American Carnage, Cheap Seats, and a Cabinet of Clowns
Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public.
But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.
This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
—President Donald John Trump, Inauguration Day, 20161 [emphasis added]
This cold, damp, and dreary Inauguration Day would turn out to be, hands down, the worst day of my entire Trump tour—and I can assure you here that there were some very bad OTHER days.
Like the day after I lit up Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and got chewed up every which way but Sunday by the Boss. Like the day John Kelly told me I had to report to Gary Cohn and cc every one of my emails to one of the biggest rectal cavities I have ever met. Like the day I was told that the chief executive officer of Kodak had likely engaged in insider trading and thereby killed the best deal I have ever done in my life—one which would have established America’s independence in essential medicines manufacturing. And yes, like the day Larry Kudlow got appointed to replace Gary Cohn as the director of the National Economic Council. I could go on and on.
Two days earlier, a new demon had entered my life via email with some beyond devilish news. That demon came by the name of Rob Porter in the corporal form of a man who President Trump himself might have said, as he often did, “was right out of central casting.”
This man, really an angry and repressed little boy in a man’s body, looked to be right off the cover of Gentlemen’s Quarterly, if, that is, GQ had an edition for RINO Republicans only.
Tall, lean, chiseled, and charming, with a Reaganesque coif and a large rack of impeccably tailored pinstripe suits in a closet that hid so many of his secrets, Rob Porter had a resume to die for: president of the Harvard Republican Club, summer internship at the White House Domestic Policy Council, Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Harvard Law School. He could check every single box on his way up the ladder to the White House.
Oh, did I mention that Porter’s father, Roger, was famous in and of himself, working in the Ford, Reagan, and H. W. Bush administrations. In fact, there’s more than one photo of little Rob with Poppa Roger in the Oval Office with President Reagan.
Clearly, from his early years, Rob Porter’s dream was to get back to the White House, and that dream would come true when he was appointed as the White House staff secretary—a position that would turn out to be one of the most important, mismanaged, and therefore consequential in the Trump White House.
Of course, the dirty little secret about Rob Porter which both White House Legal Counsel Don McGahn and two chiefs of staff in Reince Priebus and John Kelly would hide from President Trump and the world to their everlasting shame was that Rob Porter was a walking anger management issue. In fact, Porter had not one but two former wives alleging significant spousal abuse and a former girlfriend with similar complaints.2
By the way, Porter’s anger was a peculiar kind of incendiary and white hot rage that could erupt in a matter of seconds. I know this because I would experience it on more than one occasion while Porter was in the White House.
On one such occasion, I was in Rob’s office with several members of the White House press team, including the sweet, smart Natalie Strom and the soon to be Trump Team of Vipers author and Trump turncoat Cliff Sims. In a nanosecond, as he slammed a big stack of papers down on his desk, Porter morphed from Barney Fife of Mayberry into Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
Porter proceed to then falsely accuse me and several people in the room of being the source of a damaging leak. When Porter finished reading us the riot act, I calmly told him I didn’t care if he vented his rage at me, but he had no right to cast his anger either at, or in front of, the good people in the room who had been working so hard on the project.
Later in the day, Rob would come meekly to my office and contritely apologize. It was a similar kind of behavior described by his ex-wives. So I was not surprised at all by the scandal.
But here is what remains the bigger point: The fact that Porter, the only person in the White House other than President Donald John Trump who would handle every single document that would pass over the President’s Resolute Desk, would never get a top security clearance was one of the great failings of the Trump White House.
Of course, there are many reasons why people are denied security clearances in the White House, and a big one is they might be open to blackmail. Certainly, there were plenty of people who could have held those spousal abuse allegations over Porter’s head for their own game.
That said, let me turn now back to the devilish news that this new demon in Rob Porter had brought into my life several nights before. This news came in the form of an email containing substantial edits to the executive order I had drafted to establish the National Trade Council I was supposed to be the director of.
A National Trade Council Stillbirth
Recall here that as consolation prize for being elbowed out of the way as the director of the National Economic Council, President Trump had announced I would have my own policy council dedicated towards the rebuilding of America’s manufacturing base. However, when I opened the attachment to Rob Porter’s email and saw the proposed edits, it was a gut punch.
In the new version of the executive order, my beloved National Trade Council had been downgraded from a true policy council to a unit within the National Economic Council. That meant in order to get anything done, I would have to report to none other than the man who had taken my original job, Gary Cohn.
The most frustrating part about the whole situation was that for the next several days leading into Inauguration Day—the day the order was supposed to be signed, formalizing my position—I couldn’t get a hold of anybody. Not Rob Porter. Not Reince Priebus. And certainly not Gary Cohn.
I should say here that if I had known then what I know now, I might have been able to stop what was about to be heaped upon me along with the decimation of Donald Trump’s trade agenda. To fight back, my first best option would have been to call the Boss directly and explain to him how dark forces within his White House were up to no good. But I didn’t yet know how to do that. In fact, the only way I could reach the Boss in those days before I had his private cell phone number was to go through the very people who were trying to crush me.
That obvious constraint still left me a second option, the art of the strategic leak. The equally obvious gambit here would have been to call up Jonathan Swan at Axios or Daniel Lippman at Politico or Maggie Haberman at the New York Times or Damian Paletta at the Washington Post or Jennifer Jacobs at Bloomberg or any one of a number of reporters on the prowl for the latest scoop about the Trump administration and come out guns a blazing.
The headline here might have been something like “Policy Coup at White House as National Trade Council Arrives Stillborn.” As part of my big reveal, I would have tried to spin the story in a way where Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs were attempting a leveraged buyout of the White House behind the president’s back by taking out one of the president’s most loyal advisors—with the new RINO Chief of Staff in full collusion.
Of course, there were problems with this gambit as well. First, I did not yet know which reporters to call or trust—none of the ones I just named were as yet on my radar.
Second, most of the folks in the press were as eager to kill me as my enemies inside the perimeter were. I was, after all, the highest profile Populist Economic Nationalist among the president’s advisors, and I had been often mocked and ridiculed during the campaign by a corporate media seeking to marginalize me.
The upshot of all of this was that resistance was futile at this point. This was my first rodeo, I was about one hundred miles up the DC Swamp without a paddle, and, much to my chagrin and dismay, I would soon be even without a lifeboat, much less a canoe.
A Sea of Pink Hats Amidst Trump Red
After cooking breakfast for my wife and stepson who had arrived from California for the occasion, we all bundled up and began what would be a two-mile slog in the cold wind and occasional rain to the inauguration ceremony on Capitol Hill. Yes, it was as cold as a CNN anchor interviewing Kellyanne Conway—I never get tired of that line.
After this long march, there would be more bad news as I wended my way with my family to what would turn out to be some of the cheapest seats at the event. Strictly nosebleed on the West Lawn of Capitol Hill amongst the masses we would sit.
Yes, this was yet another insult and message hurled my way by Reince Priebus and Katie Walsh letting me know that I was being walled off from the halls of power. As I looked around at others sitting in the section where I had been assigned, I saw plenty of familiar faces from the campaign and transition teams. But unlike me, every single one of them was a lower echelon staffer who would serve many rungs below where I had been slated to land—as an assistant to the president. Yet, there would be one more big insult to come—and very soon.
Oh, and by the way, please don’t consider me a diva here. I didn’t care one whit that I was sitting in a crappy aluminum chair in the mud. The point was simply that I was being sent the message and the message was loud and clear: I was not welcome in the White House.
These cheap seats notwithstanding, it still was quite a show.
The moment DJT put his expansive hand on not one but two Bibles—the 1861 Bible used to swear in Abraham Lincoln and the president’s personal Bible given to him by his mother in 1955—it began to lightly rain. As a microcosm of the press and Twitter wars that would dog the administration, journalistic opinion was split as to whether this precipitation was a good or bad omen.
Time magazine would report:3 “Supporters of the new commander-in-chief took Mother Nature’s timing as a sign of cleansing, while his opponents perceived it as the sky joining them in mourning the transition of power.” Liberal angst tweets ranged from “Mother Nature cries” to the “skies are weeping” while the religious right noted that in the Bible “Rain is a sign of God’s blessing.”4
The inauguration speech itself was vintage campaign DJT with a nice presidential burnish. My favorite passage perfectly captured the underlying rationale of the Trump trade agenda as well as the broader spirit of Make America Great Again. Said the newly minted President as the sun tried to peek through the gloom:5
We’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own. And spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon.
One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world. But that is the past. And now we are looking only to the future.
We assembled here today are issuing a new decree to be heard in every city, in every foreign capital, and in every hall of power. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land.
From this moment on, it’s going to be America First. Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families.
As I took all of this in, the contrast from where I sat in the cheap seats with what I watched upon the stage on the Capitol building could not have been more stark. Through the water-smeared lenses of my small set of binoculars, there was my brother-in-arms Wilbur Ross smiling and waving to his adoring fans.
Truth be told, the Trump cabinet beyond Wilbur would turn out to be one of the worst cabinets ever assembled by a president-elect. Indeed, far too many would leave in some form of disgrace, disloyalty, or disarray. Talk about American carnage.
Some of the cabinet choices were simply monumental mismatches. For example, Ben Carson is a good, intelligent, loyal man with a broad skill set. But that skill set in no way translated well to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Carson, as you may recall, was really the only one of the gang of sixteen Republican candidates in the 2016 primary who would give Trump an initial run for his money. And perhaps for that reason, Carson was the only one of those sixteen who Trump didn’t dare demean. Nope, there would be no “Little Marco,” “Low Energy Jeb,” or “Lyin’ Ted” moniker for the good Dr. Ben.
With his extensive medical background, Carson should have been the secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). And when the pandemic rolled around, Carson—not the hapless Pence—should have been the China virus czar.
Instead, HHS wound up with a Big Pharma fan in Alex Azar orchestrating a comedy of tragic errors that would needlessly kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.
As another monumental mismatch, there was Jeff Sessions. As I have noted, Sessions had been the first US senator to endorse Trump; he was (and is) a rabid China Hawk, and there is no man more loyal to President Trump to ever have walked God’s good earth than Jeff.
Of course, Jeff’s main flaw is that he is not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. That’s why throwing Jeff as attorney general to the lions and jackals at the Department of Justice was even more darkly funny than backwatering Ben Carson at HUD.
Sessions would quickly be screwed over by the very same bureaucrats at the Department of Justice who had schemed and dreamed of taking Trump down with their phony Russia Hoax. When these bureaucrats seduced Sessions into recusing himself from investigating that Russia Hoax, it was like a Democrat dream come true.
The rest is, of course, history. With that single ill-advised decision, Sessions plummeted from Trump grace like a comet crashing to earth. The Russia Hoax itself would never get properly investigated before the 2020 Election Day, and it was only a matter of time before Sessions would get tweeted out the Trump door.
The tragedy here is that if Jeff had simply been appointed to be the secretary of Homeland Security, he would likely have served with distinction for the entire four years of the administration, and we damn well would have had a far superior border security policy than we wound up with.
Of Dim Bulbs and #MeToo Victims
Besides these kind of mismatches, President Trump simply had some very bad luck. For example, Andy Puzder was the chief executive officer of CKE Restaurants, which includes fast food chains like Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s.
I had met Andy on the campaign trail and loved the guy. He was one of those free market and free trade business types who, after you sat him down and explained the six ways from Sunday that Communist China was stealing American jobs, would quickly become a Trump trade policy convert.
During the campaign, Andy had indeed done yeoman’s work writing pro-Trump op-eds—he had a direct pipeline to the influential editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Both telegenic and articulate, Andy also performed as one of our best TV surrogates preaching the gospel of Trump on business-friendly cable networks like Fox Business and CNBC.
Well, as soon as Andy Puzder got nominated for secretary of labor, all hell broke loose. It was a hell ginned up particularly by the AFL-CIO, which took great umbrage with the fact that Puzder had had the gall to oppose the minimum wage.
The next thing we all knew, the piranha of the left-wing press were wrapping a decades-old set of false spousal abuse allegations against Puzder in the new fish wrap of the #MeToo movement. Never mind that Puzder’s ex-wife had recanted all her false claims shortly after Trump won the election in November.
Never mind indeed. The knives were out, and faced with an onslaught of bad press, Andy, a brilliant, decent, and honorable man, would withdraw his nomination on February 15. He would become the first cabinet appointee of the Trump presidency to fall, and this would be another case of subtraction by addition.
This is because the man who would be added to the cabinet to take Andy’s place would be a ticking time bomb that would blow up in another kind of scandal several years into the administration. The man in question was Alex Acosta.
Don’t Cry for Me Lolita Island
Let me give you a funny story here before I dish on the Alex Acosta tragedy cum soap opera. While Wilbur Ross was waiting for his confirmation as secretary of commerce, I invited him to set up shop in my office at the White House. And Wilbur would quickly take me up on that offer and pretty much come and go as he pleased.
One day when I returned from lunch, I found Wilbur sitting there with a guy who he simply introduced as “Alex.” Wilbur was interviewing this lean, broad-nosed, and vaguely Latino-looking gentlemen as his possible deputy secretary at Commerce, and when this guy left my office, Wilbur groused about how this “dud” lacked the kind of energy and financial acumen that were prized in the Ross calculus.
Of course, the very next day, this very same Alex Acosta—I now knew his last name—would be announced as President Trump’s second nominee for secretary of labor. Boy, did I get a laugh out of that—and an equal laugh out of Wilbur’s sheepish grin when he heard the news. Acosta, by the way, who had been recommended to the president by White House Legal Counsel Don McGahn, would cruise through a rather easy confirmation process and be approved on a 60 to 38 vote.6
Alex Acosta and I would go on to do some very good work together. Unlike Wilbur, I found him to be razor-sharp and eminently sensitive to getting stuff done in Trump time, which is to say as soon as possible, and truth be told, I was sorry to see Acosta go. This was particularly true because his replacement, Eugene Scalia, the son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, was another poor Trump cabinet choice and yet another George W. Bushie RINO.
Not only did this anti-labor ideologue in Scalia make it more difficult for President Trump to woo the Teamsters and autoworkers and plumbers and pipefitters and carpenters and other labor unions we might well have gotten into the Trump fold in 2020, when it came time to crack down on American pension funds investing in highly risky and nontransparent Communist Chinese companies, Scalia, who as labor secretary had broad authority over such pension fund investments, simply would not cooperate with the White House.
As to why Acosta would prove to be such a ticking time bomb, the fuse was lit during his tenure as the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida. In that post, Acosta had approved a “get out of jail card free” deal for the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein, who molested or sexually abused an estimated eighty women over a five-year period.7
The worst part of the Epstein deal was that it was conducted in secret, without any consultation from the victims. The Miami Herald would castigate it as the “deal of a lifetime,”8 and Acosta would later be slapped on the wrist by a federal judge for violating the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
It is an open question as to why Alex cut the deal, but it was no secret that Jeffrey Epstein had friends in very high places and across the political aisle. These friends included everyone from Democrat Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew to Wilbur Ross himself, Trump confidant Tom Barrack, and one of the fastest and biggest mouths in the legal profession, Alan Dershowitz.
No doubt white hot pressure had been applied on Acosta from multiple vectors of attack, he had folded, and his cowardice under political fire would come to blindside him and the Boss years later.
By the way, one of the things I hate most is watching grown men cry. And that’s exactly what I had to see on July 12, 2019.
Just by chance, I was traveling with POTUS and taking a rare trip with him on Marine One. While waiting under the portico of the East Wing as the Boss conducted one of his impromptu press conferences, he was joined by Acosta who gave a teary-eyed goodbye to America.
Truth be told, Acosta was doing nothing other than feeling sorry for himself when he should have been feeling sorry for the young women he had sold out. Sometimes, you just have to own it.
Corruptions R Us
As for some of the other cabinet secretary choices involving moral turpitude, there would be a surfeit. These included most notably Scott Pruitt at the Environmental Protection Agency, Tom Price at Health and Human Services, David Shulkin at the Veterans Administration, and Ryan Zinke at the Department of Interior. Each would resign in their own kind of disgrace because of an ethics scandal, and all would weaken the Trump administration in their own way by doing so.
While Price and Shulkin would turn out to be nothing more than grifters with a weakness for traveling first class on the taxpayer’s dime, both Pruitt and Zinke would be far more dangerous.
Maybe it is because of my love of the ocean having grown up in Florida and having spent many years in California, but I thought that the appointment of Pruitt, a rabid anti-environmentalist, was a particularly unnecessary punch in the nose to an American public that likes to be governed from the middle. I wasn’t surprised in the slightest when he was embroiled in a sweetheart deal with a gas industry lobbying firm. Good riddance, I thought, as soon as he was gone.
As for Ryan Zinke, I have the greatest respect for anyone who serves as a Navy SEAL. Yet, I would lose that respect for Zinke within minutes of meeting him at a showdown at the White House over the Jones Act in the office of then OMB director Mick Mulvaney.
The Jones Act is America’s oldest expression of Buy American legislation. It requires that all ships carrying cargo between two US ports be American-built, -owned, -crewed, and -flagged. It is the single most important piece of congressional legislation bolstering America’s shipbuilding industry.
Given that the two most simple rules in the Trump White House were supposed to be Buy American and Hire American, stewardship over the Jones Act was clearly in my remit as the director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy.
As for my showdown with Ryan Zinke, Mick Mulvaney had called the meeting ostensibly to review a proposal by Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan. It was a proposal that had literally been years in the making, and it was designed to strengthen a critical part of the Jones Act related to oil and gas drilling offshore by closing a glaring loophole forged at one point by the Big Oil lobby.
At the Mulvaney meet, I quickly discovered that Mick’s real agenda was to kill the Customs and Border Protection proposal. As to why Mick wanted to do so despite President Trump’s professed support for Buy American, there was this:
Mick is an extreme version of a Libertarian opposed to any kind of intervention in the marketplace. Accordingly, any form of Buy American policy was simply not his cup of Tea Party tea. Yep, that kind of anti-Buy American zealot was in the Trump administration—and I would clash repeatedly with him, first at OMB and then when Mick became the third chief of staff of the Trump White House.
In point of fact, Ryan Zinke really didn’t belong at the meeting—he was the secretary of the interior, not the secretary of energy. Yet Zinke would perform admirably as both a useful idiot and puppet for the Big Oil lobbyists who had taken dead aim at McAleenan’s Jones Act proposal.
You might imagine—and you would be spot on—that I would quickly get into a heated argument with both Zinke and Mulvaney. Meanwhile, Kevin McAleenan sat there like the milquetoast he was and wouldn’t even fight for his own damn proposal. As this is going on, I am thinking to myself: “You have to be kidding me. Exactly what White House am I sitting in?”
Of course, the other guy I had to fight that day was none other than White House Legal Counsel Don McGahn. As I had quickly found out early in the administration, McGahn was another Never-Trumper, and sure enough, here he was, opposing a Buy American policy on libertarian grounds just like Mulvaney.
In his opposition, McGahn unnecessarily weighed in with a bogus legal view questioning the legality of the CBP proposal. It was flat out disingenuous as a critique. He knew it. I knew it. But Mulvaney would seize upon McGahn’s opposition to kill that CBP proposal.
In this way, a golden opportunity to create more American manufacturing jobs was scattered to the ideological winds. At least Ryan Zinke did not last very long—and his replacement in David Bernhardt as interior secretary would turn out to be one of the best appointments Donald Trump would ever make.
The Real Clown at This Cabinet Clown Show
Now, this may sound unkind—heck, it is unkind, but what the heck—the Trump cabinet member who most looked like a clown with his red cheeks and bulbous red nose and perennial huge grin was Sonny Perdue, Trump’s secretary of agriculture.
Perdue was not, however, to be underestimated, and I would battle him repeatedly because of his stiff opposition to the Trump tariffs. It wasn’t the tariffs per se that Sonny opposed. Rather, Perdue knew full well—like we all did—that any tariffs the president might impose, particularly on China, would inevitably lead to some form of Chinese retaliation.
Of course, it would be his farmer constituents who would bear the brunt of that retaliation. So Sonny did everything he could to subvert the Trump tariff paradigm.
The irony of the situation was that America’s farmers were some of the staunchest Trump supporters, and most were more than ready to take the Chinese retaliation bullet for the greater good of cracking down on China’s economic aggression. But not Sonny Perdue.
Call him a hero if you want—they loved the SOB on Wall Street. I just marked Sonny Perdue down as yet another sapper inside the perimeter trying to scuttle the most critical part of the president’s trade and economic policy.
Interestingly enough, the worst thing Sonny did to the Boss’s trade policy had nothing to do with the China tariffs. Instead, it had everything to do with the president’s imperative to fast track the renegotiation of the toxic NAFTA trade deal with Mexico and Canada. Sonny didn’t like that fast-tracking because he feared Mexican and Canadian retaliation against his farmers if we pushed too hard for a quick NAFTA renegotiation.
I vividly remember the April 26 day I arrived at the Oval Office with an executive order that the Boss the previous day had asked me to draft. This little one-pager packed a neat little punch because it would have pulled us out of NAFTA within nine months if a successful negotiation wasn’t consummated before that date.
This was a genius strategy if I do say so myself, and one that I had pushed hard for in the Oval Office. This was a genius strategy because the nine-month deadline would have put appropriate pressure on both the Mexicans and the Canadians to get off their rear ends and start negotiating in far better faith than they had up to that point—and nine months was a Goldilocks deadline, just long enough to give everybody time to get a detailed renegotiation done.
Unbeknownst to me, Sonny snuck into the Oval before I arrived for the signing with a map filled with red dots that purported to show how important the farm vote was across the country. It was pure deception on Sonny’s part because if he had overlaid all of the manufacturing jobs at risk from bad trade deals like NAFTA, that would have dwarfed any possible job losses in the farm belt from the threatened NAFTA withdrawal—and anyway, the whole point of the threat was simply to get a quicker NAFTA renegotiation.
Remember here that direct on-farm employment only amounts to only 1.4 percent of US employment.9 In contrast, manufacturing accounts for about 8.5 percent of the total nonfarm workforce.10
This disparity notwithstanding, Sonny would use that faux farm vote map to get the Boss to back off his NAFTA threat. By the time I got to the Oval with the requisite executive order ready to be signed, Sonny’s dirty deed—with an assist from Gary Cohn and Rob Porter—was done.
Sonny Perdue saw it as a great victory. I saw it as yet more Bad Process pulled off by Bad Personnel and yet another missed opportunity.
Of course, we eventually got NAFTA renegotiated. But it took far, far longer than it should have. If we had simply put the right pressure on the Mexicans, and particularly the Canadians, as my executive order would have done, we would have had a much stronger agreement much quicker.
A KORUS of Fools
Besides Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, two of the most damaging cabinet picks would be Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis at the Pentagon and Rex Tillerson at the State Department.
The first time I met Mattis was in the Oval Office on May Day, May 1, 2017. It was not pleasant for either him or me.
On this date, the Boss was chewing out both Mattis and Tillerson for opposing his efforts to renegotiate a grossly unfair trade deal with South Korea. It was the very deal that Hillary Clinton had originally been responsible for getting to the finish line during the Obama administration and the very same deal that the Boss had promised to renegotiate in his June 2016 Jobs Plan speech.
KORUS, as it was called, was just a horrible deal that was helping to destroy our auto industry and would eventually decimate our pickup truck industry. In the mercantilist process, KORUS would destroy tens of thousands of high-paying, blue-collar manufacturing jobs in key battleground states like Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.
Memo to Mad Dog Mattis: in the Oval Office, the term “battleground” generally refers to the states in America where presidential elections are won or lost. Yet old Mad Dog just could never wrap his head around that kind of political reality so he inevitably had a knee-jerk negative reaction whenever we tried to stir up any kind of trade policy trouble with our putative military allies.
On this day in the Oval, both Mattis and Tillerson were opposing any renegotiation of the Korean deal because they didn’t want to upset either the delicate military calculus (Mattis’ view) or diplomatic alliance (Tillerson’s) with the South Koreans.
The Boss had brought me over to the Oval to wax eloquent both on how the mercantilist South Koreans were screwing us and thereby destroying a key part of our defense industrial base as well as to explain a core principle of the administration to these Trump trade policy apostates, namely, that economic security is indistinguishable from national security.
As President Trump would say eloquently, when you sacrifice economic security on the altar of national security—for example, by allowing bad trade deals like the one with South Korea to fester—you wind up losing both economic and national security. “Hey Jim Mattis: how do you think we are going to build those tanks you need if we don’t have the factories to do so?”
At any rate, I would pay a heavy price for my candor that day. Mattis would torment me every which way but loose whenever I needed anything from the Pentagon. Tillerson would just ignore me—just as, I might add, Tillerson did the president.
As for the rest of the assortment of gypsies, tramps, thieves, clowns, misfits, and occasionally competent bureaucrats that would make up the original Trump cabinet, Linda McMahon at the Small Business Administration was as tough and smart and good as Betsy DeVos was bad to the point of often embarrassing at the Department of Education.
In a similar vein, Trump loyalist Mike Pompeo at the Central Intelligence Agency was, dare I say, as intelligent and unfortunate a choice as the appointment of the far too ambitious Never-Trumper Nikki Haley as ambassador to the United Nations.
Oh Nikki, Nikki, Nikki. The only politician more treacherous, deceitful, and dangerous from South Carolina than you is Senator Lindsey Graham. More about each of these two much later.