On December 7, after returning from Kansas City, Trump and Kelly met privately and decided to part ways. The next day, as Trump left the White House to attend the Army v. Navy football game in Philadelphia, he stopped on the South Lawn to tell reporters, “John Kelly will be leaving. I don’t know if I can say ‘retiring.’ But he’s a great guy.” The announcement was anticlimactic, considering tensions between the two men had long ago spilled into the press. Still, Trump afforded Kelly a graceful exit compared with how he had dismissed Tillerson, Reince Priebus, H. R. McMaster, and other senior advisers.
Trump settled on Ayers as Kelly’s replacement. The thirty-six-year-old was a smooth and slick political operative, a wunderkind when he ran the Republican Governors Association in his twenties. Through his position as Pence’s chief, Ayers had regular access to Trump and cultivated an easy rapport with the president. He also aligned himself with Ivanka and Kushner, who were enthusiastic boosters of his. But when Trump offered him the job, Ayers shocked the president by turning him down. He was unwilling to commit to Trump’s request that he serve for two years, through the 2020 election. A father of triplets, Ayers would agree to do the job only on an interim basis for a few months because he had plans to relocate his family to his home state of Georgia. While family concerns were his stated reason for bowing out, Ayers confided to some in the White House he had been concerned watching how frequently the president bypassed or ignored a person as serious and respected as Kelly. By leaving, Ayers also dodged inquiries into his work as a political consultant, for which he reported amassing a net worth of $12.8 million to $54.8 million, before he had become Pence’s chief of staff.
Trump, who for days had been telling friends that Ayers would be his next chief, was suddenly a red-faced groom left at the altar. It was a humiliating blow for a president who loathes humiliations. Trump had no Plan B and would scramble in the days ahead to recruit other candidates.
* * *
—
On December 11, Trump got his first taste of divided government. Two years of operating without a check on his power came to a crashing halt as the combustible president met for the first time since the midterm elections with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. The leaders faced a December 22 deadline to pass a government spending bill or face a shutdown, and they were at a stalemate over Trump’s demand for it to include $5.7 billion to construct his long-promised border wall. But the meeting was about more than federal appropriations. It would establish the postelection power dynamic in Washington.
White House advisers knew the stakes were high, so they tried to prepare Trump. Kelly, who had stayed on as chief of staff through the end of the month, and legislative affairs director Shahira Knight, among others, implored Trump to strive for a deal but to be guarded with the Democrats, who they warned might try to manipulate him. They cautioned Trump about the politics of a government shutdown and told him, no matter what happens, don’t say anything that would make him “own” a government shutdown. “Don’t take the bait,” the president’s aides told him. But Trump seemed to be only half listening to their advice. He wanted a dramatic clash on immigration with the Democrats. In his mind, immigration was his issue—a winning issue. After all, he figured, who wouldn’t want a more secure border?
As the Democrats arrived in the Oval, Pelosi tried to set the tone. She led a prayer about King Solomon. She and Schumer took seats on the soft cream couches, while Trump and Pence sat in the yellow wingback chairs. The meeting was scheduled to be closed to the press, but Trump, as he often did, invited the press pool in to record the exchange. What followed were seventeen minutes of raised voices, pointed fingers, and boorish interruptions, with each principal playing for the television audience. At one point, Trump suggested Pelosi couldn’t share her true beliefs without hurting her bid to be elected House Speaker. “Nancy’s in a situation where it’s not easy for her to talk right now,” Trump said. “Mr. President,” Pelosi said, “please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory.”
Schumer baited Trump by reminding him that he had repeatedly threatened to shut down the government if he did not get his wall funding. Flustered, the president said, “I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country. So I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.” There it was. White House aides immediately felt a pit in their stomachs. Their boss had just handed the Democrats an unexpected gift. All that preparation was for naught. Trump got played.
When Pelosi returned to the Capitol later that day, she recounted the highlights to some of her colleagues. She described the Oval Office meeting as being in “a tinkle contest with a skunk.” The Speaker in waiting said debating the wall with Trump was “like a manhood thing for him. As if manhood could ever be associated with him.”
Yet as acrimonious as the meeting was, Trump was simultaneously on the cusp of a rare bipartisan accomplishment. The First Step Act, which would be signed into law on December 21, represented the biggest overhaul to the nation’s criminal justice system in a generation by reducing mandatory minimum sentences for some drug offenses and expanding programs such as job training designed to control the exploding federal prison population.
The quiet force behind the criminal justice reform efforts had been Kushner, for whom the issue was deeply personal considering his father’s incarceration. Kushner helped orchestrate a months-long lobbying campaign to unite tough-on-crime Republicans and liberal Democrats to reconsider sentencing laws. He had even invited the rapper Kanye West and the reality-television star Kim Kardashian West, both criminal justice reform advocates, to the White House to help spotlight the issue.
At Trump’s Oval Office signing ceremony, Senator Mike Lee reflected on Kushner’s persistence. “I speak to Jared Kushner about five times a day,” the Utah Republican said. “In the middle of dinner, when my phone rings, my family says to me, ‘It’s Jared, isn’t it?’”
* * *
—
On December 12, Trump called Christie with an urgent request. He asked his old friend if he could come down from New Jersey right away. They made plans to meet on December 13 at 5:30 p.m. in the White House residence. When Christie asked what was going on, Trump wouldn’t tell him. But on the train down to Washington the afternoon of December 13, Christie got a call from Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer and another old friend.
“Listen,” Giuliani told Christie. “He’s going to offer you chief of staff tonight.
“He just got off the phone with me,” Giuliani added, referring to Trump. “He told me that that’s the decision he’s made. You’re the best person in position for the reelect. You’re the smartest politician. You can run the place. He needs you.”