Trump Administration: Dysfunction, Chaos & Reality
John Kelly Quickly Moves to Impose
Military Discipline on White House
GLENN THRUSH, MICHAEL D. SHEAR and EILEEN SULLIVAN, The
New York Times Online Edition, August 3, 2017.
WASHINGTON — In his six months as Homeland Security secretary, John F.
Kelly often described the White House as one of the most dysfunctional
organizations he had ever seen, complained to colleagues and allies about its
meddling, incompetence and recklessness, and was once so angry he briefly
considered quitting.
Now as President Trump’s chief of staff, he is doing something about it — with a
suddenness and force that have upended the West Wing.
Mr. Kelly cuts off rambling advisers midsentence. He listens in on conversations
between cabinet secretaries and the president. He has booted lingering staff
members out of high-level meetings, and ordered the doors of the Oval Office
closed to discourage strays. He fired Anthony Scaramucci, the bombastic New
Yorker who was briefly the communications director, and has demanded that
even Mr. Trump’s family, including his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law,
Jared Kushner, check with him if they want face time with the president.
On Wednesday, his third day on the job, he delivered a message about respecting
chains of command, backing the decision of Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national
security adviser, to dismiss Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a Kushner ally and staff member
on the National Security Council. It was a move Mr. Kushner and Stephen K.
Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, had long opposed, according to two
administration officials.
Whether Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine general, will succeed in imposing military
discipline on the faction-ridden White House remains in doubt; Mr. Trump has
never been known to follow anybody’s direction, in Trump Tower or the White
House. But Mr. Trump has never encountered anyone quite like Mr. Kelly, a
combat veteran whose forceful management style and volatile temper are a match
for the president’s.
“He’d basically look at me and say, ‘I think that proposal is four-letter-word
nuts,’” said Leon E. Panetta, who as defense secretary made Mr. Kelly his chief
military aide. “John is the kind of guy who will look you in the eye and tell you
what the hell he is thinking. The real question is whether the president will give
him the authority he needs to do the job.”
People close to Mr. Kelly said he resisted weeks of entreaties by the president,
beginning in May, before finally agreeing to replace Reince Priebus out of a sense
of soldierly duty. That he understands the sobering realities of his new
deployment could be seen in his unsmiling mien while sitting next to Mr. Trump
for a photo opportunity this week.
Among Mr. Kelly’s immediate challenges: brokering peace between warring
factions in the West Wing; plugging leaks about internal activities; establishing a
disciplined policy-making process; and walling off the Russia investigations.
Mr. Kelly, 67, has told his new employees that he was hired to manage the staff,
not the president. He will not try to change Mr. Trump’s Twitter or TV-watching
habits. But he has also said he wants to closely monitor the information the
president consumes, quickly counter dubious news stories with verified facts, and
limit the posse of people urging Mr. Trump to tweet something they feel
passionately about.
He has privately acknowledged that he cannot control the president and that his
authority would be undermined if he tried and failed. Instead, he is intent on
cosseting Mr. Trump with bureaucratic competence and forcing staff members to
keep to their lanes, a challenge in an administration defined by tribal loyalties to
power players like Mr. Kushner and Mr. Bannon.
“Several times I’ve been on phone conversations with the president over the last
couple of days and General Kelly has been on those conversations as well,” Mick
Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters on
Thursday when asked if Mr. Kelly was making a mark.
The Trump White House is a judge-a-book-by-its-cover workplace, and staff
members have been struck by Mr. Kelly’s bearing: tall, stern and commanding a
respect Mr. Priebus never did. People close to Mr. Kelly said they expected him to
methodically assess his new staff before making more drastic changes — and he
has told people that he wants to improve morale before attacking the
organizational chart.
Mr. Kelly has not been shy about letting Mr. Trump’s staff members know when
they screwed up, ripping into West Wing aides during the chaos surrounding the
president’s original travel ban when he was at the Department of Homeland
Security. While he supported the broad policy goals, he was furious that he and
his sprawling agency’s staff were caught off guard by a directive that was
conceived and carried out by inexperienced aides in the White House, according
to several longtime Trump advisers.
People close to Mr. Kelly said he also bristled repeatedly at efforts by Mr. Bannon
and Stephen Miller, the president’s senior adviser, to install people they liked in
his department. Mr. Kelly eventually won pitched battles over who would become
director of Customs and Border Protection and head of the Secret Service,
officials said. But Mr. Bannon has had a longstanding alliance with Mr. Kelly,
supporting many of his other appointments.
In May, Mr. Kelly considered resigning after Mr. Trump’s firing of James B.
Comey, the F.B.I. director, telling Mr. Comey in a phone call that he was thinking
about doing so to protest the president’s actions, according to a former law
enforcement official familiar with the conversation.
A senior White House official briefed on the exchange by Mr. Kelly said he never
threatened to quit, but confirmed that he called Mr. Comey.
Days later, Mr. Kelly objected strenuously to the decision by Thomas P. Bossert,
Mr. Trump’s Homeland Security adviser in the White House, to take control of
the response to a global cyberattack — a role traditionally played by Mr. Kelly and
his department’s cybersecurity division.
On Capitol Hill, Mr. Kelly is viewed with a mix of admiration for his long military
service and disappointment that he has been too willing to embrace and defend
Mr. Trump’s more controversial policies, especially on illegal immigration.
In closed-door meetings with House members in March, Democrats questioned
Mr. Kelly about aggressive immigration sweeps at churches and hospitals. The
frustration grew as Mr. Kelly disputed that such sweeps were happening, even in
the face of enlarged photos showing a Homeland Security vehicle parked on the
grounds of Christ Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif.
“He’ll push back hard,” said Representative Lou Correa, Democrat of California,
who presented the photographic evidence to Mr. Kelly during the meeting.
The next month, Mr. Kelly offered a taste of his blunt approach, telling lawmakers
they could “shut up” if they did not like the laws his department was charged with
enforcing.
“He’s never come to Capitol Hill and blown smoke to senators and congressmen,”
said Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and former Army officer who
is close to Mr. Kelly.
Dealing with Mr. Trump’s family, especially Mr. Kushner, will not be so simple.
In an interview in May, Mr. Kelly came to the defense of the president’s son-inlaw,
who has an office in the West Wing as a White House adviser, against charges
that he had tried to set up an inappropriate communications channel with Russia.
He called Mr. Kushner “a great guy, a decent guy.”
In discussions with Mr. Trump about moving to the White House, Mr. Kelly also
insisted that Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump, who is also a White House adviser,
report to him. They both agreed, in part because they wanted to see Mr. Priebus
ejected as quickly as possible, and in part because they recognized Mr. Trump’s
presidency needed to be professionalized.
A lingering personnel question gave Mr. Kelly a chance to assert his position at the top
of the West Wing. Aides said the ouster of Mr. Cohen-Watnick was intended as a show
of confidence from Mr. Kelly to Mr. McMaster. Mr. Kushner did not object to the
decision, and had conceded that Mr. McMaster was going to fire his friend three weeks
ago, according to a person close to the Trump family.
Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary, who has known Mr. Kelly for two
decades, said the fact that the president agreed to have family members report to the
new chief of staff was “a really important first step.”
“The question is, does it last?” he added. “But it sends a powerful signal to the rest of the
people in the White House.”
Mr. Gates, who was also Mr. Kelly’s boss as defense secretary, recalled the times he sat
with Mr. Kelly at the Pentagon across a small conference table once used by Jefferson
Davis when he was secretary of war. Mr. Gates would tell Mr. Kelly what he was
planning to do and Mr. Kelly would say, “You could do it that way.”
What that really meant, Mr. Gates said, was “that’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard in
my entire life.” Mr. Kelly would then offer another — often better — option, Mr. Gates
said.
Mr. Panetta, who served as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff before he went to the
Pentagon, said he urged Mr. Kelly to buy a “big bottle of Scotch” when he agreed to take
the job.
A White House spokeswoman did not know if he had gotten around to buying one yet,
but said the new chief of staff preferred Irish whiskey.
Ron Nixon contributed reporting from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New
York.
A version of this article appears in print on August 4, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Former
General Taking Control At White House.
New White House Chief of Staff Has
an Enforcer
MAGGIE HABERMAN and GLENN THRUSH, The New York Times Online
Edition, September 9, 2017.
John F. Kelly, President Trump’s chief of staff, has been trying to impose order at the White House. Credit: Al Drago
for The New York Times
Lost in the scramble to cope with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, the response to North
Korea’s nuclear provocations and the shock at President Trump’s instant alliance with
Democrats was a little-noticed bureaucratic earthquake that shook the White House this
week.
At a staff meeting on Wednesday, Mr. Trump’s new chief of staff, John F. Kelly,
announced a number of seemingly quotidian internal moves, capped by the
appointment of Kirstjen Nielsen — his brusque, no-nonsense longtime aide — as an
assistant to the president and his principal deputy.
Few outside the White House marked the moment, but inside the building, this was a
big deal. Mr. Kelly had just handed day-to-day operations to a forceful, empowered aide
some of her new colleagues are already comparing to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the
feared Vatican enforcer who eventually became Pope Benedict XVI.
Perhaps the biggest problem Mr. Kelly, a retired Marine general, faces in taming his
meandering, leaky, infighting-plagued West Wing staff is getting them used to the idea
of functioning more or less the way previous White Houses have.
Call it the old normal.
Whether Mr. Kelly succeeds or fails will be a function of his tolerance for Mr. Trump’s
mercurial management style and Mr. Trump’s willingness to tolerate military discipline,
as well as Mr. Kelly’s skill in winnowing, wooing and harnessing his own staff. Ms.
Nielsen, as he made clear this week, will be a central part of his attempt to right the
president’s foundering administration.
In Mr. Trump’s White House, the old normal passes for a revolution, and Mr. Kelly’s
enemies are seething as well as plotting and griping to sympathetic members of the
news media. That is the picture described by eight current and former administration
officials who requested anonymity.
In contrast to previous White Houses, the first seven-plus months under Mr. Trump
have been something of a historical outlier — organized around an antiestablishment
president contemptuous of precedent and comfortable with spaghetti lines of authority
and the resulting chaos.
Photo
Kirstjen Nielsen, a longtime aide of Mr. Kelly’s, joined the White House as principal deputy and assistant to the
president. Credit: Andrew Harnik/Associated Press
And the first step in taming 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Mr. Kelly believes, is installing a
No. 2 who is willing to be hated.
It is Ms. Nielsen who sends out the emails announcing internal policy and planning
meetings that now contain a clipped addendum — “principals only” — with a stern
warning that any subordinates who wander in will be immediately ejected.
She is also responsible for keeping Mr. Kelly’s no-fly list of aides he deems to be unfit to
attend serious meetings, the most prominent of whom is Omarosa Manigault, the
former “Apprentice” star with an ill-defined job and a penchant for dropping into
meetings where she was not invited.
Throughout the White House, the circle of decision-making is shrinking, leaving staff
members accustomed to wandering in and out of meetings — and the Oval Office — in a
sour mood. And the feelings are not confined by the gates of the executive compound.
Outside Trump advisers, accustomed to getting their calls briskly returned, are
complaining that their phones have gone silent since Mr. Kelly took over six weeks ago.
The president’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, a former chairman of the Republican
National Committee, made only a cursory study of the structure and history of the West
Wing, much to the disgust of a half-dozen Obama administration officials who offered to
coach him but were, for the most part, politely rebuffed.
But perhaps his biggest problem was that he was a fund-raiser by trade and schmoozer
by temperament with very little knowledge, or interest, in policy and the inner workings
of government. Mechanics who never lift the hood tend to lose their jobs. Mr. Trump,
who attracts subordinates who flatter rather than challenge, also seemed to take special
delight in humiliating him, often ignoring his advice and referring to him by the
diminutive nickname “Reincey.”
Ms. Nielsen’s role is similar to the one that Katie Walsh, a longtime deputy, assumed for
Mr. Priebus when he first joined the White House — gatekeeper to the gatekeeper. And,
as has happened with Ms. Nielsen, some members of the White House have chafed at a
woman asserting power — and made her a target for the anger that they cannot express
at the chief of staff.
But there is a critical difference, people close to Mr. Kelly said. When Ms. Walsh came
under attack, Mr. Priebus did little to protect her, and she left after only a few months.
Mr. Kelly’s experience in the military, by contrast, has led him to the conclusion that it is
hard to survive a successful attack on a top subordinate without being weakened.
Still, people close to Ms. Nielsen, who was a homeland security official in George W.
Bush’s administration, have counseled her to lighten up and to pay more attention to the
perfunctory niceties of a not-so-nice job.
Slowly and methodically, Mr. Kelly is replacing the bomb-throwing reality-TV types Mr.
Trump feels most comfortable around with competent professionals capable of
stabilizing the West Wing. So far, it has been addition by subtraction.
In his first few days on the job, he approved the firing of two far-right National Security
Council staff members who were undermining Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national
security adviser, then targeted Sebastian Gorka, a blustery nationalist. But his main
objective from the start, people close to the situation said, was to force out Stephen K.
Bannon, the president’s chief strategist and internal provocateur.
At Wednesday’s staff meeting, Mr. Kelly also announced other significant moves, most
temporary:
A longtime House aide, Johnny DeStefano, will head the Office of Public Liaison while a
search is conducted for a permanent director.
Joseph Hagin, a deputy chief of staff with decades of White House experience, will
oversee the president’s schedule, a crucial role in any White House.
Rick Dearborn, a deputy chief of staff who worked for Attorney General Jeff Sessions
when he was a senator from Alabama, is not one of Mr. Kelly’s favorites, several officials
said, and is being shifted to a less high-profile role. Mr. Kelly is also reviewing the role of
Bill Stepien, the White House political director, who has done little to help Mr. Trump
improve his standing, in Mr. Kelly’s view.
Photo
Omarosa Manigault, a former “Apprentice” star, has an ill-defined West Wing job and a penchant for dropping into
all kinds of meetings uninvited. Credit: Richard Drew/Associated Press
Mr. Kelly has also greatly empowered Rob Porter, the White House Staff secretary — a
Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar — to rationalize the administration’s tangled
policy-making process.
During Mr. Trump’s transition, the two Trump associates most attentive to history and
structure were the two men most quickly shut out of administration jobs by rivals: Gov.
Chris Christie of New Jersey, who drew up a proposed West Wing organizational chart
— complete with potential hires — based on presidential history and his own experience
in Trenton. And Corey Lewandowski, Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, who
carefully studied the painstaking work of the White House historian Martha Joynt
Kumar, in part to help Mr. Trump figure out which positions were available to loyalists
who toiled on his campaign.
Mr. Kelly has not had the time to make that kind of study, though he was intuitively
attracted to the more controlled approach of his predecessor’s predecessor, Denis R.
McDonough, President Barack Obama’s last chief of staff, who modeled his chain of
command on that of the National Security Council.
But Mr. Kelly is not rebuilding the organization in a vacuum, and Mr. Trump’s mood
can have as much an effect as Mr. Kelly’s methodical approach.
The new chief of staff has tried to shield Gary D. Cohn, the chairman of the National
Economic Council, from Mr. Trump’s continuing wrath since the former Goldman Sachs
executive went public with his disgust at the president’s response to the deadly
violence last month in Charlottesville, Va.
Mr. Kelly made a point, one staff member said, of throwing his arm around Mr. Cohn in
solidarity, in full view of the news media, as they exited Marine One last week on the
South Lawn.
But he has not always been successful. Several aides said Mr. Trump is freezing out Mr.
Cohn by employing a familiar tactic: refusing to make eye contact with Mr. Cohn when
his adviser greets him.
At a meeting on Thursday on infrastructure at the White House with Gov. Andrew M.
Cuomo of New York and members of Congress from New York and New Jersey, Mr.
Kelly told participants that Mr. Cohn would lead the meeting. But Mr. Trump, whose
most cutting insult is to pretend someone does not exist or that he barely knows them,
virtually ignored him.
A version of this article appears in print on September 9, 2017, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the
headline: Chief of Staff Installs a Longtime Aide as His Deputy, and Playing Nice Is Optional.
Bob Corker Says Trump’s Recklessness
Threatens ‘World War III’
JONATHAN MARTIN and MARK LANDLER, The New York Times National
Edition, October 9, 2017, A1, A14.
Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, last week in Washington. Credit: Tom Brenner/The
New York Times
WASHINGTON — Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was
treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that
could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”
In an extraordinary rebuke of a president of his own party, Mr. Corker said he was
alarmed about a president who acts “like he’s doing ‘The Apprentice’ or something.”
“He concerns me,” Mr. Corker added. “He would have to concern anyone who cares
about our nation.”
Mr. Corker’s comments capped a remarkable day of sulfurous insults between the
president and the Tennessee senator — a powerful, if lame-duck, lawmaker, whose
support will be critical to the president on tax reform and the fate of the Iran nuclear
deal.
It began on Sunday morning when Mr. Trump, posting on Twitter, accused Mr. Corker
of deciding not to run for re-election because he “didn’t have the guts.” Mr. Corker shot
back in his own tweet: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care
center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.”
The senator, Mr. Trump said, had “begged” for his endorsement. “I said ‘NO’ and he
dropped out (said he could not win without my endorsement),” the president wrote. He
also said that Mr. Corker had asked to be secretary of state. “I said ‘NO THANKS,’” he
wrote.
Mr. Corker flatly disputed that account, saying Mr. Trump had urged him to run again,
and promised to endorse him if he did. But the exchange laid bare a deeper rift: The
senator views Mr. Trump as given to irresponsible outbursts — a political novice who
has failed to make the transition from show business.
Mr. Trump poses such an acute risk, the senator said, that a coterie of senior
administration officials must protect him from his own instincts. “I know for a fact that
every single day at the White House, it’s a situation of trying to contain him,” Mr. Corker
said in a telephone interview.
The deeply personal back-and-forth will almost certainly rupture what had been a
friendship with a fellow real estate developer turned elected official, one of the few
genuine relationships Mr. Trump had developed on Capitol Hill. Still, even as he leveled
his stinging accusations, Mr. Corker repeatedly said on Sunday that he liked Mr. Trump,
until now an occasional golf partner, and wished him “no harm.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Mr. Corker’s remarks.
Mr. Trump’s feud with Mr. Corker is particularly perilous given that the president has
little margin for error as he tries to pass a landmark overhaul of the tax code — his best,
and perhaps last, hope of producing a major legislative achievement this year.
If Senate Democrats end up unified in opposition to the promised tax bill, Mr. Trump
could lose the support of only two of the Senate’s 52 Republicans to pass it. That is the
same challenging math that Mr. Trump and Senate Republican leaders faced in their
failed effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
Mr. Corker could also play a key role if Mr. Trump follows through on his threat to
“decertify” the Iran nuclear deal, kicking to Congress the issue of whether to restore
sanctions on Tehran and effectively scuttle the pact.
Republicans could hold off on sanctions but use the threat of them to force Iran back to
the negotiating table — a strategy being advocated by Senator Tom Cotton, the Arkansas
Republican. But that approach could leave the United States isolated, and it will be up to
Mr. Corker to balance opposition to the deal with the wishes of those, including some of
Mr. Trump’s own aides, who want to change the accord but not blow it up.
Beyond the Iran deal, Mr. Corker’s committee holds confirmation hearings on Mr.
Trump’s ambassadorial appointments. If the president were to oust Rex W. Tillerson as
secretary of state, as some expect, Mr. Corker would lead the hearings on Mr. Trump’s
nominee for the post.
In a 25-minute conversation, Mr. Corker, speaking carefully and purposefully, seemed
to almost find cathartic satisfaction by portraying Mr. Trump in terms that most senior
Republicans use only in private.
The senator, who is close to Mr. Tillerson, invoked comments that the president made
on Twitter last weekend in which he appeared to undercut Mr. Tillerson’s negotiations
with North Korea.
“A lot of people think that there is some kind of ‘good cop, bad cop’ act underway, but
that’s just not true,” Mr. Corker said.
Without offering specifics, he said Mr. Trump had repeatedly undermined diplomacy
with his Twitter fingers. “I know he has hurt, in several instances, he’s hurt us as it
relates to negotiations that were underway by tweeting things out,” Mr. Corker said.
All but inviting his colleagues to join him in speaking out about the president, Mr.
Corker said his concerns about Mr. Trump were shared by nearly every Senate
Republican.
“Look, except for a few people, the vast majority of our caucus understands what we’re
dealing with here,” he said, adding that “of course they understand the volatility that
we’re dealing with and the tremendous amount of work that it takes by people around
him to keep him in the middle of the road.”
As for the tweets that set off the feud on Sunday morning, Mr. Corker expressed a
measure of powerlessness.
“I don’t know why the president tweets out things that are not true,” he said. “You know
he does it, everyone knows he does it, but he does.”
The senator recalled four conversations this year, a mix of in-person meetings and
phone calls, in which he said the president had encouraged him to run for re-election.
Mr. Trump, he said, repeatedly indicated he wanted to come to Tennessee for an early
rally on Mr. Corker’s behalf and even telephoned him last Monday to try to get him to
reconsider his decision to retire.
“When I told him that that just wasn’t in the cards, he said, ‘You know, if you run, I’ll
endorse you.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, it’s just not in the cards; I’ve already made a
decision.’ So then we began talking about other candidates that were running.”
One of the most prominent establishment-aligned Republicans to develop a relationship
with Mr. Trump, the senator said he did not regret standing with him during the
campaign last year.
“I would compliment him on things that he did well, and I’d criticize things that were
inappropriate,” he said. “So it’s been really the same all the way through.”
A former mayor of Chattanooga who became wealthy in construction, Mr. Corker, 65,
has carved out a reputation over two terms in the Senate as a reliable, but not overly
partisan, Republican.
While he opposed President Barack Obama’s divisive nuclear deal with Iran, he did not
prevent it from coming to a vote on the Senate floor, which exposed him to fierce fire
from conservatives, who blamed him for its passage.
Mr. Trump picked up on that theme hours after his initial tweets, writingthat “Bob
Corker gave us the Iran Deal, & that’s about it. We need HealthCare, we need Tax
Cuts/Reform, we need people that can get the job done!”
Mr. Corker was briefly a candidate to be Mr. Trump’s running mate in 2016, but he
withdrew his name from consideration and later expressed ambivalence about Mr.
Trump’s campaign, in part because he said he found it frustrating to discuss foreign
policy with him.
To some extent, the rift between the two men had been building for months, as Mr.
Corker repeatedly pointed out on Sunday to argue that his criticism was not merely that
of a man liberated from facing the voters again.
After a report last week that Mr. Tillerson had once referred to Mr. Trump as a “moron,”
Mr. Corker told reporters that Mr. Tillerson was one of three officials helping to
“separate our country from chaos.” Those remarks were repeated on “Fox News
Sunday,” which may have prompted Mr. Trump’s outburst.
In August, after Mr. Trump’s equivocal response to the deadly clashes in Charlottesville,
Va., Mr. Corker told reporters that the president “has not yet been able to demonstrate
the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be
successful.”
He said on Sunday that he had made all those comments deliberately, aiming them at
“an audience of one, plus those people who are closely working around with him, what I
would call the good guys.” He was referring to Mr. Tillerson, Defense Secretary Jim
Mattis and the White House chief of staff, John F. Kelly.
“As long as there are people like that around him who are able to talk him down when he
gets spun up, you know, calm him down and continue to work with him before a
decision gets made, I think we’ll be fine,” he said.
Mr. Corker would not directly answer when asked whether he thought Mr. Trump was
fit for the presidency. But he did say that the commander in chief was not fully aware of
the power of his office.
“I don’t think he appreciates that when the president of the United States speaks and
says the things that he does, the impact that it has around the world, especially in the
region that he’s addressing,” he said. “And so, yeah, it’s concerning to me.”
Maggie Haberman contributed reporting from New York, and Thomas Kaplan and Noah Weiland from
Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on October 9, 2017, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the
headline: G.O.P. Senator Rebukes Trump Over ‘Reality Show’ Behavior.
Opinion
I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the
Trump Administration
I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of
his agenda and his worst inclinations.
Anonymous, The New York Times Online Edition, September 5, 2018.
The Times is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have
done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration
whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure.
We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important
perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our
vetting process here. [Update: Our answers to some of those questions are
published here.]
President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a
modern American leader.
It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly
divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose
the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.
The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior
officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to
frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the
administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already
made America safer and more prosperous.
But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to
act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.
That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to
preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more
misguided impulses until he is out of office.
The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with
him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his
decision making.
Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for
ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free
people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he
has attacked them outright.
In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of
the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-
democratic.
Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative
coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic
tax reform, a more robust military and more.
But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s
leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.
From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior
officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s
comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his
whims.
Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive
rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and
occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.
“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one
minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by
an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy
decision he’d made only a week earlier.
The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes
in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by
the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad
decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always
successful.
It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but Americans should know that
there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we
are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.
The result is a two-track presidency.
Take foreign policy: In public and in private, President Trump shows a
preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of
Russia and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, and displays little genuine
appreciation for the ties that bind us to allied, like-minded nations.
Astute observers have noted, though, that the rest of the administration is
operating on another track, one where countries like Russia are called out for
meddling and punished accordingly, and where allies around the world are
engaged as peers rather than ridiculed as rivals.
On Russia, for instance, the president was reluctant to expel so many of Mr.
Putin’s spies as punishment for the poisoning of a former Russian spy in
Britain. He complained for weeks about senior staff members letting him get
boxed into further confrontation with Russia, and he expressed frustration
that the United States continued to impose sanctions on the country for its
malign behavior. But his national security team knew better — such actions
had to be taken, to hold Moscow accountable.
This isn’t the work of the so-called deep state. It’s the work of the steady state.
Given the instability many witnessed, there were early whispers within the
cabinet of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would start a complex
process for removing the president. But no one wanted to precipitate a
constitutional crisis. So we will do what we can to steer the administration in
the right direction until — one way or another — it’s over.
The bigger concern is not what Mr. Trump has done to the presidency but
rather what we as a nation have allowed him to do to us. We have sunk low
with him and allowed our discourse to be stripped of civility.
Senator John McCain put it best in his farewell letter. All Americans should
heed his words and break free of the tribalism trap, with the high aim of
uniting through our shared values and love of this great nation.
REACTIONS TO THIS OP-ED
Trump Lashes Out After Reports of ‘Quiet Resistance’ by Staff
Sept. 5, 2018
Anonymous Op-Ed in New York Times Causes a Stir Online and in the White
House
Sept. 5, 2018
It Wasn’t Me: Pence, Pompeo and a Parade of Administration Officials Deny
Writing Op-Ed Sept. 6, 2018
Opinion: ‘Anonymous’ vs. Trump: Resistance From Within
Sept. 6, 2018
How the Anonymous Op-Ed Came to Be
Sept. 8, 2018
Opinion: A Top Republican Fires Back at ‘Anonymous’
Sept. 7, 2018
We may no longer have Senator McCain. But we will always have his example
— a lodestar for restoring honor to public life and our national dialogue. Mr.
Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them.
There is a quiet resistance within the administration of people choosing to put
country first. But the real difference will be made by everyday citizens rising
above politics, reaching across the aisle and resolving to shed the labels in
favor of a single one: Americans.
The writer is a senior official in the Trump administration.
The story behind the unsigned Op-Ed.
The Anonymous Senior Administration Official
Sept. 6, 2018
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 5, 2018, on Page A23 of the New York
edition with the headline: The Quiet Resistance Inside the Trump Administration.
#######
Anonymous Op-Ed in New York
Times Causes a Stir Online and in the
White House
Image
President Trump greeting sheriffs from across the country on Wednesday, when The New York Times
published an anonymous Op-Ed by a senior administration official who described a “quiet resistance”
against the president. Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times
Michael M. Grynbaum, The New York Times Online Edition, September 5, 2018.
In a highly unusual move that reverberated inside the West Wing and across
the media spectrum, The New York Times on Wednesday published an Op-Ed
article by an unnamed administration official that called President Trump
“erratic” and described a “quiet resistance” of cabinet members who had
whispered about taking steps to remove him from office.
It is exceedingly rare for The Times to grant anonymity to a writer on its OpEd
pages, and the paper could cite only a handful of previous cases. But James
Dao, the paper’s Op-Ed editor, said in an interview that the material in the
essay was important enough to the public interest to merit an exception.
“This was a very strongly, clearly written piece by someone who was staking
out what we felt was a very principled position that deserved an airing,” Mr.
Dao said.
It took less than 90 minutes from the column’s publication — which prompted
news channels to cut in with special reports and set off a frenzy among White
House aides — for the president himself to go on live television and denounce
the essay, its author and the news organization that published it.
“We have somebody in what I call the failing New York Times talking about
he’s part of the resistance within the Trump administration — this is what we
have to deal with,” Mr. Trump said in the East Room of the White House,
where reporters had gathered for a previously scheduled photo-op.
Mr. Trump called the essay “gutless” and said its anonymous author was
“probably here for all the wrong reasons” — evoking, perhaps inadvertently, a
popular phrase from the reality television show “The Bachelor.” The White
House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, later issued a statement
deeming the Op-Ed piece “pathetic, reckless and selfish,” adding: “This
coward should do the right thing and resign.”
Eileen Murphy, a Times spokeswoman, responded: “We are incredibly proud
to have published this piece, which adds significant value to the public’s
understanding of what is going on in the Trump administration from someone
who is in a position to know.”
The Op-Ed article was submitted to Times opinion editors last week through
an intermediary, Mr. Dao said. “It was clear early on that the writer wanted
anonymity, but we didn’t grant anything until we read it and we were
confident that they were who they said they were,” he said.
Mr. Dao declined to elaborate on the Op-Ed editors’ internal discussions,
citing the need to protect the author’s identity. But news outlets and online
forums were abuzz with speculation.
CNN cut into coverage of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett
Kavanaugh to analyze the Op-Ed article. Rachel Maddow called into MSNBC,
hours before her prime-time slot, to say, “This feels like the end of something,
and I don’t know what happens next.”
The Fox News website declared “Trump Wants a Name.” Media pundits
questioned whether The Times had been right to grant anonymity. “This one is
a P.R. stunt,” wrote Erik Wemple of The Washington Post.
And reporters and online commenters alike began dissecting the article’s
language for clues about the identity of its author. Dan Bloom, a producer for
the podcast company Panoply, noted on Twitter that the word “lodestar,”
which appears toward the end, had popped up in speeches by Vice President
Mike Pence. Hundreds of Twitter users retweeted his theory.
Other reporters recalled the 1990s-era efforts to unmask the author of
“Primary Colors,” a roman à clef about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential
campaign. The author was eventually revealed to be the journalist Joe Klein,
after The Washington Post commissioned a handwriting analysis of notes in
the margins of a manuscript.
Not every critic of Mr. Trump welcomed the piece’s publication.
David Jolly, a former Republican representative from Florida, said on
MSNBC that if the author “wants to do something in service to the nation, you
have to come forward and sign your name for this.” David Frum, the
conservative writer whose latest book is “Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the
American Republic,” mocked the writer’s motivations: “See, we only look
complicit! Actually, we’re the real heroes of the story.”
The Times said it had published only a handful of anonymously written Op-Ed
pieces, several of them by authors whose safety could be endangered if they
were publicly identified.
One anonymous piece, published in June, was written by an undocumented
immigrant facing deportation and gang-related threats. An Op-Ed article in
2009 was written by a student in Iran who, for reasons of safety, asked to be
identified only by his first name.
The Times Op-Ed page operates independently of the paper’s newsroom and
Washington bureau. The use of anonymous sources in the paper’s news
articles is discouraged, allowed when newsworthy information cannot be
otherwise confirmed.
By the evening, those who fretted that the Op-Ed article would inflame Mr.
Trump had some evidence to support their theory. At 6:15 p.m., he posted a
one-word tweet: “TREASON?” Shortly before 8 p.m., the president asked on
Twitter if the author of the piece was merely “another phony source,” and he
called on The Times to “turn him/her over to government at once!”
A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 5, 2018, on Page A14 of the New York edition with the
headline: Riotous Response to Insider’s Story of ‘Quiet Resistance’.
Jim Mattis Compared Trump to ‘Fifth
or Sixth Grader,’ Bob Woodward
Says in Book
I
President Trump and his administration have been unsettled by Bob Woodward’s book “Fear,” which will
be published next Tuesday. Credit: Doug Mills/The New York Times
Mark Landler and Maggie Haberman, The New York Times Online, September 4,
2018.
WASHINGTON — President Trump so alarmed his defense secretary, Jim
Mattis, during a discussion last January of the nuclear standoff with North
Korea that an exasperated Mr. Mattis told colleagues “the president acted like
— and had the understanding of — a ‘fifth or sixth grader.’”
At another moment, Mr. Trump’s aides became so worried about his judgment
that Gary D. Cohn, then the chief economic adviser, took a letter from the
president’s Oval Office desk authorizing the withdrawal of the United States
from a trade agreement with South Korea. Mr. Trump, who had planned to
sign the letter, never realized it was missing.
These anecdotes are in a sprawling, highly anticipated book by Bob Woodward
that depicts the Trump White House as a byzantine, treacherous, often out-ofcontrol
operation — “crazytown,” in the words of the chief of staff, John F.
Kelly — hostage to the whims of an impulsive, ill-informed and undisciplined
president.
The New York Times obtained a copy of the book, “Fear,” which will be
published next Tuesday by Simon & Schuster.
Mr. Woodward, a longtime Washington Post reporter and editor, has turned
the internal dramas of several previous White Houses into best-sellers. In
taking on Mr. Trump, he faced the challenge of an unusually leaky
administration, which has already provided grist for countless news articles
and one mega-bestseller, “Fire and Fury” by Michael Wolff.
But Mr. Woodward’s book has unsettled the administration and the president,
in part because it is clear that the author has spoken with so many current and
former officials, though all on the condition that they not be cited as sources
for the information.
Mr. Trump, after initially brushing it aside as “just another bad book,” accused
Mr. Woodward of making up quotes from Mr. Mattis and Mr. Kelly, and
perpetuating a “con on the public.” In a tweet, he suggested that the author
was a Democratic operative who had timed the publication to hurt the
president politically before the midterm elections.
The White House, in a statement, dismissed “Fear” as “nothing more than
fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the
president look bad.” After hours of saturation news coverage on cable
networks, “Fear” rocketed to No. 1 on Amazon.
Some of the freshest details in the book involve Mr. Mattis, a retired Marine
Corps general who has been viewed as an anchor in Mr. Trump’s cabinet. Mr.
Woodward portrays Mr. Mattis as frequently derisive of the commander in
chief, rattled by his judgment, and willing to slow-walk orders from him that
he viewed as reckless.
Donald J. Trump
✔@realDonaldTrump
The Woodward book has already been refuted and discredited by
General (Secretary of Defense) James Mattis and General (Chief of
Staff) John Kelly. Their quotes were made up frauds, a con on the
public. Likewise other stories and quotes. Woodward is a Dem
operative? Notice timing?
6:18 PM - Sep 4, 2018
In the North Korea meeting, during a period of high tension with the country’s
leader, Kim Jong-un, Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Mattis about why the United
States keeps a military presence on the Korean Peninsula. “We’re doing this in
order to prevent World War III,” Mr. Mattis responded, according to Mr.
Woodward.
In April 2017, after President Bashar al-Assad of Syria launched a chemical
attack on his own people, Mr. Trump called Mr. Mattis and told him that he
wanted the United States to assassinate Mr. Assad. “Let’s go in,” the president
said, adding a string of expletives.
The defense secretary hung up and told one of his aides: “We’re not going to
do any of that. We’re going to be much more measured.” At his direction, the
Pentagon prepared options for an airstrike on Syrian military positions, which
Mr. Trump later ordered.
Mr. Mattis issued his own statement denying he ever used the “contemptuous
words” that Mr. Woodward attributed to him. “While I generally enjoy reading
fiction,” he said, “this is a uniquely Washington brand of literature, and his
anonymous sources do not lend credibility.”
Mr. Woodward’s reporting adds another layer to a recurring theme in the
Trump White House: frustrated aides who sometimes resort to extraordinary
measures to thwart the president’s decisions — a phenomenon the author
describes as “an administrative coup d’état.” In addition to Mr. Mattis and Mr.
Cohn, he recounts the tribulations of Mr. Kelly and his predecessor, Reince
Priebus, whose tensions with Mr. Trump have been reported elsewhere.
Mr. Cohn, Mr. Woodward said, told a colleague he had removed the letter
about the Korea free trade agreement to protect national security. Later, when
the president ordered a similar letter authorizing the departure of the United
States from the North American Free Trade Agreement, Mr. Cohn and other
aides plotted how to prevent him from going ahead with a move they feared
would be deeply destabilizing.
“I can stop this,” Mr. Cohn said to the staff secretary, Rob Porter, according to
the book. “I’ll just take the paper off his desk.”
Mr. Woodward reported new details about Mr. Cohn’s well-documented clash
with the president over his equivocal response to the white nationalist violence
in Charlottesville, Va., in August 2017. Mr. Cohn, who threatened to resign
over the episode, was particularly shaken after one of his daughters discovered
a swastika in her college dorm.
Mr. Trump’s dealings with foreign leaders were similarly fraught. During a
phone call to negotiate the release of an Egyptian-American detained in Cairo,
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said, “Donald, I’m worried about this
investigation,” referring to the Russia inquiry. “Are you going to be around?”
In July 2017, Mr. Woodward said, Mr. Trump told Prime Minister Malcolm
Turnbull of Australia that he would exempt his country from steel tariffs, only
to claim, nearly eight months later, that he had never made that promise.
Pressed on it by Mr. Turnbull, Mr. Trump said, “Oh yeah, I guess I remember
that.”
Mr. Cohn, Mr. Woodward said, concluded that Mr. Trump was a “professional
liar.”
He found a sympathetic ear in Mr. Kelly, another retired Marine general, who
frequently vented his frustration to colleagues about the president, whom he
labeled “unhinged,” an “idiot” and “off the rails.” Mr. Kelly’s reference to Mr.
Trump as an “idiot” has been reported before.
“We’re in crazytown,” Mr. Kelly said in one meeting, according to Mr.
Woodward. “I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job
I’ve ever had.”
Mr. Kelly also issued a denial on Tuesday, saying that “the idea I ever called
the president an idiot is not true” and repeating his earlier insistence that he
and Mr. Trump had “an incredibly candid and strong relationship.”
In Mr. Woodward’s account, Mr. Trump rarely returns the loyalty of his
subordinates. He derided Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of his earliest
political supporters, as “mentally retarded” and a “dumb Southerner,”
mimicking his accent and making fun of his halting answers during his Senate
confirmation hearing.
(Mr. Trump denied that characterization late Tuesday, saying on Twitterthat
he had “never used those terms on anyone, including Jeff, and being a
southerner is a GREAT thing.”)
Mr. Trump referred to Mr. Priebus as a “little rat” who just “scurries around.”
For his part, Mr. Priebus described the White House as a Hobbesian world, in
which officials delight in sticking knives into one another, according to the
book.
“When you put a snake and rat and falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal
into a zoo without walls, things started getting nasty and bloody,” said Mr.
Priebus, whom Mr. Trump eventually ousted and abandoned on a rain-slicked
tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base.
Mr. Woodward, who began speaking to Mr. Trump’s aides even before the
inauguration, also documented the misgivings of the president’s former
lawyer, John Dowd, about whether the president should submit to questions
from the special counsel in the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III.
“Don’t testify,” Mr. Dowd told the president. “It’s either that or an orange
jump suit.”
Mr. Dowd denied on Tuesday that he ever said that.
Last January, Mr. Woodward writes, Mr. Dowd staged a practice session in the
White House residence to dramatize the pressures Mr. Trump would face in a
session with Mr. Mueller. The president stumbled repeatedly, contradicting
himself and lying, before he exploded in anger.
“This thing’s a goddamn hoax,” Mr. Trump declared. “I don’t really want to
testify.”
Mr. Woodward said he tried to get access to the president but did not
interview him. After he had completed the manuscript, Mr. Trump called Mr.
Woodward to express regret for not talking to him, blaming it on aides who he
said had failed to inform him of interest. In a transcript and a tape of the
call published Tuesday by the The Post, Mr. Woodward told Mr. Trump he
interviewed many White House officials outside their offices, and gathered
extensive documentation. “It’s a tough look at the world and the
administration and you,” he told Mr. Trump.
“Right,” the president replied. “Well, I assume that means it’s going to be a
negative book.”
Mark Landler reported from Washington, and Maggie Haberman from New York.
Reporting was contributed by Peter Baker, Helene Cooper, Michael S. Schmidt and
Michael Shear from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on Septembeer 4, 2018, on Page A1 of the New
York edition with the headline: Woodward’s Sprawling Exposé Depicts White House in
Chaos