Behind the Trump curtain

An extract from Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward

IN EARLY September 2017, in the eighth month of the Trump presidency, Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs and the president’s top economic adviser in the White House, moved cautiously toward the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

In his 27 years at Goldman, Cohn – 1.9m, bald, brash and full of self-confidence – had made billions for his clients and hundreds of millions for himself. He had granted himself walk-in privileges to Trump’s Oval Office, and the president had accepted that arrangement.

On the desk was a one-page draft letter from the president addressed to the president of South Korea, terminating the United States-korea Free Trade Agreement, known as Korus.

Cohn was appalled. For months Trump had threatened to withdraw from the agreement, one of the foundations of an economic relationship, a military alliance and, most important, top secret intelligence operations and capabilities.

Under a treaty dating back to the 1950s, the United States stationed 28 500 US troops in the South and operated the most highly classified and sensitive Special Access Programmes, which provided sophisticated Top Secret codeword intelligence and military capabilities.

North Korean ICBM missiles now had the capability to carry a nuclear weapon, perhaps to the American homeland. A missile from North Korea would take 38 minutes to reach Los Angeles. These programmes enabled the US to detect an ICBM launch in North Korea in seven seconds. The equivalent capability in Alaska took 15 minutes – an astonishing time differential.

The ability to detect a launch in seven seconds would give the US military the time to shoot down a North Korean missile. It is perhaps the most important and most secret operation in the US government. The American presence in South Korea represents the essence of national security.

Withdrawal from the Korus trade agreement, which South Korea deemed essential to its economy, could lead to an unravelling of the entire relationship. Cohn could not believe that President Trump would risk losing vital intelligence assets crucial to US national security.

This all stemmed from Trump’s fury that the US had an $18 billion (R253bn) annual trade deficit with South Korea and was spending $3.5bn a year to keep US troops there.

Despite almost daily reports of chaos and discord in the White House, the public did not know how bad the internal situation actually was.

Trump was always shifting, rarely fixed, erratic. He would get in a bad mood, something large or small would infuriate him, and he would say about the Korus trade agreement: “We’re withdrawing today.”

But now there was the letter, dated September 5, 2017, a potential trigger to a national security catastrophe. Cohn was worried Trump would sign the letter if he saw it.

Cohn removed the letter draft from the Resolute Desk. He placed it in a blue folder marked “KEEP”.

“I stole it off his desk,” he later told an associate. “I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s never going to see that document. Got to protect the country.”

In the anarchy and disorder of the White House, and Trump’s mind, the president never noticed the missing letter.

Ordinarily Rob Porter, the staff secretary and organiser of presidential paperwork, would have been responsible for producing letters like this to the South Korean president. But this time, alarmingly, the letter draft had come to Trump through an unknown channel.

Staff secretary is one of the low-profile but critical roles in any White House. For months, Porter had been briefing Trump on decision memos and other presidential documents, including the most sensitive national security authorisations for military and covert CIA activities.

Porter, 1.93m, rail-thin, 40 years old and raised a Mormon, was one of the grey men: an organisation man with little flash who had attended Harvard and Harvard Law School and been a Rhodes Scholar.

Porter later discovered there were multiple copies of the draft letter, and either Cohn or he made sure none remained on the president’s desk.

Cohn and Porter worked together to derail what they believed were Trump’s most impulsive and dangerous orders. That document and others like it just disappeared. When Trump had a draft on his desk to proofread, Cohn at times would just yank it, and the president would forget about it.

But if it was on his desk, he’d sign it. “It’s not what we did for the country,” Cohn said privately. “It’s what we saved him from doing.”

It was no less than an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the president of the US and his constitutional authority.

In addition to co-ordinating policy decisions and schedules and running the paperwork for the president, Porter told an associate: “A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.”

Another strategy was to delay, procrastinate, cite legal restrictions.

Lawyer Porter said: “But slow-walking things or not taking things up to him, or telling him – rightly, not just as an excuse – but this needs to be vetted, or we need to do more process on this, or we don’t have legal counsel clearance – that happened 10 times more frequently than taking papers from his desk. It felt like we were walking along the edge of the cliff perpetually.”

There were days or weeks when the operation seemed under control and they were a couple of steps back from the edge. “Other times, we would fall over the edge, and an action would be taken. It was like you were always walking right there on the edge.”

Although Trump never mentioned the missing September 5 letter, he did not forget what he wanted to do about the trade agreement. “There were several different iterations of that letter,” Porter told an associate.

Later in an Oval Office meeting, the South Korean agreement was being heatedly debated. “I don’t care,” Trump said. “I’m tired of these arguments! I don’t want to hear about it anymore. We’re getting out of Korus.”

He started to dictate a new letter he wanted to send. Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, took Trump’s words seriously. Jared, 36, was a senior White House adviser and had a self-possessed, almost aristocratic bearing. He had been married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka since 2009.

Because he was sitting closest to the president, Jared started writing down what Trump was saying, taking dictation.

Finish the letter and get it to me so I can sign it, Trump ordered him.

Jared was in the process of turning the president’s dictation into a new letter when Porter heard about it.

“Send me the draft,” he told him. “If we’re going to do this, we cannot do it on the back of a napkin. We have to write it up in a way that isn’t going to embarrass us.”

Kushner sent down a paper copy of his draft. It was not of much use. Porter and Cohn had something typed up to demonstrate they were doing what the president had asked.

Trump was expecting an immediate response. They wouldn’t walk in empty-handed. The draft was part of the subterfuge.

At a formal meeting, the opponents of leaving Korus raised all kinds of arguments – the US had never withdrawn from a free trade agreement before; there were legal issues, geopolitical issues, vital national security and intelligence issues; the letter wasn’t ready. They smothered the president with facts and logic.

“Well, let’s keep working on the letter,” Trump said. “I want to see the next draft.”

Cohn and Porter did not prepare a next draft. So there was nothing to show the president. The issue, for the moment, disappeared in the haze of presidential decision-making. Trump got busy with other things.

But the Korus issue would not go away. Cohn spoke to Secretary of Defence James Mattis, the retired marine general who was perhaps the most influential voice among Trump’s cabinet and staff. General Mattis, a combat veteran, had served 40 years in the Corps. At 1.75m with ramrod-straight posture, he had a permanently world-weary demeanour.

“We’re teetering on the edge,” Cohn told the secretary. “We may need some back-up this time.”

Mattis tried to limit his visits to the White House and stick to military business as much as possible, but realising the urgency he came to the Oval Office.

“Mr President,” he said, “Kim Jong-un poses the most immediate threat to our national security. We need South Korea as an ally. It may not seem like trade is related to all this, but it’s central.”

American military and intelligence assets in South Korea are the backbone of our ability to defend ourselves from North Korea. Please don’t leave the deal.

Why is the US paying $1billion a year for an anti-ballistic missile system in South Korea? Trump asked. He was furious about the Thaad (Terminal High Altitude Area Defence) missile defence system, and had threatened to pull it out of South Korea and move it to Portland, Oregon.

“We’re not doing this for South Korea,” Mattis said. “We’re helping South Korea because it helps us.”

The president seemed to acquiesce, but only for the moment. In 2016, candidate Trump gave Bob Costa and myself his definition of the job of president: “More than anything else, it’s the security of our nation… That’s number one, two and three… The military, being strong, not letting bad things happen to our country from the outside. And I certainly think that’s always going to be my number one part of that definition.”

The reality was that the US in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader.

Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.

What follows is that story.