[Taken all together these staffer memoirs offer a sense of
something that no outsider can ever completely understand: what it’s
like to live in Trump World. ] [[link removed]]

I READ (ALMOST) EVERY MEMOIR BY A FORMER TRUMP OFFICIAL  
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Laura Miller
June 29, 2020
Slate
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_ Taken all together these staffer memoirs offer a sense of something
that no outsider can ever completely understand: what it’s like to
live in Trump World. _

All the books about Trump's Presidency, Win McNamee/Getty Images

 

A few weeks into the Trump administration, I overheard a friend who
works in publishing remark, “Possibly the only good thing that will
ever come of this is a bunch of tell-all memoirs that will be a lot
juicier than the typical White House book.” That prediction, rather
like a Trump campaign promise, has yet to be fulfilled. Exposés of
the dysfunctional inner workings of the Trump White House have reaped
plenty of cash for the book business, but the best dish has mostly
come from outsiders, journalists like Michael Wolff (2018’s _Fire
and Fury_
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Bob Woodward (2018’s _Fear_
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and Washington Post reporters Carol D. Leonnig and Philip Rucker (this
year’s _A Very Stable Genius_
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Books by former Trump staffers—of which John Bolton’s
headline-making _The Room Where It Happened_
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_is the most recent—tend to be stunted, partial accounts, twisted
like bonsai trees by the authors’ needs to make excuses, cover their
tracks, and justify choices that in retrospect look poor indeed.

But taken all together, these staffer memoirs offer a sense of
something that no outsider can ever completely understand: what it’s
like to live in Trump World. That’s what its denizens call the
alternate reality surrounding our petty, distractible, praise-hungry
president. Under its spell, people strive to gain and hold onto their
perches in what has to be one of the worst workplaces in the history
of the ruling classes, short of Caligula’s Rome. _The Room Where It
Happened_ contains its share of outraging scoops, thoroughly covered
elsewhere
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and is as replete with pontification, chickenhawk saber rattling, and
numbing notebook dumps as its initial reviewers have attested.
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it also provides the public with yet another facet of the mad tea
party that is Trump World.

Bolton replaced H.R. McMaster, who had been forced out as Donald
Trump’s national security adviser, and whose own memoir is due in
September [[link removed]].
According to _A Very Stable Genius_, by the end of McMaster’s
tenure, Trump had taken to imitating McMaster behind his back by
puffing up his chest and barking in a “fake shout like a boot camp
drill sergeant.” Bolton claims that he went in with “no
illusions” about his ability to change Trump, perhaps believing that
his frequent quoting of Eisenhower, Cato the Younger, and Thucydides
would at least succeed in shaping policy. In this, he firmly belongs
to the White House contingent he names “the axis of adults,”
officials with experience in governing who sought to direct Trump’s
wayward impulses and uninformed notions into some kind of consistent
leadership. But Bolton insists that these people (a group that
presumably includes such figures as former Secretary of Defense James
Mattis, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and McMaster) failed
because they “didn’t do nearly enough to establish order, and what
they did do was so transparently self-serving and publicly dismissive
of many of Trump’s very clear goals (whether worthy or unworthy)”
that Trump became mistrustful of his advisers and “saw conspiracies
behind rocks.” Bolton did succeed in ticking off a few items on his
to-do list, most notably the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear
deal—an obsession of his, as is everything Iranian—but eventually
he got on everyone’s nerves and was fired in September.

In opposition to the “adult” staffers who deluded themselves that
they could manage Trump are the believers, who have published their
own set of memoirs. These include staffers like former press secretary
Sean Spicer, communications aide Cliff Sims, and Trump satellite Chris
Christie. Of these three, Spicer voices the fewest reservations about
Trump’s management style. At times, in his 2018 memoir, _The
Briefing_ [[link removed]]_,_
his obeisance verges on Stockholm syndrome. After only six months in
the White House, Spicer was effectively pushed to resign when Trump
hired Anthony Scaramucci over him as communications director, the
position Spicer had been seeking since the campaign. “This is the
change you need and deserve,” he said to the president when handing
over his resignation letter. “OK, if that’s what you think,” was
Trump’s reply, prompting Spicer to rhapsodize about having seen a
side of the president that is “caring, kind, and gracious.”
(Scaramucci lasted only 11 days but got his own book out of it
anyway—one that was so slim that, as with Omarosa’s
[[link removed]], even I could
not be bothered to read it.)

Christie grovels a bit less, having known Trump since the days when
his political aspirations looked like nothing more than a publicity
stunt. After the Bridgegate scandal scuttled Christie’s own
presidential ambitions, he became an early Trump endorser, claiming,
in his 2019 memoir, _Let Me Finish_
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recognized that Trump “was everything I was, but on jet fuel.”
Trump commandeers Christie’s memoir, with Christie’s own career
taking a back seat to his herculean efforts to come up with the
campaign’s 30-volume transition plan, only to see it dumped in a
trash can by Steve Bannon. _Let Me Finish_ could just as easily be
titled _I Told You So,_ so often does Christie return to the plan as
rosy phantom of what might have been. Trump strung Christie along for
months with promises that he might be made vice president or attorney
general, before snatching away the prizes and offering instead such
lesser roles as secretary of labor and ambassador to Vatican City.

Dangling and withdrawing goodies is a classic Trump move, one he used
repeatedly on Bolton. He relishes a drawn-out interviewing process
that requires petitioning luminaries to come through various Trump HQs
like contestants in one of his beauty contests as the media
breathlessly speculates on every visitor. Another Trump standby is
keeping officials at postings in an “acting” capacity so that they
must constantly court his favor instead of telling him facts he
doesn’t want to hear.

While it is in many respects a vile object, Cliff Sims’ _Team of
Vipers_ [[link removed]], a 2019
account of Sims’ 500 days in a relatively minor White House job,
probably offers the clearest picture of Trump’s management style.
“This is my Wilbur,” Sims observed Trump saying as he introduced
Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi. Sims, who generally takes a positive view of Trump despite
having been burned by him, notes that the first-person possessive is a
term the president reserves for those with whom he feels a “special
connection.” More accurately, it reflects the fact that, in
Trump’s mind, he doesn’t so much hire staff as obtain them like
trophies for display.

Trump went on to boast to Sisi that Ross is “so famous on Wall
Street, all you have to say is ‘Wilbur,’ and everyone knows who
you’re talking about.” Despite what his supporters often praise as
a maverick independence from “elites,” Trump could not be a more
slavish credentialist. He betrays his credulous investment in
conventional opinion every time he rattles on about what “people”
or “everyone” is “saying,” and the class that dispenses
prestige and Ivy League degrees, or talks about “Wilbur,” is the
same class his base adores him for appalling. Similarly, the term
“central casting” comes up a lot in the accounts of Trump
staffers. “You’ve got to understand, Chris,” Trump told Christie
when he picked Mike Pence as his running mate. “He’s out of
Central Casting.” Sims describes the two words as Trump’s
“favorite phrase,” because for the president, “looking the part
was every bit as important as doing a good job.”

Meanwhile, Trump is forever asking his staff for impromptu performance
reviews, particularly negative ones, of other staffers. “He
couldn’t even complete a sentence today without stuttering,” Trump
once told Sims of Spicer. “What do you think about Sarah Sanders?
Would she be better?” Most Trump World memoirs feature several
conversations like these. This passive-aggressive move is manifestly
designed to make everyone feel as insecure and paranoid as he does,
but believers like Sims, Christie, and Spicer seem oblivious to
Trump’s intent, persuading themselves that scheming colleagues alone
were responsible for the misery of their workplace. It’s not until
Sims decides to fink on a co-worker he suspects of leaking
unflattering information to the press and Trump calls for a pen and
paper so that he can start taking down names for what Sims calls an
“enemies list” that the aide gets an inkling that this fish may be
rotting from the head.

Like many a terrible boss, Trump is fundamentally a coward. In direct
contrast to the image he cultivated on _The Apprentice,_ he rarely has
the nerve to fire anyone to their face. More often than not, he uses
belittling treatment and other indirect means (such as hiring
Scaramucci over Spicer) to force them to quit. Or he simply announces
their replacement on Twitter, as he did to Tillerson. Trump may lose
his temper and berate his underlings, but exercising calm, considered,
and deliberate authority is another matter.

This insecurity lies at the root of Trump’s fascination with
autocrats like Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. He
envies not just their totalitarian powers but the ease with which they
wield them. According to Sims, one Trump biography claims that
Trump’s father, Fred, used to intone to his sons, “You are a
killer. … You are a king. … You are a killer. … You are a
king.” As a result, “killer” became “the single highest
compliment” in Trump’s pantheon. He praised his Wilbur as a
“killer” and Kim, as well. In Kim’s case, it is the literal
truth. “He was like 26 or 25 when his father died,” Trump is
quoted saying in _A Warning_
[[link removed]]_,_ the 2019
book by an anonymous senior official, “and all of a sudden … he
goes in, he takes over, and he’s the boss.” By Bolton’s account,
Trump’s infatuation with Kim took on the bizarre quality of a
teenage crush. The president proclaimed that the two had “fallen in
love” and fussed for months about delivering a gift to the despot: a
Trump-autographed Elton John CD.

That this strange courtship followed closely on the heels of a
nerve-wracking incident in which Trump threatened North Korea on
Twitter
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with “fire and fury like the world has never seen
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underscores just how capricious this presidency has been. In an
interview with ABC News’ Martha Raddatz
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Bolton said that he could discern “no coherent basis, no strategy,
no philosophy” in the White House. “Decisions are made in a very
scattershot fashion.” This is partly because, as Sims puts it, Trump
believes himself to function comfortably in chaotic conditions that
leave his adversaries at a disadvantage. But in what sense can the
president’s own staff be considered his adversaries? Who makes an
enemies list of the people working for him? Is Trump really so
threatened by “his” prized pet generals and assorted “killers”
that he needs to keep them in what Bolton describes, with a
hilariously gratuitous display of Latin, as a “Hobbesian bellum
omnium contra omnes (war of all against all)”?

Yes, probably, but these memoirs also suggest that Trump doesn’t
trust some members of his administration because he simply doesn’t
understand them. Their behavior springs from a commitment to
principles he not only doesn’t possess but can’t. Some of these
principles have to do with morality, which Trump lacks, but others
require a long-term or big-picture perspective of which he also seems
incapable. According to Bolton, Trump “believed he could run the
Executive Branch and establish national-security policies on instinct,
relying on personal relationships with foreign leaders.” Everything
is personal and therefore ephemeral. Even without the shit-stirring
that Trump regularly engaged in with his staff, his fundamental
rudderlessness can only have left them to their own devices and at
cross-purposes with one another.

This blind spot also put Trump on a collision course with not one but
two G-men, James Comey and Andrew McCabe, authors of the two most
readable books about working under Trump. In their notorious
discussion during which Trump asked, improperly, for Comey’s
“loyalty,” the FBI director’s hedging counteroffer of
“honesty” led Trump to jump to the conclusion that they’d
reached a deal: Comey would provide him with “honest loyalty.” As
Comey sees it, his primary commitment is to the truth—the title of
his 2018 memoir, _A Higher Loyalty_
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this—but such abstractions mean nothing to Trump. He blows past them
as so much meaningless babble. Loyalty, however, is personal, and that
he gets.

McCabe, who succeeded Comey to become acting director of the FBI, is
less philosophically inclined than Comey, but he was fiercely devoted
to the FBI, where he had worked for more than 20 years. Both Comey’s
book and McCabe’s—_The Threat_
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2019—feature dramatic backstories about investigating organized
crime and terrorism, which are a lot more entertaining than tales from
Spicer’s early work on political campaigns or Christie’s time
running for the board of freeholders in Morris County. Comey in
particular has a fine eye for revealing character traits, noting that,
while Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama always met with him
while sitting in armchairs by the fireplace in the Oval Office, Trump
made a point of sitting behind the famous Resolute desk, as if girding
himself with an authority he felt unable to assume without it.

For his part, McCabe witnessed some of the president’s most
flagrantly vindictive pettiness. Trump insisted that the FBI’s
investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails was tainted because of
donations McCabe’s wife received for an unsuccessful political
campaign in Virginia. During a telephone call, Trump told McCabe to
ask his wife “what it was like to lose. It must be tough to be a
loser.” Later, after taunting McCabe on Twitter
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“racing the clock to retire with full benefits,” Trump had
Attorney General Jeff Sessions fire McCabe less than two days before
his pension was fully vested.

Both Comey and McCabe have backgrounds that ideally position them to
compare Trump to a mob boss—but, really, isn’t this an insult to
mob bosses? Running an extensive and ongoing criminal enterprise
requires a consistency and an accountability to one’s underlings
that Trump has never exhibited. And as Sims ruefully puts it at the
end of _Team of Vipers, _“He hadn’t lifted a finger for countless
loyal aides before me, and I’m sure he wouldn’t for countless
loyal aides to come. It was well known that in Trump World, loyalty
was mostly a one-way street.” Mafiosi may impose primitive honor
codes, but as Comey observes with no small fascination, these are
nevertheless codes that apply to everyone. How long could a mob boss
as capricious and untrustworthy as Trump last before his lieutenants
revolted and replaced him with someone more competent?

 

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