Fear: Trump in the White House

“Gary Cohn can’t do it,” Porter said, “because he’s a self-identified globalist. Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross would never let him be an honest broker coordinator of anything, and would never respect it.” And “He doesn’t want to do it anyway.”

“Well,” Priebus said, adopting Trump’s management habit of picking the person in the room, the closest at hand, “why don’t you do it?”

So Porter, the 39-year-old staff secretary with no previous experience in the executive branch, became the coordinator for trade policy and took charge of one of the major pillars and promises of the Trump presidency.

Porter began chairing 9:30 a.m. trade meetings every Tuesday in the Roosevelt Room. He invited all interested parties. Priebus gave it his blessing but did not announce anything. It just happened. Soon half a dozen cabinet secretaries and more senior staffers were showing up.

Trump later found out about the Tuesday meetings because he was talking to Porter so much on trade. Porter had developed a close enough relationship with the president, and had spent enough time with him, that all the others apparently thought his authority to chair trade coordination had come from the president.

In the meantime, Robert Lighthizer, a Washington lawyer and former deputy in Reagan’s trade office, was confirmed on May 11 as the U.S. trade representative. He was the person who was supposed to be in charge of trade issues.

On July 17, Lighthizer and Navarro brought a large poster to show Trump in the Oval Office, a brightly colored collection of boxes and arrows titled “The Trade Agenda Timeline.” It was a vision of a protectionist Trump trade agenda with 15 projected dates to start renegotiations or take action on the South Korea KORUS trade deal, NAFTA, and to launch investigations and actions regarding aluminum, steel and automobile parts. It proposed imposing steel tariffs in less than two months, after Labor Day.

Navarro and Lighthizer began the presentation. Trump seemed very interested.

Porter arrived several minutes after and soon began objecting strenuously, calling Lighthizer and Navarro out on their process foul. Since March 22, when he had spelled out the rules in a three-page memo, Priebus had required formal paperwork for presidential meetings and decisions. The memo said in bold,“Decisions are not final—and therefore may not be implemented—until the staff secretary files a vetted decision memorandum signed by the President.”

Knowing how the Trump White House worked, the memo also said in bold, “On-the-fly decisions are strictly provisional.”

Porter said that several of the actions on the poster required congressional authorization. “You don’t have authority,” he told the president.

There had been no attempt to coordinate the arguments. “Peter and Bob represent one viewpoint,” Porter said. “You need to get the viewpoint of Commerce [Wilbur Ross]. You need to get the viewpoint of Treasury [Mnuchin]. You need to get the viewpoint of the National Economic Council [Cohn]. We need to vet and have a process.”

For the moment, but only for that moment, the trade issues gave way to process. Nothing moved forward.

CHAPTER

18

By spring, Bannon saw that the constant disorder at the White House wasn’t helping him or anyone. “You’re in charge,” Bannon told Priebus. “I’m going through you. No more of me doing my own thing.” A chief of staff who was not in charge had become too disruptive even for certified disrupter and loner Steve Bannon.

It was a major concession that Jared and Ivanka would not make. They were their own silo in Priebus’s view. He could not get them into some orderly program. The whole arrangement was hurting everyone. It was hurting him. Hurting them.

“You don’t think they should be here?” Trump asked several times.

No, they shouldn’t, Priebus answered each time. But nothing happened. He believed he could go no further to try to oust Trump’s daughter and son-in-law from the West Wing. No one could fire the family. That was not going to happen.

The president would go as far as to say a number of times, “Jared and Ivanka are moderate Democrats from New York.” It was more description than complaint.

Bannon was convinced that Jared had leaked a recent story to Britain’s Daily Mail about Trump blowing up at him and Priebus and blocking them from traveling on Air Force One to Florida. It wasn’t true they had been kicked off the trip. Both had declined to travel that day. “You fucking set me up,” he said to Kushner. “You trashed Reince in this story. And I know you did it.”