Fear summary

During the campaign, the liaison between the Trump team and the Republican Party was Reince Priebus, who then became the White House chief of staff. But this was just one of many positions that needed filling.

For his secretary of defense, Trump favored the retired general Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, even though the pick didn’t sit well with Steve Bannon, who joined the administration as “chief strategist,” an invented position.

Back in 2011, Trump was tweeting for troops to be taken out of Afghanistan, calling the whole mission there a “total disaster” and a “waste of billions.” This message was kept alive during his campaign, so he felt it was a promise to his voters that needed to be kept.

However, despite Trump’s demands, the issue of Afghanistan would be a persistent conflict throughout the administration’s first year.

According to the Bannon worldview, which Trump largely shared, politicians are responsible for the decline in good factory jobs in America. These were politicians who favored “globalism over Americanism.” 

Trump’s economic advisor, and former Goldman Sachs president, Gary Cohn, didn’t believe this, nor did 99 percent of the economists in the United States. Cohn had countless pages of data printed up to prove that free trade was good for the United States, and that the nation had moved from manufacturing to a service-based economy.

Rob Porter was a Harvard-educated lawyer who started out in politics as a Senate intern. Later, he worked as chief of staff for Senator Orrin Hatch, of Utah. As Cohn saw it, Porter was one of the few stabilizing forces in the Trump White House.

Being staff secretary meant that Porter worked relatively closely with Trump, and Porter used this proximity to establish some order amid the general chaos that ruled in the White House. This meant protecting the president from distractions, negative influences and his own worst tendencies.

May 18, 2017, was a dark day in the White House. It was the day after former FBI head Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel by the Department of Justice to investigate “any matters that arose or may arise” from the ongoing investigation into Russian interference during the election. This broad directive essentially gave Mueller carte blanche to look into whatever he wanted.

The day after the news of the special investigation, Trump spent the day wallowing in uncontrollable anger. No one had seen him this angry before, but, unfortunately, the investigation would prove to be a continuing distraction that could set him off on a tirade at any moment.

One of Trump’s closest aides since the campaign has been Hope Hicks, a former professional model who rose in the ranks to become his public-relations specialist. On June 29, 2017, Hicks felt she had to say something about Trump’s use of Twitter. As she explained it, “It’s not politically helpful.”

That day’s Twitter-related crisis was caused by a 6 a.m. tweet that said Mika Brzezinski, the cohost of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, came to a party at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate with a botched face-lift that was “bleeding badly.”

Chief of Staff Reince Priebus called Trump’s bedroom the “devil’s workshop,” since it was the place where he liked to watch TV, get worked up over the news and send out disturbing tweets. Priebus considered Sunday evenings the worst for this kind of behavior and called it “the witching hour.”

Priebus tried to curb the damaging tweets by scheduling Trump less TV time on Sunday nights, but Trump still put in six hours a day in front of cable news. Priebus also tried to bring some order to Trump’s impulsive style by setting up his Rob Porter-centric system, but people still found ways around it.

The end of 2017 was marked by Trump’s tax bill, which would prove to be the only significant piece of legislation the Trump administration passed in its first year. It was aimed at cutting taxes for middle-income families, but Trump’s primary concern was cutting the corporate tax rate, which he believed would bring more money back to the United States.

Many big US companies were moving their headquarters to nations with lower corporate tax rates, like Ireland. They would then make their US offices a subsidiary and save money, a practice known as “inversion.”