs raising about half of what Hillary would spend.10 And all the free press the mainstream media could give this never-before-seen roadshow. That was the ethos, strategy, and organizational culture of the come-from-behind, close the deal Trump 2016 campaign, and I was about to become an integral part of it.
Death By China Does Manhattan
Two days earlier, I had flown at my own expense from Orange County, California to New York City with only the suit on my back and a laptop bag on my shoulder. It was supposed to be a quick, two-day, no luggage tour of the Trump for President headquarters. Little did I know at the time that this would be the beginning of the end of my days as an academic in sunny SoCal and, like Gilligan, the beginning of five long years on the island of Trump.
Months earlier, I had become one of the first to predict Candidate Trump would win the presidency and the first economist to endorse him—Harvard PhD, circa 1986, if you are interested in my bona fides. I made that startling Trump-will-crush-it prediction based on years of research as well as some intimate boots-on-the-ground knowledge.
Four years earlier during the 2012 presidential campaign between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, I had toured the heartland of America with my Death By China film trying to raise political awareness on both sides of the aisle of the importance of unfair trade in the decline of the US industrial base.
During that barnstorming tour, I saw firsthand some of the more than fifty thousand American factories that had been shut down because of bad trade deals like NAFTA and unfair trade practices like currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, and sweatshop labor. I had also spoken with hundreds of laid off workers about their own personal descents into socioeconomic hell—the bankruptcies and foreclosures; the divorces and increased drug use; the abject despair, alcoholism, and depression.
While neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney would ultimately make trade reform the centerpiece of their 2012 campaigns as I had hoped and strived for, Candidate Trump brought trade abuses front and center stage in 2016. He saw early on that his path to victory ran through the political swing states hardest hit by import competition—Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania most certainly but also other key states like North Carolina, Wisconsin, and even dirt poor, hardscrabble Maine.
Donald J. Trump—DJT as those closest to him call the man—had indeed seen the problem of unfair trade early on. As far back as the 1980s, then Real Estate Tycoon Trump had complained bitterly about how Japan was having its way with American workers while President Ronald Reagan played the free trade dupe—and a running joke between DJT and me was whether it was he or I who first saw the trade abuse problem.
For the record, it was DJT, and he beat me by more than a decade and country mile. This classic DJT quote from a 1988 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show perfectly foreshadowed Candidate Trump’s anti-globalist, fair and reciprocal trade platform.
[W]e let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets. It’s not free trade. If you ever go to Japan right now and try to sell something, forget about it Oprah. Just forget about it. It’s almost impossible. They don’t have laws against it. They just make it impossible. They come over here. They sell their cars. Their VCRs. They knock the hell out of our companies. And hey, I have tremendous respect for the Japanese people. I mean you can respect somebody that’s beating the hell out of you. But they are beating the hell out of this country.11
Just substitute the word China for Japan in DJT’s 1988 quote, and you basically have both the cornerstone of the Trump 2016 trade platform and the linchpin of DJT’s stump speech.
The New York Kazillionaires Club
On my first full day in New York city, I spent the morning at the campaign headquarters at Trump Tower. There, I got a tour of the 14th floor War Room, and met some of the key players face to face—Jason Miller, director of communications; Bryan Lanza, Jason Miller’s deputy in charge of the TV surrogates; the policy at least semi-wonks in the personas of Dan Kowalski and John Mashburn; Dave Bossie, the former head of Citizen’s United and the campaign’s deputy campaign manager; Brad Parscale, the computer geek; a very gruff and growly Stephen K. Bannon; and, of course, at the top of my list of folks I wanted to meet in person, the Candidate’s speech writer Stephen Miller, who had recruited me for the visit.
Duly welcomed, I then walked down Fifth Avenue to the regal digs of the Economic Club of New York. There, I watched with no small awe and amusement as Candidate Trump shocked the crowd of mostly arrogant, hostile, and skeptical kazillionaires with fiery, in-your-Wall-Street-face, fair trade luncheon remarks that riffed off many of the passages and promises in the Pittsburgh Jobs Plan speech. Said DJT to his New York skeptics:
If China does not stop its illegal activities, including its theft of American trade secrets and intellectual property, I will apply countervailing duties until China ceases and desists.
Just the single action of enforcing intellectual property rules alone would add millions of new American jobs…. We are going to stop the outflow of jobs from our country, and open a new highway of jobs back into our country.12
Of course, these fighting words in the belly of the Wall Street beast were breathtaking in their scope. At this inspiring time, however, I had no idea of the sturm and drang and inside attacks that would be coming—and many for me. Instead, in my ignorant bliss, Candidate Trump’s rhetoric was simply heady stuff.
The Florida Poor Boys Club
It was even headier stuff when I hopped on the Trump campaign plane the next day and headed down to Florida for one of the Candidate’s signature rallies. As we approached the arena, those unfortunate enough not to have gotten tickets ringed the venue—there would be twice as many supporters outside as in.
At the rally itself—really more of an admixture between a 1960s love-in and a gospel choir revival in the Bible Belt—the excitement was beyond palpable. On the floor of the arena, as I mingled in my suit and tie and rubbed elbows with the T-shirted crowd, I watched the Candidate weave countless improvisations into a bare bones teleprompter speech for more than an hour. He would leave this merry band of what Hillary Clinton would later haplessly dub as “Deplorables” with great hope. Their economic misery would soon end with a wave of Trumpian tax, trade, immigration, and regulatory reforms—and no more endless war adventures either, thank you very much.
On the plane ride back to the Big Apple, I saw the chess board perfectly—DJT was going to win if only he continued to carry that same Populist Economic Nationalist message. When Stephen Miller asked me to stay in New York and help develop a more detailed economic plan for the campaign, that’s exactly what I did, and the very next day, I set up shop on the 14th floor of Trump Tower in its famous War Room. Like Gilligan, a two-day trip would turn into a five-year tour before the Trump mast.
The Fastest Elevator in the Western World
The Trump 2016 War Room really consisted of two discrete and separate areas spread across one floor of Trump Tower, which stands between 56th and 57th streets on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. As to which floor that War Room actually was on, that is a matter of some amusement.
To get to the War Room, you indeed had to push the elevator button for the 14th floor, and then it was the fastest elevator ride in Manhattan. This was not because the elevator was particularly fast. Rather, it was simply because the 14th floor in Trump Tower is actually the fifth floor. That is, once you get to the fourth floor, the next floor up is labeled the 14th.
So what’s up with that? Of course, it was a typical marketing gambit from Developer Trump. The Boss simply inflated the floor numbers on the theory that higher floors would command higher rents.
Who knows if this shell game actually worked. But it does provide at least a little sneak peek into the mind of one of the great geniuses in real estate.
And by the way, you could walk down a filthy, darkened stairway to the fourth floor right to where DJT’s old show The Apprentice used to be filmed. Truth be told here, the set looked like a proverbial dung hole. This stark visual made me all the more impressed with Donald John Trump because it made it abundantly clear that it was the force of Trump’s personality alone that had truly turned that sow’s ear of an Apprentice set into pure ratings silk.
At any rate, half the War Room floor was like a mini football field. It featured stacks of big screen TVs tuned in to all the various cable news channels across one big wall, a beehive of desks crammed mostly with young, eager-beaver worker bees, and a few glass enclosure offices housing campaign littlewigs like Jason Miller and Hope Hicks.
On the other side of the floor from the worker bee hive was a honeycomb of much smaller offices along with a very small kitchen and some conference rooms. It was this side of the War Room where the bigwigs hung out—the aforementioned Bannon, Bossie, and Stephen Miller along with a little throne for the Clown Prince himself, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and a spacious but rarely occupied suite for Kellyanne Conway.
Me and Malcolm X
On my first official day at work, I staked out a Malcolm X-type spot in the far back of the worker bee War Room where I could see all of the TVs along with everybody else in the room and anybody who might arrive. Note for the record: Malcolm X always did the same thing whenever he went out into a restaurant, but a lot of good that did him.
At any rate, I would quickly set up a workstation and makeshift stand-up desk constructed out of empty printer paper boxes and initially worked on my small and clunky laptop. Eventually, my big full screen Apple computer would arrive by pony UPS express, and that would help me dramatically improve my productivity.
During my sixteen- to eighteen-hour work days in the War Room, I would crank out op-ed articles, position papers typically written with Wilbur Ross, and other assorted campaign missives designed to message what would become my own mantra for the Trump campaign—my “four points of the growth compass” construct.
For much of the eight years of the Obama-Biden administration from my perch in Laguna Beach as a TV commentator, I had publicly chastised Obama and his idiot advisors like Larry Summers, often on Fox business shows like Varney & Co. and Making Money with Charles Payne and CNBC’s Squawk Box. My major beef was the inability of the Obama-Bidenites to distinguish between a cyclical downturn of the business cycle amenable to Keynesian stimulus—which they favored—versus the very real structural problems with the American economy that I saw as primarily associated with America’s globalist trade policies.
The Trump prescription I helped craft as the president’s top economic advisor targeted four key structural changes that we believed would strengthen and expand American manufacturing and reboot productivity and rising wages. That four points of the compass growth prescription and mantra was simply tax cuts, deregulation, energy independence, and fair—as opposed to simply free—trade. And yes, these structural changes—along with a big boost in defense spending—would indeed propel the Trump economy to unparalleled prosperity, at least right up until the point that the pandemic from Communist China hit.
A Free Man in Paris
The beauty of working in Trump Tower was that I had no boss. Steve Bannon was doing his strategy thing and seemed to have no real interest in either what I was up to or in talking to me. I think at the time he saw me as some ivory tower Harvard don lacking his nuts-and-bolts experience from across the river at the Harvard Business School, and therefore he assumed that I would be useless for any real campaign.
Dave Bossie had no seeming interest in policy and was simply engrossed in the nuts and bolts of running the campaign.
As for Steve Mnuchin—the man who would become treasury secretary and my soon-to-be undisputed bête noire in the White House—I had very little contact with him during the campaign other than to frequently go on TV to clean up the messes Stevie would make with confusing statements on Candidate Trump’s proposed tax policies. I do, however, remember one of the most prescient conversations I ever had at Trump Tower in the bigwig wing of the building.
An angry Bossie had called me down to his office to talk about the latest screw up on tax policy—it had something to do with the arcane concept known as “carried interest.” When he called me down to the office to ask me what had happened, I said it was Mnuchin again popping his mouth off to the press. I then added, “God help us if Mnuchin winds up as treasury secretary.” To which Bossie replied, “That will never happen.” After which Bannon said, “And we are screwed if it does.” And screwed we would be.
As for Kellyanne Conway, I rarely saw her, although I am sure she was working her butt off—she always did. And Stephen Miller was either too busy with Candidate Trump flying around the country or too much of a hermit when he was back at the mothership to take much of an interest in what I was doing. While he had recruited me with great enthusiasm, once I arrived, he simply left me alone to do my thing.
That was all well and good with me because it left me the freedom to become a Trump policy entrepreneur filling a very real void within the Trump campaign. While the Boss himself knew exactly what he was doing, most of the folks working for him were young and green and didn’t really have a clue about Populist Economic Nationalism and Trumpism and how these powerful ideas might help get Trump elected. That was my role during the campaign—to figure these things out and help broadcast that message.
To that end, as one of the most experienced media surrogates and one with a good rapport with many of the TV anchors spread across the cable news diaspora, I would frequently drop in to the New York studios of CNN or MSNBC or CNBC and especially Fox, often to debate my Clinton counterparts like Austan Goolsbee or Jared Bernstein or simply joust with Never-Trump anchors like MSNBC’s Joy Reid and Stephanie Ruhle.
Here, it didn’t hurt that the Boss was always watching, often with great approval. In fact, one of the funny lessons I would learn in working with Donald Trump was that sometimes it was easier to talk to him on TV than actually go visit him in his office. For whatever reason, if he saw you on TV say something, he often took it more seriously.
From Worker Bees to Termites in the House
The Trump Tower War Room of 2016 would turn out to be of no small consequence for the 2020 campaign. This is because many of the worker bees in 2016 would wind up in key roles in the Trump White House, and later on in the Trump 2020 campaign. While some of these worker bees would make outstanding contributions to the administration, far too many would wind up as Never-Trump termites in the White House of Trump.
On the positive side of the ledger, there were policy and political studs like Alex Gray and Andy Surabian. Alex I would come to dub the Mozart of foreign policy. In his late twenties, bespeckled, a bit soft in the gut, and as tall as a power forward, Gray not only understood the politics, geopolitics, and dangers of a rising Communist China, he had the academic training and skill set to clearly and crisply communicate his concerns.
I note with some mentor’s satisfaction here that our cowritten crescendo piece right before election day was a beautiful article in Foreign Policy. After laying waste to Hillary Clinton’s China appeasement policies in the introduction to the article, we then laid out a peace through strength Trump vision to “rewrite America’s relationship with Asia.”13 That article would become an important part of the architecture of our Tough on China policies.
As to how young Alex had found his way to the Trump Tower War Room, he had reached out to me to express his interest, and I had dutifully landed him a plum little spot on the Asia desk—which consisted of him and him alone.
Alex would go on to be my chief deputy in the White House, and we would do great work together, particularly when it came to strengthening and expanding our defense industrial base. To this day, our Pentagon report and companion executive order on that mission remains the definitive work in Washington on the subject.
As for Andy Surabian, he was the de facto head of our boiler room ninjas—the guys tasked to monitor all negative press and immediately hit back when any slime came our way. And Andy was—and is—tough as nails.
In fact, Andy was so tough he never hesitated to chew my head off if I screwed up on TV. His favorite phrase in these circumstances was: “Well, that was not good.” And Andy would levy his scathing critiques despite the fact that he was young enough to be my grandson.
Joining Andy on the ninja team were warriors like Steven Cheung, Brad Rateike, and Clay Shoemaker. All of these ninjas would make it to the White House, but each would be quickly exiled across the street from the West Wing by the RNC RINO Sean Spicer to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. There, these neutered ninjas would languish until picked off one by one by the second chief of staff, John Kelly. Kelly was yet more fruit from the Bad Personnel tree—the dour general was as Never-Trump as they come.
Wasted By Thinking Below the Waist
At the top of the list of those on the negative side of the Trump ledger was the aforementioned press secretary Jason Miller. Full disclosure here: I like Jason and the tactical thing here would be to just leave him alone to stew in his own misery.
Yet, if I am going to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about my Trump experience, I simply cannot ignore an individual who, even as he did an excellent job helping us win the 2016 campaign, would do enormous and lasting damage to President Trump that would ripple forward to the 2020 campaign. So here is how that tawdry little tale goes, and it starts with the best I can say about Jason: By nature, temperament, and intelligence, Jason Miller is a tactical master of the art of political messaging. To put this another way, Jason is to politics what a day trader is to investing.
What I mean by that is that Jason has no real concept of overall long-term strategy. Yet, when the dung hit the fan, as it so often did on a daily basis during the 2016 campaign, there was no one better than Jason—other than the Boss—at counterpunching back in the press.
The best example I can give you of Jason’s lack of strategic political acumen and a longer-term political horizon is the comical advice he gave to Steve Bannon in the summer of 2020. After Steve’s War Room: Pandemic had become the number one podcast in politics, Jason advised Steve to drop the word “Pandemic” from the show’s title under the ridiculous assumption that the pandemic would soon be over.
Unfortunately, Jason’s personal life was a mess during the campaign. Some below the waist thinking would not only get him into very real personal trouble, it would prove very costly to the president himself and the Trump administration.
In Jason’s case, both his wife and a campaign worker became pregnant by him14 all in the same week—and both would give birth some nine months later. The ensuing scandal would break shortly after Election Day and after Jason had been announced as the new press secretary for the Trump White House.
Here is Jason’s obligatory “I need to spend more time with my family” exit from the Trump administration statement in the Huffington Post. It’s the kind of CYA drivel that invariably accompanies every political sex scandal:
Jason Miller, who was named President-elect Donald Trump’s White House communications director just two days ago, announced Saturday he will not be taking a job in the incoming administration. The 41-year-old aide, who served as Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) communications adviser before joining Trump’s campaign, said he needed to spend more time with his family. He also noted he and his wife are expecting their second child.15
What pissed me off about the whole thing was not just how stupid Jason had been and how cruel Jason had treated the campaign worker. I had worked side-by-side with her, she was a tough and elegant Cuban-American and one of our best surrogates, and she would have had a great future in the Trump White House.
No, what really pissed me off was how the whole sad and sordid affair opened the door to what would be a succession of weak and incompetent press secretaries and a constantly bumbling and fumbling press shop that would time and time again fail the president.
Indeed, like a bad Molière play, as Jason Miller stumbled off the stage out one door juggling two newborn babies from two separate women, Sean Spicer strutted in another door and immediately began making us look like idiots as early as Inauguration Day.
A Mooch Meets the Pillsbury Dough Boy
My favorite Sean Spicer story revolves around the day I walked into his office pitching some Tough on China message. As ever-the-free-trader Sean was rebuffing me, I couldn’t help notice the salad on one side of him, and the French fries on the other. That was quintessential Sean. This Pillsbury Doughboy could never make up his mind, and his tenure was anything but healthy for the Boss.
In fact, Spicer’s overzealous claim of the “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration”16 would only be topped for comedy in the press shop by the ten minutes of fame and infamy of the shortest lasting director of White House communications in presidential history, Anthony Scaramucci.
Truth be told—please do not tell the Boss—I really liked “The Mooch.” Anthony went to my alma mater, Tufts University, and shared some of the same professors I had so it was fun to talk to him about that. The Mooch actually had great talent as a communicator, and in all likelihood, he would have cleaned the press shop up if only he hadn’t put his foot in his mouth so quickly. Instead, Anthony became just one more of a rather large number of Trump loyalists who got so screwed over by Never-Trumpers within the West Wing that he would eventually turn bitterly on the president.
I put Omarosa Manigault, Cliff Sims, and Stephanie Grisham in that same Trump loyalist scorned category. While “The Mooch” got reamed by Reince Priebus, both Omarosa and Cliff Sims would get screwed by John Kelly while Stephanie Grisham would get raked every which way but loose by Trump’s fourth chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
I know that last Grisham fact quite directly because Stephanie cried at least figuratively on my shoulder several times about her ill-treatment by Meadows. It was indeed ill-treatment because Grisham never did anything to trigger the wrath of the hapless Meadows.
Grisham never did anything, that is, other than to stand in the way of his replacing her with two people handpicked by Meadows, Alyssa Farah and Kayleigh McEnany. Of course, those last two press corps peaches would, each in their own way, dump all over the president come the January 6 violence on Capitol Hill. To be clear, each would throw the Boss under the bus to salvage their own media careers on cable news. Boy, did I see a lot of that kind of kowtowing going on at the end—Kudlow, Grisham, Mulvaney, Farah, McEnany. Just pathetic.
I want to emphasize here again that all of these cases of Trump loyalists scorned were self-inflicted wounds by incompetent chiefs of staff that would cost the president. The Mooch would constantly hound Trump during the campaign as he offered himself up time and time again as a more than willing useful idiot for CNN and its Trump-bashing. For their scornful parts, Omarosa, Sims, and Grisham would write tell-all trash books ravaging the president and/or First Lady. It was all so unnecessary.