Jon Tester - Grounded

Contents

GROUNDED . Copyright 2020 by Jon Tester. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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FIRST EDITION

Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-297750-2

Version 08182020

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-297748-9

T O K ILIKINA ,

B RAYDEN ,

T UCKER ,

D ALLIN ,

AND A BBEY .

R EMEMBER YOU RE RENTING

THIS PLANET FROM

YOUR GRANDCHILDREN .

Contents

On the evening of April 25, 2018, I made one of the biggest decisions of my lifeone that changed the future of millions of American veterans. For days, that decision dominated national news headlines and hurled my political career into uncertainty, prompting pundits to change their ratings for my upcoming election from likely Democrat to tossup, or worse, and puzzling even some of my closest campaign advisers. For me, the decision was easy. I was simply doing my job holding the Trump administration accountable according to the responsibilities expected of me in the US Constitution.

A week earlier, I received a concerning phone call from someone whose identity I confirmed, though the caller asked to keep the name confidential. I told the caller I would. The person was a high-level White House insider who warned me about President Trumps latest cabinet nominee: Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, MD, the presidents personal physician, who had also attended to President Obama and President George W. Bush. A few months earlier, Dr. Jackson took the podium in a bizarre news conference to tell America that President Trump might live to be two hundred years old if only he ate healthier food.

As ranking member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, I was one of the first senators to meet in person with Dr. Jackson after the president nominated him to be secretary of veterans affairs, a job with oversight of the federal governments second-largest department, with more than 375,000 employees. I found Dr. Jackson to be affable and confident, and he seemed to be on a glide path to Senate confirmation.

You cannot confirm this guy, the insider told me. Ronny Jackson would be a disaster. His nickname is Candyman because of how loose he is with prescription drugs. And Im certainly not the only one who knows it.

I asked my contact to meet with my trusted team on the Veterans Affairs Committee, some of the sharpest minds in the country, who were tasked with vetting Jackson prior to his confirmation hearing. Over the next few days we received more than two dozen similar calls from current and former White House medical unit employees, many still in uniform, telling us about Jacksons behavior and questionable medical practices. If any of the allegations were true, Dr. Jackson was most certainly not fit for the job. To make matters worse, we werent getting answers to our growing list of questions about him and his qualifications from the White House, even after a tough phone call I had with Chief of Staff John Kelly. And someone was starting to leak accusations to the media, which endangered our control of the important responsibility of vetting Dr. Jackson internally.

If in fact this turns out to be real, the hearing is going to be really ugly, I told General Kelly. If it doesnt turn out to be real, then it wont be.

But the reports about Jackson kept coming to my committee. So on April 25, 2018, I consulted with my staff and decided to send to the press a summary of the various allegationsall of which had been corroborated independently by at least two of our sources. Minutes later, our phones started beeping with New York Times and Associated Press news alerts telling the entire world what we had been hearing for days.

That evening was a little more than six months away from Election Day. And until that night, the pollsters projected me comfortably ahead of a relatively unknown challenger in Montana. Until that night, the president of the United States really had no idea who I was, and he hadnt spent much time concerned with my second campaign to be reelected as a US senator. Then, the next morning, with a Senate confirmation hearing still on the horizon, Dr. Jackson removed himself from consideration, sparing himself from having to answer tough questions under oath. Minutes later, the president phoned in to Fox & Friends and started attacking me.

I watched what Jon Tester of Montana, a state that I won by like over twenty points, Trump said. You know, really, they love me and I love them. And I want to tell you that Jon TesterI think this is going to cause him a lot of problems in his state.

The next day, during an appearance with Chancellor Angela Merkel, the president railed on me again, suggesting my constituents in Montana werent going to put up with it.

And early Saturday morning, as I was planting wheat on my farm outside Big Sandy, Montana, my chief of staff called to tell me that the president had taken his beef with me to Twitter. Now the president of the United States, humiliated by his own poor vetting, was after mea Democrat in a bright red state, up for reelection. He made it personal. He was calling on me to resign.

So why did I make the accusations public? Why did I risk my entire political career on a move that resulted in the full wrath of a president who made history in our sparsely populated state by barnstorming there four times before Election Day? I did it because it was my duty. Everything Id learned about public service, from my earliest days as student body president of Big Sandy High School to the president of the Montana Senate, taught me that if I ignored serious and unanswered allegations, I wouldnt be doing my job. I would do it all over again, even if it cost me my political career.

But it didnt. And today I am one of the few citizens of this nation who has successfully held Donald Trump accountable without suffering politically for it. In fact, on November 6, 2018, a majority of Montana voters (including 7 percent of self-identified Republicans) sent me back to the Senate for six more years, despite the presidents full-throated attempt to exact political revenge. He was right; Montanans do love President Trump. Theyd supported him over Hillary Clinton overwhelmingly two years earlier.

Trump, to many Montanans, was exactly what Washington needed: a straight-talking antithesis of an establishment politician who seemed to resonate with rural America. He was seemingly eager to fix everything broken with our political system with simple common sense. They saw Trumps willingness to say whatever was on his mind as authentic. To many of his supporters, Trumps ethical and moral foibles, his inflammatory rhetoric and the bombastic handling of our economic and national security, are either excusable or overblown, or both. But I see right through it. The president isnt authentic, but hes good at playing the part. He takes rural America for granted.

How I got into the worlds most exclusive club is not an ordinary story. Many politicians are quick to distance themselves from the distinction of being a politician. I never feel compelled to do that, because I am and