The transmogrification of Trump from joke candidate, to whisperer for a disaffected demographic, to risible nominee, to rent-in-the-fabric-of-time president-elect, did not inspire in him any larger sense of sober reflection. After the shock of it, he immediately seemed to rewrite himself as the inevitable president.
One instance of his revisionism, and of the new stature he now seemed to assume as president, involved the lowest point of the campaign—the Billy Bush tape.
His explanation, in an off-the-record conversation with a friendly cable anchor, was that it “really wasn’t me.”
The anchor acknowledged how unfair it was to be characterized by a single event.
“No,” said Trump, “it wasn’t me. I’ve been told by people who understand this stuff about how easy it is to alter these things and put in voices and completely different people.”
He was the winner and now expected to be the object of awe, fascination, and favor. He expected this to be binary: a hostile media would turn into a fannish one.
And yet here he was, the winner who was treated with horror and depredations by a media that in the past, as a matter of course and protocol, could be depended on to shower lavish deference on an incoming president no matter who he was. (Trump’s shortfall of three million votes continued to rankle and was a subject best avoided.) It was nearly incomprehensible to him that the same people—that is, the media—who had violently criticized him for saying he might dispute the election result were now calling him illegitimate.
Trump was not a politician who could parse factions of support and opprobrium; he was a salesman who needed to make a sale. “I won. I am the winner. I am not the loser,” he repeated, incredulously, like a mantra.
Bannon described Trump as a simple machine. The On switch was full of flattery, the Off
switch full of calumny. The flattery was dripping, slavish, cast in ultimate superlatives, and
entirely disconnected from reality: so-and-so was the best, the most incredible, the ne plus ultra,
the eternal. The calumny was angry, bitter, resentful, ever a casting out and closing of the iron
door.
This was the nature of Trump’s particular salesmanship. His strategic belief was that there was no reason not to heap excessive puffery on a prospect. But if the prospect was ruled out as a buyer, there was no reason not to heap scorn and lawsuits on him or her. After all, if they don’t respond to sucking up, they might respond to piling on. Bannon felt—perhaps with overconfidence—that Trump could be easily switched on and off.
Against the background of a mortal war of wills—with the media, the Democrats, and the swamp—that Bannon was encouraging him to wage, Trump could also be courted. In some sense, he wanted nothing so much as to be courted.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, which had become one of the many
Trump media bêtes noires in the media world, nevertheless took pains to reach out not only to
the presidentelect but to his daughter Ivanka. During the campaign, Trump said Amazon was
getting “away with murder taxwise” and that if he won, “Oh, do they have problems.” Now
Trump was suddenly praising Bezos as “a top-level genius.” Elon Musk, in Trump Tower,
pitched Trump on the new administration’s joining him in his race to Mars, which Trump
jumped at. Stephen Schwarzman, the head of the Blackstone Group—and a Kushner friend— offered to organize a business council for Trump, which Trump embraced. Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor and fashion industry queen, had hoped to be named America’s ambassador to the UK under Obama and, when that didn’t happen, closely aligned herself with Hillary Clinton. Now Wintour arrived at Trump Tower (but refused to do the perp walk) and suggested that she become Trump’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. And Trump was inclined to entertain the idea. (“Fortunately,” said Bannon, “there was no chemistry.”)
On December 14, a high-level delegation from Silicon Valley came to Trump Tower to meet
the president-elect, though Trump had repeatedly criticized the tech industry throughout the
campaign. Later that afternoon, Trump called Rupert Murdoch, who asked him how the meeting
had gone.
“Oh, great, just great,” said Trump. “Really, really good. These guys really need my help.
Obama was not very favorable to them, too much regulation. This is really an opportunity for me
to help them.”
“Donald,” said Murdoch, “for eight years these guys had Obama in their pocket. They practically ran the administration. They don’t need your help.”
“Take this H-1B visa issue. They really need these H-1B visas.”
Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas might be hard to square with
his immigration promises. But Trump seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, “We’ll figure it
out.”
“What a fucking idiot,” said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.
* * *
Ten days before Donald Trump’s inauguration as the forty-fifth president, a group of young Trump staffers—the men in regulation Trump suits and ties, the women in the Trump-favored look of high boots, short skirts, and shoulder-length hair—were watching President Barack Obama give his farewell speech as it streamed on a laptop in the transition offices.
“Mr. Trump said he’s never once listened to a whole Obama speech,” said one of the young people authoritatively.
“They’re so boring,” said another.
While Obama bade his farewell, preparations for Trump’s first press conference since the election, to be held the next day, were under way down the hall. The plan was to make a substantial effort to show that the president-elect’s business conflicts would be addressed in a formal and considered way.
Up until now, Trump’s view was that he’d been elected because of those conflicts—his business savvy, connections, experience, and brand—not in spite of them, and that it was ludicrous for anyone to think he could untangle himself even if he wanted to. Indeed, to reporters and anyone else who would listen, Kellyanne Conway offered on Trump’s behalf a self-pitying defense about how great his sacrifice had already been.
After fanning the flames of his intention to disregard rules regarding conflicts of interest, now, in a bit of theater, he would take a generous new tack. Standing in the lobby of Trump Towner next to a table stacked high with document folders and legal papers, he would describe the vast efforts that had been made to do the impossible and how, henceforth, he would be exclusively focused on the nation’s business.
But suddenly this turned out to be quite beside the point.
Fusion GPS, an opposition research company (founded by former journalists, it provided
information to private clients), had been retained by Democratic Party interests. Fusion had hired
Christopher Steele, a former British spy, in June 2016, to help investigate Trump’s repeated
brags about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and the nature of Trump’s relationship with the
Kremlin. With reports from Russian sources, many connected to Russian intelligence, Steele
assembled a damaging report—now dubbed the “dossier”—suggesting that Donald Trump was
being blackmailed by the Putin government. In September, Steele briefed reporters from the New
York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker, and CNN. All declined to use
this unverified information, with its unclear provenance, especially given that it was about an
unlikely election winner.
But the day before the scheduled press conference, CNN broke details of the Steele dossier. Almost immediately thereafter, Buzzfeed published the entire report—an itemized bacchanal of beyond-the-pale behavior.
On the verge of Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, the media, with its singular voice on
Trump matters, was propounding a conspiracy of vast proportions. The theory, suddenly
presented as just this side of a likelihood, was that the Russians had suborned Donald Trump
during a trip to Moscow with a crude blackmail scheme involving prostitutes and videotaped
sexual acts pushing new boundaries of deviance (including “golden showers”) with prostitutes
and videotaped sex acts. The implicit conclusion: a compromised Trump had conspired with the
Russians to steal the election and to install him in the White House as Putin’s dupe.
If this was true, then the nation stood at one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of democracy, international relations, and journalism.
If it was not true—and it was hard to fathom a middle ground—then it would seem to support
the Trump view (and the Bannon view) that the media, in also quite a dramatic development in
the history of democracy, was so blinded by an abhorrence and revulsion, both ideological and
personal, for the democratically elected leader that it would pursue any avenue to take him down.
Mark Hemingway, in the conservative, but anti-Trump, Weekly Standard, argued the novel
paradox of two unreliable narrators dominating American public life: the president-elect spoke
with little information and frequently no factual basis, while “the frame the media has chosen to
embrace is that everything the man does is, by default, unconstitutional or an abuse of power.”
On the afternoon of January 11, these two opposing perceptions faced off in the lobby of
Trump Tower: the political antichrist, a figure of dark but buffoonish scandal, in the pocket of
America’s epochal adversary, versus the would-be revolutionary-mob media, drunk on virtue,
certainty, and conspiracy theories. Each represented, for the other side, a wholly discredited
“fake” version of reality.
If these character notes seemed comic-book in style, that was exactly how the press conference
unfolded.
First Trump’s encomiums to himself:
“I will be the greatest jobs producer that God ever created…… ” A smattering of the issues before him:
“Veterans with a little cancer can’t see a doctor until they are terminal…… ” Then the incredulity:
“I was in Russia years ago with the Ms. Universe contest—did very very well—I tell everyone be careful, because you don’t want to see yourself on television—cameras all over the place. And again, not just Russia, all over. So would anyone really believe that story? I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way. Believe me.”
Then the denial:
“I have no deals in Russia, I have no deal that could happen in Russia because we’ve stayed away, and I have no loans with Russia. I have to say one thing . . . Over the weekend I was offered two billion dollars to do a deal in Dubai and I turned it down. I didn’t have to turn it down, because as you know I have a no-conflict situation as president. I didn’t know about that until three months ago but it’s a nice thing to have. But I didn’t want to take advantage of something. I have a no-conflict-of-interest provision as president. I could actually run my business, run my business and run government at the same time. I don’t like the way that looks but I would be able to do that if I wanted to. I could run the Trump organization, a great, great company, and I could run the country, but I don’t want to do that.”
Then the direct attack on CNN, his nemesis:
“Your organization is terrible. Your organization is terrible………. Quiet . . . quiet . . . don’t be
rude . . . Don’t be……. No, I’m not going to give you a question . . . I’m not going to give you a
question…… You are fake news…… ”
And in summation:
“That report first of all should never have been printed because it’s not worth the paper it’s
printed on. I will tell you that should never ever happen. Twenty-two million accounts were
hacked by China. That’s because we have no defense, because we’re run by people who don’t
know what they’re doing. Russia will have far greater respect for our country when I’m leading
it. And not just Russia, China, which has taken total advantage of us. Russia, China, Japan,
Mexico, all countries will respect us far more, far more than they do under past administrations. .
. .”
Not only did the president-elect wear his deep and bitter grievances on his sleeve, but it was
now clear that the fact of having been elected president would not change his unfiltered,
apparently uncontrollable, utterly shoot-from-the-hip display of wounds, resentments, and ire.
“I think he did a fantastic job,” said Kellyanne Conway after the news conference. “But the media won’t say that. They never will.”
3
DAY ONE
Jared Kushner at thirty-six prided himself on his ability to get along with older men. By the time
of Donald Trump’s inauguration he had become the designated intermediary between his father-
in-law and the establishment, such as it was—more moderate Republicans, corporate interests,
the New York rich. Having a line to Kushner seemed to offer an alarmed elite a handle on a
volatile situation.
Several of his father-in-law’s circle of confidants also confided in Kushner—often confiding their worries about their friend, the presidentelect.
“I give him good advice about what he needs to do and for three hours the next day he does it,
and then goes hopelessly off script,” complained one of them to Trump’s son-in-law. Kushner,
whose pose was to take things in and not give much back, said he understood the frustration.
These powerful figures tried to convey a sense of real-world politics, which they all claimed to comprehend at some significantly higher threshold than the soon-to-be president. They were all concerned that Trump did not understand what he was up against. That there was simply not enough method to his madness.
Each of these interlocutors provided Kushner with something of a tutorial on the limitations of presidential power—that Washington was as much designed to frustrate and undermine presidential power as to accommodate it.
“Don’t let him piss off the press, don’t let him piss off the Republican Party, don’t threaten congressmen because they will fuck you if you do, and most of all don’t let him piss off the intel community,” said one national Republican figure to Kushner. “If you fuck with the intel community they will figure out a way to get back at you and you’ll have two or three years of a Russian investigation, and every day something else will leak out.”
A vivid picture was painted for the preternaturally composed Kushner of spies and their
power, of how secrets were passed out of the intelligence community to former members of the
community or to other allies in Congress or even to persons in the executive branch and then to
the press.
One of Kushner’s now-frequent wise-men callers was Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, who had
been a front-row witness when the bureaucracy and intelligence community revolted against
Richard Nixon, outlined the kinds of mischief, and worse, that the new administration could face.
“Deep state,” the left-wing and right-wing notion of an intelligence-network permanentgovernment conspiracy, part of the Breitbart lexicon, became the Trump team term of art: he’s poked the deep state bear.
Names were put to this: John Brennan, the CIA director; James Clapper, the director of
national intelligence; Susan Rice, the outgoing National Security Advisor; and Ben Rhodes, Rice’s deputy and an Obama favorite.
Movie scenarios were painted: a cabal of intelligence community myrmidons, privy to all sorts of damning evidence of Trump’s recklessness and dubious dealings, would, with a strategic schedule of wounding, embarrassing, and distracting leaks, make it impossible for the Trump White House to govern.
What Kushner was told, again and again, is that the president had to make amends. He had to
reach out. He had to mollify. These were forces not to be trifled with was said with utmost
gravity.
Throughout the campaign and even more forcefully after the election, Trump had targeted the
American intelligence community—the CIA, FBI, NSC, and, altogether, seventeen separate
intelligence agencies—as incompetent and mendacious. (His message was “on auto pilot,” said
one aide.) Among the various and plentiful Trump mixed messages at odds with conservative
orthodoxy, this was a particularly juicy one. His case against American intelligence included its
faulty information about weapons of mass destruction that preceded the Iraq war, a litany of
Obama Afghanistan-Iraq-Syria-Libya and other war-related intelligence failures, and, more
recently, but by no means least of all, intelligence leaks regarding his purported Russian
relationships and subterfuges.
Trump’s criticism seemed to align him with the left in its half century of making a bogeyman of American intelligence agencies. But, in quite some reversal, the liberals and the intelligence community were now aligned in their horror of Donald Trump. Much of the left—which had resoundingly and scathingly rejected the intelligence community’s unambiguous assessment of Edward Snowden as a betrayer of national secrets rather than a well-intentioned whistle-blower —now suddenly embraced the intelligence community’s authority in its suggestion of Trump’s nefarious relationships with the Russians.
Trump was dangerously out in the cold.
Hence, Kushner thought it was sensible to make a reach-out to the CIA among the first orders of the new administration’s business.
* * *
Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He had hoped for a big blowout. Tom Barrack, the
would-be showman—in addition to Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch, he had bought
Miramax Pictures from Disney with the actor Rob Lowe—may have declined the chief of staff
job, but, as part of his shadow involvement with his friend’s White House, he stepped up to raise
the money for the inaugural and to create an event that—seemingly quite at odds with the new
president’s character, and with Steve Bannon’s wish for a no-frills populist inauguration—he
promised would have a “soft sensuality” and “poetic cadence.” But Trump, imploring friends to
use their influence to nail some of the A-level stars who were snubbing the event, started to get
angry and hurt that stars were determined to embarrass him. Bannon, a soothing voice as well as
a professional agitator, tried to argue the dialectical nature of what they had achieved (without
using the word “dialectical”). Because Trump’s success was beyond measure, or certainly
beyond all expectations, the media and the liberals had to justify their own failure, he explained
to the new president.
In the hours before the inauguration, the whole of Washington seemed to be holding its breath.
On the evening before Trump was sworn in, Bob Corker, the Republican senator from Tennessee
and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, opened his remarks as the featured
speaker at a gathering at the Jefferson Hotel with the existential question, “Where are things going?” He paused for a moment and then answered, as though from some deep well of bewilderment, “I have no idea.”
Later that evening, a concert at the Lincoln Memorial, part of an always awkward effort to import pop culture to Washington, ended up, absent any star power, with Trump himself taking the stage as the featured act, angrily insisting to aides that he could outdraw any star.
Dissuaded by his staff from staying at the Trump International Hotel in Washington and regretting his decision, the president-elect woke up on inaugural morning complaining about the accommodations at Blair House, the official guest residence across the street from the White House. Too hot, bad water pressure, bad bed.
His temper did not improve. Throughout the morning, he was visibly fighting with his wife,
who seemed on the verge of tears and would return to New York the next day; almost every
word he addressed to her was sharp and peremptory. Kellyanne Conway had taken up Melania
Trump as a personal PR mission, promoting the new First Lady as a vital pillar of support for the
president and a helpful voice in her own right, and was trying to convince Trump that she could
have an important role in the White House. But, in general, the Trumps’ relationship was one of
those things nobody asked too many questions about—another mysterious variable in the
presidential mood.
At the ceremonial meeting of the soon-to-be-new president and the soon-to-be-old president at the White House, which took place just before they set off for the swearing-in ceremony, Trump believed the Obamas acted disdainfully—“very arrogant”—toward him and Melania. Instead of wearing a game face, going into the inaugural events, the president-elect wore what some around him had taken to calling his golf face: angry and pissed off, shoulders hunched, arms swinging, brow furled, lips pursed. This had become the public Trump—truculent Trump.
An inauguration is supposed to be a love-in. The media gets a new and upbeat story. For the party faithful, happy times are here again. For the permanent government—the swamp—it’s a chance to curry favor and seek new advantage. For the country, it’s a coronation. But Bannon had three messages or themes he kept trying to reinforce with his boss: his presidency was going to be different—as different as any since Andrew Jackson’s (he was supplying the less-than-
well-read president-elect with Jackson-related books and quotes); they knew who their enemies were and shouldn’t fall into the trap of trying to make them their friends, because they wouldn’t be; and so, from day one, they should consider themselves on a war footing. While this spoke to Trump’s combative “counterpuncher” side, it was hard on his eager-to-be-liked side. Bannon saw himself as managing these two impulses, emphasizing the former and explaining to his boss why having enemies here created friends somewhere else.
In fact, Trump’s aggrieved mood became a perfect match for the Bannon-written aggrieved inaugural address. Much of the sixteen-minute speech was part of Bannon’s daily joie de guerre patter—his take-back-the-country America-first, carnage-everywhere vision for the country. But it actually became darker and more forceful when filtered through Trump’s disappointment and delivered with his golf face. The administration purposely began on a tone of menace—a Bannon-driven message to the other side that the country was about to undergo profound change. Trump’s wounded feelings—his sense of being shunned and unloved on the very day he became president—helped send that message. When he came off the podium after delivering his address, he kept repeating, “Nobody will forget this speech.”
George W. Bush, on the dais, supplied what seemed likely to become the historic footnote to the Trump address: “That’s some weird shit.”
* * *
Trump, despite his disappointment at Washington’s failure to properly greet and celebrate him, was, like a good salesman, an optimist. Salesmen, whose primary characteristic and main asset is their ability to keep selling, constantly recast the world in positive terms. Discouragement for everyone else is merely the need to improve reality for them.
By the next morning, Trump was soliciting affirmation of his view that the inauguration had
been a great success. “That crowd went all the way back. That were more than a million people
at least, right?” He made a series of phone calls to friends who largely yes’d him on this.
Kushner confirmed a big crowd. Conway did nothing to dissuade him. Priebus agreed. Bannon
made a joke.
Among Trump’s first moves as president was to have a series of inspirational photographs in
the West Wing replaced with images of big crowd scenes at his inaugural ceremony.
Bannon had come to rationalize Trump’s reality distortions. Trump’s hyperbole,
exaggerations, flights of fancy, improvisations, and general freedom toward and mangling of the
facts, were products of the basic lack of guile, pretense, and impulse control that helped create
the immediacy and spontaneity that was so successful with so many on the stump—while so
horrifying to so many others.
For Bannon, Obama was the north star of aloofness. “Politics,” said Bannon with an authority that belayed the fact that until the previous August he had never worked in politics, “is a more immediate game than he ever played it.” Trump was, for Bannon, a modern-day William Jennings Bryan. (Bannon had long talked about the need for a new Williams Jennings Bryan in right-wing politics, with friends assuming Bannon meant himself.) At the turn of the twentieth century, Bryan had enthralled rural audiences with his ability to speak passionately and extemporaneously for apparently unlimited periods of time. Trump compensated—in the theory of some intimates, including Bannon—for his difficulties with reading, writing, and close focus with an improvisational style that produced, if not exactly a William Jennings Bryan effect, certainly close to the exact opposite of the Obama effect.
It was part hortatory, part personal testimony, part barstool blow-hard, a rambling, disjointed,
digressive, what-me-worry approach that combined aspects of cable television rage, big-tent
religious revivalism, Borscht Belt tummler, motivational speaking, and YouTube vlogging.
Charisma in American politics had come to define an order of charm, wit, and style—a coolness.
But another sort of American charisma was more in the Christian evangelical vein, an emotional,
experiential spectacle.
The Trump campaign had built its central strategy around great rallies regularly attracting tens of thousands, a political phenomenon that the Democrats both failed to heed and saw as a sign of Trump’s limited appeal. For the Trump team, this style, this unmediated connection—his speeches, his tweets, his spontaneous phone calls to radio and television shows, and, often, to anyone who would listen—was revelatory, a new, personal, and inspirational politics. For the other side, it was clownishness that, at best, aspired to the kind of raw, authoritarian demagoguery that had long been discredited by and assigned to history and that, when it appeared in American politics, reliably failed.
While the advantages of this style for the Trump team were now very clear, the problem was
that it often—in fact regularly—produced assertions that were not remotely true.
This had led increasingly to the two-different-realities theory of Trump politics. In the one
reality, which encompassed most of Trump’s supporters, his nature was understood and
appreciated. He was the anti-wonk. He was the counterexpert. His was the gut call. He was the
everyman. He was jazz (some, in the telling, made it rap), everybody else an earnest folk music.
In the other reality, in which resided most of his antagonists, his virtues were grievous if not
mental and criminal flaws. In this reality lived the media, which, with its conclusion of a
misbegotten and bastard presidency, believed it could diminish him and wound him (and wind
him up) and rob him of all credibility by relentlessly pointing out how literally wrong he was.
The media, adopting a “shocked, shocked” morality, could not fathom how being factually
wrong was not an absolute ending in itself. How could this not utterly shame him? How could
his staff defend him? The facts were the facts! Defying them, or ignoring them, or subverting
them, made you a liar—intending to deceive, bearing false witness. (A minor journalism
controversy broke out about whether these untruths should be called inaccuracies or lies.)
In Bannon’s view: (1) Trump was never going to change; (2) trying to get him to change would surely cramp his style; (3) it didn’t matter to Trump supporters; (4) the media wasn’t going to like him anyway; (5) it was better to play against the media than to the media; (6) the media’s claim to be the protector of factual probity and accuracy was itself a sham; (7) the Trump revolution was an attack on conventional assumptions and expertise, so better to embrace Trump’s behavior than try to curb it or cure it.
The problem was that, for all he was never going to stick to a script (“his mind just doesn’t
work that way” was one of the internal rationalizations), Trump craved media approval. But, as
Bannon emphasized, he was never going to get the facts right, nor was he ever going to
acknowledge that he got them wrong, so therefore he was not going to get that approval. This
meant, next best thing, that he had to be aggressively defended against the media’s disapproval.
The problem here was that the more vociferous the defense—mostly of assertions that could easily be proved wrong—the more the media redoubled its attacks and censure. What’s more, Trump was receiving the censure of his friends, too. And it was not only calls from friends worried about him, but staffers calling people to call him and say Simmer down. “Who do you have in there?” said Joe Scarborough in a frantic call. “Who’s the person you trust? Jared? Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?”
“Well,” said the president, “you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to
myself.”