The Best People

The White House

February 19, 2019

He loved the job. He was very clear about that. He said it enough times that I started to entertain the notion that he was halfway serious. Certainly, that would be news to the pundits who said he'd rather be golfing in South Florida than trying to tame North Korea. And to the Democrats who figured that impeachment would be a favor, since he seemed as thrilled by his presidency as they were. It was not so, he said. "Those are just the haters and losers," explained President Donald J. Trump with that special Queens charm of his, when we met in the Oval Office to discuss the first two years of his administration. "I love it. I enjoy it."

But he didn't have to do it, see? He'd had options, had them still. "They offered me everything to not run and to do The Apprentice," he said later, referencing the television program that was at least partly responsible for the fact that Trump was now sitting where John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan once sat. "If you check the ratings on The Apprentice," he said some time after that, "through the roof. Big hit."

He was indignant, though this too bore a touch of his New York shtick, the elaborate act that was Trump. Not that the indignation was feigned. He didn't need to explain himself to this journalist he didn't know, for a book he would never read. "I'd be doing it right now," he said of The Apprentice, "but I like this better."

To show how much he loved the job, and to supply evidence of the many accomplishments that love had yielded, Trump summoned his executive assistant Madeleine Westerhout, asking her to bring him a list of his administration's achievements. "In the first two years, this administration has done more than any other administration in the history of our country," Trump said with typical immodesty as he sat beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

Westerhout came into the Oval Office—where I was sitting with Trump, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and senior adviser Kellyanne Conway—setting some papers on the edge of the Resolute Desk, whose surface was otherwise almost complete bare. Trump examined the papers, then showed them to me. The glossy sheets were filled with what was obviously an East Asian script. Trump explained that this was a letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, with whom the president was about to hold a second summit in Vietnam.

"That's actually dated," the president said of the letter. "It's pretty amazing."

This wasn't the right evidence, but for him it was evidence all the same, in this case that he would make peace where others would stumble ineptly into nuclear cataclysm. "You would have been at war. If I didn't get elected, you'd be at war right now with North Korea," he told me. "If 'Crooked Hillary' were President right now, you'd be fighting. She would be sleeping and you would be fighting a war. She'd be upstairs sleeping, resting, to gain her strength for a two-hour day."

He still called her that, Crooked Hillary. The election was now more than two years ago and still he called her that. Because the election was not really over for him, would never be over. It was the victory beyond all victories, a triumph not only over Clinton but something much grander than that, as far as he and his supporters were concerned. The forces aligned against him on the morning of November 8, 2016, were no weaker as we sat talking in the Oval Office on February 19, 2019. If anything, they were stronger, precisely because he was in the Oval Office, despite predictions that he would not last a single full year as president.

Finally, the correct list was brought, three thick pages of bullet points titled "TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ACCOMPLISHMENTS." Those accomplishments included the creation of 5.3 million jobs and other broadly auspicious economic indicators. Some of those indicators had started trending upward during the Obama presidency, but that was neither here nor there (certainly, it wasn't on the list). There were other claims on the list, like the one about declining drug prices in 2018, that have been adjudicated to be untrue. Others, like withdrawal from the "job-killing" Paris climate accords and cancelling the "illegal" Clean Power Plan, may have been accomplishments to Trump's base. To many others, these were terrible mistakes.

He also boasted about opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil drilling, which he did by attaching a rider to the 2017 tax bill and in effect sneaking the measure through Congress. "Nobody could get it," Trump boasted. "I got it." And he did so despite "the environmental problems" being much worse than they had been in the past. Wait a fucking second: Had the president just admitted, however inadvertently, that global warming was real? It certainly seemed that way: one small step for mankind, one giant step for Donald Trump.

Trump knew that I was interested in his cabinet, in the men and women he had hired to execute his agenda. I had quite a bit of skepticism about that agenda, though there were parts of Trump's program—reviving manufacturing, improving infrastructure—that would have benefited all Americans, were he only able to make them reality. So far, they remained campaign promises, the stuff of political fiction.

Trump's cabinet had instead undertaken a program that vacillated between maliciousness and self-interest. Sometimes this was done with license from Trump, sometimes without. In either case, it often ran counter to the populism that had elevated Trump above his Republican competitors and then, in the general election, over Clinton.

For the best people, there was another list. The president consulted it. He liked what he saw.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: "has been fantastic."

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao: "has been great."

Labor Secretary Alex Acosta: "has been great."

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson: "has done a very good job."

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar: "fantastic."

Energy Secretary Rick Perry: "has been great."

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue: "he's been great."

Attorney General William Barr: "will be…really outstanding."

White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney: "People are liking him a lot. I think he's doing a good job. I'm very happy with him."

Trump did allow that there had been "some clinkers," by which he presumably meant people like Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt and HHS head Tom Price, both of whom left the administration in disgrace, as did several other of their colleagues.

"But that's okay," he said of hiring men and women who turned out to be less than they seemed and less than he'd hoped. "Who doesn't?" True enough. But there's a difference between a clinker and a thief, a man who is no good at his job and a man who sets out to do that job poorly. The total number of investigations into unethical or improper conduct by members of the Trump cabinet easily tops fifty. Clinkers don't usually require so much scrutiny.

"It's very difficult for people," Trump said, as if feeling the need to apologize for some of the people who work or once worked for him (not that the president ever actually apologizes). "Some people can't take it. As much as they want to, they can't take it." Conversely, some thought that Trump's people have done rather too much taking it, not nearly enough giving of the kind public service usually demands.

For the most part, Trump stayed in salesman's mode during our conversation. He is always selling, even if we have already bought—however reluctantly and regretfully—the thing he has been hawking, even if it is obviously improbable that he believes a pompous grifter like Ben Carson will help return the nation to greatness. 

"There are those that say we have one of the finest cabinets," Trump claimed. That is not a commonly held view. In fact, I can't think of anyone even halfway credible who has said anything approaching that. Even some of Trump's most ardent supporters have expressed dismay at the people he has hired, which is why it fell to Fox News prime time anchor Laura Ingraham to push Trump to fire Pruitt. And as much as his detractors despise Trump, they despise the people he has brought into his administration even more.

"They're really talented people," Trump said, but he did not seem to believe it. He later did acknowledge that "some of them got burned out." That seemed closer to the truth, if not quite all the way there.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. During the presidential campaign, Trump had promised to hire people utterly free of self-interest, people fully committed to his populist agenda. People for whom self-dealing and personal enrichment would be utterly anathema because they were so utterly committed to carrying out the populist vision of Trump and his campaign manager Steve Bannon.

Trump admitted that, during the presidential transition, he allowed himself to be influenced by outside groups, whether the Heritage Foundation or energy magnate Robert E. Murray. "I wouldn't say that I agreed with all of the people," he told me, "but I let them make their decision. In some cases, I was right." As for the other cases? Well, he left that unsaid.

Once he got into office, Trump quickly signed a stern ethics order that seemed to close the notorious revolving door that allowed people to move freely between working for the federal government and lobbying the federal government on behalf of private interests. But he just as quickly granted waivers that allowed political appointees to violate the rules that Trump had just put in place. Promising to drain the swamp, he merely stirred its murky surface.

When I confronted him with this fact, Trump bristled. "We need certain people to run the country well, at the top level," he argued. "We have granted waivers. How often do we grant waivers? Have you seen? Not too much, right?" At the same time, he seemed clearly discomfited by the fact that where Trump saw a political movement, others saw nothing but a means for profit. He did not know, for example, that Ryan Zinke, the Interior secretary he had fired the previous December, had joined Turnberry Solutions, a Capitol Hill lobbying firm started by Corey Lewandowski, Trump's first campaign manager.

"I didn't know that Zinke…" Trump began.

In fact, Trump didn't know at all about the existence of Turnberry Solutions. "That's an interesting name," he said sharply. The name was interesting because Turnberry was also the name of a Trump-owned golf course in Scotland. Nobody who wanted to exert influence in Washington would have missed the association. "That's amazing," the president said, though his amazement was plainly not of the happy variety.

Trump tried to rationalize how Zinke becoming a lobbyist did not fly in the face of the promises he had made as a candidate. "I guess you can't stop people from going out and doing what they do," the president said. "In some cases, they've been here from day one, when people said I didn't have much of a chance. Then they work for years. Then all of a sudden they're in a position where people are calling them because they think they're geniuses and they want them to work for them. That's been going on from George Washington until the present, let's face it. That's what happens."

Zinke wasn't the only one. Five days before we spoke, ProPublica had found that there were 33 former Trump administration officials who were either lobbying the federal government or were more or less doing the work of a lobbyist without actually registering as such. And it was true that lobbying was as old as the republic itself, but had not Trump's promise been that his administration would be unlike any other? He wanted to claim that he was exceptional, except for those instances when it suited him to claim that he was just like his predecessors.

There was also the matter of more than one hundred key administration positions that remained unfilled. These needed Senate confirmation, and though some nominees have withdrawn, many of those positions never had a nominee in the first place, allowing some agencies and departmental offices to languish like unwatered plants.

Trump contradicted this, unsurprisingly. "I have 10 people for every job," he added. "The hard part is choosing, because I have great people."

Everything was great in Trumpland, especially Trump himself. America was great again, as were its constituent parts: "the hottest economy ever," "a lot of great trade," a "great relationship" with Kim of North Korea, "great success" in fighting the Islamic State stemming from Trump's visit to Iraq. "I think I'm doing great service for the country," Trump said. There was the matter of "the Russian bullshit witch hunt," but as Trump said, "I think we're doing nicely on that one, too." He did not explain what was nice about the way he had handled the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who some thought was going to bring down the Trump administration.

Then it was time to go. Trump complained about the books that had been written about him, which he said were uniformly unfair, though he also did not appear to have read any of them. He called Michael Wolff "a dopey guy," referring to the journalist's book as "Sound and Fury," apparently conflating Wolff's book, Fire and Fury, with a William Faulkner novel.

Trump also became upset at senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, who was sitting in on the meeting, for apparently keeping Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward from interviewing the president for his own book, Fear, which was also critical of Trump. "Kellyanne didn't tell me he asked ten times for a meeting. I wish she did," he said bitterly of Conway. "I'm sure it would have been a little bit of a different book." This obviously bothered him. "You should have told me," he went on. "Honestly, you should have told me."

Conway just sat there, taking it as she has doubtlessly taken it from the boss many times before. You couldn't last in this administration unless you were willing to take it daily, take it with a smile and a "yessir," take it even while knowing that much of the country loathed you, considered you complicit in one of the great political crimes in American history. And you would take it in this way that Conway was taking it now only if you truly believed in the man who was giving it, in his vision for the country. Unless, of course, there was something in it for you. There was that, too, sometimes.

It was now late afternoon, a winter dusk descending on Washington. On Capitol Hill, members of Congress were debating Trump's declaration of an emergency at the border with Mexico, and outside the gates of the White House, protesters were denouncing the same, mingling with religious pamphleteers and tourists in Make America Great Again hats. On any given day, you could stand out on Pennsylvania Avenue and watch the gorgeous squalor that was American democracy at work. If you stood there long enough, you might be converted into a Jehovah's Witness, or a member of the anti-Trump resistance, but would you be any closer to understanding what all of it meant, what any of it meant?

These were questions for another time. I rose to go.

"Get the hell out of here, now," the president told me. "All right. Good. Have a good time."