Fear: Trump in the White House

“Exactly,” Cohn said. “So your retail space today is services. It’s not people selling shoes, or hard goods, or white goods. This is what America is today. So if we’re 80-plus percent services, if we spend less and less money on goods, we have more disposable income to spend on services or do something miraculous called savings.”

Cohn found he almost had to shout to be heard. “Look,” he said, “the only time that our trade deficit goes down” were times like the financial crisis in 2008. “Our trade deficit goes down because our economy’s contracting. If you want our trade deficit to go down, we can make that happen. Let’s just blow up the economy!”

On the other hand, Cohn said, if they did it his way—no tariffs, no quotas, no protectionism, no trade wars—“if we do things right, our trade deficit’s going to get bigger.”

And when the trade deficit got bigger each month, Cohn went to Trump, who grew more and more agitated.

“Sir, I told you this was going to happen,” Cohn said. “This is a good sign. It’s not a bad sign.”

“I went to parts of Pennsylvania,” the president said, “that used to be big steel towns and now they’re desolate towns and no one had a job and no one has work there.”

“That may be true, sir,” Cohn said. “But remember there were towns 100 years ago that made horse carriages and buggy whips. No one had a job either. They had to reinvent themselves. You go to states like Colorado, you’ve got 2.6 unemployment rate because they keep reinventing themselves.”

Trump did not like, or buy, any of the arguments. “It has nothing to do with it,” Trump said.

Cohn brought in Lawrence B. Lindsey, a Harvard economist who had held Cohn’s job under President George W. Bush. Lindsey bluntly asked, Why are you spending any time thinking about our trade deficit? You should be thinking about the economy as a whole. If we can buy cheap products abroad and we can excel in other areas—service and high-tech products—that should be the focus. The global marketplace provided immense benefits to Americans.

“Why don’t we manufacture things at home?” Lindsey asked. “We’re a manufacturing country.”

Of course the United States manufactured things, but reality did not match the vision in Trump’s mind. The president clung to an outdated view of America—locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines.

Cohn assembled every piece of economic data available to show that American workers did not aspire to work in assembly factories.

Each month Cohn brought Trump the latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, called JOLTS, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He realized he was being an asshole by rubbing it in because each month was basically the same, but he didn’t care.

“Mr. President, can I show this to you?” Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president. “See, the biggest leavers of jobs—people leaving voluntarily—was from manufacturing.”

“I don’t get it,” Trump said.

Cohn tried to explain: “I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?”

Cohn added, “People don’t want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don’t want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal dollars, they’re going to choose something else.”

Trump wasn’t buying it.

Several times Cohn just asked the president, “Why do you have these views?”

“I just do,” Trump replied. “I’ve had these views for 30 years.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re right,” Cohn said. “I had the view for 15 years I could play professional football. It doesn’t mean I was right.”

Staff secretary Rob Porter had been hired by Priebus. He came into the job with five-star recommendations from people who had served as staff secretaries to Republican presidents. Priebus had required Porter almost to sign a blood oath of loyalty to him. “It’s great you went to Harvard, Oxford; you’re smart and everybody vouches for you. But what really matters to me is that you’re going to be loyal to me.”

Porter had overlapped at Harvard with Jared Kushner, who had taken a class there taught by Porter’s father, Roger Porter, who had served on the staffs of Presidents Ford, the first Bush and Reagan. Jared and Porter met during the transition for about two hours. The first hour also seemed like a loyalty test.

Trump had great instincts and was a political genius, Kushner said, but he was going to take some getting used to. “You’re going to have to learn how to handle him. How to relate to him.”

Though he had not been a Trump supporter during the 2016 campaign, Porter had accepted the job. By Inauguration Day he had not yet met Trump. During the speech Porter sat behind the podium and winced when Trump invoked “American carnage.” He left two thirds of the way through the speech so he could begin his duties and meet the new president.