The Highest Calling, page 46
DR: So he wins the election. Is he shocked that he wins that night?
MH: Yes. He will say he wasn’t, but yes, he was.
DR: The next day, does he say, “The stars have fallen and I now have the burden of the world on my shoulders”? Is he worried about it or not worried?
MH: No. He says, “How cool is this? Look at this thing that just happened. Look at what I won. All these people are calling me. The leader of this country is calling me, the leader of that one is calling me.” The Japanese prime minister calls. “Here, talk to Ivanka.” That literally happened. He wasn’t looking at it the way somebody else would.
DR: Two days or three days later, he has a meeting in the Oval Office, a traditional meeting that the new president gets with the outgoing president. What was that like? He looked like he was a little bit intimidated.
MH: Obama came away struck by how little Trump knew. I think Obama was trying to impress upon him what the challenges were. They talked about North Korea in particular. And Trump was completely jarred by what he heard and by realizing the enormity of this job.
DR: We had never had a president before who had not served in the government, either in the military or in some civilian part. So he had a lot of learning to do in the transition. Who ran the transition for him?
MH: Initially the transition was run by Chris Christie. It was a sort of a consolation prize after not being picked to be running mate, or was in concert with that moment in time. Christie got fired from the transition within two days of the election.
DR: Why was that?
MH: Because Bannon and Jared and Reince Priebus wanted Christie out and they wanted to run what the jobs were going to be and who was being put in certain places. It was the three of them.
DR: What was the cabinet selection process like there? Was there a pre-election transition effort that had a lot of potential names?
MH: Some of the names had been in rotation previously, but then they ended up in different jobs. Jeff Sessions would be a good example. A lot of names were being offered to Trump by various people he knew in New York or he knew in Republican Party circles. Mitch McConnell was making suggestions. It was not a formal, typical process, and Jared was running his own process at the same time.
DR: So the transition moves forward and ultimately Trump is ready for the inauguration. Who wrote that inaugural address? It didn’t seem like a traditional one.
MH: The “American Carnage” inaugural address? It was a bunch of people, but Steve Bannon and Steven Miller, who was Trump’s hard-line policy advisor, had the biggest hands in it.
DR: So Trump’s inaugurated and has the various inauguration parties and so forth. When he gets in the office, does he say, “I really am not quite ready for this”?
MH: I’m sure he said that to himself in all seriousness, but that was certainly not something that he said to other people. The way that he tends to deal with anxiety or moments of pressure is to scream at people and to lash out. And he did a lot of that.
DR: White House staffs always leak, but there seemed to be, in the beginning of the administration, a lot of leaking, more than normal.
MH: More than ever.
DR: Were there people leaking against each other? Was it various factions? The Bannon faction and the Jared faction? Was that a great time for reporters because you got all these leaks coming?
MH: We definitely favor more information than less. It was a chaotic time. Jared and Bannon went to the White House as allies. They ended up having a split as time went on in the first few months. There were definitely people who were leaking against each other for factionalized reasons. There were a lot of people who were brought into that administration as what one advisor to a mayor I knew used to refer to as government auto mechanics. These were government auto mechanics around Republican circles, and they knew how things functioned, and they were brought in, but they didn’t like Trump, and they were very disturbed by what they were seeing. A lot of times they were talking to reporters just to try to process what they were learning about.
DR: President Trump had four chiefs of staffs. The first was Reince Priebus, who had been the head of the RNC. Why did Trump pick him as chief of staff initially?
MH: Paul Ryan suggested that he would be a good person because he knew Washington and because some of the other names that were being suggested seemed unwise.
DR: And how did that relationship work?
MH: Not well. Reince Priebus was gone by August of 2021. The idea of Trump and a chief of staff is hard to process. You have to be willing to defer to your chief of staff, let them handle certain things. Trump just undid everything Priebus did all the time. And Jared Kushner did too.
DR: Normally you have a process in the White House where you go through a chief of staff or a scheduler to go in to see the president. You have to get an appointment and so forth. Was Trump’s White House a little different? Did anybody just walk into the Oval Office?
MH: It wasn’t quite like that, but he would invite people in without telling other aides that he had. We forgot to mention where Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump joined him in his government as his top advisors.
DR: Did he want them to be in government?
MH: Initially he did want Jared Kushner there. He was more agnostic about his daughter. But he was very happy to have Jared Kushner running certain pieces for him. Then Jared Kushner started assuming more and more power. He also got enmeshed in the Mueller investigation into possible collusion with Russia, and started getting negative headline attention. Trump did not like that, and then wanted him to go.
DR: Under our laws, the president of the United States has no financial constraints. He can have a blind trust, as President Kennedy did, or not have a blind trust. How did Trump keep his business operations separate from what he was doing in the government? Did his two sons really run the business then?
MH: His two sons, but particularly Eric Trump, were at least the figureheads of the business. We’re still learning exactly what Trump was doing in terms of his business in office. And I think we’re going to be learning about that for some time. At minimum, he tried doing things like use his ambassador to the U.K. to get a golf tournament at one of his Scottish clubs. He was not unaware of what was taking place. He would host events at Mar-a-Lago. Everybody within the Republican Party started hosting events at his clubs. Maybe some of it happened organically, and I think in some cases it did, but in other cases it didn’t.
DR: Go through a typical day. When did Trump get up in the morning? Is he an early riser, a late riser?
MH: He’s a bad sleeper. You would sometimes see 3 a.m. tweets. There was a famous tweet that he fell asleep while sending, where he typed the word covfefe, where I think he was trying to type “coverage.” But he would be up by 6 a.m. usually watching morning television. He would claim that he didn’t watch Morning Joe or CNN. He would watch both. He would start calling people that early. Paul Ryan had to train him. “Can you just wait until I’m done with my morning workout before we start talking?” They tried having him calm down in part to keep him from tweeting in the residence around 9 a.m. But it started sliding back later and later.
DR: Did he actually do the tweets himself, or did he have a person who did it for him?
MH: There were times the tweets were done by committee, that they were drafted. Aides were often proposing them. But at that time of the morning it was generally him, or at night it was him himself.
DR: Some other presidents get up in the morning, they exercise and have a routine. Was he an exerciser?
MH: He was not an exerciser, no. He famously said that he thinks exercise saps your energy. “You have a limited amount of energy in your body, and exercise depletes it.”
DR: What time did he typically get into the Oval Office?
MH: By the end, it was between 10 and 11 a.m. It was quite late.
DR: A lot of people, when president of the United States, feel that you observe the traditions of the Oval Office. You wear a suit and tie all the time and so forth. He always did that?
MH: Yes, he’s a big suit-and-tie wearer, especially in front of people he doesn’t know, which was much of the White House.
DR: Many presidents have worked out of the Oval Office, but some presidents just use it for ceremonial purposes, and there’s a room off the side where they actually do the work. Where did he do his work?
MH: Mostly in the room off to the side. He liked being behind the Resolute Desk. That’s where he would be when people would come in for presentation meetings. But he did a lot of his meetings in that private room, in part because that’s where he had a huge big-screen TV put in. And he would watch TV constantly.
DR: Most presidents have a schedule that’s set well in advance. They have a scheduler. Did Donald Trump keep to the schedule that he was set?
MH: No. He did have a scheduler. His scheduler had a tough job. Lots of presidents, as you know, can make their scheduler’s lives hard, but he was just so willing to throw things out that it was complicated.
DR: Let’s say at noon, did he go back to the residence for lunch as some presidents have done?
MH: No, he would generally stay down in the Oval Office area.
DR: How long did he typically stay in the Oval Office before he would go back to the residence? Until 5 or 6?
MH: Yes, it was usually about 5 or 6.
DR: And then he would go back and have dinner, typically in the residence?
MH: He would have dinner in the residence. Sometimes they would have dinner as a family. Sometimes he would host people for dinner and the First Lady and their son would not be there. It was a couple of nights a week that he would host dinners.
DR: What were his relations like with the members of Congress? Did he treat them with respect? How did he deal with them?
MH: That’s a really good question. He was very effective with Republican House members. He was not with Democratic House members because everything became split by party with him, and he didn’t understand the need to woo the other side of the aisle. But with Republicans, he was very good at using the White House, Air Force One, and Marine One. These were toys to keep them on his side. And he was very good at working the phones. This is something that he did throughout his time at the Trump Organization in New York too. He was good at it.
DR: What would you say Donald Trump would say were his biggest accomplishments as president?
MH: What he would say are his biggest accomplishments would relate to expanding the military, which he overstates. He would say that a big accomplishment, and this one really was something he did, was moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in Israel. He would talk about building a border wall, which they only built about 500 miles’ worth of.
DR: He had a very popular line in the campaign: “I’m going to build a wall and I’m going to get the Mexicans to pay for it.” Where did the idea of the Mexicans paying for it come from?
MH: It was all Roger Stone and Sam Nurnberg. That whole idea of the border wall in particular was initially done as a mnemonic device to get him to remember to talk about immigration, and then it morphed into something different.
DR: In foreign policy, he dealt with all the heads of state you’re supposed to deal with. His trips overseas were generally well scheduled and organized? Did he enjoy going overseas to meet heads of state?
MH: He did. And they were well organized, but they often did not go off well because he would go off script or because he would get angry at world leaders, or he would tweet something as he was flying into the U.K. and insult the prime minister. The foreign trips were real struggles for his staff.
DR: He seemed to not like NATO. Why was he so upset about it?
MH: Why NATO in particular has never been entirely clear to me, other than the fact that he sees it as an institution that’s ripping us off, the broader us, which is something he’s been saying since the 1980s.
DR: What about Russia? He seemed to have a real fondness for Putin. What was the reason for that?
MH: I don’t think we’ve ever established exactly why he was so praising and often fawning about Vladimir Putin. I can come up with a couple of reasons. He generally likes strong men. He has autocratic instincts. His children have talked about doing business with Russians. I think, just generally speaking, he admires the behavior of Putin and admires the fact that Putin is not constrained by something like a constitution.
DR: President Trump had a number of investigations. The first one was the Mueller investigation. In the end it didn’t produce anything that changed anybody’s habits or anything. Was he obsessed with the Mueller investigation?
MH: He was beyond obsessed. It ate into his presidency for the first two years. Now, it didn’t produce anything that quote unquote changed minds, but it did lead to a lot of indictments of a lot of people around him, including Paul Manafort. It was never going to lead to an indictment of a president, regardless of whether the evidence actually led there or not, because of a Justice Department advisory opinion, dating back to the Nixon days, that you don’t indict a sitting president.
But what it did do was it told a pretty complicated story, and a Senate Intelligence Committee report that looked at the same issues did the same thing. So Trump likes to say, “This report exonerated me.” It is, as it often is with him, a lot more complicated than that.
DR: He was the only president we’ve had who’s been impeached twice. Let’s go through those. The first impeachment dealt with a call that he made to the president of Ukraine. What was that all about, and why was he so obsessed with Ukraine?
MH: Giuliani got in his head. There’s lots of talk that Giuliani and Trump are old friends. They’re not old friends. They’re people who knew each other for a long time in New York, and had a transactional relationship, as are many of Donald Trump’s relationships. Giuliani saw Donald Trump as a way to stay relevant, and he started pushing on him this tale about the Bidens, particularly Hunter Biden and Joe Biden making money from a corrupt energy company in Ukraine.
DR: Was he worried that he would actually be impeached and convicted, or he knew he would never be convicted by the Senate?
MH: He believed that he would never be convicted by the Senate because of his relationship with Mitch McConnell at that point and the other senators.
DR: Giuliani became a closer and closer advisor as the administration went on?
MH: I don’t know about closer and closer, but he certainly stayed in, despite the fact that a lot of Trump aides blamed him for that impeachment. Giuliani was right there when the election was going on in 2020 and Trump wanted to claim that it was rigged.
DR: Some of the accomplishments Trump supporters would cite would be the Abraham Accords.
MH: Definitely.
DR: How did that come about?
MH: I should have mentioned that in the list of accomplishments, that was largely Jared Kushner–run, in all seriousness. It was a real accomplishment. Its effectiveness is debated. Not everyone agrees that it was as significant as they claim, but it was a big achievement. It did change the region. Trump again was sort of along for the ride on that, as he was with many policy pieces, but that was really Jared Kushner’s baby.
DR: He also developed a relationship with China. He had an agreement with China that was designed to get China to buy more products from the U.S. Did that work out well? Was that an accomplishment, you think?
MH: I think that getting the trade deal was, although the tariffs that he put initially on China and were part of what paved the way for that were controversial. He was very happy with them. The trade deal was never quite what he claimed it was. Neither was his reworking of NAFTA, but for what his policy aims were, it was significant. However it happened, he wanted to preserve it as the coronavirus was emerging.
DR: Of his four chiefs of staff, which one was the most effective, or which one was he the closest to?
MH: He was personally the closest to Mark Meadows, who was not the most effective chief of staff. Mark Meadows presided over the worst period of time in that administration, and had a direct hand in problems with the COVID response and with the postelection behavior. John Kelly was the most effective.
DR: John Kelly was the former Marine who came in. He had been the head of Homeland Security and was brought in as chief of staff. But he was fired without a direct confrontation?
MH: They had had conversations about Kelly leaving. That one was a more of a drawn-out process, but ultimately Trump just laid it out in public.
DR: When President Trump was given national security secrets, were people and the government worried that he might disclose them?
MH: They were very worried, and those worries were born out in their minds at a point in 2019 when he tweeted out a picture that was classified of an Iranian facility that had been destroyed. They were constantly worried about what they were telling him.
DR: One time the foreign minister of Russia came to the Oval Office with the ambassador from Russia. It was said then that Trump disclosed some secrets that maybe he shouldn’t have. Is that fair or not?
MH: That is an accurate description. It was intelligence either from the Israelis or related to Israel. It was the same meeting in which he started bragging about having fired James Comey. It was a very news-significant meeting.
