One of Trump’s early ideas was to recruit his friend Tom Barrack—part of his kitchen cabinet of real estate tycoons including Steven Roth and Richard Lefrak—and make him chief of staff. Barrack, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, is a starstruck real estate investor of legendary acumen who owns Michael Jackson’s former oddball paradise, Neverland Ranch. With Jeffrey Epstein—the New York financier who would become a tabloid regular after a guilty plea to one count of soliciting prostitution that sent him to jail in 2008 in Palm Beach for thirteen months— Trump and Barrack were a 1980s and ’90s set of nightlife Musketeers.
The founder and CEO of the private equity firm Colony Capital, Barrack became a billionaire making investments in distress debt investments in real estate around the world, including helping to bail out his friend Donald Trump. More recently, he had helped bail out his friend’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
He watched with amusement Trump’s eccentric presidential campaign and brokered the deal to have Paul Manafort replace Corey Lewandowski after Lewandowski fell out of favor with Kushner. Then, as confounded as everyone else by the campaign’s continuing successes, Barrack introduced the future president in warm and personal terms at the Republican National Convention in July (at odds with its otherwise dark and belligerent tone).
It was Trump’s perfect fantasy that his friend Tom—an organizational whiz fully aware of his friend’s lack of interest in day-to-day management—would sign on to run the White House. This was Trump’s instant and convenient solution to the unforeseen circumstance of suddenly being president: to do it with his business mentor, confidant, investor, and friend, someone whom acquaintances of the two men describe as “being one of the best Donald handlers.” In the Trump circle this was called the “two amigos” plan. (Epstein, who remained close to Barrack, had been whitewashed out of the Trump biography.)
Barrack, among the few people whose abilities Trump, a reflexive naysayer, didn’t question, could, in Trump’s hopeful view, really get things running smoothly and let Trump be Trump. It was, on Trump’s part, an uncharacteristic piece of self-awareness: Donald Trump might not know what he didn’t know, but he knew Tom Barrack knew. He would run the business and Trump would sell the product—making American great again. #MAGA.
For Barrack, as for everybody around Trump, the election result was a kind of beyond-belief
lottery-winning circumstance—your implausible friend becoming president. But Barrack, even
after countless pleading and cajoling phone calls from Trump, finally had to disappoint his
friend, telling him “I’m just too rich.” He would never be able to untangle his holdings and
interests—including big investments in the Middle East—in a way that would satisfy ethics
watchdogs. Trump was unconcerned or in denial about his own business conflicts, but Barrack
saw nothing but hassle and cost for himself. Also, Barrack, on his fourth marriage, had no
appetite for having his colorful personal life—often, over the years, conducted with Trump—
become a public focus.
* * *
Trump’s fallback was his son-in-law. On the campaign, after months of turmoil and outlandishness (if not to Trump, to most others, including his family), Kushner had stepped in and become his effective body man, hovering nearby, speaking only when spoken to, but then always offering a calming and flattering view. Corey Lewandowski called Jared the butler. Trump had come to believe that his son-in-law, in part because he seemed to understand how to stay out of his way, was uniquely sagacious.
In defiance of law and tone, and everybody’s disbelieving looks, the president seemed intent on surrounding himself in the White House with his family. The Trumps, all of them—except for his wife, who, mystifyingly, was staying in New York—were moving in, all of them set to assume responsibilities similar to their status in the Trump Organization, without anyone apparently counseling against it.
Finally, it was the right-wing diva and Trump supporter Ann Coulter who took the president-
elect aside and said, “Nobody is apparently telling you this. But you can’t. You just can’t hire
your children.”
Trump continued to insist that he had every right to his family’s help, while at the same time
asking for understanding. This is family, he said—“It’s a leettle, leettle tricky.” His staffers
understood not only the inherent conflicts and difficult legal issues in having Trump’s son-in-law
run the White House, but that it would become, even more than it already was, family first for
Trump. After a great deal of pressure, he at least agreed not to make his son-in-law the chief of
staff—not officially, anyway.
* * *
If not Barrack or Kushner, then, Trump thought the job should probably go to New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who, with Rudy Giuliani, comprised the sum total of his circle of friends with actual political experience.
Christie, like most Trump allies, fell in and out of favor. In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump contemptuously measured Christie’s increasing distance from his losing enterprise, and then, with victory, his eagerness to get back in.
Trump and Christie went back to Trump’s days trying—and failing—to become an Atlantic
City gaming mogul. The Atlantic City gaming mogul. (Trump had long been competitive with
and in awe of the Las Vegas gaming mogul Steve Wynn, whom Trump would name finance
chairman of the RNC.) Trump had backed Christie as he rose through New Jersey politics. He
admired Christie’s straight-talk style, and for a while, as Christie anticipated his own presidential
run in 2012 and 2013—and as Trump was looking for a next chapter for himself with the fading
of The Apprentice, his reality TV franchise—Trump even wondered whether he might be a vice
presidential possibility for Christie.
Early in the campaign, Trump said he wouldn’t have run against Christie but for the
Bridgegate scandal (which erupted when Christie’s associates closed traffic lanes on the George
Washington Bridge to undermine the mayor of a nearby town who was a Christie opponent, and
which Trump privately justified as “just New Jersey hardball”). When Christie dropped out of
the race in February 2016 and signed on with the Trump campaign, he endured a torrent of
ridicule for supporting his friend, whom he believed had promised him a clear track to the VP
slot.
It had personally pained Trump not to be able to give it to him. But if the Republican
establishment had not wanted Trump, they had not wanted Christie almost as much. So Christie
got the job of leading the transition and the implicit promise of a central job—attorney general or
chief of staff.
But when he was the federal prosecutor in New Jersey, Christie had sent Jared’s father,
Charles Kushner, to jail in 2005. Charlie Kushner, pursued by the feds for an income tax cheat,
set up a scheme with a prostitute to blackmail his brother-in-law, who was planning to testify
against him.
Various accounts, mostly offered by Christie himself, make Jared the vengeful hatchet man in
Christie’s aborted Trump administration career. It was a kind of perfect sweet-revenge story: the
son of the wronged man (or, in this case—there’s little dispute—the guilty-as-charged man) uses
his power over the man who wronged his family. But other accounts offer a subtler and in a way
darker picture. Jared Kushner, like sons-in-law everywhere, tiptoes around his father-in-law,
carefully displacing as little air as possible: the massive and domineering older man, the reedy
and pliant younger one. In the revised death-of-Chris-Christie story, it is not the deferential Jared
who strikes back, but—in some sense even more satisfying for the revenge fantasy—Charlie
Kushner himself who harshly demands his due. It was his daughter-in-law who held the real
influence in the Trump circle, who delivered the blow. Ivanka told her father that Christie’s
appointment as chief of staff or to any other high position would be extremely difficult for her
and her family, and it would be best that Christie be removed from the Trump orbit altogether.
* * *
Bannon was the heavy of the organization. Trump, who seemed awestruck by Bannon’s
conversation—a mix of insults, historical riffs, media insights, right-wing bons mots, and
motivational truisms—now began suggesting Bannon to his circle of billionaires as chief of staff,
only to have this notion soundly ridiculed and denounced. But Trump pronounced many people
in favor of it anyway.
In the weeks leading up to the election, Trump had labeled Bannon a flatterer for his certainty that Trump would win. But now he had come to credit Bannon with something like mystical powers. And in fact Bannon, with no prior political experience, was the only Trump insider able to offer a coherent vision of Trump’s populism—aka Trumpism.
The anti-Bannon forces—which included almost every non-Tea Party Republican—were
quick to react. Murdoch, a growing Bannon nemesis, told Trump that Bannon would be a
dangerous choice. Joe Scarborough, the former congressman and cohost of MSNBC’s Morning
Joe, a favorite Trump show, privately told Trump “Washington will go up in flames” if Bannon
became chief of staff, and, beginning a running theme, publicly denigrated Bannon on the show.
In fact, Bannon presented even bigger problems than his politics: he was profoundly
disorganized, seemingly on the spectrum given what captured his single-minded focus to the
disregard of everything else. Might he be the worst manager who ever lived? He might. He
seemed incapable of returning a phone call. He answered emails in one word—partly a paranoia
about email, but even more a controlling crypticness. He kept assistants and minders at constant
bay. You couldn’t really make an appointment with Bannon, you just had to show up. And
somehow, his own key lieutenant, Alexandra Preate, a conservative fundraiser and PR woman,
was as disorganized as he was. After three marriages, Bannon lived his bachelor’s life on Capitol
Hill in a row house known as the Breitbart Embassy that doubled as the Breitbart office—the life
of a messy party. No sane person would hire Steven Bannon for a job that included making the
trains run on time.
* * *
Hence, Reince Priebus.
For the Hill, he was the only reasonable chief among the contenders, and he quickly became the subject of intense lobbying by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. If they were going to have to deal with an alien like Donald Trump, then best they do it with the help of a member of their own kind.
Priebus, forty-five, was neither politician nor policy wonk nor strategist. He was political machine worker, one of the oldest professions. A fundraiser.
A working-class kid originally from New Jersey and then Wisconsin, at thirty-two he made his first and last run for elective office: a failed bid for Wisconsin state senate. He became the chairman of the state party and then the general counsel of the Republican National Committee. In 2011 he stepped up to chairmanship of the RNC. Priebus’s political cred came from appeasing the Tea Party in Wisconsin, and his association with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, a rising Republican star (and, briefly—very briefly—the 2016 front-runner).
With significant parts of the Republican Party inalterably opposed to Trump, and with an almost universal belief within the party that Trump would go down to ignominious defeat, taking the party with him, Priebus was under great pressure after Trump captured the nomination to shift resources down the ticket and even to abandon the Trump campaign entirely.
Convinced himself that Trump was hopeless, Priebus nevertheless hedged his bets. The fact that he did not abandon Trump entirely became a possible margin of victory and made Priebus something of a hero (equally, in the Kellyanne Conway version, if they had lost, he would have been a reasonable target). He became the default choice for chief.
And yet his entry into the Trump inner circle caused Priebus his share of uncertainty and bewilderment. He came out of his first long meeting with Trump thinking it had been a disconcertingly weird experience. Trump talked nonstop and constantly repeated himself.
“Here’s the deal,” a close Trump associate told Priebus. “In an hour meeting with him you’re
going to hear fifty-four minutes of stories and they’re going to be the same stories over and over
again. So you have to have one point to make and you have to pepper it in whenever you can.”
The Priebus appointment as chief of staff, announced in mid-November, also put Bannon on a
coequal level. Trump was falling back on his own natural inclinations to let nobody have real
power. Priebus, even with the top job, would be a weaker sort of figure, in the traditional mold of
most Trump lieutenants over the years. The choice also worked well for the other would-be
chiefs. Tom Barrack could easily circumvent Priebus and continue to speak directly to Trump.
Jared Kushner’s position as son-in-law and soon top aide would not be impeded. And Steve
Bannon, reporting directly to Trump, remained the undisputed voice of Trumpism in the White
House.
There would be, in other words, one chief of staff in name—the unimportant one—and various
others, more important, in practice, ensuring both chaos and Trump’s own undisputed
independence.
Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and almost everybody’s model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job.