A “Where’s My Peter” Battle Cry and Oval Office Resurrection
Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.
—Coach Eric Taylor, Friday Night Lights
I’ve seen you guys can shoot but there’s more to the game than shooting. There’s fundamentals and defense.
—Coach Norman Dale, Hoosiers
Observe calmly; secure our position…hide our capacities and bide our time;…and never claim leadership.
—Deng Xiaoping, The 24-Character Strategy
On day five of the Trump administration, I woke up to the reality that I was a beaten man. I had no rank of assistant to the president and therefore no walk-in privileges to see the Boss. Katie Walsh had literally physically barred me from senior staff meetings. I had no office, and I was down to only one staff member while my primary antagonist Gary Cohn had over forty troops to pummel, pound, and outflank me.
In addition, my opportunity to run a beautiful table of MAGA executive orders and presidential memoranda had slipped through my fingers even as my knuckles had been repeatedly mashed and process smashed by the likes of Reince Priebus, Rob Porter, and White House Legal Counsel Don McGahn.
This was as big a beat down as one could possibly imagine, and at least at that moment in time, the well-worn cliché about “if you don’t know who the mark is in the poker game, you are probably the mark” seemed to fit me like a glove.
Or I was at least a marked man because Cohn, along with his new best buddy Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, would spend idle time trying to either get me fired or get me moved over to the Department of Commerce to work for my old “good buddy” Wilbur Ross who already was beginning to stick stilettos in my back.
About that “good buddy” thing, I might remind you here that Wilbur and I had worked beautifully together and as equals on the campaign trail. Our report on how President Trump would spur economic growth after eight years of Obama-Biden stagnation had been a tour de force and media home run, and our op-ed articles had integrated our skill sets beautifully.
On that note, Wilbur, the finance guy and consummate accountant’s pencil pusher, would grind out all manner of numbers for whatever problem we were writing about, He’d do it all with a stubby pencil on the back of a proverbial envelope. I would then take Wilbur’s scribblings, press them through the mill of my economics training, and then turn Wilbur’s drier than dust discourse into something at least a little more prosaic. It was all good between us—at least until the day after the election when Wilbur went full DC Swamp native on me.
My canary-in-the-coal-mine signal that all might not be well in Wilbur World was when the newly minted secretary of commerce refused to say anything particularly nice about me to a Bloomberg reporter who was doing a “trade warrior” profile on me. The Bloomberg reporter himself described Ross’s comments as “restrained” and pointedly noted in the profile how Ross had “added a sentence about the administration’s intention to fix bad trade deals that made no mention of Navarro.”23
It became abundantly clear to me the day I read that profile that Brother Wilbur had indeed gone full DC Swamp on me, and he was no longer content to share a limelight that we had shared quite cordially during the campaign. Going forward, he was going to be the trade guy, and it wasn’t just me who was in the way. It was also the guy who was actually supposed to do that job, United States Trade Representative Bob Lighthizer.
I vividly remember attending a dinner with Bob along with Gary Cohn over at Wilbur’s mansion in the posh Massachusetts Heights section of Washington, DC. In typical Wilbur fashion, he had paid cash for the mansion a mere days after the election outcome and dispatched his sweet wife Hilary down to decorate said new digs in the style to which both had become accustomed.
Yes, Hilary was indeed a sweet person, and she had done me a few nice favors during my time in New York on the campaign. And that was all the more reason why it bugged me when Wilbur mistreated her.
In fact, when I was with the two of them, I sometimes felt like I was in Saudi Arabia. This is because Hilary would always walk a few steps behind Wilbur rather than by his side—no burka yes, but head held down.
The only thing that bugged me more was how Wilbur treated his maids and hired help. I should have known when I first saw such barking abuse at his New York apartment that all might not end well—and I will be candid with you here. One BIG reason why I steadfastly refused to go over to the Department of Commerce to serve Wilbur was because of what I had observed.
At any rate, on that winter’s night nightmare in Wilbur’s new digs, as a new set of servants scurried back and forth from the kitchen to lavish us with haute cuisine, Gary Cohn, Bob Lighthizer, and I sat with Wilbur at the dinner table, and each of us was quickly astonished by the lecture that Wilbur began to give us about how he was going to commandeer trade policy.
In this particular delusion of grandeur, I was going to be Wilbur’s little bitch, Bob Lighthizer was going to be Wilbur’s big bitch, and presumably, Gary Cohn was going to stay out of Wilbur’s way. That night was the only night that Gary Cohn and I would ever share any common cause as we kept glancing over at each other with a bemusement in our eyes as steam began to pour out of Bob Lighthizer’s ears. Yes, Bob was hotter than a junk bond during the housing bubble.
Of Hives and Green Bananas
Lest I digress, this day five in the Trump administration had me as low as I ever get. Day five was also the day I started to get hives, and this stress-related ailment would stay with me for the better part of a year.
Towards the end of the administration, I read with interest that George Stephanopoulos had been afflicted with the same problem when he served in the Clinton White House. Unlike me, however, George probably never had to worry about his job security.
True this: from the day I walked into the White House on January 20, 2017, to the day I left, I always thought each new day would be my last day. Particularly in those early months, while Wilbur Ross and Jared Kushner and Steve Mnuchin were all buying mansions and Gary Cohn was settling into a luxury suite at the Ritz-Carlton and snoring in silk sheets, I was like a modern day Claude Pepper, daring neither to buy green bananas or sign anything that looked like even a month-to-month lease on an apartment.
At such points in my life, I have learned that you must never let the weight of the world crush you. Instead, you must say screw it and fight back. And you fight back by trying to beat whoever is beating you up at their own game.
It is not for nothing that Friday Night Lights is my favorite TV series. By day five, I did indeed have clear eyes, I would find that full heart because I owed it both to the Boss and this country, and I damn well would and could not lose.
It is not for nothing that Hoosiers is also my favorite movie. Sure, even by day one, I could shoot off executive orders like three-pointers from Steph Curry. But with the likes of Priebus and Porter and Cohn and Mnuchin and Ross as my adversaries, I had to learn a lot more about the fundamentals of how the White House and this new curveball otherwise known as the staff secretary process worked, and I sure as hell needed to build up a much better set of defenses.
So that’s what I decided to do. By mastering the ways of the White House and the staff secretary process—and by hiding my capabilities and biding my time as Deng Xiaoping did indeed once advise—I would be ready if and when the Boss ever called me.
True this too: over the course of my four years in the White House, I would shepherd more presidential actions through the staff secretary process than any other single senior White House staff member, and do so by a large margin. That winning streak would begin on March 27 and day sixty-six of the administration when I would hear for the very first time a battle cry from the Oval Office that would, like a modern-day Lazarus, raise me from the dead.
Whenever I softly say that battle cry to myself, it still puts a grin on my face, warms my heart, and lifts my spirits; That POTUS battle cry was: “Where’s my Peter?”
Gary Cohn Mano a Mano
On that March 27 day, I was at my stand-up desk working up an idea to help resurrect what had already become my beloved but flagging Philadelphia shipyard when Madeleine Westerhout, the Boss’s executive assistant, called me from her perch in the Outer Oval and asked me to come over immediately to see the president. The funny thing about getting the call was that I was in gym shorts, socks, and a T-shirt—not exactly West Wing attire, particularly with a boss who is always meticulously dressed.
I was in this locker room attire because I had jogged into work and had as yet not changed into my suit, and that was basically my routine. Jog or ride my bike into work and change in my office where I kept all three suits that I owned in a small wardrobe armoire I had commandeered from a store room in the basement of the EEOB.
This was not exactly the best day to be caught half naked because it added five minutes to the journey over to the West Wing. But all’s well that ends well, and this meeting would end even better than it began.
Despite the fact that almost every single person in the Oval that day except the president had had a boot to my neck for the better part of two months—Steve Mnuchin, Gary Cohn, Reince Priebus, Wilbur Ross, Don McGahn, and Jared Kushner—I walked into that Oval like I owned the damn place. I do not remember exactly what I said to President Trump, but it went something along the lines of, “Well, are we ready now to actually get some stuff done on trade?”
Within nanoseconds, Gary Cohn and I began going at it like Ali and Frazier in the “Thrilla in Manila.” How about I let the Financial Times provide you first with a sanitized version of the confrontation as it was leaked to the press:
A civil war has broken out within the White House over trade, leading to what one official called “a fiery meeting” in the Oval Office pitting economic nationalists close to Donald Trump against pro-trade moderates from Wall Street. According to more than half a dozen people inside the White House or dealing with it, the bitter fight has set a hardline group including senior adviser Steve Bannon and Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro against a faction led by Gary Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs executive who leads Mr. Trump’s National Economic Council. At the centre of the debate is Mr. Navarro, a firebrand economist who has angered Berlin and other European allies by accusing Germany of exploiting a “grossly undervalued” euro and calling for bilateral discussions with Angela Merkel’s government over ways to reduce the US trade deficit with Europe’s most powerful economy. The officials and people dealing with the White House said Mr. Navarro appeared to be losing influence in recent weeks. But during the recent Oval Office fight, Mr. Trump appeared to side with the economic nationalists, one official said. The battle over trade is emblematic of a broader fight on economic policy within the Trump administration.24
Not surprisingly, the staid FT left out all the good and funny parts. To wit: every time Gary Cohn tried to pull his usual globalist gibberish crap, I quickly corrected him on his flawed economic analysis. After just a few minutes of this Harvard-style skewering, the former Goldman Sachs Kingpin, who was not exactly used to being challenged in this manner, lost his cool.
Now, the thing you have to know about Gary Cohn is that when he was at Goldman Sachs his most disgusting modus operandi when he wanted to intimidate subordinates was to get up close and personal into their space and lift his leg up onto their desks. In this case, Cohn did not dare get into my personal space. But what tone-deaf Gary did do—and I still cannot believe he was dumb enough to do this—was put his leg up on one of the couches in the Oval Office as he tried to harangue me. Of course, POTUS—along with everyone else in the room—was aghast. And that was not even the best part.
The best part was when the leader of the free world tried to interrupt Cohn to disagree with him, Gary dismissed him with a wave of his hand, and, spittle flying, Cohn continued his harangue.
I knew right then—and I was right—that that day would be the high water mark of Gary Cohn’s reign in the West Wing, and it would be all downhill from there.
It was at this point in the confrontation that I noticed Brother Bannon leaning slyly against one of the back walls. As usual, he looked uncomfortable in his suit and shorn locks—Steve was born to form governments, not run them. But on this day, he did have a twinkle in his eye as he watched me go head to head with Cohn, and there was no way I was going to lose that debate that day because I not only had economics on my side. I had the Boss.
Yes, as the Financial Times noted: “Mr. Trump appeared to side with the economic nationalists.”25
At any rate, with both Gary Cohn’s guts and brains now on the floor—truly, a self-inflicted wound—I assured POTUS that I was indeed locked and loaded with close to a dozen executive orders that had been held up since day one of his administration.
“So how about we get moving, Boss?” said I. And his reply was the first time I would hear POTUS say that signature phrase of his: “Let’s go!”
And go we did, with pedal to the metal for what would be one of my most beautiful thirty days in the Trump White House. During that time, I would finally get steel and aluminum tariffs rolling on what would be an albeit long and winding road to implementation.
POTUS would also sign actions on both reducing the trade deficit and eliminating unfair trade practices around the world. He would provide for the significantly enhanced collection and enforcement of antidumping and countervailing duties from trade cheats and sign what would be the first of my many drafted orders to strengthen and expand Buy American and Hire American provisions in government procurement.
The Boss would even put his John Hancock on the order formally establishing my Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy—regrettably, a pale shadow of what should have been my National Trade Council.26
And throughout this beautiful month, there was no way on God’s good earth that either Reince Priebus or Rob Porter—much less Gary Cohn—was going to get in the way after that showdown throwdown in the Oval Office. In fact, on the way out of the Oval in the wake of that confrontation, Reince had been positively gushing. All he could say was “Navarro! Navarro!”
A Priebus Deathbed Populist Conversion
By this point, less than seventy days into the administration, Reince had realized that he was as much a marked man as I was. Cohn was openly lobbying for his job, Chris Liddell was quietly lobbying for it, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were taking turns simply doing it. Beyond desperate, Reince Priebus was looking for allies like a drowning man prays for a lifeguard.
You may be surprised here to learn that Reince would find those allies in both Steve Bannon and myself. Reince’s epiphany was this: The only way he was going to stay in the Trump White House was by moving forward the Trump trade agenda and thereby pleasing the president. And the only two people in the White House likely to help him to do that were me and Steve.
Regrettably—and it was regrettable because of what I am about to tell you—Reince came to that realization far too late to save his sad, sorry ass. Still, over the course of the next several months, as Reince helped both me and Steve move action and action through the staff secretary pipeline, we would devise what we would dub (in one of my more vanilla marketing moments) our “Trade Agenda Timeline.”
This master strategy laid out a six-month plan beginning on August 1 to effectively run the trade policy table. We would begin renegotiating NAFTA on August 16 and Hillary’s toxic South Korea deal on August 22. On September 1, POTUS would then direct the United States trade representative to start the ball rolling on possible tariffs on automobile imports.
Much to my own great delight, the day after Labor Day we would impose the by-now-long-overdue tariffs on steel imports and be poised by November 1 to impose a similar tariff on aluminum imports.
It was all good, and it was all so good that I had produced one of my oversized and colorful poster board charts to illustrate and memorialize this “Trade Agenda Timeline.” This kind of chart had become a signature analytical tool of my office after I had, several months earlier, quite accidentally stumbled across the White House print shop in the basement of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building while scrounging around for some furniture for my office.
That printshop could pop out these charts in record time, particularly if I told the always friendly operators I needed the chart for a POTUS meet. Since that time, I rarely had appeared at a briefing without one or more of these colorful charts, which got me the nickname of “poster boy” around the West Wing—and it was never said with affection.
At any rate, Reince loved my chart and agreed to get us in to see the Boss and get his blessing for our sustained trade policy blitzkrieg. As I left Reince that day, he even asked me to autograph the chart for him, which I thought was pretty funny given our earlier sordid history.
What was not funny at all was that Reince would be fired a few days later, Bannon would be exiled shortly thereafter to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on his way out the White House door, and our great Trade Agenda Timeline, which in one fell swoop, may well have done everything we needed to win the 2020 election, would be put into the deepest of freezes.
Never Claim Leadership
Truth be told, I had had a premonition that my future ally and brother-in-arms Steve Bannon would not stay the White House course when I saw him in an absolutely gorgeous photo in the Washington Post coming off the stage at the annual CPAC event arm in arm with none other than Reince.27
CPAC—the Conservative Political Action Conference—was, at least at that time, the undisputed leader of the PACs in conservative politics, and Reince and Steve just looked too damn good and powerful in the photo.
I am sure that when the Boss saw that photo in celebration of Reince and Steve as White House kingpins he was not pleased. Note: One of the reasons why I lasted five long years at the side of the president is that I always followed Deng Xiaoping’s dictum: “Never claim leadership.”
The Trump-Bannon split would be a breakup for the ages—although, as I will relate later on in this book, this Simon and Garfunkel of politics almost got back together in 2020.
Kelly Comes, Trump’s Trade Agenda Goes
The loss of Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon in the summer of 2017 would be devastating both for me personally and for the Trump trade agenda. This is because the man who would replace Priebus, US Marine Corps Four Star General John Francis Kelly, would be even more ill-equipped for the Chief’s job than Priebus.
As to why Kelly was so opposed to the Trump trade agenda from the git-go, it boiled down to three things: Kelly had nary a clue about economics, he knew less about politics, and he had no idea about how to manage either the time or space of Donald Trump.
Because Kelly had no training in economics, he easily fell prey to the facile globalism of virtually everyone in the West Wing—including Cohn, McMaster, Kushner, Porter, and Mnuchin. In that scenario, I immediately became the odd man out—and once again I had a big target placed on my back by a chief of staff.
Because Kelly had no training in politics, he failed to understand the importance of trade policy in holding the high political ground of Blue Wall manufacturing states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan that Trump had won the election with in 2016.
Because Kelly did not know how to “let Trump be Trump”—as the great Corey Lewandowski once advised—there was no way in Hades that John Boy was going to let me or anyone else with deviant trade policy thoughts anywhere near the Oval Office.
To say that I would be in for a very rough time with the coming of John Kelly would be one of the great understatements of this book. Kelly tried to fire me so many times that I lost track.
What I do remember indelibly is sitting with General Kelly at my right shoulder on December 2, 2018 at the end of a long table in Buenos Aires, Argentina. We were there with President Trump who sat at the center of the table flanked on either side by the rest of his trade team.
Of course, sitting across from us on the other side of the table were our counterparts from the Chinese Communist trade side, with the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping at center stage right across from the president.
Before the meeting began, a by-then broken and broken down Kelly, no doubt aware of his soon-to-be exit, apologized for treating me so poorly. In doing so, he further acknowledged that he had failed to see what George Bush might have called the real evildoers in the West Wing—both Gary Cohn and Jared Kushner in particular came from his muted lips.
I thought at the time that while Kelly had done a very bad job, he was at his core a very good man who had simply borne too much stress in his life—right to the breaking point. A son lost in war. Too many wars lost. And now Kelly was, as he once confessed in a jarring manner in a senior staff meeting, “in a very dark place.”
At the time, I really had nothing to say. I just gently put my hand on his forearm, looked him in the eyes briefly, and then turned my own eyes back to the Chinese Communists as the meeting began. Kelly would be fired six days later.