There is nothing for you.., p.24
There Is Nothing for You Here, page 24
As well as the fighting talk, what Trump loved most of all was the big showpiece event that would put everything in motion. As I would see firsthand, his presidency was dominated by the photo op, the staging of events, where people would stand around watching him as he signed some “major deal” or document. Trump loved to play the patron in public, seemingly creating opportunity for the American people with the flourish of his signature black Sharpie rather than a pen. The Apprentice reality TV show and franchising and branding were the most successful parts of the Trump business after his early construction projects in New York and Chicago and his phase building casinos. TV was Trump’s arena. How things looked on TV, not how they worked per se, was always the most important aspect of any meeting. Almost every meeting involved some kind of public performance, like a press conference, even when there was nothing much to play up or it was patently better do something quietly, without any fanfare.
The episode that summed all this up for me came in March 2018. President Trump invited ten steel and aluminum workers to the White House to watch as he signed a proclamation on tariffs on cheaper imported steel and aluminum coming into the United States, especially from China. The workers were political props—mostly men, one woman, one Black worker. They were in the Roosevelt Room, standing around the president, who was seated at a desk. They were in freshly pressed work clothes and overalls, some clutching hard hats. No suits even for a White House visit. They had been asked to come “in costume.” They had to look the part. Trump was always talking about “Central Casting,” about how everyone around him should have the right look.
After signing the proclamation, President Trump invited the workers to make some comments for the press. One steelworker from Pennsylvania related how his father had lost his job in a steel mill in the 1980s. His father was “crushed”—no longer able to “go to work, joke around with the guys, tell good stories, and be able to support a wife and six kids.” Obviously thinking that all steelworkers must have Hobbesian brutal and short lives, Trump remarked that the steelworker’s father must now be very proud, watching him in the White House from up in heaven. Trump’s remark fit the tableau he was trying to present—of him, the president, saving American workers from destitution and death by slapping tariffs on Chinese steel imports. The worker, slightly embarrassed, had to correct the president. His father was actually still alive and watching all this on TV. Trump was surprised but made a quick joke of it.
Personally, I cringed watching the scene unfold on the White House TV screens. My dad had often been in the same situation at Bishop Auckland General Hospital when some visiting dignitary would make a speech on the importance of the UK’s beloved National Health Service. The NHS was always the flag that British politicians liked to wrap around themselves on the campaign trail. Dad would be pulled away from work and rolled out with the other porters in their uniforms to stand around during the speech for the benefit of the press. Then they would have their picture taken with the dignitary. What might start off well would inevitably degenerate into embarrassment when people failed to play their appointed role in the political pageant. During one rollout, a pompous and self-important visitor had made a point of telling Dad that “I admire you people . . . for the way you are.” “What do you mean, the way we are?” Dad had shot back. “Simple?” “Oh no, no, of course not,” the startled visitor had replied. “Um, I mean, um, hardworking.”
The hardworking part was definitely right. Dad and the steelworkers in the Roosevelt Room wanted to work hard and have the opportunity to do so. They wanted a job that would let them get ahead, not just survive. They were willing to be part of someone else’s “big show” if it came to something. They wanted respect and results. In that moment in March 2018, the workers who attended the signing did feel respected by President Trump. I was the one cringing. I had a different view of how things were unfolding behind the scenes. The steel and aluminum workers were thrilled at the opportunity to be in the White House. This was the American people’s house, and they were meeting the American president. But when they got back home and related the story to their colleagues, they clearly underscored what results they expected from President Trump’s signature on the tariff proclamation. This wasn’t just a performance or a show-and-tell for them.
One of the workers, a United Steelworkers Union representative from Pennsylvania, noted that ultimately the visit and the tariffs were all about saving jobs, “good American jobs,” and the aspirations that came with them. He summed it up directly. This was so “people can have the ability to live the American dream. Can I buy a house? How many people at work these days can afford to buy a house? There is not a whole lot anymore. There’s not a lot that can buy new cars and help their kids go to college and can save up and actually go on a vacation. If you work hard all of your life, after 30 years you can actually get a pension so you can live and not have to go back to work. I won’t have to decide if I’m going to eat or pay for my medicine . . . These are the jobs that make the difference.”
The Populist’s Playbook
For his political base, President Trump was a ubiquitous presence out in front of the cameras, signing proclamations and executive orders promising jobs. The rest of the government was remote and often invisible, doing nobody knew what apart from spending taxpayers’ hard-earned money. That, of course, was the point of the big show, making the president look good. Trump took all the credit for initiatives that might have been devised and would certainly be carried out at lower levels of the government. He was the person working for the American people—not the faceless “deep-state bureaucrats” that he frequently railed against. Fueling long-standing popular distrust in public servants and the U.S. federal government helped to boost Trump’s popularity during his campaign and once he was in office. It was a classic populist move that helped keep him in the limelight.
In the White House, Trump continued the style that had made him famous on The Apprentice. Reality TV offers the surface verisimilitude of real life, but it’s all artifice, playing for the cameras. As president, Trump was always camera-ready in full makeup. White House press conferences, “exclusive” interviews with selected journalists, and public rallies put him at the center of national attention. When any political opponent or sometimes even a cabinet member held an event, Trump arranged a competing event or sent off a flurry of provocative tweets to draw the media’s and public’s attention away. If he had nothing to talk about, he would manufacture a scandal or a crisis to get everyone talking about him.
As the head of an eponymous family firm—as I observed from the references he made and the way he talked about things—Trump saw the United States of America as “Trump U.S.A.” Once he became the president, he set about rebranding America, in a kind of merger and acquisition with Trump family enterprises. He talked about redesigning and “Trumpifying” Air Force One, for example, to make it look more like his own personal luxury aircraft. It was the same with the White House itself. Every president puts his stamp on the American people’s house in terms of changing the decor and making additions or upgrades to the grounds or buildings. But Trump, more than anyone, tried to make it his own. He frequently violated the norms of using the building by holding political rallies and campaign events there.
In this way, the people’s house—the White House—became Trump’s house. “We the people”—the principle of American government, embedded in the Declaration of Independence—was for Trump “Me the people.” Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” and its acronym, MAGA, were plastered everywhere and on everything. There was “MAGA world” and then everything and everyone else outside. Trump repeatedly stated that he didn’t consider the people or states that had not voted for him in 2016 as part of “his America.” There were red Republican states and blue Democratic states. His were red. MAGA was emblazoned on red baseball hats that he threw out at rallies. The others, the blues, could be punished and threatened. It was tribal in the extreme.
I had watched the beginnings of Trump’s cult of personality during the campaign, reflecting with concern on what it portended for the country. At the time I would never have guessed that this was a world that I was about to enter.
10
“Russia Bitch”
I did not join Donald Trump’s National Security Council for the glamour or thrill of working at the White House. I wanted to serve my country, and I felt that I had something to offer, given my educational training and long experience of dealing with Russia, including during my previous stint in government at the National Intelligence Council. But in retrospect, I was naive about U.S. politics and how much it was possible—or not possible—to get done in such a highly charged environment after the 2016 election.
Given the nature of the threat posed by the Russian security services, I hoped I would be able to cut through the outside noise and focus on national security and foreign policy. This was certainly what most of my colleagues at the NSC and across the government were trying to do. But on the job I spent more than two years essentially fighting home-front fires. Because throughout the Trump presidency, America was at war with itself, including inside the government.
I began to think of my NSC job, with all the endless hits and explosions, like the World War II Blitz that I had heard about as a child in North East England. Grandma Vi and Mam had recounted particularly memorable stories about Billingham, a factory town and home of one of the largest chemical plants in Europe, ICI. It was a constant target during the German air force’s nightly bombing campaign against Britain in 1940–1941. Mam’s father was an air raid warden for Billingham County Council. During the Blitz, he ran around extinguishing incendiary devices and navigational flares dropped by German advance planes by placing them in buckets of sand before the big bombers could come to take out the ICI chemical works. Some nights he would have to chase little boys through the blackout. They had run off with the flares to use as firecrackers. The war was a game for them until something terrible happened.
It was just as exhausting putting out political incendiary devices at the White House before someone’s game blew us up too. At times it would have been dispiriting and pointless if not for the camaraderie and inspiring professionalism of other public servants. In this instance, looking around me, I often felt like I was down at the coalface, as Grandad Hill and Dad described from the good old days. We were stuck together in a confined space just trying to get the job done without losing anyone in a political accident.
More than anything else, however, I ended up dealing with this by treating it as I had treated every life experience outside Bishop Auckland—as a foray into terra incognita. I found myself conducting a social anthropological study of the White House, turning the lens around on the United States and noting the parallels with upheavals I had seen and experienced elsewhere. The political machinations around the Trump White House turned out to be as dirty and filled with intrigue as the Kremlin’s, and the atmosphere was as tumultuous as my life in the UK had been in the 1970s and 1980s. In many respects America’s populist turn in electing Trump in 2016 was the culmination of the forty-year sweep of time that marked my own life and career trajectory.
The United Kingdom and its relationship with the United States was a major theme of my policy portfolio. It was, of course, strange to have my family’s and friends’ lives and dilemmas back in the UK and Europe as part of my official responsibilities. When we produced reports on the consequences of Brexit and on the rise of populism and democratic backsliding in Europe and the implications for U.S. foreign policy, it was hard not to dwell on the growing similarities at home in America.
A Tough Assignment
I was first approached to join the Trump administration by K. T. McFarland, a Fox News program host who, like me, was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). We had frequently discussed U.S.-Russian relations on the margins of CFR events. After the publication of the first version of the book on Putin I cowrote with my Brookings colleague Cliff Gaddy in 2013, K. T. invited me onto her show, Defcon 3. I appeared several times to talk about Putin and his views on the United States.
The last time I appeared on K. T.’s TV show was in November 2016, just after the presidential election. K. T. wanted to talk to me about Russian interference in the election and the prospects for newly elected President Trump to deal with his Russian counterpart under these circumstances. We chatted a little in the studio after the session. I had only just learned that K. T. had been part of Trump’s campaign. I joked that perhaps she would be the next national security adviser, unaware that she was on the transition team.
In fact K. T. was designated as the deputy to Trump’s first national security adviser, General Michael Flynn, whom I had worked with when I was national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the National Intelligence Council from 2006 to 2009. Back then General Flynn was intelligence chief for the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) under its chairman, Admiral Michael Mullen. We had close contacts in that period, dealing with Russia and the 2008 war in Georgia in particular. I frequently briefed Admiral Mullen and the JCS team on the fast-moving developments and took part in strategy sessions. Although I had little contact with General Flynn after I returned to the Brookings Institution at the end of 2009, he remembered me. Flynn also recruited some former close colleagues from the NIC to positions at the National Security Council, who reached out to me.
K. T. and General Flynn thought I could help them sit down with the president to brief him on dealing with Putin, as I had for Presidents Bush and Obama when I was NIO. Another retired general, Keith Kellogg, whom I knew tangentially from my time at the NIC, was the new NSC chief of staff, having also served on the campaign. In late December 2016 and early January 2017, K. T. and General Kellogg sought my advice on how to approach the Russia challenge and offered me the position of senior director for Europe and Russia.
I initially thought I could offer general advice from my perch at the Brookings Institution, but given the scale of the Russian effort to influence the 2016 election, that was clearly not going to be an option. Someone would have to work on this from the inside. It was obvious that joining the administration would be a tough and controversial assignment, but with the encouragement of Brookings colleagues and longtime mentors like Graham Allison, I resolved to see what I could do to help tackle the Russian intelligence services’ attack on American democracy.
Sitting with the President
Within my first couple of weeks at the NSC in April 2017, it very quickly became apparent that I was never going to have any kind of sit-down with Donald Trump to talk about Vladimir Putin or Russia, or pretty much anything else in my portfolio. One of the major reasons was that I was a woman, and a completely unknown quantity at that.
These two factors became critical in shaping my time in the NSC. Despite the unexpected opportunity to serve in the White House and decades of hard work and preparation for just this eventuality, the fact that I was an “unknown woman” was detrimental to my ability to step up to meet the Russian challenge. It was an obstacle to doing the job I had been hired for. As far as President Trump was concerned, my academic and professional credentials and expertise were irrelevant. For all intents and purposes, as a woman and an outsider, I was not part of his team.
Only making matters more difficult, General Flynn was ousted from his position before I even got to the White House, having lied to both the FBI and the vice president about the content of a phone call with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the period before he was officially in office. Flynn was replaced in February 2017 by another general, H. R. McMaster, who was still in active service rather than retired. Like me, General McMaster had no prior relationship with the president. He was in the process of figuring out for himself how to navigate the White House when I came on board. Our mutual lack of familiarity with Trump and his team would prove to be a huge obstacle in the year ahead.
The early months at the NSC were chaotic and fraught, a swirl of rumors inside and outside the building. It soon became apparent that K. T. might also not keep her position for long—and indeed she was nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Singapore in May 2017. Trump had run a bare-bones campaign in terms of personnel, drawing people from his real estate business, immediate family, and close personal associates. He had to rely on the Republican Party apparatus, which he had never been part of, to staff the transition and recruit for key positions. The result was a motley crew of people with few ties to each other and some with no prior government experience whatsoever, all jockeying for influence—and often launching political assaults to oust perceived enemies from their positions. Unsurprisingly, General McMaster and I ended up frequent targets of malicious leaks to the press.
Sneakers in the Oval Office
I did not get off to an auspicious start at the NSC, even though on my first day I ended up in the Oval Office. As in my job at the medieval banquet hall at Witton Castle, or as was nearly the case in my early career at the Kennedy School, my attire proved to be my undoing.
