Mick Mulvaney says he would accept the job of White House chief of staff, if it were offered to him. Donald Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget told attendees at THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s summit in Colorado Springs Saturday that he likes working for the president and is among the small group of inside and outside advisers—from current chief of staff John Kelly to Fox News host Sean Hannity—who the president listens to most.
“That’s not a job you turn down,” said Mulvaney when asked about chatter that he could be next in line for the chief of staff position. “The president doesn’t walk in and ask you if you want to be chief of staff. The president walks in and says ‘you are the next chief of staff.’ And you say yes and you leave.” Mulvaney pointed out that in a White House, the chief job is frequently the “last job” because the pressures and responsibilities of the role “burns you out the fastest.”
“You can’t do it for more than 12 to 18 months. Nobody does,” he said. “The bad news is that as soon as he says ‘You are now the chief of staff’ it means you’re on your way out, just inevitably.”
“Yeah, I’d take it, I think I’d be pretty good at it, but I don’t think it’s come to that,” Mulvaney added. Kelly has been chief of staff for nearly 10 months, following a 6-month tenure by his predecessor, Reince Priebus. Mulvaney suggested his role at OMB is the reason some have discussed him as a successor to Kelly.
“The only reason my name’s come up is because it’s one of those traditional moves,” he said. “Other OMB directors have gone from that. [George W. Bush chief of staff] Josh Bolten I think was the last one to go from that to chief of staff, and that’s simply because OMB sort of has our hands in everything, so you do sort of have that holistic view of everything that’s going on in the administration.”
Both of Mulvaney’s appearances at the summit—he also joined a panel with Fox News host Bret Baier on Sunday—were well received by the audience, with some attendees calling him the highlight of the 3-day conference.
In the wide-ranging discussion Saturday, Mulvaney described himself as “by far the most conservative person in the Cabinet” and suggested the Democrats were not a lock to win the House of Representatives (where the South Carolina Republican served from 2011 to 2017) in the upcoming midterm elections. He acknowledged that Democrats are in a similar position to Republicans in 2010 when they took over the House during Barack Obama’s first term.
“The difference is that the economy’s really, really good,” Mulvaney said. “I’m not sure . . . there’s the same concern about the economic future of the country.”
He also offered some insight into who the president takes advice from, listing Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Peter Navarro, and Stephen Miller. “The president relies on him heavily when it comes to immigration,” Mulvaney said of Miller.
Mulvaney also mentioned Hannity, who speaks with Trump on the phone regularly, as an influential outside adviser. “He does listen to the opinions of folks on television. I think that he does,” he said.
What about retirement entitlement reform, something a fiscal hawk like Mulvaney voted for several times while in the House but which President Trump has steadfastly opposed? “The first week I was there, I sat down with some of the broad outlines of the budget we were working on before I got there. And I said, ‘Okay, let’s talk about Social Security.’ He said, ‘Mick, I promised people I wouldn’t touch it. Period. I’m not going to be one of those candidates who says one thing and does another thing. So go find different ways to solve the problem.’” Mulvaney said. “I respect that. Do I agree with the policy? No, but then again, as everyone’s quick to point out, I’m not the president.”
It doesn’t bother him, he says, that Trump isn’t interested in addressing what Mulvaney and his fellow House Republicans spent years insisting was the main driver of the national debt. “I get paid to bang my head against the wall,” he said. “A conservative Republican is sitting in the Oval Office, making the case to the president of the United States as to why we should do X on policy, and if the president only takes 20 percent of that suggestion, then I count that as a win.”
Mulvaney also serves as the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to which he was appointed after the agency’s director Richard Cordray resigned last fall in order to run for governor of Ohio. President Trump appointed Mulvaney to head the CFPB under the provisions of the Vacancies Act. Mulvaney hinted that President Trump may have a nominee for a permanent director before June 22, when Mulvaney’s tenure under the Vacancies Act runs out. “I’ve heard a couple names but I’m confident they’re going to name somebody before June 22,” he said, adding that he is “staying out” of the process of finding a replacement.
A critic of the CFPB while in Congress, Mulvaney dodged a question about whether the bureau ought to exist. “I think I can make the case that I lost the ability to have an opinion on that. I can’t have a general in the field in the middle of a battle and decide that the Army is unconstitutional and walk off. You can’t have someone running an agency decide that the agency is unconstitutional and try to shut it down,” he said. “I believe that something like the bureau is going to exist for a while. If it’s going to exist, is it better for it to be Elizabeth Warren’s baby . . . or is it better for it to be a true regulator and overseer and supervisor?”
“I don’t want us to be Elizabeth Warren’s baby. If we’re going to exist, I want to be considered a down-the-middle, credible regulator out to prevent consumer abuse, out to educate people about consumer finance, out to get rid of regulations,” he said.
And what does President Trump think of the job Mulvaney’s doing at CFPB? Mulvaney says it’s the only part of his work the president never speaks with him about, save for one time. As Mulvaney quoted Trump: “That thing you’re doing over, that’s some nice work. Keep it up.”
One of President Trump’s former national security aides says there’s “no downside and a potential upside” in the upcoming summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Michael Anton, the former spokesman for the National Security Council, defended the administration’s policy toward North Korea at the TWS summit in Colorado Springs Friday.
“Unless the United States goes to the summit and gets hoodwinked or gives something away, which I don’t expect we will, there’s no downside and a potential upside,” Anton said. “There’s already a potential upside in accepting the summit, right? It makes our allies happy.”
But is the meeting itself a concession to Kim, a sop to a murderous totalitarian? “It’s only a concession if you really make a concession. The fact of the meeting itself, the fact that you’re talking, doesn’t seem to be a concession,” Anton said. “Munich was not a failure because Chamberlain saw Hitler in person. Munich was a failure because Chamberlain gave away the store, right?”
Anton denied the North Koreans, who have developed their nuclear weapons capabilities significantly over the last months and years, have a strong hand going into the June 12 summit. “The meeting is coming after a year of extraordinary pressure on the regime. They’ve never been sanctioned like this before. They’ve never had this level of U.N. pressure on them before. They’ve never had this level of pressure from the Chinese on them before,” he said. “Our hope is that they’re really feeling the pain, the economic pain, from what these sanctions delivered, and they’re probably feeling the pressure and the potential for abandonment by their Chinese patrons, which is why they asked for the meeting.”
Asked about recent reports that President Trump and Defense secretary James Mattis have considered the removal of U.S. troops from South Korea up for negotiation, Anton offered several conditions. “If you could get some kind of a deal that formally ends the Korean War…that does achieve genuine denuclearization with inspectors crawling all over those sites, undenied anywhere, something like what we’ve seen in, say, Libya, or Brazil, or South Africa, countries that did denuclearize…if you could get all of that and some kind of international guarantee [of South Korean security] . . . then that could be part of the conversation,” he said. “I don’t think we should rule it out in advance.”
Anton also defended President Trump’s language around North Korea and its pursuit of nuclear weapons capability as “entirely sober.”
One More Thing—Our editor Stephen F. Hayes, who interviewed Anton at the TWS summit, pressed the former Trump official on questions of the president’s character. “Do you worry about Donald Trump’s character?” Hayes asked.
“No, I don’t worry about it,” Anton replied.
“Do you think he’s a man of good character?” Hayes said. “I think he’s a man with many virtues, and many of those virtues were absolutely apt and necessary to the situation we found ourselves in 2016 and we find ourselves in now,” Anton said.
“Do you think he’s a man of good character?” Hayes pressed again, bringing up a few of Trump’s statements and actions as evidence for the president’s poor character.
“Even if I were to stipulate all of that, I would still say to you, I’d still rather have a wall, and a strong foreign policy, and also not Hillary Clinton running the Justice Department and all of these agencies coming after me and everything I believe in,” Anton said.
Photo of the Day
With eight months to go to retirement and November midterms looming, House Speaker Paul Ryan may be in danger of losing control of his caucus. My colleague Haley Byrd reports that some House Republicans have considered pushing Ryan out early in order to smooth the path of succession for his presumed successor, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy:
McCarthy pushed back hard against Byrd’s story, calling it “completely untrue”—an assertion contradicted by White House budget director Mick Mulvaney, who said Sunday that he had had private conversations with McCarthy about that very subject. According to Mulvaney, Ryan stepping down early would have the benefit of forcing House Democrats to cast another vote for their unpopular leader Nancy Pelosi.
“I’ve talked with Kevin about this privately but not as much publicly,” Mulvaney said during the TWS summit. “Wouldn’t it be great to force a Democrat running in a tight race to have to put up or shut up about voting for Nancy Pelosi eight weeks before an election? That’s a really, really good vote for us to force if we can figure out how to do it.”
The Trump administration moved Monday to strengthen U.S. sanctions on Venezuela’s authoritarian government, one day after President Nicolas Maduro claimed victory in a reelection effort that was panned internationally as a sham. In a statement, President Trump said the new sanctions were intended to block Maduro and his cronies from conducting “fire sales” on “Venezuela’s critical assets—assets the country will need to rebuild its economy.”
“This money belongs to the Venezuelan people,” Trump said. “We call for the Maduro regime to restore democracy, hold free and fair elections, release all political prisoners immediately and unconditionally, and end the repression and economic deprivation of the Venezuelan people.”
A senior administration official told reporters Monday that the sanctions were a necessary tool to prevent Venezuela’s rulers from enriching themselves at their people’s expense, saying that “the region has never seen a kleptocracy like this.”
“We’ve never seen a country as wealthy in terms of natural resources and human capital as Venezuela is driven into such an economic death spiral so quickly by such a small group of individuals determined to enrich themselves at the expense of millions of people,” the official said. “The humanitarian suffering in this country is on a scale that we really don’t see in other places.”
Security Watch—From Politico: “‘Too inconvenient’: Trump goes rogue on phone security”
Song of the Day—“I’m Slowly Turning Into You” by the White Stripes
