What happens when the President doesn’t know, and won't listen
From The Guardian 27 September 2018
Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and The Big
Short, reveals how Trump’s bungled presidential transition set the template for
his time in the White House
Chris
Christie noticed a piece in the New York Times – that’s how it all started. The
New Jersey governor had dropped out of the presidential race in February 2016
and thrown what support he had behind Donald
Trump. In late April, he saw the article. It described meetings
between representatives of the remaining candidates still in the race – Trump,
John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders – and the Obama White
House. Anyone who still had any kind of shot at becoming president of the
United States apparently needed to start preparing to run the federal
government. The guy Trump sent to the meeting was, in Christie’s estimation,
comically underqualified. Christie called up Trump’s campaign manager, Corey
Lewandowski, to ask why this critical job had not been handed to someone who
actually knew something about government. “We don’t have anyone,” said
Lewandowski.
Christie
volunteered himself for the job: head of the Donald Trump presidential
transition team. “It’s the next best thing to being president,” he told
friends. “You get to plan the presidency.” He went to see Trump about it. Trump
said he didn’t want a presidential transition team. Why did anyone need to plan
anything before he actually became president? It’s legally required, said
Christie. Trump asked where the money was going to come from to pay for the
transition team. Christie explained that Trump could either pay for it himself
or take it out of campaign funds. Trump didn’t want to pay for it himself. He
didn’t want to take it out of campaign funds, either, but he agreed,
grudgingly, that Christie should go ahead and raise a separate fund to pay for
his transition team. “But not too much!” he said.
And so Christie set
out to prepare for the unlikely event that Donald Trump would one day be
elected president of the United States. Not everyone in Trump’s campaign was
happy to see him on the job. In June, Christie received a call from Trump
adviser Paul Manafort. “The kid is paranoid about you,” Manafort said. The kid
was Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Back in 2005, when he was US attorney
for New Jersey, Christie had prosecuted and jailed Kushner’s father, Charles,
for tax fraud. Christie’s investigation revealed, in the bargain, that Charles
Kushner had hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, whom he suspected
of cooperating with Christie, videotaped the sexual encounter and sent the tape
to his sister. The Kushners apparently took their grudges seriously, and
Christie sensed that Jared still harboured one against him. On the other hand,
Trump, whom Christie considered almost a friend, could not have cared less.
Christie viewed
Kushner as one of those people who thinks that, because he is rich, he must
also be smart. Still, he had a certain cunning about him. And Christie soon
found himself reporting everything he did to prepare for a Trump administration
to an “executive committee”. The committee consisted of Kushner, Ivanka Trump,
Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump, Manafort, Steve Mnuchin and Jeff Sessions. “I’m
kind of like the church elder who double-counts the collection plate every
Sunday for the pastor,” said Sessions, who appeared uncomfortable with the
entire situation. The elder’s job became more complicated in July 2016, when
Trump was formally named the Republican nominee. The transition team now moved
into an office in downtown Washington DC, and went looking for people to occupy
the top 500 jobs in the federal government. They needed to fill all the cabinet
positions, of course, but also a whole bunch of others that no one in the Trump
campaign even knew existed. It is not obvious how you find the next secretary
of state, much less the next secretary of transportation – never mind who
should sit on the board of trustees of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and
Excellence in Education Foundation.
By August, 130
people were showing up every day, and hundreds more working part-time, at Trump
transition headquarters, on the corner of 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.
The transition team made lists of likely candidates for all 500 jobs, plus
other lists of informed people to roll into the various federal agencies the
day after the election, to be briefed on whatever the federal agencies were
doing. They gathered the names for these lists by travelling the country and
talking to people: Republicans who had served in government, Trump’s closest
advisers, recent occupants of the jobs that needed filling. Then they set about
investigating any candidates for glaring flaws and embarrassing secrets and
conflicts of interest. At the end of each week, Christie handed over binders,
with lists of names of people who might do the jobs well, to Kushner, Donald Jr
and the others. “They probed everything,” says a senior Trump transition
official. “‘Who is this person?’ ‘Where did this person come from?’ They only
ever rejected one person: Manafort’s secretary.”
The first time
Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper.
The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team had raised several
million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve
Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office on the 26th floor
of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors
above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being
hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money!
You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?
Seeing Bannon,
Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my
fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to
Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of
the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the
government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC,
along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their
people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about
the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain
that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.
Shut
it down, said Trump. Shut down
the transition.
Here Christie and
Bannon parted ways. Neither thought it was a good idea to shut down the
transition, but each had his own misgivings. Christie thought that Trump had
little chance of running the government without a formal transition. Bannon
wasn’t so sure if Trump would ever get his mind around running the federal
government; he just thought it would look bad if Trump didn’t at least seem to
prepare. Seeing that Trump wasn’t listening to Christie, he said: “What do you
think Morning Joe will say if you shut down your transition?” What Morning Joe
would say – or at least what Bannon thought it would say – was that Trump was
closing his presidential transition office because he didn’t think he had any
chance of being president.
See also:
White Supremacists
Political Extremes
Alarmist Hot Air
“That makes sense,”
he said.
With that, Christie
went back to preparing for a Trump administration. He tried to stay out of the
news, but that proved difficult. From time to time, Trump would see something
in the paper about Christie’s fundraising and become upset all over again. The
money that people donated to his campaign Trump considered, effectively, his
own. He thought the planning and forethought pointless. At one point he turned
to Christie and said: “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the
victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves.”
At
that moment in American history, if you could somehow organise the entire
population into a single line, all 350 million people, ordered not by height or
weight or age but by each citizen’s interest in the federal government, and
Donald Trump loitered somewhere near one end of it, Max Stier would occupy the
other.
By the autumn of
2016, Stier might have been the American with the greatest understanding of how
the US government worked. Oddly, for an American of his age and status, he had
romanticised public service since he was a child. He had gone through Yale in
the mid-80s and Stanford law school in the early 90s without ever being tempted
by money or anything else. He thought the US government was the single most
important and interesting institution in the history of the planet and could
not imagine doing anything but working to improve it. A few years out of law
school he had met a financier named Sam Heyman, who was as disturbed as Stier
was by how uninterested talented young people were in government work. Stier
persuaded Heyman to set aside $25m for him so that he might create an
organisation to address the problem.
Stier soon realised
that to attract talented young people to government service, he would need to
turn the government into a place that talented young people wanted to work. He
would need to fix the US government. Partnership for Public Service, as Stier
called his organisation, was not nearly as dull as its name. It trained civil
servants to be business managers; it brokered new relationships across the
federal government; it surveyed the federal workforce to identify specific
management failures and success; and it lobbied Congress to fix deep structural
problems. It was Stier who had persuaded Congress to pass the laws that made it
so annoyingly difficult for Trump to avoid preparing to be president.
Anyway, from the
point of view of a smart, talented person trying to decide whether to work for
the US government, the single most glaring defect was the absence of an upside.
The jobs were not well-paid compared with their equivalents in the private sector.
And the only time government employees were recognised was if they screwed up –
in which case they often became the wrong kind of famous. In 2002, Stier
created an annual black tie, Oscars-like awards ceremony to celebrate people
who had done extraordinary things in government.
Every year the
Sammies – as Stier called them, in honour of his original patron – attracted a
few more celebrities and a bit more media attention. And every year, the list
of achievements was mind-blowing. A guy in the energy department (Frazer
Lockhart) organised the first successful cleanup of a nuclear weapons factory,
in Rocky Flats, Colorado, and had brought it in 60 years early and $30bn under
budget. A woman at the Federal Trade Commission (Eileen Harrington) had built
the Do Not Call Registry, which spared the entire country from trillions of
irritating sales pitches. A National Institutes of Health researcher (Steven
Rosenberg) had pioneered immunotherapy, which had successfully treated
previously incurable cancers. There were hundreds of fantastically important
success stories in the US government. They just never got told.
Stier knew an
astonishing number of them. He had detected a pattern: a surprising number of
the people responsible for them were first-generation Americans who had come
from places without well-functioning governments. People who had lived without
government were more likely to find meaning in it. On the other hand, people
who had never experienced a collapsed state were slow to appreciate a state
that had not yet collapsed.
That was maybe
Stier’s biggest challenge: explaining the value of this enterprise at the
centre of a democratic society to people who either took it for granted or
imagined it as a pernicious force in their lives over which they had no
control. He would explain that the federal government provided services that
the private sector could not or would not: medical care for veterans, air
traffic control, national highways, food safety guidelines. He would explain
that the federal government was an engine of opportunity: millions of American
children, for instance, would have found it even harder than they did to make
the most of their lives without the basic nutrition supplied by the federal
government. When all else failed, he would explain the many places the US
government stood between Americans and the things that might kill them. “The
basic role of government is to keep us safe,” he would say.
The US government
employed 2 million people, 70% of them one way or another in national security.
It managed a portfolio of risks that no private person or corporation was able
to manage. Some of the risks were easy to imagine: a financial crisis, a
hurricane, a terrorist attack. Most were not: the risk, say, that some
prescription drug proves to be both so addictive and so accessible that each
year it kills more Americans than were killed in action by the peak of the
Vietnam war. Many of the risks that fell into the government’s lap felt so
remote as to be unreal: that a cyberattack left half the country without
electricity, or that some airborne virus wiped out millions, or that economic
inequality reached the point where it triggered a violent revolution. Maybe the
least visible risks were of things not happening that, with better government,
might have happened. A cure for cancer, for instance.
Enter the
presidential transition. A bad transition took this entire portfolio of
catastrophic risks – the biggest portfolio of such risks ever managed by a
single institution in the history of the world – and made all the bad things
more likely to happen and the good things less likely to happen. Even before
Stier created an organisation to fix the federal government, the haphazard
nature of presidential transitions drove him nuts. “We have a legacy government
that hasn’t kept up with the world we live in, largely because of disruptions
from bad transitions,” he said. “People don’t understand that a bungled
transition becomes a bungled presidency.” The new people taking over the job of
running the government were at best only partially informed, and often deeply
suspicious, of whatever happened to be going on before they arrived. By the
time they fully grasped the problems they were dealing with, it was time to go.
“It’s Groundhog Day,” said Stier. “The new people come in and think that the
previous administration and the civil service are lazy or stupid. Then they
actually get to know the place they are managing. And when they leave they say:
‘This was a really hard job, and those are the best people I’ve ever worked
with.’ This happens over and over and over.”
Most of the big
problems inside the US government were of the practical management sort and had
nothing to do with political ideology. A mundane but important example was how
hard it was for any government agency to hire new people. Some agencies
couldn’t hire anyone without 60 different people signing off on him. The George
W Bush administration had begun to attack that particular mundane problem. The
Obama administration, instead of running with the work done during the Bush
years, had simply started all over again.
Stier’s Partnership
for Public Service had helped to push through three separate laws related to
the transition. In 2010, Congress gave free office space and other resources to
the nominees of the two major political parties immediately after the summer conventions.
“The reason campaigns didn’t prepare is that they thought it would cost them
politically: no one wanted to be seen measuring the drapes,” said Stier. “The
idea was to give the nominees of the major political parties cover to do what
they should do.” In 2011-2012, to enable the president to put people in jobs
more quickly, Congress reduced the number of presidential appointments that
required Senate confirmation from about 1,400 to roughly 1,200 – still more
than 1,000 too many, in Stier’s view, but a start. Finally, in 2015, Congress
required the sitting president to prepare in various ways to hand the
government over to his or her successor. The person who had already taken the
test was now required by law to help the person who may not have studied for
it.
As the 2016
presidential election approached, Stier was about as hopeful as he had ever
been that the US government would be handed from one leader to another with
minimum stupidity. His partnership had worked with both the Clinton and the
Trump campaigns. “Their work was good,” said Stier. He was disappointed with
Obama in some ways. Obama had been slow to engage with the federal workforce.
He had appointed some poor managers to run some agencies. The fiasco of the
rollout of HealthCare.gov was not an accident but a byproduct of bad
management. But Obama’s preparations to hand over the government had been
superb: the Obama administration had created what amounted to the best course
ever on the inner workings of the most powerful institution on earth. What
could go wrong?
Chris
Christie was sitting on a sofa beside Trump when Pennsylvania was finally
called. It was 1.35am, but that wasn’t the only reason the feeling in the room
was odd. Mike Pence went to kiss his wife, Karen, and she turned away from him.
“You got what you wanted, Mike,” she said. “Now leave me alone.” She wouldn’t
so much as say hello to Trump. Trump himself just stared at the TV without
saying anything, like a man with a pair of twos whose bluff has been called.
His campaign hadn’t even bothered to prepare an acceptance speech. It was not
hard to see why Trump hadn’t seen the point in preparing to take over the
federal government: why study for a test you will never need to take? Why take
the risk of discovering you might, at your very best, be a C student? This was
the real part of becoming president of the US. And, Christie thought, it scared
the crap out of the president-elect.
Not long after the
people on TV announced that Trump had won Pennsylvania, Jared Kushner grabbed
Christie anxiously and said: “We have to have a transition meeting tomorrow
morning!” Even before that meeting, Christie had made sure that Trump knew the
protocol for his discussions with foreign leaders. The transition team had
prepared a document to let him know how these were meant to go. The first few
calls were easy – the very first was always with the prime minister of Great
Britain – but two dozen calls in you were talking to some kleptocrat and
tiptoeing around sensitive security issues. Before any of the calls could be
made, however, the president of Egypt called in to the switchboard at Trump
Tower and somehow got the operator to put him straight through to Trump. “Trump
was like ... I love the Bangles! You know that song Walk Like an
Egyptian?” recalled one of his advisers on the scene.
That had been the
first hint Christie had of trouble. He had asked Kushner what that was about,
and Kushner had simply said, Trump ran a very unconventional campaign,
and he’s not going to follow any of the protocols. The next hint that the
transition might not go as planned came from Pence – now, incredibly, the
vice-president-elect. Christie met with Pence the day after the election, to
discuss the previous lists of people who had been vetted for jobs. The meeting
began with a prayer, followed by Pence’s first, ominous question: “Why isn’t
Puzder on the list for labour?” Andrew Puzder, the head of CKE Restaurants, the
holding company for the fast-food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr, wanted to be
the secretary of labour. Christie explained that Puzder’s ex-wife had accused
him of abuse (although she later retracted the allegation) and his fast-food
restaurant employees had complained of mistreatment. Even if he was somehow the
ideal candidate to become the next secretary of labour, he wouldn’t survive his
Senate confirmation hearings. (Trump ignored the advice and nominated Puzder.
In the controversy that followed, Puzder not only failed to be confirmed, but
also stepped down from his job.)
After meeting with
Pence, Christie was scheduled to brief the Trump children, Kushner and the
other members of Trump’s inner circle. He was surprised to find, suddenly
included in this group, retired army lieutenant general Michael Flynn. Flynn
was a jobseeker the transition team had found reasons to be extremely wary of.
Now he wanted to be named Trump’s national security adviser, which was maybe
the most important job in the entire national security apparatus. The national
security team inside the Trump transition – staffed with senior former military
and intelligence officials – had thought that was an especially bad idea.
Flynn’s name was not on the list. But here he was, in the meeting to decide who
would do what in the Trump administration, and Ivanka was asking him which job
he would like to have.
Before Christie
could intercede, Bannon grabbed him and asked to see him privately. Christie
followed Bannon to his office impatiently. Hey, this is going to have
to be quick, said Christie.
It’s
really quick, said Bannon. You’re
out.
Why? asked Christie, stunned.
We’re
making a change.
“Okay, what are
we changing?
You.
Why?
It’s
really not important.
The method of his
execution was unsurprising: Trump always avoided firing people himself. The man
who played Mr You’re Fired on TV avoided personal confrontation in real life.
The surprise was that it was being done now, just when the work of the transition
team was most critical. Only when Christie threatened to go down and tell
reporters that Bannon had fired him did Bannon concede, “It was Jared.”
In the days after
the election, the people in the building on 17th and Pennsylvania were meant to
move to another building in downtown DC, a kind of White House-in-waiting. They
soon discovered that the lists that they had created of people to staff the
Trump administration were not the lists that mattered. There was now this other
list, of people allowed into the new building, and most of their names weren’t
on it. “People would show up to the new building and say: ‘Let me in,’ and the
secret service would say: ‘Sorry, you’re not on the list,’” said a civil
servant who worked in the new building.
It wasn’t just Christie
who had been fired. It was the entire transition team – although no one ever
told them so directly. As Nancy Cook reported in Politico, Bannon visited the
transition headquarters a few days after he had given Christie the news, and
made a show of tossing the work the people there had done for Trump into the
bin. Trump was going to handle the transition more or less by himself. Not even
Bannon thought this was a good idea. “I was fucking nervous as shit,” Bannon
later told friends. “I go, ‘Holy fuck, this guy [Trump] doesn’t know anything.
And he doesn’t give a shit.’”
They were about to
take control of the portfolio of existential risks managed by the US
government. Only they weren’t. On the morning after the election the hundreds
of people who had prepared to brief the incoming Trump administration sat
waiting. A day became a week and a week became a month … and no one showed up.
The parking spots that had been set aside for Trump’s people remained empty,
and the briefing books were never opened. You could walk into almost any
department of the US government and hear people asking the same question: where
were these people who were meant to be running the place?
The department of
agriculture was an excellent case study. The place had an annual budget of
$164bn and was charged with so many missions critical to the society that the
people who worked there played a drinking game called Does the Department of
Agriculture Do It? Someone would name a function of government, say, making
sure that geese don’t gather at US airports, and fly into jet engines. Someone
else would have to guess whether the agriculture department did it. (In this
case, it did.) Guess wrong and you had to drink. Among other things, the
department essentially maintained rural America, and also ensured that the
American poor and the elderly did not starve. Much of its work was complicated
and technical – and yet for the months between the election and the
inauguration, Trump people never turned up to learn about it. Only on
inauguration day did they flood into the building, but the people who showed up
had no idea why they were there or what they were meant to do. Trump sent,
among others, a long-haul truck driver, a telephone company clerk, a gas
company meter reader, a country club cabana attendant, a Republican National
Committee intern and the owner of a scented candle company. One of the CVs
listed the new appointee’s only skill as “a pleasant demeanor”.
All these people
had two things in common. They were Trump loyalists. And they knew nothing
whatsoever about the job they suddenly found themselves in. A new American
experiment was underway.
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This
is an edited extract from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, published by Penguin
on 2 October.To order a copy for £17.20 (RRP £20), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or
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The evolution of business and employment has been
going on for thousands of years and the invention of the wheel and the wagon
has been a vital part of that evolution, but the development of motor vehicles
has been crucial. Before the Industrial Revolution few people lived beyond the
age of 40 and the main causes of death were starvation (chiefly from
unemployment) war, plague, murder and suicide. 
