The New York Times Washington bureau, itself quite literal and worried by the possible
lack of an actual bathrobe, reverse-leaked that Bannon was the source of the story.
Bannon, who styled himself as a kind of black hole of silence, had also become a sort
of official black-hole voice, everybody’s Deep Throat. He was witty, intense, evocative,
and bubbling over, his theoretical discretion ever giving way to a constant semipublic
commentary on the pretensions and fatuousness and hopeless lack of seriousness of most
everyone else in the White House. By the second week of the Trump presidency,
everybody in the White House seemed to be maintaining their own list of likely leakers
and doing their best to leak before being leaked about.
But another likely leak source about his angst in the White House was Trump himself.
In his calls throughout the day and at night from his bed, he frequently spoke to people
who had no reason to keep his confidences. He was a river of grievances—including about
what a dump the White House was on close inspection—examples of which many
recipients of his calls promptly spread throughout the ever attentive and merciless gossip
world.
* * *
On February 6, Trump made one of his seething, self-pitying, and unsolicited phone calls
without presumption of confidentiality to a passing New York media acquaintance. The
call had no discernible point other than to express his bent-out-of-shape feelings about the
relentless contempt of the media and the disloyalty of his staff.
The initial subject of his ire was the New York Times and its reporter Maggie
Haberman, whom he called “a nut job.” The Times’s Gail Collins, who had written a
column unfavorably comparing Trump to Vice President Pence, was “a moron.” But then,
continuing under the rubric of media he hated, he veered to CNN and the deep disloyalty
of its chief, Jeff Zucker. Zucker, who as the head of NBC had commissioned The
Apprentice, had been “made by Trump,” Trump said of himself in the third person. And
Trump had “personally” gotten Zucker his job at CNN. “Yes, yes, I did,” said Trump.
He then repeated a story that he was obsessively telling almost everyone he spoke to.
He’d gone to a dinner, he didn’t remember when, where he had sat next to “a gentleman
named Kent”—undoubtedly Phil Kent, a former CEO of Turner Broadcasting, the Time
Warner division that oversaw CNN—“and he had a list of four names.” Three of them
Trump had never heard of, but he knew Jeff Zucker because of The Apprentice. “Zucker
was number four on the list, so I talked him up to number one. I probably shouldn’t have
because Zucker is not that smart but I like to show I can do that sort of thing.” But Zucker,
“a very bad guy who has done terrible with the ratings,” had turned around after Trump
had gotten him the job and had said, well, it’s “unbelievably disgusting.” This was the
Russian “dossier” and the “golden shower” story—the practice CNN had accused him of
being party to in the Moscow hotel suite with assorted prostitutes.
Having dispensed with Zucker, the president of the United States went on to speculate
on what was involved with a golden shower. And how this was all just part of a media
campaign that would never succeed in driving him from the White House. Because they
were sore losers and hated him for winning, they spread total lies, 100 percent made-up
things, totally untrue, for instance, the cover that week of Time magazine—which, Trump
reminded his listeners, he had been on more than anyone in history—that showed Steve
Bannon, a good guy, saying he was the real president. “How much influence do you think
Steve Bannon has over me?” Trump demanded and repeated the question, and then
repeated the answer: “Zero! Zero!” And that went for his son-in-law, too, who had a lot to
learn.
The media was not only hurting him, he said—he was not looking for any agreement or
really even any response—but hurting his negotiating capabilities, which hurt the nation.
And that went for Saturday Night Live, too, which might think it was very funny but was
actually hurting everybody in the country. And while he understood that SNL was there to
be mean to him, they were being very, very mean. It was “fake comedy.” He had reviewed
the treatment of all other presidents in the media and there was nothing like this ever, even
of Nixon who was treated very unfairly. “Kellyanne, who is very fair, has this all
documented. You can look at it.”
The point is, he said, that that very day, he had saved $700 million a year in jobs that
were going to Mexico but the media was talking about him in his bathrobe, which “I don’t
have because I’ve never worn a bathrobe. And would never wear one, because I’m not that
kind of guy.” And what the media was doing was undermining this very dignified house,
and “dignity is so important.” But Murdoch, “who had never called me, never once,” was
now calling all the time. So that should tell people something.
The call went on for twenty-six minutes.
7
RUSSIA
E
ven before there was reason to suspect Sally Yates, they suspected her. The transition
report said Trump wouldn’t like the fifty-six-year-old Atlanta-born University of
Georgia career Justice Department lawyer slated to step up to acting attorney general.
There was something about a particular kind of Obama person. Something about the way
they walked and held themselves. Superiority. And about a certain kind of woman who
would immediately rub Trump the wrong way—Obama women being a good tip-off,
Hillary women another. Later this would be extended to “DOJ women.”
Here was an elemental divide: between Trump and career government employees. He
could understand politicians, but he was finding it hard to get a handle on these bureaucrat
types, their temperament and motives. He couldn’t grasp what they wanted. Why would
they, or anyone, be a permanent government employee? “They max out at what? Two
hundred grand? Tops,” he said, expressing something like wonder.
Sally Yates could have been passed over for the acting AG spot—to serve in place
while the attorney-general-designate, Jeff Sessions, waited for confirmation—and before
long Trump would be furious about why she wasn’t. But she was the sitting deputy and
she’d been confirmed by the Senate, and the acting AG job needed someone with Senate
confirmation. And even though she seemed to see herself as something of a prisoner held
in hostile territory, Yates accepted the job.
Given this context, the curious information she presented to White House counsel Don
McGahn during the administration’s first week—this was before, in the second week, she
refused to enforce the immigration order and was thereupon promptly fired—seemed not
only unwelcome but suspect.
The newly confirmed National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, had brushed off
reports in the Washington Post about a conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey
Kislyak. It was a simple meet and greet, he said. He assured the transition team—among
others, Vice President-elect Pence—that there were no discussions of Obama
administration sanctions against the Russians, an assurance Pence publicly repeated.
Yates now told the White House that Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak had actually
been captured as part of an “incidental collection” of authorized wiretaps. That is, a
wiretap had presumably been authorized on the Russian ambassador by the secret Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court and, incidentally, picked up Flynn.
The FISA court had achieved a moment of notoriety after the Edward Snowden
revelations briefly made it a bête noire for liberals who were angry about privacy
incursions. Now it was achieving another moment, but this time as the friend of liberals,
who hoped to use these “incidental” wiretaps as a way to tie the Trump camp to a wideranging
conspiracy with Russia.
In short order, McGahn, Priebus, and Bannon, each with prior doubts about Flynn’s
reliability and judgment—“a fuck-up,” according to Bannon—conferred about the Yates
message. Flynn was asked again about his call with Kislyak; he was also told that a
recording might exist. Again he scoffed at any suggestion that this was a meaningful
conversation about anything.
In one White House view, Yates’s tattling was little more than “like she found out her
girlfriend’s husband flirted with somebody else and, standing on principle, had to tell on
him.”
Of more alarm to the White House was how, in an incidental collection wherein the
names of American citizens are supposedly “masked”—with complicated procedures
required to “unmask” them—had Yates so handily and conveniently picked up Flynn? Her
report would also seem to confirm that the leak to the Post about these recordings came
from the FBI, DOJ, or Obama White House sources—part of the growing river of leaks,
with the Times and the Post the leakers’ favored destinations.
The White House in its assessment of the Yates message ended up seeing this as less a
problem with an always hard-to-handle Flynn than as a problem with Yates, even as a
threat from her: the Justice Department, with its vast staff of career and Obama-inclined
prosecutors, had ears on the Trump team.
* * *
“It’s unfair,” said Kellyanne Conway, sitting in her yet undecorated second-floor office
while representing the president’s hurt feelings. “It’s obviously unfair. It’s very unfair.
They lost. They didn’t win. This is so unfair. So POTUS just doesn’t want to talk about
it.”
There was nobody in the White House who wanted to talk about—or even anyone who
had been officially delegated to talk about—Russia, the story that, evident to most, even
before they entered the White House, was certain to overwhelm the first year of the Trump
administration at the very least. Nobody was prepared to deal with it.
“There’s no reason to even talk about it,” said Sean Spicer, sitting on the couch in his
office, firmly crossing his arms. “There’s no reason to even talk about it,” he said again,
stubbornly.
For his part, the president did not use, though he might have, the word “Kafkaesque.”
He regarded the Russia story as senseless and inexplicable and having no basis in reality.
They were just being sucked in.
They had survived scandal during the campaign—the Billy Bush weekend—which
virtually no one in Trump’s inner circle had thought they could survive, only to be hit by
the Russia scandal. Compared to Pussy-gate, Russia seemed like the only-desperate-thingleft-gate.
What seemed unfair now was that the issue still wasn’t going away, and that,
incomprehensibly, people took it seriously. When at best it was … nothing.
It was the media.
The White House had quickly become accustomed to media-led scandals, but they
were also used to their passing. But now this one was, frustratingly, holding on.
If there was any single piece of proof not just of media bias but of the intention of the
media to do anything it could to undermine this president, it was—in the view of the
Trump circle—this, the Russia story, what the Washington Post termed “Russia’s attack on
our political system.” (“So terribly, terribly unfair, with no proof of one vote changed,”
according to Conway.) It was insidious. It was, to them, although they didn’t put it this
way, similar to the kind of dark Clinton-like conspiracies that Republicans were more
wont to accuse liberals of—Whitewater, Benghazi, Email-gate. That is, an obsessive
narrative that leads to investigations, which lead to other investigations, and to more
obsessive no-escape media coverage. This was modern politics: blood-sport conspiracies
that were about trying to destroy people and careers.
When the comparison to Whitewater was made to Conway, she, rather proving the
point about obsessions, immediately began to argue the particulars involving Webster
Hubbell, a mostly forgotten figure in the Whitewater affair, and the culpability of the Rose
Law Firm in Arkansas, where Hillary Clinton was a partner. Everybody believed their
side’s conspiracies, while utterly, and righteously, rejecting the conspiracies leveled at
them. To call something a conspiracy was to dismiss it.
As for Bannon, who had himself promoted many conspiracies, he dismissed the Russia
story in textbook fashion: “It’s just a conspiracy theory.” And, he added, the Trump team
wasn’t capable of conspiring about anything.
* * *
The Russia story was—just two weeks into the new presidency—a dividing line with each
side viewing the other as pushing fake news.
The greater White House wholly believed that the story was an invented construct of
weak if not preposterous narrative threads, with a mind-boggling thesis: We fixed the
election with the Russians, OMG! The anti-Trump world, and especially its media—that
is, the media—believed that there was a high, if not overwhelming, likelihood that there
was something significant there, and a decent chance that it could be brought home.
If the media, self-righteously, saw it as the Holy Grail and silver bullet of Trump
destruction, and the Trump White House saw it, with quite some self-pity, as a desperate
effort to concoct a scandal, there was also a range of smart money in the middle.
The congressional Democrats had everything to gain by insisting, Benghazi-like, that
where there was smoke (even if they were desperately working the bellows) there was fire,
and by using investigations as a forum to promote their minority opinion (and for
members to promote themselves).
For Republicans in Congress, the investigations were a card to play against Trump’s
vengefulness and unpredictability. Defending him—or something less than defending him
and, indeed, possibly pursuing him—offered Republicans a new source of leverage in their
dealings with him.
The intelligence community—with its myriad separate fiefdoms as suspicious of
Trump as of any incoming president in memory—would, at will, have the threat of dripdrip-drip
leaks to protect its own interests.
The FBI and DOJ would evaluate the evidence—and the opportunity—through their
own lenses of righteousness and careerism. (“The DOJ is filled with women prosecutors
like Yates who hate him,” said a Trump aide, with a curiously gender-biased view of the
growing challenge.)
If all politics is a test of your opponent’s strength, acumen, and forbearance, then this,
regardless of the empirical facts, was quite a clever test, with many traps that many people
might fall into. Indeed, in many ways the issue was not Russia but, in fact, strength,
acumen, and forbearance, the qualities Trump seemed clearly to lack. The constant
harping about a possible crime, even if there wasn’t an actual crime—and no one was yet
pointing to a specific act of criminal collusion, or in fact any other clear violation of the
law—could force a cover-up which might then turn into a crime. Or turn up a perfect
storm of stupidity and cupidity.
“They take everything I’ve ever said and exaggerate it,” said the president in his first
week in the White House during a late-night call. “It’s all exaggerated. My exaggerations
are exaggerated.”
* * *
Franklin Foer, the Washington-based former editor of the New Republic, made an early
case for a Trump-Putin conspiracy on July 4, 2016, in Slate. His piece reflected the
incredulity that had suddenly possessed the media and political intelligentsia: Trump, the
unserious candidate, had, however incomprehensibly, become a more or less serious one.
And somehow, because of his prior unseriousness, and his what-you-see-is-what-you-get
nature, the braggart businessman, with his bankruptcies, casinos, and beauty pageants, had
avoided serious vetting. For Trump students—which, over his thirty years of courting
attention, many in the media had become—the New York real estate deals were dirty, the
Atlantic City ventures were dirty, the Trump airline was dirty, Mar-a-Lago, the golf
courses, and the hotels all dirty. No reasonable candidate could have survived a recounting
of even one of these deals. But somehow a genial amount of corruption had been figured
into the Trump candidacy—that, after all, was the platform he was running on. I’ll do for
you what a tough businessman does for himself.
To really see his corruption, you had to see it on a bigger stage. Foer was suggesting a
fabulous one.
Assembling a detailed road map for a scandal that did not yet exist, Foer, without
anything resembling smoking guns or even real evidence, pulled together in July virtually
all of the circumstantial and thematic threads and many of the various characters that
would play out over the next eighteen months. (Unbeknownst to the public or even most
media or political insiders, Fusion GPS had by this point hired the former British spy
Christopher Steele to investigate a connection between Trump and the Russian
government.)
Putin was seeking a resurgence of Russian power and, as well, to block encroachments
by the European Union and NATO. Trump’s refusal to treat Putin as a semi-outlaw—not
to mention what often seemed like a man crush on him—meant, ipso facto, that Trump
was sanguine about a return of Russian power and might actually be promoting it.
Why? What could possibly be in it for an American politician to publicly embrace—
sycophantically embrace—Vladimir Putin and to encourage what the West saw as Russian
adventurism?
Theory 1: Trump was drawn to authoritarian strongmen. Foer recounted Trump’s
longtime fascination with Russia, including being duped by a Gorbachev look-alike who
visited Trump Tower in the 1980s, and his many fulsome and unnecessary “odes to Putin.”
This suggested a lie-down-with-dogs-wake-up-with-fleas vulnerability: consorting with or
looking favorably upon politicians whose power lies partly in their tolerance of corruption
brings you closer to corruption. Likewise, Putin was drawn to populist strongmen in his
own image: hence, Foer asked, “Why wouldn’t the Russians offer him the same furtive
assistance they’ve lavished on Le Pen, Berlusconi, and the rest?”
Theory 2: Trump was part of a less-than-blue-chip (much less) international business
set, feeding off the rivers of dubious wealth that had been unleashed by all the efforts to
move cash, much of it from Russia and China, out of political harm’s way. Such money, or
rumors of such money, became an explanation—still only a circumstantial one—in trying
to assess all the Trump business dealings that largely remained hidden from view. (There
were two contradictory theories here: he had hidden these dealings because he didn’t want
to admit their paucity, or he had hidden them to mask their disreputableness.) Because
Trump is less than creditworthy, Foer was among many who concluded that Trump needed
to turn to other sources—more or less dirty money, or money with other sorts of strings
attached. (One way the process can work is, roughly speaking, as follows: an oligarch
makes an investment in a more or less legitimate third-party investment fund, which, quid
pro quo, makes an investment in Trump.) And while Trump would categorically deny that
he had any loans or investments from Russia, one would, of course, not have dirty money
on one’s books.
As a subset of this theory, Trump—never very scrupulous about vetting his people—
surrounded himself with a variety of hustlers working their own deals, and, plausibly,
aiding Trump’s deals. Foer identified the following characters as part of a possible Russian
conspiracy:
• Tevfik Arif, a former Rus sian official who ran the Bayrock Group, a middleman in
Trump financings with an office in Trump Tower.
• Felix Sater (sometimes spelled Satter), a Russian-born immigrant to Brighton Beach
in Brooklyn, who had previously served time in prison in connection with a fraud at
a Mafia-run brokerage and who went to work for Bayrock and had a business card
identifying him as senior adviser to Donald Trump. (When Sater’s name later
continued to surface, Trump assured Bannon he didn’t know Sater at all.)
• Carter Page, a banker of uncertain portfolio who had spent time in Russia and billed
himself as having advised the state-run oil company, Gazprom, and who showed up
on a hastily assembled list of Trump foreign policy advisers and who, it would turn
out, the FBI was closely monitoring in what it said was a Russian intelligence effort
to turn him. (Trump would later deny ever meeting Page, and the FBI would say that
it believed Russian intelligence had targeted Page in an effort to turn him.)
• Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency—fired by
Obama for unclear reasons—who had yet to emerge as Trump’s key foreign policy
counselor and future National Security Advisor, but who was accompanying him on
many campaign trips and who earlier in the year had been paid a $45,000 speaking
fee in Moscow and been photographed sitting at a dinner with Putin.
• Paul Manafort, whom, along with serving as Trump’s campaign manager, Foer
highlighted as a political operative and consultant who had generated substantial
income advising Kremlin-backed Viktor Yanukovych, who successfully ran for the
presidency of Ukraine in 2010, was later deposed in 2014, and had been in business
with the Russian oligarch and Putin crony Oleg Deripaska.
More than a year later, each of these men would be part of the near-daily Russia-Trump
news cycle.
Theory 3: The Holy Grail proposition was that Trump and the Russians—perhaps even
Putin himself—had gotten together to hack the Democratic National Committee.
Theory 4: But then there was the those-that-know-him-best theory, some version of
which most Trumpers would come to embrace. He was just star-fucking. He took his
beauty pageant to Russia because he thought Putin was going to be his friend. But Putin
couldn’t have cared less, and in the end Trump found himself at the promised gala dinner
seated on one side next to a guy who looked like he had never used a utensil and on the
other side Jabba the Hutt in a golf shirt. In other words, Trump—however foolish his
sucking-up might have been, and however suspicious it might look in hindsight—just
wanted a little respect.
Theory 5: The Russians, holding damaging information about Trump, were
blackmailing him. He was a Manchurian Candidate.
* * *
On January 6, 2017—nearly six months to the day after Foer’s piece was published—the
CIA, FBI, and NSA announced their joint conclusion that “Vladimir Putin ordered an
influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.” From the Steele
dossier, to the steady leaks from the U.S. intelligence community, to testimony and
statements from the leadership of U.S. intelligence agencies, a firm consensus had
emerged. There was a nefarious connection, perhaps an ongoing one, between Trump and
his campaign and the Russian government.
Still, this could yet be seen as highly wishful thinking by Trump opponents. “The
underlying premise of the case is that spies tell the truth,” said the veteran intelligence
community journalist Edward Jay Epstein. “Who knew?” And, indeed, the worry in the
White House was not about collusion—which seemed implausible if not farcical—but
what, if the unraveling began, would likely lead to the messy Trump (and Kushner)
business dealings. On this subject every member of the senior staff shrugged helplessly,
covering eyes, ears, and mouth.
This was the peculiar and haunting consensus—not that Trump was guilty of all that he
was accused of, but that he was guilty of so much else. It was all too possible that the
hardly plausible would lead to the totally credible.
* * *
On February 13, twenty-four days into the new administration, National Security Advisor
Michael Flynn became the first actual link between Russia and the White House.
Flynn had really only one supporter in the Trump administration, and that was the
president himself. They were best friends during the campaign—buddy movie stuff. Postinauguration,
this translated into a total-access relationship. On Flynn’s part, it led to a set
of misapprehensions that was common inside Trump’s circle: that the president’s personal
endorsement indicated your status in the White House and that Trump’s level of flattery
was a convincing indication that you had an unbreakable bond with him and that you
were, in his eyes, and in his White House, something close to omnipotent. Trump, with his
love of generals, had even for a moment wanted to make Michael Flynn his vice president.
Intoxicated by Trump’s flattery during the campaign, Flynn—a lower-tier general and
quite a flaky one at that—had become something of a Trump dancing monkey. When
former generals make alliances with political candidates, they customarily position
themselves as providers of expertise and figures of a special maturity. But Flynn had
become quite a maniacal partisan, part of the Trump traveling road show, one of the
ranters and ravers opening Trump rallies. This all-in enthusiasm and loyalty had helped
win him access to Trump’s ear, into which he poured his anti-intelligence-community
theories.
During the early part of the transition, when Bannon and Kushner had seemed joined at
the hip, this was part of their bond: an effort to disintermediate Flynn and his often
problematic message. A subtext in the White House estimation of Flynn, slyly insinuated
by Bannon, was that Defense Secretary Mattis was a four-star general and Flynn but a
three-star.
“I like Flynn, he reminds me of my uncles,” said Bannon. “But that’s the problem: he
reminds me of my uncles.”
Bannon used the general odor that had more and more attached to Flynn among
everybody except the president to help secure a seat for himself on the National Security
Council. This was, for many in the national security community, a signal moment in the
effort by the nationalist right wing to seize power. But Bannon’s presence on the council
was just as much driven by the need to babysit the impetuous Flynn, prone to antagonizing
almost everyone else in the national security community. (Flynn was “a colonel in a
general’s uniform,” according to one senior intelligence figure.)
Flynn, like everyone around Trump, was besotted by the otherworldly sense of
opportunity that came with, against all odds, being in the White House. And inevitably, he
had been made more grandiose by it.
In 2014, Flynn had been roughly cashiered out of government, for which he blamed his
many enemies in the CIA. But he had energetically set himself up in business, joining the
ranks of former government officials profiting off the ever growing globalist corporatefinancial-government
policy and business networks. Then, after flirting with several other
Republican presidential candidates, he bonded with Trump. Both Flynn and Trump were
antiglobalists—or, anyway, they believed the United States was getting screwed in global
transactions. Still, money was money, and Flynn, who, when he retired, had been
receiving a few hundred thousand a year on his general’s pension, was not turning any of
it down. Various friends and advisers—including Michael Ledeen, a longtime anti-Iran
and anti-CIA crony, and the coauthor of Flynn’s book, whose daughter now worked for
Flynn—advised Flynn that he ought not to accept fees from Russia or the larger
“consulting” assignments from Turkey.
It was in fact the sort of carelessness that almost everyone in Trump’s world, including
the president and his family, was guilty of. They lived with parallel realities in which,
while proceeding with a presidential campaign, they also had to live in a vastly more
likely world—rather a certain world—in which Donald Trump would never be president.
Hence, business as usual.
In early February, an Obama administration lawyer friendly with Sally Yates remarked
with some relish and considerable accuracy: “It certainly is an odd circumstance if you
live your life without regard for being elected and then get elected—and quite an
opportunity for your enemies.”
In this, there was not only the Russian cloud hanging over the administration, but a
sense that the intelligence community so distrusted Flynn, and so blamed its bad blood
with Trump on him, that Flynn was the target here. Within the White House there was
even a feeling that a soft trade was being implicitly offered: Flynn for the goodwill of the
intelligence community.
At the same time, in what some thought a direct result of the president’s rage over the
Russia insinuations—particularly the insinuation about the golden shower—the president
seemed to bond even more strongly with Flynn, assuring his National Security Advisor
over and over again that he had his back, that the Russia accusations, those related both to
Flynn and to himself, were “garbage.” After Flynn’s dismissal, a narrative describing
Trump’s increasing doubts about his adviser would be offered to the press, but in fact the
opposite was true: the more doubts gathered around Flynn, the more certain the president
became that Flynn was his all-important ally.
* * *
The final or deadliest leak during Michael Flynn’s brief tenure is as likely to have come
from the National Security Advisor’s antagonists inside the White House as from the
Justice Department.
On Wednesday, February 8, the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung came to visit Flynn
for what was billed as an off-the-record interview. They met not in his office but in the
most ornate room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building—the same room where
Japanese diplomats waited to meet with Secretary of State Cordell Hull as he learned of
the attack on Pearl Harbor.
To all outward appearances, it was an uneventful background interview, and DeYoung,
Columbo-like in her affect, aroused no suspicions when she broached the de rigueur
question: “My colleagues asked me to ask you this: Did you talk to the Russians about
sanctions?”
Flynn declared that he had had no such conversations, absolutely no conversation, he
confirmed again, and the interview, attended by senior National Security Council official
and spokesman Michael Anton, ended soon thereafter.
But later that day, DeYoung called Anton and asked if she could use Flynn’s denial on
the record. Anton said he saw no problem—after all, the White House wanted Flynn’s
denial to be clear—and notified Flynn.
A few hours later, Flynn called Anton back with some worries about the statement.
Anton applied an obvious test: “If you knew that there might be a tape of this conversation
that could surface, would you still be a hundred percent sure?”
Flynn equivocated, and Anton, suddenly concerned, advised him that if he couldn’t be
sure they ought to “walk it back.”
The Post piece, which appeared the next day under three other bylines—indicating that
DeYoung’s interview was hardly the point of the story—contained new leaked details of
the Kislyak phone call, which the Post now said had indeed dealt with the issue of
sanctions. The article also contained Flynn’s denial—“he twice said ‘no’ ”—as well as his
walk-back: “On Thursday, Flynn, through his spokesman, backed away from the denial.
The spokesman said Flynn ‘indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing
sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.’ ”
After the Post story, Priebus and Bannon questioned Flynn again. Flynn professed not
to remember what he had said; if the subject of sanctions came up, he told them, it was at
most glossed over. Curiously, no one seemed to have actually heard the conversation with
Kislyak or seen a transcript.
Meanwhile, the vice president’s people, caught unaware by the sudden Flynn
controversy, were taking particular umbrage, less about Flynn’s possible
misrepresentations than about the fact that they had been kept out of the loop. But the
president was undisturbed—or, in one version, “aggressively defensive”—and, while the
greater White House looked on askance, Trump chose to take Flynn with him to Mar-a-
Lago for his scheduled weekend with Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister.
That Saturday night, in a bizarre spectacle, the Mar-a-Lago terrace became a public
Situation Room when President Trump and Prime Minister Abe openly discussed how to
respond to North Korea’s launch of a missile three hundred miles into the Sea of Japan.
Standing right over the president’s shoulder was Michael Flynn. If Bannon, Priebus, and
Kushner believed that Flynn’s fate hung in the balance, the president seemed to have no
such doubts.
For the senior White House staff, the underlying concern was less about getting rid of
Flynn than about the president’s relationship with Flynn. What had Flynn, in essence a spy
in a soldier’s uniform, roped the president into? What might they have got up to together?
On Monday morning, Kellyanne Conway appeared on MSNBC and offered a firm
defense of the National Security Advisor. “Yes,” she said, “General Flynn does enjoy the
full confidence of the president.” And while this seemed to many an indication that
Conway was out of the loop, it was more accurately an indication that she had been
talking directly to the president.
A White House meeting that morning failed to convince Trump to fire Flynn. He was
concerned about what it would look like to lose his National Security Advisor after just
twenty-four days. And he was adamant about not wanting to blame Flynn for talking to
the Russians, even about sanctions. In Trump’s view, condemning his adviser would
connect him to a plot where there was no plot. His fury wasn’t directed toward Flynn but
to the “incidental” wiretap that had surveilled him. Making clear his confidence in his
adviser, Trump insisted that Flynn come to Monday’s lunch with the Canadian prime
minister, Justin Trudeau.
Lunch was followed by another meeting about the furor. There were yet more details of
the phone call and a growing itemization of the money Flynn had been paid by various
Russian entities; there was also increasing focus on the theory that the leaks from the intel
community—that is, the whole Russia mess—was directed at Flynn. Finally, there was a
new rationale that Flynn should be fired not because of his Russian contacts, but because
he had lied about them to the vice president. This was a convenient invention of a chain of
command: in fact, Flynn did not report to Vice President Pence, and he was arguably a
good deal more powerful than Pence.
The new rationale appealed to Trump, and he at last agreed that Flynn had to go.
Still, the president did not waiver in his belief in Flynn. Rather, Flynn’s enemies were
his enemies. And Russia was a gun to his head. He might, however ruefully, have had to
fire Flynn, but Flynn was still his guy.
Flynn, ejected from the White House, had become the first established direct link
between Trump and Russia. And depending on what he might say to whom, he was now
potentially the most powerful person in Washington.
8
ORG CHART
T
he White House, realized former naval officer Steve Bannon after a few weeks, was
really a military base, a government-issue office with a mansion’s façade and a few
ceremonial rooms sitting on top of a secure installation under military command. The
juxtaposition was striking: military hierarchy and order in the background, the chaos of
the temporary civilian occupants in the fore.
You could hardly find an entity more at odds with military discipline than a Trump
organization. There was no real up-and-down structure, but merely a figure at the top and
then everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasn’t task-based so much as responseoriented—whatever
captured the boss’s attention focused everybody’s attention. That was
the way in Trump Tower, just as it was now the way in the Trump White House.
The Oval Office itself had been used by prior occupants as the ultimate power symbol,
a ceremonial climax. But as soon as Trump arrived, he moved in a collection of battle
flags to frame him sitting at his desk, and the Oval immediately became the scene of a
daily Trump cluster-fuck. It’s likely that more people had easy access to this president than
any president before. Nearly all meetings in the Oval with the president were invariably
surrounded and interrupted by a long list of retainers—indeed, everybody strove to be in
every meeting. Furtive people skulked around without clear purpose: Bannon invariably
found some reason to study papers in the corner and then to have a last word; Priebus kept
his eye on Bannon; Kushner kept constant tabs on the whereabouts of the others. Trump
liked to keep Hicks, Conway, and, often, his old Apprentice sidekick Omarosa Manigault
—now with a confounding White House title—in constant hovering presence. As always,
Trump wanted an eager audience, encouraging as many people as possible to make as
many attempts as possible to be as close to him as possible. In time, however, he would
take derisive notice of those who seemed most eager to suck up to him.
Good management reduces ego. But in the Trump White House, it could often seem
that nothing happened, that reality simply did not exist, if it did not happen in Trump’s
presence. This made an upside-down kind of sense: if something happened and he wasn’t
present, he didn’t care about it and barely recognized it. His response then was often just a
blank stare. It also fed one theory of why hiring in the West Wing and throughout the
executive branch was so slow—filling out the vast bureaucracy was out of his view and
thus he couldn’t care less. Likewise, visitors with appointments were befuddled by the
West Wing’s own lack of staff: after being greeted with a smart military salute by the dress
marine at the West Wing door, they discovered that the West Wing often lacked a politicalappointee
receptionist, leaving guests to find their own way through the warren that was
the Western world’s pinnacle of power.
Trump, a former military academy cadet—albeit not an enthusiastic one—had touted a
return to military values and expertise. In fact, he most of all sought to preserve his
personal right to defy or ignore his own organization. This, too, made sense, since not
really having an organization was the most efficient way to sidestep the people in your
organization and to dominate them. It was just one irony of his courtship of admired
military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found
themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command
principles.
* * *
Almost from the beginning, the West Wing was run against the near-daily report that the
person charged with running it, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, was about to lose his job.
Or, if he was not about to lose his job, the only reason he was keeping it was that he had
not had it long enough to yet be fired from it. But no one in Trump’s inner circle doubted
that he would lose his job as soon as, practically speaking, his losing it would not
embarrass the president too much. So, they reasoned, no one need pay any attention to
him. Priebus, who, during the transition, doubted he would make it to the inauguration,
and then, once in, wondered if he could endure the torture for the minimally respectable
period of a year, shortly reduced his goal to six months.
The president himself, absent any organizational rigor, often acted as his own chief of
staff, or, in a sense, elevated the press secretary job to the primary staff job, and then
functioned as his own press secretary—reviewing press releases, dictating quotes, getting
reporters on the phone—which left the actual press secretary as a mere flunky and
whipping boy. Moreover, his relatives acted as ad hoc general managers of whatever areas
they might choose to be general managers in. Then there was Bannon, conducting
something of an alternate-universe operation, often launching far-reaching undertakings
that no one else knew about. And thus Priebus, at the center of an operation that had no
center, found it easy to think there was no reason for him to be there at all.
At the same time, the president seemed to like Priebus more and more quite for the
reason that he seemed entirely expendable. He took Trump’s verbal abuse about his height
and stature affably, or anyway stoically. He was a convenient punching bag when things
went wrong—and he didn’t punch back, to Trump’s pleasure and disgust.
“I love Reince,” said the president, with the faintest praise. “Who else would do this
job?”
Among the three men with effectively equal rank in the West Wing—Priebus and
Bannon and Kushner—only a shared contempt kept them from ganging up on one another.
In the early days of Trump’s presidency, the situation seemed clear to everybody: three
men were fighting to run the White House, to be the real chief of staff and power behind
the Trump throne. And of course there was Trump himself, who didn’t want to relinquish
power to anyone.
In these crosshairs was thirty-two-year-old Katie Walsh.
* * *
Walsh, the White House deputy chief of staff, represented, at least to herself, a certain
Republican ideal: clean, brisk, orderly, efficient. A righteous bureaucrat, pretty but with a
permanently grim expression, Walsh was a fine example of the many political
professionals in whom competence and organizational skills transcend ideology. (To wit:
“I would much rather be part of an organization that has a clear chain of command that I
disagree with than a chaotic organization that might seem to better reflect my views.”)
Walsh was an inside-the-Beltway figure—a swamp creature. Her expertise was
prioritizing Beltway goals, coordinating Beltway personnel, marshaling Beltway
resources. A head-down-get-things-done kind of person was how she saw herself. And no
nonsense.
“Any time someone goes into a meeting with the president there are like sixty-five
things that have to happen first,” she enumerated. “What cabinet secretary has to be
alerted about what person is going in there; what people on the Hill should be consulted;
the president needs a policy briefing, so who’s owning the brief and getting it to
appropriate staff members, oh and by the way you have to vet the guy… . Then you have
to give it to comms and figure out if it’s a national story, a regional story and are we doing
op-eds, going on national TV … and that’s before you get to political affairs or public
liaison… . And for anybody who meets with the president, it has to be explained why
other people are not meeting with him, or else they’ll go out there and shit all over the last
person who was in… .”
Walsh was what politics is supposed to be—or what it has been. A business supported
by, tended to, and, indeed, ennobled, by a professional political class. Politics, evident in
the sameness and particular joylessness of Washington dress, a determined anti-fashion
statement, is about procedure and temperament. Flash passes. No flash stays in the game.
From an all-girl Catholic school in St. Louis (still wearing a diamond cross around her
neck) and volunteer work on local political campaigns, Walsh went to George Washington
University—D.C. area colleges being among the most reliable feeders of swamp talent
(government is not really an Ivy League profession). Most government and political
organizations are not run, for better or worse, by MBAs, but by young people
distinguished only by their earnestness and public sector idealism and ambition. (It is an
anomaly of Republican politics that young people motivated to work in the public sector
find themselves working to limit the public sector.) Careers advance by how well you
learn on the job and how well you get along with the rest of the swamp and play its game.
In 2008, Walsh became the McCain campaign’s midwest regional finance director—
having majored in marketing and finance at GW, she was trusted to hold the checkbook.
Then on to deputy finance director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee,
deputy finance director and then finance director of the Republican National Committee,
and finally, pre-White House, chief of staff of the RNC and its chairman, Reince Priebus.
In retrospect, the key moment in saving the Trump campaign might be less the Mercerled
takeover and imposition of Bannon and Conway in mid-August than the acceptance
that the bare-bones and still largely one-man organization would need to depend on the
largesse of the RNC. The RNC had the ground game and the data infrastructure; other
campaigns might not normally trust the national committee, with its many snakes in the
grass, but the Trump campaign had chosen not to build this sort of organization or make
this investment. In late August, Bannon and Conway, with Kushner’s consent, made a deal
with the deep-swamp RNC despite Trump’s continued insistence that they’d gotten this far
without the RNC, so why come crawling now?
Almost right away Walsh became a key player in the campaign, a dedicated, make-thetrains-run-on-time
power centralizer—a figure without which few organizations can run.
Commuting between RNC headquarters in Washington and Trump Tower, she was the
quartermaster who made national political resources available to the campaign.
If Trump himself was often a disruption in the final months of the race and during the
transition, the campaign around him, in part because its only option was to smoothly
integrate with the RNC, was a vastly more responsive and unified organization than, say,
the Hillary Clinton campaign with its significantly greater resources. Facing catastrophe
and seeming certain humiliation, the Trump campaign pulled together—with Priebus,
Bannon, and Kushner all starring in buddy-movie roles.
The camaraderie barely survived a few days in the West Wing.
* * *
To Katie Walsh, it became almost immediately clear that the common purpose of the
campaign and the urgency of the transition were lost as soon as the Trump team stepped
into the White House. They had gone from managing Donald Trump to the expectation of
being managed by him—or at least through him and almost solely for his purposes. Yet
the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy
norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and
vitriol into policy, nor a team that could reasonably unite behind him.
In most White Houses, policy and action flow down, with staff trying to implement
what the president wants—or, at the very least, what the chief of staff says the president
wants. In the Trump White House, policy making, from the very first instance of Bannon’s
immigration EO, flowed up. It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall
style, what the president might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought
of this himself (a result that was often helped along with the suggestion that he had in fact
already had the thought).
Trump, observed Walsh, had a set of beliefs and impulses, much of them on his mind
for many years, some of them fairly contradictory, and little of them fitting legislative or
political conventions or form. Hence, she and everyone else was translating a set of
desires and urges into a program, a process that required a lot of guess work. It was, said
Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child wants.”
But making suggestions was deeply complicated. Here was, arguably, the central issue
of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: he
didn’t process information in any conventional sense—or, in a way, he didn’t process it at
all.
Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist.
Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. (There was
some argument about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or
at least headlines on articles about himself, and the gossip squibs on the New York Post’s
Page Six.) Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited. Others
concluded that he didn’t read because he just didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one
of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate—total television.
But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And
he trusted his own expertise—no matter how paltry or irrelevant—more than anyone
else’s. What’s more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you
were worthy of attention.
The organization therefore needed a set of internal rationalizations that would allow it
to trust a man who, while he knew little, was entirely confident of his own gut instincts
and reflexive opinions, however frequently they might change.
Here was a key Trump White House rationale: expertise, that liberal virtue, was
overrated. After all, so often people who had worked hard to know what they knew made
the wrong decisions. So maybe the gut was as good, or maybe better, at getting to the heart
of the matter than the wonkish and data-driven inability to see the forest for the trees that
often seemed to plague U.S. policy making. Maybe. Hopefully.
Of course, nobody really believed that, except the president himself.
Still, here was the basic faith, overriding his impetuousness and eccentricities and
limited knowledge base: nobody became the president of the United States—that camel-
through-the-eye-of-the-needle accomplishment—without unique astuteness and cunning.
Right? In the early days of the White House, this was the fundamental hypothesis of the
senior staff, shared by Walsh and everyone else: Trump must know what he was doing, his
intuition must be profound.
But then there was the other aspect of his supposedly superb insight and apprehension,
and it was hard to miss: he was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a
savant in these instances than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose
instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however silent and confused,
was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do.
During the campaign, he became a kind of vaunted action figure. His staff marveled at
his willingness to keep moving, getting back on the plane and getting off the plane and
getting back on, and doing rally after rally, with a pride in doing more events than
anybody else—double Hillary’s!—and ever ridiculing his opponent’s slow pace. He
performed. “This man never takes a break from being Donald Trump,” noted Bannon,
with a complicated sort of faint praise, a few weeks after joining the campaign full time.
It was during Trump’s early intelligence briefings, held soon after he captured the
nomination, that alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to
lack the ability to take in third-party information. Or maybe he lacked the interest;
whichever, he seemed almost phobic about having formal demands on his attention. He
stonewalled every written page and balked at every explanation. “He’s a guy who really
hated school,” said Bannon. “And he’s not going to start liking it now.”
However alarming, Trump’s way of operating also presented an opportunity to the
people in closest proximity to him: by understanding him, by observing the kind of habits
and reflexive responses that his business opponents had long learned to use to their
advantage, they might be able to game him, to move him. Still, while he might be moved
today, nobody underestimated the complexities of continuing to move him in the same
direction tomorrow.
* * *
One of the ways to establish what Trump wanted and where he stood and what his
underlying policy intentions were—or at least the intentions that you could convince him
were his—came to involve an improbably close textual analysis of his largely off-the-cuff
speeches, random remarks, and reflexive tweets during the campaign.
Bannon doggedly went through the Trump oeuvre highlighting possible insights and
policy proscriptions. Part of Bannon’s authority in the new White House was as keeper of
the Trump promises, meticulously logged onto the white board in his office. Some of these
promises Trump enthusiastically remembered making, others he had little memory of, but
was happy to accept that he had said it. Bannon acted as disciple and promoted Trump to
guru—or inscrutable God.
This devolved into a further rationalization, or Trump truth: “The president was very
clear on what he wanted to deliver to the American public,” said Walsh. He was “excellent
in communicating this.” At the same time, she acknowledged that it was not at all clear in
any specific sense what he wanted. Hence, there was another rationalization: Trump was
“inspirational not operational.”
Kushner, understanding that Bannon’s white board represented Bannon’s agenda more
than the president’s agenda, got to wondering how much of this source text was being
edited by Bannon. He made several attempts to comb through his father-in-law’s words on
his own before expressing frustration with the task and giving up.
Mick Mulvaney, the former South Carolina congressman now head of the Office of
Management and Budget and directly charged with creating the Trump budget that would
underlie the White House program, also fell back on the Trump spoken record. Bob
Woodward’s 1994 book, The Agenda, is a blow-by-blow account of the first eighteen
months of the Clinton White House, most of it focused on creating the Clinton budget,
with the single largest block of the president’s time devoted to deep contemplation and
arguments about how to allocate resources. In Trump’s case, this sort of close and
continuous engagement was inconceivable; budgeting was simply too small-bore for him.
“The first couple of times when I went to the White House, someone had to say, This is
Mick Mulvaney, he’s the budget director,” said Mulvaney. And in Mulvaney’s telling
Trump was too scattershot to ever be of much help, tending to interrupt planning with
random questions that seem to have come from someone’s recent lobbying or by some
burst of free association. If Trump cared about something, he usually already had a fixed
view based on limited information. If he didn’t care, he had no view and no information.
Hence, the Trump budget team was also largely forced to return to Trump’s speeches
when searching for the general policy themes they could then fasten into a budget
program.
* * *
Walsh, sitting within sight of the Oval Office, was located at something like the ground
zero of the information flow between the president and his staff. As Trump’s primary
scheduler, her job was to ration the president’s time and organize the flow of information
to him around the priorities that the White House had set. In this, Walsh became the
effective middle person among the three men working hardest to maneuver the president
—Bannon, Kushner, and Priebus.
Each man saw the president as something of a blank page—or a scrambled one. And
each, Walsh came to appreciate with increasing incredulity, had a radically different idea
of how to fill or remake that page. Bannon was the alt-right militant. Kushner was the
New York Democrat. And Priebus was the establishment Republican. “Steve wants to
force a million people out of the country and repeal the nation’s health law and lay on a
bunch of tariffs that will completely decimate how we trade, and Jared wants to deal with
human trafficking and protecting Planned Parenthood.” And Priebus wanted Donald
Trump to be another kind of Republican altogether.
As Walsh saw it, Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared
Kushner was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was
running the Paul Ryan White House. It was a 1970s video game, the white ball pinging
back and forth in the black triangle.
Priebus—who was supposed to be the weak link, thus allowing both Bannon and
Kushner, variously, to be the effective chief of staff—was actually turning out to be quite a
barking dog, even if a small one. In the Bannon world and in the Kushner world,
Trumpism represented politics with no connection to the Republican mainstream, with
Bannon reviling that mainstream and Kushner operating as a Democrat. Priebus,
meanwhile, was the designated mainstream terrier.
Bannon and Kushner were therefore more than a little irritated to discover that the
unimposing Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s
prescription that “this president will sign whatever is put in front of him,” while also
taking advantage of the White House’s lack of political and legislative experience and
outsourcing as much policy as possible to Capitol Hill.
In the early weeks of the administration, Priebus arranged for House Speaker Paul
Ryan, however much a Trumpist bête noire for much of the campaign, to come into the
White House with a group of ranking committee chairmen. In the meeting, the president
blithely announced that he had never had much patience for committees and so was glad
someone else did. Ryan, henceforth, became another figure with unfettered access to the
president—and to whom the president, entirely uninterested in legislative strategy or
procedures, granted virtual carte blanche.
Almost nobody represented what Bannon opposed as well as Paul Ryan. The essence
of Bannonism (and Mercerism) was a radical isolationism, a protean protectionism, and a
determined Keynesianism. Bannon ascribed these principles to Trumpism, and they ran as
counter to Republicanism as it was perhaps possible to get. What’s more, Bannon found
Ryan, in theory the House’s policy whiz, to be slow-witted if not incompetent, and an easy
and constant target of Bannon’s under-his-breath ridicule. Still, if the president had
unaccountably embraced Priebus-Ryan, he also could not do without Bannon.
Bannon’s unique ability—partly through becoming more familiar with the president’s
own words than the president was himself, and partly through a cunning self-effacement
(upended by his bursts of self-promotion)—was to egg the president on by convincing him
that Bannon’s own views were entirely derived from the president’s views. Bannon didn’t
promote internal debate, provide policy rationale, or deliver Power-Point presentations;
instead, he was the equivalent of Trump’s personal talk radio. Trump could turn him on at
any moment, and it pleased him that Bannon’s pronouncements and views would
consistently be fully formed and ever available, a bracing, unified-field narrative. As well,
he could turn him off, and Bannon would be tactically quiet until turned on again.
Kushner had neither Bannon’s policy imagination nor Priebus’s institutional ties. But,
of course, he had family status, carrying its own high authority. In addition, he had
billionaire status. He had cultivated a wide range of New York and international money
people, Trump acquaintances and cronies, and, often, people whom Trump would have
wished to like him better than they did. In this, Kushner became the representative in the
White House of the liberal status quo. He was something like what used to be called a
Rockefeller Republican and now might more properly be a Goldman Sachs Democrat. He
—and, perhaps even more, Ivanka—was at diametric odds with both Priebus, the stoutright,
Sun Belt–leaning, evangelical dependent Republican, and Bannon, the alt-right,
populist, anti-party disruptor.
From their separate corners each man pursued his own strategy. Bannon did all he
could to roll over Priebus and Kushner in an effort to prosecute the war for
Trumpism/Bannonism as quickly as possible. Priebus, already complaining about
“political neophytes and the boss’s relatives,” subcontracted his agenda out to Ryan and
the Hill. And Kushner, on one of the steepest learning curves in the history of politics (not
that everyone in the White House wasn’t on a steep curve, but Kushner’s was perhaps the
steepest), and often exhibiting a painful naïveté as he aspired to be one of the world’s
savviest players, was advocating doing nothing fast and everything in moderation. Each
had coteries opposed to the other: Bannonites pursued their goal of breaking everything
fast, Priebus’s RNC faction focused on the opportunities for the Republican agenda,
Kushner and his wife did their best to make their unpredictable relative look temperate
and rational.
And in the middle was Trump.
* * *
“The three gentlemen running things,” as Walsh came to coolly characterize them, all
served Trump in different ways. Walsh understood that Bannon provided the president
with inspiration and purpose, while the Priebus-Ryan connection promised to do what to
Trump seemed like the specialized work of government. For his part, Kushner best
coordinated the rich men who spoke to Trump at night, with Kushner often urging them to
caution him against both Bannon and Priebus.
The three advisers were in open conflict by the end of the second week following the
immigration EO and travel ban debacle. This internal rivalry was the result of stylistic,
philosophic, and temperamental differences; perhaps more important, it was the direct
result of the lack of a rational org chart or chain of command. For Walsh, it was a daily
process of managing an impossible task: almost as soon as she received direction from one
of the three men, she would be countermanded by one or another of them.
“I take a conversation at face value and move forward with it,” she defended herself. “I
put what was decided on the schedule and bring in comms and build a press plan around it
and bring in political affairs and office of public liaison. And then Jared says, Why did
you do that. And I say, ‘Because we had a meeting three days ago with you and Reince
and Steve where you agreed to do this.’ And he says, ‘But that didn’t mean I wanted it on
the schedule. That’s not why I had that conversation.’ It almost doesn’t matter what
anyone says: Jared will agree, and then it will get sabotaged, and then Jared goes to the
president and says, See, that was Reince’s idea or Steve’s idea.”
Bannon concentrated on a succession of EOs that would move the new administration
forward without having to wade through Congress. That focus was countermanded by
Priebus, who was cultivating the Trump-Ryan romance and the Republican agenda, which
in turn was countermanded by Kushner, who was concentrating on presidential bonhomie
and CEO roundtables, not least because he knew how much the president liked them (and,
as Bannon pointed out, because Kushner himself liked them). And instead of facing the
inherent conflicts in each strategy, the three men recognized that the conflicts were largely
irresolvable and avoided facing that fact by avoiding each other.
Each man had, in his own astute fashion, found his own way to appeal to the president
and to communicate with him. Bannon offered a rousing fuck-you show of force; Priebus
offered flattery from the congressional leadership; Kushner offered the approval of bluechip
businessmen. So strong were these particular appeals that the president typically
preferred not to distinguish among them. They were all exactly what he wanted from the
presidency, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t have them all. He wanted to break
things, he wanted a Republican Congress to give him bills to sign, and he wanted the love
and respect of New York machers and socialites. Some inside the White House perceived
that Bannon’s EOs were meant to be a workaround in response to Priebus’s courtship of
the party, and that Kushner’s CEOs were appalled by Bannon’s EOs and resistant to much
of the Republican agenda. But if the president understood this, it did not particularly
trouble him.
* * *
Having achieved something like executive paralysis within the first month of the new
administration—each of the three gentlemen was as powerful in his allure to the president
as the others and each, at times, was equally annoying to the president—Bannon, Priebus,
and Kushner all built their own mechanisms to influence the president and undermine the
others.
Analysis or argument or PowerPoint did not work. But who said what to Trump and
when often did. If, at Bannon’s prodding, Rebekah Mercer called him, that had an effect.
Priebus could count on Paul Ryan’s clout with him. If Kushner set up Murdoch to call, that
registered. At the same time, each successive call mostly canceled the others out.
This paralysis led the three advisers to rely on the other particularly effective way to
move him, which was to use the media. Hence each man became an inveterate and
polished leaker. Bannon and Kushner studiously avoided press exposure; two of the most
powerful people in government were, for the most part, entirely silent, eschewing almost
all interviews and even the traditional political conversations on Sunday morning
television. Curiously, however, both men became the background voices to virtually all
media coverage of the White House. Early on, before getting down to attacking each
other, Bannon and Kushner were united in their separate offensives against Priebus.
Kushner’s preferred outlet was Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s Morning Joe, one
of the president’s certain morning shows. Bannon’s first port of call was the alt-right
media (“Bannon’s Breitbart shenanigans,” in Walsh’s view). By the end of the first month
in the White House, Bannon and Kushner had each built a network of primary outlets, as
well as secondary ones to deflect from the obviousness of the primary ones, creating a
White House that simultaneously displayed extreme animosity toward the press and yet
great willingness to leak to it. In this, at least, Trump’s administration was achieving a
landmark transparency.
The constant leaking was often blamed on lower minions and permanent executive
branch staff, culminating in late February with an all-hands meeting of staffers called by
Sean Spicer—cell phones surrendered at the door—during which the press secretary
issued threats of random phone checks and admonitions about the use of encrypted texting
apps. Everybody was a potential leaker; everybody was accusing everybody else of being
a leaker.
Everybody was a leaker.
One day, when Kushner accused Walsh of leaking about him, she challenged him back:
“My phone records versus yours, my email versus yours.”
But most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups—
not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon.
The president couldn’t stop talking. He was plaintive and self-pitying, and it was
obvious to everyone that if he had a north star, it was just to be liked. He was ever
uncomprehending about why everyone did not like him, or why it should be so difficult to
get everyone to like him. He might be happy throughout the day as a parade of union steel
workers or CEOs trooped into the White House, with the president praising his visitors
and them praising him, but that good cheer would sour in the evening after several hours
of cable television. Then he would get on the phone, and in unguarded ramblings to
friends and others, conversations that would routinely last for thirty or forty minutes, and
could go much longer, he would vent, largely at the media and his staff. In what was
termed by some of the self-appointed Trump experts around him—and everyone was a
Trump expert—he seemed intent on “poisoning the well,” in which he created a loop of
suspicion, disgruntlement, and blame heaped on others.
When the president got on the phone after dinner, it was often a rambling affair. In
paranoid or sadistic fashion, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member
of his staff. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was
weak (not to mention he was short—a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Spicer was stupid
(and looks terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come
to Washington.
His callers, largely because they found his conversation peculiar, alarming, or
completely contrary to reason and common sense, often overrode what they might
otherwise have assumed to be the confidential nature of the calls and shared the content
with someone else. Hence news about the inner workings of the White House went into
free circulation. Except it was not so much the inner workings of the White House—
although it would often be reported as such—but the perambulations of the president’s
mind, which changed direction almost as fast as he could express himself. Yet there were
constant tropes in his own narrative: Bannon was about to be cast out, Priebus too, and
Kushner needed his protection from the other bullies.
So if Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner were now fighting a daily war with one another, it
was mightily exacerbated by something of a running disinformation campaign about them
that was being prosecuted by the president himself. A chronic naysayer, he viewed each
member of his inner circle as a problem child whose fate he held in his hand. “We are
sinners and he is God” was one view; “We serve at the president’s displeasure,” another.
* * *
In the West Wing of every administration since at least that of Clinton and Gore, the vice
president has occupied a certain independent power base in the organization. And yet Vice
President Mike Pence—the fallback guy in an administration the length of whose term
remained the subject of something like a national office betting pool—was a cipher, a
smiling presence either resisting his own obvious power or unable to seize it.
“I do funerals and ribbon cuttings,” he told a former Republican Hill colleague. In this,
he was seen as either feigning an old-fashioned, what-me-worry, standard-issue veep
identity lest he upset his patron or, in fact, honestly acknowledging who he was.
Katie Walsh, amid the chaos, saw the vice president’s office as a point of calm in the
storm. Pence’s staff was not only known by people outside the White House for the
alacrity with which it returned calls and for the ease with which it seemed to accomplish
West Wing tasks, it also seemed to be comprised of people who liked each other and who
were dedicated to a common goal: eliminating as much friction as possible around the vice
president.
Pence started nearly every speech saying, “I bring greetings from our forty-fifth
president of the United States, Donald J. Trump …”—a salutation directed more to the
president than to the audience.
Pence cast himself as blandly uninteresting, sometimes barely seeming to exist in the
shadow of Donald Trump. Little leaked out of the Pence side of the White House. The
people who worked for the vice president, were, like Pence himself, people of few words.
In a sense, he had solved the riddle of how to serve as the junior partner to a president
who could not tolerate any kind of comparisons: extreme self-effacement.
“Pence,” said Walsh, “is not dumb.”
Actually, well short of intelligent was exactly how others in the West Wing saw him.
And because he wasn’t smart, he was not able to provide any leadership ballast.
On the Jarvanka side, Pence became a point of grateful amusement. He was almost
absurdly happy to be Donald Trump’s vice president, happy to play the role of exactly the
kind of vice president that would not ruffle Trump’s feathers. The Jarvanka side credited
Pence’s wife, Karen, as the guiding hand behind his convenient meekness. Indeed, he took
to this role so well that, later, his extreme submissiveness struck some as suspicious.
The Priebus side, where Walsh firmly sat, saw Pence as one of the few senior West
Wing figures who treated Priebus as though he was truly the chief of staff. Pence often
seemed like a mere staffer, the ever present note taker in so many meetings.
From the Bannon side, Pence garnered only contempt. “Pence is like the husband in
Ozzie and Harriet, a nonevent,” said one Bannonite.
Although many saw him as a vice president who might well assume the presidency
someday, he was also perceived as the weakest vice president in decades and, in
organizational terms, an empty suit who was useless in the daily effort to help restrain the
president and stabilize the West Wing.
* * *
During that first month, Walsh’s disbelief and even fear about what was happening in the
White House moved her to think about quitting. Every day after that became its own
countdown toward the moment she knew she wouldn’t be able to take it anymore—which
would finally come at the end of March. To Walsh, the proud political pro, the chaos, the
rivalries, and the president’s own lack of focus and lack of concern were simply
incomprehensible.
In early March, Walsh confronted Kushner and demanded: “Just give me the three
things the president wants to focus on. What are the three priorities of this White House?”
“Yes,” said Kushner, wholly absent an answer, “we should probably have that
conversation.”
9
CPAC
O
n February 23, a 75-degree day in Washington, the president woke up complaining
about an overheated White House. But for once, the president’s complaints were not
the main concern. The excited focus in the West Wing was organizing a series of car pools
out to the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of conservative
movement activists, which had outgrown the accommodations of Washington hotels and
moved to the Gaylord Resort on Maryland’s National Harbor waterfront. CPAC, right of
right-of-center and trying to hold steady there, ambivalent about all the conservative
vectors that further diverged from that point, had long had an uncomfortable relationship
with Trump, viewing him as an unlikely conservative, if not a charlatan. CPAC, too, saw
Bannon and Breitbart as practicing an outré conservatism. For several years Breitbart had
staged a nearby competitive conference dubbed “The Uninvited.”
But the Trump White House would dominate or even subsume the conference this year,
and everybody wanted to turn out for this sweet moment. The president, set to speak on
the second day, would, like Ronald Reagan, address the conference in his first year in
office, whereas both Bushes, wary of CPAC and conservative activists, had largely
snubbed the gathering.
Kellyanne Conway, a conference opener, was accompanied by her assistant, two
daughters, and a babysitter. Bannon was making his first official pubic appearance of the
Trump presidency, and his retinue included Rebekah Mercer, the pivotal Trump donor and
Breitbart funder, her young daughter, and Allie Hanley, a Palm Beach aristocrat,
conservative donor, and Mercer friend. (The imperious Hanley, who had not met Bannon
before, pronounced him “dirty” looking.)
Bannon was scheduled to be interviewed in the afternoon session by CPAC chairman
Matt Schlapp, a figure of strained affability who seemed to be trying to embrace the
Trump takeover of his conference. A few days before, Bannon had decided to add Priebus
to the interview, as both a private gesture of goodwill and a public display of unity—a sign
of a budding alliance against Kushner.
In nearby Alexandria, Virginia, Richard Spencer, the president of the National Policy
Institute, which is sometimes described as a “white supremacist think tank,” who had,
peskily for the White House, adopted the Trump presidency as a personal victory, was
organizing his trip to CPAC, which would be as much a victory march for him as it was
for the Trump team. Spencer—who, in 2016, he had declared, “Let’s party like it’s 1933,”
as in the year Hitler came to power—provoked an outcry with his widely covered “Heil
Trump” (or “Hail Trump,” which of course amounts to the same thing) salute after the
election, and then achieved a kind of reverse martyrdom by taking a punch from a
protester on Inauguration Day that was memorialized on YouTube.
CPAC, organized by the remnants of the conservative movement after Barry
Goldwater’s apocalyptic defeat in 1964, had, with stoic indefatigability, turned itself into
the backbone of conservative survival and triumph. It had purged John Birchers and the
racist right and embraced the philosophic conservative tenets of Russell Kirk and William
F. Buckley. In time, it endorsed Reagan-era small government and antiregulatory reform,
and then added the components of the cultural wars—antiabortion, anti-gay-marriage, and
a tilt toward evangelicals—and married itself to conservative media, first right-wing radio
and later Fox News. From this agglomeration it spun an ever more elaborate and allembracing
argument of conservative purity, synchronicity, and intellectual weight. Part of
the fun of a CPAC conference, which attracted a wide assortment of conservative young
people (reliably mocked as the Alex P. Keaton crowd by the growing throng of liberal
press that covered the conference), was the learning of the conservative catechism.
But after a great Clinton surge in the 1990s, CPAC started to splinter during the George
W. Bush years. Fox News became the emotional center of American conservativism. Bush
neocons and the Iraq War were increasingly rejected by the libertarians and other suddenly
breakaway factions (among them the paleocons); the family values right, meanwhile, was
more and more challenged by younger conservatives. In the Obama years, the
conservative movement was increasingly bewildered by Tea Party rejectionism and a new
iconoclastic right-wing media, exemplified by Breitbart News, which was pointedly
excluded from the CPAC conference.
In 2011, professing conservative fealty, Trump lobbied the group for a speaking slot
and, with reports of a substantial cash contribution, was awarded a fifteen-minute berth. If
CPAC was supposedly about honing a certain sort of conservative party line, it was also
attentive to a wide variety of conservative celebrities, including, over the years, Rush
Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and various Fox News stars. The year before Obama’s reelection,
Trump fell into this category. But he was viewed quite differently four years later. In the
winter of 2016, during the still competitive Republican primary race, Trump—now eyed
as much as a Republican apostate as a Republican crowd pleaser—decided to forgo CPAC
and what he feared would be less than a joyous welcome.
This year, as part of its new alignment with the Trump-Bannon White House, CPAC’s
personality headliner was slated to be the alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay British
right-wing provocateur attached to Breitbart News. Yiannopoulos—whose entire position,
rather more like a circa-1968 left-wing provocateur, seemed to be about flouting political
correctness and social convention, resulting in left-wing hysteria and protests against him
—was as confounding a conservative figure as could be imagined. Indeed, there was a
subtle suggestion that CPAC had chosen Yiannopoulos precisely to hoist Bannon and the
White House on the implicit connection to him—Yiannopoulos had been something of a
Bannon protégé. When, two days before CPAC opened, a conservative blogger discovered
a video of Yiannopoulos in bizarre revelry seeming to rationalize pedophilia, the White
House made it clear he had to go.
Still, the White House presence at CPAC—which included, along with the president,
Bannon, Conway, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the oddball White House foreign
policy adviser and former Breitbart writer Sebastian Gorka—seemed to push the
Yiannopoulos mess to the side. If CPAC was always looking to leaven boring politicians
with star power, Trump, and anyone connected him, were now the biggest stars. With her
family positioned out in front of a full house, Conway was interviewed in Oprah-like style
by Mercedes Schlapp (wife of Matt Schlapp—CPAC was a family affair), a columnist for
the conservative Washington Times who would later join the White House
communications staff. It was an intimate and inspirational view of a woman of high
achievement, the kind of interview that Conway believed she would have been treated to
on network and cable television if she were not a Trump Republican—the type of
treatment, she’d point out, that had been given to Democratic predecessors like Valerie
Jarrett.
At about the time that Conway was explaining her particular brand of antifeminist
feminism, Richard Spencer arrived at the convention center hoping to attend the breakout
session “The Alt-Right Ain’t Right at All,” a modest effort to reaffirm CPAC’s traditional
values. Spencer, who since the Trump victory had committed himself to full-time activism
and press opportunities, had planned to position himself to get in the first question. But
almost immediately upon arriving and paying his $150 registration fee, he had attracted
first one reporter and then a growing circle, a spontaneous press scrum, and he responded
by giving an ad hoc news conference. Like Yiannopoulos, and in many ways like Trump
and Bannon, Spencer helped frame the ironies of the modern conservative movement. He
was a racist but hardly a conservative—he doggedly supported single-payer health care,
for instance. And the attention he received was somehow less a credit to conservatism than
another effort by the liberal media to smear conservatism. Hence, as the scrum around him
increased to as many as thirty people, the CPAC irony police stepped in.
“You’re not welcome on the property,” announced one of the security guards. “They
want you off the property. They want you to cease. They want you off the property.”
“Wow,” said Spencer. “Can they?”
“Enough debate,” the guard said. “This is private property and CPAC wants you off the
property.”
Relieved of his credentials, Spencer was ushered to the CPAC perimeter of the hotel,
where, his pride not all that wounded, he turned, in the comfort of the atrium lounge area,
to social media and to texting and emailing reporters on his contact list.
The point Spencer was making was that his presence here was not really so disruptive
or ironic as Bannon’s, or, for that matter, Trump’s. He might be ejected, but in a larger
historical sense it was the conservatives who were now being ejected from their own
movement by the new cadre—which included Trump and Bannon—of what Spencer
called the identitarians, proponents of “white interests, values, customs, and culture.”
Spencer was, he believed, the true Trumper and the rest of CPAC now the outliers.
* * *
In the green room, after Bannon, Priebus, and their retinues had arrived, Bannon—in dark
shirt, dark jacket, and white pants—stood off to the side talking to his aide, Alexandra
Preate. Priebus sat in the makeup chair, patiently receiving a layer of foundation, powder,
and lip gloss.
“Steve—” said Priebus, gesturing to the chair as he got up.
“That’s okay,” said Bannon. He put up his hand, making another of the continual small
gestures meant, pointedly, to define himself as something other than every phony baloney
in swampland politics—and something other than Reince Priebus, with his heavy powder
foundation.
The significance of Bannon’s first appearance in public—after days of apparent West
Wing turmoil, a Time magazine cover story about him, nearly endless speculation about
his power and true intentions, and his elevation at least in the media mind to the essential
mystery of the Trump White House—could hardly be underestimated. For Bannon himself
this was, in his own mind, a carefully choreographed moment. It was his victory walk. He
had, he thought, prevailed in the West Wing. He had, again in his own mind, projected his
superiority over both Priebus and the idiot son-in-law. And he would now dominate
CPAC. But for the moment he attempted a shucks-nothing-to-it lack of self-consciousness
even as, at the same time, he was unquestionably the preening man of the hour. Demurring
about accepting makeup was not just a way to belittle Priebus, but also a way to say that,
ever the commando, he went into battle fully exposed.
“You know what he thinks even when you don’t know what he thinks,” explained
Alexandra Preate. “He’s a bit like a good boy who everybody knows is a bad boy.”
When the two men emerged onto the stage and appeared on the big-screen monitors,
the contrast between them could hardly have been greater. The powder made Priebus look
mannequin-like, and his suit with lapel pin, little-boyish. Bannon, the supposedly
publicity-shy man, was eating up the camera. He was a country music star—he was
Johnny Cash. He seized Priebus’s hand in a power handshake, then relaxed in his chair as
Priebus came too eagerly forward in his.
Priebus opened with traditional bromides. Bannon, taking his turn, went wryly for the
dig: “I want to thank you for finally inviting me to CPAC.”
“We decided to say that everybody is a part of our conservative family,” said Matt
Schlapp, resigned. He then welcomed “the back of the room,” where the hundreds of
reporters covering the event were positioned.
“Is that the opposition party?” asked Bannon, shielding his eyes.
Schlapp went to the setup question: “We read a lot about you two. Ahem …”
“It’s all good,” replied Priebus tightly.
“I’ll bet not all of it’s accurate,” said Schlapp. “I’ll bet there’s things that don’t get
written correctly. Let me ask both of you, what’s the biggest misconception about what’s
going on in the Donald Trump White House?”
Bannon responded with something just less than a smirk and said nothing.
Priebus offered a testimonial to the closeness of his relationship with Bannon.
Bannon, eyes dancing, lifted the microphone trumpetlike and made a joke about
Priebus’s commodious office—two couches and a fireplace—and his own rough-andready
one.
Priebus hewed to the message. “It’s, ahh … it’s actually … something that you all have
helped build, which is, when you bring together, and what this election shows, and what
President Trump showed, and let’s not kid ourselves, I can talk about data and ground
game and Steve can talk about big ideas but the truth of the matter is Donald Trump,
President Trump, brought together the party and the conservative movement, and I tell you
if the party and the conservative movement are together”—Priebus knocked his fists
—“similar to Steve and I, it can’t be stopped. And President Trump is the one guy, he was
the one person, and I can say this after overseeing sixteen people kill each other, it was
Donald Trump who was able to bring this country, this party, and this movement together.
And Steve and I know that and we live it every day and our job is to get the agenda of
President Trump through the door and on pen and paper.”
With Priebus gasping for breath, Bannon snatched the relay baton. “I think if you look
at the opposition party”—throwing his hand out to the back of the room—“and how they
portrayed the campaign, how they portrayed the transition, and now how they are
portraying the administration, it’s always wrong. I mean on the very first day that
Kellyanne and I started, we reached out to Reince, Sean Spicer, Katie… . It’s the same
team, you know, that every day was grinding away at the campaign, the same team that
did the transition, and if you remember, the campaign was the most chaotic, in the media’s
description, most chaotic, most disorganized, most unprofessional, had no earthly idea
what they were doing, and then you saw ’em all crying and weeping that night on
November 8.”
Back in the White House, Jared Kushner, watching the proceedings casually and then
more attentively, suddenly felt a rising anger. Thin-skinned, defensive, on guard, he
perceived Bannon’s speech as a message sent directly to him. Bannon has just credited the
Trump victory to everybody else. Kushner was certain he was being taunted.
When Schlapp asked the two men to enumerate the accomplishments of the last thirty
days, Priebus floundered and then seized on Judge Gorsuch and the deregulation executive
orders, all things, said Priebus, “that”—he paused, struggling—“eighty percent of
Americans agree with.”
After a brief pause, as though waiting for the air to clear, Bannon raised the
microphone: “I kind of break it down into three verticals, three buckets; the first, national
security and sovereignty, and that’s your intelligence, defense department, homeland
security. The second line of work is what I refer to as economic nationalism, and that is
Wilbur Ross at Commerce, Steve Mnuchin at Treasury, [Robert] Lighthizer at Trade, Peter
Navarro, [and] Stephen Miller, who are rethinking how we are going to reconstruct our
trade arrangements around the world. The third, broadly, line of work is deconstruction of
the administrative state—” Bannon stopped for a moment; the phrase, which had never
before been uttered in American politics, drew wild applause. “The way the progressive
left runs is that if they can’t get it passed they’re just going to put it in some sort of
regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed.”
Schlapp fed another setup question, this one about the media.
Priebus grabbed it, rambled and fumphered for a while, and ended up, somehow, on a
positive note: We’ll all come together.
Lifting the microphone, once again Joshua-like, and with a sweeping wave of his hand,
Bannon pronounced, “It’s not only not going to get better, it’s going to get worse every
day”—his fundamental apocalyptic song—“and here’s why—and by the way, the internal
logic makes sense, corporatist, globalist media, that are adamantly opposed, adamantly
opposed, to an economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has. And here’s why it’s
going to get worse: because he’s going to continue to press his agenda. And as economic
conditions continue to get better, as more jobs get better, they’re going to continue to fight.
If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight you are sadly
mistaken. Every day it is going to be a fight. This is why I’m proudest of Donald Trump.
All the opportunities he had to waver off this. All the people he had coming to him saying
‘Oh, you got to moderate.’ ” Another dig at Kushner. “Every day in the Oval Office he
tells Reince and me, ‘I committed this to the American people. I promised this when I ran.
And I’m going to deliver on this.’ ”
And then the final, agreed-upon-beforehand question: “Can this Trump movement be
combined with what’s happening at CPAC and other conservative movements for fifty
years? Can this be brought together … and is this going to save the country?”
“Well, we have to stick together as a team,” said Priebus. “It’s gonna take all of us
working together to make it happen.”
As Bannon started into his answer, he spoke slowly, looking out at his captive and
riveted audience: “I’ve said that there is a new political order being formed out of this and
it’s still being formed. If you look at the wide degree of opinions in this room, whether
you are a populist, whether you’re a limited-government conservative, whether you’re a
libertarian, whether you’re an economic nationalist, we have wide and sometimes
divergent opinions, but I think the center core of what we believe, that we’re a nation with
an economy, not an economy just in some global market place with open borders, but that
we are a nation with a culture, and a reason for being. I think that’s what unites us. And
that’s what’s going to unite this movement going forward.”
Bannon lowered the microphone to, after what might be interpreted as a beat of
uncertainty, suddenly thunderous applause.
Watching from the White House, Kushner—who had come to believe that there was
something insidious when Bannon used the words “borders,” “global,” “culture,” and
“unite,” and who was more and more convinced that they were personally directed against
him—was now in a rage.
* * *
Kellyanne Conway had increasingly been worrying about the seventy-year-old president’s
sleeplessness and his worn look. It was the president’s indefatigability—a constant
restlessness—that she believed carried the team. On the campaign trail, he would always
add stops and speeches. He doubled his own campaign time. Hillary worked at half time;
he worked at double time. He sucked in the energy from the crowds. Now that he was
living alone in the White House, though, he had seemed to lose a step.
But today he was back. He had been under the sunlamp and lightened his hair, and
when the climate-change-denying president woke up on another springlike morning, 77
degrees in the middle of winter, on the second day of CPAC, he seemed practically a
different person, or anyway a noticeably younger one. At the appointed hour, to the
locked-down ballroom at the Gaylord Resort, filled to capacity with all stripes of the
conservative faithful—Rebekah Mercer and her daughter up front—and hundreds of
media people in an SRO gallery, the president emerged onto the stage, not in an energetic
television-style rush, but with a slow swagger to the low strains of “I’m Proud to Be an
American.” He came to the stage as a political strongman, a man occupying his moment,
clapping—here he reverted to entertainer pose—as he slowly approached the podium,
mouthing “Thank you,” crimson tie dipping over his belt.
This would be Trump’s fifth CPAC address. As much as Steve Bannon liked to see
himself as the author of Donald Trump, he also seemed to find it proof of some added
legitimacy—and somehow amazing in itself—that since 2011 Trump had basically come
to CPAC with the same message. He wasn’t a cipher, he was a messenger. The country
was a “mess”—a word that had stood the Trump test of time. Its leaders were weak. Its
greatness had been lost. The only thing different was that in 2011 he was still reading his
speeches with only occasional ad-libs, and now he ad-libbed everything.
“My first major speech was at CPAC,” the president began. “Probably five or six years
ago. My first major political speech. You were there. I loved it. I loved the people. I loved
the commotion. They did these polls where I went through the roof. I wasn’t even running,
right? But it gave me an idea! And I got a little bit concerned when I saw what was
happening in the country so I said let’s go to it. It was very exciting. I walked the stage at
CPAC. I had very little notes and even less preparation.” (In fact, he read his 2011 speech
from a sheet of paper.) “So when you have practically no notes and no preparation and
then you leave and everybody was thrilled. I said, I think I like this business.”
This first preamble gave way to the next preamble.
“I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s phony. Fake. A few
days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people. Because they have no sources.
They just make ’em up when there are none. I saw one story recently where they said nine
people have confirmed. There are no nine people. I don’t believe there was one or two
people. Nine people. And I said, Give me a break. I know the people. I know who they
talk to. There were no nine people. But they say nine people… .”
A few minutes into the forty-eight-minute speech and it was already off the rails, riff
sustained by repetition.
“Maybe they’re just bad at polling. Or maybe they’re not legit. It’s one or the other.
They’re very smart. They’re very cunning. And they’re very dishonest… . Just to
conclude”—although he would go on for thirty-seven minutes more—“it’s a very sensitive
topic and they get upset when we expose their false stories. They say we can’t criticize
their dishonest coverage because of the First Amendment. You know they always bring
up”—he went into a falsetto voice—“the First Amendment. Now I love the First
Amendment. Nobody loves it better than me. Nobody.”
Each member of the Trump traveling retinue was now maintaining a careful poker face.
When they did break it, it was as though on a delay, given permission by the crowd’s
cheering or laughter. Otherwise, they seemed not to know whether the president had in
fact gotten away with his peculiar rambles.
“By the way, you folks in here, the place is packed, there are lines that go back six
blocks”—there were no lines outside the crowded lobby—“I tell you that because you
won’t read about it. But there are lines that go back six blocks… .
“There is one allegiance that unites us all, to America, America… . We all salute with
pride the same American flag … and we are all equal, equal in the eyes of Almighty
God… . We’re equal … and I want to thank, by the way, the evangelical community, the
Christian community, communities of faith, rabbis and priests and pastors, ministers,
because the support for me, as you know, was a record, not only numbers of people but
percentages of those numbers who voted for Trump … an amazing outpouring and I will
not disappoint you … as long as we have faith in each other and trust in God then there is
no goal beyond our reach … there is no dream too large … no task too great … we are
Americans and the future belongs to us … America is roaring. It’s going to be bigger and
better and stronger than ever before… .”
Inside the West Wing, some had idly speculated about how long he would go on if he
could command time as well as language. The consensus seemed to be forever. The sound
of his own voice, his lack of inhibition, the fact that linear thought and presentation turned
out not at all to be necessary, the wonder that this random approach seemed to command,
and his own replenishing supply of free association—all this suggested that he was limited
only by everyone else’s schedule and attention span.
Trump’s extemporaneous moments were always existential, but more so for his aides
than for him. He spoke obliviously and happily, believing himself to be a perfect pitch
raconteur and public performer, while everyone with him held their breath. If a wackadoo
moment occurred on the occasions—the frequent occasions—when his remarks careened
in no clear direction, his staff had to go into intense method-acting response. It took
absolute discipline not to acknowledge what everyone could see.
* * *
As the president finished up his speech, Richard Spencer, who in less than four months
from the Trump election was on his way to becoming the most famous neo-Nazi in
America since George Lincoln Rockwell, had returned to a seat in the atrium of the
Gaylord Resort to argue his affinity for Donald Trump—and, he believed, vice versa.
Spencer, curiously, was one of the few people trying to ascribe an intellectual doctrine
to Trumpism. Between those taking him literally but not seriously, and those taking him
seriously but not literally, there was Richard Spencer. Practically speaking, he was doing
both, arguing the case that if Trump and Bannon were the pilot fish for a new conservative
movement, Spencer himself—the owner of altright.com and, he believed, the purest
exponent of the movement—was their pilot fish, whether they knew it or not.
As close to a real-life Nazi as most reporters had ever seen, Spencer was a kind of
catnip for the liberal press crowded at CPAC. Arguably, he was offering as good an
explanation of Trump’s anomalous politics as anyone else.
Spencer had come up through writing gigs on conservative publications, but he was
hardly recognizable in any sort of official Republican or conservative way. He was a postright-wing
provocateur but with none of the dinner party waspishness or bite of Ann
Coulter or Milo Yiannopoulos. They were a stagey type of reactionary. He was a real one
—a genuine racist with a good education, in his case UVA, the University of Chicago, and
Duke.
It was Bannon who effectively gave Spencer flight by pronouncing Breitbart to be “the
platform for the alt-right”—the movement Spencer claimed to have founded, or at least
owned the domain name for.
“I don’t think Bannon or Trump are identitarians or alt-rightists,” Spencer explained
while camped out just over CPAC’s property line at the Gaylord. They were not, like
Spencer, philosophic racists (itself different from a knee-jerk racist). “But they are open to
these ideas. And open to the people who are open to these ideas. We’re the spice in the
mix.”
Spencer was right. Trump and Bannon, with Sessions in the mix, too, had come closer
than any major national politician since the Civil Rights movement to tolerating a racetinged
political view.