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Trump regularly calls friends to bounce off ideas and ask for their input. The smarter they are, the more he likes them.
Most of them billionaires, they include New England Patriots chairman and CEO Robert Kraft, former New Jersey governor Christie, Continental Resources CEO Harold Hamm, developer Richard LeFrak, Vornado Realty Trust chairman Steve Roth, private equity real estate investor Tom Barrack, real estate brokerage executive Howard Lorber, former campaign chairman Corey Lewandowski, Reince Priebus, former deputy campaign manager David Bossie, Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Fox News scion Rupert Murdoch, and investor Carl Icahn. Early on, Trump would call Rudy Giuliani, but the relationship seemed to fade.
At other times, Trump calls people spontaneously when he sees them on TV or when he reads an article quoting them. But some who are described in the press as friends or advisers, such as his former strategist Roger Stone, who purport to convey the latest information from the Oval Office, actually never talk with Trump or just briefly say hello to him at Mar-a-Lago.
“The men influencing Trump include Roger J. Stone, a self-proclaimed dirty trickster and longtime Trump confidant who himself has been linked to the FBI’s Russia investigation,” the Washington Post erroneously reported, apparently based on Stone’s own claims. But Stone’s only contact with Trump was in a meeting that lasted under ten minutes in December 2016, when Stone presented Trump with his book The Making of the President 2016.
“Trump was very dismissive,” says Bannon, who was in on the meeting. “He hates when he thinks guys are feeding off him to make a living. He doesn’t take his calls.”
Promoting her book Raising Trump, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, claimed that she and the president speak “about once every fourteen days.” In fact, like most divorced couples, they never speak with each other. Ivana also claimed that she turned down Trump’s offer to be the Czech ambassador.
“My ex said, ‘Ivana, if you want it, I give it to you,’ ” the first Mrs. Donald Trump told the New York Post from her front-row seat at the Dennis Basso fashion show. She claimed she turned down the offer because she did not want to give up her jet-setting lifestyle.
“She was never promised the Czech Republic post,” a Trump aide says.
Whether negotiating or seeking advice, with his habit of making asides, Trump encourages candor, as he did with the press at Mar-a-Lago after his meeting with China’s Xi Jinping. “We had a long discussion already. So far, I have gotten nothing. Absolutely nothing,” he said to laughs from the delegation.
“How am I doing? Am I doing okay? I’m president. Hey, I’m president,” Trump said boyishly in a Rose Garden talk. “Can you believe it?”
In the same way, one of Trump’s strengths is that to a remarkable degree, he encourages open, candid debate among his staff. When choosing both staff and friends, Trump values two things: intelligence and candor.
“Everyone openly argued and shared ideas about everything,” Priebus says. “We would get in a big semicircle around his desk all the time and discuss and argue. We discussed and argued over the events of the inauguration, who to call and who not to call, as well as real policy issues.”
Trivial though it may seem, even the use of the honorific “Mr. President” can intimidate aides, stifling honest feedback.
“Few people, with the possible exception of his wife, will ever tell a president that he is a fool,” President Ford lamented in his book, A Time to Heal. “There’s a majesty to the office that inhibits even your closest friends from saying what is really on their minds. They won’t tell you that you just made a lousy speech or bungled a chance to get your point across. Instead, they’ll say they liked the speech you gave last week a little better or that an even finer opportunity to get your point across will come very soon. You can tell them you want the blunt truth; you can leave instructions on every bulletin board, but the guarded response you get never varies.”
“People are circumspect when speaking to the president,” says Bradley Blakeman, who was George W. Bush’s deputy assistant to the president for appointments and scheduling. “You’re respectful of the office, and you restrain criticism because it’s the president. So I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that people are so direct with President Trump and open in their criticism because it takes a special type of person to give it and to receive it. If they know that they can be blunt with the president and in some cases brutally honest and the president takes it in the spirit it’s given as being constructive, that’s hugely important.”
The fact that Trump’s aides were an amalgam of populist nationalists, hard-line conservatives, establishment Republicans, and a few Democrats demonstrated that he wanted to hear competing views. Rather than cloister himself with White House aides, Trump solicits opinions from almost anyone, from chambermaids to Secret Service agents to Mike Pence, who has a knack for retreating into the woodwork when Trump causes a controversy.
“He encourages disagreement in order to get everyone’s best thought out and then makes a decision based on everyone’s arguments,” Priebus says. His aides’ differing positions on free trade versus restricted trade are an example.
Priebus thought making Romney secretary of state an intriguing idea, and both Joe Scarborough and Bannon came up with the idea as well. Bannon liked the fact that Romney was a hawk on China.
“But Romney came for the first meeting with Trump, and he doesn’t really know anything,” Bannon says. “I mean it was kind of shocking. He actually said he didn’t think it was serious for him to become the secretary of state so he said, ‘Hadn’t prepared.’ ”
For subsequent meetings, Romney brushed up on world affairs. Trump liked the fact that Romney looked the part, and they hit it off, but Trump decided not to name him to the position. Aides pointed out that it would be a slap in the face to Rudy Giuliani, who wanted the secretary of state job and had strongly supported Trump during the campaign, if Trump offered the job to Romney, who had castigated him during the campaign, calling Trump a “phony, a fraud.”
But Trump also was not convinced Giuliani would be suitable as secretary of state. Trump went with his gut, and his gut told him Rudy was not cut out for the job. Instead, he offered him the post of attorney general, but Giuliani declined the offer.
“Giuliani only wanted secretary of state,” Bannon says. “He said, ‘Look, I’m seventy-two years old. Attorney general is too much work. I can’t do it. No way. I’m making ten million dollars a year.’ Giuliani said he would take secretary of state. Other than that, he was not interested.”
Contrary to popular impression, Trump began to have doubts during the transition about his choice of Michael Flynn as national security adviser. That was well before the former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency lied to Pence when he told him he had only exchanged holiday greetings with Russian ambassador Kislyak, prompting Trump to fire him.
As with Giuliani, Trump had reservations about appointing Sessions attorney general. But in his case, everyone around Trump said Sessions would be perfect for the job. Besides having been a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sessions had previously served as a U.S. attorney and attorney general of Alabama. Given the fact that Sessions was the first senator to endorse him back in February 2016, Trump felt a loyalty to him he did not feel toward Giuliani. For that reason, he overcame his gut feeling. But despite Sessions’s aggressive effort as attorney general to carry out Trump’s agenda, Trump continued to question the decision. He privately called Sessions weak, and he told aides he regretted appointing him.
In the end, Trump chose Rex Tillerson, the CEO of Exxon, as secretary of state. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state under George W. Bush, had proposed him. However, whether on North Korea, Afghanistan, or Iran, Tillerson and Trump had fundamentally different positions, Tillerson being more moderate. Aides felt that Tillerson thought that as secretary of state, he was going to be the CEO of foreign policy. He was mistaken.
“Tillerson and Trump have just a terrible relationship,” Bannon says. Tillerson is more moderate than Trump. When Trump overrules him, “Tillerson kind of rolls his eyes,” Bannon says. “He’s been terribly disrespectful in meetings. He will say sarcastically, ‘Okay, you’re the boss. It’s your deal. Just tell me what you want done.’ ”
Trump, not for the first time, publicly contradicted his chief diplomat on a major foreign policy issue when he tweeted that Tillerson was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” using his nickname for North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un. “Save your energy, Rex, we’ll do what has to be done,” Trump said, referring to a possible military strike against North Korea.
“On financial policy, you had Gary Cohn, the U.S. trade representative, Bob Lighthizer, Wilbur Ross, and Steve Mnuchin, all offering different opinions,” Priebus says. “He [Trump] brings on disparate arguments to learn from. That’s the way he conducts business and learns and makes decisions.”
But Trump’s tolerance for dissent did not extend to public declarations. He let several senators know of his frustration with Gary Cohn, who went out of his way to publicly criticize Trump after his “both sides” comments concerning the violent events of Charlottesville. Cohn had been hoping to succeed Janet Yellen as chairman of the Federal Reserve, but Trump made it known that he had no chance in hell. The position ultimately went to Jerome Powell, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
In soliciting advice in the White House, Trump employs the Socratic method, Bannon says.
“What he does is he questions nonstop,” Bannon says. “He goes back and forth and asks a thousand questions. Sometimes he asks it of the doorman. Sometimes he’ll ask it of a general. Sometimes he asks it of somebody from Mar-a-Lago. But he’s just picking up more and more information and part of it is patterning. He’s looking to graph where the critical mass is.”
“There are some things that are fundamental to what he believes, and he is very clear about that,” Sean Spicer says. “And then there are some issues where he may seek a lot of input from different folks, then kind of listen to all sides, and then kind of come to a very decisive final answer.”
In other cases, Trump has made up his mind but double-checks with a range of people to try to see if they will reinforce his gut instinct.
“He’ll ask people all the time about a person or an individual,” Spicer says. “That’s not necessarily always part of the decision-making process. That’s more of the sounding-board process. At the back of his mind, he may know what he wants to do. But he wants to make sure that he’s hearing a bunch of other people telling him the same thing. At the back of his mind, he knows the answer is A, and he’s trying to validate what he has decided.”
At times, Trump will bat a question back and forth between two individuals as in a quiz show.
“This president’s method of managing is by him personally curating points of views from a diverse group of people in whom he has some trust and credibility,” said Trump’s longtime friend Thomas Barrack Jr., who ran his inaugural festivities, to the New York Times. “And he very rarely accepts one course of action or one suggestion without laundering it amongst all of them. And what happens in that process is confusion amongst those from whom he’s seeking advice. What works for him is that, out of that milieu, his instincts take him to the right answer.”
Calling Trump a pragmatic problem solver, one of his lawyers told me: “I have observed Donald Trump during the past twenty years in rooms filled with lawyers, architects, CPAs, and other professionals for all sorts of planning. He listens, surveying everyone’s opinions, encouraging thorough debate, and welcoming positions challenging to him or to conventional wisdom. He then decides, reversing his previous positions if he thinks it’s warranted.”
In the days leading up to his New Year’s Eve party celebrating 2017, when I chatted with Trump at Mar-a-Lago about problems in the Secret Service and other matters, Trump asked my opinion on Israeli settlements and the two-state solution. I know as much about the Middle East as Trump knows about the Talmud, but I gave my opinion. Indeed, that was the way Trump had first learned about Mar-a-Lago, chatting with his limousine driver and asking about properties for sale.
When Paul Rampell, Trump’s Florida lawyer, proposed turning the Mar-a-Lago estate into a private club, Trump called him almost every day over the course of a month, sometimes several times a day. As he does in the White House, Trump consulted a range of other people. He told Rampell that friends who are in real estate told him the idea would never work. Several other lawyers also threw cold water on the idea. But Trump went ahead.
Trump would ask his longtime security chief Keith Schiller, a former New York City police detective, for his take on almost any matter. Two decades ago, Schiller was at the Manhattan prosecutor’s office when he noticed Trump’s wife Marla Maples. She was reporting an alleged theft by a former employee. With Maples was her bodyguard.
Describing how he came to work for Trump as his chief of security, Schiller told his high school classmate Rich Siegel in a videotaped interview that he was not impressed by the man’s physical stature. “A light goes off. I said: ‘Bodyguard, I can do this…’ I’m no stranger to putting my hands on people,” according to Schiller.
Fellow police officers admired Schiller for his size and strength. When raiding an apartment to make an arrest, he would volunteer to carry the sixty-pound battering ram up a flight of stairs, then slam the ram himself.
Schiller reached out to Trump and started working for him part-time in 1999. After his retirement from the police department in 2004, Schiller became the Trump Organization’s director of security. Schiller followed Trump onto the campaign trail, providing security in the months before the Secret Service took over.
At one rally, when a man jumped onto the stage to attack Trump, Schiller beat a Secret Service agent by seconds to grab Trump and shuffle him off the stage. Contrary to press reports that portrayed Trump’s private security as Gestapo-like, Schiller, who was never armed, and former FBI agents hired to help maintain security at rallies worked smoothly with Trump’s Secret Service detail.
In August 2015, I urged Trump to request Secret Service protection, saying private protection was useless at that point. He finally did request it in October of that year, and his Secret Service protection began on November 12, 2015. Schiller then continued to provide an added layer of protection, not hesitating to keep reporters away from the candidate or venture into rally crowds to confront protesters.
Schiller was a good gatekeeper, and Trump would sometimes take his advice over the advice of other aides. Schiller was critical of FBI director Comey, telling Trump that the FBI was not aggressive enough in investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. His views helped shape those of his boss.
In fact, it was Comey who decided to investigate Clinton in the first place and to castigate her and her aides at a press conference before the election as “extremely careless in handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” hardly indicating that he wanted to go easy on her. Aside from the legal issues and whether a jury in Washington would convict her, Comey then fell victim to endless misinformation about the investigation, including from some former FBI agents.
Critics said the FBI should have recorded its agents’ interview of Clinton, that she should have been placed under oath, that she should have been given a polygraph test. They maintained Comey should have recommended impaneling a grand jury so that subpoenas could have been issued for pertinent evidence. They said the FBI should have interviewed her at the start of the investigation rather than at the end so her statements could be compared with what agents later uncovered.
But except in unusual circumstances, the FBI only records interviews when a subject is in custody after an arrest. Lying to the FBI is a crime, so there is no need to place a subject under oath, and the FBI does not do so. Proving a case using the statute prohibiting lying to the FBI is far easier than proving a perjury case for lying under oath. Since Clinton was cooperating, subpoenas were not necessary and could have resulted in delays if Clinton’s lawyers challenged them in court. Polygraphs are voluntary. Clinton, whose FBI interview was voluntary in the first place, never would have consented to being polygraphed.
Whether the FBI conducts an interview near the beginning or end of an investigation is a judgment call based on the case. In a complex investigation of this kind, where the subject likely would not consent to an interview unless she thought the FBI had already gathered extensive damaging evidence, it is more likely that the FBI would conduct an interview at the end of an investigation when all the facts had been amassed.
Along with Comey, for some reason Schiller never liked George Gigicos, Trump’s longtime advance man, even though Gigicos was one of a handful of aides who were the organizing force behind the hundreds of rallies Trump held throughout his campaign. Whenever the slightest thing went wrong, Schiller would be on his case.
Watching TV in his Phoenix hotel room in August 2017, Trump saw shots of an empty venue an hour and a half before his rally was about to start. Irate at what he saw on TV, Trump asked Schiller, who was the director of Oval Office operations, why the crowds were scarce. Schiller asked Gigicos, who explained that while TV correspondents were live early, the rally wouldn’t start for several more hours and crowds had just begun to trickle in.
Soon after, Trump called Gigicos, saying that the venue better be full by the time he arrived. It was crammed with people. Yet a few days later, Gigicos got a call from the Trump campaign’s executive director, Michael Glassner, who informed him that Trump did not want him working on his rallies anymore.
“George was batting like a thousand. Arranging all those rallies during the campaign. He did every one of them,” a Trump aide says. “It’s hard to do, but he had a capacity crowd in almost every one of them. And it turned out the one in Phoenix was a pretty good crowd.”