The Private Trump Angst of a Republican Icon

 

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.