3 days ago
Flattery and sleight of hand: The art of managing President Trump
Marco Rubio, the US foreign secretary, had a dilemma. Peace talks were fast approaching in London last month but Ukraine had signalled it was not ready to accept Washington's proposal to end the war.
So he pulled out of the talks, leaving negotiations to more junior officials.
Better that than having to return to Washington and report his failure to Donald Trump, his quixotic boss.
'Fundamentally, he didn't come to London, because what they understood the Ukrainians were bringing to London was something that he would not be able to sell back in the White House, so there was no point in him coming,' a source with knowledge of the negotiations said.
'He made it pretty clear when explaining the reasoning behind his decision for not attending with the foreign secretary.'
It is just one of the ways that Cabinet officials, advisers and aides are managing the president, killing off dubious ideas or keeping themselves out of the firing line.
The result is a surprisingly stable White House. Where Trump 1.0 was marked by leaks, infighting and dismissals, this time around, disagreements have mostly played out quietly behind the scenes.
No one has played the game better than Mr Rubio, who has seen his stock rise to the point where he is talked of as a potential 2028 runner.
Peter Navarro has watched it all from his palatial office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door to the White House.
He is one of the few survivors of Mr Trump's first term and confided there was little secret to getting along with the president.
'Basically, you help president Trump fulfil his vision,' he previously told The Telegraph. 'Never take the credit. Be willing to take the blame.'
However, insiders have worked out a string of tricks to gently bring Mr Trump around to their way of thinking. And Mr Navarro himself has ended up on the wrong side of such strategies.
He was one of the key architects behind 'liberation day' when Mr Trump unveiled swingeing tariffs on goods imported around the world.
The immediate impact was to plunge markets into free-fall, spooking key Trump administration figures who sensed a political bloodbath.
So when Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, and Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, hatched a plan to urge Mr Trump to think again, they knew they needed to keep Mr Navarro as far away as possible.
They made sure they met the president when the hawkish trade adviser had his own meeting elsewhere in the White House and was away from Mr Trump's ear.
It is a feature, not a flaw, of Mr Trump's style of management, say those that know him well, as he enjoys the spectacle of staffers fighting it out to influence policy.
It is a divide-and-conquer approach to team building, said Barbara Res, who described her 18 years at the Trump Organisation in a memoir Tower of Lies.
'He will pit two people against each other and divide them, instead of allowing them to join forces in a disagreement with him or complain about him,' she said.
'And he likes to see them fight and see who comes out on top.'
She even described how he pitted his own ex-wife, Ivana, against a Trump Organisation employee on rival redevelopments in Atlantic City during the 1990s to see who would do best.
Trump 2.0 is different from Trump 1.0. Then Mr Trump's administration was built from scratch, in the days after his shock election win, drawing on members of the Republican Party establishment, Wall Street and the armed forces.
They did not make easy bedfellows and the first tranche of memoirs from that time revealed all sorts of tricks used by officials to build guardrails around an unpredictable and inexperienced president.
A book by political insider Bob Woodward described how Gary Cohn, Mr Trump's chief economic adviser, was so disturbed by plans to end a free trade agreement with South Korea that he simply removed a draft letter from the president's desk before he could sign it.
'Working inside the White House with him was like living inside a pinball machine,' is how one former staffer put it.
John Bolton, Mr Trump's third national security adviser in his first administration, said he found much of his job was simply trying to keep the policy process on track.
'People found out that if they just happened to be the last person to talk to him, as likely as not, they would get the outcome they wanted,' he told The Telegraph.
'Well, of course, the whole National Security Council process is intended to prevent that from happening.'
He lasted 18 months in office and is today one of the figures most hated by Mr Trump and his allies.
This time around, the president has built an administration of loyalists who stayed close to him through four years in the political wilderness.
Much of the policy comes directly from trusted advisers such as Stephen Miller. And last Friday, officials took an axe to the NSC, firing 100 officials, and concentrating decision-making in the hands of a few senior directors.
Even so, some of the same rules that applied the first time around still stand.
Keep memos brief. Make them graphic. Be the first to arrive with good news. Get yourself on TV as much as possible. And things work best if it sounds like the idea has come from Mr Trump himself.
'Try something like, do you remember that day we were talking about blah, blah, blah, and you said we should stop doing that thing,' said a former aide to Mr Trump. 'first he'll say, 'No, I never said that.'
'Then you come back with well, we were all very surprised and in awe of you taking that position. And eventually he'll say, 'Yeah I guess I did do that.'
Other Trump allies take a dim view of the tactics.
'I don't fall in the list of people that try to manipulate him, so I don't need a strategy,' said Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hardline congresswoman and staunch Trump ally.
'I'm real with him. And he's pretty smart about who he's dealing with.'
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