My Hard Pratfall from Trumpian Grace
Katie Walsh, Deputy White House Chief of Staff, former RNC staffer and notorious Never Trumper, has been exposed as the White House leaker…With so many enemies in his own camp and his own party, our new president…must scrutinize closely the potential Judases working around him.11
—Thomas Madison, Powdered Wig Society, February 21, 2017
After the Boss’s Inauguration Day speech, it was time to get to work. So I headed over to the rendezvous point for staffers at what had been the headquarters for the Presidential transition. This was a General Services Administration office building just west of the White House grounds at 1800 F Street.
I hadn’t visited this paean-to-drab 1950s-style architecture for more than a month. My one enduring memory of that first visit was a rather eye-opening meeting with the then nominee for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. He had set up shop at the HQ to practice for the tough grilling he could expect during his confirmation hearings in sessions that were accurately, but not so affectionately, called “murder boards.”
During this visit, King Rex let me know in no uncertain terms that as secretary of state he would be balancing the promises of Donald Trump to crack down on the unfair trade practices of countries around the world with his own need for judicious diplomacy, and as Tillerson quite openly expressed his intentions to subvert the Trump trade policy paradigm, he made copious references to the need for well-functioning global supply chains.
Reading between Rex’s lines, he, as the former chairman of Exxon—one of the biggest multinational corporations in the world—was telling me to forget about all that Populist Economic Nationalist stuff where we would bring our supply chains home. In Rex’s world, that’s not the way the world should work—at least when it came to allocating resources “efficiently,” that is, in a way to maximize corporate profits. Let the devil and blue-collar workers take the hindmost.
At least Rex was honest about his intentions to sabotage our trade policy—despite the fact he had gotten not a single vote in the election, and I would remember that day well almost a year later at a big showdown in the Roosevelt room over the possible imposition of tariffs on China.
Virtually every top cabinet member with a stake in trade policy was there. Besides Tillerson, there was Treasury’s Steve Mnuchin, Commerce’s Wilbur Ross, the Pentagon’s Jim Mattis, Agriculture’s Sonny Perdue, and even Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta. Every single person in that room, including National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, the Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and the always lurking Staff Secretary Rob Porter argued against the tough measures President Trump was proposing.
In fact, the only guy in the room supportive of the president was yours truly, and this unified opposition in the Roosevelt room to the centerpiece of his entire campaign and economic strategy seemed to be a wake-up call for the Boss.
As I had watched this showdown all unfold, I thought to myself: “Yes, the Boss is finally smelling the coffee that many of those on his putatively nationalist team might be playing for the other globalist side.”
In fact, whenever I saw President Trump’s eyebrows go up, it suggested an epiphany was at least percolating. When Rex Tillerson pointedly said to me that day in the Roosevelt room in his slow Texas drawl, “Peter, you simply don’t understand the global supply chains,” and I had quickly retorted, “Rex, you simply don’t understand the president’s trade policy,” I at least might have climbed up a few notches in the Boss’s respect for me. Yet, in that first year, as with so many showdowns on trade policy, it would be all for naught.
At any rate, it had been on that brief trip to Washington, DC, where it had become crystal clear that the real locus of power and center of gravity of the transition was in New York at Trump Tower rather than in the DC Swamp. And I vowed never to return to DC until it was time for the president to be inaugurated. That time had now come, and this, my second visit to the DC presidential transition team headquarters, would make the first tawdry visit seem like an all-expense paid trip to Tahiti.
Stabbed in the Front
There would be nothing subtle about what Reince Priebus and Katie Walsh were about to do to me. As I moved slowly through security like a cow moving through a cattle pen to the slaughterhouse, I looked around and saw no familiar faces other than some low-level staffers.
Inside, I was given my welcome kit, and in the cover letter, there was this shattering news: I was addressed as a deputy assistant to the president rather than a full assistant. And here, I must confess that in my then naïveté, I had never imagined that they would stick that particular knife in my chest.
Sure, they looked like they were trying to take away my National Trade Council. And yes, there might be jockeying over whether I would have an office in the coveted West Wing or be exiled to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. But I never thought they would strip me of the rank that President Trump himself had bestowed on me in a press release.
And to be clear here lest you again think I’m some kind of diva: I have never been particularly rank conscious. But I knew damn well right then that this deputy versus assistant rank mattered, and I would be horribly right.
As an assistant to the president, I would have been entitled to walk-in privileges to see the Boss anytime in the Oval Office or East Wing residence. That alone was literally worth the price of admission as it would be impossible to wall me off from President Trump.
As an assistant rather than deputy assistant, I would also have an open invitation to all senior staff meetings and walk-in privileges to virtually any senior staff member. At the convenience and perquisite level, I would likewise be able to reserve at a moment’s notice a staff car to take me anywhere I wanted.
At a personal level, I would even have free Cadillac health care at Walter Reed Hospital. This was not an inconsequential benefit as it would play out in the first several years of my tenure at the White House, as I would be plagued by a series of nagging medical issues that were a direct result of the stress I was under—issues that I was unable to get proper medical care for because of the lack of ready access to Walter Reed.
To this point, I came down with a bad staphylococcus infection on my right ankle early in 2017. For a few days, it made my whole leg look like I had elephantiasis. I’m still grappling with a bit of residual damage from that.
At any rate, this demotion was, if not the biggest, then certainly the most consequential F-U that anybody had ever given me. And when I say “anybody” in this particular case, I mean Reince Priebus and Katie Walsh, in all likelihood acting as the water boy and water girl for the likes of a gleeful Gary Cohn and a Machiavellian Jared Kushner.
When I confronted Katie Walsh about what I hoped was simply an oversight, she simply told me that there weren’t enough assistant positions to go around. As we talked, Walsh could barely suppress her smile and disdain. She was having a good screw with me, and she was clearly enjoying it. Message received.
An Office Lost and Found
Things didn’t get any better once I got over to the White House to get my badge, cell phone, and laptop computer and find what I thought would be my new office. That “office” turned out not to be in the West Wing where all power does indeed reside in the White House. Instead, as I had feared, I had been exiled to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the White House.
And here was the biggest joke of all that Priebus and Walsh would play on me: my “office,” such as it was, consisted of a little windowless cubbyhole that had been assigned to about ten other people. In other words, I didn’t have an office at all—I had another Dilbert-style big F-U.
In fact, for the next month, I would wander around the EEOB—and sometimes in the hall outside Stephen Miller’s office in the West Wing—like the Flying Dutchman working on my laptop while trying to figure out a way both forward and out of the box—nay, coffin—Priebus and Walsh had put me in.
The story of how I made what would be a spectacularly successful escape out of that box would be one that likely saved my entire White House career. It goes something like this:
On yet another cold February day, I would trek into the White House along some very icy streets, and the first thing that would hit me was a frantic call from my one and only deputy Alex Gray. He had been prevented from coming into the West Wing complex because of an alleged badge malfunction.
Given all the crap I had been facing, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that Priebus and Walsh were screwing around not just with me but now with my deputy as well. To this day, I don’t know if it was an innocent mistake. I do know that I stomped over to Kushner’s office, told him in no uncertain terms that it was one thing to F with me, but he and the clowns over the West Wing needed to draw the line at screwing around with a young man who was simply trying to serve his country.
My rant finally got Jared’s attention. Fearing that I might take this all way up to the top of the chain—that possibility did come up in the conversation—he made one call and told whoever it was at the other end of the line to make sure I had an office by the end of the day.
For whatever reason—that was my first inkling that Jared might be the real chief of staff—that office turned out to be a four-hundred-square-foot suite on the first floor of the northeast corner of the EEOB with a kick ass outer office that could accommodate up to eight staff—an accommodation I would eventually make as my star rose over the four years of the administration and I steadily added staff.
At any rate, with a twenty-foot-high ceiling and a beautiful view of the north lawn media complex and the White House itself in the background, heaven—at least political heaven—could not have been any prettier. In other words, I had just landed one of the best offices inside the entire White House perimeter.
I can safely say here that if Walsh and Priebus had simply put me in a little office with no view at the outset, it is unlikely that I would have lasted more than a few months. But that big, beautiful office suite—not just one of the very best in the EEOB but three to four times the size of anything most staffers had in the West Wing—would be where my comeback and numerous counterattacks would officially begin.
Indeed, it would be from that office where I would create dozens of executive orders, write dozens of memos (including many that would save hundreds of thousands of American lives during the pandemic), author nearly one hundred articles and reports, solve countless problems, and especially on the weekends, kick back and relax during my breaks, often with a little sports on the two big screen televisions inside the suite.
So at least now this truth can be told: Reince and Katie, you had me on the ropes. But you blew it by overplaying your hand. And you both would be gone long before I would leave—Walsh in just sixty-nine days for leaking.
Memo to the Boss: You might want to make sure that Katie Walsh has nothing ever to do either with your 2024 campaign or in your POTUS 47 White House. She sandbagged you when she was in the West Wing, and, as we will discuss later, Walsh milked you for all your campaign was worth during the 2020 tilt.
Deputy Down, Down a Deputy
Now the other thing I need to tell you about my worst day in the Trump White House is this: Not only was I unceremoniously demoted, I also lost one of the two deputy slots I had been promised.
In losing that deputy slot—and this is the buried lede—I was also stripped of my responsibilities for moving a Trump infrastructure bill forward. Both the deputy slot and the infrastructure portfolio were absorbed—no surprise here—into Gary Cohn’s National Economic Council. And yes, as with so many things that Priebus, Cohn, and Walsh did at the outset of the administration, this particular move would come back to haunt President Trump and his 2020 reelection chances.
Why? Because for all four years of the Trump administration, Gary Cohn, and then his successor Larry Kudlow, would fail miserably in moving an infrastructure bill on Capitol Hill. This failure—likely the result of these Wall Street hacks not caring a whit about all the jobs an infrastructure bill might create for blue-collar Americans—bordered on the criminal. For no piece of legislation was more important to the MAGA blue-collar and manufacturing agenda of President Trump than a robust infrastructure bill. None.
In the process of rebuilding our roads and bridges and airports—not to mention our digital infrastructure like fiber and 5G—a robust infrastructure bill would have created millions of manufacturing jobs. Such an infrastructure bill would also have dramatically increased both productivity and wages. Here, a central tenet of economics is that investment in the public good of infrastructure inevitably boosts productivity in the private sector and therefore increases real wages.
For example, when you build better roads and bridges, you will have more efficient domestic supply chains and shorter transit times to get goods to market. Upgrade your airports and similar good things happen.
It broke my heart to lose this infrastructure portfolio. It broke my heart again when first Cohn and then Kudlow failed miserably in delivering a infrastructure bill. It broke my heart for a third time when Joe Biden, with the help of a lot of the same Democrats and RINO Republicans who had been so unhelpful to President Trump in his bid to pass his own infrastructure bill, gave full throated support to a faux Biden “infrastructure” bill.
I say “faux” because Biden’s abomination dedicated only a relatively small fraction of expenditures to actual infrastructure like roads and bridges. Instead, the rest of Biden’s bucks will be squandered on a gaggle of Green New Deal and Robin Hood schemes that will benefit workers in Shanghai and Mumbai a lot more than those in Akron and Scranton.
Here’s the broader point:
So many of the mistakes made early in the administration would come back to haunt us in the 2020 election—including this massive Trump legislative miss with infrastructure.
It wouldn’t just be the infrastructure bill the 2017 West Wing cast of characters would screw up. It would be virtually the entire Trump legislative agenda for the year.
In considering the politically preferred order of that legislative agenda, it is important to remember this: On the strength of Donald Trump’s coattails, the Republican party had seized control of both the Senate and House of Representatives on Capitol Hill. By all accounts and measures, we had the Democrats by the proverbial shorthairs, and we should have been locked and loaded to push forward the Trump agenda as expressed in the campaign of Donald Trump.
Instead, however, because of all of the Bad Personnel in the West Wing, the Trump presidency almost immediately went off the legislative rails. The precipitating event was the really inexplicable decision to make repeal and replacement of Obamacare the very first priority of the White House.
When I heard about that decision, I thought this was sheer political lunacy. If Hillary Clinton’s experience during the early years of the Bill Clinton presidency had taught us anything, it is that healthcare is an issue where presidencies come to die.
Of course, my second thought was that there was no way in Hades this particular repeal-and-replace-Obamacare initiative would pass. It was just too politically divisive.
Instead, all this tilting at Barack’s windmill would do would be to burn precious presidential capital in the first critical hundred days of the administration. But what did I know? I was just that pesky trade advisor in exile across the street in the EEOB.
The Short and Long of It
So just how did this lunacy happen? Here, the blame can squarely be laid on Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and his Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short along with Reince’s fellow Badger State compadre, newly minted Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan.
As a reminder from my book In Trump Time, Marc Short wormed his way into the White House as an advisor to Vice President Mike Pence during the 2016 campaign. He would turn out to be a very destructive worm as a de facto emissary for a Koch network of dark conservative and globalist money dedicated to the defeat of Donald Trump. And Marc Short would play a key role as Iago in the Shakespearean tragedy otherwise known as the et tu Brute betrayal of the American Caesar Trump by his own vice president on January 6, 2021.
At any rate, Speaker Ryan would convince Reince that he had the votes to repeal and replace Obamacare,12 Marc Short was too stupid or arrogant to push back, and pretty soon Ryan, Reince, and Short convinced President Trump to get a quick win on Obamacare before moving on to the next favorite piece of legislation on Reince’s RINO list. Nope, not infrastructure but rather the Trump tax cuts.
Now, as I just noted, but it is worth repeating: any damn fool with any sense of history knows that healthcare policy is the mother of all tar babies when it comes to dragging down political careers and presidencies. The fact that this issue almost killed the Clinton presidency in its crib should have been warning enough not to go there. But Reince, Ryan, and Marc Short said that this time would be different.
It was like thinking you could go into Iraq in March of 2003, simply topple Saddam Hussein, and have the troops home by Christmas. Mission accomplished. Right? Wrong!
Of course, we would get bogged down in the battle over Obamacare for six long months, and, as I feared, in the process, the Boss would indeed burn incredible amounts of political capital.
On top of all this, John McCain’s famous two thumbs down July 28, 2017, killing of even a weak compromise bill vehemently and venomously turned what had been a simmering squabble between McCain and Trump into a full-blown Hatfields versus McCoys blood feud.
This blood feud would, in turn, help contribute to President Trump’s contested loss of Arizona in the 2020 race. Not only did the McCain wing of the Republican Party in Arizona actively campaign against Trump.13 Key Republican officials in that McCain wing like Governor Doug Ducey, former Senator Jeff Flake, and Cindy McCain herself helped thwart efforts to investigate widespread fraud and election irregularities in Arizona in the 2020 race—Ducey, Flake, and McCain would all be censored by the Arizona Republican Party for their turncoat behavior while Biden would reward McCain with an ambassadorship.14
A Flawed Tax Bill Loses the House
President Trump’s deeply flawed tax bill that ultimately passed in Congress on December 20, 2017, would have even more far ranging Bad Personnel equals Bad Politics consequences as it would directly contribute to the loss of the House of Representatives to the Democrats in the midterm elections of 2018.
Follow me here: If, for example, Steve Bannon had been chief of staff instead of Reince Priebus and I had been director of the National Economic Council instead of Gary Cohn, we would have pushed for a tax bill just like Priebus and Cohn, albeit only after we had passed an infrastructure bill. However, the Bannon-Navarro version of that tax bill would have truly targeted the middle class and done so with far greater political sensitivity.
In particular, both Bannon and I would have pressed hard on President Trump to include a tax on the uber-wealthy—the top 1 percent of earners. By simply including such a provision, we would have immediately blunted the criticism that this was a tax cut for the wealthy.
Note to the Steve Moores of this world: Any negative economic consequences from such a “tax the uber-rich” provision would have been negligible. In contrast, the political benefits would have been huge. As Steve Bannon might have said with successful passage of such a provision and thereby having secured the president’s left flank: “Suck on that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.”
Even more important politically, neither Bannon nor I would have crafted a piece of tax legislation explicitly designed to screw the Democrats’ Blue States in a way designed to redistribute income and tax dollars to the Republicans’ Red States. Priebus and Cohn, on the other hand, working in league with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, and both Paul Ryan and his partner in tax crime on Capitol Hill Kevin Brady, came up with this anything but brilliant idea: the Trump tax bill would significantly reduce the tax deduction on state and local taxes—the so-called SALT provision.
When the Trump tax bill capped the SALT deduction at $10,000, it was a giant SCREW-YOU to middle class homeowners in general. However, that cap disproportionately hit property owners in Blue States like California and New York where home prices and associated property taxes were far higher.
For libertarian purists like Mulvaney, this was a dream come true. His textbook thinking—I sure heard Mick voice it enough—was that by sharply curtailing the SALT deduction, that would lead to a more efficient allocation of investment resources and therefore stronger economic growth. Never mind that nuking the SALT deduction would be a wallet and hammer blow to many middle-class families living in homes in Blue State country, homes that would have cost half as much for the same amenities in flyover Red State land.
As for Priebus and Ryan, they could barely hide their glee at the prospect of kicking the dung out of the Deep Blue States. And the more politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein squealed and whined as the debate unfolded, the more pleasure Priebus and Ryan—and a whole gaggle of myopic Republicans on the Hill—took from it.
Yet, here is what these Republicans, along with Mulvaney and Priebus and Ryan and Marc Short—and of course Mnuchin and Cohn—all missed:
Even though there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that the Republican Party would ever grab a Senate seat in any of the Deep Blue States where the elimination of the SALT deduction would most wound, and even though there was not an ice cube’s chance in boiling water of a Republican presidential candidate ever getting any Electoral College votes in these Deep Blue States, there were still a hell of a lot of Republican-leaning congressional seats in those states. And ALL of these Republican-leaning seats would suddenly be put up for grabs by the anger engendered by this big SALT SCREW-YOU and assault on middle-class homeowners.
For my part, I had a particularly keen sense of the political dangers and tried my best to warn everybody I could, including the president, that nuking the SALT provision could be politically catastrophic. I understood that because I had lived for more than twenty-five years in the very Reddest part of one of America’s Bluest states—Orange County, California.
For any of you who have ever flown into Orange County, you might have noticed the statue of that most famous Republican cowboy John Wayne at the airport. Orange County was also the home of a “Western White House” during the halcyon days of the Nixon administration, and it is the home of Ronald Reagan’s Presidential Library.
Knowing all this, you may not be surprised to learn that when Donald Trump took office in January of 2017, Republicans held fully six congressional seats that included some or all of Orange County. We would lose fully four of those seats in 2018 at a time when the Democrats seized the House of Representatives by a count of just thirty-six seats.
As an example of how the Trump tax bill and loss of the SALT deduction hit middle-class Blue Stators so very hard, just consider how hard this alleged “tax cut” hit yours truly. To be clear here, I am a man of modest means—not by choice but rather by bad choices.
In 1992, I squandered a relatively small fortune doing what you should never do in politics, spending your own money on your campaign, in that case, my 1992 San Diego mayor’s race. Over time, I fought my way back, and by the early 2000s, I was able to buy a small starter home.
I then parlayed that Laguna Canyon pillbox into a down payment on a $1 million fixer-upper in Laguna Beach. After a half a million dollars in upgrades, and steady property tax escalations over time, I had, along with the interest payments on my jumbo mortgage, more than a nice little SALT deduction every year.
Enter stage right the Trump tax cut. My tax bill the following year would pop up by over $25,000. Moreover, the market value of my beloved ocean view house would fall, along with my net worth, by at least $1 million.
In short, I was living proof right inside the White House that the Trump tax bill was indeed designed not for middle class professors like me—at least not middle classers from a Blue State—but rather more for the uber rich. And this was entirely the product of the screw job Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus, Steve Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, and Mick Mulvaney all ginned up to gleefully screw the Deep Blue States.
Of course, all this SALT into the wounds of the Deep Blue States would indeed come back to bite us big time in the 2018 congressional midterms. In Orange County alone, as I have noted, we lost four seats, and this was in no small part because the real estate industry spent a ton of money on the Democrat challengers.
Harley Rouda, a Republican turned Democrat from my own hometown of Laguna Beach, would lead the way, vanquishing ten-term Republican and fellow China Hawk Dana Rohrabacher. Wrote a gleeful Politico:
Rouda and three other Democrats swept the congressional races, eradicating the GOP from the electoral map in a place that Ronald Reagan once described as the place “where good Republicans go to die.” Democrats’ blue wave in 2018 was more like a blue tsunami in this affluent and scenic sanctuary nestled between the urban sprawls of Los Angeles and San Diego.15
If only we had instead swapped out a Bannon-Navarro income tax on the uber-wealthy for the SALT gambit to get us to the required revenue stream necessary to pass the tax bill, we would have been living high on the political hog—and maybe even held on to a House of Representatives.
It’s the House, Stupid, Not the Senate!
Now, I would be remiss here in not pointing out one other big bad decision within the West Wing that would help grease the skids for the Democrats to seize control of the House in 2018. The feckless fools responsible for this particular fiasco would go by the names of Bill Stepien and Johnny DeStefano.
Bill Stepien had come to the White House from Governor Chris Christie’s House of Corruption Horrors, yet somehow, by the grace of either God or the Devil, Stepien had avoided a jail cell for his alleged role in Chris Christie’s infamous Bridgegate scandal.16
Johnny DeStefano was—and remains—a quintessential Deep Swamp RINO political operative right out of the John Boehner School of Glad-Handing—Johnny jumpstarted his career with Boehner. At the White House, Johnny’s best qualities included his height, winning smile, and wavy hair. After that, he was a pure zero. If you don’t believe me, all you need know is that after he departed the West Wing, John Boy cashed in as a lowly lobbyist for a low-life e-cigarette company.
At any rate, in 2018, Bill Stepien was working at the White House in the Office of Political Affairs while DeStefano was in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs. It would be their bright idea to focus primarily on Senate, rather than House, races as a way of economizing President Trump’s travel time and campaign costs.
By focusing on Senate races, these geniuses would be able to send the Boss on Air Force One to as many states as possible, but as a trade-off, the Boss wouldn’t be able to take the time to actually visit many of the key congressional districts that were at risk.
This was because many of the key congressional districts up for grabs did not have an airport that was long enough for Air Force One to land and therefore close enough for the Boss to take a simple limo ride in the Beast directly to the event. Instead, the Boss would have to deplane from Air Force One at a more distant airport and then travel on a fleet of Nighthawk Helicopters to some landing zone nearby the event—often a high school parking lot or football field. From there, the Boss could motor in quickly to the event in the Beast.
By the way, “the Beast” is the nickname for POTUS’s heavily armor-plated limousine. It comes with a refrigerator full of the president’s own blood type, is sealed for any bioweapons or chemical weapons attack, and tips the scales at an astonishing 10 tons.17 That’s about five times heavier than the average pickup truck.18
Sadly, although I did get to ride the Marine One helicopter several times, a trip in the Beast remains on my bucket list.
The more pertinent punchline here, however, is that adding the Nighthawks to the journey substantially increased not just the travel time but also the cost of campaigning. And Stepien and DeStefano along with Kushner simply didn’t want to bear that freight.
It was an incredibly stupid “penny-wise, pound-foolish” strategy to focus on Senate races rather than the House of Representatives in this manner. It was stupid because, all things being equal, a president like Trump—arguably the greatest presidential campaigner of all time—would much rather have control of the House of Representatives than the Senate leading into a presidential reelection campaign.
The reason, as I have alluded to, is that members of the House tend to behave like feral cats when it comes to abusing their investigatory powers, and of course the Boss had all manner of investigatory targets on his back. These ranged from possible impeachment proceedings and guilt by association with the Russia Hoax to alleged shady real estate dealings and the release of his tax returns.
Sure enough, once Nancy Pelosi and henchmen like Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler got control of the House, they would quickly weaponize the House’s investigatory powers in a way designed to inflict maximum political damage on the Boss every hour of every day leading up to November 3, 2020. As Yahoo would note:
President Trump has had a rough go of it since the midterms in November…. [T]he elections on November 6th handed Democrats control of the House of Representatives. In addition to being able to thwart Republican legislative efforts, House Democrats will now helm several congressional committees that have the power to investigate—and, if necessary, subpoena—the Trump administration…. [N]ow that Democrats are in charge, the White House should be prepared to field a flood of inquiries into how it’s chosen to run the country since Trump took office.19
Truth be told here, this was not just a Stepien-DeStefano screw up. It was also a Mitch McConnell screw job.
As Senate Majority Leader, McConnell quietly lobbied the White House to focus on the Senate, constantly raising the specter of not being able to fill seats on the Supreme Court if we lost the Senate. And he would play both Bill Stepien and Johnny DeStefano like fiddling fools to achieve his goal.
Truth be told here once again: Mitch McConnell absolutely hated the Trump trade and border security agendas, and on behalf of his corporate donor base, McConnell did everything possible during our four years to block any progress on moving these agendas—and thereby preserve Corporate America’s access to the sweatshops of Latin America and Asia.
And now hear this: Even as Mitch was doing everything he could to smooth the way for appointing conservative judges, he would drag his heels on all of the Trump political appointees we needed to get confirmed by the Senate so that they could begin serving the president and his agenda.
Yes, I hated Mitch McConnell from the moment I was onto his game; and that was just days after I arrived in Washington watching him work—and work against us. Unfortunately, it would take four more years before the Boss would finally go off on McConnell.
Better late than never, I guess, but Mitch sure did a lot of damage to the Trump administration for a guy who was supposed be playing on our team, not the least of which was to help us lose the House. For once the House of Representatives fell to the Pelosites, the stage was set for what would be not one but two supremely politically corrosive impeachments of the president.
For added measure, we would indeed have to endure a wide array of other politically motivated House investigations into everything from the Russia Hoax to alleged malfeasance and mismanagement by the White House during the pandemic—with me caught in the middle of that last cluster puck.
***
These were all self-inflicted wounds directly traceable back to Bad Personnel in the White House who never should have been there to begin with. And if there ever were a canary in that particular coal mine gasping for a breath of fresh MAGA air, it was me as I entered the White House on Inauguration Day.
At least I had one small piece of good news come my way on my purple haze of a hazing day at the White House. Priebus and Walsh gave me as a consolation prize a blue, rather than a green, badge. With that blue badge, I could at least walk without the humiliation of an escort from the EEOB into the West Wing.