Michael Lewis - The Fifth Risk

THE FIFTH
RISK

ALSO BY MICHAEL LEWIS

The Undoing Project

Flash Boys

The Big Short

Boomerang

Home Game

The Blind Side

Coach

Moneyball

Next

The New New Thing

Losers

Pacific Rift

The Money Culture

Liars Poker

EDITED BY MICHAEL LEWIS

Panic

MICHAEL
LEWIS
THE FIFTH
RISK

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
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NEW YORK | LONDON

Copyright 2018 by Michael Lewis

All rights reserved
First Edition

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Book design by Chris Welch Design
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JACKET DESIGN AND PHOTOGRAHS BY PETE GARCEAU
ART DIRECTION BY INGSU LIU | JACKET CONCEPT BY HARRY
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Lewis, Michael (Michael M.), author.
Title: The fifth risk / Michael Lewis.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, 2018.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018038204 | ISBN 9781324002642 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: United StatesPolitics and government2017 |
Administrative agenciesUnited StatesManagement. | Government
executivesUnited States. | Public administrationUnited States. |
Civil serviceUnited States.
Classification: LCC E912 .L48 2018 | DDC 320.973/090512dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038204

ISBN 978-1-324-00265-9 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
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W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

for
Tom Wolfe
In Memoriam

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

Very organized process taking place as I
decide on Cabinet and many other positions.
I am the only one who knows who the
finalists are!

9:55 PM - 15 Nov 2016

25,572 Retweets 112,055 Likes

CONTENTS

C HRIS CHRISTIE NOTICED a piece in the New York Timesthats how it all started. The New Jersey governor had dropped out of the presidential race in February 2016 and thrown what support he had behind Donald Trump. In late April he saw the article. It described meetings between representatives of the remaining candidates still in the raceTrump, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sandersand the Obama White House. Anyone who still had any kind of shot at becoming president of the United States apparently needed to start preparing to run the federal government. The guy Trump sent to the meeting was, in Christies estimation, comically underqualified. Christie called up Trumps campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, to ask why this critical job hadnt been handed to someone who actually knew something about government. We dont have anyone, said Lewandowski.

Christie volunteered himself for the job: head of the Donald Trump presidential transition team. Its the next best thing to being president, he told friends. You get to plan the presidency. He went to see Trump about it. Trump said he didnt want a presidential transition team. Why did anyone need to plan anything before he actually became president? Its legally required, said Christie. Trump asked where the money was going to come from to pay for the transition team. Christie explained that Trump could either pay for it himself or take it out of campaign funds. Trump didnt want to pay for it himself. He didnt want to take it out of campaign funds, either, but he agreed, grudgingly, that Christie should go ahead and raise a separate fund to pay for his transition team. But not too much! he said.

And so Christie set out to prepare for the unlikely event that Donald Trump would one day be elected president of the United States. Not everyone in Trumps campaign was happy to see him on the job. In June, Christie received a call from Trump adviser Paul Manafort. The kid is paranoid about you, Manafort said. The kid was Jared Kushner, Trumps son-in-law. Back in 2005, when he was U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, Christie had prosecuted and jailed Kushners father, Charles, for tax fraud. Christies investigation revealed, in the bargain, that Charles Kushner had hired a prostitute to seduce his own brother-in-law, whom he suspected of cooperating with Christie, videotaped the sexual encounter, and sent the tape to his sister. The Kushners apparently took their grudges seriously, and Christie sensed that Jared still harbored one against him. On the other hand, Trump, whom Christie considered almost a friend, couldnt have cared less. Hed invited Christie to his and Melanias wedding and then pressed him to attend his daughter, Ivanka, and Jared Kushners wedding. Thatd be awkward! said Christie. Im paying for the wedding and I dont give a shit, said Donald.

Christie viewed Jared as one of those people who thinks that, because hes rich, he must also be smart. Still, he had a certain cunning about him. And Christie soon found himself reporting everything he did to prepare for a Trump administration to an executive committee. The committee consisted of Jared, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Paul Manafort, Steve Mnuchin, and Jeff Sessions. Im kind of like the church elder who double-counts the collection plate every Sunday for the pastor, said Sessions, who appeared uncomfortable with the entire situation. The elders job became more complicated in July 2016, when Trump was formally named the Republican nominee. The transition team now moved into an office in downtown Washington, DC, and went looking for people to occupy the top five hundred jobs in the federal government. They needed to fill all the cabinet positions, of course, but also a whole bunch of others that no one in the Trump campaign even knew existed. Its not obvious how you find the next secretary of state, much less the next secretary of transportationnever mind who should sit on the board of trustees of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation.

By August, 130 people were showing up every day, and hundreds more working part-time, at Trump transition headquarters, on the corner of Seventeenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. The transition team made lists of likely candidates for all five hundred jobs, plus other lists of informed people to roll into the various federal agencies the day after the election, to be briefed on whatever the federal agencies were doing. They gathered the names for these lists by traveling the country and talking to people: Republicans who had served in government, Trumps closest advisers, recent occupants of the jobs that needed filling. Then they set about investigating any candidates for glaring flaws and embarrassing secrets and conflicts of interest. At the end of each week Christie handed over binders, with lists of names of people who might do the jobs well, to Jared and Donald and Eric and the others. They probed everything, says a senior Trump transition official. Who is this person? Where did this person come from? They only ever rejected one person, Paul Manaforts secretary.