for having survived his initial intention to kill him? Nobody really thought Trump forgot
—instead, he dwelled and ruminated and chewed. “One of the worst things is when he
believes you’ve succeeded at his expense,” explained Sam Nunberg, once on the inside of
the Trump circle, then cast to the outside. “If your win is in any way perceived as his loss,
phew.”
For his part, Bannon believed he was back because, at a pivotal moment, his advice
had proved vastly better than that of the “geniuses.” Firing Comey, the solve-all-problems
Jarvanka solution, had indeed unleashed a set of terrible consequences.
The Jarvanka side believed that Bannon was in essence blackmailing the president. As
Bannon went, so went the virulence of right-wing digital media. Despite his apparent
obsession with the “fake news” put out by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and
CNN, for the president the threat of fake news was actually greater on the right. Though
he would never call out fake news on Fox, Breitbart, and the others, these outlets—which
could conceivably spew a catchall of conspiracies in which a weak Trump sold out to a
powerful establishment—were potentially far more dangerous than their counterparts on
the left.
Bannon, too, was seen to be rectifying an earlier bureaucratic mistake. Where initially
he had been content to be the brains of the operation—confident that he was vastly smarter
than everybody else (and, indeed, few tried to challenge him for that title)—and not staff
up, now he was putting his organization and loyalists firmly in place. His off-balancesheet
communications staff—Bossie, Lewandowski, Jason Miller, Sam Nunberg (even
though he had long fallen out with Trump himself), and Alexandra Preate—formed quite a
private army of leakers and defenders. What’s more, whatever breach there had been
between Bannon and Priebus came smoothly together over their mutual loathing of Jared
and Ivanka. The professional White House was united against the amateur family White
House.
Adding to Bannon’s new bureaucratic advantage, he had maximum influence on the
staffing of the new firewall team, the lawyers and comm staff who would collectively
become the Lanny Davis of the Trump defense. Unable to hire prestige talent, Bannon
turned to one of the president’s longtime hit-man lawyers, Marc Kasowitz. Bannon had
previously bonded with Kasowitz when the attorney had handled a series of near-death
problems on the campaign, including dealing with a vast number of allegations and legal
threats from an ever growing list of women accusing Trump of molesting and harassing
them.
On May 31, the Bannon firewall plan went into effect. Henceforth, all discussion
related to Russia, the Mueller and congressional investigations, and other personal legal
issues would be entirely handled by the Kasowitz team. The president, as Bannon
described the plan in private and as he urged his boss, would no longer be addressing any
of these areas. Among the many, many efforts to force Trump into presidential mode, this
was the latest.
Bannon then installed Mark Corallo, a former Karl Rove communications staffer, as
the firewall spokesperson. He was also planning to put in Bossie and Lewandowski as part
of the crisis management team. And at Bannon’s prompting, Kasowitz attempted to further
insulate the president by giving his client a central piece of advice: send the kids home.
Bannon was indeed back. It was his team. It was his wall around the president—one
that he hoped would keep Jarvanka out.
Bannon’s formal moment of being back was marked by a major milestone. On June 1,
after a long and bitter internal debate, the president announced that he had decided to
withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. For Bannon, it was a deeply satisfying slap
in the face of liberal rectitude—Elon Musk and Bob Iger immediately resigned from
Trump’s business council—and confirmation of Trump’s true Bannonite instincts.
It was, likewise, the move that Ivanka Trump had campaigned hardest against in the
White House.
“Score,” said Bannon. “The bitch is dead.”
* * *
There are few modern political variables more disruptive than a dedicated prosecutor. It’s
the ultimate wild card.
A prosecutor means that the issue under investigation—or, invariably, cascading issues
—will be a constant media focus. Setting their own public stage, prosecutors are certain
leakers.
It means that everybody in a widening circle has to hire a lawyer. Even tangential
involvement can cost six figures; central involvement quickly rises into the millions.
By early summer, there was already an intense seller’s market in Washington for top
criminal legal talent. As the Mueller investigation got under way, White House staffers
made a panicky rush to get the best firm before someone else got there first and created a
conflict.
“Can’t talk about Russia, nothing, can’t go there,” said Katie Walsh, now three months
removed from the White House, on advice of her new counsel.
Any interviews or depositions given to investigators risked putting you in jeopardy.
What’s more, every day in the White House brought new dangers: any random meeting
you might find yourself in exposed you more.
Bannon kept insisting on the absolute importance of this point—and for him the
strategic importance. If you didn’t want to find yourself getting wrung out in front of
Congress, your career and your net worth in jeopardy, be careful who you spoke to. More
to the point: you must not under any circumstances speak to Jared and Ivanka, who were
now Russia toxic. It was Bannon’s widely advertised virtue and advantage: “I’ve never
been to Russia. I don’t know anybody from Russia. I’ve never spoken to any Russians.
And I’d just as well not speak to anyone who has.”
Bannon observed a hapless Pence in a lot of “wrong meetings,” and helped to bring in
the Republican operative Nick Ayers as Pence’s chief of staff, and to get “our fallback
guy” out of the White House and “running around the world and looking like a vice
president.”
And beyond the immediate fears and disruption, there was the virtually certain
outcome that a special prosecutor delegated to find a crime would find one—likely many.
Everybody became a potential agent of implicating others. Dominos would fall. Targets
would flip.
Paul Manafort, making a good living in international financial gray areas, his risk
calculation based on the long-shot odds that an under-the-radar privateer would ever
receive close scrutiny, would now be subjected to microscopic review. His nemesis, Oleg
Deripaska—still pursuing his $17 million claim against Manafort and himself looking for
favorable treatment from federal authorities who had restricted his travel to the United
States—was continuing his own deep investigation into Manafort’s Russian and Ukrainian
business affairs.
Tom Barrack, privy to the president’s stream of consciousness as well as his financial
history, was suddenly taking stock of his own exposure. Indeed, all the billionaire friends
with whom Trump got on the phone and gossiped and rambled were potential witnesses.
In the past, administrations forced to deal with a special prosecutor appointed to
investigate and prosecute matters with which the president might have been involved
usually became consumed by the effort to cope. Their tenure broke into “before” and
“after” periods—with the “after” period hopelessly bogged down in the soap opera of G-
man pursuit. Now it looked like the “after” period would be almost the entirety of the
Trump administration.
The idea of formal collusion and artful conspiracy—as media and Democrats more or
less breathlessly believed or hoped had happened between Trump and the Russians—
seemed unlikely to everybody in the White House. (Bannon’s comment that the Trump
campaign was not organized enough to collude with its own state organizations became
everybody’s favorite talking point—not least because it was true.) But nobody was
vouching for the side deals and freelance operations and otherwise nothing-burger stuff
that was a prosecutor’s daily bread and the likely detritus of the Trump hangers-on. And
everybody believed that if the investigation moved into the long chain of Trump financial
transactions, it would almost certainly reach the Trump family and the Trump White
House.
And then there was the president’s insistent claim that he could do something. I can
fire him, he would say. Indeed, it was another of his repetitive loops: I can fire him. I can
fire him. Mueller. The idea of a showdown in which the stronger, more determined, more
intransigent, more damn-the-consequences man prevails was central to Trump’s own
personal mythology. He lived in a mano a mano world, one in which if your own
respectability and sense of personal dignity were not a paramount issue—if you weren’t
weak in the sense of needing to seem like a reasonable and respectable person—you had a
terrific advantage. And if you made it personal, if you believed that when the fight really
mattered that it was kill or be killed, you were unlikely to meet someone willing to make it
as personal as you were.
This was Bannon’s fundamental insight about Trump: he made everything personal,
and he was helpless not to.
* * *
Dissuaded by everyone from focusing his anger on Mueller (at least for now), the
president focused on Sessions.
Sessions—“Beauregard”—was a close Bannon ally, and in May and June the
president’s almost daily digs against the attorney general—beyond even his loyalty and
resolve, Trump issued scathing criticism of his stature, voice, and dress—provided a
sudden bit of good news for the anti-Bannon side of the house. Bannon, they reasoned,
couldn’t really be on top if his key proxy was now being blamed for everything bad in
Trump’s life. As always, Trump’s regard or scorn was infectious. If you were in favor,
then whatever and whomever he associated with you was also in favor. If you weren’t,
then everything associated with you was poisonous.
The brutality of Trump’s dissatisfaction kept increasing. A small man with a Mr.
Magoo stature and an old-fashioned Southern accent, Sessions was bitterly mocked by the
president, who drew a corrosive portrait of physical and mental weakness. Insult trauma
radiated out of the Oval Office. You could hear it when passing by.
Bannon’s efforts to talk the president down—reminding Trump of the difficulties they
would encounter during another attorney general confirmation, the importance of Sessions
to the hard conservative base, the loyalty that Sessions had shown during the Trump
campaign—backfired. To the anti-Bannon side’s satisfaction, they resulted in another
round of Trump’s dissing Bannon.
The attack on Sessions now became, at least in the president’s mind, the opening salvo
in an active effort to replace Sessions as attorney general. But there were only two
candidates to run the Justice Department from whom Trump believed he could extract
absolute loyalty, Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani. He believed they would both perform
kamikaze acts for him—just as everyone else knew they would almost certainly never be
confirmed.
* * *
As James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee approached—it
would take place on June 8, twelve days after the presidential traveling party returned
home from the long trip to the Middle East and Europe—there began among senior
staffers an almost open inquiry into Trump’s motives and state of mind.
This seemed spurred by an obvious question: Why hadn’t he fired Comey during his
first days of office, when it would likely have been seen as a natural changing of the guard
with no clear connection to the Russian investigation? There were many equivocal
answers: general disorganization, the fast pace of events, and a genuine sense of innocence
and naïveté about the Russian charges. But now there seemed to be a new understanding:
Donald Trump believed he had vastly more power, authority, and control than in fact he
had, and he believed his talent for manipulating people and bending and dominating them
was vastly greater than it was. Pushing this line of reasoning just a little further: senior
staff believed the president had a problem with reality, and reality was now overwhelming
him.
If true, this notion directly contravened the basic premise of the support for Trump
among his staff. In some sense, not too closely questioned, they believed he had almost
magical powers. Since his success was not explainable, he must have talents beyond what
they could fathom. His instincts. Or his salesman’s gifts. Or his energy. Or just the fact
that he was the opposite of what he was supposed to be. This was out-of-the-ordinary
politics—shock-to-the-system politics—but it could work.
But what if it didn’t? What if they were all profoundly wrong?
Comey’s firing and the Mueller investigation prompted a delayed reckoning that ended
months of willing suspension of disbelief. These sudden doubts and considerations—at the
highest level of government—did not quite yet go to the president’s ability to adequately
function in his job. But they did, arguably for the first time in open discussions, go to the
view that he was hopelessly prone to self-sabotaging his ability to function in the job. This
insight, scary as it was, at least left open the possibility that if all the elements of selfsabotage
were carefully controlled—his information, his contacts, his public remarks, and
the sense of danger and threat to him—he might yet be able to pull it together and
successfully perform.
Quite suddenly, this became the prevailing view of the Trump presidency and the
opportunity that still beckoned: you can be saved by those around you or brought down by
them.
Bannon believed the Trump presidency would fail in some more or less apocalyptic
fashion if Kushner and his wife remained Trump’s most influential advisers. Their lack of
political or real-world experience had already hobbled the presidency, but since the
Comey disaster it was getting worse: as Bannon saw it, they were now acting out of
personal panic.
The Kushner side believed that Bannon or Bannonism had pushed the president into a
harshness that undermined his natural salesman’s abilities to charm and reach out. Bannon
and his ilk had made him the monster he more and more seemed to be.
Meanwhile, virtually everybody believed that a large measure of the fault lay in Reince
Priebus, who had failed to create a White House that could protect the president from
himself—or from Bannon or from his own children. At the same time, believing that the
fundamental problem lay in Priebus was easy scapegoating, not to mention little short of
risible: with so little power, the chief of staff simply wasn’t capable of directing either
Trump or those around him. Priebus himself could, not too helpfully, argue only that no
one had any idea how much worse all this would have been without his long-suffering
mediation among the president’s relatives, his Svengali, and Trump’s own terrible
instincts. There might be two or three debacles a day, but without Priebus’s stoic resolve,
and the Trump blows that he absorbed, there might have been a dozen more.
* * *
On June 8, from a little after ten in the morning to nearly one in the afternoon, James
Comey testified in public before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The former FBI
director’s testimony, quite a tour de force of directness, moral standing, personal honor,
and damning details, left the country with a simple message: the president was likely a
fool and certainly a liar. In the age of modern media politesse, few presidents had been so
directly challenged and impugned before Congress.
Here it was, stark in Comey’s telling: the president regarded the FBI director as
working directly for him, of owing his job to him, and now he wanted something back.
“My common sense,” said Comey, “again, I could be wrong, but my common sense told
me what’s going on here is he’s looking to get something in exchange for granting my
request to stay in the job.”
In Comey’s telling, the president wanted the FBI to lay off Michael Flynn. And he
wanted to stop the FBI from pursuing its Russia-related investigation. The point could
hardly have been clearer: if the president was pressuring the director because he feared
that an investigation of Michael Flynn would damage him, then this was an obstruction of
justice.
The contrast between the two men, Comey and Trump, was in essence the contrast
between good government and Trump himself. Comey came across as precise,
compartmentalized, scrupulous in his presentation of the details of what transpired and the
nature of his responsibility—he was as by-the-book as it gets. Trump, in the portrait
offered by Comey, was shady, shoot-from-the-hip, heedless or even unaware of the rules,
deceptive, and in it for himself.
After the hearing ended, the president told everybody he had not watched it, but
everybody knew he had. To the extent that this was, as Trump saw it, a contest between
the two men, it was as direct a juxtaposition as might be imagined. The entire point of the
Comey testimony was to recast and contradict what the president had said in his angry and
defensive tweets and statements, and to cast suspicion on his actions and motives—and to
suggest that the president’s intention was to suborn the director of the FBI.
Even among Trump loyalists who believed, as Trump did, that Comey was a phony and
this was all a put-up job, the nearly universal feeling was that in this mortal game, Trump
was quite defenseless.
* * *
Five days later, on June 13, it was Jeff Sessions’s turn to testify before the Senate
Intelligence Committee. His task was to try to explain the contacts he had had with the
Russian ambassador, contacts that had later caused him to recuse himself—and made him
the president’s punching bag. Unlike Comey, who had been invited to the Senate to show
off his virtue—and had seized the opportunity—Sessions had been invited to defend his
equivocation, deception, or stupidity.
In an often testy exchange, the attorney general provided a squirrelly view of executive
privilege. Though the president had not in fact evoked executive privilege, Sessions
deemed it appropriate to try to protect it anyway.
Bannon, watching the testimony from the West Wing, quickly became frustrated.
“Come on, Beauregard,” he said.
Unshaven, Bannon sat at the head of the long wooden conference table in the chief of
staff’s office and focused intently on the flat-screen monitor across the room.
“They thought the cosmopolitans would like it if we fired Comey,” he said, with “they”
being Jared and Ivanka. “The cosmopolitans would be cheering for us for taking down the
man who took Hillary down.” Where the president saw Sessions as the cause of the
Comey fiasco, Bannon saw Sessions as a victim of it.
A sylphlike Kushner, wearing a skinny gray suit and skinny black tie, slipped into the
room. (Recently making the rounds was a joke about Kushner being the best-dressed man
in Washington, which is quite the opposite of a compliment.) On occasion the power
struggle between Bannon and Kushner seemed to take physical form. Bannon’s demeanor
rarely changed, but Kushner could be petulant, condescending, and dismissive—or, as he
was now, hesitating, abashed, and respectful.
Bannon ignored Kushner until the younger man cleared his throat. “How’s it going?”
Bannon indicated the television set: as in, Watch for yourself.
Finally Bannon spoke. “They don’t realize this is about institutions, not people.”
“They” would appear to be the Jarvanka side—or an even broader construct referring
to all those who mindlessly stood with Trump.
“This town is about institutions,” Bannon continued. “We fire the FBI director and we
fire the whole FBI. Trump is a man against institutions, and the institutions know it. How
do you think that goes down?”
This was shorthand for a favorite Bannon riff: In the course of the campaign, Donald
Trump had threatened virtually every institution in American political life. He was a
clown-prince version of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Trump believed,
offering catnip to deep American ire and resentment, that one man could be bigger than
the system. This analysis presupposed that the institutions of political life were as
responsive as those in the commercial life that Trump was from—and that they yearned to
meet the market and find the Zeitgeist. But what if these institutions—the media, the
judiciary, the intelligence community, the greater executive branch itself, and the “swamp”
with its law firms, consultants, influence peddlers, and leakers—were in no way eager to
adapt? If, by their nature, they were determined to endure, then this accidental president
was up against it.
Kushner seemed unpersuaded. “I wouldn’t put it like that,” he said.
“I think that’s the lesson of the first hundred days that some people around here have
learned,” said Bannon, ignoring Kushner. “It’s not going to get better. This is what it’s
like.”
“I don’t know,” said Kushner.
“Know it,” said Bannon.
“I think Sessions is doing okay,” said Kushner. “Don’t you?”
19
MIKA WHO?
T
he media had unlocked the value of Donald Trump, but few in the media had
unlocked it more directly and personally than Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski.
Their MSNBC breakfast show was an ongoing soap-opera-ish or possibly Oprahesque
drama about their relationship with Trump—how he had disappointed them, how far they
had come from their original regard for him, and how much and how pathetically he
regularly embarrassed himself. The bond he once had with them, forged through mutual
celebrity and a shared proprietary sense of politics (Scarborough, the former congressman,
seemed to feel that he ought reasonably to be president as much as Donald Trump felt he
should be), had distinguished the show during the campaign; now its public fraying
became part of the daily news cycle. Scarborough and Brzezinski lectured him, channeled
the concerns of his friends and family, upbraided him, and openly worried about him—
that he was getting the wrong advice (Bannon) and, too, that his mental powers were
slipping. They also staked a claim at representing the reasonable center-right alternative to
the president, and indeed were quite a good barometer of both the center-right’s efforts to
deal with him and its day-to-day difficulties of living with him.
Trump, believing he had been used and abused by Scarborough and Brzezinski,
claimed he’d stopped watching the show. But Hope Hicks, every morning, quaking, had to
recount it for him.
Morning Joe was a ground-zero study in the way the media had over-invested in
Trump. He was the whale against which media emotions, self-regard, ego, joie de guerre,
career advancement, and desire to be at the center of the story, too, all churned in nearly
ecstatic obsession. In reverse regard, the media was the same whale, serving the same
function, for Trump.
To this Trump added another tic, a lifelong sense that people were constantly taking
unfair advantage of him. This perhaps came from his father’s cheapness and lack of
generosity, or from his own overawareness of being a rich kid (and, no doubt, his
insecurities about this), or from a negotiator’s profound understanding that it is never winwin,
that where there is profit there is loss. Trump simply could not abide the knowledge
that somebody was getting a leg up at his expense. His was a zero-sum ecosystem. In the
world of Trump, anything that he deemed of value either accrued to him or had been
robbed from him.
Scarborough and Brzezinski had taken their relationship with Trump and amply
monetized it, while putting no percentage in his pocket—and in this instance, he judged
his commission should be slavishly favorable treatment. To say this drove him mad would
be an understatement. He dwelled and fixated on the perceived injustice. Don’t mention
Joe or Mika to him was a standing proscription.
His wounded feelings and incomprehension at the failure of people whose embrace he
sought to, in return, embrace him was “deep, crazy deep,” said his former aide Sam
Nunberg, who had run afoul of his need for 100 percent approbation and his bitter
suspicion of being profited from.
* * *
Out of this accumulated rage came his June 29 tweet about Mika Brzezinski.
It was classic Trump: there was no mediation between off-the-record language and the
public statement. Referring to “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” in one tweet, he wrote in another
that she was “bleeding badly from a facelift” when she and Scarborough visited Trump at
Mar-a-Lago on the previous New Year’s Eve. Many of his tweets were not, as they might
seem, spontaneous utterances, but constant ones. Trump’s rifts often began as insult
comedy and solidified as bitter accusations and then, in an uncontainable moment, became
an official proclamation.
The next step, in his tweet paradigm, was universal liberal opprobrium. Almost a week
of social media fury, cable breast-beating, and front-page condemnation followed his
tweet about Brzezinski. That was accompanied by the other part of the Trump tweet
dynamic: by unifying liberal opinion against him, he unified its opposite for him.
In truth, he was often neither fully aware of the nature of what he had said nor fully
cognizant of why there should be such a passionate reaction to it. As often as not, he
surprised himself. “What did I say?” he would ask after getting severe blowback.
He wasn’t serving up these insults for effect—well, not entirely. And his behavior
wasn’t carefully calculated; it was tit for tat, and he likely would have said what he’d said
even if no one was left standing with him. (This very lack of calculation, this inability to
be political, was part of his political charm.) It was just his good luck that the Trumpian 35
percent—that standing percentage of people who, according to most polls, seemed to
support him no matter what (who would, in his estimation, let him get away with shooting
someone on Fifth Avenue)—was largely unfazed and maybe even buoyed by every new
expression of Trumpness.
Now, having expressed himself and gotten in the last word, Trump was cheery again.
“Mika and Joe totally love this. It’s big ratings for them,” said the president, with
certain satisfaction and obvious truth.
* * *
Ten days later, a large table of Bannonites was having dinner at the Bombay Club, a highend
Indian restaurant two blocks from the White House. One of the group—Arthur
Schwartz, a PR consultant—asked a question about the Mika and Joe affair.
Perhaps it was the noise, but it was also a fitting measure of the speed of events in the
Trump era: Bannon lieutenant Alexandra Preate replied, with genuine fogginess, “Who?”
The operetta of the Mika tweets—the uncouthness and verbal abuse demonstrated by
the president, his serious lack of control and judgment, and the worldwide censure heaped
upon him for it—had already far receded, wholly overshadowed by more Trump eruptions
and controversy.
But before moving on to the next episode of ohmygodness, it is worth considering the
possibility that this constant, daily, often more than once-a-day, pileup of events—each
one canceling out the one before—is the true aberration and novelty at the heart of the
Trump presidency.
Perhaps never before in history—not through world wars, the overthrow of empires,
periods of extraordinary social transformation, or episodes of government-shaking scandal
—have real-life events unfolded with such emotional and plot-thickening impact. In the
fashion of binge-watching a television show, one’s real life became quite secondary to the
public drama. It was not unreasonable to say Whoa, wait just a minute: public life doesn’t
happen like this. Public life in fact lacks coherence and drama. (History, by contrast,
attains coherence and drama only in hindsight.)
The process of accomplishing the smallest set of tasks within the sprawling and
resistant executive branch is a turtle process. The burden of the White House is the
boredom of bureaucracy. All White Houses struggle to rise above that, and they succeed
only on occasion. In the age of hypermedia, this has not gotten easier for the White House,
it’s gotten harder.
It’s a distracted nation, fragmented and preoccupied. It was, arguably, the peculiar
tragedy of Barack Obama that even as a transformational figure—and inspirational
communicator—he couldn’t really command much interest. As well, it might be a central
tragedy of the news media that its old-fashioned and even benighted civic-minded belief
that politics is the highest form of news has helped transform it from a mass business to a
narrow-cast one. Alas, politics itself has more and more become a discrete business. Its
appeal is B-to-B—business-to-business. The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred,
incestuous interests. This isn’t corruption so much as overspecialization. It’s a wonk’s life.
Politics has gone one way, the culture another. The left-right junkies might pretend
otherwise, but the great middle doesn’t put political concerns at the top of their minds.
And yet, contravening all cultural and media logic, Donald Trump produced on a daily
basis an astonishing, can’t-stop-following-it narrative. And this was not even because he
was changing or upsetting the fundamentals of American life. In six months as president,
failing to master almost any aspect of the bureaucratic process, he had, beyond placing his
nominee on the Supreme Court, accomplished, practically speaking, nothing. And yet,
OMG!!! There almost was no other story in America—and in much of the world. That was
the radical and transformational nature of the Trump presidency: it held everybody’s
attention.
Inside the White House, the daily brouhaha and world’s fascination was no cause for
joy. It was, in the White House staff’s bitter view, the media that turned every day into a
climactic, dastardly moment. And, in a sense, this was correct: every development cannot
be climactic. The fact that yesterday’s climax would soon, compared to the next climax, be
piddling, rather bore out the disproportion. The media was failing to judge the relative
importance of Trump events: most Trump events came to naught (arguably all of them
did), and yet all were greeted with equal shock and horror. The White House staff believed
that the media’s Trump coverage lacked “context”—by this, they meant that people ought
to realize that Trump was mostly just huffing and puffing.
At the same time, few in the White House did not assign blame to Trump for this as
well. He seemed to lack the most basic understanding that a president’s words and actions
would, necessarily, be magnified to the nth power. In some convenient sense, he failed to
understand this because he wanted the attention, no matter how often it disappointed him.
But he also wanted it because again and again the response surprised him—and, as though
every time was the first time, he could not modify his behavior.
Sean Spicer caught the brunt of the daily drama, turning this otherwise reasonable,
mild-mannered, process-oriented professional into a joke figure standing at the White
House door. In his daily out-of-body experience, as a witness to his own humiliation and
loss for words, Spicer understood after a while—although he began to understand this
beginning his first day on the job when dealing with the dispute about the inaugural
audience numbers—that he had “gone down a rabbit hole.” In this disorienting place, all
public artifice, pretense, proportion, savvy, and self-awareness had been cast off, or—
possibly another result of Trump never really intending to be president—never really
figured into the state of being president.
On the other hand, constant hysteria did have one unintended political virtue. If every
new event canceled out every other event, like some wacky news-cycle pyramid scheme,
then you always survived another day.
* * *
Donald Trump’s sons, Don Jr., thirty-nine, and Eric, thirty-three, existed in an enforced
infantile relationship to their father, a role that embarrassed them, but one that they also
professionally embraced. The role was to be Donald Trump’s heirs and attendees. Their
father took some regular pleasure in pointing out that they were in the back of the room
when God handed out brains—but, then again, Trump tended to scorn anyone who might
be smarter than he was. Their sister Ivanka, certainly no native genius, was the designated
family smart person, her husband Jared the family’s smooth operator. That left Don and
Eric to errands and admin. In fact, the brothers had grown into reasonably competent
family-owned-company executives (this is not saying all that much) because their father
had little or no patience for actually running his company. Of course, quite a good amount
of their professional time was spent on the whims, projects, promotions, and general way
of life of DJT.
One benefit of their father’s run for president was that it kept him away from the office.
Still, the campaign’s administration was largely their responsibility, so when the campaign
went from caprice to a serious development in the Trump business and family, it caused a
disruption in the family dynamic. Other people were suddenly eager to be Donald Trump’s
key lieutenants. There were the outsiders, like Corey Lewandowski, the campaign
manager, but there was also the insider, brother-in-law Jared. Trump, not unusually for a
family-run company, made everybody compete for his favor. The company was about
him; it existed because of his name, personality, and charisma, so the highest standing in
the company was reserved for those who could best serve him. There wasn’t all that much
competition for this role before he ran for president, but in early 2016, with the
Republican Party collapsing and Trump rising, his sons faced a new professional and
family situation.
Their brother-ln-law had been slowly drawn into the campaign, partly at his wife’s
urging because her father’s lack of constraint might actually affect the Trump business if
they didn’t keep an eye on him. And then he, with his brothers-in-law, was pulled in by the
excitement of the campaign itself. By late spring 2016, when the nomination was all but
clinched, the Trump campaign was a set of competing power centers with the knives out.
Lewandowski regarded both brothers and their brother-in-law with rolling-on-the-floor
contempt: not only were Don Jr. and Eric stupid, and Jared somehow both supercilious
and obsequious (the butler), but nobody knew a whit about politics—indeed, there wasn’t
an hour of political experience among them.
As time went on, Lewandowski became particularly close to the candidate. To the
family, especially to Kushner, Lewandowski was an enabler. Trump’s worst instincts
flowed through Lewandowski. In early June, a little more than a month before the
Republican National Convention, Jared and Ivanka decided that what was needed—for the
sake of the campaign, for the sake of the Trump business—was an intervention.
Making common cause with Don Jr. and Eric, Jared and Ivanka pushed for a united
front to convince Trump to oust Lewandowski. Don Jr., feeling squeezed not only by
Lewandowski but by Jared, too, seized the opportunity. He would push out Lewandowski
and become his replacement—and indeed, eleven days later Lewandowski would be gone.
All this was part of the background to one of the most preposterous meetings in
modern politics. On June 9, 2016, Don Jr., Jared, and Paul Manafort met with a
movieworthy cast of dubious characters in Trump Tower after having been promised
damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Don Jr., encouraged by Jared and Ivanka,
was trying to impress his father that he had the stuff to rise in the campaign.
When this meeting became public thirteen months later, it would, for the Trump White
House, encapsulate both the case against collusion with the Russians and the case for it. It
was a case, or the lack of one, not of masterminds and subterfuge, but of senseless and
benighted people so guileless and unconcerned that they enthusiastically colluded in plain
sight.
* * *
Walking into Trump Tower that June day were a well-connected lawyer from Moscow,
who was a likely Russian agent; associates of the Azerbaijani Russian oligarch Aras
Agalarov; a U.S. music promoter who managed Agalarov’s son, a Russian pop star; and a
Russian government lobbyist in Washington. Their purpose in visiting the campaign
headquarters of a presumptive major party nominee for president of the United States was
to meet with three of the most highly placed people on the campaign. This meeting was
preceded by an email chain addressed to multiple recipients inside the Trump campaign of
almost joyful intent: the Russians were offering a dump of negative or even incriminating
information about their opponent.
Among the why-and-how theories of this imbecilic meeting:
• The Russians, in organized or freelance fashion, were trying to entrap the Trump
campaign into a compromising relationship.
• The meeting was part of an already active cooperation on the part of the Trump
campaign with the Russians to obtain and distribute damaging information about
Hillary Clinton—and, indeed, within days of the Don Jr. meeting, WikiLeaks
announced that it had obtained Clinton emails. Less than a month later, it started to
release them.
• The wide-eyed Trump campaign, largely still playacting at running for president—
and with no thought whatsoever of actually winning the election—was open to any
and all entreaties and offers, because it had nothing to lose. Dopey Don Jr. (Fredo, as
Steve Bannon would dub him, in one of his frequent Godfather borrowings) was
simply trying to prove he was a player and a go-to guy.
• The meeting included the campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and the campaign’s
most influential voice, Jared Kushner, because: (a) a high-level conspiracy was
being coordinated; (b) Manafort and Kushner, not taking the campaign very
seriously, and without a thought of any consequence here, were merely entertained
by the possibility of dirty tricks; (c) the three men were united in their plan to get rid
of Lewandowski—with Don Jr. as the hatchet man—and, as part of this unity,
Manafort and Kushner need to show up at Don Jr.’s silly meeting.
Whatever the reason for the meeting, no matter which of the above scenarios most
accurately describes how this comical and alarming group came together, a year later,
practically nobody doubted that Don Jr. would have wanted his father to know that he
seized the initiative.
“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the
twenty-sixth floor is zero,” said an astonished and derisive Bannon, not long after the
meeting was revealed.
“The three senior guys in the campaign,” an incredulous Bannon went on, “thought it
was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference
room on the twenty-fifth floor—with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. Even if
you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think
it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately. Even if you didn’t think to do
that, and you’re totally amoral, and you wanted that information, you do it in a Holiday
Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people and go
through everything and then they verbally come and tell another lawyer in a cut-out, and if
you’ve got something, then you figure out how to dump it down to Breitbart or something
like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication. You never see it, you never
know it, because you don’t need to… . But that’s the brain trust that they had.”
All of the participants would ultimately plead that the meeting was utterly
inconsequential, whatever the hope for it might have been, and admit that it was hapless.
But even if that was true, a year later the revelation of the meeting had three profound and
probably transformational effects:
First, the constant, ever repeated denials about there having been no discussion
between campaign officials and the Russians connected to the Kremlin about the
campaign, and, indeed, no meaningful contact between campaign officials and the Russian
government, were exploded.
Second, the certainty among the White House staff that Trump himself would have not
only been apprised of the details of this meeting, but have met the principals, meant that
the president was caught out as a liar by those whose trust he most needed. It was another
inflection point between hunkered-in-the-bunker and signed-on-for-the-wild-ride, and getme-out-of-here.
Third, it was now starkly clear that everyone’s interests diverged. The fortunes of Don
Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner hung individually in the balance. Indeed, the best
guess by many in the West Wing was that the details of the meeting had been leaked by
the Kushner side, thus sacrificing Don Jr. in an attempt to deflect responsibility away from
themselves.
* * *
Even before word of the June 2016 meeting leaked out, Kushner’s legal team—largely
assembled in a rush since the appointment of Mueller, the special counsel—had been
piecing together a forensic picture of both the campaign’s Russian contacts and Kushner
Companies’ finances and money trail. In January, ignoring almost everybody’s caution
against it, Jared Kushner had entered the White House as a senior figure in the
administration; now, six months later, he faced acute legal jeopardy. He had tried to keep a
low profile, seeing himself as a behind-the-scenes counselor, but now his public position
was not only endangering himself but the future of his family’s business. As long as he
remained exposed, his family was effectively blocked from most financial sources.
Without access to this market, their holdings risked becoming distress debt situations.
Jared and Ivanka’s self-created fantasylike life—two ambitious, well-mannered, wellliked
young people living at the top of New York’s social and financial world after having,
in their version of humble fashion, accepted global power—had now, even with neither
husband nor wife in office long enough to have taken any real action at all, come to the
precipice of disgrace.
Jail was possible. So was bankruptcy. Trump may have been talking defiantly about
offering pardons, or bragging about his power to give them, but that did not solve
Kushner’s business problems, nor did it provide a way to mollify Charlie Kushner, Jared’s
choleric and often irrational father. What’s more, successfully navigating through the eye
of the legal needle would require a careful touch and nuanced strategic approach on the
part of the president—quite an unlikely development.
Meanwhile, the couple blamed everyone else in the White House. They blamed Priebus
for the disarray that had produced a warlike atmosphere that propelled constant and
damaging leaks, they blamed Bannon for leaking, and they blamed Spicer for poorly
defending their virtue and interests.
They needed to defend themselves. One strategy was to get out of town (Bannon had a
list of all the tense moments when the couple had taken a convenient holiday), and it
happened that Trump would be attending the G20 summit Hamburg, Germany, on July 7
and 8. Jared and Ivanka accompanied the president on the trip, and while at the summit
they learned that word of Don Jr.’s meeting with the Russians—and the couple kept
pointedly presenting it as Don Jr.’s meeting—had leaked. Worse, they learned that the
story was about to break in the New York Times.
Originally, Trump’s staff was expecting details of the Don Jr. meeting to break on the
website Circa. The lawyers, and spokesperson Mark Corallo, had been working to manage
this news. But while in Hamburg, the president’s staff learned that the Times was
developing a story that had far more details about the meeting—quite possibly supplied by
the Kushner side—which it would publish on Saturday, July 8. Advance knowledge of this
article was kept from the president’s legal team for the ostensible reason that it didn’t
involve the president.
In Hamburg, Ivanka, knowing the news would shortly get out, was presenting her
signature effort: a World Bank fund to aid women entrepreneurs in developing countries.
This was another instance of what White House staffers saw as the couple’s
extraordinarily off-message direction. Nowhere in the Trump campaign, nowhere on
Bannon’s white boards, nowhere in the heart of this president was there an interest in
women entrepreneurs in developing countries. The daughter’s agenda was singularly at
odds with the father’s—or at least the agenda that had elected him. Ivanka, in the view of
almost every White House staffer, profoundly misunderstood the nature of her job and had
converted traditional First Lady noblesse oblige efforts into White House staff work.
Shortly before boarding Air Force One for the return trip home, Ivanka—with what by
now was starting to seem like an almost anarchic tone deafness—sat in for her father
between Chinese president Xi Jinping and British prime minister Theresa May at the main
G20 conference table. But this was mere distraction: as the president and his team huddled
on the plane, the central subject was not the conference, it was how to respond to the
Times story about Don Jr.’s and Jared’s Trump Tower meeting, now only hours away from
breaking.
En route to Washington, Sean Spicer and everybody else from the communications
office was relegated to the back of the plane and excluded from the panicky discussions.
Hope Hicks became the senior communications strategist, with the president, as always,
her singular client. In the days following, that highest political state of being “in the room”
was turned on its head. Not being in the room—in this case, the forward cabin on Air
Force One—became an exalted status and get-out-of-jail-free card. “It used to hurt my
feelings when I saw them running around doing things that were my job,” said Spicer.
“Now I’m glad to be out of the loop.”
Included in the discussion on the plane were the president, Hicks, Jared and Ivanka,
and their spokesperson, Josh Raffel. Ivanka, according to the later recollection of her
team, would shortly leave the meeting, take a pill, and go to sleep. Jared, in the telling of
his team, might have been there, but he was “not taking a pencil to anything.” Nearby, in a
small conference room watching the movie Fargo, were Dina Powell, Gary Cohn, Stephen
Miller, and H. R. McMaster, all of whom would later insist that they were, however
physically close to the unfolding crisis, removed from it. And, indeed, anyone “in the
room” was caught in a moment that would shortly receive the special counsel’s close
scrutiny, with the relevant question being whether one or more federal employees had
induced other federal employees to lie.
An aggrieved, unyielding, and threatening president dominated the discussion, pushing
into line his daughter and her husband, Hicks, and Raffel. Kasowitz—the lawyer whose
specific job was to keep Trump at arm’s length from Russian-related matters—was kept
on hold on the phone for an hour and then not put through. The president insisted that the
meeting in Trump Tower was purely and simply about Russian adoption policy. That’s
what was discussed, period. Period. Even though it was likely, if not certain, that the Times
had the incriminating email chain—in fact, it was quite possible that Jared and Ivanka and
the lawyers knew the Times had this email chain—the president ordered that no one should
let on to the more problematic discussion about Hillary Clinton.
It was a real-time example of denial and cover-up. The president believed,
belligerently, what he believed. Reality was what he was convinced it was—or should be.
Hence the official story: there was a brief courtesy meeting in Trump Tower about
adoption policy, to no result, attended by senior aides and unaffiliated Russian nationals.
The crafting of this manufactured tale was a rogue operation by rookies—always the two
most combustible elements of a cover-up.
In Washington, Kasowitz and the legal team’s spokesperson, Mark Corallo, weren’t
informed of either the Times article or the plan for how to respond to it until Don Jr.’s
initial statement went out just before the story broke that Saturday.
Over the course of next seventy-two hours or so, the senior staff found itself wholly
separate from—and, once again, looking on in astonishment at—the actions of the
president’s innermost circle of aides. In this, the relationship of the president and Hope
Hicks, long tolerated as a quaint bond between the older man and a trustworthy young
woman, began to be seen as anomalous and alarming. Completely devoted to
accommodating him, she, his media facilitator, was the ultimate facilitator of unmediated
behavior. His impulses and thoughts—unedited, unreviewed, unchallenged—not only
passed through him, but, via Hicks, traveled out into the world without any other White
House arbitration.
“The problem isn’t Twitter, it’s Hope,” observed one communication staffer.
On July 9, a day after publishing its first story, the Times noted that the Trump Tower
meeting was specifically called to discuss the Russian offer of damaging material about
Clinton. The next day, as the Times prepared to publish the full email chain, Don Jr.
hurriedly dumped it himself. There followed an almost daily count of new figures—all, in
their own way, peculiar and unsettling—who emerged as participants in the meeting.
But the revelation of the Trump Tower meeting had another, perhaps even larger
dimension. It marked the collapse of the president’s legal strategy: the demise of Steve
Bannon’s Clinton-emulating firewall around the president.
The lawyers, in disgust and alarm, saw, in effect, each principal becoming a witness to
another principal’s potential misdeeds—all conspiring with one another to get their stories
straight. The client and his family were panicking and running their own defense. Short-
term headlines were overwhelming any sort of long-term strategy. “The worst thing you
can do is lie to a prosecutor,” said one member of the legal team. The persistent Trump
idea that it is not a crime to lie to the media was regarded by the legal team as at best
reckless and, in itself, potentially actionable: an explicit attempt to throw sand into the
investigation’s gears.
Mark Corallo was instructed not to speak to the press, indeed not to even answer his
phone. Later that week, Corallo, seeing no good outcome—and privately confiding that he
believed the meeting on Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice—quit.
(The Jarvanka side would put it out that Corallo was fired.)
“These guys are not going to be second-guessed by the kids,” said a frustrated Bannon
about the firewall team.
Likewise, the Trump family, no matter its legal exposure, was not going to be run by its
lawyers. Jared and Ivanka helped to coordinate a set of lurid leaks—alleging drinking, bad
behavior, personal life in disarray—about Marc Kasowitz, who had advised the president
to send the couple home. Shortly after the presidential party returned to Washington,
Kasowitz was out.
* * *
Blame continued to flow. The odor of a bitter new reality, if not doom, that attached to the
Comey-Mueller debacle was compounded by everyone’s efforts not to be tagged by it.
The sides in the White House—Jared, Ivanka, Hope Hicks, and an increasingly
ambivalent Dina Powell and Gary Cohn on one side, and almost everyone else, including
Priebus, Spicer, Conway, and most clearly Bannon, on the other—were most distinguished
by their culpability in or distance from the Comey-Mueller calamity. It was, as the non-
Jarvanka side would unceasingly point out, a calamity of their own making. Therefore it
became an effort of the Jarvankas not only to achieve distance for themselves from the
causes of the debacle—such involvement as they had they now cast as strictly passive
involvement or just following orders—but to suggest that their adversaries were at least
equally at fault.
Shortly after the Don Jr. story broke, the president not unsuccessfully changed the
subject by focusing the blame for the Comey-Mueller mess on Sessions, even more
forcefully belittling and threatening him and suggesting that his days were numbered.
Bannon, who continued to defend Sessions, and who believed that he had militantly—
indeed with scathing attacks on the Jarvankas for their stupidity—walled himself off from
the Comey smashup, was now suddenly getting calls from reporters with leaks that
painted him as an engaged participant in the Comey decision.
In a furious phone call to Hicks, Bannon blamed the leaks on her. In time, he had come
to see the twenty-eight-year-old as nothing more than a hapless presidential enabler and
poor-fish Jarvanka flunky—and he believed she had now deeply implicated herself in the
entire disaster by participating in the Air Force One meeting. The next day, with more
inquiries coming from reporters, he confronted Hicks inside the cabinet room, accusing
her of doing Jared and Ivanka’s dirty work. The face-off quickly escalated into an
existential confrontation between the two sides of the White House—two sides on a total
war footing.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” shouted a livid Bannon at Hicks, demanding to
know who she worked for, the White House or Jared and Ivanka. “You don’t know how
much trouble you are in,” he screamed, telling her that if she didn’t get a lawyer he would
call her father and tell him he had better get her one. “You are dumb as a stone!” Moving
from the cabinet room across the open area into the president’s earshot, “a loud, scary,
clearly threatening” Bannon, in the Jarvanka telling, yelled, “I am going to fuck you and
your little group!” with a baffled president plaintively wanting to know, “What’s going
on?”
In the Jarvanka-side account, Hicks then ran from Bannon, hysterically sobbing and
“visibly terrified.” Others in the West Wing marked this as the high point of the boiling
enmity between the two sides. For the Jarvankas, Bannon’s rant was also a display that
they believed they could use against him. The Jarvanka people pushed Priebus to refer the
matter to the White House counsel, billing this as the most verbally abusive moment in the
history of the West Wing, or at least certainly up among the most abusive episodes ever.
For Bannon, this was just more Jarvanka desperation—they were the ones, not him,
saddled with Comey-Mueller. They were the ones panicking and out of control.
For the rest of his time in the White House, Bannon would not speak to Hicks again.
20
MCMASTER AND SCARAMUCCI
T
rump was impetuous and yet did not like to make decisions, at least not ones that
seemed to corner him into having to analyze a problem. And no decision hounded
him so much—really from the first moment of his presidency—as what to do about
Afghanistan. It was a conundrum that became a battle. It involved not only his own
resistance to analytic reasoning, but the left brain/right brain divide of his White House,
the split between those who argued for disruption and those who wanted to uphold the
status quo.
In this, Bannon became the disruptive and unlikely White House voice for peace—or
anyway a kind of peace. In Bannon’s view, only he and the not-too-resolute backbone of
Donald Trump stood between consigning fifty thousand more American soldiers to
hopelessness in Afghanistan.
Representing the status quo—and, ideally, a surge on top of the status quo—was H. R.
McMaster, who, next to Jarvanka, had become Bannon’s prime target for abuse. On this
front, Bannon forged an easy bond with the president, who didn’t much hide his contempt
for the Power-Point general. Bannon and the president enjoyed trash-talking McMaster
together.
McMaster was a protégé of David Petraeus, the former CENTCOM and Afghanistan
commander who became Obama’s CIA director before resigning in a scandal involving a
love affair and the mishandling of classified information. Petraeus and now McMaster
represented a kind of business-as-usual approach in Afghanistan and the Middle East. A
stubborn McMaster kept proposing to the president new versions of the surge, but at each
pitch Trump would wave him out of the Oval Office and roll his eyes in despair and
disbelief.
The president’s distaste and rancor for McMaster grew on pace with the approaching
need to finally make a decision on Afghanistan, a decision he continued to put off. His
position on Afghanistan—a military quagmire he knew little about, other than that it was a
quagmire—had always been a derisive and caustic kiss-off of the sixteen-year war. Having
inherited it did not make his feelings warmer or inspire him to want to dwell on it further.
He knew the war was cursed and, knowing that, felt no need to know more. He put the
responsibility for it on two of his favorite people to blame: Bush and Obama.
For Bannon, Afghanistan represented one more failure of establishment thinking. More
precisely, it represented the establishment’s inability to confront failure.
Curiously, McMaster had written a book on exactly this subject, a scathing critique of
the unchallenged assumptions with which military leaders pursued the Vietnam War. The
book was embraced by liberals and the establishment, with whom, in Bannon’s view,
McMaster had become hopelessly aligned. And now—ever afraid of the unknown, intent
on keeping options open, dedicated to stability, and eager to protect his establishment cred
—McMaster was recommending a huge troop surge in Afghanistan.
* * *
By early July, the pressure to make a decision was approaching the boiling point. Trump
had already authorized the Pentagon to deploy the troop resources it believed were
needed, but Defense Secretary Mattis refused to act without a specific authorization from
the president. Trump would finally have to make the call—unless he could find a way to
put it off again.
Bannon’s thought was that the decision could be made for the president—a way the
president liked to have decisions made—if Bannon could get rid of McMaster. That would
both head off the strongest voice for more troops and also avenge Bannon’s ouster by
McMaster’s hand from the NSC.
With the president promising that he would make up his mind by August, and
McMaster, Mattis, and Tillerson pressing for a decision as soon as possible, Bannoninspired
media began a campaign to brand McMaster as a globalist, interventionist, and all
around not-our-kind-of-Trumper—and, to boot, soft on Israel.
It was a scurrilous, albeit partly true, attack. McMaster was in fact talking to Petraeus
often. The kicker was the suggestion that McMaster was giving inside dope to Petraeus, a
pariah because of his guilty plea regarding his mishandling of classified information. It
was also the case that McMaster was disliked by the president and on the point of being
dismissed.
It was Bannon, riding high again, enjoying himself in a moment of supreme
overconfidence.
Indeed, in part to prove there were other options beyond more troops or humiliating
defeat—and logically there probably weren’t more options—Bannon became a sponsor of
Blackwater-founder Erik Prince’s obviously self-serving idea to replace the U.S. military
force with private contractors and CIA and Special Operations personnel. The notion was
briefly embraced by the president, then ridiculed by the military.
By now Bannon believed McMaster would be out by August. He was sure he had the
president’s word on this. Done deal. “McMaster wants to send more troops to
Afghanistan, so we’re going to send him,” said a triumphal Bannon. In Bannon’s scenario,
Trump would give McMaster a fourth star and “promote” him to top military commander
in Afghanistan.
As with the chemical attack in Syria, it was Dina Powell—even as she made
increasingly determined efforts to get herself out of the White House, either on a Sheryl
Sandberg trajectory or, stopping first at a way station, as ambassador to the United Nations
—who struggled to help support the least disruptive, most keep-all-options-open
approach. In this, both because the approach seemed like the safest course and because it
was the opposite of Bannon’s course, she readily recruited Jared and Ivanka.
The solution Powell endorsed, which was designed to put the problem and the
reckoning off for another year or two or three, was likely to make the United States’
position in Afghanistan even more hopeless. Instead of sending fifty or sixty thousand
troops—which, at insupportable cost and the risk of national fury, might in fact win the
war—the Pentagon would send some much lower number, one which would arouse little
notice and merely prevent us from losing the war. In the Powell and Jarvanka view, it was
the moderate, best-case, easiest-to-sell course, and it struck just the right balance between
the military’s unacceptable scenarios: retreat and dishonor or many more troops.
Before long, a plan to send four, five, six, or (tops) seven thousand troops became the
middle-course strategy supported by the national security establishment and most
everyone else save for Bannon and the president. Powell even helped design a PowerPoint
deck that McMaster began using with the president: pictures of Kabul in the 1970s when it
still looked something like a modern city. It could be like this again, the president was
told, if we are resolute!
But even with almost everyone arrayed against him, Bannon was confident he was
winning. He had a united right-wing press with him, and, he believed, a fed-up, workingclass
Trump base—its children the likely Afghanistan fodder. Most of all, he had the
president. Pissed off that he was being handed the same problem and the same options that
were handed Obama, Trump continued to heap spleen and mockery on McMaster.
Kushner and Powell organized a leak campaign in McMaster’s defense. Their narrative
was not a pro-troops defense; instead, it was about Bannon’s leaks and his use of rightwing
media to besmirch McMaster, “one of the most decorated and respected generals of
his generation.” The issue was not Afghanistan, the issue was Bannon. In this narrative, it
was McMaster, a figure of stability, against Bannon, a figure of disruption. It was the New
York Times and the Washington Post, who came to the defense of McMaster, against
Breitbart and its cronies and satellites.
It was the establishment and never-Trumpers against the America-first Trumpkins. In
many respects, Bannon was outgunned and outnumbered, yet he still thought he had it
nailed. And when he won, not only would another grievously stupid chapter in the war in
Afghanistan be avoided, but Jarvanka, and Powell, their factotum, would be further
consigned to irrelevance and powerlessness.
* * *
As the debate moved toward resolution, the NSC, in its role as a presenter of options
rather than an advocate for them (although of course it was advocating, too), presented
three: withdrawal; Erik Prince’s army of contractors; and a conventional, albeit limited,
surge.
Withdrawal, whatever its merits—and however much a takeover of Afghanistan by the
Taliban could be delayed or mitigated—still left Donald Trump with having lost a war, an
insupportable position for the president.
The second option, a force of contractors and the CIA, was largely deep-sixed by the
CIA. The agency had spent sixteen years successfully avoiding Afghanistan, and everyone
knew that careers were not advanced in Afghanistan, they died in Afghanistan. So please
keep us out of it.
That left McMaster’s position, a modest surge, argued by Secretary of State Tillerson:
more troops in Afghanistan, which, somehow, slightly, would be there on a different basis,
somewhat, with a different mission, subtly, than that of troops sent there before.
The military fully expected the president to sign off on the third option. But on July 19,
at a meeting of the national security team in the situation room at the White House, Trump
lost it.
For two hours, he angrily railed against the mess he had been handed. He threatened to
fire almost every general in the chain of command. He couldn’t fathom, he said, how it
had taken so many months of study to come up with this nothing-much-different plan. He
disparaged the advice that came from generals and praised the advice from enlisted men.
If we have to be in Afghanistan, he demanded, why can’t we make money off it? China,
he complained, has mining rights, but not the United States. (He was referring to a tenyear-old
U.S.-backed deal.) This is just like the 21 Club, he said, suddenly confusing
everyone with this reference to a New York restaurant, one of his favorites. In the 1980s,
21 closed for a year and hired a large number of consultants to analyze how to make the
restaurant more profitable. In the end, their advice was: Get a bigger kitchen. Exactly what
any waiter would have said, Trump shouted.
To Bannon, the meeting was a high point of the Trump presidency to date. The
generals were punting and waffling and desperately trying to save face—they were,
according to Bannon, talking pure “gobbledygook” in the situation room. “Trump was
standing up to them,” said a happy Bannon. “Hammering them. He left a bowel movement
in the middle of their Afghan plans. Again and again, he came back to the same point:
we’re stuck and losing and nobody here has a plan to do much better than that.”
Though there was still no hint of a viable alternative strategy in Afghanistan, Bannon,
his Jarvanka frustration cresting, was sure he was the winner here. McMaster was toast.
* * *
Later on the day of the Afghanistan briefing, Bannon heard about yet another harebrained
Jarvanka scheme. They planned to hire Anthony Scaramucci, aka “the Mooch.”
After Trump had clinched the nomination more than a year before, Scaramucci—a
hedge funder and go-to Trump surrogate for cable business news (mostly Fox Business
Channel)—had become a reliable presence at Trump Tower. But then, in the last month of
the campaign, with polls predicting a humiliating Trump defeat, he was suddenly nowhere
to be seen. The question “Where’s the Mooch?” seemed to be just one more indicator of
the campaign’s certain and pitiless end.
But on the day after the election, Steve Bannon—soon to be named chief strategist for
the forty-fifth president-elect—was greeted as he arrived midmorning in Trump Tower by
Anthony Scaramucci, holding a Starbucks coffee for him.
Over the next three months, Scaramucci, although no longer needed as a surrogate and
without anything else particularly to do, became a constant hovering—or even lurking—
presence at Trump Tower. Ever unflagging, he interrupted a meeting in Kellyanne
Conway’s office in early January just to make sure she knew that her husband’s firm,
Wachtell, Lipton, was representing him. Having made that point, name-dropping and
vastly praising the firm’s key partners, he then helped himself to a chair in Conway’s
meeting and, for both Conway’s and her visitor’s benefit, offered a stirring testimonial to
the uniqueness and sagacity of Donald Trump and the working-class people—speaking of
which, he took the opportunity to provide a résumé of his own Long Island working-class
bona fides—who had elected him.
Scaramucci was hardly the only hanger-on and job seeker in the building, but his
method was among the most dogged. He spent his days looking for meetings to be invited
into, or visitors to engage with—this was easy because every other job seeker was looking
for someone with whom to chat it up, so he soon became something like the unofficial
official greeter. Whenever possible, he would grab a few minutes with any senior staffer
who would not rebuff him. As he waited to be offered a high White House position, he
was, he seemed personally certain, reaffirming his loyalty and team spirit and unique
energy. He was so confident about his future that he made a deal to sell his hedge fund,
Skybridge Capital, to HNA Group, the Chinese megaconglomerate.
Political campaigns, substantially based on volunteer help, attract a range of silly,
needy, and opportunistic figures. The Trump campaign perhaps scraped lower in the barrel
than most. The Mooch, for one, might not have been the most peculiar volunteer in the
Trump run for president, but many figured him to be among the most shameless.
It was not just that before he became a dedicated supporter of Donald Trump, he was a
dedicated naysayer, or that he had once been an Obama and Hillary Clinton supporter. The
problem was that, really, nobody liked him. Even for someone in politics, he was
immodest and incorrigible, and followed by a trail of self-serving and often contradictory
statements made to this person about that person, which invariably made it back to
whatever person was being most negatively talked about.
He was not merely a shameless self-promoter; he was a proud self-promoter. He was,
by his own account, a fantastic networker. (This boast was surely true, since Skybridge
Capital was a fund of funds, which is less a matter of investment acumen than of knowing
top fund managers and being able to invest with them.) He had paid as much as half a
million dollars to have his firm’s logo appear in the movie Wall Street 2 and to buy himself
a cameo part in the film. He ran a yearly conference for hedge funders at which he himself
was the star. He had a television gig at Fox Business Channel. He was a famous partier
every year at Davos, once exuberantly dancing alongside the son of Muammar Gaddafi.
As for the presidential campaign, when signing on with Donald Trump—after he had
bet big against Trump—he billed himself as a version of Trump, and he saw the two of
them as a new kind of showman and communicator set to transform politics.
Although his persistence and his constant on-the-spot personal lobbying might not
have endeared him to anybody, it did prompt the “What to do with Scaramucci?” question,
which somehow came to beg an answer. Priebus, trying to deal with the Mooch problem
and dispose of him at the same time, suggested that he take a money-raising job as finance
director of the RNC—an offer Scaramucci rebuffed in a blowup in Trump Tower, loudly
bad-mouthing Priebus in vivid language, a mere preview of what was to come.
While he wanted a job with the Trump administration, the Mooch specifically wanted
one of the jobs that would give him a tax break on the sale of his business. A federal
program provides for deferred payment of capital gains in the event of a sale of property
to meet ethical requirements. Scaramucci needed a job that would get him a “certificate of
divestiture,” which is what an envious Scaramucci knew Gary Cohn had received for the
sale of his Goldman stock.
A week before the inaugural he was finally offered such a job: director of the White
House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs. He would be the
president’s representative and cheerleader before Trump-partial interest groups.
But the White House ethics office balked—the sale of his business would take months
to complete and he would be directly negotiating with an entity that was at least in part
controlled by the Chinese government. And because Scaramucci had little support from
anybody else, he was effectively blocked. It was, a resentful Scaramucci noted, one of the
few instances in the Trump government when someone’s business conflicts interfered with
a White House appointment.
And yet with a salesman’s tenacity, the Mooch pressed on. He appointed himself a
Trump ambassador without portfolio. He declared himself Trump’s man on Wall Street,
even if, practically speaking, he wasn’t a Trump man and he was exiting his firm on Wall
Street. He was also in constant touch with anybody from the Trump circle who was
willing to be in touch with him.
The “What to do with the Mooch” question persisted. Kushner, with whom Scaramucci
had exercised a rare restraint during the campaign, and who had steadily heard from other
New York contacts about Scaramucci’s continued loyalty, helped push the question.
Priebus and others held Scaramucci at bay until June and then, as a bit of a punch line,
Scaramucci was offered and, degradingly, had to accept, being named senior vice
president and chief strategy officer for the U.S. Export-Import Bank, an executive branch
agency Trump had long vowed to eliminate. But the Mooch was not ready to give up the
fight: after yet more lobbying, he was offered, at Bannon’s instigation, the post of
ambassador to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The job
came with a twenty-room apartment on the Seine, a full staff, and—Bannon found this
part particularly amusing—absolutely no influence or responsibilities.
* * *
Meanwhile, another persistent question, “What to do with Spicer,” seemed to somehow
have been joined to the disaster involving the bungled response to the news of the June
2016 meeting between Don Jr., Jared, and the Russians. Since the president, while
traveling on Air Force One, had actually dictated Don Jr.’s response to the initial Times
report about the meeting, the blame for this should have been laid at the feet of Trump and
Hope Hicks: Trump dictated, Hicks transcribed. But because no disasters could be laid at
the president’s feet, Hicks herself was spared. And, even though he had been pointedly
excluded from the Trump Tower crisis, the blame for the episode was now put at Spicer’s
feet, precisely because, his loyalty in doubt, he and the communications staff had to be
excluded.
In this, the comms team was judged to be antagonistic if not hostile to the interests of
Jared and Ivanka; Spicer and his people had failed to mount an inclusive defense for them,
nor had the comms team adequately defended the White House. This of course homed in
on the essential and obvious point: although the junior first couple were mere staffers and
not part of the institutional standing of the White House, they thought and acted as if they
were part of the presidential entity. Their ire and increasing bitterness came from some of
the staff’s reluctance—really, a deep and intensifying resistance—to treat them as part and
parcel of the presidency. (Once Priebus had to take Ivanka aside to make sure she
understood that in her official role, she was just a staffer. Ivanka had insisted on the
distinction that she was a staffer-slash-First Daughter.)
Bannon was their public enemy; they expected nothing of him. But Priebus and Spicer
they regarded as functionaries, and their job was to support the White House’s goals,
which included their goals and interests.
Spicer, ever ridiculed in the media for his cockamamie defense of the White House and
a seeming dumb loyalty, had been judged by the president, quite from the inauguration, to
be not loyal enough and not nearly as aggressive as he should be in Trump’s defense. Or,
in Jared and Ivanka’s view, in his family’s defense. “What does Spicer’s forty-member
comm staff actually do?” was a persistent First Family question.
* * *
Almost from the beginning, the president had been interviewing potential new press
secretaries. He appeared to have offered the job to various people, one of whom was
Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Fox News personality and cohost of The Five. Guilfoyle, the
former wife of California Democrat Gavin Newsom, was also reported to be Anthony
Scaramucci’s girlfriend, a rumor he denied. Unbeknownst to the White House,
Scaramucci’s personal life was in dramatic free fall. On July 9, nine months pregnant with
their second child, Scaramucci’s wife filed for divorce.
Guilfoyle, knowing that Spicer was on his way out but having decided not to take his
job—or, according to others in the White House, never having been offered it—suggested
Scaramucci, who set to work convincing Jared and Ivanka that theirs was largely a PR
problem and that they were ill served by the current communications team.
Scaramucci called a reporter he knew to urge that an upcoming story about Kushner’s
Russian contacts be spiked. He followed up by having another mutual contact call the
reporter to say that if the story was spiked it would help the Mooch get into the White
House, whereupon the reporter would have special Mooch access. The Mooch then
assured Jared and Ivanka that he had, in this clever way, killed the story.
Now Scaramucci had their attention. We need some new thinking, the couple thought;
we need somebody who is more on our side. The fact that Scaramucci was from New
York, and Wall Street, and was rich, reassured them that he understood what the deal was.
And that he would understand the stakes and know that an aggressive game needed to be
played.
On the other hand, the couple did not want to be perceived as being heavy-handed. So,
after bitterly accusing Spicer of not defending them adequately, they suddenly backed off
and suggested that they were just looking to add a new voice to the mix. The job of White
House communications director, which had no precise purview, had been vacant since
May, when Mike Dubke, whose presence at the White House had hardly registered,
resigned. Scaramucci could take this job, the couple figured, and in that role he could be
their ally.
“He’s good on television,” Ivanka told Spicer when she explained the rationale for
hiring a former hedge fund manager as White House communications director. “Maybe he
can help us.”
It was the president who, meeting with Scaramucci, was won over by the Mooch’s
cringeworthy Wall Street hortatory flattery. (“I can only hope to realize a small part of
your genius as a communicator, but you are my example and model” was one report of the
gist of the Scaramucci supplication.) And it was Trump who then urged that Scaramucci
become the true communications chief, reporting directly to the president.
On July 19, Jared and Ivanka, through intermediaries, put a feeler out to Bannon: What
would he think about Scaramucci’s coming on board in the comms job?
So preposterous did this seem to Bannon—it was a cry of haplessness, and certain
evidence that the couple had become truly desperate—that he refused to consider or even
reply to the question. Now he was sure: Jarvanka was losing it.
21
BANNON AND SCARAMUCCI
B
annon’s apartment in Arlington, Virginia, a fifteen-minute drive from downtown
Washington, was called the “safe house.” This seemed somehow to acknowledge his
transience and to nod, with whatever irony, to the underground and even romantic nature
of his politics—the roguish and joie de guerre alt-right. Bannon had decamped here from
the Breitbart Embassy on A Street on Capitol Hill. It was a one-bedroom graduate-student
sort of apartment, in a mixed-use building over a mega-McDonald’s—quite belying
Bannon’s rumored fortune—with five or six hundred books (emphasis on popular history)
stacked against the wall without benefit of shelving. His lieutenant, Alexandra Preate, also
lived in the building, as did the American lawyer for Nigel Farage, the right-wing British
Brexit leader who was part of the greater Breitbart circle.
On the evening on Thursday, July 20, the day after the contentious meeting about
Afghanistan, Bannon was hosting a small dinner—organized by Preate, with Chinese
takeout. Bannon was in an expansive, almost celebratory, mood. Still, Bannon knew, just
when you felt on top of the world in the Trump administration, you could probably count
on getting cut down. That was the pattern and price of one-man leadership—insecure-man
leadership. The other biggest guy in the room always had to be reduced in size.
Many around him felt Bannon was going into another bad cycle. In his first run around
the track, he’d been punished by the president for his Time magazine cover and for the
Saturday Night Live portrayal of “President Bannon”—that cruelest of digs to Trump.
Now there was a new book, The Devil’s Bargain, and it claimed, often in Bannon’s own
words, that Trump could not have done it without him. The president was again greatly
peeved.
Still, Bannon seemed to feel he had broken through. Whatever happened, he had
clarity. It was such a mess inside in the White House that, if nothing else, this clarity
would put him on top. His agenda was front and center, and his enemies sidelined. Jared
and Ivanka were getting blown up every day and were now wholly preoccupied with
protecting themselves. Dina Powell was looking for another job. McMaster had screwed
himself on Afghanistan. Gary Cohn, once a killer enemy, was now desperate to be named
Fed chairman and currying favor with Bannon—“licking my balls,” Bannon said with a
quite a cackle. In return for supporting Cohn’s campaign to win the Fed job, Bannon was
extracting fealty from him for the right-wing trade agenda.
The geniuses were fucked. Even POTUS might be fucked. But Bannon had the vision
and the discipline—he was sure he did. “I’m cracking my shit every day. The nationalist
agenda, we’re fucking owning it. I’ll be there for the duration.”
Before the dinner, Bannon had sent around an article from the Guardian—though one
of the leading English-language left-leaning newspapers, it was nevertheless Bannon’s
favorite paper—about the backlash to globalization. The article, by the liberal journalist
Nikil Saval, both accepted Bannon’s central populist political premise—“the competition
between workers in developing and developed countries … helped drive down wages and
job security for workers in developed countries”—and elevated it to the epochal fight of
our time. Davos was dead and Bannon was very much alive. “Economists who were once
ardent proponents of globalization have become some of its most prominent critics,” wrote
Saval. “Erstwhile supporters now concede, at least in part, that it has produced inequality,
unemployment and downward pressure on wages. Nuances and criticisms that economists
only used to raise in private seminars are finally coming out in the open.”
“I’m starting to get tired of winning” was all that Bannon said in his email with the link
to the article.
Now, restless and pacing, Bannon was recounting how Trump had dumped on
McMaster and, as well, savoring the rolling-on-the-floor absurdity of the geniuses’
Scaramucci gambit. But most of all he was incredulous about something else that had
happened the day before.
Unbeknownst to senior staff, or to the comms office—other than by way of a pro forma
schedule note—the president had given a major interview to the New York Times. Jared
and Ivanka, along with Hope Hicks, had set it up. The Times’s Maggie Haberman,
Trump’s bête noire (“very mean, and not smart”) and yet his go-to journalist for some
higher sort of approval, had been called in to see the president with her colleagues Peter
Baker and Michael Schmidt. The result was one of the most peculiar and ill-advised
interviews in presidential history, from a president who had already, several times before,
achieved that milestone.
In the interview, Trump had done his daughter and son-in-law’s increasingly frantic
bidding. He had, even if to no clear end and without certain strategy, continued on his
course of threatening the attorney general for recusing himself and opening the door to a
special prosecutor. He openly pushed Sessions to resign—mocking and insulting him and
daring him to try to stay. However much this seemed to advance no one’s cause, except
perhaps that of the special prosecutor, Bannon’s incredulity—“Jefferson Beauregard
Sessions is not going to go anywhere”—was most keenly focused on another remarkable
passage in the interview: the president had admonished the special counsel not to cross the
line into his family’s finances.
“Ehhh … ehhh … ehhh!” screeched Bannon, making the sound of an emergency alarm.
“Don’t look here! Let’s tell a prosecutor what not to look at!”
Bannon then described the conversation he’d had with the president earlier that day: “I
went right into him and said, ‘Why did you say that?’ And he says, ‘The Sessions thing?’
and I say, ‘No, that’s bad, but it’s another day at the office.’ I said, ‘Why did you say it was
off limits to go after your family’s finances?’ And he says, ‘Well, it is … .’ I go, ‘Hey, they
are going to determine their mandate… . You may not like it, but you just guaranteed if
you want to get anybody else in [the special counsel] slot, every senator will make him
swear that the first thing he’s going to do is come in and subpoena your fucking tax
returns.’ ”
Bannon, with further disbelief, recounted the details of a recent story from the
Financial Times about Felix Sater, one of the shadiest of the shady Trump-associated
characters, who was closely aligned with Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael
Cohen (reportedly a target of the Mueller investigation), and a key follow-the-money link
to Russia. Sater, “get ready for it—I know this may shock you, but wait for it”—had had
major problems with the law before, “caught with a couple of guys in Boca running
Russian money through a boiler room.” And, it turns out, “Brother Sater” was prosecuted
by—“wait”—Andrew Weissmann. (Mueller had recently hired Weissmann, a highpowered
Washington lawyer who headed the DOJ’s criminal fraud division.) “You’ve got
the LeBron James of money laundering investigations on you, Jarvanka. My asshole just
got so tight!”
Bannon quite literally slapped his sides and then returned to his conversation with the
president. “And he goes, ‘That’s not their mandate.’ Seriously, dude?”
Preate, putting out the Chinese food on a table, said, “It wasn’t their mandate to put
Arthur Andersen out of business during Enron, but that didn’t stop Andrew
Weissmann”—one of the Enron prosecutors.
“You realize where this is going,” Bannon continued. “This is all about money
laundering. Mueller chose Weissmann first and he is a money laundering guy. Their path
to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner … It’s as
plain as a hair on your face… . It goes through all the Kushner shit. They’re going to roll
those two guys up and say play me or trade me. But … ‘executive privilege!’ ” Bannon
mimicked. “ ‘We’ve got executive privilege!’ There’s no executive privilege! We proved
that in Watergate.”
An expressive man, Bannon seemed to have suddenly exhausted himself. After a
pause, he added wearily: “They’re sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five.”
With his hands in front of him, he mimed something like a force field that would
isolate him from danger. “It’s not my deal. He’s got the five geniuses around him:
Jarvanka, Hope Hicks, Dina Powell, and Josh Raffel.” He threw up his hands again, this
time as if to say Hands off. “I know no Russians, I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. I’m
not being a witness. I’m not hiring a lawyer. It is not going to be my ass in front of a
microphone on national TV answering questions. Hope Hicks is so fucked she doesn’t
even know it. They are going to lay her out. They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg
on national TV. Michael Cohen, cracked like an egg. He”—the president—“said to me
everybody would take that Don Junior meeting with the Russians. I said, ‘Everybody
would not take that meeting.’ I said, ‘I’m a naval officer. I’m not going to take a meeting
with Russian nationals, and do it in headquarters, are you fucking insane?’ and he says,
‘But he’s a good boy.’ There were no meetings like that after I took over the campaign.”
Bannon’s tone veered from ad absurdum desperation to resignation.
“If he fires Mueller it just brings the impeachment quicker. Why not, let’s do it. Let’s
get it on. Why not? What am I going to do? Am I going to go in and save him? He’s
Donald Trump. He’s always gonna do things. He wants an unrecused attorney general. I
told him if Jeff Sessions goes, Rod Rosenstein goes, and then Rachel Brand”—the
associate attorney general, next in line after Rosenstein—“goes, we’ll be digging down
into Obama career guys. An Obama guy will be acting attorney general. I said you’re not
going to get Rudy”—Trump had again revived a wish for his loyalists Rudy Giuliani or
Chris Christie to take the job—“because he was on the campaign and will have to recuse
himself, and Chris Christie, too, so those are masturbatory fantasies, get those out of your
brain. And, for anybody to get confirmed now, they are going to have to swear and ensure
that things will go ahead and they won’t fire anybody, because you said yesterday—Ehhh
… ehhh … .ehhh!—‘my family finances are off limits,’ and they’re going to demand that,
whoever he is, he promises and commits to make the family finances part of this
investigation. I told him as night follows day that’s a lock, so you better hope Sessions
stays around.”
“He was calling people in New York last night asking what he should do,” added
Preate. (Almost everybody in the White House followed Trump’s thinking by tracking
whom he had called the night before.)
Bannon sat back and, with steam-rising frustration—almost a cartoon figure—he
outlined his Clinton-like legal plan. “They went to the mattresses with amazing discipline.
They ground through it.” But that was about discipline, he emphasized, and Trump, said
Bannon, noting the obvious, was the least disciplined man in politics.
It was clear where Mueller and his team were going, said Bannon: they would trace a
money trail through Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Jared Kushner
and roll one or all of them on the president.
It’s Shakespearean, he said, enumerating the bad advice from his family circle: “It’s the
geniuses, the same people who talked him into firing Comey, the same people on Air
Force One who cut out his outside legal team, knowing the email was out there, knowing
that email existed, put the statement out about Don Junior, that the meeting was all about
adoptions … the same geniuses trying to get Sessions fired.
“Look, Kasowitz has known him for twenty-five years. Kasowitz has gotten him out of
all kinds of jams. Kasowitz on the campaign—what did we have, a hundred women?
Kasowitz took care of all of them. And now he’s out in, what, four weeks? He’s New
York’s toughest lawyer. Mark Corallo, toughest motherfucker I ever met, just can’t do it.”
Jared and Ivanka believe, said Bannon, that if they advocate prison reform and save
DACA—the program to protect the children of illegal immigrants—the liberals will come
to their defense. He digressed briefly to characterize Ivanka Trump’s legislative acumen,
and her difficulty—which had become quite a White House preoccupation—in finding
sponsorship for her family leave proposal. “Here’s why, I keep telling her: there’s no
political constituency in it. You know how easy it is to get a bill sponsored, any
schmendrick can do it. You know why your bill has no sponsorship? Because people
realize how dumb it is.” In fact, said, Bannon, eyes rolling and mouth agape, it was the
Jarvanka idea to try to trade off amnesty for the border wall. “If not the dumbest idea in
Western civilization, it’s up there in the top three. Do these geniuses even know who we
are?”
Just then Bannon took a call, the caller telling him that it looked as if Scaramucci
might indeed be getting the job of communications director. “Don’t fuck with me, dude,”
he laughed. “Don’t fuck with me like that!”
He got off the phone expressing further wonder at the fantasy world of the geniuses—
and added, for good measure, an extra dollop of dripping contempt for them. “I literally do
not talk to them. You know why? I’m doing my shit, and they got nothing to do with it,
and I don’t care what they’re doing … I don’t care… . I’m not going to be alone with
them, I’m not going to be in a room with them. Ivanka walked into the Oval today …
[and] as soon as she walked in, I looked at her and walked right out… . I won’t be in a
room … don’t want to do it… . Hope Hicks walked in, I walked out.”
“The FBI put Jared’s father in jail,” said Preate. “Don’t they understand you don’t mess
—”
“Charlie Kushner,” said Bannon, smacking his head again in additional disbelief. “He’s
going crazy because they’re going to get down deep in his shit about how he’s financed
everyfhing… . all the shit coming out of Israel … and all these guys coming out of Eastern
Europe … all these Russian guys … and guys in Kazakhstan… . And he’s frozen on 666
[Fifth Avenue]… . [If] it goes under next year, the whole thing’s cross-collateralized …
he’s wiped, he’s gone, he’s done, it’s over… . Toast.”
He held his face in his hands for a moment and then looked up again.
“I’m pretty good at coming up with solutions, I came up with a solution for his brokedick
campaign in about a day, but I don’t see this. I don’t see a plan for getting through.
Now, I gave him a plan, I said you seal the Oval Office, you send those two kids home,
you get rid of Hope, all these deadbeats, and you listen to your legal team—Kasowitz, and
Mark Dowd, and Jay Sekulow, and Mark Corallo, these are all professionals who have
done this many times. You listen to those guys and never talk about this stuff again, you
just conduct yourself as commander in chief and then you can be president for eight years.
If you don’t, you’re not, simple. But he’s the president, he gets a choice, and he’s clearly
choosing to go down another path … and you can’t stop him. The guy is going to call his
own plays. He’s Trump… .”
And then another call came, this one from Sam Nunberg. He, too, was calling about
Scaramucci, and his words caused something like stupefaction in Bannon: “No fucking,
fucking way.”
Bannon got off the phone and said, “Jesus. Scaramucci. I can’t even respond to this.
It’s Kafkaesque. Jared and Ivanka needed somebody to represent their shit. It’s madness.
He’ll be on that podium for two days and he’ll be so chopped he’ll bleed out everywhere.
He’ll literally blow up in a week. This is why I don’t take this stuff seriously. Hiring
Scaramucci? He’s not qualified to do anything. He runs a fund of funds. Do you know
what a fund of funds is? It’s not a fund. Dude, it’s sick. We look like buffoons.”
* * *
The ten days of Anthony Scaramucci, saw, on the first day, July 21, the resignation of
Sean Spicer. Oddly, this seemed to catch everyone unawares. In a meeting with
Scaramucci, Spicer, and Priebus, the president—who in his announcement of
Scaramucci’s hire as communications director had promoted Scaramucci not only over
Spicer, but in effect over Priebus, his chief of staff—suggested that the men ought to be
able to work it out together.
Spicer went back to his office, printed out his letter of resignation, and then took it
back to the nonplussed president, who said again that he really wanted Spicer to be a part
of things. But Spicer, surely the most mocked man in America, understood that he had
been handed a gift. His White House days were over.
For Scaramucci, it was now payback time. Scaramucci blamed his six humiliating
months out in the cold on nobody so much as Reince Priebus—having announced his
White House future, having sold his business in anticipation of it, he had come away with
nothing, or at least nothing of any value. But now, in a reversal befitting a true master of
the universe—befitting, actually, Trump himself—Scaramucci was in the White House,
bigger, better, and grander than even he had had the gall to imagine. And Priebus was dead
meat.
That was the signal the president had sent Scaramucci—deal with the mess. In Trump’s
view, the problems in his tenure so far were just problems about the team. If the team
went, the problems went. So Scaramucci had his marching orders. The fact that the
president had been saying the same stuff about his rotten team from the first day, that this
riff had been a constant from the campaign on, that he would often say he wanted
everybody to go and then turn around and say he didn’t want everybody to go—all that
rather went over Scaramucci’s head.
Scaramucci began taunting Priebus publicly, and inside the West Wing he adopted a
tough-guy attitude about Bannon—“I won’t take his bullshit.” Trump seemed delighted
with this behavior, which led Scaramucci to feel that the president was urging him on.
Jared and Ivanka were pleased, too; they believed they had scored with Scaramucci and
were confident that he would defend them against Bannon and the rest.
Bannon and Priebus remained not just disbelieving but barely able not to crack up. For
both men, Scaramucci was either a hallucinatory episode—they wondered whether they
ought to just shut their eyes while it passed—or some further march into madness.
* * *
Even as measured against other trying weeks in the Trump White House, the week of July
24 was a head-slammer. First, it opened the next episode in what had become a comicopera
effort to repeal Obamacare in the Senate. As in the House, this had become much
less about health care than a struggle both among Republicans in Congress and between
the Republican leadership and the White House. The signature stand for the Republican
Party had now become the symbol of its civil war.
On that Monday, the president’s son-in-law appeared at the microphones in front of the
West Wing to preview his statement to Senate investigators about the Trump campaign’s
connections to Russia. Having almost never spoken before in public, he now denied
culpability in the Russian mess by claiming feckless naïveté; speaking in a reedy, selfpitying
voice, he portrayed himself as a Candide-like figure who had become disillusioned
by a harsh world.
And that evening, the president traveled to West Virginia to deliver a speech before the
Boy Scouts of America. Once more, his speech was tonally at odds with time, place, and
good sense. It prompted an immediate apology from the Boy Scouts to its members, their
parents, and the country at large. The quick trip did not seem to improve Trump’s mood:
the next morning, seething, the president again publicly attacked his attorney general and
—for good measure and no evident reason—tweeted his ban of transgender people in the
military. (The president had been presented with four different options related to the
military’s transgender policy. The presentation was meant to frame an ongoing discussion,
but ten minutes after receiving the discussion points, and without further consultation,
Trump tweeted his transgender ban.)
The following day, Wednesday, Scaramucci learned that one of his financial disclosure
forms seemed to have been leaked; assuming he’d been sabotaged by his enemies,
Scaramucci blamed Priebus directly, implicitly accusing him of a felony. In fact,
Scaramucci’s financial form was a public document available to all.
That afternoon, Priebus told the president that he understood he should resign and they
should start talking about his replacement.
Then, that evening, there was a small dinner in the White House, with various current
and former Fox News people, including Kimberly Guilfoyle, in attendance—and this was
leaked. Drinking more than usual, trying desperately to contain the details of the
meltdown of his personal life (being linked to Guilfoyle wasn’t going to help his
negotiation with his wife), and wired by events beyond his own circuits’ capacity,
Scaramucci called a reporter at the New Yorker magazine and unloaded.
The resulting article was surreal—so naked in its pain and fury, that for almost twentyfour
hours nobody seemed to be able to quite acknowledge that he had committed public
suicide. The article quoted Scaramucci speaking bluntly about the chief of staff: “Reince
Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” Saying
that he had taken his new job “to serve the country” and that he was “not trying to build
my brand,” Scaramucci also took on Steve Bannon: “I’m not Steve Bannon. I’m not trying