“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.
