A Warning

The day began like any other in the Trump administration: with a self-inflicted crisis. It was Wednesday, December 19, 2018, and the White House was dealing with a communications problem. The State Department had decided to unveil an economic development program in Latin America the day before, which experts believed would reduce violence and instability in the region. There was one catch. The president was on the brink of scrapping it. He reportedly thought it was too expensive and threatened to kill the deal by tweet. Its architects panicked about whether the president was going to create a diplomatic row.

As it often does, the main show turned out to be a sideshow. The president hadn’t yet come down from the residence to the Oval Office. We all knew why. It was prime tweeting hour, and at 9:29 a.m., he fired off a missive from the executive mansion: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.” Within minutes, news broke that the president had decided to withdraw. He later tweeted: “After historic victories against ISIS, it’s time to bring our great young people home!”

The announcement reverberated across Washington. It was contrary to what had been recommended to him. From the top Pentagon officials to leaders of the intelligence community, most of the president’s top advisors cautioned against arbitrarily pulling the roughly two thousand US troops out of Syria. ISIS was still a potent threat, he was told, and America’s exit would allow the group to reconstitute and plot more deadly attacks. An early pullout would also cede the area to a dictator who used chemical weapons on his own people, to the anti-American Iranian regime that was expanding its reach in the region, and to Russia. What’s more, it would probably result in the slaughter of Kurdish forces who had helped us go after terrorists. In every way, withdrawal would damage US security interests.

The president was unmoved. Rather than convene his national security team to discuss options, he bucked them with a tweet.

“People are going to fucking die because of this,” a top aide angrily remarked. We all scrambled to figure out what had happened and what Trump’s plans were. US allies were baffled and alarmed. The Department of Defense was in the dark. Officials couldn’t even figure out how to respond to press inquiries since it was a decision in which they had played virtually no role. The nation’s top military brass were infuriated at the lack of pre-planning, as the sudden announcement meant soldiers on the ground could immediately become sitting ducks, potentially vulnerable to attack from opportunistic adversaries who saw them as being in retreat. The military hastily began contingency planning to ensure US forces were not put in harm’s way.

We’d all seen presidents make poor decisions when it came to America’s defense. This was different. None of us could recall it being done so casually. In a normal White House, decisions of this magnitude receive sober deliberation. They are the subject of sensitive meetings—sometimes too many meetings—just to make sure the details are right. All of the bases get covered, and every question gets answered. How will our enemies interpret this? What can we do to affect their thinking? How will our partners react? Most importantly, how will we best protect the American people, including our men and women in uniform? None of these questions were answered beforehand.

Not only was the decision reckless, but administration officials had been testifying under oath that ISIS was not yet eliminated. They also publicly vowed that the United States would not abandon the fight in Syria. Now the president was falsely declaring ISIS to be finished, because he just decided it was true one day. He was broadcasting to the enemy that America was headed for the exits. “We are going to get hauled up to the Hill and crucified for this,” a senior cabinet member lamented.

In Congress, reaction came swiftly, including from Trump’s own party. “I’ve never seen a decision like this since I’ve been here in twelve years,” a baffled Senator Bob Corker, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told reporters. “It is hard to imagine that any president would wake up and make this kind of decision, with little communication, with this little preparation.” Even Senator Lindsey Graham, who’d been trying to curry Trump’s favor, blasted the decision. Lindsey told reporters the announcement had “rattled the world.”

It was a watershed moment for another reason, too. It signaled the downfall of key officials who thought they could bring order to the administration’s chaos. One in particular decided enough was enough.

The day after the Syria tweets, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis announced his resignation. In a letter to the president, he wrote: “My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues… Because you have a right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.” Mattis set a departure date of February 28. Jim Mattis is a patriot and war fighter who had earned bipartisan support when he was nominated for secretary of defense. Perpetually stoic, he’d told senators concerned about Trump that he wouldn’t for a moment sit idle if he felt the president was asking him to do things that ran contrary to his conscience or that would needlessly put lives in danger. Jim was, as ever, true to his word. The resignation shook the White House, all the way into the Oval Office.

The press called it a protest resignation. President Trump was incensed. In classic fashion, one bad decision led to another. Within days, the president decided in a temper tantrum to move Secretary Mattis’s departure date forward. He wanted Jim out as soon as possible. This once again threw the Department of Defense into unnecessary turmoil, as aides scrambled to figure out the succession plan. Leadership changes atop the world’s mightiest military usually take several months to game out to ensure stability. Trump chopped it down to a few days. He tweeted that the Pentagon’s number two would assume the duties of the top job on January 1, two months sooner than planned. The next week, in the Orwellian up-is-down culture that we’d all grown accustomed to, the president bragged that he “essentially” fired the decorated marine general. The loss was felt throughout the administration and the world. One of the few reasonable hands on board the ship of state was headed overboard.

From the very start, like-minded appointees observed the president’s erratic management style with concern. We made a concerted effort to replace the tumultuous environment with a disciplined policy process—in other words, a system for making sure presidential decisions were considered thoughtfully, procedures were followed, all sides of a debate were considered, and ultimately that the president was set up for success, including with advisors willing to speak up when the president was headed in the wrong direction.

We thought the situation was manageable. We were dead wrong. If 2017 marked the rise of a loose cabal of pragmatists in the Trump administration—a “Steady State”—2018 marked the start of its demise.

State of Chaos

The early days of any presidential administration are tough. You can’t hand over the reins of a $4-trillion-a-year organization, with millions of employees, and expect a seamless transition. The outgoing White House typically directs agencies to help prepare their replacements to take over. Leading up to the inauguration, a flurry of briefings are held, new employees are informed about sensitive programs, and memos are prepared to bring the incoming team up to speed. Sometimes an outgoing administration will offer to leave some of their own officials in place for a few weeks or months into the new president’s term in order to make the hand-off easier. Even then, it’s still never enough to prepare any group of people for the extraordinary challenge of running the United States government.

For the incoming Trump administration, the situation was much harder.

It’s all been spun differently now, but few people on the Trump campaign—up to and including the candidate himself—truly expected to win. It showed. The mood was bleak for employees of his transition team, the group of aides responsible for mapping out an “administration-in-waiting” in the event that Trump won. Some were sending out résumés to find work before the voters of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin cast historic ballots on November 8.

The election result left the transition team rattled, now that they were actually going to be in charge of a presidential transition. Inexperienced operatives admitted they were not ready. Most had never led a government changeover, and they were left without the guidance of seasoned veterans from previous Republican transitions, many of whom had decided to sit the race out, certain there would be no Trump presidency. What remained was a bench of B-listers. Nonetheless, the head of Trump’s transition team, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, believed he had a plan, albeit with a staff lagging behind in preparations when compared to its predecessors. Those designs ended up on the ash heap of history, as did their designer. Fresh off his election victory, President-Elect Trump suddenly decided to sack Christie as the transition chief and make Vice-President-Elect Pence the new chair. The hasty move set the incoming administration back weeks in some ways, if not months.

Abraham Lincoln famously constructed a “team of rivals” after he won office, assembling his former competitors into a cohesive cabinet. But because of poor planning and widespread doubt about his prospects, Trump wound up with the opposite: “rival teams.” Infighting from the campaign spilled over into the presidential transition. Advisors brandished their knives, back-stabbing each other to get the jobs they wanted. At the same time, a parade of job-seekers made the pilgrimage to Trump Tower in New York to pay homage to the incoming commander in chief, seeking a place on his short list. Most had conveniently changed their minds about the president-elect. Factions formed. Conspiracies to undermine potential candidates—while boosting others—were hatched and dissolved, sometimes in the same day. There was the Kushner camp, the Bannon camp, the Conway camp, and others such as Penceland or the so-called Flynn-stones, acolytes of the anointed national security advisor. They were united at times and divided at others. This was a real-life version of The Apprentice. Some of these rivalries persisted deep into the start of the president’s term. Trump often encouraged disunity by making suggestions about who had his favor and who did not.

Despite the internal bedlam, the president-elect did not end up with a government solely populated by flunkies. Far from it, in fact. Although a long list of highly experienced Republican leaders were de-facto barred from the incoming administration for being “Never-Trumpers,” those who didn’t sign their names onto anti-Trump screeds, myself included, had a shot. Respected political figures and experts signed up. Notwithstanding the surrealness of it all, the process produced a White House team and a cabinet more competent than critics were willing to give Trump credit for. There were former governors such as Nikki Haley and Rick Perry, four-star generals such as John Kelly and Jim Mattis, corporate executives such as Rex Tillerson and Steven Mnuchin, US senators such as Jeff Sessions and Dan Coats, and former cabinet secretaries such as Elaine Chao. This was a solid group of lieutenants for any president-elect and, for a time, Donald Trump’s choices were encouraging to those who doubted him.

The assemblage of outsiders helped tamp down some of the feuding within the Trump team. These people had no reason to fight with one another. They were not tainted by the internal politics of the campaign. Unlike the president-elect’s friends and the leftovers he brought with him, who were used to currying Trump’s favor and surviving his fickle turns of affection, these experienced leaders were not worn down by life inside Trump’s inner circle of flattery and deception. The administration’s recruits came together because many had one trait in common: They didn’t know the chief executive.

False optimism infected the new team. Everyone was hopeful the rancor of the campaign would be replaced by the high purpose of leading the country, which can ennoble even the most distracted minds. “Hope” evaporated on first contact with the president-elect. He was so focused on his “win” that he could barely focus on the forthcoming task of governing. Trump carried around maps outlining his electoral victory, which he would pull out at odd times in discussions meant to focus on preparing him to take office. He would beckon his guests, as well as aides, advisors, and incoming cabinet officers, to gaze at the sea of red on the map, visual proof that he’d won. “Yeah, we know you won,” we would think to ourselves. “That’s why we’re here.”

It was clear something wasn’t right. Incoming staff exchanged worried glances about what they were seeing during the transition. This place was already crazy, they confided in each other, and Trump hadn’t even entered the White House yet. His turbulent demeanor and off-the-wall comments—like his continued fixation with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who were leaving government—were not part of a television persona. They were the real thing. His management of the upstart operation was, well, not really management at all.

The bonds that eventually became an informal “Steady State” were tightened not long after the president’s inauguration. Only days into office, he invited congressional leaders to the White House to meet. This was supposed to be a bipartisan show of goodwill. But at the outset of the meeting the president railed against what he claimed were “millions” of people who voted illegally in the election, depriving him of winning the popular vote. The assertion had been debunked previously, and it was so clearly false on its face that no one could believe he was raising it again. After the meeting, we tried to brush it off by joking that the president was off his rocker. But it wasn’t really a joke. We were genuinely worried by the tone he was setting. Then there were his actions.

President Trump signed off on a rapid-fire barrage of executive orders intended to undo Obama administration policies, cut regulations, spur economic growth, and more. On the surface, everyone agreed with the goals. Only a few aides had been involved in the drafting, though, and the president didn’t really seem aware of what he’d done. Some orders were so hastily written that they backfired spectacularly, like the president’s travel ban on citizens from supposedly terrorist countries—an order that wound up in the courts, was publicly protested, and needlessly cost the administration early congressional and public goodwill. New White House appointees and agency officials were livid that the rollouts weren’t more carefully planned.

Then the president decided to give his chief political strategist, Steve Bannon, a seat on the National Security Council (NSC). This really got folks up in arms. The NSC is a White House organization responsible for advising the president on the most sensitive matters of intelligence, defense, and diplomacy that affect the lives and safety of Americans at home and around the world. Seats at the table are typically reserved for top agency heads, not media advisors. NSC matters weren’t supposed to be “political” discussions. In this case, Bannon was elevated, while others, such as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of National Intelligence, were effectively demoted. The president’s most experienced recruits were astounded. Although Trump reversed the order a few months later, it wasn’t forgotten.

The administration was only a few weeks in, and already the mayhem made everyone look foolish. Internal whispers grew louder: This was not a way to do business. As a result, people who’d previously been outsiders to Trump World grew closer to one another and developed a bizarre sense of fraternity, like bank-robbery hostages lying on the floor at gunpoint, unable to sound the alarm but aware that everyone else was stricken with the same fear of the unknown.

“He’s About to Do Something”

To be clear, there is no seditious plot inside the administration to undercut the president. The Steady State is not code for a coordinated scheme to sabotage his policies or, worse, oust him from office. I use “resistance” in quotes because it’s neither the Right’s fear of a “Deep State” gone rogue, or the Left’s conception of an active subversion campaign. Trump’s critics, who are rooting for an actual resistance, have let their imaginations run wild with the idea of public servants frustrating the gears of government to bring down Trump. If this kind of conspiracy exists, it’s news to me, and it would be disturbing. Public service is a public trust. Any government employee with such a nefarious end goal should be condemned.

Instead, the early Steady State formed to keep the wheels from coming off the White House wagon. When presidential appointees started conferring about their shared concerns with the nation’s chief executive, it was not in dimly lit, smoke-filled back rooms of Washington. It was done informally, in weekly phone calls or on the margins of meetings. People who compared notes during the workday and in the normal course of business realized that the administration’s problems were more than fleeting. They were systemic. They emanated from the top.

Two traits are illustrative of what brought the Steady State together: the president’s inattentiveness and his impulsiveness. Both will be documented further in this book. But coming to terms with these characteristics for the first time had a powerful impact on the people serving in the administration.

Take, for instance, the process of briefing the president of the United States, which is an experience that no description can fully capture. In any administration, advisors would rightfully want to be prepared for such a moment. This is the most powerful person on earth we are talking about. But before a conversation with him, you want to make sure you’ve got your main points lined up and a crisp agenda ready to present. You are about to discuss weighty matters, sometimes life-and-death matters, with the leader of the free world. A moment of utmost sobriety and purpose. The process does not unfold that way in the Trump administration. Briefings with Donald Trump are of an entirely different nature. Early on, briefers were told not to send lengthy documents. Trump wouldn’t read them. Nor should they bring summaries to the Oval Office. If they must bring paper, then PowerPoint was preferred because he is a visual learner. Okay, that’s fine, many thought to themselves, leaders like to absorb information in different ways.

Then officials were told that PowerPoint decks needed to be slimmed down. The president couldn’t digest too many slides. He needed more images to keep his interest—and fewer words. Then they were told to cut back the overall message (on complicated issues such as military readiness or the federal budget) to just three main points. Eh, that was still too much. Soon, West Wing aides were exchanging “best practices” for success in the Oval Office. The most salient advice? Forget the three points. Come in with one main point and repeat it—over and over again, even if the president inevitably goes off on tangents—until he gets it. Just keep steering the subject back to it. ONE point. Just that one point. Because you cannot focus the commander in chief’s attention on more than one goddamned thing over the course of a meeting, okay?

Some officials refused to believe this is how it worked. “Are you serious?” they asked, quizzing others who’d already briefed the president. How could they dumb down their work to this level? They were facilitating presidential decisions on major issues, not debates about where to go out for dinner. I saw a number of appointees as they dismissed the advice of the wisened hands and went in to see President Trump, prepared for robust policy discussion on momentous national topics, and a peppery give-and-take. They invariably paid the price.

“What the fuck is this?” the president would shout, looking at a document one of them handed him. “These are just words. A bunch of words. It doesn’t mean anything.” Sometimes he would throw the papers back on the table. He definitely wouldn’t read them.

One of the hardest culture shifts took place with the National Security Council. NSC staff were accustomed to producing long-winded classified memos. But if the aim was to educate this new commander in chief, they couldn’t submit a fifty-page report entitled something like “Integrated National Strategy for Indo-Pacific Partnership and Defense,” expect him to read it, and then discuss it. That would be like speaking Aramaic to Trump through a pillow; even if he tried very hard to pay attention, which he didn’t, he wouldn’t be able to understand what the hell he was hearing.

It took a lot of trial and error for West Wing staff to realize there needed to be a change in the White House briefing process. Until that happened, officials would walk out of briefings frustrated. “He is the most distracted person I’ve ever met,” one of the president’s security lieutenants confessed. “He has no fucking clue what we are talking about!” More changes were ordered to cater to Trump’s peculiarities. Documents were dramatically downsized, and position papers became sound bites. As a result, complex proposals were reduced to a single page (or ideally a paragraph) and translated into Trump’s “winners and losers” tone.

Others discovered that if they walked into the Oval Office with a simple graphic that Trump liked, it would more than do the trick. We might hear about it for days, in fact. He would hold on to the picture, waving it around at us in meetings. “Did you see this? Can you believe this? This is beautiful. Something truly special. Dan!” He might summon the White House’s social media guru, who sits just outside the Oval Office. “Let’s tweet this out, okay? Here’s what I want to say…” That way the public would get to share in his excitement, too.

One graphic that left Trump spellbound was intended to explain certain government and industrial relationships. The basic depiction of interlocked gears, likely pulled from clip art, showed how different elements of the government bureaucracy depended on parts of the private sector. The president was so mesmerized that he showed it off to Oval Office visitors for no apparent reason, leaving us—and them—scratching our heads. Another time he became enamored with a parody poster in the style of Game of Thrones, with the words “Sanctions Are Coming,” overlaid on a photo of the president. This was meant to be a teaser for forthcoming Iran sanctions. Trump was elated and tweeted the image out to his followers at once, resulting in a cycle of memes mocking the graphic.

Seeing this type of behavior was both educating and jarring to the burgeoning Steady State. It was a visceral lesson that we weren’t just appointees of the president. We were glorified government babysitters.

The feeling of unease was cemented by having to deal with the president’s penchant for making major decisions with little forethought or discussion. These “five-alarm fire drills,” as I call them, seemed like a curse. When Trump wanted to do something, aides might only get a few hours’ notice from him before he announced it. They then launched a frenetic response effort, a race against the clock to reshape his views before the tweet went out. This could upend entire workdays. Over time, the last-minute warnings actually came to be seen as a luxury. It’s better to have a few hours—or minutes, for that matter—to intervene than have no opportunity at all to convince Trump to hit the brakes on a wacky or destructive idea. He’s less inclined to preview his decisions today.

Here is how it might play out in the early days of the administration: The president sees something on television. He doesn’t like it. It makes him think, “Maybe I should fire the secretary of commerce,” or “We should pull out of that treaty. It’s really a terrible treaty, after all.” He might tee up a tweet. Then he bounces it off of the next aide he talks to, who is stunned to discover that the terrible idea is tip-of-brain for the president of the United States, and might be on the brink of becoming reality. The aide finds the president disinterested in thinking through the consequences. “We’re going to do this today, okay? Tell Sean to get ready.” He wants Press Secretary Sean Spicer prepared to defend it to the death.

Staff throw up the Bat-Signal, calling a snap meeting or a teleconference. “He’s about to do something,” one warns the group, explaining what the president is about to announce.

“He can’t do this. We’ll all look like idiots, and he’ll get murdered for it in the press,” another exclaims.

“Yeah, well, I’m telling you he’s going to do it unless someone gets to him fast,” the first warns. “Can you cancel your afternoon?”

Officials rush back to the White House. The delicate Oval Office schedule is shattered to make way for an unexpected intervention, and top agency executives scrap meetings with foreign leaders, press conferences, and briefings to join the gathering. The conversation with the president is tense. He wants to do what he wants to do, consequences be damned. It isn’t beneath him to attack his own family members, too. “Jared, you don’t know what you’re talking about, okay? I mean seriously. You don’t know.” After some dire warnings (“Everyone will get subpoenaed”—“This will cost you dearly with working-class voters”—“This will put Americans in harm’s way”), he might show signs of reconsidering. Refusing to admit error, the president insists he still wants to go with his original plan, but he backs off temporarily or agrees to a less drastic measure, averting disaster for the moment.

These mini crises didn’t happen once or twice at the administration’s outset. They became the norm, a semi-regular occurrence with aftershocks that could be felt for days. Some aides grew so worn down by the roller coaster of presidential whims that they started encouraging him to hold more campaign rallies, putting aside the fact that it wasn’t campaign season. The events had the dual benefit of giving Trump something “fun” to do and also getting him out of town, where he would hypothetically do less damage. More public events were put on his schedule, allowing frayed nerves back in Washington the chance to recover.

Yet even when the president was convinced not to do something spontaneous and given a few days’ distance from the idea, he would still bring it back up when he got back to town. That’s the storyline of many of the anecdotes referenced in this book. It might be a desire to fire someone who’d only recently been confirmed by the Senate, like his Federal Reserve chairman, or an itch to issue an executive order to end a deal he hates, like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). His cyclical urges can’t be suppressed for long.

Steady Staters felt this was becoming a seesaw presidency.

The Broken Branch

Whether you were “all in” on the president’s agenda or not, one reality couldn’t be denied—lurching from one spontaneous decision to another was more than a distraction. The day-to-day management of the executive branch was falling apart before our eyes. Trump was all over the place. He was like a twelve-year-old in an air traffic control tower, pushing the buttons of government indiscriminately, indifferent to the planes skidding across the runway and the flights frantically diverting away from the airport. This was not how it was supposed to be.

Every White House in recent history instituted a deliberate process by which decisions were made and executed. Policies were carefully considered, final decisions were carried out with a step-by-step plan, partners at other levels of government were rarely caught off guard by White House positions, the paperwork and information the president received was properly vetted and fact-checked, and someone was in charge of overseeing hiring and firing. Family members were kept at a safe distance, and in cases where they participated in governing, like Bobby Kennedy, most had clearly defined roles. Great deference was given to ethics officials and the White House counsel’s office, who acted as watchdogs against inappropriate activities by members of the presidential staff. This was all undertaken to ensure the presidency was operating within or sometimes to the limit of its constitutional authorities and in compliance with federal laws. Not in the Trump administration. This approach was abandoned through inattention, intention, incompetence, or all three.

Fundamentally, the president never learned to manage the government’s day-to-day functions, or showed any real interest in doing so. This remains a problem. He doesn’t know how the executive branch works. As a consequence, he doesn’t know how to lead it. The policymaking process has suffered considerably. On any given issue—say, how to fix health care—there is daily confusion between departments and agencies about what the plan is and who is in charge. He tells the secretary of defense to do things that are the responsibility of the secretary of state. He tells the attorney general to do things that are the job of the director of National Intelligence. Sometimes he tells his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to do all of their jobs at once, including reimagining care for America’s veterans, negotiating Middle East peace, spearheading criminal justice reform, and undertaking delicate conversations with foreign allies.

Jared is a likable person, a youthful and energetic advisor and an empathetic listener. However, when the secretary of defense is cut out of Jared’s meetings regarding a crucial part of the world, or the national security advisor isn’t back-briefed on an important conversation Kushner has with a foreign ambassador, it can cause problems, sometimes big problems. It isn’t clear the president is satisfied that so many issues run through his son-in-law’s office, but the arrangement persists because Jared is careful to always demonstrate loyalty to his wife’s father, even at the expense of his standing among other top officials. Thus, the unclear and unhealthy lanes of authority persist.

The White House, quite simply, is broken. Policies are rarely coordinated or thoroughly considered. Major issues are neglected until a crisis develops. Because there is no consistent process, it is easy for the administration to run afoul of federal laws, ethics guidelines, and other norms of behavior. We will walk through a fraction of the mind-numbing examples in this book, but it will take many years to fully capture the scope of the unruliness.

There is no shortage of people, inside and outside the administration, who want to convince you and themselves that this is an act of three-dimensional chess. Trump is doing all of this for a reason. Just wait and see. It’s part of his genius. During the administration’s infancy, a handful of aides went as far as to argue that management-through-chaos was an asset. Among them was Stephen Miller, a senior advisor to the president and early campaign hand Trump inherited from Jeff Sessions. He is a hard-liner who developed a name for himself in certain Washington circles with his preachy warnings about illegal aliens and for filibustering on these themes in conversation. A cunning aide who relishes having the president wrapped around his finger on any number of issues, Miller back-channels his side of the story to the press, and works daily to outwit other aides who sit just down the hall from him. Like Jared, he is careful not to show daylight between himself and the president, for fear of losing his stature as a Trump whisperer.

Stephen has argued that Donald Trump’s impulses needed to be encouraged, not tempered. From the beginning, he agitated for the White House to “flood the zone” by issuing as many dramatic policy changes as possible, regardless of whether they would withstand legal scrutiny. It would shock the system and put “the opposition” (Democrats) on their heels, he contended. It would also create powerful distractions the White House could exploit, drawing fire away from the real policies hard-liners cared about. To Stephen, chaos is a deliberate governing strategy.

He is not alone in the misguided view. A now former top aide was fond of comparing the president to General George S. Patton. Contemporaries could never predict what Patton was going to say or do. “That’s how I like it,” General Patton is said to have remarked. He wanted to keep everyone, especially the enemy, on their toes. “That is the political genius of Trump,” the aide reminded us during a heated debate over a particularly troublesome presidential decision. “He is just like Patton.” The argument might have some merit, if the president displayed any sense that he knew what he was doing.

The Steady State grew more worried about the condition of the executive branch. The Patton approach doesn’t work in a democracy. It’s okay to leave foreign enemies on a battlefield confused about what you are planning, but not the American people or the Congress or your friends and allies. Officials decided they didn’t want the president’s willingness to play fast and loose with the powers of government to trickle down to lower levels of the bureaucracy, where they could infect the culture. Department and agency heads started insulating their operations from Trump’s whims and created separate discussion forums run outside of the White House. They confessed wariness about sending staff to the West Wing for meetings, not wanting more junior officials to see how bad it was or partake in the gross mismanagement.

It was getting ugly. As the old saying goes, this was no way to run a railroad. In fact, if railroads were run this way, trains would go in the wrong direction, or never show up at all, or crash into each other. The conductor would be unqualified, the engineer would be fired in the middle of a trip, and Chinese-built trains would zip right by us, watching the disaster with wonder at their unbelievable good fortune.

Putting out Fires

“Among us friends, let’s be honest,” a prominent presidential advisor once remarked, after the pro-chaos crowd left a White House meeting. The slimmed-down group was comprised of White House officials and cabinet secretaries. “About a third of the things the president wants us to do are flat-out stupid. Another third would be impossible to implement and wouldn’t even solve the problem. And a third of them would be flat-out illegal.” Heads nodded.

That day, the group was gathered to discuss a presidential proposal that fell into the first category. Trump wasn’t halfway through year one, and he wanted to shut down the government because he was unhappy with congressional budget negotiations. He’d been talking about it behind closed doors for weeks. Now he was bringing it up in press conferences and tweeted that the government needed a “good shutdown.” The president certainly had the constitutional right to do it. He could veto whatever spending bill was sent to his desk. But it was bound to be a political loser. Federal employees would be without pay, essential services would abruptly halt, and in the end we knew the Democrats were prepared to dig in harder. Picking this fight, advisors warned, could cost the party congressional seats in next year’s midterm election.

We tipped off Republican leaders in Congress that they needed to take it seriously. The president wasn’t just playing a game. “He’s crazy as a lunatic,” one West Wing advisor told the Speaker’s office. Paul Ryan’s team was exasperated and urged us to just “take the win” because they’d already gotten concessions from the Democrats in budget talks. Staff arranged for Trump to hear from Republican members of Congress. They warned him that he would be putting the party’s majority in jeopardy if he caused a shutdown at the end of the fiscal year. They helped persuade him that we would lose the fight and that it wasn’t worth it. The president reluctantly agreed and stood down.

For now, the Steady State had put out the fire, a duty that became an all-consuming function despite the day jobs we’d been hired for. But of course President Trump would revisit the idea of a government shutdown later on, seeking a different outcome.

In the second category—things that the president asks for that “would be impossible to implement and wouldn’t even solve the problem”—we found ourselves tamping down requests from the impractical to the disturbing.

Take February 2018, for instance, when the president proposed a way to end gun violence in our schools. He suggested to aides that weapons be given to all of America’s teachers so they could fight back against mass shooters. This was typical Trump. An idea was formed in the ether of his mind, and he decided it was brilliant because he thought of it. Most sane folks raised an eyebrow. The teachers we remembered tended to be gentler souls like Betty White, not Annie Oakley. We wanted to hand Betty and all of her colleagues a pistol? When this idea seemed unpalatable to us, he ratcheted it back to 20 percent of educators—a figure that seems to have just popped into his head. With 3.7 million teachers in the United States, that would still mean training or putting guns in the hands of nearly a million of them. As Steady Staters tried to explain, this would be wildly impractical and would undoubtedly make the gun violence situation more contentious.

The president took the idea public anyway. “So let’s say you had 20 percent of your teaching force, because that’s pretty much the number,” Trump said, describing the plan. “If you had a teacher who was adept at firearms, they could very well end the attack very quickly.” It was time for all of us to reenact the daily face-palm ritual. It wasn’t that everyone thought having armed and trained officials in schools was bad, it’s just that the president had no conception of what was doable and what was nuts.

One Harvard gun violence expert summed up the public reaction: “It’s a crazy proposal. So what should we do about reducing airline hijacking? Give all the passengers guns as they walk on?”

Fortunately, the idea was dropped because no one else took it seriously, much like the president’s claim that he would be the citizen-hero if he was on the scene of a school massacre. “I really believe I’d run in there, even if I didn’t have a weapon,” he claimed. We couldn’t contain our laughter.

Most concerning are the one-third of “things the president wants us to do [that] would be flat-out illegal.” In fairness, when Trump suggests doing something unlawful, it’s not necessarily nefarious. More often than not, it’s because he doesn’t understand the limits of federal law. He might order an agency to stop spending money on something he dislikes, not knowing he generally can’t cut off funds Congress has already approved. For instance, Trump has repeatedly tried to stop the flow of aid to countries overseas, complaining we are wasting money that should be spent at home. His demands began within weeks of taking office and only got worse when he got briefed about US activities in places such as Africa and Southeast Asia to fight deadly diseases or to invest in activities that are designed to protect US economic interests. “Why the hell are we spending so much money there?” he’d demand, directing officials to stop the programs altogether, which of course they couldn’t do. They’d explain to him that only Congress could make those cuts. He’d say he didn’t care and to do it anyway, but then he’d appear to drop it for the time being. In other cases he thought of the funds as bargaining chips, as in the case of money earmarked by Congress to go to Ukraine, and tried to pause the funds for whatever purpose suited him at the moment, perhaps until he got something he wanted in return.

Or he might tell one of his departments to take an action the law explicitly forbids. This happens a lot with acquisitions. The president inserts himself regularly into discussions about Pentagon purchases, forgetting that the US government isn’t like the private sector, where he can pick a favorite contractor based on personal preferences. He memorably came into office determined to negotiate costs down for the next-generation Air Force One (which he claimed he successfully accomplished, though that’s actually not what happened). To prevent corrupt practices, agreements for the purchase of new aircraft or defense technologies often must be advertised and bid competitively, with strict selection criteria. The president can’t just jump into the fray and pick his favorite company. Once these limitations are explained to him for the umpteenth time, he’ll usually (begrudgingly) relent.

“The president will let me do whatever the hell I want,” a newly minted cabinet secretary remarked after receiving an inappropriate request from Trump. Walking out of the West Wing, he paused and turned around, adding, “That’s why I have to take this job extra seriously.” The president doesn’t police bad behavior in his cabinet, he encourages it. Aides have to self-police.

Other presidential orders cannot be written off to ignorance. This dilemma occurs frequently on the hot-button issue of immigration. The president gets animated on the subject, to say the least, and somehow it’s become a part of all of our lives, even when it’s not in our respective portfolios. Almost anything, any issue, and problem can be tied back to immigration in his mind.

At one point, Trump warmed to a new idea for solving what he viewed as the biggest crisis in American history: to label migrants as “enemy combatants.” Keep in mind this is the same designation given to hardcore terrorist suspects. If we said these illegals were a national security threat, Trump reasoned, then the administration had an excuse to keep all of them out of the country. It was unclear if someone had planted this in his head or whether he had come up with it on his own, but either way, advisors were mortified.

Trump toyed with the shocking proposal in meetings having nothing to do with the subject, asking random advisors what they thought. Word got around. It’s times like these when people freeze and don’t know what to say. They’ll give him one of those polite smiles reserved for a deranged relative who thinks you want to hear about his soul-searching solo retreat to the Rockies. Not receiving too much resistance, Trump went further and mused about shipping the migrants to Guantanamo Bay, where hardened terrorists were jailed. In his mind, the deterrent would be a powerful one: Come to the United States illegally, and you will be sent to a remote US detention facility in Cuba to live alongside murderous criminals.

The rumor escaped the confines of the White House. “Are you fucking kidding me?” one career State Department official blurted when informed of the proposal. “This is completely batshit.” Advisors worked to shut it down quickly and quietly. They argued it was wildly impractical (how could you ship thousands of migrants a day to Cuba?) and too expensive (Trump often was persuaded against something if he thought it was too pricey, ironic for someone who is driving the country deeply into debt). Left unsaid was the more obvious reason. It was truly insane, on its face, for America to send migrant children and families to a terrorist prison in Cuba.

Finally, aside from its ineffectiveness and moral offensiveness, the policy would be outright illegal. Migrants seeking shelter in the United States are not “enemy combatants.” They are not engaged in hostilities against the United States on behalf of foreign states or terror groups, even though the president and his border agencies like to insinuate that the throngs of arriving migrants could have dangerous militants in their midst. Rational people know that the vast majority are innocent people trying to get to America for a better life. Despite the president’s recurring desire to do so, the law cannot be shaped like Play-Doh and made to say whatever he wants it to say. Before the president could make a public case for the concept, officials quashed it.

Or did they? That’s the question with any of the above ideas. You never really know if the fire has been put out completely. There may still be hot embers. Glimpses of them will appear in press conferences and off-the-cuff presidential statements. Then, one afternoon, the blaze might come roaring back, such as Trump’s recurring demands for one-on-one meetings with the world’s most brutal dictators. On some days, the return of a half-baked suggestion is harmless. On other days, it would cost the president his office if it was carried out. Ironically, many of those who worked to protect the president from losing his job became some of the people he was most interested in firing.

Dismantling the Guardrails

Donald Trump built his reality television career on the image of a tough boss. The immortal words “you’re fired!” became associated with Trump himself, establishing a unique place in the public lexicon. The president relishes this image and brought it with him into the White House. He keeps officials on their toes by wondering aloud about their tenure within his administration. He fans the flames of gossip about potential firings, often starting the rumors himself by complaining about his aides, knowing listeners will spread the word.

Officials are perpetually on “deathwatch,” as it is known inside the administration, waiting for that assassination tweet to come. Every week there is a new potential victim. For a president known for demanding loyalty pledges, this is a pernicious way of making sure staff do what he wants, by reminding them that the ax could come down at any time.

He publicly teased the possibility of firings after the midterm elections. “I have a fantastic cabinet,” he told reporters when asked about a shake-up, but added, “There are a few positions I am thinking about… I could leave it the way things are now and be very happy with it, or make changes and maybe be even happier with those positions.” Trump let some of the names leak into the press. Really, he wanted everyone to be concerned they were in the crosshairs.

No one is immune, including those he has known for years. One day, Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin was the target of presidential ire for failing to follow through on an impossible task Trump assigned to him. The president wanted Mnuchin to use his powers to levy a new tax on certain types of financial transactions. The secretary explained repeatedly why he couldn’t do what was being demanded, but Trump complained behind his back.

“Every time I ask Mnuchin about this, he’s got another excuse. ‘We can’t do this, we can’t do that,’” he said, half faking the voice of Mnuchin, a man he has known for close to two decades. “What good is he? I thought we had the right guy at Treasury. But now I don’t know. Maybe not so much. What do you think—personnel mistake?” He likes to poll the room when someone is on the ropes. People laugh or offer approving facial expressions, usually relieved that the anvil isn’t hovering over their own head.

Trump will leave people in the lurch for weeks, months, or longer. He notoriously kept Kirstjen Nielsen, his homeland security chief, flummoxed about whether and when she might get sacked. For Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, his time in limbo was far longer. Rumors trickled out periodically for years that the president was dissatisfied and might be considering a change. The West Wing corner office that belongs to the national security advisor appears to be the most cursed, as all of its occupants under Trump have dealt with regular speculation from down the hall about whether their time has come.

The president considered making changes to the top of the ticket, too. On more than one occasion, Trump has discussed with staff the possibility of dropping Vice President Pence in advance of the 2020 election. Although Mr. Pence has been loyal to a fault, the president is always eager to “shake things up,” and Trump’s view of loyalty, of course, is self-serving to the extreme. Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley was under active consideration to step in as vice president, which she did not discourage at first. Some of Trump’s closest advisors have suggested she would help shore up the president’s unpopularity with women, which demonstrates how little this White House understands women in the first place.

Trump avoids directly firing people, contrary to his television image. Instead he takes the cowardly way out and cuts them loose by way of social media. In July of 2017, he got rid of his first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, with a tweet. Priebus expected to be removed and personally offered to resign, but he didn’t know his canning was imminent. After returning from a trip to New York, the president tweeted out, “I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F. Kelly as White House chief of staff. He is a great American…” Reince was sitting yards away in the presidential motorcade in the rain when he got the news. The president had not yet departed Air Force One. Another humiliating spectacle.

Incredibly, the first official duty of the new chief of staff was to get rid of someone else the president wouldn’t fire himself, Anthony Scaramucci, the short-lived White House communications director. The day he was sworn in, John Kelly told Scaramucci his eleven-day tenure was finished. It wouldn’t be the last time he’d have to deliver bad news that Trump wouldn’t.

Kelly’s ascent to the White House was generally met with optimism, albeit with pockets of trepidation from those who sensed he wasn’t as politically astute as others on the team. Regardless, officials prayed for a new sense of order. They got it for a time. Access to the president was more tightly controlled, preventing unnecessary distractions. The day became more structured. The new chief of staff was also willing to be frank with the president when Trump lurched toward a bad decision. As a result, the anxiety level went down a few notches, and a false sense of security set in.

Kelly also tried to curb ad-hoc decision making and spontaneous presidential directives. John told agency heads he was establishing a system to make sure the president heard all sides of a debate so he could make informed choices. That usually required pleading for time with the commander in chief so that a subject could be considered at lower levels of government and fleshed out into a set of sensible options.

Afghanistan was a prime example. Donald Trump announced before his presidency that the United States should pull out of this “total disaster” and “endless” war. Once in office, he didn’t seem interested in contrary opinions. Security officials feared that pulling out suddenly would plunge Afghanistan back into chaos, and they urged him not to make a wartime decision right away. They persuaded him to wait. In the meantime, a process was put in place to develop options, which were battle-tested by the national security team.

Toward the end of the summer, a special Camp David retreat was organized to walk the president through the proposals. Trump was starting to allow Kelly to manage the process—and to manage him. The results were atypical. The team laid out the pros and cons of each option over the course of an hours-long discussion. Trump asked tough questions, and he got nuanced answers. The conversation was mostly cool-headed, organized, and rational. It was everything other decisions hadn’t been. In the end, the president agreed to a more thoughtful strategy focused on a long-term solution, rather than immediate withdrawal or capitulation to the murderous Taliban regime. Steady Staters silently declared victory. Maybe the administration could be stabilized after all.

Of course, as we all feared, the newfound sense of order didn’t last long. Trump grew to despise the insinuation that he needed to be managed at all and began circumventing the new structures that had been put in place. As spring 2018 rolled around, the president agitated for additional personnel changes in his still-young administration. Top advisors were forced to spend inordinate time persuading the president not to fire fellow members of his team, usually the ones who were more comfortable telling him “No.” Over time, a feeling of insecurity returned to the administration, and the Steady State recognized that Trump’s demeanor couldn’t be moderated.

It got harder and harder to convince the president to avoid reckless decisions. Improving the “process” wasn’t a durable solution. It was just a wet Band-Aid that wouldn’t hold together a gaping wound. We realized as year two wore on that we couldn’t rely on any system to instill in the president the leadership traits he’d never developed. We returned to running interference against gross impulsivity, confronting each third-rate presidential contrivance as it came and trying to make the best of it.

Senior advisors and cabinet-level officials pondered a mass resignation, a “midnight self-massacre,” as noted earlier, to draw the public’s attention to the disarray. At any given time during the Trump administration, there are at least a handful of top aides on the brink of resigning, either out of principle or exhaustion. Several departure timelines appeared to be converging in 2018, creating the possibility for a simultaneous walkout to prove our point about the president’s faltering administration. Every time this was contemplated, it was rejected. The move was deemed too risky because it would shake public confidence and destabilize an already teetering government. We also didn’t want to litter the executive branch with vacancies. Maybe, we thought, it could still get better. It didn’t. It went downhill, and the vacancies followed anyway.

Disaffected officials were picked off by the president, one by one. Trump is adept at identifying anyone with an independent streak who might challenge him. Others departed of their own accord. The ranks of experienced leaders started thinning fast. Economic advisor Gary Cohn announced his resignation shortly after the one-year mark. Then the president fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Then he forced out national security advisor H. R. McMaster, followed by homeland security advisor Tom Bossert. Then UN ambassador Nikki Haley said she was resigning. Then the president fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Then he announced that John Kelly would be out the door soon. Then Jim Mattis resigned. And with the New Year approaching, more heads were reported to be on the chopping block.

As 2018 came to a close, the president could scarcely find a replacement chief of staff. Trump was in crisis mode when his first and only choice for the job, Pence aide Nick Ayers, declined. Once Ayers was out, Trump turned to Chris Christie. After Christie showed disinterest, Trump finally settled on budget director Mick Mulvaney, but only in an “acting” capacity. Such is life in the Trump White House that what is usually the most coveted and powerful staff job in Washington cannot be reliably filled and, when it is, only by a temporary figure. Smart candidates know that the president’s whims become his chief’s life, and the person is never really in charge. Trump’s children are his chiefs of staff. Random Fox News hosts are his chiefs of staff. Everyone is the chief of staff but the chief of staff. It’s no wonder people aren’t jumping at the opportunity.

The high rate of turnover was a direct result of the president’s leadership. He ejected people who were willing to stand up to him. He got bored with officials who weren’t dynamic enough or didn’t defend him on television. Some escaped the administration because of policy differences, and still others departed to avoid what they perceived to be an inevitably sinking ship. For certain people, it was a combination of all of these factors. John Bolton, Trump’s third national security advisor, saved the president many times from irresponsible decisions but grew weary of the turbulence and Trump’s fumbling in foreign policy. He resigned of his own volition, but the president still tried to make it look like a firing.

Trump is not bothered by an administration strewn with vacancies. In fact, he says, it’s good to have “acting” officials in the top slots. “My ‘actings’ are doing really great,” he told reporters. “I sort of like ‘acting.’ It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that? I like ‘acting.’ So we have a few that are ‘acting.’ We have a great, great cabinet.” Translation: Acting officials are less inclined to ask questions and more inclined to do what they are told. This best explains the slow but systematic purge of the Steady State. With the guardrails disappearing, the road ahead looked all the more ominous.

“God grant that men of principle be our principal men,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote.

Good people are needed in government to administer our laws. But the Founders did not want us to put our faith in them exclusively. Public servants are corruptible and expendable. As we will discuss later, that’s why the Founders proposed a system of checks and balances, so that negative human impulses would be ameliorated and the power of one branch would be kept in line by another.

Awful ideas are seeping out of the White House at high volume with the ranks of the clear-eyed depleted. Fewer people speak up these days in meetings, and increasingly the voices in Donald Trump’s ear are only those who tell him what he wants to hear. If ever there was a victim of confirmation bias—the tendency to search for information that validates one’s preexisting beliefs, even if they are wrong—it is him. The danger is that President Trump runs the most powerful government on earth and cannot afford to be without dissenting opinions. Yet the Oval Office has become an echo chamber.

I was wrong about the “quiet resistance” inside the Trump administration. Unelected bureaucrats and cabinet appointees were never going to steer Donald Trump in the right direction in the long run, or refine his malignant management style. He is who he is. Americans should not take comfort in knowing whether there are so-called adults in the room. We are not bulwarks against the president and shouldn’t be counted upon to keep him in check. That is not our job. That is the job of the voters and their elected representatives.

Americans’ faith in the executive branch should be measured by their faith in the president himself and him alone, not by functionaries in his administration whose names never appeared on the ballot. So that begs the question: Who is he?