Anxious about 2018

White House aides already anxious about 2018

Senior staff are looking down the pike of a difficult year, from the looming West Wing brain drain and ongoing Russia inquiries to the threat of a Democratic wave in the midterms.

By ELIANA JOHNSON, ANNIE KARNI and ANDREW RESTUCCIA

President Donald Trump returned to Washington from his sunny holiday break in Florida in an upbeat mood, relaxed and rested — but many of his top aides are dreading what’s to come in 2018.

After ending their first year on a high, signing a sweeping tax reform bill into law, Trump’s advisers are divided about how to capitalize on that victory and maintain momentum going forward with Hill Republicans again at odds over their legislative agenda.

They’re facing a brain drain on a White House that already had trouble recruiting top talent. Many senior West Wing aides are expected to depart in the coming year, with no replacements lined up. White House chief of staff John Kelly – who has already fired several presidential aides – wants to push out more, but has struggled to find suitable alternatives.

And they’re still working under the shadow of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, despite repeated assurances from the White House legal team that the inquiry is wrapping up.

The grim reality of 2018 has generated a sense of foreboding among White House aides, according to more than a dozen current and former officials and outside advisers. West Wing aides, who worked furiously to push through legislation and executive actions during Trump’s first year in office, expect limited prospects for getting things done in Washington this year heading into a contentious midterm election.

“They absolutely should worry about 2018,” said Ari Fleischer, a former press secretary to President George W. Bush. “I do fear a wave election. Democrats are highly motivated to vote against Trump and all Republicans. Trump has got to grow beyond the base, and he has got to make himself less hated among a group in the middle.”

While Republicans were unified in their desire to reform the tax code, they are now split over which legislative initiative to tackle next – a dispute the Trump White House, which has sometimes delegated the nuts and bolts of legislating to congressional leaders, has done little to settle.

And with a diminished margin in the Senate – after Roy Moore’s loss in Alabama, Republicans now hold just a 51-seat majority – White House aides and Republicans in Congress say they have little hope that much if any meaningful legislation will reach the president’s desk before the midterms.

Behind the scenes, White House aides and Trump’s outside advisers are engaged in a fierce debate over the shape of next year’s agenda. At issue: whether to appeal to traditional conservative voters by tackling welfare reform or instead push forward on the president’s long-promised infrastructure plan, which could attract Democratic support and win over a broader slice of the electorate.

Several Trump advisers have urged the president to strike a more bipartisan tone next year, encouraging him to facilitate a deal with Democrats on the DACA program for undocumented immigrants and then quickly move to an infrastructure package – a sequence that would significantly delay welfare reform.

The advisers have told the president that passing infrastructure legislation could help Republicans hold the House, pointing to polling that shows the issue is popular with the public.

Trump met before Christmas in the Oval Office with his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, his former director of digital media, Brad Parscale, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway and others about the merits of each option, according to people familiar with the discussion.

The president has privately told top aides at various points that he is eager to pursue both infrastructure and welfare reform. But Trump’s top policy adviser on the subject, Paul Winfree, recently left the White House to return to the Heritage Foundation, and the president has more recently signaled that he believes infrastructure has the best chance of winning bipartisan support and buoying Republicans in the fall.

Some of the president’s outside advisers say that’s the right approach. “Infrastructure first,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a longtime Trump ally. “I wouldn’t touch entitlements. There’s zero reason to pick a fight on any of those in an election year.”

But House Speaker Paul Ryan has repeatedly said he is determined to reform welfare. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, however, has publicly dismissed the idea, telling National Public Radio that he is “not interested” in taking on the issue on a party-line basis — and Democrats are in no mood to cooperate ahead of the midterms.

Trump, McConnell, and Ryan are expected to settle their differences in a meeting at Camp David the first week in January, though one administration official said he nonetheless expects “lot of infighting.”

The president stormed into office with a series of executive orders, but questions also linger about what the president will be able to accomplish at the executive level in the coming year. Aides expect a renewed push on trade, including the possibility that Trump will slap China and other economic competitors with tariffs in the coming weeks.

The issue was largely put on the back burner in recent months so it wouldn’t distract from tax reform, according to one White House aide, but the administration is weighing trade measures on everything from steel to solar imports, stoking deep concern among Trump’s free-market advisers that the president could spark a trade war.

Administration officials have been working quietly for months to curb the influence of Trump’s protectionist advisers. Though the White House’s leading China critic, trade adviser Peter Navarro, has been sidelined, the president's free-market aides fear their efforts have had little effect on Trump's thinking.

Compounding this challenging legislative terrain is the departure of senior aides,including deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell to Jeremy Katz, the deputy director of the National Economic Council, as well as Winfree, who was deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council.

Few expect Gary Cohn – the director of the National Economic Council, which has emerged as the White House’s central policymaking hub – to stay in the administration until the end of 2018. Cohn, the former Goldman Sachs president who was integral in the passage of tax reform, is likely to depart either at the end of January or in August, at the close of the legislative session, according to a senior White House aide. Cohn has assembled a team of policy aides on the NEC – including Katz, who departs in late January – and many of his staffers are expected to follow him if he leaves.

People familiar with plans for staff changes said Johnny DeStefano, already head of the White House personnel office and interim head of the Office of Public Liaison, will also oversee the White House’s political affairs and intergovernmental affairs offices — a combined portfolio bigger than any that previous West Wing staff, including Valerie Jarrett under President Barack Obama or Karl Rove under President George W. Bush, ever held, one former White House official noted.

The decision to elevate DeStefano – who struggled running the personnel office last year and was slow to fill positions – rather than bringing in outsiders is another sign that the White House is having trouble recruiting new staff. Two people familiar with the hiring process said Trump’s White House has had difficulty attracting outside talent as a result of the Russia probe, the complicated government vetting process and the cap on federal employees’ salaries.

“My advice to them is find younger people,” Gingrich said of a president who favors generals, billionaires, and CEOs that he views as peers. “There are lots of ambitious people who can do the jobs. He can lean on Kelly, while Kelly hires young people.”

Amid the churn, there is expected to be at least one constant for Trump: the presence, in the West Wing, of his family members, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, whom insiders say now plan to stay in Washington at least through the 2018 school year.

After a rocky first year – when even the president questioned whether having family members serving in senior White House posts was a good idea after all – the marginalized power couple plans to start off 2018 with lower profiles and smaller, more defined portfolios than those they pursued in Trump’s first year in office, according to a White House official.

Ivanka Trump will continue to serve as a surrogate selling tax reform, promoting STEM and female entrepreneurs. Behind the scenes, she is expected to continue what the official called “quiet talks” around paid family leave. Kushner, meanwhile, will be working on Middle East peace, while also working on criminal justice reform, NAFTA negotiations and a potential infrastructure bill.

Kushner, for his part, is still widely viewed as the White House official with the most exposure in Mueller’s probe, having reportedly instructed former national security adviser Michael Flynn during the presidential transition to reach out to United Nations Security Council member countries, including Russia, to encourage them to oppose a resolution on Israeli settlements.

While the White House’s lawyers, led by Beltway powerhouse Ty Cobb, have been assuring Trump that Mueller’s probe into Russian meddling in the election is likely to conclude in the coming weeks, most of the president’s senior aides not only dismiss that as fantasy, but expect the special counsel’s investigation to ramp up in the coming year.

For Trump’s closest aides, that means weeks, and potentially months, of the president’s dark moods – which his lawyers have sought to alleviate in part by assuring him the investigation is nearing its conclusion, first by Thanksgiving and then by year’s end. It’s a strategy that one White House aide predicted the president is likely to pick up on.

“I’m among those who can’t conceive of it ending in a matter of a few weeks,” said a prominent Washington attorney advising one member of the administration. “I can’t imagine they actually believed it when they said it, though it’s hard to imagine lawyers deliberately misleading their client like that.”