Jeffrey Lewis - The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States

But, according to aides, the president also blamed Bolton. Trump never enjoyed sharing the spotlight with the combative Bolton, who often seemed to give the impression that he was calling the shots. The president came to think that Bolton had undermined him.

Trump blamed his entire national security team for the failed effort to negotiate with Kim’s regime. This deep dissatisfaction underlays one of the strangest moments in American political history: the president of the United States firing practically his entire national security team with a single tweet:

Donald J. Trump@tehDonaldJTrump

I wanted a Summit! But Little Rocketman won’t de-nuke!

No more Mr. nice guys! Thank you to Mike Pompeo, John Bolton and John Kelly for your service! Tomorrow we announce a GREAT new national security team! Going to the mattress! I need a war time consillary! [1] According to a follow-up statement released by the White House, “consillary” is “an accepted anglicization of the Italian term consigliere ” and is “commonly used by real Americans who don’t learn Italian at fancy Swiss boarding schools.”

#MAGA

After the “Twitter Massacre,” as it came to be known, only Secretary of Defense James Mattis remained on the president’s national security team, which otherwise had to be entirely rebuilt. In short order, Trump chose Francis and Kellogg to pick up the pieces.

As chief of staff, Francis attempted to impose a semblance of order around the life of a man who, prior to being elected president, was used to having large blocks of unstructured time. The president would rise around 5:30 AM and start the day by watching news on television. The White House typically scheduled a block of “executive time” from 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM. Official schedules listed that time as occurring in the Oval Office, but in fact staff at the time indicated that, while he was staying at the White House, Trump often “spends that time in his [executive] residence, watching TV, making phone calls and tweeting.” Trump would not appear in the Oval Office until his first scheduled meeting of the day, which was typically his intelligence briefing at 11:00 AM.

Early on, Francis revived one of John Kelly’s pet projects—an effort to encourage the president to spend more time in the Oval Office rather than the executive residence, located between the East and West Wings of the White House. Francis attempted to schedule regular meetings with family and close advisers of the president to establish a routine. On a typical day, Trump would have meetings with Kellogg, his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, his legal team, and Kellyanne Conway, who was then serving as the president’s counselor. Trump typically took an hour-long lunch at 12:30, followed by another block of either “executive time” or “policy time.” The president’s day typically ended around 4:15, at which point he was most likely to return to his residence. Dinner was usually served at 5:30.

Staff members had long been concerned about Trump’s time outside of the Oval Office, even when he was staying at the White House. “Once he goes upstairs [to the residence], there’s no managing him,” one administration insider said. It was also clear that staff were concerned about flows of information, including social media and television. And yet, the president was the president. “But if he wants to watch [television], it’s not like we can say, ‘Oh, the TV doesn’t work,’” a staffer remarked. Recognizing this problem, Francis sought to improve the overall quality of information available to the president, but he accepted that there would always be some things he could not control.

The president’s insistence on spending time at Mar-a-Lago made Francis’s job much harder, increasing the amount of unstructured time available to the president while physically isolating him from staff who might otherwise keep him engaged and focused. But Trump viewed his time at Mar-a-Lago as an escape from the pressures of the White House—and from Francis. The president rarely scheduled formal meetings during this time, opting instead to play golf.

While he was staying at Mar-a-Lago, it was also unusual for President Trump to receive a routine intelligence briefing, which would have required him to go down into the SCIF in the basement fallout shelter. Some aides suggested that this was because the president was uncomfortable walking down stairs, although others disputed that claim as “absurd” and indicated that Trump would go down to the SCIF when necessary.

In addition to isolating the president from his key staff, Trump’s time in Palm Beach placed him in close and often unpredictable contact with club members. In one case, a golf club member invited a New York Times reporter as a guest and then introduced the reporter to Trump—who then agreed to give a thirty-minute, on-the-record interview without a single aide present.

Francis understood the challenges posed by Mar-a-Lago, but he also understood that the president needed time away from the demands of serving as president and his mounting legal problems. As a result, the chief of staff did little to control Trump’s time at Mar-a-Lago beyond encouraging him to avoid the dining room. In retrospect, the chief of staff’s hands-off approach at Mar-a-Lago appears to have made it all the more attractive to the president as a home-away-from-home.

On the afternoon of Friday, March 20, Trump arrived at Mar-a-Lago alone. First Lady Melania Trump and their son, Barron, were in New York, at Trump Tower.

When Trump spoke briefly with Francis at 5:06 PM, the chief of staff encouraged the president to skip the dining room and take dinner in his room.

Francis was looking forward to a relatively uneventful Saturday. As usual during the president’s trips to Mar-a-Lago, no formal intelligence briefing was slated for March 21. The only item on Trump’s schedule was a round of golf with his old friend Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots.

The crash of an airliner in South Korea had been reported in the American press shortly after the loss of Flight 411 at 11:28 PM Eastern Daylight Time on Friday. But it was not public knowledge that the aircraft had been shot down until the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), the official news outlet of Kim Jong Un’s government, issued its statement more than an hour later, at 1:11 PM on Saturday in Seoul—just after midnight in Palm Beach.

After the North Korean announcement, Francis conferred with Kellogg about whether they should inform the president. It was unclear if Trump was still awake. They briefly discussed calling the residence at Mar-a-Lago. “I remember Jack looked at me and then looked down at his phone,” Kellogg recalled to this commission’s investigators, “and then he said, ‘We’ll know pretty shortly if he’s still awake.’” They both checked Twitter, but saw no new updates to Trump’s Twitter feed. The newest tweet was still an angry lambasting of John Bolton’s new memoir.

If Trump had gone to bed, Francis concluded, it would be a mistake to wake him. The president would need to be well rested and alert for the coming day of intense discussions with the South Koreans, Japanese, and other world leaders as they attempted to contain the crisis in East Asia.

Kellogg looked at the schedule and suggested that they let Kraft know that the president might be unable to keep their tee time. Francis disagreed. “We’re going to have to be very careful not to disrupt his normal routine,” the chief of staff recalled telling Kellogg. “This is dangerous business, and we need to keep him calm and focused.” They worried about the appearance of Trump playing golf during the crisis, but in the end they decided it would be easier to manage the fallout from the press than the fallout from the president.