Alexander Nazaryan - The Best People

The White House

February 19, 2019

H e loved the job. He was very clear about that. He said it enough times that I started to entertain the notion that he was halfway serious. Certainly, that would be news to the pundits who said hed rather be golfing in South Florida than trying to tame North Korea. And to the Democrats who figured that impeachment would be a favor, since he seemed as thrilled by his presidency as they were. It was not so, he said. Those are just the haters and losers, explained President Donald J. Trump with that special Queens charm of his, when we met in the Oval Office to discuss the first two years of his administration. I love it. I enjoy it.

But he didnt have to do it, see? Hed had options, had them still. They offered me everything to not run and to do The Apprentice, he said later, referencing the television program that was at least partly responsible for the fact that Trump was now sitting where John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan once sat. If you check the ratings on The Apprentice, he said some time after that, through the roof. Big hit.

He was indignant, though this too bore a touch of his New York shtick, the elaborate act that was Trump. Not that the indignation was feigned. He didnt need to explain himself to this journalist he didnt know, for a book he would never read. Id be doing it right now, he said of The Apprentice, but I like this better.

To show how much he loved the job, and to supply evidence of the many accomplishments that love had yielded, Trump summoned his executive assistant Madeleine Westerhout, asking her to bring him a list of his administrations achievements. In the first two years, this administration has done more than any other administration in the history of our country, Trump said with typical immodesty as he sat beneath a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

Westerhout came into the Oval Officewhere I was sitting with Trump, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and senior adviser Kellyanne Conwaysetting some papers on the edge of the Resolute Desk, whose surface was otherwise almost completely bare. Trump examined the papers, then showed them to me. The glossy sheets were filled with what was obviously an East Asian script. Trump explained that this was a letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, with whom the president was about to hold a second summit in Vietnam.

Thats actually dated, the president said of the letter. Its pretty amazing.

This wasnt the right evidence, but for him it was evidence all the same, in this case that he would make peace where others would stumble ineptly into nuclear cataclysm. You would have been at war. If I didnt get elected, youd be at war right now with North Korea, he told me. If Crooked Hillary were President right now, youd be fighting. She would be sleeping and you would be fighting a war. Shed be upstairs sleeping, resting, to gain her strength for a two-hour day.

He still called her that, Crooked Hillary. The election was now more than two years ago and still he called her that. Because the election was not really over for him, would never be over. It was the victory beyond all victories, a triumph not only over Clinton but something much grander than that, as far as he and his supporters were concerned. The forces aligned against him on the morning of November 8, 2016, were no weaker as we sat talking in the Oval Office on February 19, 2019. If anything, they were stronger, precisely because he was in the Oval Office, despite predictions that he would not last a single full year as president.

Finally, the correct list was brought, three thick pages of bullet points titled TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ACCOMPLISHMENTS. Those accomplishments included the creation of 5.3 million jobs and other broadly auspicious economic indicators. Some of those indicators had started trending upward during the Obama presidency, but that was neither here nor there (certainly, it wasnt on the list). There were other claims on the list, like the one about declining drug prices in 2018, that have been adjudicated to be untrue. Others, like withdrawal from the job-killing Paris climate accords and cancelling the illegal Clean Power Plan, may have been accomplishments to Trumps base. To many others, these were terrible mistakes.

He also boasted about opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil drilling, which he did by attaching a rider to the 2017 tax bill and in effect sneaking the measure through Congress. Nobody could get it, Trump boasted. I got it. And he did so despite the environmental problems being much worse than they had been in the past. Wait a fucking second: Had the president just admitted, however inadvertently, that global warming was real? It certainly seemed that way: one small step for mankind, one giant step for Donald Trump.

Trump knew that I was interested in his cabinet, in the men and women he had hired to execute his agenda. I had quite a bit of skepticism about that agenda, though there were parts of Trumps programreviving manufacturing, improving infrastructurethat would have benefited all Americans, were he only able to make them reality. So far, they remained campaign promises, the stuff of political fiction.