A White House Confederacy of Media Dunces
If you aren’t on TV, you can’t be in this administration.
—President Donald John Trump, Oval Office, June 22nd, 2020
[Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows gets slaughtered on CNN by Jake Tapper. Marc Short and four other members of Vice Presidents Pence’s staff get COVID. This couldn’t happen at a worse time as it emphasizes the coronavirus theme and how we have mishandled it even as it threatens to take Pence off the campaign trail…. Only [National Security Advisor Robert] O’Brien on Face the Nation has a good [outing]…. No money [left] for get out the vote. No money for advertising. No money for lawyers to contest what is likely to be a contested election.
—Navarro Journal Entry, October 24, 2020
To dominate the daily news cycle, any presidential administration has at its disposal at least four distinct pools of talent.
•First and foremost, there is the White House press secretary;
•Second in importance and potential impact is the White House chief of staff;
•Within the perimeter of the White House, there should also be key senior officials ready, willing, and able to serve as TV surrogates; and
•Fourth, there should likewise be a very deep bench of media-hardened and well-seasoned cabinet secretaries.
Unfortunately, in the Trump White House, we would not hit cleanly on even one of these four cylinders.
A Parade of Mediocre Press Secretaries
Like an orchestra conductor, the White House press secretary should lead on a daily basis a beautiful symphony of pro-administration talking points designed to define, shape, and ultimately dominate the daily news cycle. To pull off such a feat, however, any press secretary must possess a keen intellect, be a quick study, have the ability to equally quickly throw counter punches, and do all of this in a witty and urbane fashion.
Press secretaries who fit this description historically include the truly debonair Pierre Salinger for John F. Kennedy; the wise-as-an owl Bill Moyers for Lyndon Johnson; the straight- and plain-speaking James Brady for Ronald Reagan; the Aaron Sorkin-inspiration Dee Dee Myers and Q-factor-off-the-charts George Stephanopoulos for Bill Clinton; and the elegant street fighter Dana Perino and erudite streetfighter Ari Fleischer for George W. Bush.
Compare any one of these historical figures with Trump’s Sean Spicer, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephanie Grisham, and Kayleigh McEnany, and none ever completely measured up.
Spicer was a hot head on a cool medium with all the pugnaciousness of his Boss and none of the Trump charm.
Spicey literally blew it on day one of the administration with his hyperbolic over-estimate of the Trump Inauguration Day crowd. Melissa McCarthy would stick both a fork and a knife into Spicey the minute she played Sean androgynously on Saturday Night Live.
Spicer would last just 211 days—a New York minute by press secretary standards.
By sharp contrast, Sarah Sanders, the second Trump press secretary, would endure for almost two years. Ironically, Sanders had virtually no ability to counterpunch when Never-Trump media emissaries like CNN’s Jim Acosta and Kaitlan Collins or ABC’s Jonathan Karl would throw repeated leftist hooks at her glass jaw. I say “ironically” because Sanders worked for the greatest counterpuncher in presidential history in Donald Trump.
Trump’s third White House press secretary, Stephanie Grisham, would go down in history as the only press secretary to never hold a regular White House news briefing—this over the course of her nine months in office. “You can’t win the news cycle if you won’t play,” might be the definitive gambler’s slogan here for Grisham. But nobody—including the Boss—ever wanted to gamble on putting Stephanie on the podium.
As for the Trump White House cleanup hitter, Kayleigh McEnany, she never had the gravitas to make any of her talking points stick—and talking points was all she really had when she went to the podium. So when Kayleigh got hit with a tough question, she was often like a deer in the headlights.
Let me drill down just a minute on that gravitas problem: You take a Bill Moyers or Ari Fleischer or Dana Perino, and they clearly had both the intellect and training to understand the nuances of the policies they might be sent out to the podium to defend. Absent those qualities, any press secretary is going to get eaten alive.
A Motley Crue of Chiefs
As a second pool of talent to draw from in the daily battle to dominate the news cycle, the White House also has at its disposal its chief of staff. Chiefs who have excelled in this dimension include Lyndon Baines Johnson’s Kenneth O’Donnell, Jimmy Carter’s Hamilton Jordan, Ronald Reagan’s Fabulous Baker Boys—James and Howard—Leon Panetta for Bill Clinton, and Rahm Emanuel for Barack Obama.
Once again, if we compare any one of these historical figures to the four Trump chiefs of staff, we again come up wanting. As we discussed earlier in this book, the first chief Reince Priebus was just the wrong, small, and inexperienced man for a very big job.
As for Chief #2, John Kelly, from a media perspective, this was like recruiting a trucker to drive a Formula One car. Or maybe like using a chainsaw for open heart surgery.
With his thick Boston accent, a smile always missing in action, and “I don’t suffer fools from the media gladly” tattoos stuck on both his forehead and sleeves, Kelly was brutally and simply incapable of messaging anything to the press.
Fortunately, Kelly didn’t try to “meet the press” very often, but during the 519 days that Kelly served as chief of staff—I painfully counted every one of them—we sure could have used somebody in that office to help us dominate the daily news cycle.
That somebody certainly was not Mick Mulvaney—Trump’s third chief of staff. Or should I say “acting” chief of staff.
That “acting” part of his title was a little dig that the Boss liked to stick into Mick so he never got comfortable in the job. The more Mick begged, the more permanent his “acting chief” status would become.
From a media messaging perspective, the problem with Mulvaney was that God blessed this smug Mick with an overabundance of both arrogance and hubris. It would be these character traits—as they say, “a man’s character determines his fate”—that would lead to one of the worst press conferences ever held by a chief of staff.
On October 17, 2019, Mulvaney would shoot both himself in the foot and POTUS in the chest with fateful remarks that instantly gave new life to an impeachment that the Boss was desperately trying to avoid. Wrote one newspaper:
The hastily announced White House news conference was supposed to be a full-throated defense of President Trump’s controversial decision to host next year’s Group of Seven summit at his private golf club in Florida. By the time it was over, acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney had made much more explosive news—adding to Trump’s impeachment troubles and calling into question his ability to lead the White House staff in a time of crisis…. And Mulvaney’s situation was made worse, some Republicans said, by his decision to attempt to retract his remarks hours later in a bellicose written statement blaming the media reporting his remarks.
Yikes. That single press conference was the beginning of the end for Mulvaney even as it underscored yet again the inability of the White House to dominate the news cycle.
I would like to tell you that, at least with Mark Meadows, the “fourth time was a charm.” However, Meadows himself would earn the dubious distinction of being ranked as the “worst chief of staff in history” by the reigning scholar on the subject, Chris Whipple.27
To this I will again say my three favorite words I learned from the Washington Swamp: “I don’t disagree.” Although it’s probably more of a dead heat between Meadows, Mulvaney, and Kelly.
Note to Reince: I think you would have turned out to be the best of the bunch if the Boss had only given you a bit more time to prove yourself.
As still a third pool of talent a White House communications team can draw upon in its efforts to dominate the daily news cycle, there will always be a large stable of senior advisors within the West Wing.
Given that the post of senior advisor to an American president represents the pinnacle of achievement, it is most often the case that a president will be surrounded by tough, smart, and typically media-savvy individuals for whom walking out to Pebble Beach for a media interview is certainly not their first rodeo.
By the way, “Pebble Beach” is the nickname of the set of media tents lined up along the Northwest wall of the White House between the White House itself and the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. For me, Pebble Beach was love at first sight because for years back in California I had had to schlep miles upon miles to satellite studios when I started doing regular TV hits on CNBC and Fox Business and occasionally CNN.
At the White House, the ability to simply cross the street from my office and step into a tent with beautiful lighting and crisp sound to do my TV hits was a pure delight. It was a pure delight, except, of course, in the dead of winter when it was 20 degrees or when the lawnmowers were going full bore on a 100-degree July day.
At any rate, particularly during the worst days of the pandemic, there were few senior advisors capable of walking out to Pebble Beach and doing anything but sticking their feet—yes both feet—into their mouths.
While Senior Counselor Kellyanne Conway would have been a very useful asset, she resigned for family reasons just a few days before Labor Day. That was an unexpected and harsh blow to the Trump reelection effort as Labor Day marks the traditional kickoff of the home stretch for any presidential race and having Kellyanne suddenly out of the picture was a real setback.
By the way, Kellyanne was one of my favorites at the White House. She called me the “unbroken thread” for the fact that I was one of only three senior White House officials who managed to survive all the way from the campaign to the end of the administration. When her thread was unexpectedly broken, it was indeed a loss.
As for the one senior White House official who likely could have made the most difference in the media, at least on the trade issue, there was the Greta Garbo of the West Wing—United States Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer. The few times Bob was on TV—including big shows like Face the Nation—he knocked it out of the park.
On TV, Lighthizer never flapped. He always had a very calm demeanor, he was in absolute command of the facts, and whenever challenged, Bob would quickly put any anchor or reporter in their place and do so with either grace or like a cat gently playing with a mouse.
His impressive media skill set notwithstanding, Bob Lighthizer absolutely refused to go on television, particularly during those last months before Election Day when we needed him most. Bob just would not do it. No way. No how. Not good. Shame on Bob.
In sharp contrast, the one guy who was always willing to go on TV and who actually was very good—National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien—was one of the few assets we had. I liken Robert to the political equivalent of Jimmy Stewart for our times.
With an impish charm, a head of full and wavy hair to die for, and a surfs-up, California optimism, Robert could pivot and spin his way out of any trap that might be set for him even as he advanced our message of the day. The problem, however, was that Robert’s domain was limited primarily to national security when what we really needed to be campaigning on—and dominating the news cycle about—was the economy and trade issues. So as good as Robert was, his contributions would be limited down the home stretch.
Cabinet of Clowns Redux
As a final pool of talent to draw upon in the unending quest of any White House to dominate the daily news cycle, there should be a very deep bench of seasoned, media-savvy masters of their cabinet universes. As with the post of senior advisor to the president of the United States, a cabinet secretary position likewise represents the pinnacle of achievement.
Given that fact, you should normally expect a murderer’s row of highly polished media killers in the cabinet secretary pool. Regrettably, this was just not so in Trump Land.
Ever the media hound, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin got the most airtime. It was never a good thing.
On TV, Mnuchin spoke like a robot, often with an uncomfortable nervous tic around the corners of his mouth. To most viewers, he was just an uncomfortable cross between cringeworthy and a Wall Street hack with yawning lack of credibility. Here, both Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow had great difficulty connecting whenever they went beyond the friendly globalist confines of the Fox and CNBC business networks.
In the heat of the pandemic, there was also the always punctilious Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar. A former Big Pharma top executive, Azar had a nasty habit of distancing himself from the Boss at the first hint of trouble. So, on net, Azar usually did far more media harm to the Boss than good—even as he would burnish his own credentials.
Of course, we had the very same distancing and “diss the Boss” problem with other high-ranking officials across the healthcare bureaucracies. FDA Commissioner Steve Hahn, Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield, and National Institutes of Health head Francis Collins would each throw POTUS under the bus even faster than Azar—as would other key officials like the insufferably pompous Brett Giroir and of course, the king of stepping on White House messaging, Saint Fauci.
The short and long of all of this is that mediocrity reigned across the four main talent pools any White House Communications Team usually draws upon to perform the most important task in its job description: dominate the daily news cycle in strong support of the president.
Because of this endemic mediocrity, it was far more often the case that the Never-Trump media would do the dominating and thereby successfully drive down President Donald Trump’s favorability and job approval ratings.
This strategic failure was all so unnecessary—as was so much of what went on in the Trump White House that would drag the Boss down.