more than a million people at least, right?” He made a series of phone calls to friends who
largely yes’d him on this. Kushner confirmed a big crowd. Conway did nothing to
dissuade him. Priebus agreed. Bannon made a joke.
Among Trump’s first moves as president was to have a series of inspirational
photographs in the West Wing replaced with images of big crowd scenes at his inaugural
ceremony.
Bannon had come to rationalize Trump’s reality distortions. Trump’s hyperbole,
exaggerations, flights of fancy, improvisations, and general freedom toward and mangling
of the facts, were products of the basic lack of guile, pretense, and impulse control that
helped create the immediacy and spontaneity that was so successful with so many on the
stump—while so horrifying to so many others.
For Bannon, Obama was the north star of aloofness. “Politics,” said Bannon with an
authority that belayed the fact that until the previous August he had never worked in
politics, “is a more immediate game than he ever played it.” Trump was, for Bannon, a
modern-day William Jennings Bryan. (Bannon had long talked about the need for a new
Williams Jennings Bryan in right-wing politics, with friends assuming Bannon meant
himself.) At the turn of the twentieth century, Bryan had enthralled rural audiences with
his ability to speak passionately and extemporaneously for apparently unlimited periods of
time. Trump compensated—in the theory of some intimates, including Bannon—for his
difficulties with reading, writing, and close focus with an improvisational style that
produced, if not exactly a William Jennings Bryan effect, certainly close to the exact
opposite of the Obama effect.
It was part hortatory, part personal testimony, part barstool blow-hard, a rambling,
disjointed, digressive, what-me-worry approach that combined aspects of cable television
rage, big-tent religious revivalism, Borscht Belt tummler, motivational speaking, and
YouTube vlogging. Charisma in American politics had come to define an order of charm,
wit, and style—a coolness. But another sort of American charisma was more in the
Christian evangelical vein, an emotional, experiential spectacle.
The Trump campaign had built its central strategy around great rallies regularly
attracting tens of thousands, a political phenomenon that the Democrats both failed to
heed and saw as a sign of Trump’s limited appeal. For the Trump team, this style, this
unmediated connection—his speeches, his tweets, his spontaneous phone calls to radio
and television shows, and, often, to anyone who would listen—was revelatory, a new,
personal, and inspirational politics. For the other side, it was clownishness that, at best,
aspired to the kind of raw, authoritarian demagoguery that had long been discredited by
and assigned to history and that, when it appeared in American politics, reliably failed.
While the advantages of this style for the Trump team were now very clear, the
problem was that it often—in fact regularly—produced assertions that were not remotely
true.
This had led increasingly to the two-different-realities theory of Trump politics. In the
one reality, which encompassed most of Trump’s supporters, his nature was understood
and appreciated. He was the anti-wonk. He was the counterexpert. His was the gut call. He
was the everyman. He was jazz (some, in the telling, made it rap), everybody else an
earnest folk music. In the other reality, in which resided most of his antagonists, his
virtues were grievous if not mental and criminal flaws. In this reality lived the media,
which, with its conclusion of a misbegotten and bastard presidency, believed it could
diminish him and wound him (and wind him up) and rob him of all credibility by
relentlessly pointing out how literally wrong he was.
The media, adopting a “shocked, shocked” morality, could not fathom how being
factually wrong was not an absolute ending in itself. How could this not utterly shame
him? How could his staff defend him? The facts were the facts! Defying them, or ignoring
them, or subverting them, made you a liar—intending to deceive, bearing false witness. (A
minor journalism controversy broke out about whether these untruths should be called
inaccuracies or lies.)
In Bannon’s view: (1) Trump was never going to change; (2) trying to get him to
change would surely cramp his style; (3) it didn’t matter to Trump supporters; (4) the
media wasn’t going to like him anyway; (5) it was better to play against the media than to
the media; (6) the media’s claim to be the protector of factual probity and accuracy was
itself a sham; (7) the Trump revolution was an attack on conventional assumptions and
expertise, so better to embrace Trump’s behavior than try to curb it or cure it.
The problem was that, for all he was never going to stick to a script (“his mind just
doesn’t work that way” was one of the internal rationalizations), Trump craved media
approval. But, as Bannon emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was
he ever going to acknowledge that he got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get
that approval. This meant, next best thing, that he had to be aggressively defended against
the media’s disapproval.
The problem here was that the more vociferous the defense—mostly of assertions that
could easily be proved wrong—the more the media redoubled its attacks and censure.
What’s more, Trump was receiving the censure of his friends, too. And it was not only
calls from friends worried about him, but staffers calling people to call him and say
Simmer down. “Who do you have in there?” said Joe Scarborough in a frantic call. “Who’s
the person you trust? Jared? Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act
on it?”
“Well,” said the president, “you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk
to myself.”
Hence, within twenty-four hours of the inauguration, the president had invented a
million or so people who did not exist. He sent his new press secretary, Sean Spicer—
whose personal mantra would shortly become “You can’t make this shit up”—to argue his
case in a media moment that turned Spicer, quite a buttoned-down political professional,
into a national joke, which he seemed destined to never recover from. To boot, the
president blamed Spicer for not making the million phantom souls seem real.
It was the first presidential instance of what the campaign regulars had learned over
many months: on the most basic level, Trump just did not, as Spicer later put it, give a
fuck. You could tell him whatever you wanted, but he knew what he knew, and if what
you said contradicted what he knew, he simply didn’t believe you.
The next day Kellyanne Conway, her aggressive posture during the campaign turning
more and more to petulance and self-pity, asserted the new president’s right to claim
“alternative facts.” As it happened, Conway meant to say “alternative information,” which
at least would imply there might be additional data. But as uttered, it certainly sounded
like the new administration was claiming the right to recast reality. Which, in a sense, it
was. Although, in Conway’s view, it was the media doing the recasting, making a
mountain (hence “fake news”) out of a molehill (an honest minor exaggeration, albeit of
vast proportions).
Anyway, the frequently asked question about whether Trump would continue his
unsupervised and often inexplicable tweets now that he was officially in the White House
and the president of the United States—a question as hotly asked inside the White House
as out—was answered: he would.
This was his fundamental innovation in governing: regular, uncontrolled bursts of
anger and spleen.
* * *
The president’s immediate official business, however, was to make nice with the CIA.
On Saturday, January 21, in an event organized by Kushner, the president, in his first
presidential act, paid a call on Langley to, in Bannon’s hopeful description, “play some
politics.” In carefully prepared remarks in his first act as president, he would lay some of
the famous Trump flattery on the CIA and the rest of the sprawling, and leaking, U.S.
intelligence world.
Not taking off his dark overcoat, lending him quite a hulking gangster look, pacing in
front of the CIA’s wall of stars for its fallen agents, in front of a crowd of about three
hundred agency personnel and a group of White House staffers, and, suddenly, in a mood
of sleepless cockiness and pleasure at having a captive crowd, the new president,
disregarding his text, launched into what we could confidently call some of the most
peculiar remarks ever delivered by an American president.
“I know a lot about West Point, I’m a person who very strongly believes in academics.
Every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at MIT for 35 years, who did a
fantastic job in so many ways academically—he was an academic genius—and then they
say, Is Donald Trump an intellectual? Trust me, I’m like a smart person.”
Which was all somehow by way of praise for the new, soon-to-be-confirmed CIA
director, Mike Pompeo, who had attended West Point and who Trump had brought with
him to stand in the crowd—and who now found himself as bewildered as everyone else.
“You know when I was young. Of course I feel young—I feel like I was 30 … 35 …
39 … . Somebody said, Are you young? I said, I think I’m young. I was stopping in the
final months of the campaign, four stops, five stops, seven stops—speeches, speeches in
front of twenty-five, thirty thousand people … fifteen, nineteen thousand. I feel young—I
think we’re all so young. When I was young we were always winning things in this
country. We’d win with trade, we’d win with wars—at a certain age I remembering
hearing from one of my instructors, the United States has never lost a war. And then, after
that, it’s like we haven’t won anything. You know the old expression, to the victor belongs
the spoils? You remember I always say, keep the oil.”
“Who should keep the oil?” asked a bewildered CIA employee, leaning over to a
colleague in the back of the room.
“I wasn’t a fan of Iraq, I didn’t want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you when we were
in we got out wrong and I always said in addition to that keep the oil. Now I said it for
economic reasons, but if you think about it, Mike”—he called out across the room,
addressing the soon-to-be director—“if we kept the oil we wouldn’t have ISIS because
that’s where they made their money in the first place, so that’s why we should have kept
the oil. But okay—maybe you’ll have another chance—but the fact is we should have kept
the oil.”
The president paused and smiled with evident satisfaction.
“The reason you are my first stop, as you know I have a running war with the media,
they are among the most dishonest human beings on earth, and they sort of made it sound
like I had a feud with the intelligence community and I just want to let you know the
reason you’re the number one stop is exactly the opposite, exactly, and they understand
that. I was explaining about the numbers. We did, we did a thing yesterday at the speech.
Did everybody like the speech? You had to like it. But we had a massive field of people.
You saw them. Packed. I get up this morning, I turn on one of the networks, and they show
an empty field and I say, Wait a minute, I made a speech. I looked out—the field was—it
looked like a million, million and half people. They showed a field where there were
practically nobody standing there. And they said Donald Trump did not draw well and I
said it was almost raining, the rain should have scared them away, but God looked down
and said we’re not going to let it rain on your speech and in fact when I first started I said,
Oooh no, first line I got hit by a couple of drops, and I said, Oh this is too bad, but we’ll
go right through it, the truth is it stopped immediately… .”
“No, it didn’t,” one of the staffers traveling with him said reflexively, then catching
herself and, with a worried look, glancing around to see if she had been overheard.
“… and then it became really sunny and I walked off and it poured right after I left. It
poured but we have something amazing because—honestly it looked like a million,
million and a half people, whatever it was it was, but it went all the way back to the
Washington Monument and by mistake I get this network and it showed an empty field
and it said we drew two hundred fifty thousand people. Now that’s not bad, but it’s a lie…
. And we had another one yesterday which was interesting. In the Oval Office there’s a
beautiful statue of Dr. Martin Luther King and I also happen to like Churchill—Winston
Churchill—I think most of us like Churchill, doesn’t come from our country but had a lot
to do with it, helped us, real ally, and as you know the Churchill statue was taken out… .
So a reporter for Time magazine and I have been on the cover like fourteen or fifteen
times. I think I have the all-time record in the history of Time magazine. Like if Tom
Brady is on the cover it’s one time because he won the Super Bowl or something. I’ve
been on fifteen times this year. I don’t think, Mike, that’s a record that can ever be broken,
do you agree with that … . What do you think?”
“No,” said Pompeo in a stricken voice.
“But I will say that they said it was very interesting that ‘Donald Trump took down the
bust, the statue, of Dr. Martin Luther King,’ and it was right there, there was a cameraman
that was in front of it. So Zeke … Zeke … from Time magazine … writes a story that I
took it down. I would never do that. I have great respect for Dr. Martin Luther King. But
this is how dishonest the media is. Now big story, but the retraction was like this”—he
indicated ever-so-small with his fingers. “Is it a line or do they even bother putting it in? I
only like to say I love honesty, I like honest reporting. I will tell you, final time, although I
will say it when you let in your thousands of other people who have been trying to come
in, because I am coming back, we may have to get you a larger room, we may have to get
you a larger room and maybe, maybe, it will be built by somebody that knows how to
build and we won’t have columns. You understand that? We get rid of the columns, but
you know I just wanted to say that I love you, I respect you, there’s nobody I respect more.
You do a fantastic job and we’re going to start winning again, and you’re going to be
leading the charge, so thank you all very much.”
In a continuing sign of Trump’s Rashomon effect—his speeches inspiring joy or horror
—witnesses would describe his reception at the CIA as either a Beatles-like emotional
outpouring or a response so confounded and appalled that, in the seconds after he finished,
you could hear a pin drop.
4
BANNON
S
teve Bannon was the first Trump senior staffer in the White House after Trump was
sworn in. On the inauguration march, he had grabbed the newly appointed deputy
chief of staff, Katie Walsh, Reince Priebus’s deputy at the RNC, and together they had
peeled off to inspect the now vacant West Wing. The carpet had been shampooed, but little
else had changed. It was a warren of tiny offices in need of paint, not rigorously cleaned
on a regular basis, the décor something like an admissions office at a public university.
Bannon claimed the nondescript office across from the much grander chief of staff’s suite,
and he immediately requisitioned the white boards on which he intended to chart the first
hundred days of the Trump administration. And right away he began moving furniture out.
The point was to leave no room for anyone to sit. There were to be no meetings, at least no
meetings where people could get comfortable. Limit discussion. Limit debate. This was
war. This was a war room.
Many who had worked with Bannon on the campaign and through the transition
shortly noticed a certain change. Having achieved one goal, he was clearly on to another.
An intense man, he was suddenly at an even higher level of focus and determination.
“What’s up with Steve?” Kushner began to ask. And then, “Is something wrong with
Steve?” And then finally, “I don’t understand. We were so close.”
Within the first week, Bannon seemed to have put away the camaraderie of Trump
Tower—including a willingness to talk at length at any hour—and become far more
remote, if not unreachable. He was “focused on my shit.” He was just getting things done.
But many felt that getting things done was was more about him hatching plots against
them. And certainly, among his basic character notes, Steve Bannon was a plotter. Strike
before being struck. Anticipate the moves of others—counter them before they can make
their moves. To him this was seeing things ahead, focusing on a set of goals. The first goal
was the election of Donald Trump, the second the staffing of the Trump government. Now
it was capturing the soul of the Trump White House, and he understood what others did
not yet: this would be a mortal competition.
* * *
In the early days of the transition, Bannon had encouraged the Trump team to read David
Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest. (One of the few people who seem actually to
have taken him up on this reading assignment was Jared Kushner.) “A very moving
experience reading this book. It makes the world clear, amazing characters and all true,”
Bannon enthused.
This was a personal bit of branding—Bannon made sure to exhibit the book to many of
the liberal reporters he was courting. But he was also trying to make a point, an important
one considering the slapdash nature of the transition team’s staffing protocols: be careful
who you hire.
Halberstam’s book, published in 1972, is a Tolstoyan effort to understand how great
figures of the academic, intellectual, and military world who had served during the
Kennedy and Johnson years had so grievously misapprehended the nature of the Vietnam
War and mishandled its prosecution. The Best and the Brightest was a cautionary tale
about the 1960s establishment—the precursor of the establishment that Trump and
Bannon were now so aggressively challenging.
But the book also served as a reverential guide to the establishment. For the 1970s
generation of future policy experts, would-be world leaders, and Ivy League journalists
aiming for big-time careers—though it was Bannon’s generation, he was far outside this
self-selected elite circle—The Best and the Brightest was a handbook about the
characteristics of American power and the routes to it. Not just the right schools and right
backgrounds, although that, too, but the attitudes, conceits, affect, and language that would
be most conducive to finding your way into the American power structure. Many saw the
book as a set of prescriptions about how to get ahead, rather than, as intended, what not to
do when you are ahead. The Best and the Brightest described the people who should be in
power. A college-age Barack Obama was smitten with the book, as was Rhodes Scholar
Bill Clinton.
Halberstam’s book defined the look and feel of White House power. His language,
resonant and imposing and, often, boffo pompous, had set the tone for the next half
century of official presidential journalism. Even scandalous or unsuccessful tenants of the
White House were treated as unique figures who had risen to the greatest heights after
mastering a Darwinian political process. Bob Woodward, who helped bring Nixon down
—and who himself became a figure of unchallengeable presidential mythmaking—wrote a
long shelf of books in which even the most misguided presidential actions seemed part of
an epochal march of ultimate responsibility and life-and-death decision making. Only the
most hardhearted reader would not entertain a daydream in which he or she was not part
of this awesome pageant.
Steve Bannon was such a daydreamer.
* * *
But if Halberstam defined the presidential mien, Trump defied it—and defiled it. Not a
single attribute would place him credibly in the revered circle of American presidential
character and power. Which was, in a curious reversal of the book’s premise, just what
created Steve Bannon’s opportunity.
The less likely a presidential candidate is, the more unlikely, and, often, inexperienced,
his aides are—that is, an unlikely candidate can attract only unlikely aides, as the likely
ones go to the more likely candidates. When an unlikely candidate wins—and as outsiders
become ever more the quadrennial flavor of the month, the more likely an unlikely
candidate is to get elected—ever more peculiar people fill the White House. Of course, a
point about the Halberstam book and about the Trump campaign was that the most
obvious players make grievous mistakes, too. Hence, in the Trump narrative, unlikely
players far outside the establishment hold the true genius.
Still, few have been more unlikely than Steve Bannon.
At sixty-three, Bannon took his first formal job in politics when he joined the Trump
campaign. Chief Strategist—his title in the new administration—was his first job not just
in the federal government but in the public sector. (“Strategist!” scoffed Roger Stone,
who, before Bannon, had been one of Trump’s chief strategists.) Other than Trump
himself, Bannon was certainly the oldest inexperienced person ever to work in the White
House.
It was a flaky career that got him here.
Catholic school in Richmond, Virginia. Then a local college, Virginia Tech. Then seven
years in the Navy, a lieutenant on ship duty and then in the Pentagon. While on active
duty, he got a master’s degree at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, but then he
washed out of his naval career. Then an MBA from Harvard Business School. Then four
years as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs—his final two years focusing on the
media industry in Los Angeles—but not rising above a midlevel position.
In 1990, at the age of thirty-seven, Bannon entered peripatetic entre-preneurhood under
the auspices of Bannon & Co., a financial advisory firm to the entertainment industry. This
was something of a hustler’s shell company, hanging out a shingle in an industry with a
small center of success and concentric rings radiating out of rising, aspiring, falling, and
failing strivers. Bannon & Co., skirting falling and failing, made it to aspiring by raising
small amounts of money for independent film projects—none a hit.
Bannon was rather a movie figure himself. A type. Alcohol. Bad marriages. Cashstrapped
in a business where the measure of success is excesses of riches. Ever scheming.
Ever disappointed.
For a man with a strong sense of his own destiny, he tended to be hardly noticed. Jon
Corzine, the former Goldman chief and future United States senator and governor of New
Jersey, climbing the Goldman ranks when Bannon was at the firm, was unaware of
Bannon. When Bannon was appointed head of the Trump campaign and became an
overnight press sensation—or question mark—his credentials suddenly included a
convoluted story about how Bannon & Co. had acquired a stake in the megahit show
Seinfeld and hence its twenty-year run of residual profits. But none of the Seinfeld
principals, creators, or producers seem ever to have heard of him.
Mike Murphy, the Republican media consultant who ran Jeb Bush’s PAC and became a
leading anti-Trump movement figure, has the vaguest recollection of Bannon’s seeking PR
services from Murphy’s firm for a film Bannon was producing a decade or so ago. “I’m
told he was in the meeting, but I honestly can’t get a picture of him.”
The New Yorker magazine, dwelling on the Bannon enigma—one that basically
translated to: How is it that the media has been almost wholly unaware of someone who is
suddenly among the most powerful people in government?—tried to trace his steps in
Hollywood and largely failed to find him. The Washington Post traced his many addresses
to no clear conclusion, except a suggestion of possible misdemeanor voter fraud.
In the midnineties, he inserted himself in a significant role into Biosphere 2, a project
copiously funded by Edward Bass, one of the Bass family oil heirs, about sustaining life in
space, and dubbed by Time one of the hundred worst ideas of the century—a rich man’s
folly. Bannon, having to find his opportunities in distress situations, stepped into the
project amid its collapse only to provoke further breakdown and litigation, including
harassment and vandalism charges.
After the Biosphere 2 disaster, he participated in raising financing for a virtual currency
scheme (MMORPGs, or MMOs) called Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE). This was a
successor company to Digital Entertainment Network (DEN), a dot-com burnout, whose
principals included the former child star Brock Pierce (The Mighty Ducks) who went on to
be the founder of IGE, but was then pushed out. Bannon was put in as CEO, and the
company was subsumed by endless litigation.
Distress is an opportunistic business play. But some distress is better than others. The
kinds of situations available to Bannon involved managing conflict, nastiness, and relative
hopelessness—in essence managing and taking a small profit on dwindling cash. It’s a
living at the margins of people who are making a much better living. Bannon kept trying
to make a killing but never found the killing sweet spot.
Distress is also a contrarian’s game. And the contrarian’s impulse—equal parts
personal dissatisfaction, general resentment, and gambler’s instinct—started to ever more
strongly fuel Bannon. Part of the background for his contrarian impulse lay in an Irish
Catholic union family, Catholic schools, and three unhappy marriages and bad divorces
(journalists would make much of the recriminations in his second wife’s divorce filings).
Not so long ago, Bannon might have been a recognizably modern figure, something of
a romantic antihero, an ex-military and up-from-the-working-class guy, striving, through
multiple marriages and various careers, to make it, but never finding much comfort in the
establishment world, wanting to be part of it and wanting to blow it up at the same time—
a character for Richard Ford, or John Updike, or Harry Crews. An American man’s story.
But now such stories have crossed a political line. The American man story is a right-wing
story. Bannon found his models in political infighters like Lee Atwater, Roger Ailes, Karl
Rove. All were larger-than-life American characters doing battle with conformity and
modernity, relishing ways to violate liberal sensibilities.
The other point is that Bannon, however smart and even charismatic, however much he
extolled the virtue of being a “stand-up guy,” was not necessarily a nice guy. Several
decades as a grasping entrepreneur without a satisfying success story doesn’t smooth the
hustle in hustler. One competitor in the conservative media business, while acknowledging
his intelligence and the ambitiousness of his ideas, also noted, “He’s mean, dishonest, and
incapable of caring about other people. His eyes dart around like he’s always looking for a
weapon with which to bludgeon or gouge you.”
Conservative media fit not only his angry, contrarian, and Roman Catholic side, but it
had low barriers to entry—liberal media, by contrast, with its corporate hierarchies, was
much harder to break into. What’s more, conservative media is a highly lucrative target
market category, with books (often dominating the bestseller lists), videos, and other
products available through direct sales avenues that can circumvent more expensive
distribution channels.
In the early 2000s, Bannon became a purveyor of conservative books products and
media. His partner in this enterprise was David Bossie, the far-right pamphleteer and
congressional committee investigator into the Clintons’ Whitewater affair, who would join
him as deputy campaign manager on the Trump campaign. Bannon met Breitbart News
founder Andrew Breitbart at a screening of one of the Bannon-Bossie documentaries In
the Face of Evil (billed as “Ronald Reagan’s crusade to destroy the most tyrannical and
depraved political systems the world has ever known”), which in turn led to a relationship
with the man who offered Bannon the ultimate opportunity: Robert Mercer.
* * *
In this regard, Bannon was not so much an entrepreneur of vision or even business
discipline, he was more simply following the money—or trying to separate a fool from his
money. He could not have done better than Bob and Rebekah Mercer. Bannon focused his
entrepreneurial talents on becoming courtier, Svengali, and political investment adviser to
father and daughter.
Theirs was a consciously quixotic mission. They would devote vast sums—albeit still
just a small part of Bob Mercer’s many billions—to trying to build a radical free-market,
small-government, home-schooling, antiliberal, gold-standard, pro-death-penalty, anti-
Muslim, pro-Christian, monetarist, anti-civil-rights political movement in the United
States.
Bob Mercer is an ultimate quant, an engineer who designs investment algorithms and
became a co-CEO of one of the most successful hedge funds, Renaissance Technologies.
With his daughter, Rebekah, Mercer set up what is in effect a private Tea Party movement,
self-funding whatever Tea Party or alt-right project took their fancy. Bob Mercer is almost
nonverbal, looking at you with a dead stare and either not talking or offering only minimal
response. He had a Steinway baby grand on his yacht; after inviting friends and colleagues
on the boat, he would spend the time playing the piano, wholly disengaged from his
guests. And yet his political beliefs, to the extent they could be discerned, were generally
Bush-like, and his political discussions, to the extent that you could get him to be
responsive, were about issues involving ground game and data gathering. It was Rebekah
Mercer—who had bonded with Bannon, and whose politics were grim, unyielding, and
doctrinaire—who defined the family. “She’s … like whoa, ideologically there is no
conversation with her,” said one senior Trump White House staffer.
With the death of Andrew Breitbart in 2012, Bannon, in essence holding the proxy of
the Mercers’ investment in the site, took over the Breitbart business. He leveraged his
gaming experience into using Gamergate—a precursor alt-right movement that coalesced
around an antipathy toward, and harassment of, women working in the online gaming
industry—to build vast amounts of traffic through the virality of political memes. (After
hours one night in the White House, Bannon would argue that he knew exactly how to
build a Breitbart for the left. And he would have the key advantage because “people on the
left want to win Pulitzers, whereas I want to be Pulitzer!”)
Working out of—and living in—the town house Breitbart rented on Capitol Hill,
Bannon became one of the growing number of notable Tea Party figures in Washington,
the Mercers’ consigliere. But a seeming measure of his marginality was that his big project
was the career of Jeff Sessions—“Beauregard,” Sessions’s middle name, in Bannon’s
affectionate moniker and evocation of the Confederate general—among the least
mainstream and most peculiar people in the Senate, whom Bannon tried to promote to run
for president in 2012.
Donald Trump was a step up—and early in the 2016 race, Trump became the Breitbart
totem. (Many of Trump’s positions in the campaign were taken from the Breitbart articles
he had printed out for him.) Indeed, Bannon began to suggest to people that he, like Ailes
had been at Fox, was the true force behind his chosen candidate.
Bannon didn’t much question Donald Trump’s bona fides, or behavior, or electability,
because, in part, Trump was just his latest rich man. The rich man is a fixed fact, which
you have to accept and deal with in an entrepreneurial world—at least a lower-level
entrepreneurial world. And, of course, if Trump had had firmer bona fides, better behavior,
and clear electability, Bannon would not have had his chance.
However much a marginal, invisible, small-time hustler Bannon had been—something
of an Elmore Leonard character—he was suddenly transformed inside Trump Tower, an
office he entered on August 15, and for practical purposes, did not exit, save for a few
hours a night (and not every night) in his temporary midtown Manhattan accommodations,
until January 17, when the transition team moved to Washington. There was no
competition in Trump Tower for being the brains of the operation. Of the dominant figures
in the transition, neither Kushner, Priebus, nor Conway, and certainly not the presidentelect,
had the ability to express any kind of coherent perception or narrative. By default,
everybody had to look to the voluble, aphoristic, shambolic, witty, off-the-cuff figure who
was both ever present on the premises and who had, in an unlikely attribute, read a book
or two.
And indeed who, during the campaign, turned out to be able to harness the Trump
operation, not to mention its philosophic disarray, to a single political view: that the path
to victory was an economic and cultural message to the white working class in Florida,
Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.
* * *
Bannon collected enemies. Few fueled his savagery and rancor toward the standard-issue
Republican world as much as Rupert Murdoch—not least because Murdoch had Donald
Trump’s ear. It was one of the key elements of Bannon’s understanding of Trump: the last
person Trump spoke to ended up with enormous influence. Trump would brag that
Murdoch was always calling him; Murdoch, for his part, would complain that he couldn’t
get Trump off the phone.
“He doesn’t know anything about American politics, and has no feel for the American
people,” said Bannon to Trump, always eager to point out that Murdoch wasn’t an
American. But Trump couldn’t get enough of him. With his love of “winners”—and he
saw Murdoch as the ultimate winner—Trump was suddenly bad-mouthing his friend Ailes
as a “loser.”
And yet in one regard Murdoch’s message was useful to Bannon. Having known every
president since Harry Truman—as Murdoch took frequent opportunities to point out—
and, he conjectured, as many heads of state as anyone living, Murdoch believed he
understood better than younger men, even seventy-year-old Trump, that political power
was fleeting. (This was in fact the same message he had imparted to Barack Obama.) A
president really had only, max, six months to make an impact on the public and set his
agenda, and he’d be lucky to get six months. After that it was just putting out fires and
battling the opposition.
This was the message whose urgency Bannon himself had been trying to impress on an
often distracted Trump. Indeed, in his first weeks in the White House, an inattentive
Trump was already trying to curtail his schedule of meetings, limit his hours in the office,
and keep his normal golf habits.
Bannon’s strategic view of government was shock and awe. Dominate rather than
negotiate. Having daydreamed his way into ultimate bureaucratic power, he did not want
to see himself as a bureaucrat. He was of a higher purpose and moral order. He was an
avenger. He was also, he believed, a straight shooter. There was a moral order in aligning
language and action—if you said you were going to do something, you do it.
In his head, Bannon carried a set of decisive actions that would not just mark the new
administration’s opening days, but make it clear that nothing ever again would be the
same. At the age of sixty-three, he was in a hurry.
* * *
Bannon had delved deeply into the nature of executive orders—EOs. You can’t rule by
decree in the United States, except you really can. The irony here was that it was the
Obama administration, with a recalcitrant Republican Congress, that had pushed the EO
envelope. Now, in something of a zero-sum game, Trump’s EOs would undo Obama’s
EOs.
During the transition, Bannon and Stephen Miller, a former Sessions aide who had
earlier joined the Trump campaign and then become Bannon’s effective assistant and
researcher, assembled a list of more than two hundred EOs to issue in the first hundred
days.
But the first step in the new Trump administration had to be immigration, in Bannon’s
certain view. Foreigners were the ne plus ultra mania of Trumpism. An issue often
dismissed as living on the one-track-mind fringe—Jeff Sessions was one of its cranky
exponents—it was Trump’s firm belief that a lot of people had had it up to here with
foreigners. Before Trump, Bannon had bonded with Sessions on the issue. The Trump
campaign became a sudden opportunity to see if nativism really had legs. And then when
they won, Bannon understood there could be no hesitation about declaring their
ethnocentric heart and soul.
To boot, it was an issue that made liberals bat-shit mad.
Laxly enforced immigration laws reached to the center of the new liberal philosophy
and, for Bannon, exposed its hypocrisy. In the liberal worldview, diversity was an absolute
good, whereas Bannon believed any reasonable person who was not wholly blinded by the
liberal light could see that waves of immigrants came with a load of problems—just look
at Europe. And these were problems borne not by cosseted liberals but by the more
exposed citizens at the other end of the economic scale.
It was out of some instinctive or idiot-savant-like political understanding that Trump
had made this issue his own, frequently observing, Wasn’t anybody an American
anymore? In some of his earliest political outings, even before Obama’s election in 2008,
Trump talked with bewilderment and resentment about strict quotas on European
immigration and the deluge from “Asia and other places.” (This deluge, as liberals would
be quick to fact-check, was, even as it had grown, still quite a modest stream.) His
obsessive focus on Obama’s birth certificate was in part about the scourge of non-
European foreignness—a certain race-baiting. Who were these people? Why were they
here?
The campaign sometimes shared a striking graphic. It showed a map of the country
reflecting dominant immigration trends in each state from fifty years ago—here was a
multitude of countries, many European. Today, the equivalent map showed that every state
in the United States was now dominated by Mexican immigration. This was the daily
reality of the American workingman, in Bannon’s view, the ever growing presence of an
alternative, discount workforce.
Bannon’s entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also
in Internet media—that is, media ruled by immediate response. The Breitbart formula was
to so appall the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet
of disgust and delight. You defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the
media bait—hence, now, the political chum. The new politics was not the art of the
compromise but the art of conflict.
The real goal was to expose the hypocrisy of the liberal view. Somehow, despite laws,
rules, and customs, liberal globalists had pushed a myth of more or less open immigration.
It was a double liberal hypocrisy, because, sotto voce, the Obama administration had been
quite aggressive in deporting illegal aliens—except don’t tell the liberals that.
“People want their countries back,” said Bannon. “A simple thing.”
* * *
Bannon meant his EO to strip away the liberal conceits on an already illiberal process.
Rather than seeking to accomplish his goals with the least amount of upset—keeping
liberal fig leaves in place—he sought the most.
Why would you? was the logical question of anyone who saw the higher function of
government as avoiding conflict.
This included most people in office. The new appointees in place at the affected
agencies and departments, among them Homeland Security and State—General John
Kelly, then the director of Homeland Security, would carry a grudge about the disarray
caused by the immigration EO—wanted nothing more than a moment to get their footing
before they might even consider dramatic and contentious new policies. Old appointees—
Obama appointees who still occupied most executive branch jobs—found it unfathomable
that the new administration would go out of its way to take procedures that largely already
existed and to restate them in incendiary, red-flag, and ad hominem terms, such that
liberals would have to oppose them.
Bannon’s mission was to puncture the global-liberal-emperor-wears-no-clothes bubble,
nowhere, in his view, as ludicrously demonstrated as the refusal to see the colossally
difficult and costly effects of uncontrolled immigration. He wanted to force liberals to
acknowledge that even liberal governments, even the Obama government, were engaged
in the real politics of slowing immigration—ever hampered by the liberal refusal to
acknowledge this effort.
The EO would be drafted to remorselessly express the administration’s (or Bannon’s)
pitiless view. The problem was, Bannon really didn’t know how to do this—change rules
and laws. This limitation, Bannon understood, might easily be used to thwart them.
Process was their enemy. But just doing it—the hell with how—and doing it immediately,
could be a powerful countermeasure.
Just doing things became a Bannon principle, the sweeping antidote to bureaucratic
and establishment ennui and resistance. It was the chaos of just doing things that actually
got things done. Except, even if you assumed that not knowing how to do things didn’t
much matter if you just did them, it was still not clear who was going to do what you
wanted to do. Or, a corollary, because nobody in the Trump administration really knew
how to do anything, it was therefore not clear what anyone did.
Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply
could not—because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job.
Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organize meetings, schedules, and the hiring of staff;
he also had to oversee the individual functions of the executive office departments. But
Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and the president’s daughter actually had no specific
responsibilities—they could make it up as they went along. They did what they wanted.
They would seize the day if they could—even if they really didn’t know how to do what
they wanted to do.
Bannon, for instance, even driven by his imperative just to get things done, did not use
a computer. How did he do anything? Katie Walsh wondered. But that was the difference
between big visions and small. Process was bunk. Expertise was the last refuge of liberals,
ever defeated by the big picture. The will to get big things done was how big things got
done. “Don’t sweat the small stuff” was a pretty good gist of Donald Trump’s—and Steve
Bannon’s—worldview. “Chaos was Steve’s strategy,” said Walsh.
Bannon got Stephen Miller to write the immigration EO. Miller, a fifty-five-year-old
trapped in a thirty-two-year-old’s body, was a former Jeff Sessions staffer brought on to
the Trump campaign for his political experience. Except, other than being a dedicated farright
conservative, it was unclear what particular abilities accompanied Miller’s political
views. He was supposed to be a speechwriter, but if so, he seemed restricted to bullet
points and unable to construct sentences. He was supposed to be a policy adviser but knew
little about policy. He was supposed to be the house intellectual but was purposely unread.
He was supposed to be a communications specialist, but he antagonized almost everyone.
Bannon, during the transition, sent him to the Internet to learn about and to try to draft the
EO.
By the time he arrived in the White House, Bannon had his back-of-the-envelope
executive order on immigration and his travel ban, a sweeping, Trumpian exclusion of
most Muslims from the United States, only begrudgingly whittled down, in part at
Priebus’s urging, to what would shortly be perceived as merely draconian.
In the mania to seize the day, with an almost total lack of knowing how, the nutty
inaugural crowd numbers and the wacky CIA speech were followed, without almost
anybody in the federal government having seen it or even being aware of it, by an
executive order overhauling U.S. immigration policy. Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and
the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President Trump—with Bannon’s
low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information—signed what was
put in front of him.
On Friday, January 27, the travel ban was signed and took immediate effect. The result
was an emotional outpouring of horror and indignation from liberal media, terror in
immigrant communities, tumultuous protests at major airports, confusion throughout the
government, and, in the White House, an inundation of lectures, warnings, and
opprobrium from friends and family. What have you done? Do you know what you’re
doing? You have to undo this! You’re finished before you even start! Who is in charge
there?
But Steve Bannon was satisfied. He could not have hoped to draw a more vivid line
between the two Americas—Trump’s and liberals’—and between his White House and the
White House inhabited by those not yet ready to burn the place down.
Why did we do this on a Friday when it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the
most protesters? almost the entire White House staff demanded to know.
“Errr … that’s why,” said Bannon. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports
and riot.” That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the
left.
5
JARVANKA
O
n the Sunday after the immigration order was issued, Joe Scarborough and his cohost
on the MSNBC show Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski, came for lunch at the White
House.
Scarborough is a former Republican congressman from Pensacola, Florida, and
Brzezinski is the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a high-ranking aide in the Johnson
White House and Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor. Morning Joe had gone on the
air in 2007 and developed a following among New York political and media types. Trump
was a longtime devotee.
Early in the 2016 campaign, with a change of leadership at NBC News, it seemed
likely that the show, its ratings falling, would be canceled. But Scarborough and
Brzezinski embraced their relationship with Trump and became one of the few media
outlets not only with a positive outlook on him, but that seemed to know his thinking.
Trump became a frequent call-in guest and the show a way to speak more or less directly
to him.
It was the kind of relationship Trump dreamed of: media people who took him
seriously, talked about him often, solicited his views, provided him with gossip, and
retailed the gossip he offered them. The effect was to make them all insiders together,
which was exactly where Trump wanted to be. Though he branded himself as a political
outsider, actually finding himself on the outside wounded him.
Trump believed that the media, which he propelled (in the case of Scarborough and
Brzezinski, helping them keep their jobs), owed him something, and the media, giving him
vast amounts of free coverage, believed he owed them, with Scarborough and Brzezinski
seeing themselves as something like semiofficial advisers, if not the political fixers who
had put him in his job.
In August, they had had a public spat, resulting in Trump’s tweet: “Some day, when
things calm down, I’ll tell the real story of @JoeNBC and his very insecure long-time
girlfriend, @morningmika. Two clowns!” But Trump’s spats often ended in a tacit
admission, however grudging, of mutual advantage, and in short order they were back on
cordial terms again.
On their arrival at the White House, the ninth day of his presidency, Trump proudly
showed them into the Oval Office and was momentarily deflated when Brzezinski said she
had been there many times before with her father, beginning at age nine. Trump showed
them some of the memorabilia and, eagerly, his new portrait of Andrew Jackson—the
president whom Steve Bannon had made the totem figure of the new administration.
“So how do you think the first week has gone?” Trump asked the couple, in a buoyant
mood, seeking flattery.
Scarborough, puzzled by Trump’s jauntiness in the face of the protests spreading across
the nation, demurred and then said, “Well, I love what you did with U.S. Steel and that
you had the union guys come into the Oval Office.” Trump had pledged to use U.S.-made
steel in U.S. pipelines and, in a Trump touch, met at the White House with union
representatives from building and sheet metal unions and then invited them back to the
Oval Office—something Trump insisted Obama never did.
But Trump pressed his question, leaving Scarborough with the feeling that nobody had
actually told Trump that he had had a very bad week. Bannon and Priebus, wandering in
and out of the office, might actually have convinced him that the week had been a success,
Scarborough thought.
Scarborough then ventured his opinion that the immigration order might have been
handled better and that, all in all, it seemed like a rough period.
Trump, surprised, plunged into a long monologue about how well things had gone,
telling Bannon and Priebus, with a gale of laughter, “Joe doesn’t think we had a good
week.” And turning to Scarborough: “I could have invited Hannity!”
At lunch—fish, which Brzezinski doesn’t eat—Jared and Ivanka joined the president
and Scarborough and Brzezinski. Jared had become quite a Scarborough confidant and
would continue to supply Scarborough with an inside view of the White House—that is,
leaking to him. Scarborough subsequently became a defender of Kushner’s White House
position and view. But, for now, both son-in-law and daughter were subdued and
deferential as Scarborough and Brzezinski chatted with the president, and the president—
taking more of the air time as usual—held forth.
Trump continued to cast for positive impressions of his first week and Scarborough
again reverted to his praise of Trump’s handling of the steel union leadership. At which
point, Jared interjected that reaching out to unions, a traditional Democratic constituency,
was Bannon’s doing, that this was “the Bannon way.”
“Bannon?” said the president, jumping on his son-in-law. “That wasn’t Bannon’s idea.
That was my idea. It’s the Trump way, not the Bannon way.”
Kushner, going concave, retreated from the discussion.
Trump, changing the topic, said to Scarborough and Brzezinski, “So what about you
guys? What’s going on?” He was referencing their not-so-secret secret relationship.
Scarborough and Brzezinski said it was all still complicated, and not public, officially,
but it was good and everything was getting resolved.
“You guys should just get married,” prodded Trump.
“I can marry you! I’m an Internet Unitarian minister,” Kushner, otherwise an Orthodox
Jew, said suddenly.
“What?” said the president. “What are you talking about? Why would they want you to
marry them when I could marry them? When they could be married by the president! At
Mar-a-Lago!”
* * *
Almost everybody advised Jared not to take the inside job. As a family member, he would
command extraordinary influence from a position that no one could challenge. As an
insider, a staffer, not only could his experience be challenged, but while the president
himself might not yet be exposed, a family member on staff would be where enemies and
critics might quite effectively start chipping from. Besides, inside Trump’s West Wing, if
you had a title—that is, other than son-in-law—people would surely want to take it from
you.
Both Jared and Ivanka listened to this advice—from among others it came from Jared’s
brother, Josh, doubly making this case not only to protect his brother but also because of
his antipathy to Trump—but both, balancing risk against reward, ignored it. Trump
himself variously encouraged his son-in-law and his daughter in their new ambitions and,
as their excitement mounted, tried to express his skepticism—while at the same time
telling others that he was helpless to stop them.
For Jared and Ivanka, as really for everybody else in the new administration, quite
including the president, this was a random and crazy turn of history such that how could
you not seize it? It was a joint decision by the couple, and, in some sense, a joint job. Jared
and Ivanka had made an earnest deal between themselves: if sometime in the future the
time came, she’d be the one to run for president (or the first one of them to take the shot).
The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be
Ivanka Trump.
Bannon, who had coined the Jarvanka conflation now in ever greater use, was horrified
when the couple’s deal was reported to him. “They didn’t say that? Stop. Oh come on.
They didn’t actually say that? Please don’t tell me that. Oh my god.”
And the truth was that at least by then Ivanka would have more experience than almost
anybody else now serving in the White House. She and Jared, or Jared, but by inference
she, too, were in effect the real chief of staff—or certainly as much a chief of staff as
Priebus or Bannon, all of them reporting directly to the president. Or, even more to the
organizational point, Jared and Ivanka had a wholly independent standing inside the West
Wing. A super status. Even as Priebus and Bannon tried, however diplomatically, to
remind the couple of staff procedures and propriety, they would in turn remind the West
Wing leadership of their overriding First Family prerogatives. In addition, the president
had immediately handed Jared the Middle East portfolio, making him one of the
significant international players in the administration—indeed, in the world. In the first
weeks, this brief extended out to virtually every other international issue, about which
nothing in Kushner’s previous background would have prepared him for.
Kushner’s most cogent reason for entering the White House was “leverage,” by which
he meant proximity. Quite beyond the status of being inside the family circle, anyone who
had proximity to the president had leverage, the more proximity the more leverage. Trump
himself you could see as a sort of Delphic oracle, sitting in place and throwing out
pronouncements which had to be interpreted. Or as an energetic child, and whomever
could placate or distract him became his favorite. Or as the Sun God (which is effectively
how he saw himself), the absolute center of attention, dispensing favor and delegating
power, which could, at any moment, be withdrawn. The added dimension was that this
Sun God had little calculation. His inspiration existed in the moment, hence all the more
reason to be there with him in the moment. Bannon, for one, joined Trump for dinner
every night, or at least made himself available—one bachelor there for the effective other
bachelor. (Priebus would observe that in the beginning everyone would try to be part of
these dinners, but within a few months, they had become a torturous duty to be avoided.)
Part of Jared and Ivanka’s calculation about the relative power and influence of a
formal job in the West Wing versus an outside advisory role was the knowledge that
influencing Trump required you to be all in. From phone call to phone call—and his day,
beyond organized meetings, was almost entirely phone calls—you could lose him. The
subtleties here were immense, because while he was often most influenced by the last
person he spoke to, he did not actually listen to anyone. So it was not so much the force of
an individual argument or petition that moved him, but rather more just someone’s
presence, the connection of what was going through his mind—and although he was a
person of many obsessions, much of what was on his mind had no fixed view—to
whomever he was with and their views.
Ultimately Trump may not be that different in his fundamental solipsism from anyone
of great wealth who has lived most of his life in a highly controlled environment. But one
clear difference was that he had acquired almost no formal sort of social discipline—he
could not even attempt to imitate decorum. He could not really converse, for instance, not
in the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation. He
neither particularly listened to what was said to him, nor particularly considered what he
said in response (one reason he was so repetitive). Nor did he treat anyone with any sort of
basic or reliable courtesy. If he wanted something, his focus might be sharp and attention
lavish, but if someone wanted something from him, he tended to become irritable and
quickly lost interest. He demanded you pay him attention, then decided you were weak for
groveling. In a sense, he was like an instinctive, pampered, and hugely successful actor.
Everybody was either a lackey who did his bidding or a high-ranking film functionary
trying to coax out his attention and performance—and to do this without making him
angry or petulant.
The payoff was his enthusiasm, quickness, spontaneity, and—if he departed for a
moment from the nonstop focus on himself—an often incisive sense of the weaknesses of
his opponents and a sense of their deepest desires. Politics was handicapped by
incrementalism, of people knowing too much who were defeated by all the complexities
and conflicting interests before they began. Trump, knowing little, might, Trumpers tried
to believe, give a kooky new hope to the system.
Jared Kushner in quite a short period of time—rather less than a year—had crossed
over from the standard Democratic view in which he was raised, to an acolyte of
Trumpism, bewildering many friends and, as well, his own brother, whose insurance
company, Oscar, funded with Kushner-family money, was destined to be dealt a blow by a
repeal of Obamacare.
This seeming conversion was partly the result of Bannon’s insistent and charismatic
tutoring—a kind of real-life engagement with world-bending ideas that had escaped
Kushner even at Harvard. And it was helped by his own resentments toward the liberal
elites whom he had tried to court with his purchase of the New York Observer, an effort
that had backfired terribly. And it was, once he ventured onto the campaign trail, about
having to convince himself that close up to the absurd everything made sense—that
Trumpism was a kind of unsentimental realpolitik that would show everybody in the end.
But most of all, it was that they had won. And he was determined not to look a gift horse
in the mouth. And, everything that was bad about Trumpism, he had convinced himself, he
could help fix.
* * *
As much as it might have surprised him—for many years, he had humored Trump more
than embraced him—Kushner was in fact rather like his father-in-law. Jared’s father,
Charlie, bore an eerie resemblance to Donald’s father, Fred. Both men dominated their
children, and they did this so completely that their children, despite their demands,
became devoted to them. In both instances, this was extreme stuff: belligerent,
uncompromising, ruthless men creating long-suffering offspring who were driven to
achieve their father’s approval. (Trump’s older brother, Freddy, failing in this effort, and,
by many reports, gay, drank himself to death; he died in 1981 at age forty-three.) In
business meetings, observers would be nonplussed that Charlie and Jared Kushner
invariably greeted each other with a kiss and that the adult Jared called his father Daddy.
Neither Donald nor Jared, no matter their domineering fathers, went into the world
with humility. Insecurity was soothed by entitlement. Both out-of-towners who were eager
to prove themselves or lay rightful claim in Manhattan (Kushner from New Jersey, Trump
from Queens), they were largely seen as overweening, smug, and arrogant. Each cultivated
a smooth affect, which could appear more comical than graceful. Neither, by choice nor
awareness, could seem to escape his privilege. “Some people who are very privileged are
aware of it and put it away; Kushner not only seemed in every gesture and word to
emphasize his privilege, but also not to be aware of it,” said one New York media
executive who dealt with Kushner. Both men were never out of their circle of privilege.
The main challenge they set for themselves was to enter further into the privileged circle.
Social climbing was their work.
Jared’s focus was often on older men. Rupert Murdoch spent a surprising amount of
time with Jared, who sought advice from the older media mogul about the media business
—which the young man was determined to break into. Kushner paid long court to Ronald
Perelman, the billionaire financier and takeover artist, who later would host Jared and
Ivanka in his private shul on Jewish high holy days. And, of course, Kushner wooed
Trump himself, who became a fan of the young man and was uncharacteristically tolerant
about his daughter’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism when that became a necessary next
step toward marriage. Likewise, Trump as a young man had carefully cultivated a set of
older mentors, including Roy Cohn, the flamboyant lawyer and fixer who had served as
right-hand man to the red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy.
And then there was the harsh fact that the world of Manhattan and particular its living
voice, the media, seemed to cruelly reject them. The media long ago turned on Donald
Trump as a wannabe and lightweight, and wrote him off for that ultimate sin—anyway, the
ultimate sin in media terms—of trying to curry favor with the media too much. His fame,
such as it was, was actually reverse fame—he was famous for being infamous. It was joke
fame.
To understand the media snub, and its many levels of irony, there is no better place to
look than the New York Observer, the Manhattan media and society weekly that Kushner
bought in 2006 for $10 million—by almost every estimate $10 million more than it was
worth.
* * *
The New York Observer was, when it launched in 1987, a rich man’s fancy, as much failed
media often is. It was a bland weekly chronicle of the Upper East Side, New York’s
wealthiest neighborhood. Its conceit was to treat this neighborhood like a small town. But
nobody took any notice. Its frustrated patron, Arthur Carter, who made his money in the
first generation of Wall Street consolidations, was introduced to Graydon Carter (no
relation), who had started Spy magazine, a New York imitation of the British satirical
publication Private Eye. Spy was part of a set of 1980s publications—Manhattan, Inc., a
relaunched Vanity Fair, and New York— obsessed with the new rich and what seemed to
be a transformational moment in New York. Trump was both symbol of and punch line for
this new era of excess and celebrity and the media’s celebration of those things. Graydon
Carter became the editor of the New York Observer in 1991 and not only refocused the
weekly on big-money culture, but essentially made it a tip-sheet for the media writing
about media culture, and for members of the big-money culture who wanted to be in the
media. There may never have been such a self-conscious and self-referential publication
as the New York Observer.
As Donald Trump, along with many others of this new-rich ilk, sought to be covered
by the media—Murdoch’s New York Post was the effective court recorder of this new
publicity-hungry aristocracy—the New York Observer covered the process of him being
covered. The story of Trump was the story of how he tried to make himself a story. He
was shameless, campy, and instructive: if you were willing to risk humiliation, the world
could be yours. Trump became the objective correlative for the rising appetite for fame
and notoriety. Trump came to believe he understood everything about the media—who
you need to know, what pretense you need to maintain, what information you could
profitably trade, what lies you might tell, what lies the media expected you to tell. And the
media came to believe it knew everything about Trump—his vanities, delusions, and lies,
and the levels, uncharted, to which he would stoop for ever more media attention.
Graydon Carter soon used the New York Observer as his stepping-stone to Vanity Fair
—where, he believed, he might have access to a higher level of celebrity than Donald
Trump. Carter was followed at the Observer in 1994 by Peter Kaplan, an editor with a
heightened sense of postmodern irony and ennui.
Trump, in Kaplan’s telling, suddenly took on a new persona. Whereas he had before
been the symbol of success and mocked for it, now he became, in a shift of zeitgeist (and
of having to refinance a great deal of debt), a symbol of failure and mocked for it. This
was a complicated reversal, not just having to do with Trump, but of how the media was
now seeing itself. Donald Trump became a symbol of the media’s own self-loathing: the
interest in and promotion of Donald Trump was a morality tale about the media. Its
ultimate end was Kaplan’s pronouncement that Trump should not be covered anymore
because every story about Donald Trump had become a cliché.
An important aspect of Kaplan’s New York Observer and its self-conscious inside
media baseball was that the paper became the prime school for a new generation of media
reporters flooding every other publication in New York as journalism itself became ever
more self-conscious and self-referential. To everyone working in media in New York,
Donald Trump represented the ultimate shame of working in media in New York: you
might have to write about Donald Trump. Not writing about him, or certainly not taking
him at face value, became a moral stand.
In 2006, after Kaplan had edited the paper for fifteen years, Arthur Carter sold the
Observer—which had never made a profit—to the then twenty-five-year-old Kushner, an
unknown real estate heir interested in gaining stature and notoriety in the city. Kaplan was
now working for someone twenty-five years his junior, a man who, ironically, was just the
kind of arriviste he would otherwise have covered.
For Kushner, owning the paper soon paid off, because, with infinite ironies not
necessarily apparent to him, it allowed him into the social circle where he met Donald
Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, whom he married in 2009. But the paper did not, irksomely for
Kushner, pay off financially, which put him into increasing tension with Kaplan. Kaplan,
in turn, began telling witty and devastating tales about the pretensions and callowness of
his new boss, which spread, in constant retelling, among his many media protégés and
hence throughout the media itself.
In 2009, Kaplan left the paper, and Kushner—making a mistake that many rich men
who have bought vanity media properties are prone to making—tried to find a profit by
cutting costs. In short order, the media world came to regard Kushner as the man who not
only took Peter Kaplan’s paper from him, but also ruined it, brutally and incompetently.
And worse: in 2013, Kaplan, at fifty-nine, died of cancer. So, effectively, in the telling,
Kushner had killed him, too.
Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collective mind
decides who is going to rise and who is going to fall, who lives and who dies. If you stay
around long enough in the media eye, your fate, like that of a banana republic despot, is
often an unkind one—a law Hillary Clinton was not able to circumvent. The media has the
last word.
Long before he ran for president, Trump and his sidekick son-in-law Kushner had been
marked not just for ignominy, but for slow torture by ridicule, contempt, and ever-more
amusing persiflage. These people are nothing. They are media debris. For goodness’ sake!
Trump, in a smart move, picked up his media reputation and relocated it from a
hypercritical New York to a more value-free Hollywood, becoming the star of his own
reality show, The Apprentice, and embracing a theory that would serve him well during his
presidential campaign: in flyover country, there is no greater asset than celebrity. To be
famous is to be loved—or at least fawned over.
The fabulous, incomprehensible irony that the Trump family had, despite the media’s
distaste, despite everything the media knows and understands and has said about them,
risen to a level not only of ultimate consequence but even of immortality is beyond worstcase
nightmare and into cosmic-joke territory. In this infuriating circumstance, Trump and
his son-in-law were united, always aware and yet never quite understanding why they
should be the butt of a media joke, and now the target of its stunned outrage.
* * *
The fact that Trump and his son-in-law had many things in common did not mean they
operated on a common playing field. Kushner, no matter how close to Trump, was yet a
member of the Trump entourage, with no more ultimate control of his father-in-law than
anybody else now in the business of trying to control Trump.
Still, the difficulty of controlling him had been part of Kushner’s self-justification or
rationalization for stepping beyond his family role and taking a senior White House job: to
exercise restraint on his father-in-law and even—a considerable stretch for the
inexperienced young man—to help lend him some gravitas.
If Bannon was going to pursue as his first signature White House statement the travel
ban, then Kushner was going to pursue as his first leadership mark a meeting with the
Mexican president, whom his father-in-law had threatened and insulted throughout the
campaign.
Kushner called up the ninety-three-year-old Kissinger for advice. This was both to
flatter the old man and to be able to drop his name, but it was also actually for real advice.
Trump had done nothing but cause problems for the Mexican president. To bring the
Mexican president to the White House would be, despite Bannon’s no-pivot policy from
the campaign’s harshness, a truly meaningful pivot for which Kushner would be able to
claim credit (although don’t call it a pivot). It was what Kushner believed he should be
doing: quietly following behind the president and with added nuance and subtlety
clarifying the president’s real intentions, if not recasting them entirely.
The negotiation to bring Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto to the White House
had begun during the transition period. Kushner saw the chance to convert the issue of the
wall into a bilateral agreement addressing immigration—hence a tour de force of
Trumpian politics. The negotiations surrounding the visit reached their apogee on the
Wednesday after the inaugural, with a high-level Mexican delegation—the first visit by
any foreign leader to the Trump White House—meeting with Kushner and Reince Priebus.
Kushner’s message to his father-in-law that afternoon was that Peña Nieto had signed on
to a White House meeting and planning for the visit could go forward.
The next day Trump tweeted: “The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with
Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers
…” And he continued in the next tweet … “of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is
unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming
meeting …”
At which point Peña Nieto did just that, leaving Kushner’s negotiation and statecraft as
so much scrap on the floor.
* * *
On Friday, February 3, at breakfast at the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown, an epicenter
of the swamp, Ivanka Trump, flustered, came down the stairs and entered the dining room,
talking loudly on her cell phone: “Things are so messed up and I don’t know how to fix
it… .”
The week had been overwhelmed by continuing fallout from the immigration order—
the administration was in court and headed to a brutal ruling against it—and more
embarrassing leaks of two theoretically make-nice phone calls, one with the Mexican
president (“bad hombres”) and the other with the Australian prime minister (“my worst
call by far”). What’s more, the day before, Nordstrom had announced that it was dropping
Ivanka Trump’s clothing line.
The thirty-five-year-old was a harried figure, a businesswoman who had had to
abruptly shift control of her business. She was also quite overwhelmed by the effort of
having just moved her three children into a new house in a new city—and having to do
this largely on her own. Asked how his children were adjusting to their new school several
weeks after the move, Jared said that yes, they were indeed in school—but he could not
immediately identify where.
Still, in another sense, Ivanka was landing on her feet. Breakfast at the Four Seasons
was a natural place for her. She was among everyone who was anyone. In the restaurant
that morning: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Blackstone CEO Stephen
Schwarzman; Washington fixture, lobbyist, and Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan; labor
secretary nominee Wilbur Ross; Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith; Washington Post
national reporter Mark Berman; and a table full of women lobbyists and fixers, including
the music industry’s longtime representative in Washington, Hillary Rosen; Elon Musk’s
D.C. adviser, Juleanna Glover; Uber’s political and policy executive, Niki Christoff; and
Time Warner’s political affairs executive, Carol Melton.
In some sense—putting aside both her father’s presence in the White House and his
tirades against draining the swamp, which might otherwise include most everyone here,
this was the type of room Ivanka had worked hard to be in. Following the route of her
father, she was crafting her name and herself into a multifaceted, multiproduct brand; she
was also transitioning from her father’s aspirational male golf and business types to
aspirational female mom and business types. She had, well before her father’s presidency
could have remotely been predicted, sold a book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules
for Success, for $1 million.
In many ways, it had been an unexpected journey, requiring more discipline than you
might expect from a contented, distracted, run-of-the-mill socialite. As a twenty-one-yearold,
she appeared in a film made by her then boyfriend, Jamie Johnson, a Johnson &
Johnson heir. It’s a curious, even somewhat unsettling film, in which Johnson corrals his
set of rich-kid friends into openly sharing their dissatisfactions, general lack of ambition,
and contempt for their families. (One of his friends would engage in long litigation with
him over the portrayal.) Ivanka, speaking with something like a Valley Girl accent—which
would transform in the years ahead into something like a Disney princess voice—seems
no more ambitious or even employed than anyone else, but she is notably less angry with
her parents.
She treated her father with some lightness, even irony, and in at least one television
interview she made fun of his comb-over. She often described the mechanics behind it to
friends: an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp reduction surgery—
surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are
drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The
color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men—the
longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair
color.
Father and daughter got along almost peculiarly well. She was the real mini-Trump (a
title that many people now seemed to aspire to). She accepted him. She was a helper not
just in his business dealings, but in his marital realignments. She facilitated entrances and
exits. If you have a douchebag dad, and if everyone is open about it, then maybe it
becomes fun and life a romantic comedy—sort of.
Reasonably, she ought to be much angrier. She grew up not just in the middle of a
troubled family but in one that was at all times immersed in bad press. But she was able to
bifurcate reality and live only in the uppermost part of it, where the Trump name, no
matter how often tarnished, nevertheless had come to be an affectionately tolerated
presence. She resided in a bubble of other wealthy people who thrived on their
relationship with one another—at first among private school and Upper East Side of
Manhattan friends, then among social, fashion, and media contacts. What’s more, she
tended to find protection as well as status in her boyfriends’ families, aggressively bonding
with a series of wealthy suitors’ families—including Jamie Johnson’s before the Kushners
—over her own.
The Ivanka-Jared relationship was shepherded by Wendi Murdoch, herself a curious
social example (to nobody so much as to her then husband, Rupert). The effort among a
new generation of wealthy women was to recast life as a socialite, turning a certain model
of whimsy and noblesse oblige into a new status as a power woman, a kind of postfeminist
socialite. In this, you worked at knowing other rich people, the best rich people, and of
being an integral and valuable part of a network of the rich, and of having your name itself
evoke, well … riches. You weren’t satisfied with what you had, you wanted more. This
required quite a level of indefatigability. You were marketing a product—yourself. You
were your own start-up.
This was what her father had always done. This, more than real estate, was the family
business.
She and Kushner then united as a power couple, consciously recasting themselves as
figures of ultimate attainment, ambition, and satisfaction in the new global world and as
representatives of a new eco-philanthropic-art sensibility. For Ivanka, this included her
friendship with Wendi Murdoch and with Dasha Zhukova, the then wife of the Russian
oligarch Roman Abramovich, a fixture in the international art world, and, just a few
months before the election, attending a Deepak Chopra seminar on mediation with
Kushner. She was searching for meaning—and finding it. This transformation was further
expressed not just in ancillary clothing, jewelry, and footwear lines, as well as reality TV
projects, but in a careful social media presence. She became a superbly coordinated
everymom, who would, with her father’s election, recast herself again, this time as royal
family.
And yet, the larger truth was that Ivanka’s relationship with her father was in no way a
conventional family relationship. If it wasn’t pure opportunism, it was certainly
transactional. It was business. Building the brand, the presidential campaign, and now the
White House—it was all business.
But what did Ivanka and Jared really think of their father and father-in-law? “There’s
great, great, great affection—you see it, you really do,” replied Kellyanne Conway,
somewhat avoiding the question.
“They’re not fools,” said Rupert Murdoch when asked the question.
“They understand him, I think truly,” reflected Joe Scarborough. “And they appreciate
his energy. But there’s detachment.” That is, Scarborough went on, they have tolerance but
few illusions.
* * *
Ivanka’s breakfast that Friday at the Four Seasons was with Dina Powell, the latest
Goldman Sachs executive to join the White House.
In the days after the election, Ivanka and Jared had both met with a revolving door of
lawyers and PR people, most of them, the couple found, leery of involvement, not least
because the couple seemed less interested in bending to advice and more interested in
shopping for the advice they wanted. In fact, much of the advice they were getting had the
same message: surround yourself—acquaint yourselves—with figures of the greatest
establishment credibility. In effect: you are amateurs, you need professionals.
One name that kept coming up was Powell’s. A Republican operative who had gone on
to high influence and compensation at Goldman Sachs, she was quite the opposite of
anyone’s notion of a Trump Republican. Her family emigrated from Egypt when she was a
girl, and she is fluent in Arabic. She worked her way up through a series of stalwart
Republicans, including Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and House Speaker Dick
Armey. In the Bush White House she served as chief of the personnel office and an
assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs. She went to Goldman in
2007 and became a partner in 2010, running its philanthropic outreach, the Goldman
Sachs Foundation. Following a trend in the careers of many poiitical operatives, she had
become, as well as an über networker, a corporate public affairs and PR-type adviser—
someone who knew the right people in power and had a keen sensitivity to how other
people’s power can be used.
The table of women lobbyists and communications professionals in the Four Seasons
that morning was certainly as interested in Powell, and her presence in the new
administration, as they were in the president’s daughter. If Ivanka Trump was a figure
more of novelty than of seriousness, the fact that she had helped bring Powell into the
White House and was now publicly conferring with her added a further dimension to the
president’s daughter. In a White House seeming to pursue a dead-set Trumpian way, this
was a hint of an alternative course. In the assessment of the other fixers and PR women at
the Four Seasons, this was a potential shadow White House—Trump’s own family not
assaulting the power structure but expressing an obvious enthusiasm for it.
Ivanka, after a long breakfast, made her way through the room. Between issuing
snappish instructions on her phone, she bestowed warm greetings and accepted business
cards.
6
At HQME
W
ithin the first weeks of his presidency a theory emerged among Trump’s friends
that he was not acting presidential, or, really, in any way taking into account his
new status or restraining his behavior—from early morning tweets, to his refusal to follow
scripted remarks, to his self-pitying calls to friends, details of which were already making
it into the press—because he hadn’t taken the leap that others before him had taken. Most
presidents arrived in the White House from more or less ordinary political life, and could
not help but be awed and reminded of their transformed circumstances by their sudden
elevation to a mansion with palacelike servants and security, a plane at constant readiness,
and downstairs a retinue of courtiers and advisers. But this would not have been that
different from Trump’s former life in Trump Tower, which was more commodious and to
his taste than the White House, with servants, security, courtiers, and advisers always on
the premises and a plane at the ready. The big deal of being president was not so apparent
to him.
But another theory of the case was exactly opposite: he was totally off-kilter here
because everything in his orderly world had been thrown on its head. In this view, the
seventy-year-old Trump was a creature of habit at a level few people without despotic
control of their environment could ever imagine. He had lived in the same home, a vast
space in Trump Tower, since shortly after the building was completed in 1983. Every
morning since, he had made the same commute to his office a few floors down. His corner
office was a time capsule from the 1980s, the same gold-lined mirrors, the same Time
magazine covers fading on the wall; the only substantial change was the substitution of
Joe Namath’s football for Tom Brady’s. Outside the doors to his office, everywhere he
looked there were the same faces, the same retainers—servants, security, courtiers, the
“yes people”—who had attended him basically always.
“Can you imagine how disruptive it would be if that’s what you did every day and then
suddenly you’re in the White House?” marveled a longtime Trump friend, smiling broadly
at this trick of fate, if not abrupt comeuppance.
Trump found the White House, an old building with only sporadic upkeep and
piecemeal renovations—as well as a famous roach and rodent problem—to be vexing and
even a little scary. Friends who admired his skills as a hotelier wondered why he just
didn’t remake the place, but he seemed cowed by the weight of the watchful eyes on him.
Kellyanne Conway, whose family had remained in New Jersey, and who had
anticipated that she could commute home when the president went back to New York, was
surprised that New York and Trump Tower were suddenly stricken from his schedule.
Conway thought that the president, in addition to being aware of the hostility in New
York, was making a conscious effort to be “part of this great house.” (But, acknowledging
the difficulties inherent in his change of circumstances and of adapting to presidential
lifestyle, she added, “How often will he go to Camp David?”—the Spartan, woodsy
presidential retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland—“How ’bout never.”)
At the White House, he retreated to his own bedroom—the first time since the
Kennedy White House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms (although
Melania was spending scant time so far in the White House). In the first days he ordered
two television screens in addition to the one already there, and a lock on the door,
precipitating a brief standoff with the Secret Service, who insisted they have access to the
room. He reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: “If
my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor.” Then he imposed a set of new
rules: nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of
being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s—nobody knew he was
coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would let housekeeping know when
he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his own bed.
If he was not having his six-thirty dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking,
he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making
phone calls—the phone was his true contact point with the world—to a small group of
friends, among them most frequently Tom Barrack, who charted his rising and falling
levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another.
* * *
But after the rocky start, things started to look better—even, some argued, presidential.
On Tuesday, January 31, in an efficiently choreographed prime-time ceremony, an
upbeat and confident President Trump announced the nomination of federal appellate
judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch was a perfect combination of
impeccable conservative standing, admirable probity, and gold-standard legal and judicial
credentials. The nomination not only delivered on Trump’s promise to the base and to the
conservative establishment, but it was a choice that seemed perfectly presidential.
Gorsuch’s nomination was also a victory for a staff that had seen Trump, with this
plum job and rich reward in his hand, waver again and again. Pleased by how the
nomination was received, especially by how little fault the media could find with it,
Trump would shortly become a Gorsuch fan. But before settling on Gorsuch, he wondered
why the job wasn’t going to a friend and loyalist. In the Trump view, it was rather a waste
to give the job to someone he didn’t even know.
At various points in the process he had run through almost all his lawyer friends—all
of them unlikely, if not peculiar, choices, and, in almost every case, political nonstarters.
The one unlikely, peculiar, and nonstarter choice that he kept returning to was Rudy
Giuliani.
Trump owed Giuliani; not that he was so terribly focused on his debts, but this was one
that was certainly unpaid. Not only was Giuliani a longtime New York friend, but when
few Republicans were offering Trump their support, and almost none with a national
reputation, Giuliani was there for him—and in combative, fiery, and relentless fashion.
This was particularly true during the hard days following Billy Bush: when virtually
everybody, including the candidate himself, Bannon, Conway, and his children, believed
the campaign would implode, Giuliani barely allowed himself a break from his nonstop,
passionate, and unapologetic Trump defense.
Giuliani wanted to be the secretary of state, and Trump had in so many words offered
him the job. The resistance to Giuliani from the Trump circle derived from the same
reason Trump was inclined to give him the job—Giuliani had Trump’s ear and wouldn’t
let go. The staff whispered about his health and stability. Even his full-on pussygate
defense now started to seem like a liability. He was offered attorney general, Department
of Homeland Security, and director of national intelligence, but he turned them all down,
continuing to hold out for State. Or, in what staffers took to be the ultimate presumption,
or grand triangulation, the Supreme Court. Since Trump could not put someone openly
pro-choice on the court without both sundering his base and risking defeat of his nominee,
then, of course, he’d have to give Giuliani State.
When this strategy failed—Rex Tillerson got the secretary of state job—that should
have been the end of it, but Trump kept returning to the idea of putting Giuliani on the
court. On February 8, during the confirmation process, Gorsuch took public exception to
Trump’s disparagement of the courts. Trump, in a moment of pique, decided to pull his
nomination and, during conversations with his after-dinner callers, went back to
discussing how he should have given the nod to Rudy. He was the only loyal guy. It was
Bannon and Priebus who kept having to remind him, and to endlessly repeat, that in one of
the campaign’s few masterful pieces of issue-defusing politics, and perfect courtship of the
conservative base, it had let the Federalist Society produce a list of candidates. The
campaign had promised that the nominee would come from that list—and needless to say,
Giuliani wasn’t on it.
Gorsuch was it. And Trump would shortly not remember when he had ever wanted
anyone but Gorsuch.
* * *
On February 3, the White House hosted a carefully orchestrated meeting of one of the
newly organized business councils, the president’s Strategic and Policy Forum. It was a
group of highly placed CEOs and weighty business types brought together by Blackstone
chief Stephen Schwarzman. The planning for the event—with a precise agenda,
choreographed seating and introductions, and fancy handouts—was more due to
Schwarzman than to the White House. But it ended up being the kind of event that Trump
did very well at and very much enjoyed. Kellyanne Conway, often referencing the
Schwarzman gathering, would soon begin a frequent theme of complaint, namely that
these kinds of events—Trump sitting down with serious-minded people and looking for
solutions to the nation’s problems—were the soul of Trump’s White House and the media
was giving them scant coverage.
Hosting business advisory councils was a Kushner strategy. It was an enlightened
business approach, distracting Trump from what Kushner viewed as the unenlightened
right-wing agenda. To an increasingly scornful Bannon, its real purpose was to allow
Kushner himself to consort with CEOs.
Schwarzman reflected what to many was a surprising and sudden business and Wall
Street affinity for Trump. Although few major-company CEOs had publicly supported him
—with many, if not all, big companies planning for a Hillary Clinton victory and already
hiring Clinton-connected public policy teams and with a pervasive media belief that a
Trump victory would assure a market tailspin—there was suddenly an overnight warming.
An antiregulatory White House and the promise of tax reform outweighed the prospect of
disruptive tweeting and other forms of Trump chaos; besides, the market had not stopped
climbing since November 9, the day after the election. What’s more, in one-on-one
meetings, CEOs were reporting good vibes from Trump’s effusive and artful flattery—and
the sudden relief of not having to deal with what some knew to be relentless Clinton-team
hondling (what can you do for us today and can we use your plan?).
On the other hand, while there was a warming C-suite feeling for Trump, there was
also rising concern about the consumer side of many big brands. The Trump brand was
suddenly the world’s biggest brand—the new Apple, except the opposite, since it was
universally disdained (at least among many of the consumers who most top brands sought
to court).
Hence, on inaugural morning, the employees of Uber, the ride sharing company, whose
then CEO Travis Kalanick had signed on to the Schwarzman council, woke up to find
people chained to the doors of their San Francisco headquarters. The charge was that Uber
and Kalanick were “collaborating”—with its whiff of Vichy—a much different status than
a business looking to sober forums with the president as a way to influence the
government. Indeed, the protesters who believed they were seeing the company’s
relationship with Trump in political terms were actually seeing this in conventional brand
terms and zooming in on the disconnect. Uber’s customer base is strongly young, urban,
and progressive, and therefore out of sync with the Trump base. Brand-conscious
millennials saw this as beyond policy dickering and as part of an epic identity clash. The
Trump White House stood less for government and the push-pull of competing interests
and developing policies, and more, in a brand-savvy world, as a fixed and unpopular
cultural symbol.
Uber’s Kalanick resigned from the council. Disney CEO Bob Iger simply found that he
was otherwise occupied on the occasion of the forum’s first meeting.
But most of the people on the council—other than Elon Musk, the investor, inventor,
and founder of Tesla (who would later resign)—were not from media or tech companies,
with their liberal bent, but from old-line, when-America-was-great enterprises. They
included Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors; Ginni Rometty of IBM; Jack Welch,
the former CEO of GE; Jim McNerney, the former CEO of Boeing; and Indra Nooyi of
PepsiCo. If the new right had elected Trump, it was the older Fortune 100 executives who
most pleased him.
Trump attended the meeting with his full retinue—the circle that seemed always to
move with him in lockstep, including Bannon, Priebus, Kushner, Stephen Miller, and
National Economic Council chief Gary Cohn—but conducted it entirely himself. Each of
the people at the table, taking a point of interest, spoke for five minutes, with Trump then
asking follow-up questions. Though Trump appeared not to have particularly, or at all,
prepared for any of the subjects being discussed, he asked engaged and interested
questions, pursuing things he wanted to know more about, making the meeting quite an
easy back-and-forth. One of the CEOs observed that this seemed like the way Trump
preferred to get information—talking about what he was interested in and getting other
people to talk about his interests.
The meeting went on for two hours. In the White House view, this was Trump at his
best. He was most at home around people he respected—and these were “the most
respected people in the country,” according to Trump—who seemed to respect him, too.
This became a staff goal—to create situations in which he was comfortable, to
construct something of a bubble, to wall him off from a mean-spirited world. Indeed, they
sought to carefully replicate this formula: Trump in the Oval or in a larger West Wing
ceremonial room presiding in front of a receptive audience, with a photo opportunity.
Trump was often his own stage manager at these events, directing people in and out of the
picture.
* * *
The media has a careful if selective filter when it comes to portraying real life in the White
House. The president and First Family are not, at least not usually, subjected to the sort of
paparazzi pursuit that in celebrity media results in unflattering to embarrassing to mocking
photographs, or in endless speculation about their private lives. Even in the worst
scandals, a businesslike suit-and-tie formality is still accorded the president. Saturday
Night Live presidential skits are funny in part because they play on our belief that in
reality, presidents are quite contained and buttoned-down figures, and their families,
trotting not far behind, colorless and obedient. The joke on Nixon was that he was pitiably
uptight—even at the height of Watergate, drinking heavily, he remained in his coat and tie,
kneeling in prayer. Gerald Ford merely tripped coming off Air Force One, providing great
hilarity in this break from formal presidential poise. Ronald Reagan, likely suffering the
early effects of Alzheimer’s, remained a carefully managed picture of calm and
confidence. Bill Clinton, amid the greatest break in presidential decorum in modern
history, was even so always portrayed as a man in control. George W. Bush, for all his
disengagement, was allowed by the media to be presented as dramatically in charge.
Barack Obama, perhaps to his disadvantage, was consistently presented as thoughtful,
steady, and determined. This is partly a benefit of overweening image control, but it is also
because the president is thought to be the ultimate executive—or because the national
myth requires him to be.
That was actually the kind of image that Donald Trump had worked to project
throughout most of his career. His is a 1950s businessman sort of ideal. He aspires to look
like his father—or, anyway, not to displease his father. Except when he’s in golf wear, it is
hard to imagine him out of a suit and tie, because he almost never is. Personal dignity—
that is, apparent uprightness and respectability—is one of his fixations. He is
uncomfortable when the men around him are not wearing suit and ties. Formality and
convention—before he became president, almost everybody without high celebrity or a
billion dollars called him “Mr. Trump”—are a central part of his identity. Casualness is the
enemy of pretense. And his pretense was that the Trump brand stood for power, wealth,
arrival.
On the February 5, the New York Times published an inside-the-White-House story that
had the president, two weeks into his term, stalking around in the late hours of the night in
his bathrobe, unable to work the light switches. Trump fell apart. It was, the president not
incorrectly saw, a way of portraying him as losing it, as Norma Desmond in the movie
Sunset Boulevard, a faded or even senile star living in a fantasy world. (This was
Bannon’s interpretation of the Times’s image of Trump, which was quickly adopted by
everyone in the White House.) And, of course, once again, it was a media thing—he was
being treated in a way that no other president had ever been treated.
This was not incorrect. The New York Times, in its efforts to cover a presidency that it
openly saw as aberrant, had added to its White House beat something of a new form of
coverage. Along with highlighting White House announcements—separating the trivial
from the significant—the paper would also highlight, often in front-page coverage, the
sense of the absurd, the pitiable, and the all-too-human. These stories turned Trump into a
figure of ridicule. The two White House reporters most consistently on this beat, Maggie
Haberman and Glenn Thrush, would become part of Trump’s constant refrain about the
media being out to get him. Thrush would even become a fixture in Saturday Night Live
sketches that mocked the president, his children, his press secretary Sean Spicer, and his
advisers Bannon and Conway.
The president, while often a fabulist in his depiction of the world, was quite a literalist
when it came to how he saw himself. Hence he rebutted this picture of him as a halfdemented
or seriously addled midnight stalker in the White House by insisting that he
didn’t own a bathrobe.
“Do I seem like a bathrobe kind of guy, really?” he demanded, not humorously, of
almost every person with whom he spoke over the next forty-eight hours. “Seriously, can
you see me in a bathrobe?”
Who had leaked it? For Trump, the details of his personal life suddenly became a far
greater matter of concern than all the other kinds of leaks.