1
Empty Frames
As the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States approached, there were reminders everywhere of how dramatically the world was about to change. On January 19, 2017, I was reporting from the White House on the final day of Barack Obamaâs administration. But the story was no longer Obama; his time was up. The story was the arrival of Trump. And there was a sense of dread inside the Obama West Wing.
That day, the last before Trump would be sworn into office, I decided to roam the media-accessible hallway of the West Wing that leads to the area known as âUpper Press.â This is where the office of the White House press secretary is located, and I was milling around, looking to say farewell to some of the people who had worked for Obama. The last press secretary of the Obama administration, Josh Earnest, had already cleared out his office. He was gone. So, too, was Eric Schultz, Obamaâs deputy press secretary. Schultz and I had developed a good working relationship during my time covering the Obama White House.
Anybody who knew Eric understood full well that he had his own misgivings about the press. He thought we chased Trumpâs bright, shiny objects too much, and he was right. Schultz also enjoyed needling me over my question to Obama at a news conference at the 2015 G20 summit in Turkey. That was when I pressed Obama on his administrationâs inability to control the spread of the terrorist group ISIS as it stormed across Iraq and Syria, creating a caliphate that destabilized the region and was responsible for murdering a number of foreign journalists.
âWhy canât we take out these bastards?â I asked Obama at that news conference.
Obama offered a detailed and somewhat detached, almost clinical response to the question. Obama, for all his strengths and intellect, seemed to have misread the publicâs anxiety over ISIS, something his own aides would later admit to me privately. People inside the White House were incensed over the question at the time, and Schultz never let me forget that the Obama team disliked the question. From that day forward, Eric would email me news reports of various success stories from the Obama White House battle against ISIS.
âWe got one of the bastards,â he would email me from time to time. He meant it, in part, in good funâor so I thoughtâbut it was also a way for him to let me know I had pissed them off.
In the days following Trumpâs victory, Iâd caught up with Eric in his office. Schultz had an unforgettable look of sleep-deprived agony on his face. During the run-up to the 2016 campaign, he and I had lengthy discussions about the wisdom of Hillary Clinton running for president. Schultz, like many in the Obama White House, was despondent that Clinton seemed to have botched what should have been a thoroughly winnable campaign. They had all suffered a crushing loss. They had all banked on the conventional wisdom that was marrow deep in Washington that Trump had no chance of winning. How could the man who had laughably accused Obama of not having been born in the United States succeed the first African American president of the United States, they all wondered with dread. How could it all end like this? they thought.
Now, standing in Upper Press on the night of January 19, I saw that Eric and the rest of the Obama gang had vanished from the press-accessible areas of the West Wing. All I could find, as I looked around, were empty walls, empty desks, and an eerie silence. It is a sight few Americans ever get to see. Obamaâs aides had packed up to leave. This was the transition of power under way. Out with the old and in with the new. This is how our democracy works.
No image crystallized this cold reality more than the picture frames hanging in the hallway outside Upper Press. During the Obama years, photographs of the forty-fourth president and his family hung there. But on the night of January 19, the frames were empty. The photos of Barack, Michelle, Malia, and Sasha Obama had been taken down. Over the next several weeks, pictures of Trump and his family would fill those frames. Until then, they were a blank canvas.
In a sense, every new administration is an empty frame, and we were all about to learn how Trump would fill his. For all the bluster on the campaign trail, no one knew for sure exactly how he would govern. Of course, some things were easy to envision. Trumpâs ability to pit one group of Americans against another, his bullying of immigrants, and yes, his demonizing of the press and assaults on the truth were also hallmarks of his rise to power. Trump was brash, but thatâs being too kind; he could also act like a bully. With this style of governance, the question was clear: would he change the office, or would the office change him?
So many pundits and respected presidential historians, perhaps out of a sense of national anxiety, predicted that the office he was about to assume would transform Trump. There was a feeling that the great weight of the presidency of the United States, with all its trappings and ceremony, would rest upon Trumpâs shoulders and humble him, turning the New York businessman into a leader all Americans could admire. But as Obamaâs longtime strategist David Axelrod has observed, presidential campaigns have a way of magnifying oneâs characterâlike an âMRI of the soul.â Trumpâs soul was about to be magnified and projected onto the world stage. And the lessons learned from the moments leading up to January 20, 2017, suggested that the nation was about to undergo a remarkable and pivotal test.
On that night of January 19, I did find one last staffer from the Obama administration. A press aide, Brian Gabriel, greeted me and remarked on the incredible turn of political events that was about to unfold the following day. I joked to Brian that he basically was the White House. It was hard for him to crack a smile.
As I stood there with Brian, a question dawned on me that I thought I had better get out of the way while I had the chance. Trumpâs treatment of the press had worried me throughout the campaign, so I asked Brian if he wouldnât mind sharing a secret with me.
âDid you guys have the ability to listen in on our conversations in the press areas of the White House? Any listening devices in the booths?â I asked, referring to the small work areas set up for the TV networks and wire services in the press areas of the West Wing.
âNo. Not that Iâm aware of,â Gabriel responded, a puzzled look on his face. Iâll confess, at the time it seemed like a nutty question, but his answer did give me some relief. At least the Trump people would not have infrastructure already in place to spy on us, I thought.
* * *
ON THE EVE OF TRUMPâS PRESIDENCY, I HAD GOOD REASON TO BE worried based on what Iâd seen on the campaign trail. As a reporter whoâd covered previous administrations as well as much of Trumpâs campaign, I suspected the office would not transform the man. Trump struck me as potentially unprepared for the White House. Neither Trump nor his top advisers thought he was going to win. Still, they had put on a good show.
Two nights before Election Day, I was in Pennsylvania and spotted a sign that the Trump wave was coming. Trump was doing a tarmac event near the Pittsburgh airport. The crowd was big and rowdy. Trumpâs supporters were so loyal that they booed as a Bruce Springsteen song played over the loudspeakers. They werenât yelling âBruceâ; they were booing, perhaps in response to Springsteen referring to Trump as a âmoronâ in the weeks before the election.
But that wasnât the memory that stayed with me. It was when Trumpâs Pennsylvania campaign manager, David Urban, came up to me and said, âFollow me.â We made our way outside and then walked the length of the line of people waiting to get inside. It was easily a mile and a half long.
âDoes this look like a losing campaign to you?â Urban asked.
âNo, it doesnât,â I replied. It was a sight to behold. A thought occurred to me: If Trump wins Pennsylvania, Clinton is in very big trouble.
The next night, we covered Trumpâs last event of the 2016 campaign, a rally in Grand Rapids before thousands of screaming Michiganders wearing red âMake America Great Againâ hats. Trump had remarked that the large crowd hardly had the look of a second-place finish. How right he was! With crowds like the ones he was receiving in the final days of the campaign, Trump didnât need the press. And what happened after his final rally in Grand Rapids made that all too clear.
Although Trumpâs plane was parked on the tarmac right next to the press plane, the Republican candidate refused the time-honored tradition for a presidential candidate of posing in front of the plane for a photo with the journalists covering his or her campaign. One of Trumpâs traveling press aides, Stephanie Grisham, told us he was unavailable. (Yeah, right.) Disappointed, we schlepped onto the press plane for the final ride back to New York.
It was hardly surprising that Trump would stiff the press out of the planeside picture. He had spent the better part of the last year savaging the news media. We were, in his words, âdisgusting,â âdishonest,â âscum,â âthieves,â âcrooks,â âliars,â and so on. Trump simply could not stand us.
As a journeyman correspondent, I had already covered three presidential campaigns before âthe Donaldâ came along. My first Election Eve picture with a candidate was in 2004, with John Kerry, who lost. Iâll never forget that day. Unlike Trump, who rode on his own private plane (dubbed Trump Force One by the press), separate from the press plane, Kerry and the media all traveled on the same charter jet. (Thatâs the campaign norm, one of many that Trump was happy to break.) And on Election Day 2004, Kerry walked to the press cabin and handed out red fleece jackets. Emblazoned on each were the words âKerry Edwards Press Corps.â (One small problem with the jackets: âKerry Edwardsâ was written in a bright white stitching. The words âPress Corpsâ were barely visible in a dark blueâso dark that at a gas station on the way home after Kerry lost, a motorist looked at my new fleece and said, âSorry, you lost.â He couldnât make out from the jacket that I was with the press.)
No one thought a fleece jacket would be forthcoming from the Trump campaign. There had been no candidate bonding time with Trump as the 2016 campaign came to an end, so it wasnât exactly a surprise when Trump skipped the group photo and one last moment as a candidate to make peace with his imagined enemy. Leaving nothing to chance, his staff had arranged it so that the two planes didnât even land at the same airport, with the press plane landing in Newark, far away from Trump Force Oneâs home at LaGuardia.
I felt bad for the younger campaign reporters, some barely into their twenties, who had spent the last eighteen months chronicling Trumpâs candidacy. I had wanted them to have that picture. So, as we got off the press plane in Newark at 3:30 a.m. on Election Day and started plodding toward the sad, dark buses awaiting us, I shouted at everybody to assemble in front of the plane. We were going to have our goddamned picture.
One of my colleagues had procured a cardboard cutout of Trump. We propped it up in the middle of us and all gathered together on the tarmac for the money shot. And with the flashlights on our mobile phones angled up at our faces to provide some much-needed lighting, we managed a pretty damn good middle-of-the-night photo in front of the plane. After all the taunting and all the abuse from a candidate who repeatedly lashed out at the news media, posing for that picture gave us all a good laugh.
* * *
IT WAS 4:30 IN THE MORNING ON ELECTION DAY WHEN THE CAMPAIGN reporters following Donald J. Trumpâs unlikely, unconventional, unbelievable bid for the presidency arrived, haggard, half-drunk, and bleary-eyed, at the Manhattan hotel preferred by the press corps, the JW Marriott Essex House.
We were standing in line, waiting patiently for our room keys, when in walks Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Priebus had become a trusted adviser to Trump, sticking by the real estate tycoon when times were tough. I had always liked Priebus. A Wisconsin nice guy, he was the GOPâs smooth operator, easygoing with the party and the press. He seemed genuinely human to me, a rarity in the Washington viper pit.
The RNC chair had been with Trump through good times and bad. He had dutifully gone on the âshowsâ and fought the good fight, insisting against all evidence to the contrary that the former host of the reality TV show The Apprentice was going to win the presidency.
But privately, Priebus was less confident. In the lobby of the Essex House, he walked right up to me and said, âItâs going to take a miracle for us to win.â Priebus was a little tipsy that morning. Still, I couldnât believe my ears. He just walked up in a bit of a stupor and uttered those unbelievable words. So, I let him talk.
Priebus laid out what all the data were telling them: that the Trump campaign would lose but by a narrow margin. In Reinceâs mind, that was a small victory.
âDidnât you think we were dead after the Access Hollywood thing?â he asked.
âYes,â I said. âI said so on TV.â I had, actually. On The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, the very day the Access Hollywood tape surfaced. On the tape, as most of the world knows by now, Trump was caught on a hot microphone saying he could grab a woman âby the pussyâ and get away with it, among other outrageous remarks. At the time, I said that the tape probably meant the end of his campaign. âThe bottom of the barrelâ was how I described Trumpâs behavior on the recording. Oh, how wrong I was.
Priebus repeated himself: âDidnât you think that was the end?â
âYes,â I said, uncertain why he kept asking me the same question.
Then he started looking on the bright side, noting how the Trump campaign had managed to pull back from the abyss and make the final weeks of the election competitive. It was going to be close, not a blowout loss to Clinton. These were all good points, and all true. This is what the Republican Party chairman, at a desperate moment, no doubt, in his career and his life, was trying to get across. Again, I liked Reince, so I felt bad for him.
He went on to say how ...
