You need people with heart. That’s probably the one thing you need in government that they don’t have in business, not quite as much. You need some, but not a lot.
—DONALD J. TRUMP, ON HIRING A STAFF
A COUPLE of weeks after the election, while Dave sat in the campaign office in Trump Tower with Bannon, Johnny McEntee walked in and told us he was going to order dinner for the boss. It was nearing seven o’clock in the evening. Most of the volunteers and full-time staffers had gone home for the day. The feeling in the room was starkly different from the roller coaster of emotions it held on election night.
“What’s for dinner tonight, Johnny?” the president-elect had asked. He’d been taking meetings with potential cabinet secretaries and working the phone since morning, and it was nearly time for him to take his nightly elevator ride up to the residence, where he could watch a little news and have his dinner—then get back on the phone.
“I’ll go to the Carnegie,” Johnny said. The famous deli, just a few blocks from Trump Tower on Seventh Avenue, had announced that it would soon close its doors for good. Johnny figured he should have one more pastrami on rye from the Carnegie while he still had the chance. They make a nice sandwich.
Dave had never had one of their sandwiches. “I’ll have the same as the boss,” he said.
Priebus and Bannon had been trying to figure the best way to go about the difficult business of a presidential transition. They had been going through candidates for cabinet positions for a few days, mostly wondering where to start and how to get organized. Bannon was leafing through a book called The Romney Readiness Project, that Dave had found in his desk drawer beside a small pile of ketchup packets on his first day working in Trump Tower. It was a comprehensive manual containing suggestions for staff hires and budgetary guidelines, as well as a clear guide to thousands of presidential appointments that the Romney team created to help staff their own White House had they won the 2012 election. Bannon had read through it several times already, and had highlighted a few useful things. If nothing else, the book gave the Trump campaign a blueprint on how to organize itself, and some sense of what to tackle first and how to properly allocate the federal government’s funds.
Not many people are aware of this, but the Trump transition didn’t have much to work with on its way in, especially when it came to money. By November 2016, the Obama administration had used up about 78 percent of the White House budget for its fiscal year, which begins and ends at the beginning of May. Meaning, the Trump transition didn’t have much to work with, and it left us only 22 percent of the budget, or about two and a half months of money, to pay federal salaries and upkeep costs from January 20 until the end of April. That meant, among other things, that we would have to go light on the lower-office appointments, at least for a little while.
On top of that, the details and rituals of the transition itself were all new to the team. During the campaign, for fear of bad juju, we were never allowed to talk about what a Trump White House would look like, never mind a plan for one.
“Remember Romney?” the boss would say. “He was walking around in khakis with his transition team, and what the hell did it get him? I’ll tell you what! He lost!”
He had a point. Just as the 2012 campaign was heating up, Mitt Romney had decided he would take two weeks off to focus on the plans that he would implement if—or, in his mind, when—he won. Trump, on the other hand, wouldn’t take so much as a minute off to focus on his post-victory plans. And he wouldn’t let anyone else who worked for him do it either. In fact, until Chris Christie, who was in charge of the transition team during the campaign, began raising funds, Trump wasn’t even aware that he had a full-time, functioning transition team. A federal statute mandates that presidential candidates raise funds to help pay for transition offices and staff should they be elected.
Under Chris Christie, the team made only a few major moves and appointments, one of which was the hiring of Bill Hagerty as director of political appointments. Hagerty, a private-equity investor from Nashville, had done the same job for Mitt Romney’s transition team in 2012.
Today Hagerty is the US ambassador to Japan.
About a half hour after he had left, Johnny McEntee walked back into the campaign office.
“Where is the inauguration committee’s office?” he asked Bannon.
“I have no earthly idea,” Steve said. “I… would imagine it’s in DC. Why?”
Johnny put the sandwiches down on a desk. “The boss just put me in charge of the inauguration. I need to get on a train to DC.”
Dave and Steve looked at each other, and then let out a laugh.
As told, Johnny had brought the sandwich up to the residence. When he got there, Mr. Trump was nowhere to be seen, but the next first lady, Melania, was in the living room with Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a tall, elegant woman who played an integral role with Mrs. Trump planning the inaugural activities. Mrs. Trump had her phone on speaker and was talking into it about the inaugural.
“Hello, Rick Gates,” Melania said to the voice on the phone.
At that precise moment, the president-elect walked into the room.
“Rick Gates!? Where is he?”
“He’s on the phone, Donald,” Melania said.
“Gates, are you there?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What are you doing talking to my wife?”
“I’m in charge of the inaugural, sir.”
“Not anymore you’re not—you’re fired.”
Trump looked up and spotted Johnny, wide-eyed in the doorway, holding a bag of pastrami sandwiches.
“Johnny!” he said. “You’re in charge of the inaugural now.”
When they had gotten control of their laughter, Steve and Dave assured Johnny that he wouldn’t be running anything alone in DC. Dave also thought to ask Cassidy, who had been his assistant since just after he joined the campaign, to get a handle on the inaugural organization and report back to the Tower. Cassidy had done an amazing job overseeing logistics and tickets for the three presidential and one vice presidential debates. Together with Tom Barrack, whom Trump named chairman of the inaugural, Cassidy and Boris Epshteyn, communications director for the inaugural, got to work right away. As for Rick Gates, who’d gotten the job via his close personal relationship with Paul Manafort, forged when they worked together in Ukraine, arguably stealing money, and then meeting Tom Barrack? It’s really no surprise that he somehow hung onto his job with the transition team.
The transition was a bittersweet time for us. After Election Day, working with Steve and Reince, Dave made several recommendations for all the top jobs and even sat in on some interviews for major cabinet appointments where he gave his counsel during the hiring process. It was a huge honor and an awesome responsibility, and Dave relished the role. The president conducted some of the interviews at Trump Tower but as the Thank You tour wound down, a week before Christmas he moved the interviews to Mar-a-Lago.
Sometimes Dave would also meet the candidates when they arrived at Mr. Trump’s private club. They turned the tea room of Mar-a-Lago into a waiting area. Madeleine Westerhout, Katie Walsh, and Dave would keep the candidates entertained until it was time for their interview. Mr. Trump, Jared, Steve, and Reince Priebus would see five to ten candidates a day.
One day in the holding area, Dave got to meet Dr. Toby Cosgrove from the Cleveland Clinic, who was up for VA secretary. Cosgrove was eminently qualified for the position. He had been a US Air Force surgeon during the Vietnam War and was awarded the Bronze Star. And he ran the Cleveland Clinic, a big, sprawling network of hospitals with over fifty thousand employees and an operating revenue of $8 billion. One of the hospitals in his network was the Washington Hospital Center, where surgeons had operated on Dave. While they waited, Dave mentioned his surgery.
“What did you have done?” Cosgrove asked.
“Mitral valve,” Dave said.
“Replaced or repaired?”
“Repaired.”
Dave then took out his wallet, removed a medical alert card, and handed it to the doctor. Right away, Cosgrove must have seen the details of the procedure in his head. He knew what it had taken Dave a few weeks to find out: that there was a synthetic ring implanted in his heart, helping the mitral valve open and close.
“Oh yeah,” Cosgrove said. “I invented that.” Dave laughed. What were the chances? They got to talking about other things, then Cosgrove circled back around to the heart surgery.
“By the way,” he said, “who operated on you?”
“Dr. Louis Kanda,” Dave answered.
“Oh, Louis! I trained him and he’s a good friend.”
When the president-elect came out to meet Cosgrove, Dave told him that the doctor had trained his heart surgeon. The boss didn’t look surprised.
“Who haven’t you trained, Cosgrove?” Mr. Trump said with a smile. “He’s the best.” The president-elect then told them that Cosgrove had been involved in his brother’s heart surgery. Cosgrove would end up removing his name from consideration for the cabinet position.
One of Dave’s biggest highlights of the transition was planning and attending the president-elect’s trip to the annual Army-Navy football game, held that year in Baltimore. Dave brought Griffin. Also attending was Reince and his son, Jack, and Steve Bannon and his daughter, Maureen, a West Point graduate. For the first half, they watched the game from David Urban’s suite on the Navy side. One of the things we haven’t mentioned about the boss so far in this book is his presence. Any time Donald Trump walks into a room. he owns it. But it was striking to see him have the same effect on a booth filled with three- and four-star generals: the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“They’re like little kids around him,” Bannon remembered.
At the half, we visited the television team of Gary Danielson and Verne Lundquist in the booth. As the boss’s image was shown on the jumbotron, the stadium, filled with cadets and midshipmen, erupted in cheers, followed by chants of “USA, USA.”
That game happened to be Lundquist’s last as a college football broadcaster. Danielson mentioned to Mr. Trump that Verne might be looking for work, and seeing as he was of Swedish descent, perhaps the president-elect might consider him for the job as ambassador. Mr. Trump played along.
“Just make sure he’s available for the Masters,” Danielson said about Verne’s annual pilgrimage to Augusta to help call the prestigious golf tourney.
“We have to have him for the Masters, absolutely,” the boss answered. “I think Sweden would be very happy.” It was just a feel-good moment for everyone and terrific television.
At halftime at the Army-Navy game, it’s customary for the commander in chief to switch sides, so after wrapping up the Lundquist interview, we made our way over to Ollie North’s box in Army territory for the second half.
“Ah, that was great,” Mr. Trump said to Dave on the way.
“Yeah, too bad Verne supported Hillary,” Dave answered.
“What?! I wouldn’t have done the interview had I known,” Mr. Trump said jokingly.
But there were disappointments, too, during the transition, and the sheer number of outsiders who managed to sneak their way into the ranks was perhaps the biggest disappointment. Some of those were people who had never fully supported Donald Trump when he was a candidate, and many of them had actively worked against him during the campaign. The president-elect always knew who was loyal.
We had dinner at Mar-a-Lago the same night Congress certified the Electoral College results. A famous photo of the team was taken that night to commemorate the evening.
Despite internal competition, Reince had been named White House chief of staff, and he had managed to convince the boss that it was time for him to embrace the Republican establishment and the Priebus team along with it. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell each made a few calls on Reince’s behalf, telling the president-elect that he would need a Washington insider in the White House if he wanted to move his agenda forward. While Reince was at the RNC, they said, he had put together what amounted to a West Wing staff. He was ready to plug it into the White House. The president-elect, acting in the spirit of unity, decided it was a good move.
To tell you the truth, the establishment/outsider distinction never mattered all that much to Trump. In his mind, people are placed into two distinct categories: loyal and disloyal. Once you’re in the second category, it’s hard to climb your way out.
So when Reince started talking up Sean Spicer, suggesting that he’d be a good fit for White House communications director, and proposed Katie Walsh as Reince’s deputy, Trump was leery. He remembered the days before the election when he was told that Spicer and Walsh went to the media and put as much distance between themselves and the candidate as they could.
“He’s not loyal,” Mr. Trump said about Spicer. Ultimately, Mr. Trump took Reince’s advice, and hired Spicer, but he never forgot. “Imagine that somebody would bad-mouth me before the election and then want a job with me after!” the president-elect marveled out loud.
Though Sean Spicer wasn’t at the dinner, Katie Walsh was. After Mr. Trump made the remark, she left the celebration. A famous photo was taken of the Trump team the night of the Electoral College certification.
We were glad to see some of the old team getting ready for their new posts in the White House. It was clear from Election Day that Hope Hicks and Keith Schiller would have jobs with the boss in the West Wing,. And the same also went for Dan Scavino and Don McGahn.
We watched as our friend George Gigicos was offered and took the post of White House director of scheduling and advance. We got to see Johnny McEntee become Trump’s body man, looking after his schedule and traveling everywhere with the boss. There were spots for Meghan and Cassidy. And it was no surprise that Bannon and Kellyanne would take senior positions in the new administration. The critical post of Attorney General was given to the first United States Senator to endorse Trump, Jeff Sessions.
As for us?
There was much discussion, both privately and in the press, about senior staff positions for each of us in the White House. The prized job of RNC chairman went to Ronna Romney McDaniel, whom neither of us knew very well, and most of the other jobs we could have done were filled, as Reince had promised, with a whole slew of former RNC staffers. Forces were put in place that wanted to make Donald Trump into a Washington DC Republican with a typical establishment staff—that didn’t work out very well.
Prior to the inaugural, the boss had called Corey and told him he had a seat on the platform for the swearing-in ceremony. “Just not too close to me,” the president-elect said. “They only want good-looking people in the camera shot.” Dave had worked with Cassidy on the seating chart and knew he and Corey had seats on the platform.
But when we arrived, we found ourselves, along with Jeff DeWit, in seats next to a college band one level up from the Presidential Platform. It wasn’t that bad, but it certainly wasn’t where we expected to be seated. We called Kellyanne, and then Bannon, whom we could see down on the platform. Both told us that there were seats for us there, so we moved.
We watched the swearing-in of the forty-fifth president of the United States from a spot few in the world will ever experience.
We never took one moment for granted working for the boss.