The
Private Trump Angst of a Republican Icon
James Baker thinks Trump
is “nuts,” but he voted for him once—and may soon do so again.
By Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker
Over lunch a few blocks
from the White House on a bright, sunny day in the summer of 2019, one of the
architects of the modern Republican Party admitted he was thinking the
unthinkable. If Joseph R. Biden, Jr., won his party’s
nomination, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III confided that he might
vote for the Democrat over President
Trump. For Baker, that would be a profound break with the Party he
spent decades building. Until Trump came along, every Republican President for
four decades had relied on Baker. Baker ran their campaigns or their White
Houses, brought them to power or helped them stay there.
Not
Trump, the antithesis of everything Baker stood for during his storied career
as Washington’s indispensable man: the sitting President was a boorish,
dishonest carnival barker who was tearing down everything Baker’s party and
generation had accomplished—free-trade pacts, international alliances, American
leadership in the world, nuclear-arms treaties. The words Baker kept coming up
with to describe Trump to us were “crazy” and “nuts.”
But
when we sat down in the fall of 2019 to talk it over again, at his office in
Houston, he had changed his mind. “Don’t say that I will vote for Biden,” Baker
cautioned. “I will vote for the Republican—I really will. I won’t leave my
party. You can say my party has left me, because the head of it has. But I
think it’s important, the big picture.” What was the big picture? Republican
control of the levers of power. Even if it means another four years of Trump in
the White House.
For
five years, ever since Trump first announced his Presidential candidacy, we’ve
had a running conversation with Baker as he wrestled with conflicted feelings
about the President, appalled by his erratic leadership yet unwilling to
publicly break with him. We watched as Baker initially dismissed the
reality-show veteran as a joke who would never win, then searched for reasons to
embrace his party’s choice and ignore his own personal misgivings. We saw him
try to help Trump with advice and personnel recommendations only to find a
President impervious to counsel. Eventually, Baker started rationalizing the
outrages and forgiving the mistakes, focussing instead on those Trump
Administration policies he supported.
Baker’s
struggle these last five years is a parable for the Republican establishment
that he once embodied, a political leadership that ultimately chose to
reconcile itself to what Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, recently called a
“hostile takeover.” Rather than reject a President they fear has damaged their
party and may drag it down to defeat in the election five weeks from now,
Republicans like Baker have doubled down on Trump without ever fully accepting
him—even as the costs that Baker feared from a Trump Presidency have become all
too real for the country and for Baker personally. With a pandemic raging in
the U.S. that has now claimed more than two hundred thousand lives, Baker,
ninety years old, and his wife fell ill last month with the coronavirus that
the President had denied was a serious threat.
Few
did more to build the modern Republican Party before Trump than James Addison
Baker III. A courtly lawyer with a Texas twang, a genial manner, and an ear for
gossip, Baker hails from Houston aristocracy but was an unlikely national and
international power broker. His grandfather, one of the architects of modern Houston,
had long enforced a family maxim: “Work hard, study and apply yourself closely,
stay on the job, and keep out of politics.”
Baker
ultimately disregarded that maxim thanks to a chance friendship forged on the
tennis courts of the Houston Country Club with an ambitious oilman named George
H. W. Bush. Through much of the nineteen-seventies, eighties, and early
nineties, Baker was one of the dominant forces in both American politics and
policymaking. As a delegate hunter, campaign manager, White House chief of
staff, Treasury Secretary, and Secretary of State, he played a leading role in
some of the most critical junctures in modern American history, capped by the
peaceful end of the Cold War.
Baker
had only a passing acquaintance with Trump before the 2016 Presidential
campaign. When Baker was Treasury Secretary and laboring to overhaul the tax
code for President Ronald Reagan, Trump was among those with special interests
who objected to losing provisions that benefitted him. When the New York
developer arrived at Baker’s office at the Treasury Building for an appointment
on July 9, 1986, he raised hell about the impact of the tax proposal on real
estate. “He came in there like a Storm Trooper,” Baker recalled. The Treasury
Secretary’s patience finally wore thin, and he pointed out the window to the
White House next door. “Look,” he told Trump, “you’re at the wrong building.
This building right across the street here, a guy that wants to do this is in
that building, and you need to go there.”
The
next time he recalled hearing much about Trump was a couple of years later,
when Baker was stepping down from the Cabinet to manage Bush’s campaign for
President, in 1988. Trump sent word through Bush’s campaign adviser Lee Atwater
offering himself up as a Vice-Presidential running mate—a proposal that Bush
dismissed as “strange and unbelievable,” an assessment Baker shared. It was no
less strange or unbelievable when Trump kicked off his own campaign for
President in 2015 and promptly demolished a field of experienced Republican
rivals, including Jeb Bush, a son of Baker’s friend. As he found himself
falling short, Jeb warned, presciently, that Trump was a chaos candidate who
would become a chaos President. But Baker was not ready to give up on the
Republican Party just because it was embracing this crude outsider.
In
March, 2016, at a memorial service for Nancy Reagan, where Baker delivered the
eulogy, he found himself talking politics with former Secretary of State George
Shultz, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, and former Prime Minister Brian
Mulroney, of Canada. “I see some eerie parallels to the way Reagan came up and
the way Trump is coming up,” Baker recalled telling them over lunch. Not that
they were precisely the same but they were both disruptors feared by the
establishment, not to mention entertainers before they became politicians. They
both appealed to disaffected Midwest Democrats who flocked to the “Make America
Great Again” slogan first used by Reagan and later adopted by Trump. “We
thought he was a grade-B movie actor, ‘Bedtime for Bonzo,’ he was going to get
us in a nuclear war, and we were scared to death,” Baker recalled saying to the
other lunch guests, as he reflected about the initial fears of Reagan. “And
look at the people he brought into the Republican Party, and then I see
somewhat the same kind of phenomenon at work here.”
Baker’s
effort to see Trump in the best light struck Mulroney, who was friendly with
the real-estate developer in Palm Beach, Florida, where they both lived part of
the year. When Mulroney returned home, he called Trump and told him about what
Baker had said. “I think that you should put in a call to Jim Baker and visit
with him,” Mulroney told him. “He’ll give you nothing but the straight talk and
good advice.” Trump agreed. A call was set up, and they ended up speaking for
twenty minutes.
“I really think you need
to be thinking about pivoting to becoming more Presidential,” Baker told the
candidate.
“I
hear that a lot,” Trump said. “But, when I’m under attack, I have to fight
back.” And as far as Trump was concerned, he was always under attack.
Not
long after their phone conversation, Trump’s campaign Convention manager, Paul
Manafort, called Baker. Manafort had worked for Baker during the 1976
Republican Convention counting delegates for President Gerald R. Ford before
going on to a long and ultimately criminal career as a big-money lobbyist for
an array of Russian-aligned interests. At that point, though, Manafort was the
bridge between an insurgent candidate and the G.O.P. establishment. Manafort
asked Baker to meet with Trump. Baker agreed, reasoning that he had met with
other Republican candidates. One afternoon, he slipped into the offices of a
Washington law firm that worked for Trump’s campaign and the two sat down for
about twenty-five minutes. Baker handed Trump a two-page list of suggestions
for what to do now that he was becoming the nominee.
“You
do not need to abandon your outsider/rebel persona,” Baker’s memo said. “But
you do need to bring on board other voters if you expect to win.” Stop
attacking people who might be allies, Baker urged. Don’t feed the
“shoot-from-the-lip big mouth” narrative. Reach out to women, minorities, and
establishment Republicans. Steer clear of isolationism; embrace a more balanced
immigration plan; stop talking about getting rid of nato; do not advocate a new arms race.
Baker,
the master of compromise, recommended negotiating with Democrats, much as he
had done brokering a landmark Social Security deal in 1983 and the tax overhaul
in 1986. “These suggestions,” Baker concluded, “come to you from one who, at
the age of eighty-six, doesn’t want anything except a Republican president in
2017 who is like the four I was privileged to have served.”
The
meeting was supposed to be off the record, but naturally it leaked almost
immediately. That was why Baker gave Trump the two-page paper in the first
place, so that the campaign could not spin the meeting as a quasi-endorsement.
Baker had, in effect, laid out conditions for his support, conditions that
Trump would never meet. Baker was recommending that Trump abandon the political
formula that had taken him to the brink of the Republican nomination, that had
enabled him to triumph over sixteen other candidates. Trump would never do
that. He would not pivot to the center, as the candidates of Baker’s day had
invariably done. He did not care about being Presidential. He would never be
like the four Republican Presidents Baker had served.
Baker’s
flirtation with Trump was enough to cause heartache among his friends and
family. He got a call one day from Tom Brokaw, the now-retired NBC anchor who
had become a close friend. “Jim, you do not want to do this,” Brokaw warned
him. “You served your country nobly and your party admirably and you’re at an
age and stage, I’m telling you, as a friend, that this is not a good move.”
Baker was hardly convinced by Trump. “He’s probably his own worst enemy,” he
reflected to us one day shortly before the 2016 Republican Convention. “I don’t
think he’s disciplined enough to do what he needs to do.” But, he added, “I’m a
Republican and I will tell you this—I’ve always believed at the end of the day there
has to be a really overriding reason why you wouldn’t support the nominee of
your party.”
A
few months later, on Halloween, with the election days away, we sat down with
Baker in his favorite suite at the Willard Hotel, near the White House. “The
guy is nuts,” he sighed. “He’s crazy. I will not endorse him.” He ticked off
some of the ways that Trump was promising to upend everything Baker had built.
“He’s against free trade. He’s talking about nato being a failed alliance. He’s dumping all
over nafta,” a trade
agreement that Baker had a role in forging. “That was a hell of a deal,” he
said, shaking his head.
So
could Jim Baker, the very definition of the establishment, really vote for
Donald Trump? Baker looked stricken. “Well,” he said, almost pleadingly, “I
haven’t voted for him yet.”
Baker
had a ready-made excuse to vote against Trump, given the candidate’s
vilification of the Bushes. The Bush family loathed Trump. One day, when we met
with them in the midst of the 2016 campaign, Barbara Bush scrunched her face in
horror at the thought of Trump as President. “We’re talking about ego that
knows no bounds,” she said. Months later, she wrote in her son Jeb’s name on
her ballot while her husband and her eldest son, George W. Bush, also voted
against Trump, the elder former President casting his ballot for Hillary
Clinton and the younger for “none of the above.”
Yet
Baker could not bring himself to follow their lead and bolt from the Party.
“I’m a conservative,” he explained, almost with a shrug. Better to have a
conservative in the Oval Office than a liberal, “even if he’s crazy.” His
compromise was not to publicly come out for Trump—no statement, no joint
appearance. But, in the privacy of the voting booth, Baker later told us, he
voted for Trump.
Still,
the ambivalence with Trump that we found in all our conversations with Baker
was real, too. During the succeeding four years, Baker would be offended by the
new President’s sheer incompetence even more than the outrageous tweets and
statements. The failure to hire an effective staff, the myriad ethical
scandals, the gratuitous insults to allies—it all grated.
Baker
recommended the new President appoint his friend, Rex Tillerson, the chief
executive of ExxonMobil, as his first Secretary of State. “I’m hopeful Trump
will listen to him,” Baker told us. Trump did not. Tillerson was cast aside
just as so many others would be. Every few months, we sat down with Baker
again, and he would roll his eyes or make a face when asked about the latest
Trump outrage.
By
the time the House brought impeachment charges against Trump, Baker had all but
given up. As the elder Bush’s White House chief of staff in 1992, Baker had
rebuffed attempts to seek campaign help from Russia and Britain. Now Trump was
charged with leveraging military aid to force Ukraine to help him denigrate his
domestic rivals. “Egregious. Inappropriate. Wrong,” Baker told us. But then he
added, “Not a crime.” As the hearings proceeded toward the inevitable trial,
Baker assumed correctly that the Republican-controlled Senate would not convict
the President. “But, boy, it’s hard to defend the antics,” he allowed. “That’s
the only way to say it.”
In
the end, Baker was against Trump but could never bring himself to become an
outright Never Trumper. If Trump was Republicanism now, then rejecting the
President meant rejecting the Party. Baker saw that clearly from the start.
What he had learned in a lifetime of wielding power was that on the outside you
have none. Becoming a Never Trumper and publicly embracing Biden would have
meant giving up whatever modest influence he had left; whether he actually
needed it anymore was not the point. He had succeeded by working within
institutions, not by blowing them up. He worked fundamentally with the world as
he found it.
Within a couple of
months, Baker stopped even trying. As the country was suddenly ravaged in early
2020 by a virus that Trump had blithely predicted would simply vanish on its
own, Baker went into isolation with his wife, Susan, at their ranch, where he
celebrated his birthday, in May, via a video call with his family. The economy
collapsed, millions were put out of work, and the police killing of an unarmed
Black man touched off months of street demonstrations. Among those who caught
the coronavirus were Baker and his wife. It knocked them for a loop as they
isolated at their Houston home. But, even after he recovered enough to go
hunting and return to his ranch, Baker decided that he had nothing more to say
about Trump or Biden or the election. He would not reconsider and he would say
nothing more in public. He was done. At long last, he opted to keep out of
politics, as his grandfather had urged him so many years ago.
This story is adapted from “The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life
and Times of James A. Baker III,” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser,
to be published this week.
