“Trump has said things that conservatives never would have thought… . His criticism
of the Iraq War, bashing the Bush family, I couldn’t believe he did that … but he did … .
Fuck them … if at the end of the day an Anglo Wasp family produces Jeb and W then
clearly that’s a clear sign of denegation… . And now they marry Mexicans … Jeb’s wife
… he married his housekeeper or something.
“In Trump’s 2011 CPAC address he specifically calls for a relaxation of immigration
restrictions for Europeans … that we should re-create an America that was far more stable
and more beautiful… . No other conservative politician would say those things … but on
the other hand pretty much everyone thought it … so it’s powerful to say it… . Clearly
[there’s] a normalization process going on.”
“We are the Trump vanguard. The left will say Trump is a nationalist and an implicit or
quasi-racialist. Conservatives, because they are just so douchey, say Oh, no, of course not,
he’s a constitutionalist, or whatever. We on the alt-right will say, He is a nationalist and he
is a racialist. His movement is a white movement. Duh.”
Looking very satisfied with himself, Spencer paused and then said: “We give him a
kind of permission.”
* * *
Nearby, in the Gaylord atrium, Rebekah Mercer sat having a snack with her homeschooled
daughter and her friend and fellow conservative donor Allie Hanley. Both
women agreed that the president’s CPAC speech showed him at his most gracious and
charming.
10
GQLDMAN
T
he Jarvanka side of the White House increasingly felt that rumors leaked by Bannon
and his allies were undermining them. Jared and Ivanka, ever eager to enhance their
status as the adults in the room, felt personally wounded by these backdoor attacks.
Kushner, in fact, now believed Bannon would do anything to destroy them. This was
personal. After months of defending Bannon against liberal media innuendo, Kushner had
concluded that Bannon was an anti-Semite. That was the bottom-line issue. This was a
complicated and frustrating business—and quite hard to communicate to his father-in-law
—because one of Bannon’s accusations against Kushner, the administration’s point person
on the Middle East, was that he was not nearly tough enough in his defense of Israel.
After the election, the Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson with sly jocularity privately
pointed out to the president that by offhandedly giving the Israel portfolio to his son-inlaw—who
would, Trump said, make peace in the Middle East—he hadn’t really done
Kushner any favors.
“I know,” replied Trump, quite enjoying the joke.
Jews and Israel were a curious Trump subtext. Trump’s brutish father was an often
vocal anti-Semite. In the split in New York real estate between the Jews and non-Jews, the
Trumps were clearly on the lesser side. The Jews were white shoe, and Donald Trump,
even more than his father, was perceived as a vulgarian—after all, he put his name on his
buildings, quite a déclassé thing to do. (Ironically, this proved to be a significant advance
in real estate marketing and, arguably, Trump’s greatest accomplishment as a developer—
branding buildings.) But Trump had grown up and built his business in New York, the
world’s largest Jewish city. He had made his reputation in the media, that most Jewish of
industries, with some keen understanding of media tribal dynamics. His mentor, Roy
Cohn, was a demimonde, semiunderworld, tough-guy Jew. He courted other figures he
considered “tough-guy Jews” (one of his accolades): Carl Icahn, the billionaire hedge
funder; Ike Perlmutter, the billionaire investor who had bought and sold Marvel Comics;
Ronald Perelman, the billionaire Revlon chairman; Steven Roth, the New York billionaire
real estate tycoon; and Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate. Trump had
adopted a sort of 1950s Jewish uncle (tough-guy variety) delivery, with assorted
Yiddishisms—Hillary Clinton, he declared, had been “shlonged” in the 2008 primary—
helping to give an inarticulate man an unexpected expressiveness. Now his daughter, a de
facto First Lady, was, through her conversion, the first Jew in the White House.
The Trump campaign and the White House were constantly supplying off-note
messages about Jews, from their equivocal regard for David Duke to their apparent desire
to tinker with Holocaust history—or at least tendency to stumble over it. At one point
early in the campaign, Trump’s son-in-law, challenged by his own staff at the New York
Observer and feeling pressure about his own bona fides, as well as seeking to stand by his
father-in-law, wrote an impassioned defense of Trump in an attempt to prove that he was
not an anti-Semite. For his efforts, Jared was rebuked by various members of his own
family, who clearly seemed worried about both the direction of Trumpism and Jared’s
opportunism.
There was also the flirtation with European populism. Whenever possible, Trump
seemed to side with and stoke Europe’s rising right, with its anti-Semitic associations,
piling on more portent and bad vibes. And then there was Bannon, who had allowed
himself to become—through his orchestration of right-wing media themes and stoking of
liberal outrage—a winking suggestion of anti-Semitism. It was certainly good right-wing
business to annoy liberal Jews.
Kushner, for his part, was the prepped-out social climber who had rebuffed all
entreaties in the past to support traditional Jewish organizations. When called upon, the
billionaire scion had refused to contribute. Nobody was more perplexed by the sudden rise
of Jared Kushner to his new position as Israel’s great protector than U.S. Jewish
organizations. Now, the Jewish great and the good, the venerated and the tried, the
mandarins and myrmidons, had to pay court to Jared Kushner … who until little more than
a few minutes ago had truly been a nobody.
For Trump, giving Israel to Kushner was not only a test, it was a Jewish test: the
president was singling him out for being Jewish, rewarding him for being Jewish, saddling
him with an impossible hurdle for being Jewish—and, too, defaulting to the stereotyping
belief in the negotiating powers of Jews. “Henry Kissinger says Jared is going to be the
new Henry Kissinger,” Trump said more than once, rather a combined compliment and
slur.
Bannon, meanwhile, did not hesitate to ding Kushner on Israel, that peculiar right-wing
litmus test. Bannon could bait Jews—globalist, cosmopolitan, Davoscentric liberal Jews
like Kushner—because the farther right you were, the more correct you were on Israel.
Netanyahu was an old Kushner family friend, but when, in the fall, the Israeli prime
minister came to New York to meet with Trump and Kushner, he made a point of seeking
out Steve Bannon.
On Israel, Bannon had partnered with Sheldon Adelson, titan of Las Vegas, big-check
right-wing contributor, and, in the president’s mind, quite the toughest tough-guy Jew (that
is, the richest). Adelson regularly disparaged Kushner’s motives and abilities. The
president, to Bannon’s great satisfaction, kept telling his son-in-law, as he strategized on
Israel, to check with Sheldon and, hence, Bannon.
Bannon’s effort to grab the stronger-on-Israel label was deeply confounding to
Kushner, who had been raised as an Orthodox Jew. His closest lieutenants in the White
House, Avi Berkowitz and Josh Raffel, were Orthodox Jews. On Friday afternoons, all
Kushner business in the White House stopped before sunset for the Sabbath observance.
For Kushner, Bannon’s right-wing defense of Israel, embraced by Trump, somehow
became a jujitsu piece of anti-Semitism aimed directly at him. Bannon seemed determined
to make Kushner appear weak and inadequate—a cuck, in alt-right speak.
So Kushner had struck back, bringing into the White House his own tough-guy Jews—
Goldman Jews.
* * *
Kushner had pushed for the then president of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, to run the
National Economic Council and to be the president’s chief economic adviser. Bannon’s
choice had been CNBC’s conservative anchor and commentator Larry Kudlow. For
Trump, the Goldman cachet outdrew even a television personality.
It was a Richie Rich moment. Kushner had been a summer intern at Goldman when
Cohn was head of commodities trading. Cohn then became president of Goldman in 2006.
Once Cohn joined Trump’s team, Kushner often found occasion to mention that the
president of Goldman Sachs was working for him. Bannon, depending on whom he
wanted to slight, either referred to Kushner as Cohn’s intern or pointed out that Cohn was
now working for his intern. The president, for his part, was continually pulling Cohn into
meetings, especially with foreign leaders, just to introduce him as the former president of
Goldman Sachs.
Bannon had announced himself as Trump’s brain, a boast that vastly irritated the
president. But in Cohn, Kushner saw a better brain for the White House: not only was it
much more politic for Cohn to be Kushner’s brain than Trump’s, but installing Cohn was
the perfect countermove to Bannon’s chaos management philosophy. Cohn was the only
person in the West Wing who had ever managed a large organization (Goldman has thirtyfive
thousand employees). And, not to put too fine a point on it—though Kushner was
happy to do so—Bannon had rolled out of Goldman having barely reached midlevel
management status, whereas Cohn, his contemporary, had continued on to the firm’s
highest level, making hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Cohn—a Democrat
globalist-cosmopolitan Manhattanite who voted for Hillary Clinton and who still spoke
frequently to former Goldman chief and former Democratic New Jersey senator and
governor Jon Corzine—immediately became Bannon’s antithesis.
For Bannon, the ideologue, Cohn was the exact inverse, a commodities trader doing
what traders do—read the room and figure out which way the wind is blowing. “Getting
Gary to take a position on something is like nailing butterflies to the wall,” commented
Katie Walsh.
Cohn started to describe a soon-to-be White House that would be business-focused and
committed to advancing center-right to moderate positions. In this new configuration,
Bannon would be marginalized and Cohn, who was dismissive of Priebus, would be the
chief of staff in waiting. To Cohn, it seemed like easy street. Of course it would work out
this way: Priebus was a lightweight and Bannon a slob who couldn’t run anything.
Within weeks of Cohn’s arrival on the transition team, Bannon nixed Cohn’s plan to
expand the National Economic Council by as many as thirty people. (Kushner, not to be
denied, nixed Bannon’s plan to have David Bossie build and lead his staff.) Bannon also
retailed the likely not-too-far-off-the-mark view (or, anyway, a popular view inside
Goldman Sachs) that Cohn, once slated to become Goldman’s CEO, had been forced out
for an untoward Haig-like grasping for power—in 1981 then secretary of state Alexander
Haig had tried to insist he held the power after Ronald Reagan was shot—when Goldman
CEO Lloyd Blankfein underwent cancer treatment. In the Bannon version, Kushner had
bought damaged goods. The White House was clearly Cohn’s professional lifeline—why
else would he have come into the Trump administration? (Much of this was retailed to
reporters by Sam Nunberg, the former Trump factotum who was now doing duty for
Bannon. Nunberg was frank about his tactics: “I beat the shit out of Gary whenever
possible.”)
It is a measure of the power of blood (or blood by marriage), and likely the power of
Goldman Sachs, too, that in the middle of a Republican-controlled Washington and a
virulent, if not anti-Semitic (at least toward liberal Jews), right-wing West Wing, the
Kushner-Cohn Democrats appeared to be ascendant. Part of the credit went to Kushner,
who showed an unexpected tenacity. Conflict averse—in the Kushner household, his
father, monopolizing all the conflict, forced everyone else to be a mollifier—confronting
neither Bannon nor his father-in-law, he began to see himself in a stoic sense: he was the
last man of moderation, the true figure of self-effacement, the necessary ballast of the
ship. This would all be made manifest by a spectacular accomplishment. He would
complete the mission his father-in-law had foisted on him, the one he was more and more
seeing as his, yes, destiny. He would make peace in the Middle East.
“He’s going to make peace in the Middle East,” Bannon said often, his voice reverent
and his expression deadpan, cracking up all the Bannonites.
So in one sense Kushner was a figure of heightened foolishness and ridicule. In
another, he was a man, encouraged by his wife and by Cohn, who saw himself on the
world stage carrying out a singular mission.
Here was yet another battle to be won or lost. Bannon regarded Kushner and Cohn (and
Ivanka) as occupying an alternative reality that had little bearing on the real Trump
revolution. Kushner and Cohn saw Bannon as not just destructive but self-destructive, and
they were confident he would destroy himself before he destroyed them.
In the Trump White House, observed Henry Kissinger, “it is a war between the Jews
and the non-Jews.”
* * *
For Dina Powell, the other Goldman hire in the West Wing, the main consideration when
Ivanka pitched her on coming to work at the White House was the downside assessment of
being associated with a Trump presidency. Powell ran the Goldman Sachs philanthropic
arm, a public relations initiative as well as a courtship of the increasingly powerful pools
of philanthropic money. Representing Goldman, she had become something of a legend at
Davos, a supreme networker among the world’s supreme networkers. She stood at an
intersection of image and fortune, in a world increasingly swayed by private wealth and
personal brands.
It was a function of both her ambition and Ivanka Trump’s sales talents during swift
meetings in New York and Washington that Powell, swallowing her doubts, had come on
board. That, and the politically risky but high-return gamble that she, aligned with Jared
and Ivanka, and working closely with Cohn, her Goldman friend and ally, could take over
the White House. That was the implicit plan: nothing less. Specifically, the idea was that
Cohn or Powell—and quite possibly both over the course of the next four or eight years—
would, as Bannon and Priebus faltered, come to hold the chief of staff job. The president’s
own constant grumbling about Bannon and Priebus, noted by Ivanka, encouraged this
scenario.
This was no small point: a motivating force behind Powell’s move was the certain
belief on the part of Jared and Ivanka (a belief that Cohn and Powell found convincing)
that the White House was theirs to take. For Cohn and Powell, the offer to join the Trump
administration was transmuted beyond opportunity and became something like duty. It
would be their job, working with Jared and Ivanka, to help manage and shape a White
House that might otherwise become the opposite of the reason and moderation they could
bring. They could be instrumental in saving the place—and, as well, take a quantum
personal leap forward.
More immediately for Ivanka, who was focused on concerns about women in the
Trump White House, Powell was an image correction to Kellyanne Conway, whom, quite
apart from their war with Bannon, Ivanka and Jared disdained. Conway, who continued to
hold the president’s favor and to be his preferred defender on the cable news shows, had
publicly declared herself the face of the administration—and for Ivanka and Jared, this
was a horrifying face. The president’s worst impulses seem to run through Conway
without benefit of a filter. She compounded Trump’s anger, impulsiveness, and miscues.
Whereas a presidential adviser was supposed to buffer and interpret his gut calls, Conway
expressed them, doubled down on them, made opera out of them. She took Trump’s
demand for loyalty too literally. In Ivanka and Jared’s view, Conway was a cussed,
antagonistic, self-dramatizing cable head, and Powell, they hoped, would be a deliberate,
circumspect, adult guest on the Sunday morning shows.
By late February, after the first helter-skelter month in the West Wing, the campaign by
Jared and Ivanka to undermine Bannon seemed to be working. The couple had created a
feedback loop, which included Scarborough and Murdoch, that reinforced the president’s
deep annoyance with and frustration about Bannon’s purported importance in the White
House. For weeks after the Time magazine cover story featuring Bannon, there was hardly
a conversation in which Trump didn’t refer to it bitterly. (“He views Time covers as zero
sum,” said Roger Ailes. “If someone else gets on it, he doesn’t.”) Scarborough, cruelly,
kept up a constant patter about President Bannon. Murdoch forcefully lectured the
president about the oddness and extremism of Bannonism, linking Bannon with Ailes:
“They’re both crazy,” he told Trump.
Kushner also pressed the view to the president—ever phobic about any age-related
weakness—that the sixty-three-year-old Bannon wouldn’t hold up under the strain of
working in the White House. Indeed, Bannon was working sixteen- and eighteen-hour
days, seven days a week, and, for fear of missing a presidential summons or afraid that
someone else might grab it, he considered himself on call pretty much all night. As the
weeks went by, Bannon seemed physically to deteriorate in front of everybody’s eyes: his
face became more puffy, his legs more swollen, his eyes more bleary, his clothes more
slept in, his attention more distracted.
* * *
As Trump’s second month in office began, the Jared-Ivanka-Gary-Dina camp focused on
the president’s February 28 speech to the joint session of Congress.
“Reset,” declared Kushner. “Total reset.”
The occasion provided an ideal opportunity. Trump would have to deliver the speech in
front of him. It was not only on the teleprompter but distributed widely beforehand.
What’s more, the well-mannered crowd wouldn’t egg him on. His handlers were in
control. And for this occasion at least, Jared-Ivanka-Gary-Dina were the handlers.
“Steve will take credit for this speech if there’s even one word of his in it,” Ivanka told
her father. She knew well that for Trump, credit, much more than content, was the hotbutton
driver, and her comment ensured that Trump would keep it out of Bannon’s hands.
“The Goldman speech,” Bannon called it.
The inaugural, largely written by Bannon and Stephen Miller, had shocked Jared and
Ivanka. But a particular peculiarity of the Trump White House, compounding its
messaging problems, was its lack of a speech-writing team. There was the literate and
highly verbal Bannon, who did not really do any actual writing himself; there was Stephen
Miller, who did little more than produce bullet points. Beyond that, it was pretty much just
catch as catch can. There was a lack of coherent message because there was nobody to
write a coherent message—just one more instance of disregarding political craft.
Ivanka grabbed firm control of the joint session draft and quickly began pulling in
contributions from the Jarvanka camp. In the event, the president behaved exactly as they
hoped. Here was an upbeat Trump, a salesman Trump, a nothing-to-be-afraid-of Trump, a
happy-warrior Trump. Jared, Ivanka, and all their allies judged it a magnificent night,
agreeing that finally, amid the pageantry—Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States
—the president really did seem presidential. And for once, even the media agreed.
The hours following the president’s speech were Trump’s best time in the White
House. It was, for at least one news cycle, a different presidency. For a moment, there was
even something like a crisis of conscience among parts of the media: Had this president
been grievously misread? Had the media, the biased media, missed well-intentioned
Donald Trump? Was he finally showing his better nature? The president himself spent
almost two full days doing nothing but reviewing his good press. He had arrived, finally,
at a balmy shore (with appreciative natives on the beach). What’s more, the success of the
speech confirmed the Jared and Ivanka strategy: look for common ground. It also
confirmed Ivanka’s understanding of her father: he just wanted to be loved. And, likewise,
it confirmed Bannon’s worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a marshmallow.
The Trump on view the night of the joint session was not just a new Trump, but a
declaration of a new West Wing brain trust (which Ivanka was making plans to formally
join in just a few weeks). Jared and Ivanka, with an assist from their Goldman Sachs
advisers, were changing the message, style, and themes of the White House. “Reaching
out” was the new theme.
Bannon, hardly helping his cause, cast himself as a Cassandra to anyone who would
listen. He insisted that only disaster would come from trying to mollify your mortal
enemies. You need to keep taking the fight to them; you’re fooling yourself if you believe
that compromise is possible. The virtue of Donald Trump—the virtue, anyway, of Donald
Trump to Steve Bannon—was that the cosmopolitan elite was never going to accept him.
He was, after all, Donald Trump, however much you shined him up.
11
WIRETAP
W
ith three screens in his White House bedroom, the president was his own best cable
curator. But for print he depended on Hope Hicks. Hicks, who had been his junior
aide for most of the campaign and his spokesperson (although, as he would point out, he
was really his own spokesperson), had been, many thought, pushed to the sidelines in the
West Wing by the Bannonites, the Goldman wing, and the Priebus-RNC professionals. To
the senior staff, she seemed not only too young and too inexperienced—she was famous
among campaign reporters for her hard-to-maneuver-in short skirts—but a way-tooovereager
yes woman, always in fear of making a mistake, ever tremulously secondguessing
herself and looking for Trump’s approval. But the president kept rescuing her
—“Where’s Hope?”—from any oblivion others tried to assign her to. Baffling to almost
everyone, Hicks remained his closest and most trusted aide, with, perhaps, the single most
important job in this White House: interpreting the media for him in the most positive way
it could be interpreted, and buffering him from the media that could not be positively
spun.
The day after his “reset” speech before the joint session of Congress presented a certain
conundrum for Hicks. Here were the first generally good notices for the administration.
But in the Post, the Times, and the New Yorker that day, there was also an ugly bouquet of
very bad news. Fortunately the three different stories had not quite sunk into cable, so
there was yet a brief respite. And at least for the better part of the day, March 1, Hicks
herself did not entirely seem to grasp how bad the news actually was.
The Washington Post’s story was built around a leak from a Justice Department source
(characterized as a “former senior American official”—hence, most likely someone from
the Obama White House) saying that the new attorney general, Jeff Sessions, had, on two
occasions, met with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.
When the president was shown the story, he didn’t see its significance. “So what?” he
said.
Well, during his confirmation, it was explained to the president, Sessions had said he
didn’t.
Facing Sessions at the January 10 hearing, Al Franken, the former comedian and
Democratic senator from Minnesota, appeared to be casting blindly for an elusive fish in
his efforts to find a question. Stopping and starting, slogging through his sentence
construction, Franken, who had been handed a question based on the just-revealed Steele
dossier, got to this end:
These documents also allegedly say, quote, “There was a continuing exchange of
information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries
for the Russian government.”
Now, again, I’m telling you this as it’s coming out, so you know. But if it’s true,
it’s obviously extremely serious and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated
with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course
of this campaign, what will you do?
Instead of answering Franken’s circuitous question—“What will you do?”—with an
easy “We will of course investigate and pursue any and all illegal actions,” a confused
Sessions answered a question he wasn’t asked.
Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a
surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have—did not have
communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.
The president’s immediate focus was on the question of why anyone believed that
communicating with the Russians was bad. There is nothing wrong with that, Trump
insisted. As in the past, it was hard to move him off this point and to the issue at hand: a
possible lie to Congress. The Post story, to the extent that it registered at all, didn’t worry
him. Supported by Hicks, he saw it a way-long-shot effort to pin something on Sessions.
And anyway, Sessions was saying he didn’t meet with the Russians as a campaign
surrogate. So? He didn’t. Case closed.
“Fake news,” said the president, using his now all-purpose rejoinder.
As for the bad Times story, as Hicks related it to the president, it appeared to him to be
good news. Briefed by anonymous sources in the Obama administration (more anonymous
Obama sources), the story revealed a new dimension to the ever growing suggestion of a
connection between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to influence the U.S.
election:
American allies, including the British and the Dutch, had provided information
describing meetings in European cities between Russian officials—and others close
to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin—and associates of President-elect Trump,
according to three former American officials who requested anonymity in
discussing classified intelligence.
And:
Separately, American intelligence agencies had intercepted communications of
Russian officials, some of them within the Kremlin, discussing contacts with Trump
associates.
The story went on:
Mr. Trump has denied that his campaign had any contact with Russian officials, and
at one point he openly suggested that American spy agencies had cooked up
intelligence suggesting that the Russian government had tried to meddle in the
presidential election. Mr. Trump has accused the Obama administration of hyping
the Russia story line as a way to discredit his new administration.
And then the real point:
At the Obama White House, Mr. Trump’s statements stoked fears among some that
intelligence could be covered up or destroyed—or its sources exposed—once power
changed hands. What followed was a push to preserve the intelligence that
underscored the deep anxiety with which the White House and American
intelligence agencies had come to view the threat from Moscow.
Here was more confirmation of a central Trump thesis: The previous administration, its
own candidate defeated, was not just disregarding the democratic custom of smoothing the
way for the winner of the election; rather, in the Trump White House view, Obama’s
people had plotted with the intelligence community to put land mines in the new
administration’s way. Secret intelligence was, the story suggested, being widely
distributed across intelligence agencies so as to make it easier to leak, and at the same time
to protect the leakers. This intelligence, it was rumored, consisted of spreadsheets kept by
Susan Rice that listed the Trump team’s Russian contacts; borrowing a technique from
WikiLeaks, the documents were secreted on a dozen servers in different places. Before
this broad distribution, when the information was held tightly, it would have been easy to
identify the small pool of leakers. But the Obama administration had significantly
expanded that pool.
So this was good news, right? Wasn’t this proof, the president asked, that Obama and
his people were out to get him? The Times story was a leak about a plan to leak—and it
provided clear evidence of the deep state.
Hope Hicks, as always, supported Trump’s view. The crime was leaking and the culprit
was the Obama administration. The Justice Department, the president was confident, was
now going to investigate the former president and his people. Finally.
* * *
Hope Hicks also brought to the president a big piece in the New Yorker. The magazine had
just published an article by three authors—Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa
—attributing Russian aggressiveness to a new cold war. Remnick, the editor of the New
Yorker, had, since the Trump election, propounded an absolutist view that Trump’s
election imperiled Democratic norms.
This 13,500-word story—handily connecting the dots of Russia’s geopolitical
mortification, Putin’s ambition, the country’s cyber talents, Trump’s own nascent
authoritarianism, and the U.S. intelligence community’s suspicions about Putin and Russia
—codified a new narrative as coherent and as apocalyptic as the one about the old cold
war. The difference was that in this one, the ultimate result was Donald Trump—he was
the nuclear bomb. One of the frequently quoted sources in the article was Ben Rhodes, the
Obama aide who, Trump’s camp believed, was a key leaker, if not one of the architects of
the Obama administration’s continued effort to connect Trump and his team to Putin and
Russia. Rhodes, many in the White House believed, was the deep state. They also believed
that every time a leak was credited to “former and current officials,” Rhodes was the
former official who was in close touch with current officials.
While the article was largely just a dire recapitulation of fears about Putin and Trump,
it did, in a parenthesis toward the end of the article—quite burying the lead—connect
Jared Kushner to Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, in a meeting in Trump Tower with
Michael Flynn in December.
Hicks missed this point; later, it had to be highlighted for the president by Bannon.
Three people in the Trump administration—the former National Security Advisor, the
current attorney general, and the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law—had now been
directly connected to the Russian diplomat.
To Kushner and his wife, this was less than innocent: they would, with a sense of
deepening threat, suspect Bannon of leaking the information about Kushner’s meeting
with Kislyak.
* * *
Few jobs in the Trump administration seemed so right, fitting, and even destined to their
holder as Jeff Sessions’s appointment as the nation’s top law enforcement officer. As he
viewed his work as AG, it was his mandate to curb, circumscribe, and undo the
interpretation of federal law that had for three generations undermined American culture
and offended his own place in it. “This is his life’s work,” said Steve Bannon.
And Sessions was certainly not going to risk his job over the silly Russia business, with
its growing collection of slapstick Trump figures. God knows what those characters were
up to—nothing good, everybody assumed. Best to have nothing to do with it.
Without consulting the president or, ostensibly, anyone in the White House, Sessions
decided to move as far as possible out of harm’s way. On March 2, the day after the Post
story, he recused himself from anything having to do with the Russia investigation.
The news of the attorney general’s recusal exploded like an IED in the White House.
Sessions was Trump’s protection against an overly aggressive Russian investigation. The
president just could not grasp the logic here. He railed to friends: Why would Sessions not
want to protect him? What would Sessions gain? Did he think this stuff was real? Sessions
needed to do his job!
In fact, Trump already had good reason to worry about the DOJ. The president had a
private source, one of his frequent callers, who, he believed, was keeping him abreast of
what was going on in the Justice Department—and, the president noted, doing a much
better job of it than Sessions himself.
The Trump administration, as a consequence of the Russia story, was involved in a
high-stakes bureaucratic push-pull, with the president going outside government to find
out what was happening in his own government. The source, a longtime friend with his
own DOJ sources—many of the president’s rich and powerful friends had their own
reasons to keep close tabs on what was happening at the Justice Department—fed the
president a bleak picture of a Justice Department and an FBI run amok in its efforts to get
him. “Treason” was a word that was being used, the president was told.
“The DOJ,” the president’s source told him, “was filled with women who hated him.”
It was an army of lawyers and investigators taking instructions from the former
administration. “They want to make Watergate look like Pissgate,” the president was told.
This comparison confused Trump; he thought his friend was making a reference to the
Steele dossier and its tale of the golden showers.
After the attorney general’s recusal, the president, whose instinctive reaction to every
problem was to fire someone, right away, thought he should just get rid of Sessions. At the
same time, there was little doubt in his mind about what was happening here. He knew
where this Russia stuff was coming from, and if these Obama people thought they were
going to get away with it they had another think coming. He would expose them all!
* * *
One of Jared Kushner’s many new patrons was Tony Blair, the former —British prime
minister, whom Kushner had gotten to know when, on the banks of the River Jordan in
2010, they both attended the baptism of Grace and Chloe Murdoch, the young daughters
of Rupert Murdoch and his then wife, Wendi. Jared and Ivanka had also lived in the same
Trump building on Park Avenue where the Murdochs lived (for the Murdochs it was a
temporary rental apartment while their grand triplex on Fifth Avenue was —renovated, but
the renovation had lasted for four years), and during that period Ivanka Trump had
become one of Wendi Murdoch’s closest friends. Blair, godfather to Grace, would later be
accused by Murdoch of having an affair with his wife, and of being the cause of their
breakup (something Blair has categorically denied). In the divorce, Wendi got the Trumps.
But once in the White House, the president’s daughter and son-in-law became the
target of a renewed and eager cultivation by, with quite some irony, both Blair and
Murdoch. Lacking a circle of influence in almost all of the many areas of government with
which he was now involved, Kushner was both susceptible to cultivation and more than a
little desperate for the advice his cultivators had to offer. Blair, now with philanthropic,
private diplomatic, and varied business interests in the Middle East, was particularly intent
on helping shepherd some of Jared’s Middle East initiatives.
In February, Blair visited Kushner in the White House.
On this trip, the now freelance diplomat, perhaps seeking to prove his usefulness to this
new White House, mentioned a juicy rumor: the possibility that the British had had the
Trump campaign staff under surveillance, monitoring its telephone calls and other
communications and possibly even Trump himself. This was, as Kushner might
understand, the Sabbath goy theory of intelligence. On the Sabbath, observant Jews could
not turn on the lights, nor ask someone else to turn on the lights. But if they expressed the
view that it would be much easier to see with light, and if a non-Jew then happened to turn
them on, that would be fine. So although the Obama administration would not have asked
the British to spy on the Trump campaign, the Brits would have been led to understand
how helpful it might be if they did.
It was unclear whether the information was rumor, informed conjecture, speculation, or
solid stuff. But, as it churned and festered in the president’s mind, Kushner and Bannon
went out to CIA headquarters in Langley to meet with Mike Pompeo and his deputy
director Gina Haspel to check it out. A few days later, the CIA opaquely reported back that
the information was not correct; it was a “miscommunication.”
* * *
Politics had seemed to become, even well before the age of Trump, a mortal affair. It was
now zero-sum: When one side profited, another lost. One side’s victory was another’s
death. The old notion that politics was a trader’s game, an understanding that somebody
else had something you wanted—a vote, goodwill, old-fashioned patronage—and that in
the end the only issue was cost, had gone out of fashion. Now it was a battle between good
and evil.
Curiously, for a man who seemed to have led a movement based in anger and
retribution, Trump was very much (or believed he was very much) a politician of the old
stripe—a let’s-work-it-out guy. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. He was, in his
mind, the ultimate tactician, always knowing what the other guy wanted.
Steve Bannon had pressed him to invoke Andrew Jackson as his populist model, and
he had loaded up on Jackson books (they remained unread). But his real beau ideal was
Lyndon Johnson. LBJ was a big man who could knock heads, do deals, and bend lesser
men to his will. Trade it out so in the end everyone got something, and the better
dealmaker got a little more. (Trump did not, however, appreciate the irony of where
Lyndon Johnson ended up—one of the first modern politicians to have found himself on
the wrong end of both mortal and moral politics.)
But now, after little more than seven weeks in office, Trump saw his own predicament
as unique and overwhelming. Like no other president before (though he did make some
allowances for Bill Clinton), his enemies were out to get him. Worse, the system was
rigged against him. The bureaucratic swamp, the intelligence agencies, the unfair courts,
the lying media—they were all lined up against him. This was, for his senior staff, a
reliable topic of conversation with him: the possible martyrdom of Donald Trump.
In the president’s nighttime calls, he kept coming back to how unfair this was, and to
what Tony Blair had said—and others, too! It all added up. There was a plot against him.
Now, it was certainly true that Trump’s closest staff appreciated his volatility, and, to a
person, was alarmed by it. At points on the day’s spectrum of adverse political
developments, he could have moments of, almost everyone would admit, irrationality.
When that happened, he was alone in his anger and not approachable by anyone. His
senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he
said. And if some of them occasionally tried to hedge, Hope Hicks never did. She agreed
absolutely with all of it.
At Mar-a-Lago on the evening of March 3, the president watched Bret Baier interview
Paul Ryan on Fox. Baier asked the Speaker about a report on the online news site Circa—
owned by Sinclair, the conservative broadcast group—involving allegations that Trump
Tower had been surveilled during the campaign.
On March 4, Trump’s early morning tweets began:
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the
victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! (4:35 a.m.)
Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election?
Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW! (4:49 a.m.)
How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process.
This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy! (5:02 a.m.)
At 6:40 he called Priebus, waking him up. “Did you see my tweet?” he asked. “We’ve
caught them red-handed!” Then the president held his phone so Priebus could hear the
playback of the Baier show.
He had no interest in precision, or even any ability to be precise. This was pure public
exclamation, a window into pain and frustration. With his misspellings and his use of
1970s lingo—“wire tapping” called up an image of FBI agents crouched in a van on Fifth
Avenue—it seemed kooky and farcical. Of the many tweets that Trump had seemed to
hoist himself by, from the point of view of the media, intelligence community, and
extremely satisfied Democrats, the wiretap tweets had pulled him highest and most left
him dangling in ignorance and embarrassment.
According to CNN, “Two former senior U.S. officials quickly dismissed Trump’s
accusations out of hand. ‘Just nonsense,’ said one former senior U.S. intelligence official.”
Inside the White House, the “just nonsense” quote was thought to be from Ben Rhodes,
offered in cat-that-swallowed-the-canary fashion.
Ryan, for his part, told Priebus he had no idea what Baier was talking about and that he
was just BSing through the interview.
But if tapping Trump’s phones wasn’t literally true, there was a sudden effort to find
something that might be, and a frantic White House dished up a Breitbart article that
linked to a piece by Louise Mensch, a former British politician who, now living in the
United States, had become a kind of conspiracy-central of the Trump-Russia connection.
There was a further effort to push aggressive incidental collection and unmasking back
onto the Obama White House. But in the end, this was another—and to some quite the
ultimate—example of how difficult it was for the president to function in a literal,
definitional, lawyerly, cause-and-effect political world.
It was a turning point. Until now, Trump’s inner circle had been mostly game to defend
him. But after the wiretap tweets, everybody, save perhaps Hope Hicks, moved into a state
of queasy sheepishness, if not constant incredulity.
Sean Spicer, for one, kept repeating his daily, if not hourly, mantra: “You can’t make
this shit up.”
12
REPEAL AND REPLACE
A
few days after the election, Steve Bannon told the president-elect—in what Katie
Walsh would characterize with a raised eyebrow as more “Breitbart shenanigans”—
that they had the votes to replace Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House with Mark Meadows,
the head of the Tea Party-inspired Freedom Caucus and an early Trump supporter.
(Meadows’s wife had a particular place of regard in the Trump camp for continuing a
campaign swing across the Bible Belt over Billy Bush weekend.)
Nearly as much as winning the presidency itself, removing Ryan—indeed, humiliating
him—was an ultimate expression of what Bannon sought to accomplish and of the mindmeld
of Bannonism and Trumpism. From the beginning, the Breitbart campaign against
Paul Ryan was a central part of its campaign for Donald Trump. Its embrace of Trump,
and Bannon’s personal enlistment in the campaign fourteen months after it began, was in
part because Trump, throwing political sense to the wind, was willing to lead the charge
against Ryan and the GOP godfathers. Still, there was a difference between the way
Breitbart viewed Ryan and the way Trump viewed him.
For Breitbart, the House rebellion and transformation that had driven the former
Speaker, John Boehner, from office, and which, plausibly, was set to remake the House
into the center of the new radical Republicanism had been halted by Ryan’s election as
Speaker. Mitt Romney’s running mate, and a figure who had merged a conservative fiscal
wonkishness—he had been the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and,
as well, chairman of the House Budget Committee—with an old-fashioned idea of
unassailable Republican rectitude, Ryan was the official last, best hope of the Republican
Party. (Bannon, typically, had turned this trope into an official Trumpist talking point:
“Ryan was created in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.”) If the Republican Party
had been moved further right by the Tea Party rebellion, Ryan was part of the ballast that
would prevent it from moving further, or at least at a vastly slower pace. In this he
represented an adult, older-brother steadiness in contrast to the Tea Party’s ADD-hyper
immaturity—and a stoic, almost martyrlike resistance to the Trump movement.
Where the Republican establishment had promoted Ryan into this figure of not only
maturity but sagaciousness, the Tea Party-Bannon-Breitbart wing mounted an ad hominem
campaign pushing an image of Ryan as uncommitted to the cause, an inept strategist and
incompetent leader. He was the Tea Party-Bannon-Breitbart punch line: the ultimate empty
suit, a hee-haw sort of joke and an embarrassment.
Trump’s distaste for Ryan was significantly less structural. He had no views about
Ryan’s political abilities, and had paid no real attention to Ryan’s actual positions. His
view was personal. Ryan had insulted him—again and again. Ryan had kept betting
against him. Ryan had become the effective symbol of the Republican establishment’s
horror and disbelief about Trump. Adding insult to injury, Ryan had even achieved some
moral stature by dissing Trump (and, as usual, he considered anybody’s gain at his
expense a double insult). By the spring of 2016, Ryan was still, and by then the only,
alternative to Trump as the nominee. Say the word, many Republicans felt, and the
convention would stampede to Ryan. But Ryan’s seemingly smarter calculation was to let
Trump win the nomination, and then to emerge as the obvious figure to lead the party after
Trump’s historic defeat and the inevitable purge of the Tea Party-Trump-Breitbart wing.
Instead, the election destroyed Paul Ryan, at least in Steve Bannon’s eyes. Trump had
not only saved the Republican Party but had given it a powerful majority. The entire
Bannon dream had been realized. The Tea Party movement, with Trump as its remarkable
face and voice, had come to power—something like total power. It owned the Republican
Party. Publicly breaking Paul Ryan was the obvious and necessary step.
But a great deal could fall into the chasm between Bannon’s structural contempt for
Ryan and Trump’s personal resentment. If Bannon saw Ryan as being unwilling and
unable to carry out the new Bannon-Trump agenda, Trump saw a chastened Ryan as
suddenly and satisfyingly abject, submissive, and useful. Bannon wanted to get rid of the
entire Republican establishment; Trump was wholly satisfied that it now seemed to bend
to him.
“He’s quite a smart guy,” Trump said after his first postelection conversation with the
Speaker. “A very serious man. Everybody respects him.”
Ryan, “rising to a movie-version level of flattery and sucking-up painful to witness,”
according to one senior Trump aide, was able to delay his execution. As Bannon pressed
his case for Meadows—who was significantly less yielding than Ryan—Trump dithered
and then finally decided that not only was he not going to push for Ryan’s ouster, but Ryan
was going to be his man, his partner. In an example of the odd and unpredictable effects of
personal chemistry on Trump—of how easy it can be to sell the salesman—Trump would
now eagerly back Ryan’s agenda instead of the other way around.
“I don’t think that we quite calculated that the president would give him carte blanche,”
reflected Katie Walsh. “The president and Paul went from such a bad place during the
campaign to such a romance afterward that the president was happy to go along with
whatever he wanted.”
It didn’t exactly surprise Bannon when Trump flipped; Bannon understood how easy it
was to bullshit a bullshitter. Bannon also recognized that the Ryan rapprochement spoke to
Trump’s new appreciation of where he found himself. It was not just that Ryan had been
willing to bow to Trump, but that Trump was willing to bow to his own fears about how
little he actually knew about being president. If Ryan could be counted on to handle
Congress, thought the president, well, phew, that takes care of that.
* * *
Trump had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare. An
overweight seventy-year-old man with various physical phobias (for instance, he lied
about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese), he
personally found health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful subject. The
details of the contested legislation were, to him, particularly boring; his attention would
begin wandering from the first words of a policy discussion. He would have been able to
enumerate few of the particulars of Obamacare—other than expressing glee about the silly
Obama pledge that everyone could keep his or her doctor—and he certainly could not
make any kind of meaningful distinction, positive or negative, between the health care
system before Obamacare and the one after.
Prior to his presidency, he had likely never had a meaningful discussion in his life
about health insurance. “No one in the country, or on earth, has given less thought to
health insurance than Donald,” said Roger Ailes. Pressed in a campaign interview about
the importance of Obamacare repeal and reform, Trump was, to say the least, quite unsure
of its place on the agenda: “This is an important subject but there are a lot of important
subjects. Maybe it is in the top ten. Probably is. But there is heavy competition. So you
can’t be certain. Could be twelve. Or could be fifteen. Definitely top twenty for sure.”
It was another one of his counterintuitive connections to many voters: Obama and
Hillary Clinton seemed actually to want to talk about health care plans, whereas Trump,
like most everybody else, absolutely did not.
All things considered, he probably preferred the notion of more people having health
insurance than fewer people having it. He was even, when push came to shove, rather
more for Obamacare than for repealing Obamacare. As well, he had made a set of rash
Obama-like promises, going so far as to say that under a forthcoming Trumpcare plan (he
had to be strongly discouraged from using this kind of rebranding—political wise men
told him that this was one instance where he might not want to claim ownership with his
name), no one would lose their health insurance, and that preexisting conditions would
continue to be covered. In fact, he probably favored government-funded health care more
than any other Republican. “Why can’t Medicare simply cover everybody?” he had
impatiently wondered aloud during one discussion with aides, all of whom were careful
not to react to this heresy.
It was Bannon who held the line, insisting, sternly, that Obamacare was a litmus
Republican issue, and that, holding a majority in Congress, they could not face Republican
voters without having made good on the by now Republican catechism of repeal. Repeal,
in Bannon’s view, was the pledge, and repeal would be the most satisfying, even cathartic,
result. It would also be the easiest one to achieve, since virtually every Republican was
already publicly committed to voting for repeal. But Bannon, seeing health care as a weak
link in Bannonism-Trumpism’s appeal to the workingman, was careful to take a back seat
in the debate. Later, he hardly even made an effort to rationalize how he’d washed his
hands of the mess, saying just, “I hung back on health care because it’s not my thing.”
It was Ryan who, with “repeal and replace,” obfuscated the issue and won over Trump.
Repeal would satisfy the Republican bottom line, while replace would satisfy the
otherwise off-the-cuff pledges that Trump had made on his own. (Pay no attention to the
likelihood that what the president construed as repeal and replace might be very different
from what Ryan construed as repeal and replace.) “Repeal and replace” was a useful
slogan, too, in that it came to have meaning without having any actual or specific
meaning.
The week after the election, Ryan, bringing Tom Price—the Georgia congressman and
orthopedist who had become Ryan’s resident heath care expert—traveled to Trump’s
Bedminster, New Jersey, estate for a repeal and replace briefing. The two men summed up
for Trump—who kept wandering off topic and trying to turn the conversation to golf—
seven years of Republican legislative thinking about Obamacare and the Republican
alternatives. Here was a perfect example of an essential Trump paradigm: he acceded to
anyone who seemed to know more about any issue he didn’t care about, or simply one
whose details he couldn’t bring himself to focus on closely. Great! he would say,
punctuating every statement with a similar exclamation and regularly making an effort to
jump from his chair. On the spot, Trump eagerly agreed to let Ryan run the health care bill
and to make Price the Health and Human Services secretary.
Kushner, largely staying silent during the health care debate, publicly seemed to accept
the fact that a Republican administration had to address Obamacare, but he privately
suggested that he was personally against both repeal alone and repeal and replace. He and
his wife took a conventional Democratic view on Obamacare (it was better than the
alternatives; its problems could be fixed in the future) and strategically believed it was
best for the new administration to get some easier victories under its belt before entering a
hard-to-win or no-win fight. (What’s more, Kushner’s brother Josh ran a health insurance
company that depended on Obamacare.)
Not for the last time, then, the White House would be divided along the political
spectrum, Bannon taking an absolutist base position, Priebus aligned with Ryan in support
of the Republican leadership, and Kushner maintaining, and seeing no contradiction in, a
moderate Democratic view. As for Trump himself, here was a man who was simply trying
to get out from under something he didn’t especially care about.
Ryan and Priebus’s salesmanship promised to get the president out from under other
issues as well. Health care reform, according to the Ryan plan, was something of a magic
bullet. The reform the Speaker would push through Congress would fund the tax cuts
Trump had guaranteed, which, in turn, would make all that Trump-promised infrastructure
investment possible.
On this basis—this domino theory that was meant to triumphantly carry the Trump
administration through to the August recess and mark it as one of the most
transformational presidencies in modern times—Ryan kept his job as Speaker, rising from
hated campaign symbol to the administration’s man on the Hill. In effect, the president,
quite aware of his and his staff’s inexperience in drafting legislation (in fact, nobody on
his senior staff had any experience at all), decided to outsource his agenda—and to a
heretofore archenemy.
Watching Ryan steal the legislative initiative during the transition, Bannon faced an
early realpolitik moment. If the president was willing to cede major initiatives, Bannon
would need to run a counteroperation and be ready with more Breitbart shenanigans.
Kushner, for his part, developed a certain Zen—you just had to go with the president’s
whims. As for the president, it was quite clear that deciding between contradictory policy
approaches was not his style of leadership. He simply hoped that difficult decisions would
make themselves.
* * *
Bannon was not merely contemptuous of Ryan’s ideology; he had no respect, either, for
his craft. In Bannon’s view, what the new Republican majority needed was a man like
John McCormick, the Democratic Speaker of the House who had served during Bannon’s
teenage years and had shepherded Johnson’s Great Society legislation. McCormick and
other Democrats from the 1960s were Bannon’s political heroes—put Tip O’Neill in that
pantheon, too. An Irish Catholic working-class man was philosophically separate from
aristocrats and gentry—and without aspirations to be either. Bannon venerated oldfashioned
pols. He looked like one himself: liver spots, jowls, edema. And he hated
modern politicians; they lacked, in addition to political talents, authenticity and soul. Ryan
was an Irish Catholic altar boy who had stayed an altar boy. He had not grown up to be a
thug, cop, or priest—or a true politician.
Ryan certainly wasn’t a vote counter. He was a benighted figure who had no ability to
see around corners. His heart was in tax reform, but as far as he could tell the only path to
tax reform was through health care. But he cared so little about the issue that—just as the
White House had outsourced health care to him—he outsourced the writing of the bill to
insurance companies and K Street lobbyists.
In fact, Ryan had tried to act like McCormick or O’Neill, offering absolute assurances
of his hold on the legislation. It was, he told the president during his several daily calls, a
“done deal.” Trump’s trust in Ryan rose still higher, and it seemed to become in his own
mind proof that he had achieved a kind of mastery over the Hill. If the president had been
worried, he was worried no more. Done deal. The White House, having had to sweat
hardly at all, was about to get a big victory, bragged Kushner, embracing the expected win
over his dislike of the bill.
The sudden concern that the outcome might be otherwise began in early March. Katie
Walsh, who Kushner now described as “demanding and petulant,” began to sound the
alarm. But her efforts to personally involve the president in vote collecting were blocked
by Kushner in a set of increasingly tense face-offs. The unraveling had begun.
* * *
Trump still dismissively called it “the Russian thing—a whole lot of nothing.” But on
March 20, FBI director James Comey appeared before the House Intelligence Committee
and tied the story up in a neat package:
I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part
of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts
to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, and that includes investigating the
nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and
the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the
campaign and Russia’s efforts. As with any counter intelligence investigation, this
will also include an assessment of whether any crimes were committed. Because it
is an open, ongoing investigation and is classified I cannot say more about what we
are doing and whose conduct we are examining.
He had, however, said quite enough. Comey converted rumor, leaks, theory, innuendo,
and pundit hot air—and until this moment that was all there was, at best the hope of a
scandal—into a formal pursuit of the White House. Efforts to pooh-pooh the narrative—
the fake news label, the president’s germaphobe defense against the golden shower
accusations, the haughty dismissal of minor associates and hopeless hangers-on, the
plaintive, if real, insistence that no crime had even been alleged, and the president’s charge
that he was the victim of an Obama wiretap—had failed. Comey himself dismissed the
wiretap allegation. By the evening of Comey’s appearance, it was evident to everyone that
the Russia plot line, far from petering out, had a mighty and bloody life to come.
Kushner, ever mindful of his father’s collision with the Justice Department, was
especially agitated by Comey’s increasing focus on the White House. Doing something
about Comey became a Kushner theme. What can we do about him? was a constant
question. And it was one he kept raising with the president.
Yet this was also—as Bannon, without too much internal success, tried to explain—a
structural issue. It was an opposition move. You could express surprise at how fierce,
creative, and diabolical the moves turned out to be, but you shouldn’t be surprised that
your enemies would try to hurt you. This was check, but far from checkmate, and you had
to continue to play the game, knowing that it would be a very long one. The only way to
win the game, Bannon argued, was with a disciplined strategy.
But the president, prodded here by his family, was an obsessive and not a strategist. In
his mind, this was not a problem to address, this was a person to focus on: Comey. Trump
eschewed abstractions and, ad hominem, zeroed in on his opponent. Comey had been a
difficult puzzle for Trump: Comey had declined to have the FBI pursue charges against
Clinton for her email dodge. Then, in October, Comey had single-handedly boosted
Trump’s fortunes with the letter reopening the Clinton email investigation.
In their personal interactions, Trump had found Comey to be a stiff—he had no banter,
no game. But Trump, who invariably thought people found him irresistible, believed that
Comey admired his banter and game. When pressed, by Bannon and others, to fire Comey
as one of his early acts—an idea opposed by Kushner, and thus another bullet on Bannon’s
list of bad recommendations by Kushner—the president said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got him.”
That is, he had no doubt that he could woo and flatter the FBI director into positive feeling
for him, if not outright submission.
Some seducers are preternaturally sensitive to the signals of those they try to seduce;
others indiscriminately attempt to seduce, and, by the law of averages, often succeed (this
latter group of men might now be regarded as harassers). That was Trump’s approach to
women—pleased when he scored, unconcerned when he didn’t (and, often, despite the
evidence, believing that he had). And so it was with Director Comey.
In their several meetings since he took office—when Comey received a presidential
hug on January 22; at their dinner on January 27, during which Comey was asked to stay
on as FBI director; at their Valentine’s Day chat after emptying the office of everybody
else, including Sessions, Comey’s titular boss—Trump was confident that he had laid on
the moves. The president was all but certain that Comey, understanding that he, Trump,
had his back (i.e., had let him keep his job), would have Trump’s back, too.
But now this testimony. It made no sense. What did make sense to Trump was that
Comey wanted it to be about him. He was a media whore—this Trump understood. All
right, then, he, too, could play it this way.
Indeed, health care, a no-fun issue—suddenly becoming much less fun, if, as seemed
increasingly possible, Ryan couldn’t deliver—palled before the clarity of Comey, and the
fury, enmity, and bitterness Trump, and Trump’s relatives, now bore him.
Comey was the larger-than-life problem. Taking Comey down was the obvious
solution. Getting Comey became the mission.
In Keystone Cops fashion, the White House enlisted House Intelligence Committee
chairman Devin Nunes in a farcical effort to discredit Comey and support the wiretap
theory. The scheme shortly collapsed in universal ridicule.
Bannon, taking a public hands-off with respect to both health care and Comey, began
to advise reporters that the important story wasn’t health care but Russia. This was cryptic
advice: it was not clear whether he was trying to distract attention from the coming health
care debacle, or couple it with this new dangerous variable, thus amping up the kind of
chaos that he usually benefited from.
But Bannon was unequivocal about one thing. As the Russia story unfolds, he advised
reporters, keep your eye on Kushner.
* * *
By mid-March, Gary Cohn had been drafted into the effort to salvage the faltering health
care bill. This might have seemed like a form of hazing for Cohn, whose grasp of
legislative matters was even more limited than that of most in the White House.
On Friday, March 24, the morning of the theoretical House vote for the Republican
health care bill, Politico’s Playbook characterized the chances of a vote actually coming to
the floor as a “toss-up.” In that morning’s senior staff meeting, Cohn was asked for an
assessment of where things stood and promptly said, “I think it’s a toss-up.”
“Really?” thought Katie Walsh. “That’s what you think?”
Bannon, joining Walsh in a pitiless contempt for the White House effort, targeted
Kushner, Cohn, Priebus, Price, and Ryan in a series of calls to reporters. Kushner and
Cohn could, per Bannon, be counted on to run at the first sound of gunfire. (Kushner, in
fact, had spent much of the week on a skiing holiday.) Priebus mouthed Ryan talking
points and excuses. Price, supposedly the health care guru, was an oafish imposter; he
would stand up in meetings and mumble nothing but nonsense.
These were the bad guys, setting up the administration to lose the House in 2018,
thereby assuring the president’s impeachment. This was vintage Bannon analysis: a certain
and immediate political apocalypse that sat side by side with the potential for a half
century of Bannonism-Trumpism rule.
Convinced he knew the direction of success, keenly aware of his own age and finite
opportunities, and—if for no clear reason—seeing himself as a talented political infighter,
Bannon sought to draw the line between believers and sell-outs, being and nothingness.
For him to succeed, he needed to isolate the Ryan, Cohn, and Kushner factions.
The Bannon faction held tight on forcing a vote on the health care bill—even knowing
defeat was inevitable. “I want it as a report on Ryan’s job as Speaker,” said Bannon. That
is, a devastating report, an epic fail.
The day of the vote, Pence was sent to the Hill to make one last pitch to Meadows’s
Freedom Caucus. (Ryan’s people believed that Bannon was secretly urging Meadows to
hold out, though earlier in the week Bannon had harshly ordered the Freedom Caucus to
vote for the bill—“a silly Bannon show,” according to Walsh.) At three-thirty, Ryan called
the president to say he was short fifteen to twenty votes and needed to pull the vote.
Bannon, backed by Mulvaney, who had become the White House’s Hill operative,
continued to urge an immediate vote. A defeat here would be a major defeat for the
Republican leadership. That suited Bannon just fine: let them fail.
But the president backed down. Faced with this singular opportunity to make the
Republican leadership the issue, and to name them as the problem, Trump wobbled,
provoking in Bannon a not-so-silent rage. Ryan then leaked that it was the president who
had asked him to cancel the vote.
Over the weekend, Bannon called a long list of reporters and told them—off the record,
but hardly—“I don’t see Ryan hanging around a long time.”
* * *
After the bill had been pulled that Friday, Katie Walsh, feeling both angry and disgusted,
told Kushner she wanted out. Outlining what she saw as the grim debacle of the Trump
White House, she spoke with harsh candor about bitter rivalries joined to vast
incompetence and an uncertain mission. Kushner, understanding that she needed to be
discredited immediately, leaked that she had been leaking and hence had to be pushed out.
On Sunday evening, Walsh had dinner with Bannon in his Capitol Hill redoubt, the
Breitbart Embassy, during which, to no avail, he implored her to stay. On Monday she
sorted out the details with Priebus—she would leave to work part time for the RNC and
part time for the Trump (c)(4), the outside campaign group. By Thursday she was gone.
Ten weeks into the new administration, the Trump White House had lost, after Michael
Flynn, its second senior staff member—and the one whose job it was to actually get things
done.
13
BANNON AGONISTES
H
e, too, felt like a prisoner, he had told Katie Walsh when she came to tell him she
was leaving.
By ten weeks in, Steve Bannon’s mastery of the Trump agenda, or at least of Trump
himself, appeared to have crumbled. His current misery was both Catholic in nature—the
self-flagellation of a man who believed he lived on a higher moral plane than all others—
and fundamentally misanthropic. As an antisocial, maladjusted, post-middle-aged man, he
had to make a supreme effort to get along with others, an effort that often did not go well.
Most especially, he was miserable because of Donald Trump, whose cruelties, always
great even when they were casual, were unbearable when he truly turned against you.
“I hated being on the campaign, I hated the transition, I hate being here in the White
House,” said Bannon, sitting one evening in Reince Priebus’s office, on an unseasonably
warm evening in early spring, with the French doors open to the arbor-covered patio
where he and Priebus, now firm friends and allies in their antipathy toward Jarvanka, had
set an outdoor table.
But Bannon was, he believed, here for a reason. And it was his firm belief—a belief he
was unable to keep to himself, thus continually undermining his standing with the
president—that his efforts had brought everybody else here. Even more important, he was
the only person showing up for work every day who was committed to the purpose of
actually changing the country. Changing it quickly, radically, and truly.
The idea of a split electorate—of blue and red states, of two opposing currents of
values, of globalists and nationalists, of an establishment and populist revolt—was media
shorthand for cultural angst and politically roiled times, and, to a large degree, for
business as usual. But Bannon believed the split was literal. The United States had become
a country of two hostile peoples. One would necessarily win and the other lose. Or one
would dominate while the other would become marginal.
This was modern civil war—Bannon’s war. The country built on the virtue and the
character and the strength of the American workingman circa 1955–65 was the ideal he
meant to defend and restore: trade agreements, or trade wars, that supported American
manufacturing; immigration policies that protected American workers (and, hence,
American culture, or at least America’s identity from 1955 to 1965); and an international
isolation that would conserve American resources and choke off the ruling class’s Davos
sensibility (and also save working-class military lives). This was, in the view of almost
everyone but Donald Trump and the alt-right, a crazy bit of voodoo economic and political
nonsense. But it was, for Bannon, a revolutionary and religious idea.
For most others in the White House, it was Bannon’s pipe dream. “Steve is … Steve,”
became the gentle term of art for tolerating him. “A lot of stuff goes on in his head,” said
the president, pursuing one of his reliable conversational themes, dismissing Bannon.
But it wasn’t Bannon versus everybody else so much as it was Bannon Trump versus
non-Bannon Trump. If Trump, in his dark, determined, and aggressive mood, could
represent Bannon and his views, he could just as easily represent nothing at all—or
represent solely his own need for instant gratification. That’s what the non-Bannon people
understood about Trump. If the boss was happy, then a normal, incremental, two-stepsforward-one-step-back
approach to politics might prevail. Even a new sort of centrism, as
inimical to Bannonism as it was possible to conceive, could emerge. Bannon’s
pronouncements about a fifty-year rule for Trumpism might then be supplanted by the rule
of Jared, Ivanka, and Goldman Sachs.
By the end of March, this was the side that was winning. Bannon’s efforts to use the
epic health care fail as evidence that the establishment was the enemy had hopelessly
backfired. Trump saw the health care failure as his own failure, but since he didn’t have
failures, it couldn’t be a failure, and would in fact be a success—if not now, soon. So
Bannon, a Cassandra on the sidelines, was the problem.
Trump rationalized his early embrace of Bannon by heaping scorn on him—and by
denying that he had ever embraced him. If there was anything wrong with his White
House, it was Steve Bannon. Maligning Bannon was Trump’s idea of fun. When it came to
Bannon, Trump rose to something like high analysis: “Steve Bannon’s problem is PR. He
doesn’t understand it. Everybody hates him. Because … look at him. His bad PR rubs off
on other people.”
The real question, of course, was how Bannon, the fuck-the-system populist, had ever
come to think that he might get along with Donald Trump, the use-the-system-to-his-ownadvantage
billionaire. For Bannon, Trump was the game he had to play. But in truth he
hardly played it—or couldn’t help undermining it. While ever proclaiming it Trump’s
victory, he would helplessly point out that when he had joined the campaign it was facing
a polling deficit that no campaign, ten weeks from election day, had ever recovered from.
Trump without Bannon, according to Bannon, was Wendell Willkie.
Bannon understood the necessity not to take what otherwise might be Trump’s own
spotlight; he was well aware that the president meticulously logged all claims against
credit that he believed solely to be his. Both he and Kushner, the two most important
figures in the White House after the president, seemed professionally mute. Still, Bannon
seemed to be everywhere, and the president was convinced—rightly—that it was the result
of Bannon’s private press operation. More often than self-mockery could sustain, Bannon
referred to himself as “President Bannon.” A bitter Kellyanne Conway, regularly dissed
for her own spotlight grabbing, confirmed the president’s observation that Bannon stepped
into as many White House photo ops as possible. (Everybody seemed to keep count of
everybody else’s photo bombs.) Bannon also did not much bother to disguise his
innumerable blind quotes, nor to make much of an effort to temper his not-so-private slurs
against Kushner, Cohn, Powell, Conway, Priebus, and even the president’s daughter
(often, most especially, the president’s daughter).
Curiously, Bannon never expressed a sideways thought about Trump—not yet.
Trump’s own righteousness and soundness was perhaps too central to Bannon’s construct
of Trumpism. Trump was the idea you had to support. This could seem to approach the
traditional idea of respecting the office. In fact, it was the inverse. The man was the vessel:
there was no Bannon without Trump. However much he might stand on his unique, even
magical-seeming, contributions to the Trump victory, Bannon’s opportunity was wholly
provided by Trump’s peculiar talent. He was no more than the man behind the man—
Trump’s Cromwell, as he put it, even though he was perfectly aware of Cromwell’s fate.
But his loyalty to the idea of Trump hardly protected him from the actual Trump’s
constant briefs against him. The president had assembled a wide jury to weigh Bannon’s
fate, putting before it, in an insulting Borscht Belt style, a long list of Bannon’s
annoyances: “Guy looks homeless. Take a shower, Steve. You’ve worn those pants for six
days. He says he’s made money, I don’t believe it.” (The president, notably, never much
took issue with Bannon’s policy views.) The Trump administration was hardly two months
old, yet every media outlet was predicting Bannon’s coming defenestration.
One particularly profitable transaction with the president was to bring him new, ever
harsher criticism of his chief strategist, or reports of other people criticizing him. It was
important to know not to say anything positive to Trump about Bannon. Even faint praise
before the “but”—“Steve is obviously smart, but …”—could produce a scowl and pout if
you didn’t hurry to the “but.” (Then again, saying anyone was “smart” invariably incurred
Trump’s annoyance.) Kushner enlisted Scarborough and Brzezinski in something of a
regular morning television Bannon slag-a-thon.
H. R. McMaster, the three-star general who had replaced Michael Flynn as National
Security Advisor, had secured the president’s pledge that he could veto members of the
NSC. Kushner, a supporter of McMaster’s appointment, had quickly ensured that Dina
Powell, a key player in the Kushner faction, would join the NSC and Bannon would be
removed.
Bannonites would, with lowered voices and certain pity, ask each other how he seemed
and how he was holding up; invariably they would agree about how bad he looked, the
strain etching ever deeper into his already ruined face. David Bossie thought Bannon
“looked like he would die.”
“I now understand what it is like to be in the court of the Tudors,” reflected Bannon.
On the campaign trail, he recalled, Newt Gingrich “would come with all these dumb ideas.
When we won he was my new best friend. Every day a hundred ideas. When”—by spring
in the White House—“I got cold, when I went through my Valley of Death, I saw him one
day in the lobby and he looks down, avoiding my eyes with a kind of mumbled ‘Hey,
Steve.’ And I say, ‘What are you doing here, let’s get you inside,’ and he says, ‘No, no,
I’m fine, I’m waiting for Dina Powell.’ ”
Having attained the unimaginable—bringing a fierce alt-right, anti-liberal
ethnopopulism into a central place in the White House—Bannon found himself face to
face with the untenable: undermined by and having to answer to rich, entitled Democrats.
* * *
The paradox of the Trump presidency was that it was both the most ideologically driven
and the least. It represented a deeply structural assault on liberal values—Bannon’s
deconstruction of the administrative state meant to take with it media, academic, and notfor-profit
institutions. But from the start it also was apparent that the Trump administration
could just as easily turn into a country club Republican or a Wall Street Democrat regime.
Or just a constant effort to keep Donald Trump happy. Trump had his collection of petpeeve
issues, test-marketed in various media rollouts and megarallies, but none seemed so
significant as his greater goal of personally coming out ahead of the game.
As the drumbeat for Bannon’s removal grew, the Mercers stepped in to protect their
investment in radical government overthrow and the future of Steve Bannon.
In an age when all successful political candidates are surrounded by, if not at the beck
and call of, difficult, rich people pushing the bounds of their own power—and the richer
they were, the more difficult they might be—Bob and Rebekah Mercer were quite onto
themselves. If Trump’s ascent was unlikely, the Mercers’ was all the more so.
Even the difficult rich—the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson on the right, David
Geffen and George Soros on the left—are leavened and restrained by the fact that money
exists in a competitive market. Obnoxiousness has its limits. The world of the rich is, in its
fashion, self-regulating. Social climbing has rules.
But among the difficult and entitled rich, the Mercers cut a path through disbelief and
incredulity. Unlike other people contributing vast sums to political candidates, they were
willing not to win—ever. Their bubble was their bubble.
So when they did win, by the fluke alignment of the stars for Donald Trump, they were
yet pure. Now, having found themselves—by odds that were perfect-storm outlandish—in
power, they were not going to give it up because Steve Bannon had hurt feelings and
wasn’t getting enough sleep.
Toward the end of March, the Mercers organized a set of emergency meetings. At least
one of them was with the president himself. It was exactly the kind of meeting Trump
usually avoided: he had no interest in personnel problems, since they put the emphasis on
other people. Suddenly he was being forced to deal with Steve Bannon, rather than the
other way around. What’s more, it was a problem he had in part created with his constant
Bannon dissing, and now he was being asked to eat crow. Even though the president kept
saying he could and should fire Bannon, he was aware of the costs—a right-wing backlash
of unpredictable proportions.
Trump thought the Mercers were super-strange bedfellows too. He didn’t like Bob
Mercer looking at him and not saying a word; he didn’t like being in the same room with
Mercer or his daughter. But though he refused to admit that the Mercers’ decision to back
him and their imposition of Bannon on the campaign in August was, likely, the event
without which he would not now be in the White House, he did understand that if crossed,
the Mercers and Bannon were potential world-class troublemakers.
The complexity of the Bannon-Mercer problem prompted Trump to consult two
contradictory figures: Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes. Even as the president did so,
perhaps he knew he would come up with a zero-sum answer.
Murdoch, already briefed by Kushner, said getting rid of Bannon was the only way to
deal with the dysfunction in the White House. (Murdoch, of course, made the assumption
that getting rid of Kushner was not an option.) It was the inevitable outcome, so do it now.
Murdoch’s response made perfect sense: by now, he had become an active political
supporter of the Kushner-Goldman moderates, seeing them as the people who would save
the world from Bannon and, indeed, from Trump as well.
Ailes, blunt and declarative as always, said, “Donald, you can’t do it. You’ve made
your bed and Steve is in it. You don’t have to listen to him, you don’t have to even get
along with him. But you’re married to him. You can’t handle a divorce right now.”
Jared and Ivanka were gleeful at the prospect of Bannon’s ouster. His departure would
return the Trump organization to pure family control—the family and its functionaries,
without an internal rival for brand meaning and leadership. From the family’s point of
view, it would also—at least in theory—help facilitate one of the most implausible brand
shifts in history: Donald Trump to respectability. The dream, long differed, of the Trump
pivot, might actually happen without Bannon. Never mind that this Kushner ideal—saving
Trump from himself and projecting Jared and Ivanka into the future—was nearly as farfetched
and extreme as Bannon’s own fantasy of a White House dedicated to the return of
a pre-1965 American mythology.
If Bannon were to go, it also might cause the ultimate split in the already fractured
Republican Party. Before the election, one theory suggested that a defeated Trump would
take his embittered 35 percent and make hay with a rancorous minority. Now the alarming
theory was that as Kushner tried to transform his father-in-law into the kind of latter-day
Rockefeller that Trump, however implausibly, had on occasion dreamed of becoming
(Rockefeller Center being an inspiration for his own real estate branding), Bannon could
run off with some meaningful part of that 35 percent.
This was the Breitbart threat. The Breitbart organization remained under the control of
the Mercers, and it could at any moment be handed back to Steve Bannon. And now, with
Bannon’s overnight transformation into political genius and kingmaker, and the triumph of
the alt-right, Breitbart was potentially much more powerful. Trump’s victory had, in some
sense, handed the Mercers the tool with which to destroy him. As push came to shove and
the mainstream media and swamp bureaucracy more and more militantly organized
against him, Trump was certainly going to need the Mercer-backed alt-right standing up in
his defense. What, after all, was he without them?
As the pressure mounted, Bannon—until now absolutely disciplined in his regard for
Donald Trump as the ideal avatar of Trumpism (and Bannonism), rigidly staying in
character as aide and supporter of a maverick political talent—began to crack. Trump, as
almost anyone who had ever worked for him appreciated, was, despite what you hoped he
might be, Trump—and he would invariably sour on everyone around him.
But the Mercers dug in. Without Bannon, they believed the Trump presidency, at least
the Trump presidency they had imagined (and helped pay for), was over. The focus
became how to make Steve’s life better. They made him pledge to leave the office at a
reasonable time—no more waiting around for Trump to possibly need a dinner
companion. (Recently, Jared and Ivanka had been heading this off anyway.) The solution
included a search for a Bannon’s Bannon—a chief strategist for the chief strategist.
In late March, the Mercers came to an agreed-upon truce with the president: Bannon
would not be fired. While this guaranteed nothing about his influence and standing, it did
buy Bannon and his allies some time. They could regroup. A presidential aide was only as
good as the last good advice he gave, and in this, Bannon believed the ineptness of his
rivals, Kushner and his wife, would seal their fate.
* * *
Though the president agreed not to fire Bannon, he gave Kushner and his daughter
something in exchange: he would enhance both their roles.
On March 27, the Office of American Innovation was created and Kushner was put in
charge. Its stated mission was to reduce federal bureaucracy—that is, to reduce it by
creating more of it, a committee to end committees. In addition, Kushner’s new outfit
would study the government’s internal technology, focus on job creation, encourage and
suggest policies about apprenticeships, enlist business in a partnership with government,
and help with the opioid epidemic. It was, in other words, business as usual, albeit with a
new burst of enthusiasm for the administrative state.
But its real import was that it gave Kushner his own internal White House staff, a team
of people working not just on Kushner-supported projects—all largely antithetical to
Bannon projects—but, more broadly, as Kushner explained to one staffer, “on expanding
my footprint.” Kushner even got his own “comms person,” a dedicated spokesperson and
Kushner promoter. It was a bureaucratic build-out meant not only to enhance Kushner but
to diminish Steve Bannon.
Two days after the announcement about Jared’s expanded power base, Ivanka was
formally given a White House job, too: adviser to the president. From the beginning she
had been a key adviser to her husband—and he to her. Still, it was an overnight
consolidation of Trump family power in the White House. It was, quite at Steve Bannon’s
expense, a remarkable bureaucratic coup: a divided White House had now all but been
united under the president’s family.
His son-in-law and daughter hoped—they were even confident—that they could speak
to DJT’s better self, or at least balance Republican needs with progressive rationality,
compassion, and good works. Further, they could support this moderation by routing a
steady stream of like-minded CEOs through the Oval Office. And, indeed, the president
seldom disagreed with and was often enthusiastic about the Jared and Ivanka program. “If
they tell him the whales need to be saved, he’s basically for it,” noted Katie Walsh.
But Bannon, suffering in his internal exile, remained convinced that he represented
what Donald Trump actually believed, or, more accurately, what the president felt. He
knew Trump to be a fundamentally emotional man, and he was certain that the deepest
part of him was angry and dark. However much the president wanted to support his
daughter and her husband’s aspirations, their worldview was not his. As Walsh saw it,
“Steve believes he is Darth Vader and that Trump is called to the dark side.”
Indeed, Trump’s fierce efforts to deny Bannon’s influence may well have been in
inverse proportion to the influence Bannon actually had.
The president did not truly listen to anybody. The more you talked, the less he listened.
“But Steve is careful about what he says, and there is something, a timbre in his voice and
his energy and excitement, that the president can really hone in on, blocking everything
else out,” said Walsh.
As Jared and Ivanka were taking a victory lap, Trump signed Executive Order 13783, a
change in environmental policy carefully shepherded by Bannon, which, he argued,
effectively gutted the National Environmental Policy Act, the 1970 law that served as the
foundation of modern environmental protections and that required all executive agencies
to prepare environmental impact statements for agency actions. Among other impacts, EO
13783 removed a prior directive to consider climate change—a precursor to coming
debates on the country’s position regarding the Paris Climate Accord.
On April 3, Kushner unexpectedly turned up in Iraq, accompanying Gen. Joseph
Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to the White House press office,
Kushner was “traveling on behalf of the president to express the president’s support and
commitment to the government of Iraq and U.S. personnel currently engaged in the
campaign.” Kushner, otherwise a remote and clammed-up media presence, was copiously
photographed throughout the trip.
Bannon, watching one of the many television screens that provided a constant
background in the West Wing, glimpsed Kushner wearing a headset while flying in a
helicopter over Baghdad. To no one in particular, recalling a foolish and callow George W.
Bush in flight gear on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln proclaiming the end of the
Iraq War, he intoned, “Mission accomplished.”
Gritting his teeth, Bannon saw the structure of the White House moving in the exact
opposite direction from Trumpism-Bannonism. But even now, he was certain he perceived
the real impulses of the administration coming his way. It was Bannon, stoic and resolute,
the great if unheralded warrior, who, at least in his own mind, was destined to save the
nation.
14
SITUATION ROOM
J
ust before seven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, April 4, the seventy-fourth day of
the Trump presidency, Syrian government forces attacked the rebel-held town of Khan
Sheikhoun with chemical weapons. Scores of children were killed. It was the first time a
major outside event had intruded into the Trump presidency.
Most presidencies are shaped by external crises. The presidency, in its most critical
role, is a reactive job. Much of the alarm about Donald Trump came from the widespread
conviction that he could not be counted on to be cool or deliberate in the face of a storm.
He had been lucky so far: ten weeks in, and he had not been seriously tested. In part this
might have been because the crises generated from inside the White House had
overshadowed all outside contenders.
Even a gruesome attack, even one on children in an already long war, might not yet be
a presidential game changer of the kind that everyone knew would surely come. Still,
these were chemical weapons launched by a repeat offender, Bashar al-Assad. In any other
presidency, such an atrocity would command a considered and, ideally, skillful response.
Obama’s consideration had in fact been less than skillful in proclaiming the use of
chemical weapons as a red line—and then allowing it to be crossed.
Almost nobody in the Trump administration was willing to predict how the president
might react—or even whether he would react. Did he think the chemical attack important
or unimportant? No one could say.
If the Trump White House was as unsettling as any in American history, the president’s
views of foreign policy and the world at large were among its most random, uninformed,
and seemingly capricious aspects. His advisers didn’t know whether he was an isolationist
or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two. He was enamored with
generals and determined that people with military command experience take the lead in
foreign policy, but he hated to be told what to do. He was against nation building, but he
believed there were few situations that he couldn’t personally make better. He had little to
no experience in foreign policy, but he had no respect for the experts, either.
Suddenly, the question of how the president might respond to the attack in Khan
Sheikhoun was a litmus test for normality and those who hoped to represent it in Trump’s
White House. Here was the kind of dramatic juxtaposition that might make for a vivid and
efficient piece of theater: people working in the Trump White House who were trying to
behave normally.
* * *
Surprisingly, perhaps, there were quite a few such people.
Acting normal, embodying normality—doing things the way a striving, achieving,
rational person would do them—was how Dina Powell saw her job in the White House. At
forty-three, Powell had made a career at the intersection of the corporate world and public
policy; she did well (very, very well) by doing good. She had made great strides in George
W. Bush’s White House and then later at Goldman Sachs. Returning to the White House at
a penultimate level, with at least a chance of rising to one of the country’s highest
unelected positions, would potentially be worth enormous sums when she returned to the
corporate world.
In Trumpland, however, the exact opposite could happen. Powell’s carefully cultivated
reputation, her brand (and she was one of those people who thought intently about their
personal brand), could become inextricably tied to the Trump brand. Worse, she could
become part of what might easily turn into historical calamity. Already, for many people
who knew Dina Powell—and everybody who was anybody knew Dina Powell—the fact
that she had taken a position in the Trump White House indicated either recklessness or
seriously bad judgment.
“How,” wondered one of her longtime friends, “does she rationalize this?” Friends,
family, and neighbors asked, silently or openly, Do you know what you’re doing? And how
could you? And why would you?
Here was the line dividing those whose reason for being in the White House was a
professed loyalty to the president from the professionals they had needed to hire. Bannon,
Conway, and Hicks—along with an assortment of more or less peculiar ideologues that
had attached themselves to Trump and, of course, his family, all people without clearly
monetizable reputations before their association with Trump—were, for better or worse,
hitched to him. (Even among dedicated Trumpers there was always a certain amount of
holding their breath and constant reexamination of their options.) But those within the
larger circle of White House influence, those with some stature or at least an imagined
stature, had to work through significantly more complicated contortions of personal and
career justification.
Often they wore their qualms on their sleeves. Mick Mulvaney, the OMB director,
made a point of stressing the fact that he worked in the Executive Office Building, not the
West Wing. Michael Anton, holding down Ben Rhodes’s former job at the NSC, had
perfected a deft eye roll (referred to as the Anton eye roll). H. R. McMaster seemed to
wear a constant grimace and have perpetual steam rising from his bald head. (“What’s
wrong with him?” the president often asked.)
There was, of course, a higher rationale: the White House needed normal, sane, logical,
adult professionals. To a person, these pros saw themselves bringing positive attributes—
rational minds, analytic powers, significant professional experience—to a situation sorely
lacking those things. They were doing their bit to make things more normal and, therefore,
more stable. They were bulwarks, or saw themselves that way, against chaos,
impulsiveness, and stupidity. They were less Trump supporters than an antidote to Trump.
“If it all starts going south—more south than it is already going—I have no doubt that
Joe Hagin would himself take personal responsibility, and do what needed to be done,”
said a senior Republican figure in Washington, in an effort at self-reassurance, about the
former Bush staffer who now served as Trump’s deputy chief of staff for operations.
But this sense of duty and virtue involved a complicated calculation about your
positive effect on the White House versus its negative effect on you. In April, an email
originally copied to more than a dozen people went into far wider circulation when it was
forwarded and reforwarded. Purporting to represent the views of Gary Cohn and quite
succinctly summarizing the appalled sense in much of the White House, the email read:
It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read
anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up
halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is
no better. Kushner is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant
prick who thinks he’s smarter than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of
terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his family. I hate the work, but
feel I need to stay because I’m the only person there with a clue what he’s doing.
The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only accept people who pass
ridiculous purity tests, even for midlevel policy-making jobs where the people will
never see the light of day. I am in a constant state of shock and horror.
Still, the mess that might do serious damage to the nation, and, by association, to your
own brand, might be transcended if you were seen as the person, by dint of competence
and professional behavior, taking control of it.
Powell, who had come into the White House as an adviser to Ivanka Trump, rose, in
weeks, to a position on the National Security Council, and was then, suddenly, along with
Cohn, her Goldman colleague, a contender for some of the highest posts in the
administration.
At the same time, both she and Cohn were spending a good deal of time with their ad
hoc outside advisers on which way they might jump out of the White House. Powell could
eye seven-figure comms jobs at various Fortune 100 companies, or a C-suite future at a
tech company—Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, after all, had a background in corporate
philanthropy and in the Obama administration. Cohn, on his part, already a
centamillionaire, was thinking about the World Bank or the Fed.
Ivanka Trump—dealing with some of the same personal and career considerations as
Powell, except without a viable escape strategy—was quite in her own corner.
Inexpressive and even botlike in public but, among friends, discursive and strategic,
Ivanka had become both more defensive about her father and more alarmed by where his
White House was heading. She and her husband blamed this on Bannon and his let-
Trump-be-Trump philosophy (often interpreted as let Trump be Bannon). The couple had
come to regard him as more diabolical than Rasputin. Hence it was their job to keep
Bannon and the ideologues from the president, who, they believed, was, in his heart, a
practical-minded person (at least in his better moods), swayed only by people preying on
his short attention span.
In mutually codependent fashion, Ivanka relied on Dina to suggest management tactics
that would help her handle her father and the White House, while Dina relied on Ivanka to
offer regular assurances that not everyone named Trump was completely crazy. This link
meant that within the greater West Wing population, Powell was seen as part of the much
tighter family circle, which, while it conferred influence, also made her the target of ever
sharper attacks. “She will expose herself as being totally incompetent,” said a bitter Katie
Walsh, seeing Powell as less a normalizing influence than another aspect of the abnormal
Trump family power play.
And indeed, both Powell and Cohn had privately concluded that the job they both had
their eye on—chief of staff, that singularly necessary White House management position
—would always be impossible to perform if the president’s daughter and son-in-law, no
matter how much they were allied to them, were in de facto command whenever they
wanted to exert it.
Dina and Ivanka were themselves spearheading an initiative that, otherwise, would
have been a fundamental responsibility of the chief of staff: controlling the president’s
information flow.
* * *
The unique problem here was partly how to get information to someone who did not (or
could not or would not) read, and who at best listened only selectively. But the other part
of the problem was how best to qualify the information that he liked to get. Hope Hicks,
after more than a year at this side, had honed her instincts for the kind of information—the
clips—that would please him. Bannon, in his intense and confiding voice, could insinuate
himself into the president’s mind. Kellyanne Conway brought him the latest outrages
against him. There were his after-dinner calls—the billionaire chorus. And then cable,
itself programmed to reach him—to court him or enrage him.
The information he did not get was formal information. The data. The details. The