options. The analysis. He didn’t do PowerPoint. For anything that smacked of a classroom
or of being lectured to—“professor” was one of his bad words, and he was proud of never
going to class, never buying a textbook, never taking a note—he got up and left the room.
This was a problem in multiple respects—indeed, in almost all the prescribed functions
of the presidency. But perhaps most of all, it was a problem in the evaluation of strategic
military options.
The president liked generals. The more fruit salad they wore, the better. The president
was very pleased with the compliments he got for appointing generals who commanded
the respect that Mattis and Kelly and McMaster were accorded (pay no attention to
Michael Flynn). What the president did not like was listening to generals, who, for the
most part, were skilled in the new army jargon of PowerPoint, data dumps, and
McKinsey-like presentations. One of the things that endeared Flynn to the president was
that Flynn, quite the conspiracist and drama queen, had a vivid storytelling sense.
By the time of the Syrian attack on Khan Sheikhoun, McMaster had been Trump’s
National Security Advisor for only about six weeks. Yet his efforts to inform the president
had already become an exercise in trying to tutor a recalcitrant and resentful student.
Recently Trump’s meetings with McMaster had ended up in near acrimony, and now the
president was telling several friends that his new National Security Advisor was too
boring and that he was going to fire him.
McMaster had been the default choice, a fact that Trump kept returning to: Why had he
hired him? He blamed his son-in-law.
After the president fired Flynn in February, he had spent two days at Mar-a-Lago
interviewing replacements, badly taxing his patience.
John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and Bannon’s
consistent choice, made his aggressive light-up-the-world, go-to-war pitch.
Then Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., superintendent of the United States Military
Academy at West Point, presented himself with what Trump viewed positively as oldfashioned
military decorum. Yes, sir. No, sir. That’s correct, sir. Well, I think we know
China has some problems, sir. And in short order it seemed that Trump was selling Caslen
on the job.
“That’s the guy I want,” said Trump. “He’s got the look.”
But Caslen demurred. He had never really had a staff job. Kushner thought he might
not be ready.
“Yeah, but I liked that guy,” pressed Trump.
Then McMaster, wearing a uniform with his silver star, came in and immediately
launched into a wide-ranging lecture on global strategy. Trump was soon, and obviously,
distracted, and as the lecture continued he began sulking.
“That guy bores the shit out of me,” announced Trump after McMaster left the room.
But Kushner pushed him to take another meeting with McMaster, who the next day
showed up without his uniform and in a baggy suit.
“He looks like a beer salesman,” Trump said, announcing that he would hire McMaster
but didn’t want to have another meeting with him.
Shortly after his appointment, McMaster appeared on Morning Joe. Trump saw the
show and noted admiringly, “The guy sure gets good press.”
The president decided he had made a good hire.
* * *
By midmorning on April 4, a full briefing had been assembled at the White House for the
president about the chemical attacks. Along with his daughter and Powell, most members
of the president’s inner national security circle saw the bombing of Khan Sheikhoun as a
straightforward opportunity to register an absolute moral objection. The circumstance was
unequivocal: Bashar al-Assad’s government, once again defying international law, had
used chemical weapons. There was video documenting the attack and substantial
agreement among intelligence agencies about Assad’s responsibility. The politics were
right: Barack Obama failed to act when confronted with a Syrian chemical attack, and now
Trump could. The downside was small; it would be a contained response. And it had the
added advantage of seeming to stand up to the Russians, Assad’s effective partners in
Syria, which would score a political point at home.
Bannon, at perhaps his lowest moment of influence in the White House—many still
felt that his departure was imminent—was the only voice arguing against a military
response. It was a purist’s rationale: keep the United States out of intractable problems,
and certainly don’t increase our involvement in them. He was holding the line against the
rising business-as-usual faction, making decisions based on the same set of assumptions,
Bannon believed, that had resulted in the Middle East quagmire. It was time to break the
standard-response pattern of behavior, represented by the Jarvanka-Powell-Cohn-
McMaster alliance. Forget normal—in fact, to Bannon, normal was precisely the problem.
The president had already agreed to McMaster’s demand that Bannon be removed from
the National Security Council, though the change wouldn’t be announced until the
following day. But Trump was also drawn to Bannon’s strategic view: Why do anything, if
you don’t have to? Or, why would you do something that doesn’t actually get you
anything? Since taking office, the president had been developing an intuitive national
security view: keep as many despots who might otherwise screw you as happy as possible.
A self-styled strongman, he was also a fundamental appeaser. In this instance, then, why
cross the Russians?
By the afternoon, the national security team was experiencing a sense of rising panic:
the president, in their view, didn’t seem to be quite registering the situation. Bannon
wasn’t helping. His hyperrationalist approach obviously appealed to the not-alwaysrational
president. A chemical attack didn’t change the circumstances on the ground,
Bannon argued; besides, there had been far worse attacks with far more casualties than
this one. If you were looking for broken children, you could find them anywhere. Why
these broken children?
The president was not a debater—well, not in any Socratic sense. Nor was he in any
conventional sense a decision maker. And certainly he was not a student of foreign policy
views and options. But this was nevertheless turning into a genuine philosophical face-off.
“Do nothing” had long been viewed as an unacceptable position of helplessness by
American foreign policy experts. The instinct to do something was driven by the desire to
prove you were not limited to nothing. You couldn’t do nothing and show strength. But
Bannon’s approach was very much “A pox on all your houses,” it was not our mess, and
judging by all recent evidence, no good would come of trying to help clean it up. That
effort would cost military lives with no military reward. Bannon, believing in the need for
a radical shift in foreign policy, was proposing a new doctrine: Fuck ’em. This iron-fisted
isolationism appealed to the president’s transactional self: What was in it for us (or for
him)?
Hence the urgency to get Bannon off the National Security Council. The curious thing
is that in the beginning he was thought to be much more reasonable than Michael Flynn,
with his fixation on Iran as the source of all evil. Bannon was supposed to babysit Flynn.
But Bannon, quite to Kushner’s shock, had not just an isolationist worldview but an
apocalyptic one. Much of the world would burn and there was nothing you could do about
it.
The announcement of Bannon’s removal was made the day after the attack. That in
itself was a rather remarkable accomplishment on the part of the moderates. In little more
than two months, Trump’s radical, if not screwball, national security leadership had been
replaced by so-called reasonable people.
The job was now to bring the president into this circle of reason.
* * *
As the day wore on, both Ivanka Trump and Dina Powell were united in their
determination to persuade the president to react … normally. At the very minimum, an
absolute condemnation of the use of chemical weapons, a set of sanctions, and, ideally, a
military response—although not a big one. None of this was in any way exceptional.
Which was sort of the point: it was critical not to respond in a radical, destabilizing way—
including a radical nonresponse.
Kushner was by now complaining to his wife that her father just didn’t get it. It had
even been difficult to get a consensus on releasing a firm statement about the
unacceptability of the use of chemical weapons at the noon press briefing. To both
Kushner and McMaster it seemed obvious that the president was more annoyed about
having to think about the attack than by the attack itself.
Finally, Ivanka told Dina they needed to show the president a different kind of
presentation. Ivanka had long ago figured out how to make successful pitches to her
father. You had to push his enthusiasm buttons. He may be a businessman, but numbers
didn’t do it for him. He was not a spreadsheet jockey—his numbers guys dealt with
spreadsheets. He liked big names. He liked the big picture—he liked literal big pictures.
He liked to see it. He liked “impact.”
But in one sense, the military, the intelligence community, and the White House’s
national security team remained behind the times. Theirs was a data world rather than a
picture world. As it happened, the attack on Khan Sheikhoun had produced a wealth of
visual evidence. Bannon might be right that this attack was no more mortal than countless
others, but by focusing on this one and curating the visual proof, this atrocity became
singular.
Late that afternoon, Ivanka and Dina created a presentation that Bannon, in disgust,
characterized as pictures of kids foaming at the mouth. When the two women showed the
presentation to the president, he went through it several times. He seemed mesmerized.
Watching the president’s response, Bannon saw Trumpism melting before his eyes.
Trump—despite his visceral resistance to the establishment ass-covering and standardissue
foreign policy expertise that had pulled the country into hopeless wars—was
suddenly putty. After seeing all the horrifying photos, he immediately adopted a
completely conventional point of view: it seemed inconceivable to him that we couldn’t
do something.
That evening, the president described the pictures in a call to a friend—the foam, all
that foam. These are just kids. He usually displayed a consistent contempt for anything but
overwhelming military response; now he expressed a sudden, wide-eyed interest in all
kinds of other military options.
On Wednesday, April 5, Trump received a briefing that outlined multiple options for
how to respond. But again McMaster burdened him with detail. He quickly became
frustrated, feeling that he was being manipulated.
The following day, the president and several of his top aides flew to Florida for a
meeting with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping—a meeting organized by Kushner with the
help of Henry Kissinger. While aboard Air Force One, he held a tightly choreographed
meeting of the National Security Council, tying into the staff on the ground. By this point,
the decision about how to respond to the chemical attack had already been made: the
military would launch a Tomahawk cruise missile strike at Al Shayrat airfield. After a
final round of discussion, while on board, the president, almost ceremonially, ordered the
strike for the next day.
With the meeting over and the decision made, Trump, in a buoyant mood, came back to
chat with reporters traveling with him on Air Force One. In a teasing fashion, he declined
to say what he planned to do about Syria. An hour later, Air Force One landed and the
president was hustled to Mar-a-Lago.
The Chinese president and his wife arrived for dinner shortly after five o’clock and
were greeted by a military guard on the Mar-a-Lago driveway. With Ivanka supervising
arrangements, virtually the entire White House senior staff attended.
During a dinner of Dover sole, haricots verts, and thumbelina carrots—Kushner seated
with the Chinese first couple, Bannon at the end of the table—the attack on Al Shayrat
airfield was launched.
Shortly before ten, the president, reading straight off the teleprompter, announced that
the mission had been completed. Dina Powell arranged a for-posterity photo of the
president with his advisers and national security team in the makeshift situation room at
Mar-a-Lago. She was the only woman in the room. Steve Bannon glowered from his seat
at the table, revolted by the stagecraft and the “phoniness of the fucking thing.”
It was a cheerful and relieved Trump who mingled with his guests among the palm
trees and mangroves. “That was a big one,” he confided to a friend. His national security
staff were even more relieved. The unpredictable president seemed almost predictable.
The unmanageable president, manageable.
15
MEDIA
O
n April 19, Bill O’Reilly, the Fox anchor and the biggest star in cable news, was
pushed out by the Murdoch family over charges of sexual harassment. This was a
continuation of the purge at the network that had begun nine months before with the firing
of its chief, Roger Ailes. Fox achieved its ultimate political influence with the election of
Donald Trump, yet now the future of the network seemed held in a peculiar Murdoch
family limbo between conservative father and liberal sons.
A few hours after the O’Reilly announcement, Ailes, from his new oceanfront home in
Palm Beach—precluded by his separation agreement with Fox from any efforts to
compete with it for eighteen months—sent an emissary into the West Wing with a
question for Steve Bannon: O’Reilly and Hannity are in, what about you? Ailes, in secret,
had been plotting his comeback with a new conservative network. Currently in internal
exile inside the White House, Bannon—“the next Ailes”—was all ears.
This was not just the plotting of ambitious men, seeking both opportunity and revenge;
the idea for a new network was also driven by an urgent sense that the Trump
phenomenon was about, as much as anything else, right-wing media. For twenty years,
Fox had honed its populist message: liberals were stealing and ruining the country. Then,
just at the moment that many liberals—including Rupert Murdoch’s sons, who were
increasingly in control of their father’s company—had begun to believe that the Fox
audience was beginning to age out, with its anti-gay-marriage, anti-abortion, antiimmigrant
social message, which seemed too hoary for younger Republicans, along came
Breitbart News. Breitbart not only spoke to a much younger right-wing audience—here
Bannon felt he was as much in tune with this audience as Ailes was with his—but it had
turned this audience into a huge army of digital activists (or social media trolls).
As right-wing media had fiercely coalesced around Trump—readily excusing all the
ways he might contradict the traditional conservative ethos—mainstream media had
become as fiercely resistant. The country was divided as much by media as by politics.
Media was the avatar of politics. A sidelined Ailes was eager to get back in the game. This
was his natural playing field: (1) Trump’s election proved the power of a significantly
smaller but more dedicated electoral base—just as, in cable television terms, a smaller
hardcore base was more valuable than a bigger, less committed one; (2) this meant an
inverse dedication by an equally small circle of passionate enemies; (3) hence, there
would be blood.
If Bannon was as finished as he appeared in the White House, this was his opportunity,
too. Indeed, the problem with Bannon’s $1.5 million a year Internetcentric Breitbart News
was that it couldn’t be monetized or scaled up in a big way, but with O’Reilly and Hannity
on board, there could be television riches fueled by, into the foreseeable future, a new
Trump-inspired era of right-wing passion and hegemony.
Ailes’s message to his would-be protégé was plain: Not just the rise of Trump, but the
fall of Fox could be Bannon’s moment.
In reply, Bannon let Ailes know that for now, he was trying to hold on to his position in
the White House. But yes, the opportunity was obvious.
* * *
Even as O’Reilly’s fate was being debated by the Murdochs, Trump, understanding
O’Reilly’s power and knowing how much O’Reilly’s audience overlapped with his own
base, had expressed his support and approval—“I don’t think Bill did anything wrong… .
He is a good person,” he told the New York Times.
But in fact a paradox of the new strength of conservative media was Trump himself.
During the campaign, when it suited him, he had turned on Fox. If there were other media
opportunities, he took them. (In the recent past, Republicans, particularly in the primary
season, paid careful obeisance to Fox over other media outlets.) Trump kept insisting that
he was bigger than just conservative media.
In the past month, Ailes, a frequent Trump caller and after-dinner adviser, had all but
stopped speaking to the president, piqued by the constant reports that Trump was badmouthing
him as he praised a newly attentive Murdoch, who had, before the election, only
ever ridiculed Trump.
“Men who demand the most loyalty tend to be the least loyal pricks,” noted a sardonic
Ailes (a man who himself demanded lots of loyalty).
The conundrum was that conservative media saw Trump as its creature, while Trump
saw himself as a star, a vaunted and valued product of all media, one climbing ever higher.
It was a cult of personality, and he was the personality. He was the most famous man in
the world. Everybody loved him—or ought to.
On Trump’s part this was, arguably, something of a large misunderstanding about the
nature of conservative media. He clearly did not understand that what conservative media
elevated, liberal media would necessarily take down. Trump, goaded by Bannon, would
continue to do the things that would delight conservative media and incur the wrath of
liberal media. That was the program. The more your supporters loved you, the more your
antagonists hated you. That’s how it was supposed to work. And that’s how it was
working.
But Trump himself was desperately wounded by his treatment in the mainstream
media. He obsessed on every slight until it was overtaken by the next slight. Slights were
singled out and replayed again and again, his mood worsening with each replay (he was
always rerunning the DVR). Much of the president’s daily conversation was a repetitive
rundown of what various anchors and hosts had said about him. And he was upset not only
when he was attacked, but when the people around him were attacked. But he did not
credit their loyalty, or blame himself or the nature of liberal media for the indignities
heaped on his staffers; he blamed them and their inability to get good press.
Mainstream media’s self-righteousness and contempt for Trump helped provide a
tsunami of clicks for right-wing media. But an often raging, self-pitying, tormented
president had not gotten this memo, or had failed to comprehend it. He was looking for
media love everywhere. In this, Trump quite profoundly seemed unable to distinguish
between his political advantage and his personal needs—he thought emotionally, not
strategically.
The great value of being president, in his view, was that you’re the most famous man in
the world, and fame is always venerated and adored by the media. Isn’t it? But,
confusingly, Trump was president in large part because of his particular talent, conscious
or reflexive, to alienate the media, which then turned him into a figure reviled by the
media. This was not a dialectical space that was comfortable for an insecure man.
“For Trump,” noted Ailes, “the media represented power, much more so than politics,
and he wanted the attention and respect of its most powerful men. Donald and I were
really quite good friends for more than 25 years, but he would have preferred to be friends
with Murdoch, who thought he was a moron—at least until he became president.”
* * *
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was set for April 29, the one hundredth day of
the Trump administration. The annual dinner, once an insiders’ event, had become an
opportunity for media organizations to promote themselves by recruiting celebrities—
most of whom had nothing to do with journalism or politics—to sit at their tables. This
had resulted in a notable Trump humiliation when, in 2011, Barack Obama singled out
Trump for particular mockery. In Trump lore, this was the insult that pushed him to make
the 2016 run.
Not long after the Trump team’s arrival in the White House, the Correspondents’
Dinner became a cause for worry. On a winter afternoon in Kellyanne Conway’s upstairs
West Wing office, Conway and Hope Hicks engaged in a pained discussion about what to
do.
The central problem was that the president was neither inclined to make fun of himself,
nor particularly funny himself—at least not, in Conway’s description, “in that kind of
humorous way.”
George W. Bush had famously resisted the Correspondents’ Dinner and suffered
greatly at it, but he had prepped extensively, and every year he pulled out an acceptable
performance. But neither woman, confiding their concerns around the small table in
Conway’s office to a journalist they regarded as sympathetic, thought Trump had a
realistic chance of making the dinner anything like a success.
“He doesn’t appreciate cruel humor,” said Conway.
“His style is more old-fashioned,” said Hicks.
Both women, clearly seeing the Correspondents’ Dinner as an intractable problem, kept
characterizing the event as “unfair,” which, more generally, is how they characterized the
media’s view of Trump. “He’s unfairly portrayed.” “They don’t give him the benefit of the
doubt.” “He’s just not treated the way other presidents have been treated.”
The burden here for Conway and Hicks was their understanding that the president did
not see the media’s lack of regard for him as part of a political divide on which he stood
on a particular side. Instead, he perceived it as a deep personal attack on him: for entirely
unfair reasons, ad hominem reasons, the media just did not like him. Ridiculed him.
Cruelly. Why?
The journalist, trying to offer some comfort, told the two women there was a rumor
going around that Graydon Carter—the editor of Vanity Fair and host of one of the most
important parties of the Correspondents’ Dinner weekend, and, for decades, one of
Trump’s key tormentors in the media—was shortly going to be pushed out of the
magazine.
“Really?” said Hicks, jumping up. “Oh my God, can I tell him? Would that be okay?
He’ll want to know this.” She headed quickly downstairs to the Oval Office.
* * *
Curiously, Conway and Hicks each portrayed a side of the president’s alter ego media
problem. Conway was the bitter antagonist, the mud-in-your-eye messenger who reliably
sent the media into paroxysms of outrage against the president. Hicks was the confidante
ever trying to get the president a break and some good ink in the only media he really
cared about—the media that most hated him. But as different as they were in their media
functions and temperament, both women had achieved remarkable influence in the
administration by serving as the key lieutenants responsible for addressing the president’s
most pressing concern, his media reputation.
While Trump was in most ways a conventional misogynist, in the workplace he was
much closer to women than to men. The former he confided in, the latter he held at arm’s
length. He liked and needed his office wives, and he trusted them with his most important
personal issues. Women, according to Trump, were simply more loyal and trustworthy
than men. Men might be more forceful and competent, but they were also more likely to
have their own agendas. Women, by their nature, or Trump’s version of their nature, were
more likely to focus their purpose on a man. A man like Trump.
It wasn’t happenstance or just casting balance that his Apprentice sidekick was a
woman, nor that his daughter Ivanka had become one of his closest confidants. He felt
women understood him. Or, the kind of women he liked—positive-outlook, can-do, loyal
women, who also looked good—understood him. Everybody who successfully worked for
him understood that there was always a subtext of his needs and personal tics that had to
be scrupulously attended to; in this, he was not all that different from other highly
successful figures, just more so. It would be hard to imagine someone who expected a
greater awareness of and more catering to his peculiar whims, rhythms, prejudices, and
often inchoate desires. He needed special—extra special—handling. Women, he explained
to one friend with something like self-awareness, generally got this more precisely than
men. In particular, women who self-selected themselves as tolerant of or oblivious to or
amused by or steeled against his casual misogyny and constant sexual subtext—which was
somehow, incongruously and often jarringly, matched with paternal regard—got this.
* * *
Kellyanne Conway first met Donald Trump at a meeting of the condo board for the Trump
International Hotel, which was directly across the street from the UN and was where, in
the early 2000s, she lived with her husband and children. Conway’s husband, George, a
graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, was a partner at the premier corporate
mergers and acquisitions firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. (Though Wachtell was a
Democratic-leaning firm, George had played a behind-the-scenes role on the team that
represented Paula Jones in her pursuit of Bill Clinton.) In its professional and domestic
balance, the Conway family was organized around George’s career. Kellyanne’s career
was a sidelight.
Kellyanne, who in the Trump campaign would use her working-class biography to
good effect, grew up in central New Jersey, the daughter of a trucker, raised by a single
mother (and, always in her narrative, her grandmother and two unmarried aunts). She went
to George Washington law school and afterward interned for Reagan’s pollster, Richard
Wirthlin. Then she became the assistant to Frank Luntz, a curious figure in the Republican
Party, known as much for his television deals and toupee as for his polling acumen.
Conway herself began to make appearances on cable TV while working for Luntz.
One virtue of the research and polling business she started in 1995 was that it could
adapt to her husband’s career. But she never much rose above a midrank presence in
Republican political circles, nor did she become more than the also-ran behind Ann
Coulter and Laura Ingraham on cable television—which is where Trump first saw her and
why he singled her out at the condo board meeting.
In a real sense, however, her advantage was not meeting Trump but being taken up by
the Mercers. They recruited Conway in 2015 to work on the Cruz campaign, when Trump
was still far from the conservative ideal, and then, in August 2016, inserted her into the
Trump campaign.
She understood her role. “I will only ever call you Mr. Trump,” she told the candidate
with perfect-pitch solemnity when he interviewed her for the job. It was a trope she would
repeat in interview after interview—Conway was a catalog of learned lines—a message
repeated as much for Trump as for others.
Her title was campaign manager, but that was a misnomer. Bannon was the real
manager, and she was the senior pollster. But Bannon shortly replaced her in that role and
she was left in what Trump saw as the vastly more important role of cable spokesperson.
Conway seemed to have a convenient On-Off toggle. In private, in the Off position, she
seemed to regard Trump as a figure of exhausting exaggeration or even absurdity—or, at
least, if you regarded him that way, she seemed to suggest that she might, too. She
illustrated her opinion of her boss with a whole series of facial expressions: eyes rolling,
mouth agape, head snapping back. But in the On position, she metamorphosed into
believer, protector, defender, and handler. Conway is an antifeminist (or, actually, in a
complicated ideological somersault, she sees feminists as being antifeminists), ascribing
her methods and temperament to her being a wife and mother. She’s instinctive and
reactive. Hence her role as the ultimate Trump defender: she verbally threw herself in
front of any bullet coming his way.
Trump loved her defend-at-all-costs shtick. Conway’s appearances were on his
schedule to watch live. His was often the first call she got after coming off the air. She
channeled Trump: she said exactly the kind of Trump stuff that would otherwise make her
put a finger-gun to her head.
After the election—Trump’s victory setting off a domestic reordering in the Conway
household, and a scramble to get her husband an administration job—Trump assumed she
would be his press secretary. “He and my mother,” Conway said, “because they both
watch a lot of television, thought this was one of the most important jobs.” In Conway’s
version, she turned Trump down or demurred. She kept proposing alternatives in which
she would be the key spokesperson but would be more as well. In fact, almost everyone
else was maneuvering Trump around his desire to appoint Conway.
Loyalty was Trump’s most valued attribute, and in Conway’s view her kamikaze-like
media defense of the president had earned her a position of utmost primacy in the White
House. But in her public persona, she had pushed the boundaries of loyalty too far; she
was so hyperbolic that even Trump loyalists found her behavior extreme and were
repelled. None were more put off than Jared and Ivanka, who, appalled at the
shamelessness of her television appearances, extended this into a larger critique of
Conway’s vulgarity. When referring to her, they were particularly partial to using the
shorthand “nails,” a reference to her Cruella de Vil-length manicure treatments.
By mid-February she was already the subject of leaks—many coming from Jared and
Ivanka—about how she had been sidelined. She vociferously defended herself, producing
a list of television appearances still on her schedule, albeit lesser ones. But she also had a
teary scene with Trump in the Oval Office, offering to resign if the president had lost faith
in her. Almost invariably, when confronted with self-abnegation, Trump offered copious
reassurances. “You will always have a place in my administration,” he told her. “You will
be here for eight years.”
But she had indeed been sidelined, reduced to second-rate media, to being a designated
emissary to right-wing groups, and left out of any meaningful decision making. This she
blamed on the media, a scourge that further united her in self-pity with Donald Trump. In
fact, her relationship with the president deepened as they bonded over their media wounds.
* * *
Hope Hicks, then age twenty-six, was the campaign’s first hire. She knew the president
vastly better than Conway did, and she understood that her most important media function
was not to be in the media.
Hicks grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her father was a PR executive who now
worked for the Glover Park Group, the Democratic-leaning communications and political
consulting firm; her mother was a former staffer for a democratic congressman. An
indifferent student, Hicks went to Southern Methodist University and then did some
modeling before getting a PR job. She first went to work for Matthew Hiltzik, who ran a
small New York-based PR firm and was noted for his ability to work with highmaintenance
clients, including the movie producer Harvey Weinstein (later pilloried for
years of sexual harassment and abuse—accusations that Hiltzik and his staff had long
helped protect him from) and the television personality Katie Couric. Hiltzik, an active
Democrat who had worked for Hillary Clinton, also represented Ivanka Trump’s fashion
line; Hicks started to do some work for the account and then joined Ivanka’s company full
time. In 2015, Ivanka seconded her to her father’s campaign; as the campaign progressed,
moving from novelty project to political factor to juggernaut, Hicks’s family increasingly,
and incredulously, viewed her as rather having been taken captive. (Following the Trump
victory and her move into the White House, her friends and intimates talked with great
concern about what kind of therapies and recuperation she would need after her tenure
was finally over.)
Over the eighteen months of the campaign, the traveling group usually consisted of the
candidate, Hicks, and the campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. In time, she became—
in addition to an inadvertent participant in history, about which she was quite as
astonished as anyone—a kind of Stepford factotum, as absolutely dedicated to and tolerant
of Mr. Trump as anyone who had ever worked for him.
Shortly after Lewandowski, with whom Hicks had an on-and-off romantic relationship,
was fired in June 2016 for clashing with Trump family members, Hicks sat in Trump
Tower with Trump and his sons, worrying about Lewandowski’s treatment in the press and
wondering aloud how she might help him. Trump, who otherwise seemed to treat Hicks in
a protective and even paternal way, looked up and said, “Why? You’ve already done
enough for him. You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have,” sending Hicks running from
the room.
As new layers began to form around Trump, first as nominee and then as presidentelect,
Hicks continued playing the role of his personal PR woman. She would remain his
constant shadow and the person with the best access to him. “Have you spoken to Hope?”
were among the words most frequently uttered in the West Wing.
Hicks, sponsored by Ivanka and ever loyal to her, was in fact thought of as Trump’s
real daughter, while Ivanka was thought of as his real wife. More functionally, but as
elementally, Hicks was the president’s chief media handler. She worked by the president’s
side, wholly separate from the White House’s forty-person-strong communications office.
The president’s personal message and image were entrusted to her—or, more accurately,
she was the president’s agent in retailing that message and image, which he trusted to no
one but himself. Together they formed something of a freelance operation.
Without any particular politics of her own, and, with her New York PR background,
quite looking down on the right-wing press, she was the president’s official liaison to the
mainstream media. The president had charged her with the ultimate job: a good write-up
in the New York Times.
That, in the president’s estimation, had yet failed to happen, “but Hope tries and tries,”
the president said.
On more than one occasion, after a day—one of the countless days—of particularly
bad notices, the president greeted her, affectionately, with “You must be the world’s worst
PR person.”
* * *
In the early days of the transition, with Conway out of the running for the press secretary
job, Trump became determined to find a “star.” The conservative radio host Laura
Ingraham, who had spoken at the convention, was on the list, as was Ann Coulter. Fox
Business’s Maria Bartiromo was also under consideration. (This was television, the
president-elect said, and it ought to be a good-looking woman.) When none of those ideas
panned out, the job was offered to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who turned it down.
But there was a counterview: the press secretary ought to be the opposite of a star. In
fact, the entire press operation ought to be downgraded. If the press was the enemy, why
pander to it, why give it more visibility? This was fundamental Bannonism: stop thinking
you can somehow get along with your enemies.
As the debate went on, Priebus pushed for one of his deputies at the Republican
National Committee, Sean Spicer, a well-liked forty-five-year-old Washington political
professional with a string of posts on the Hill in the George W. Bush years as well as with
the RNC. Spicer, hesitant to take the job, kept anxiously posing the question to colleagues
in the Washington swamp: “If I do this, will I ever be able to work again?”
There were conflicting answers.
During the transition, many members of Trump’s team came to agree with Bannon that
their approach to White House press management ought to be to push it off—and the
longer the arm’s length the better. For the press, this initiative, or rumors of it, became
another sign of the incoming administration’s antipress stance and its systematic efforts to
cut off the information supply. In truth, the suggestions about moving the briefing room
away from the White House, or curtailing the briefing schedule, or limiting broadcast
windows or press pool access, were variously discussed by other incoming
administrations. In her husband’s White House, Hillary Clinton had been a proponent of
limiting press access.
It was Donald Trump who was not able to relinquish this proximity to the press and the
stage in his own house. He regularly berated Spicer for his ham-handed performances,
often giving his full attention to them. His response to Spicer’s briefings was part of his
continuing belief that nobody could work the media like he could, that somehow he had
been stuck with an F-Troop communications team that was absent charisma, magnetism,
and proper media connections.
Trump’s pressure on Spicer—a constant stream of directorial castigation and
instruction that reliably rattled the press secretary—helped turn the briefings into a can’tmiss
train wreck. Meanwhile, the real press operation had more or less devolved into a set
of competing press organizations within the White House.
There was Hope Hicks and the president, living in what other West Wingers
characterized as an alternative universe in which the mainstream media would yet
discover the charm and wisdom of Donald Trump. Where past presidents might have spent
portions of their day talking about the needs, desires, and points of leverage among
various members of Congress, the president and Hicks spent a great deal of time talking
about a fixed cast of media personalities, trying to second-guess the real agendas and weak
spots among cable anchors and producers and Times and Post reporters.
Often the focus of this otherworldly ambition was directed at Times reporter Maggie
Haberman. Haberman’s front-page beat at the paper, which might be called the “weirdness
of Donald Trump” beat, involved producing vivid tales of eccentricities, questionable
behavior, and shit the president says, told in a knowing, deadpan style. Beyond
acknowledging that Trump was a boy from Queens yet in awe of the Times, nobody in the
West Wing could explain why he and Hicks would so often turn to Haberman for what
would so reliably be a mocking and hurtful portrayal. There was some feeling that Trump
was returning to scenes of past success: the Times might be against him, but Haberman
had worked at the New York Post for many years. “She’s very professional,” Conway said,
speaking in defense of the president and trying to justify Haberman’s extraordinary access.
But however intent he remained on getting good ink in the Times, the president saw
Haberman as “mean and horrible.” And yet, on a near-weekly basis, he and Hicks plotted
when next to have the Times come in.
* * *
Kushner had his personal press operation and Bannon had his. The leaking culture had
become so open and overt—most of the time everybody could identify everybody else’s
leaks—that it was now formally staffed.
Kushner’s Office of American Innovation employed, as its spokesperson, Josh Raffel,
who, like Hicks, came out of Matthew Hiltzik’s PR shop. Raffel, a Democrat who had
been working in Hollywood, acted as Kushner and his wife’s personal rep—not least of all
because the couple felt that Spicer, owing his allegiance to Priebus, was not aggressively
representing them. This was explicit. “Josh is Jared’s Hope,” was his internal West Wing
job description.
Raffel coordinated all of Kushner and Ivanka’s personal press, though there was more
of this for Ivanka than for Kushner. But, more importantly, Raffel coordinated all of
Kushner’s substantial leaking, or, as it were, his off-the-record briefings and guidance—no
small part of it against Bannon. Kushner, who with great conviction asserted that he never
leaked, in part justified his press operation as a defense against Bannon’s press operation.
Bannon’s “person,” Alexandra Preate—a witty conservative socialite partial to
champagne—had previously represented Breitbart News and other conservative figures
like CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, and was close friends with Rebekah Mercer. In a relationship
that nobody seemed quite able to explain, she handled all of Bannon’s press “outreach”
but was not employed by the White House, although she maintained an office, or at least
an officelike presence, there. The point was clear: her client was Bannon and not the
Trump administration.
Bannon, to Jared and Ivanka’s continued alarm, had unique access to Breitbart’s
significant abilities to change the right-wing mood and focus. Bannon insisted he had cut
his ties to his former colleagues at Breitbart, but that strained everybody’s credulity—and
everybody figured nobody was supposed to believe it. Rather, everybody was supposed to
fear it.
There was, curiously, general agreement in the West Wing that Donald Trump, the
media president, had one of the most dysfunctional communication operations in modern
White House history. Mike Dubke, a Republican PR operative who was hired as White
House communications director, was, by all estimations, from the first day on his way out
the door. In the end he lasted only three months.
* * *
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner rose, as much as any other challenge for the
new president and his team, as a test of his abilities. He wanted to do it. He was certain
that the power of his charm was greater than the rancor that he bore this audience—or that
they bore him.
He recalled his 2015 Saturday Night Live appearance—which, in his view, was entirely
successful. In fact, he had refused to prepare, had kept saying he would “improvise,” no
problem. Comedians don’t actually improvise, he was told; it’s all scripted and rehearsed.
But this counsel had only marginal effect.
Almost nobody except the president himself thought he could pull off the
Correspondents’ Dinner. His staff was terrified that he would die up there in front of a
seething and contemptuous audience. Though he could dish it out, often very harshly, no
one thought he could take it. Still, the president seemed eager to appear at the event, if
casual about it, too—with Hicks, ordinarily encouraging his every impulse, trying not to.
Bannon pressed the symbolic point: the president should not be seen currying the favor
of his enemies, or trying to entertain them. The media was a much better whipping boy
than it was a partner in crime. The Bannon principle, the steel stake in the ground,
remained: don’t bend, don’t accommodate, don’t meet halfway. And in the end, rather than
implying that Trump did not have the talent and wit to move this crowd, that was a much
better way to persuade the president that he should not appear at the dinner.
When Trump finally agreed to forgo the event, Conway, Hicks, and virtually
everybody else in the West Wing breathed a lot easier.
* * *
Shortly after five o’clock on the one hundredth day of his presidency—a particularly
muggy one—while twenty-five hundred or so members of news organizations and their
friends gathered at the Washington Hilton for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner,
the president left the West Wing for Marine One, which was soon en route to Andrews Air
Force Base. Accompanying him were Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Reince Priebus,
Hope Hicks, and Kellyanne Conway. Vice President Pence and his wife joined the group
at Andrews for the brief flight on Air Force One to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where the
president would give a speech. During the flight, crab cakes were served, and Face the
Nation’s John Dickerson was granted a special hundredth-day interview.
The first Harrisburg event was held at a factory that manufactured landscaping and
gardening tools, where the president closely inspected a line of colorful wheelbarrows.
The next event, where the speech would be delivered, was at a rodeo arena in the Farm
Show Complex and Expo Center.
And that was the point of this little trip. It had been designed both to remind the rest of
the country that the president was not just another phony baloney in a tux like those at the
White House Correspondents’ Dinner (this somehow presupposed that the president’s base
cared about or was even aware of the event) and to keep the president’s mind off the fact
that he was missing the dinner.
But the president kept asking for updates on the jokes.
16
COMEY
“I
t’s impossible to make him understand you can’t stop these investigations,” said Roger
Ailes in early May, a frustrated voice in the Trump kitchen cabinet. “In the old days,
you could say leave it alone. Now you say leave it alone and you’re the one who gets
investigated. He can’t get this through his head.”
In fact, as various members of the billionaires’ cabinet tried to calm down the president
during their evening phone calls, they were largely egging him on by expressing deep
concern about his DOJ and FBI peril. Many of Trump’s wealthy friends saw themselves as
having particular DOJ expertise. In their own careers, they had had enough issues with the
Justice Department to prompt them to develop DOJ relationships and sources, and now
they were always up on DOJ gossip. Flynn was going to throw him in the soup. Manafort
was going to roll. And it wasn’t just Russia. It was Atlantic City. And Mar-a-Lago. And
Trump SoHo.
Both Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani—each a self-styled expert on the DOJ and the
FBI, and ever assuring Trump of their inside sources—encouraged him to take the view
that the DOJ was resolved against him; it was all part of a holdover Obama plot.
Even more urgent was Charlie Kushner’s fear, channeled through his son and daughterin-law,
that the Kushner family’s dealings were getting wrapped up in the pursuit of
Trump. Leaks in January had put the kibosh on the Kushners’ deal with the Chinese
financial colossus Anbang Insurance Group to refinance the family’s large debt in one of
its major real estate holdings, 666 Fifth Avenue. At the end of April, the New York Times,
supplied with leaks from the DOJ, linked the Kushner business in a front-page article to
Beny Steinmetz—an Israeli diamond, mining, and real estate billionaire with Russian ties
who was under chronic investigation around the world. (The Kushner position was not
helped by the fact that the president had been gleefully telling multiple people that Jared
could solve the Middle East problem because the Kushners knew all the best people in
Israel.) During the first week of May, the Times and the Washington Post covered the
Kushner family’s supposed efforts to attract Chinese investors with the promise of U.S.
visas.
“The kids”—Jared and Ivanka—exhibited an increasingly panicked sense that the FBI
and DOJ were moving beyond Russian election interference and into finances. “Ivanka is
terrified,” said a satisfied Bannon.
Trump turned to suggesting to his billionaire chorus that he fire FBI director Comey.
He had raised this idea many times before, but always, seemingly, at the same time and in
the same context that he brought up the possibility of firing everybody. Should I fire
Bannon? Should I fire Reince? Should I fire McMaster? Should I fire Spicer? Should I fire
Tillerson? This ritual was, everyone understood, more a pretext to a discussion of the
power he held than it was, strictly, about personnel decisions. Still, in Trump’s poison-thewell
fashion, the should-I-fire-so-and-so question, and any consideration of it by any of
the billionaires, was translated into agreement, as in: Carl Icahn thinks I should fire
Comey (or Bannon, or Priebus, or McMaster, or Tillerson).
His daughter and son-in-law, their urgency compounded by Charlie Kushner’s concern,
encouraged him, arguing that the once possibly charmable Comey was now a dangerous
and uncontrollable player whose profit would inevitably be their loss. When Trump got
wound up about something, Bannon noted, someone was usually winding him up. The
family focus of discussion—insistent, almost frenzied—became wholly about Comey’s
ambition. He would rise by damaging them. And the drumbeat grew.
“That son of a bitch is going to try to fire the head of the FBI,” said Ailes.
During the first week of May, the president had a ranting meeting with Sessions and his
deputy Rod Rosenstein. It was a humiliating meeting for both men, with Trump insisting
they couldn’t control their own people and pushing them to find a reason to fire Comey—
in effect, he blamed them for not having come up with that reason months ago. (It was
their fault, he implied, that Comey hadn’t been fired right off the bat.)
Also that week, there was a meeting that included the president, Jared and Ivanka,
Bannon, Priebus, and White House counsel Don McGahn. It was a closed-door meeting—
widely noted because it was unusual for the Oval Office door ever to be closed.
All the Democrats hate Comey, said the president, expressing his certain and selfjustifying
view. All the FBI agents hate him, too—75 percent of them can’t stand him.
(This was a number that Kushner had somehow alighted on, and Trump had taken it up.)
Firing Comey will be a huge fundraising advantage, declared the president, a man who
almost never talked about fundraising.
McGahn tried to explain that in fact Comey himself was not running the Russia
investigation, that without Comey the investigation would proceed anyway. McGahn, the
lawyer whose job was necessarily to issue cautions, was a frequent target of Trump rages.
Typically these would begin as a kind of exaggeration or acting and then devolve into the
real thing: uncontrollable, vein-popping, ugly-face, tantrum stuff. It got primal. Now the
president’s denunciations focused in a vicious fury on McGahn and his cautions about
Comey.
“Comey was a rat,” repeated Trump. There were rats everywhere and you had to get rid
of them. John Dean, John Dean, he repeated. “Do you know what John Dean did to
Nixon?”
Trump, who saw history through personalities—people he might have liked or disliked
—was a John Dean freak. He went bananas when a now gray and much aged Dean
appeared on talk shows to compare the Trump-Russia investigation to Watergate. That
would bring the president to instant attention and launch an inevitable talk-back
monologue to the screen about loyalty and what people would do for media attention. It
might also be accompanied by several revisionist theories Trump had about Watergate and
how Nixon had been framed. And always there were rats. A rat was someone who would
take you down for his own advantage. If you had a rat, you needed to kill it. And there
were rats all around.
(Later, it was Bannon who had to take the president aside and tell him that John Dean
had been the White House counsel in the Nixon administration, so maybe it would be a
good idea to lighten up on McGahn.)
As the meeting went on, Bannon, from the doghouse and now, in their mutual
antipathy to Jarvanka, allied with Priebus, seized the opportunity to make an impassioned
case opposing any move against Comey—which was also, as much, an effort to make the
case against Jared and Ivanka and their allies, “the geniuses.” (“The geniuses” was one of
Trump’s terms of derision for anybody who might annoy him or think they were smarter
than him, and Bannon now appropriated the term and applied it to Trump’s family.)
Offering forceful and dire warnings, Bannon told the president: “This Russian story is a
third-tier story, but you fire Comey and it’ll be the biggest story in the world.”
By the time the meeting ended, Bannon and Priebus believed they had prevailed. But
that weekend, at Bedminster, the president, again listening to the deep dismay of his
daughter and son-in-law, built up another head of steam. With Jared and Ivanka, Stephen
Miller was also along for the weekend. The weather was bad and the president missed his
golf game, dwelling, with Jared, on his Comey fury. It was Jared, in the version told by
those outside the Jarvanka circle, that pushed for action, once more winding up his fatherin-law.
With the president’s assent, Kushner, in this version, gave Miller notes on why the
FBI director should be fired and asked him to draft a letter that could set out the basis for
immediate dismissal. Miller—less than a deft drafting hand—recruited Hicks to help,
another person without clearly relevant abilities. (Miller would later be admonished by
Bannon for letting himself get tied up, and potentially implicated, in the Comey mess.)
The letter, in the panicky draft assembled by Miller and Hicks, either from Kushner’s
directions or on instructions directly coming from the president, was an off-the-wall
mishmash containing the talking points—Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton
investigation; the assertion (from Kushner) that the FBI itself had turned against Comey;
and, the president’s key obsession, the fact that Comey wouldn’t publicly acknowledge
that the president wasn’t under investigation—that would form the Trump family’s case
for firing Comey. That is, everything but the fact that Comey’s FBI was investigating the
president.
The Kushner side, for its part, bitterly fought back against any characterization of
Kushner as the prime mover or mastermind, in effect putting the entire Bedminster letter
effort—as well as the determination to get rid of Comey—entirely on the president’s head
and casting Kushner as passive bystander. (The Kushner side’s position was articulated as
follows: “Did he [Kushner] support the decision? Yes. Was he told this was happening?
Yes. Did he encourage it? No. Was he fighting for it [Comey’s ouster] for weeks and
months? No. Did he fight [the ouster]? No. Did he say it would go badly? No.”)
Horrified, McGahn quashed sending it. Nevertheless, it was passed to Sessions and
Rosenstein, who quickly began drafting their own version of what Kushner and the
president obviously wanted.
“I knew when he got back he might blow at any moment,” said Bannon after the
president returned from his Bedminster weekend.
* * *
On Monday morning, May 8, in a meeting in the Oval Office, the president told Priebus
and Bannon that he had made his decision: he would fire Director Comey. Both men again
made heated pleas against the move, arguing for, at the very least, more discussion. Here
was a key technique for managing the president: delay. Rolling something forward likely
meant that something else—an equal or greater fiasco—would come along to preempt
whatever fiasco was currently at hand. What’s more, delay worked advantageously with
Trump’s attention span; whatever the issue of the moment, he would shortly be on to
something else. When the meeting ended, Priebus and Bannon thought they had bought
some breathing room.
Later that day, Sally Yates and former director of National Intelligence James Clapper
appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Crime and Terrorism subcommittee—
and were greeted by a series of furious tweets from the president.
Here was, Bannon saw again, the essential Trump problem. He hopelessly personalized
everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was
always trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight. The
battle was between you and someone else who wanted what you had. For Bannon,
reducing the political world to face-offs and spats belittled the place in history Trump and
his administration had achieved. But it also belied the real powers they were up against.
Not people—institutions.
To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, “such a cunt.”
Since her firing on January 30, Yates had remained suspiciously quiet. When
journalists approached her, she, or her intermediaries, explained that per her lawyers she
was shut down on all media. The president believed she was merely lying in wait. In
phone calls to friends, he worried about her “plan” and “strategy,” and he continued to
press his after-dinner sources for what they thought she and Ben Rhodes, Trump’s favorite
Obama plotter, had “up their sleeves.”
For each of his enemies—and, actually, for each of his friends—the issue for him came
down, in many ways, to their personal press plan. The media was the battlefield. Trump
assumed everybody wanted his or her fifteen minutes and that everybody had a press
strategy for when they got them. If you couldn’t get press directly for yourself, you
became a leaker. There was no happenstance news, in Trump’s view. All news was
manipulated and designed, planned and planted. All news was to some extent fake—he
understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his career.
This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the “fake news” label. “I’ve made stuff up
forever, and they always print it,” he bragged.
The return of Sally Yates, with her appointment before the Senate Judiciary
Committee, marked the beginning, Trump believed, of a sustained and well-organized
media rollout for her. (His press view was confirmed later in May by a lavish,
hagiographic profile of Yates in the New Yorker. “How long do you think she was
planning this?” he asked, rhetorically. “You know she was. It’s her payday.”) “Yates is
only famous because of me,” the president complained bitterly. “Otherwise, who is she?
Nobody.”
In front of Congress that Monday morning, Yates delivered a cinematic performance—
cool, temperate, detailed, selfless—compounding Trump’s fury and agitation.
* * *
On the morning of Tuesday, May 9, with the president still fixated on Comey, and with
Kushner and his daughter behind him, Priebus again moved to delay: “There’s a right way
to do this and a wrong way to do this,” he told the president. “We don’t want him learning
about this on television. I’m going to say this one last time: this is not the right way to do
this. If you want to do this, the right way is to have him in and have a conversation. This is
the decent way and the professional way.” Once more, the president seemed to calm down
and become more focused on the necessary process.
But that was a false flag. In fact, the president, in order to avoid embracing
conventional process—or, for that matter, any real sense of cause and effect—merely
eliminated everybody else from his process. For most of the day, almost no one would
know that he had decided to take matters into his own hands. In presidential annals, the
firing of FBI director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a
modern president acting entirely on his own.
As it happened, the Justice Department—Attorney General Sessions and Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—were, independent of the president’s own course,
preparing their case against Comey. They would take the Bedminster line and blame
Comey for errors of his handling of the Clinton email mess—a problematic charge,
because if that was truly the issue, why wasn’t Comey dismissed on that basis as soon as
the Trump administration took office? But in fact, quite regardless of the Sessions and
Rosenstein case, the president had determined to act on his own.
Jared and Ivanka were urging the president on, but even they did not know that the axe
would shortly fall. Hope Hicks, Trump’s steadfast shadow, who otherwise knew
everything the president thought—not least because he was helpless not to express it out
loud—didn’t know. Steve Bannon, however much he worried that the president might
blow, didn’t know. His chief of staff didn’t know. And his press secretary didn’t know. The
president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress,
was going rogue.
At some point that afternoon Trump told his daughter and son-in-law about his plan.
They immediately became coconspirators and firmly shut out any competing advice.
Eerily, it was a notably on-time and unruffled day in the West Wing. Mark Halperin,
the political reporter and campaign chronicler, was waiting in the reception area for Hope
Hicks, who fetched him a bit before 5:00 p.m. Fox’s Howard Kurtz was there, too, waiting
for his appointment with Sean Spicer. And Reince Priebus’s assistant had just been out to
tell his five o’clock appointment it would be only a few more minutes.
Just before five, in fact, the president, having not too long before notified McGahn of
his intention, pulled the trigger. Trump’s personal security guard, Keith Schiller, delivered
the termination letter to Comey’s office at the FBI just after five o’clock. The letter’s
second sentence included the words “You are hereby terminated and removed from office,
effective immediately.”
Shortly thereafter, most of the West Wing staff, courtesy of an erroneous report from
Fox News, was for a brief moment under the impression that Comey had resigned. Then,
in a series of information synapses throughout the offices of the West Wing, it became
clear what had actually happened.
“So next it’s a special prosecutor!” said Priebus in disbelief, to no one in particular,
when he learned shortly before five o’clock what was happening.
Spicer, who would later be blamed for not figuring out how to positively spin the
Comey firing, had only minutes to process it.
Not only had the decision been made by the president with almost no consultation
except that of his inner family circle, but the response, and explanation, and even legal
justifications, were also almost exclusively managed by him and his family. Rosenstein
and Sessions’s parallel rationale for the firing was shoehorned in at the last minute, at
which point, at Kushner’s direction, the initial explanation of Comey’s firing became that
the president had acted solely on their recommendation. Spicer was forced to deliver this
unlikely rationale, as was the vice president. But this pretense unraveled almost
immediately, not least because most everyone in the West Wing, wanting nothing to do
with the decision to fire Comey, was helping to unravel it.
The president, along with his family, stood on one side of the White House divide,
while the staff—mouths agape, disbelieving and speechless—stood on the other.
But the president seemed also to want it known that he, aroused and dangerous,
personally took down Comey. Forget Rosenstein and Sessions, it was personal. It was a
powerful president and a vengeful one, in every way galled and affronted by those in
pursuit of him, and determined to protect his family, who were in turn determined to have
him protect them.
“The daughter will take down the father,” said Bannon, in a Shakespearian mood.
Within the West Wing there was much replaying of alternative scenarios. If you wanted
to get rid of Comey, there were surely politic ways of doing it—which had in fact been
suggested to Trump. (A curious one—an idea that later would seem ironic—was to get rid
of General Kelly at Homeland Security and move Comey into that job.) But the point
really was that Trump had wanted to confront and humiliate the FBI director. Cruelty was
a Trump attribute.
The firing had been carried out publicly and in front of his family—catching Comey
entirely off guard as he gave a speech in California. Then the president had further
personalized the blow with an ad hominem attack on the director, suggesting that the FBI
itself was on Trump’s side and that it, too, had only contempt for Comey.
The next day, as though to further emphasize and delight in both the insult and his
personal impunity, the president met with Russian bigwigs in the Oval Office, including
Russia’s Ambassador Kislyak, the very focus of much of the Trump-Russia investigation.
To the Russians he said: “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I
faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Then, to boot, he revealed
information supplied to the United States by Israel from its agent in place in Syria about
ISIS using laptops to smuggle bombs onto airlines—revealing enough information to
compromise the Israeli agent. (This incident did not help Trump’s reputation in
intelligence circles, since, in spycraft, human sources are to be protected above all other
secrets.)
“It’s Trump,” said Bannon. “He thinks he can fire the FBI.”
* * *
Trump believed that firing Comey would make him a hero. Over the next forty-eight hours
he spun his side to various friends. It was simple: he had stood up to the FBI. He proved
that he was willing to take on the state power. The outsider against the insiders. After all,
that’s why he was elected.
At some level he had a point. One reason presidents don’t fire the director of the FBI is
that they fear the consequences. It’s the Hoover syndrome: any president can be hostage to
what the FBI knows, and a president who treats the FBI with something less than
deference does so at his own peril. But this president had stood up to the feds. One man
against the unaccountable power that the left had long railed against—and that more
recently the right had taken as a Holy Grail issue, too. “Everybody should be rooting for
me,” the president said to friends, more and more plaintively.
Here was another peculiar Trump attribute: an inability to see his actions the way most
others saw them. Or to fully appreciate how people expected him to behave. The notion of
the presidency as an institutional and political concept, with an emphasis on ritual and
propriety and semiotic messaging—statesmanship—was quite beyond him.
Inside the government, the response to Comey’s firing was a kind of bureaucratic
revulsion. Bannon had tried to explain to Trump the essential nature of career government
officials, people whose comfort zone was in their association with hegemonic
organizations and a sense of a higher cause—they were different, very different, from
those who sought individual distinction. Whatever else Comey might be, he was first and
foremost a bureaucrat. Casting him ignominiously out was yet another Trump insult to the
bureaucracy.
Rod Rosenstein, the author of the letter that ostensibly provided the justification for
firing Comey, now stood in the line of fire. The fifty-two-year-old Rosenstein, who, in
rimless glasses, seemed to style himself as a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, was the longestserving
U.S. attorney in the country. He lived within the system, all by the book, his
highest goal seeming to be to have people say he did things by the book. He was a straight
shooter—and he wanted everyone to know it.
All this was undermined by Trump—trashed, even. The brow-beating and snarling
president had hectored the country’s two top law enforcement officials into an illconsidered
or, at the very least, an ill-timed indictment of the director of the FBI.
Rosenstein was already feeling used and abused. And then he was shown to have been
tricked, too. He was a dupe.
The president had forced Rosenstein and Sessions to construct a legal rationale, yet
then he could not even maintain the bureaucratic pretense of following it. Having enlisted
Rosenstein and Sessions in his plot, Trump now exposed their efforts to present a
reasonable and aboveboard case as a sham—and, arguably, a plan to obstruct justice. The
president made it perfectly clear that he hadn’t fired the director of the FBI because he did
Hillary wrong; he fired Comey because the FBI was too aggressively investigating him
and his administration.
Hyper-by-the-book Rod Rosenstein—heretofore the quintessential apolitical player—
immediately became, in Washington eyes, a hopeless Trump tool. But Rosenstein’s
revenge was deft, swift, overwhelming, and (of course) by the book.
Given the decision of the attorney general to recuse himself from the Russia
investigation, it fell under the authority of the deputy attorney general to determine
whether a conflict existed—that is, whether the deputy attorney general, because of selfinterest,
might not be able to act objectively—and if, in his sole discretion, he judged a
conflict to exist, to appoint an outside special counsel with wide powers and
responsibilities to conduct an investigation and, potentially, a prosecution.
On May 17, twelve days after FBI director Comey was fired, without consulting the
White House or the attorney general, Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert
Mueller to oversee the investigation of Trump’s, his campaign’s, and his staff’s ties to
Russia. If Michael Flynn had recently become the most powerful man in Washington for
what he might reveal about the president, now Mueller arguably assumed that position
because he had the power to make Flynn, and all other assorted Trump cronies and
flunkies, squeal.
Rosenstein, of course, perhaps with some satisfaction, understood that he had delivered
what could be a mortal blow to the Trump presidency.
Bannon, shaking his head in wonder about Trump, commented drily: “He doesn’t
necessarily see what’s coming.”
17
ABROAD AND AT HOME
O
n May 12, Roger Ailes was scheduled to return to New York from Palm Beach to
meet with Peter Thiel, an early and lonely Trump supporter in Silicon Valley who
had become increasingly astonished by Trump’s unpredictability. Ailes and Thiel, both
worried that Trump could bring Trumpism down, were set to discuss the funding and
launch of a new cable news network. Thiel would pay for it and Ailes would bring
O’Reilly, Hannity, himself, and maybe Bannon to it.
But two days before the meeting, Ailes fell in his bathroom and hit his head. Before
slipping into a coma, he told his wife not to reschedule the meeting with Thiel. A week
later, Ailes, that singular figure in the march from Nixon’s silent majority to Reagan’s
Democrats to Trump’s passionate base, was dead.
His funeral in Palm Beach on May 20 was quite a study in the currents of right-wing
ambivalence and even mortification. Right-wing professionals remained passionate in
their outward defense of Trump but were rattled, if not abashed, among one another. At
the funeral, Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham struggled to parse support for Trumpism
even as they distanced themselves from Trump himself.
The president had surely become the right wing’s meal ticket. He was the ultimate
antiliberal: an authoritarian who was the living embodiment of resistance to authority. He
was the exuberant inverse of everything the right wing found patronizing and gullible and
sanctimonious about the left. And yet, obviously, Trump was Trump—careless, capricious,
disloyal, far beyond any sort of control. Nobody knew that as well as the people who
knew him best.
Ailes’s wife, Beth, had militantly invited only Ailes loyalists to the funeral. Anyone
who had wavered in her husband’s defense since his firing or had decided that a better
future lay with the Murdoch family was excluded. This put Trump, still enthralled by his
new standing with Murdoch, on the other side of the line. Hours and then days—carefully
tracked by Beth Ailes—ticked off without a condolence call from the president.
The morning of the funeral, Sean Hannity’s private plane took off for Palm Beach from
Republic Airport in Farmingdale, Long Island. Accompanying Hannity was a small group
of current and former Fox employees, all Ailes and Trump partisans. But each felt some
open angst, or even incredulity, about Trump being Trump: first there was the difficulty of
grasping the Comey rationale, and now his failure to give even a nod to his late friend
Ailes.
“He’s an idiot, obviously,” said the former Fox correspondent Liz Trotta.
Fox anchor Kimberly Guilfoyle spent much of the flight debating Trump’s entreaties to
have her replace Sean Spicer at the White House. “There are a lot of issues, including
personal survival.”
As for Hannity himself, his view of the right-wing world was shifting from Foxcentric
to Trumpcentric. He did not think much more than a year would pass before he, too,
would be pushed from the network, or find it too inhospitable to stay on. And yet he was
pained by Trump’s slavish attentions to Murdoch, who had not only ousted Ailes but
whose conservatism was at best utilitarian. “He was for Hillary!” said Hannity.
Ruminating out loud, Hannity said he would leave the network and go work full time
for Trump, because nothing was more important than that Trump succeed—“in spite of
himself,” Hannity added, laughing.
But he was pissed off that Trump hadn’t called Beth. “Mueller,” he concluded, drawing
deeply on an electronic cigarette, had distracted him.
Trump may be a Frankenstein creation, but he was the right wing’s creation, the first,
true, right-wing original. Hannity could look past the Comey disaster. And Jared. And the
mess in the White House.
Still, he hadn’t called Beth.
“What the fuck is wrong with him?” asked Hannity.
* * *
Trump believed he was one win away from turning everything around. Or, perhaps more
to the point, one win away from good press that would turn everything around. The fact
that he had largely squandered his first hundred days—whose victories should have been
the currency of the next hundred days—was immaterial. You could be down in the media
one day and then the next have a hit that made you a success.
“Big things, we need big things,” he said, angrily and often. “This isn’t big. I need big.
Bring me big. Do you even know what big is?”
Repeal and replace, infrastructure, true tax reform—the rollout Trump had promised
and then depended on Paul Ryan to deliver—was effectively in tatters. Every senior staff
member was now maintaining that they shouldn’t have done health care, the precursor to
the legislative rollout, in the first place. Whose idea was that, anyway?
The natural default might be to do smaller things, incremental versions of the program.
But Trump showed little interest in the small stuff. He became listless and irritable.
So, okay, it would have to be peace in the Middle East.
For Trump, as for many showmen or press release entrepreneurs, the enemy of
everything is complexity and red tape, and the solution for everything is cutting corners.
Bypass or ignore the difficulties; just move in a straight line to the vision, which, if it’s
bold enough, or grandiose enough, will sell itself. In this formula, there is always a series
of middlemen who will promise to help you cut the corners, as well as partners who will
be happy to piggyback on your grandiosity.
Enter the Crown Prince of the House of Saud, Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz
Al Saud, age thirty-one. Aka MBS.
The fortuitous circumstance was that the king of Saudi Arabia, MBS’s father, was
losing it. The consensus in the Saudi royal family about a need to modernize was growing
stronger (somewhat). MBS—an inveterate player of video games—was a new sort of
personality in the Saudi leadership. He was voluble, open, and expansive, a charmer and
an international player, a canny salesman rather than a remote, taciturn grandee. He had
seized the economic portfolio and was pursuing a vision—quite a Trumpian vision—to
out-Dubai Dubai and diversify the economy. His would be a new, modern—well, a bit
more modern—kingdom (yes, women would soon be allowed to drive—so thank God
self-driving cars were coming!). Saudi leadership was marked by age, traditionalism,
relative anonymity, and careful consensus thinking. The Saudi royal family, on the other
hand, whence the leadership class comes, was often marked by excess, flash, and the
partaking of the joys of modernity in foreign ports. MBS, a man in a hurry, was trying to
bridge the Saudi royal selves.
Global liberal leadership had been all but paralyzed by the election of Donald Trump—
indeed, by the very existence of Donald Trump. But it was an inverted universe in the
Middle East. The Obama truculence and hyperrationalization and micromanaging,
preceded by the Bush moral militarism and ensuing disruptions, preceded by Clinton deal
making, quid pro quo, and backstabbing, had opened the way for Trump’s version of
realpolitik. He had no patience with the our-hands-are-tied ennui of the post-cold war
order, that sense of the chess board locked in place, of incremental movement being the
best-case scenario—the alternative being only war. His was a much simpler view: Who’s
got the power? Give me his number.
And, just as basically: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If Trump had one fixed
point of reference in the Middle East, it was—mostly courtesy of Michael Flynn’s tutoring
—that Iran was the bad guy. Hence everybody opposed to Iran was a pretty good guy.
After the election, MBS had reached out to Kushner. In the confusion of the Trump
transition, nobody with foreign policy stature and an international network had been put in
place—even the new secretary of state designate, Rex Tillerson, had no real experience in
foreign policy. To bewildered foreign secretaries, it seemed logical to see the
presidentelect’s son-in-law as a figure of stability. Whatever happened, he would be there.
And for certain regimes, especially the familycentric Saudis, Kushner, the son-in-law, was
much more reassuring than a policy person. He wasn’t in his job because of his ideas.
Of the many Trump gashes in modern major-power governing, you could certainly
drive a Trojan horse through his lack of foreign policy particulars and relationships. This
presented a do-over opportunity for the world in its relationship with the United States—
or it did if you were willing to speak the new Trump language, whatever that was. There
wasn’t much of a road map here, just pure opportunism, a new transactional openness. Or,
even more, a chance to use the powers of charm and seduction to which Trump responded
as enthusiastically as he did to offers of advantageous new deals.
It was Kissingeresque realpolitik. Kissinger himself, long familiar with Trump by way
of the New York social world and now taking Kushner under his wing, was successfully
reinserting himself, helping to organize meetings with the Chinese and the Russians.
Most of America’s usual partners, and even many antagonists, were unsettled if not
horrified. Still, some saw opportunity. The Russians could see a free pass on the Ukraine
and Georgia, as well as a lifting of sanctions, in return for giving up on Iran and Syria.
Early in the transition, a high-ranking official in the Turkish government reached out in
genuine confusion to a prominent U.S. business figure to inquire whether Turkey would
have better leverage by putting pressure on the U.S. military presence in Turkey or by
offering the new president an enviable hotel site on the Bosporus.
There was something curiously aligned between the Trump family and MBS. Like the
entire Saudi leadership, MBS had, practically speaking, no education outside of Saudi
Arabia. In the past, this had worked to limit the Saudi options—nobody was equipped to
confidently explore new intellectual possibilities. As a consequence, everybody was wary
of trying to get them to imagine change. But MBS and Trump were on pretty much equal
footing. Knowing little made them oddly comfortable with each other. When MBS offered
himself to Kushner as his guy in the Saudi kingdom, that was “like meeting someone nice
at your first day of boarding school,” said Kushner’s friend.
Casting aside, in very quick order, previously held assumptions—in fact, not really
aware of those assumptions—the new Trump thinking about the Middle East became the
following: There are basically four players (or at least we can forget everybody else)—
Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. The first three can be united against the fourth. And
Egypt and Saudi Arabia, given what they want with respect to Iran—and anything else
that does not interfere with the United States’ interests—will pressure the Palestinians to
make a deal. Voilà.
This represented a queasy-making mishmash of thought. Bannon’s isolationism (a pox
on all your houses—and keep us out of it); Flynn’s anti-Iranism (of all the world’s perfidy
and toxicity, there is none like that of the mullahs); and Kushner’s Kissingerism (not so
much Kissingerism as, having no point of view himself, a dutiful attempt to follow the
ninety-four-year-old’s advice).
But the fundamental point was that the last three administrations had gotten the Middle
East wrong. It was impossible to overstate how much contempt the Trump people felt for
the business-as-usual thinking that had gotten it so wrong. Hence, the new operating
principle was simple: do the opposite of what they (Obama, but the Bush neocons, too)
would do. Their behavior, their conceits, their ideas—in some sense even their
backgrounds, education, and class—were all suspect. And, what’s more, you don’t really
have to know all that much yourself; you just do it differently than it was done before.
The old foreign policy was based on the idea of nuance: facing an infinitely complex
multilateral algebra of threats, interests, incentives, deals, and ever evolving relationships,
we strain to reach a balanced future. In practice, the new foreign policy, an effective
Trump doctrine, was to reduce the board to three elements: powers we can work with,
powers we cannot work with, and those without enough power whom we can functionally
disregard or sacrifice. It was cold war stuff. And, indeed, in the larger Trump view, it was
during the cold war that time and circumstance gave the United States its greatest global
advantage. That was when America was great.
* * *
Kushner was the driver of the Trump doctrine. His test cases were China, Mexico, Canada,
and Saudi Arabia. He offered each country the opportunity to make his father-in-law
happy.
In the first days of the administration, Mexico blew its chance. In transcripts of
conversations between Trump and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto that would later
become public, it was vividly clear that Mexico did not understand or was unwilling to
play the new game. The Mexican president refused to construct a pretense for paying for
the wall, a pretense that might have redounded to his vast advantage (without his having to
actually pay for the wall).
Not long after, Canada’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, a forty-five-year-old
globalist in the style of Clinton and Blair, came to Washington and repeatedly smiled and
bit his tongue. And that did the trick: Canada quickly became Trump’s new best friend.
The Chinese, who Trump had oft maligned during the campaign, came to Mar-a-Lago
for a summit advanced by Kushner and Kissinger. (This required some tutoring for Trump,
who referred to the Chinese leader as “Mr. X-i”; the president was told to think of him as a
woman and call him “she.”) They were in an agreeable mood, evidently willing to humor
Trump. And they quickly figured out that if you flatter him, he flatters you.
But it was the Saudis, also often maligned during the campaign, who, with their
intuitive understanding of family, ceremony, and ritual and propriety, truly scored.
The foreign policy establishment had a long and well-honed relationship with MBS’s
rival, the crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN). Key NSA and State Department
figures were alarmed that Kushner’s discussions and fast-advancing relationship with
MBS would send a dangerous message to MBN. And of course it did. The foreign policy
people believed Kushner was being led by MBS, whose real views were entirely untested.
The Kushner view was either, naïvely, that he wasn’t being led, or, with the confidence of
a thirty-six-year-old assuming the new prerogatives of the man in charge, that he didn’t
care: let’s embrace anybody who will embrace us.
The Kushner/MBS plan that emerged was straightforward in a way that foreign policy
usually isn’t: If you give us what we want, we’ll give you what you want. On MBS’s
assurance that he would deliver some seriously good news, he was invited to visit the
White House in March. (The Saudis arrived with a big delegation, but they were received
at the White House by only the president’s small circle—and the Saudis took particular
note that Trump ordered Priebus to jump up and fetch him things during the meeting.) The
two large men, the older Trump and much younger MBS—both charmers, flatterers, and
country club jokers, each in their way—grandly hit it off.
It was an aggressive bit of diplomacy. MBS was using this Trump embrace as part of
his own power play in the kingdom. And the Trump White House, ever denying this was
the case, let him. In return, MBS offered a basket of deals and announcements that would
coincide with a scheduled presidential visit to Saudi Arabia—Trump’s first trip abroad.
Trump would get a “win.”
Planned before the Comey firing and Mueller hiring, the trip had State Department
professionals alarmed. The itinerary—May 19 to May 27—was too long for any president,
particularly such an untested and untutored one. (Trump himself, full of phobias about
travel and unfamiliar locations, had been grumbling about the burdens of the trip.) But
coming immediately after Comey and Mueller it was a get-out-of-Dodge godsend. There
couldn’t have been a better time to be making headlines far from Washington. A road trip
could transform everything.
Almost the entire West Wing, along with State Department and National Security staff,
was on board for the trip: Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus,
Stephen Bannon, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Hope Hicks, Sean Spicer, Stephen Miller, Joe
Hagin, Rex Tillerson, and Michael Anton. Also included were Sarah Huckabee Sanders,
the deputy press secretary; Dan Scavino, the administration’s social media director; Keith
Schiller, the president’s personal security adviser; and Wilbur Ross, the commerce
secretary. (Ross was widely ridiculed for never missing an Air Force One opportunity—as
Bannon put it, “Wilbur is Zelig, every time you turn around he’s in a picture.”) This trip
and the robust American delegation was the antidote, and alternate universe to the Mueller
appointment.
The president and his son-in-law could barely contain their confidence and enthusiasm.
They felt certain that they had set out on the road to peace in the Middle East—and in this,
they were much like a number of other administrations that had come before them.
Trump was effusive in his praise for Kushner. “Jared’s gotten the Arabs totally on our
side. Done deal,” he assured one of his after-dinner callers before leaving on the trip. “It’s
going to be beautiful.”
“He believed,” said the caller, “that this trip could pull it out, like a twist in a bad
movie.”
* * *
On the empty roads of Riyadh, the presidential motorcade passed billboards with pictures
of Trump and the Saudi king (MBS’s eighty-one-year-old father) with the legend
TOGETHER WE PREVAIL.
In part, the president’s enthusiasm seemed to be born out of—or perhaps had caused—
a substantial exaggeration of what had actually been agreed to during the negotiations
ahead of the trip. In the days before his departure, he was telling people that the Saudis
were going to finance an entirely new military presence in the kingdom, supplanting and
even replacing the U.S. command headquarters in Qatar. And there would be “the biggest
breakthrough in Israel-Palestine negotiations ever.” It would be “the game changer, major
like has never been seen.”
In truth, his version of what would be accomplished was a quantum leap beyond what
was actually agreed, but that did not seem to alter his feelings of zeal and delight.
The Saudis would immediately buy $110 billion’s worth of American arms, and a total
of $350 billion over ten years. “Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the
United States and jobs, jobs, jobs,” declared the president. Plus, the Americans and the
Saudis would together “counter violent extremist messaging, disrupt financing of
terrorism, and advance defense cooperation.” And they would establish a center in Riyadh
to fight extremism. And if this was not exactly peace in the Middle East, the president,
according to the secretary of state, “feels like there’s a moment in time here. The
president’s going to talk with Netanyahu about the process going forward. He’s going to
be talking to President Abbas about what he feels is necessary for the Palestinians to be
successful.”
It was all a Trumpian big deal. Meanwhile, the First Family—POTUS, FLOTUS, and
Jared and Ivanka—were ferried around in gold golf carts, and the Saudis threw a $75
million party in Trump’s honor, with Trump getting to sit on a thronelike chair. (The
president, while receiving an honor from the Saudi king, appeared in a photograph to have
bowed, arousing some right-wing ire.)
Fifty Arab and Muslim nations were summoned by the Saudis to pay the president
court. The president called home to tell his friends how natural and easy this was, and
how, inexplicably and suspiciously, Obama had messed it all up. There “has been a little
strain, but there won’t be strain with this administration,” the president assured Hamad bin
Isa Al Khalifa, the king of Bahrain.
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian strongman, ably stroked the president and said, “You
are a unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible.” (To Sisi, Trump replied,
“Love your shoes. Boy, those shoes. Man… .”)
It was, in dramatic ways, a shift in foreign policy attitude and strategy—and its effects
were almost immediate. The president, ignoring if not defying foreign policy advice, gave
a nod to the Saudis’ plan to bully Qatar. Trump’s view was that Qatar was providing
financial support to terror groups—pay no attention to a similar Saudi history. (Only some
members of the Saudi royal family had provided such support, went the new reasoning.)
Within weeks of the trip, MBS, detaining MBN quite in the dead of night, would force
him to relinquish the Crown Prince title, which MBS would then assume for himself.
Trump would tell friends that he and Jared had engineered this: “We’ve put our man on
top!”
From Riyadh, the presidential party went on to Jerusalem, where the president met
with Netanyahu and, in Bethlehem, with Abbas, expressing ever greater certainty that, in
his third-person guise, “Trump will make peace.” Then to Rome to meet the pope. Then to
Brussels, where, in character, he meaningfully drew the line between Western-alliancebased
foreign policy, which had been firmly in place since World War II, and the new
America First ethos.
In Trump’s view, all this should have been presidency-shaping stuff. He couldn’t
believe his dramatic accomplishments weren’t getting bigger play. He was simply in
denial, Bannon, Priebus, and others noted, about the continuing and competing Comey
and Mueller headlines.
One of Trump’s deficiencies—a constant in the campaign and, so far, in the presidency
—was his uncertain grasp of cause and effect. Until now, whatever problems he might
have caused in the past had reliably been supplanted by new events, giving him the
confidence that one bad story can always be replaced by a better, more dramatic story. He
could always change the conversation. The Saudi trip and his bold campaign to upend the
old foreign policy world order should have accomplished exactly that. But the president
continued to find himself trapped, incredulously on his part, by Comey and Mueller.
Nothing seemed to move on from those two events.
After the Saudi leg of the trip, Bannon and Priebus, both exhausted by the trip’s intense
proximity to the president and his family, peeled off and headed back to Washington. It
was now their job to deal with what had become, in the White House staff’s absence, the
actual, even ultimate, presidency-shaping crisis.
* * *
What did the people around Trump actually think of Trump? This was not just a
reasonable question, it was the question those around Trump most asked themselves. They
constantly struggled to figure out what they themselves actually thought and what they
thought everybody else was truly thinking.
Mostly they kept their answers to themselves, but in the instance of Comey and
Mueller, beyond all the usual dodging and weaving rationalizations, there really wasn’t
anybody, other than the president’s family, who didn’t very pointedly blame Trump
himself.
This was the point at which an emperors-new-clothes threshold was crossed. Now you
could, out loud, rather freely doubt his judgment, acumen, and, most of all, the advice he
was getting.
“He’s not only crazy,” declared Tom Barrack to a friend, “he’s stupid.”
But Bannon, along with Priebus, had strongly opposed the Comey firing, while Ivanka
and Jared had not only supported it, but insisted on it. This seismic event prompted a new
theme from Bannon, repeated by him widely, which was that every piece of advice from
the couple was bad advice.
Nobody now believed that firing Comey was a good idea; even the president seemed
sheepish. Hence, Bannon saw his new role as saving Trump—and Trump would always
need saving. He might be a brilliant actor but he could not manage his own career.
And for Bannon, this new challenge brought a clear benefit: when Trump’s fortune
sank, Bannon’s rose.
On the trip to the Middle East, Bannon went to work. He became focused on the figure
of Lanny Davis, one of the Clinton impeachment lawyers who, for the better part of two
years, became a near round-the-clock spokesperson and public defender of the Clinton
White House. Bannon judged Comey-Mueller to be as threatening to the Trump White
House as Monica Lewinsky and Ken Starr were to the Clinton White House, and he saw
the model for escaping a mortal fate in the Clinton response.
“What the Clintons did was to go to the mattresses with amazing discipline,” he
explained. “They set up an outside shop and then Bill and Hillary never mentioned it
again. They ground through it. Starr had them dead to rights and they got through it.”
Bannon knew exactly what needed to be done: seal off the West Wing and build a
separate legal and communications staff to defend the president. In this construct, the
president would occupy a parallel reality, removed from and uninvolved with what would
become an obvious partisan blood sport—as it had in the Clinton model. Politics would be
relegated to its nasty corner, and Trump would conduct himself as the president and as the
commander in chief.
“So we’re going to do it,” insisted Bannon, with joie de guerre and manic energy, “the
way they did it. Separate war room, separate lawyers, separate spokespeople. It’s keeping
that fight over there so we can wage this other fight over here. Everybody gets this. Well,
maybe not Trump so much. Not clear. Maybe a little. Not what he imagined.”
Bannon, in great excitement, and Priebus, grateful for an excuse to leave the
president’s side, rushed back to the West Wing to begin to cordon it off.
It did not escape Priebus’s notice that Bannon had in mind to create a rear guard of
defenders—David Bossie, Corey Lewandowski, and Jason Miller, all of whom would be
outside spokespeople—that would largely be loyal to him. Most of all, it did not escape
Priebus that Bannon was asking the president to play a role entirely out of character: the
cool, steady, long-suffering chief executive.
And it certainly didn’t help that they were unable to hire a law firm with a top-notch
white-collar government practice. By the time Bannon and Priebus were back in
Washington, three blue-chip firms had said no. All of them were afraid they would face a
rebellion among the younger staff if they represented Trump, afraid Trump would publicly
humiliate them if the going got tough, and afraid Trump would stiff them for the bill.
In the end, nine top firms turned them down.
18
BANNON REDUX
B
annon was back, according to the Bannon faction. According to Bannon himself:
“I’m good. I’m good. I’m back. I said don’t do it. You don’t fire the director of the
FBI. The geniuses around here thought otherwise.”
Was Bannon back? asked the worried other side of the house—Jared and Ivanka, Dina
Powell, Gary Cohn, Hope Hicks, H. R. McMaster.
If he was back, that meant he had successfully defied the organizational premise of the
Trump White House: the family would always prevail. Steve Bannon had, even in his
internal exile, not stopped his running public verbal assault on Jared and Ivanka. Off the
record became Bannon’s effective on the record. These were bitter, sometimes hilarious,
denunciations of the couple’s acumen, intelligence, and motives: “They think they’re
defending him, but they are always defending themselves.”
Now he declared they were finished as a power center—destroyed. And if not, they
would destroy the president with their terrible and self-serving advice. Even worse than
Jared was Ivanka. “She was a nonevent on the campaign. She became a White House
staffer and that’s when people suddenly realized she’s dumb as a brick. A little marketing
savvy and has a look, but as far as understanding actually how the world works and what
politics is and what it means—nothing. Once you expose that, you lose such credibility.
Jared just kind of flits in and does the Arab stuff.”
The folks on the Jarvanka side seemed more and more genuinely afraid of what might
happen if they crossed the Bannon side. Because the Bannonites, they truly seemed to
fear, were assassins.
On the flight to Riyadh, Dina Powell approached Bannon about a leak involving her to
a right-wing news site. She told him she knew the leak had come from Julia Hahn, one of
Bannon’s people and a former Breitbart writer.
“You should take it up with her,” said an amused Bannon. “But she’s a beast. And she
will come at you. Let me know how it works out.”
Among Bannon’s many regular targets, Powell had become a favorite. She was often
billed as Deputy National Security Advisor; that was her sometime designation even in the
New York Times. Actually, she was Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy—the
difference, Bannon pointed out, between the COO of a hotel chain and the concierge.
Coming back from the overseas trip, Powell began to talk in earnest to friends about
her timetable to get out of the White House and back into a private-sector job. Sheryl
Sandberg, she said, was her model.
“Oh my fucking god,” said Bannon.
On May 26, the day before the presidential party returned from the overseas trip, the
Washington Post reported that during the transition, Kushner and Sergey Kislyak, the
Russian ambassador, had, at Kushner’s instigation, discussed the possibility of having the
Russians set up a private communications channel between the transition team and the
Kremlin. The Post cited “U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports.” The Jarvanka side
believed that Bannon was the source.
Part of the by now deep enmity between the First Family couple and their allies and
Bannon and his team was the Jarvanka conviction that Bannon had played a part in many
of the reports of Kushner’s interactions with the Russians. This was not, in other words,
merely an internal policy war; it was a death match. For Bannon to live, Kushner would
have to be wholly discredited—pilloried, investigated, possibly even jailed.
Bannon, assured by everyone that there was no winning against the Trump family,
hardly tried to hide his satisfied belief that he was going to outplay them. In the Oval
Office, in front of her father, Bannon openly attacked her. “You,” he said, pointing at her
as the president watched, “are a fucking liar.” Ivanka’s bitter complaints to her father,
which in the past had diminished Bannon, were now met by a hands-off Trump: “I told
you this is a tough town, baby.”
* * *
But if Bannon was back, it was far from clear what being back meant. Trump being
Trump, was this true rehabilitation, or did he feel an even deeper rancor toward Bannon