Chap 10 in the In Trump Time Serialization

My Hard Pratfall From Trumpian Grace

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Katie Walsh, Deputy White House Chief of Staff, former RNC staffer and notorious Never Trumper, has been exposed as the White House leaker… With so many enemies in his own camp and his own party, our new president…must scrutinize closely the potential Judases working around him.⁶⁵

Thomas Madison, Powdered Wig Society, February 21, 2017

After the Boss’ Inauguration Day speech, it was time to get to work. So I headed over to the rendezvous point for staffers at what had been the headquarters for the Presidential Transition. This was a General Services Administration office building just west of the White House grounds at 1800 F Street.

I hadn’t visited this paean to drab 1950s-style architecture for more than a month. My one enduring memory of that first visit was a rather eye-opening meeting with the then-nominee for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. He had set up shop at the HQ to practice for the tough grilling he could expect during his confirmation hearings in sessions that were accurately, but not so affectionately, call “murder boards.”

During this visit, King Rex let me know in no uncertain terms that as Secretary of State he would be balancing the promises of Donald Trump to crack down on the unfair trade practices of countries around the world with his own need for judicious diplomacy; and as Tillerson quite openly expressed his intentions to subvert the Trump trade policy paradigm, he made copious references to the need for well-functioning global supply chains.

Reading between Rex’s lines, he, as the former Chairman of Exxon – one of the biggest multinational corporations in the world – was telling me to forget about all that Populist Economic Nationalist stuff where we would bring our supply chains home. In Rex’s world, that’s not the way the world should work – at least when it came to allocating resources “efficiently,” that is, in a way to maximize corporate profits. Let the devil and blue-collar workers take the hindmost.

At least Rex was honest about his intentions to sabotage our trade policy – despite the fact he had gotten not a single vote in the election; and I would remember that day well almost a year later at a big showdown in the Roosevelt room over the possible imposition of tariffs on China.

Virtually every top Cabinet member with a stake in trade policy was there. Besides Tillerson, there was Treasury’s Steve Mnuchin, Commerce’s Wilbur Ross, the Pentagon’s Jim Mattis, Agriculture’s Sonny Perdue, and even Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta. Every single person in that room, including National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, the Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and the always lurking Staff Secretary Rob Porter argued against the tough measures President Trump was proposing.

In fact, the only guy in the room supportive of the president was yours truly; and this unified opposition in the Roosevelt room to the centerpiece of his entire campaign and economic strategy seemed to be a wake-up call for the Boss.

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