Chap 18: Taking Back Trump's America Serialization

A Slave Labor Debacle Debases the Situation Room

Enjoy the read! The entire book is available on Amazon.

Fresh off their heated, “f**k”-encrusted shouting match in China, tensions and policy fissures between Donald Trump advisers Steve Mnuchin and Peter Navarro are at an all-time high  Navarro has—according to multiple sources who spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity—privately nicknamed Mnuchin “Neville Chamberlain” (in reference to the Conservative British prime minister famous for his foreign policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler) and likened the economic threat from China to that of fascist dictator Hitler.

The Daily Beast, May 24, 2018

Here’s a funny story about this dust-up reported by The Daily Beast. It’s a story that may help shed a useful spotlight on my four-year long feud with Neville Mnuchin.

In May of 2018, Bob Lighthizer and I jumped on Steve Mnuchin’s Treasury Department plane with a gaggle of National Security Council staffers and headed to Beijing for what would be our one and only round of major trade talks with the Chinese on their home turf.

This trip to the Far East immediately went South when Mnuchin unilaterally decided at breakfast just before the talks began that he would conduct one-on-one negotiations directly with China’s chief negotiator, Vice Premier Liu He, rather than allow the rest of us to participate. Yep, we had just flown 7,000 miles only to have Stupid Stevie, rather than the Chinese, be the first to screw us.

Both Lighthizer and Terry Branstad, the Ambassador to China, were predictably livid at Mnuchin; but I was the only one who bothered to speak up. In fact, I got right up in Steve’s big-nosed ugly grill right outside the meeting hall and didn’t let up until he agreed to back down and at least let Lighthizer into his stupid little negotiating party.

Mnuchin’s gambit was indeed stupid. Through the eyes of the Chinese, we as a team lost considerable face; and the episode was a particular embarrassment to Lighthizer, the guy who was supposed to be our real chief negotiator.

The net result was that Mnuchin considerably weakened our negotiating position at the very beginning of what were already very sensitive negotiations.

That night, in a long dinner in which every course served seem to get weirder – to the point where I didn’t even know what I was eating by the end – the Chinese purposely isolated Lighthizer. They did so by seating poor forlorn Bob alone in the middle of a huge table, with no one within 10 feet of him on either side. Meanwhile, directly across from Bob at another huge table, our Communists hosts treated Mnuchin like an Emperor, feting him with conversation and fawning all over him.

I wondered at the time whether I, with my cross-cultural training as a Peace Corps volunteer, was the only one in the banquet hall to pick up on this Chinese trick. Certainly Steve Mnuchin had no clue.

Now here’s the funny part of the story: On the way home, somebody in the flight crew must have had a keen sense of history – or at least humor – because they showed the film “Darkest Hour.”

This glorious piece of cinema tells the tale of Winston Churchill’s own dustup in the 1930s with Great Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Minister Lord Halifax. Churchill’s fight comes as he is jockeying to become Prime Minister in the face of unrelenting Nazi aggression – which both Chamberlain and Halifax repeatedly appease.

After the movie was over, a number of us congregated in the aisles; and at one point, one of the National Security Council staff made the comparison between Trump battling the Chinese Communist Party and Churchill fighting the Nazis. When another staffer asked: “If Trump is Churchill, who is Neville Chamberlain and who is Lord Halifax in this administration?”

Of course, the hands-down, no question about it consensus was Mnuchin as Neville Chamberlain. There was, however, a split over Lord Halifax. Some folks thought it was Kushner, while at least to me, it was unquestionably Larry Kudlow.

At any rate, several weeks later, The Daily Beast would, as the lead off quote to this chapter indicates, accuse little old me of christening Mnuchin as the “Neville Chamberlain” of our time; but I always like to give credit where credit is due. In this case, it was clearly a group decision made somewhere over the skies of Alaska on our way home to the DC Swamp.

After the Beasty story broke and the next time we were in the Oval Office, Mnuchin began to whine in front of the Boss about how I could possibly call poor Stevie “Neville Chamberlain.” After all, it was the evil Chamberlain who had surrendered Europe to those far eviler Nazis who had killed so many of Stevie’s Jewish ancestors.