The real goal was to expose the hypocrisy of the liberal view. Somehow, despite laws, rules, and customs, liberal globalists had pushed a myth of more or less open immigration. It was a double liberal hypocrisy, because, sotto voce, the Obama administration had been quite aggressive in deporting illegal aliens—except don’t tell the liberals that.
“People want their countries back,” said Bannon. “A simple thing.”
* * *
Bannon meant his EO to strip away the liberal conceits on an already illiberal process. Rather than seeking to accomplish his goals with the least amount of upset—keeping liberal fig leaves in place—he sought the most.
Why would you? was the logical question of anyone who saw the higher function of government as avoiding conflict.
This included most people in office. The new appointees in place at the affected agencies and departments, among them Homeland Security and State—General John Kelly, then the director of Homeland Security, would carry a grudge about the disarray caused by the immigration EO— wanted nothing more than a moment to get their footing before they might even consider dramatic and contentious new policies. Old appointees—Obama appointees who still occupied most executive branch jobs—found it unfathomable that the new administration would go out of its way to take procedures that largely already existed and to restate them in incendiary, red-flag, and ad hominem terms, such that liberals would have to oppose them.
Bannon’s mission was to puncture the global-liberal-emperor-wears-no-clothes bubble,
nowhere, in his view, as ludicrously demonstrated as the refusal to see the colossally difficult
and costly effects of uncontrolled immigration. He wanted to force liberals to acknowledge that
even liberal governments, even the Obama government, were engaged in the real politics of
slowing immigration—ever hampered by the liberal refusal to acknowledge this effort.
The EO would be drafted to remorselessly express the administration’s (or Bannon’s) pitiless
view. The problem was, Bannon really didn’t know how to do this—change rules and laws. This
limitation, Bannon understood, might easily be used to thwart them. Process was their enemy.
But just doing it—the hell with how—and doing it immediately, could be a powerful
countermeasure.
Just doing things became a Bannon principle, the sweeping antidote to bureaucratic and
establishment ennui and resistance. It was the chaos of just doing things that actually got things
done. Except, even if you assumed that not knowing how to do things didn’t much matter if you
just did them, it was still not clear who was going to do what you wanted to do. Or, a corollary,
because nobody in the Trump administration really knew how to do anything, it was therefore
not clear what anyone did.
Sean Spicer, whose job was literally to explain what people did and why, often simply could not—because nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job.
Priebus, as chief of staff, had to organize meetings, schedules, and the hiring of staff; he also had to oversee the individual functions of the executive office departments. But Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and the president’s daughter actually had no specific responsibilities—they could make it up as they went along. They did what they wanted. They would seize the day if they could—even if they really didn’t know how to do what they wanted to do.
Bannon, for instance, even driven by his imperative just to get things done, did not use a computer. How did he do anything? Katie Walsh wondered. But that was the difference between big visions and small. Process was bunk. Expertise was the last refuge of liberals, ever defeated by the big picture. The will to get big things done was how big things got done. “Don’t sweat the small stuff” was a pretty good gist of Donald Trump’s—and Steve Bannon’s—worldview. “Chaos was Steve’s strategy,” said Walsh.
Bannon got Stephen Miller to write the immigration EO. Miller, a fifty-five-year-old trapped in a thirty-two-year-old’s body, was a former Jeff Sessions staffer brought on to the Trump campaign for his political experience. Except, other than being a dedicated far-right conservative, it was unclear what particular abilities accompanied Miller’s political views. He was supposed to be a speechwriter, but if so, he seemed restricted to bullet points and unable to construct sentences. He was supposed to be a policy adviser but knew little about policy. He was supposed to be the house intellectual but was purposely unread. He was supposed to be a communications specialist, but he antagonized almost everyone. Bannon, during the transition, sent him to the Internet to learn about and to try to draft the EO.
By the time he arrived in the White House, Bannon had his back-of-the-envelope executive order on immigration and his travel ban, a sweeping, Trumpian exclusion of most Muslims from the United States, only begrudgingly whittled down, in part at Priebus’s urging, to what would shortly be perceived as merely draconian.
In the mania to seize the day, with an almost total lack of knowing how, the nutty inaugural crowd numbers and the wacky CIA speech were followed, without almost anybody in the federal government having seen it or even being aware of it, by an executive order overhauling U.S. immigration policy. Bypassing lawyers, regulators, and the agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing it, President Trump—with Bannon’s low, intense voice behind him, offering a rush of complex information—signed what was put in front of him.
On Friday, January 27, the travel ban was signed and took immediate effect. The result was an emotional outpouring of horror and indignation from liberal media, terror in immigrant communities, tumultuous protests at major airports, confusion throughout the government, and, in the White House, an inundation of lectures, warnings, and opprobrium from friends and family. What have you done? Do you know what you’re doing? You have to undo this! You’re finished before you even start! Who is in charge there?
But Steve Bannon was satisfied. He could not have hoped to draw a more vivid line between the two Americas—Trump’s and liberals’—and between his White House and the White House inhabited by those not yet ready to burn the place down.
Why did we do this on a Friday when it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the most protesters? almost the entire White House staff demanded to know.
“Errr . . . that’s why,” said Bannon. “So the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot.” That was the way to crush the liberals: make them crazy and drag them to the left.
5
JARVANKA
On the Sunday after the immigration order was issued, Joe Scarborough and his cohost on the
MSNBC show Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski, came for lunch at the White House.
Scarborough is a former Republican congressman from Pensacola, Florida, and Brzezinski is
the daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a high-ranking aide in the Johnson White House and
Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor. Morning Joe had gone on the air in 2007 and
developed a following among New York political and media types. Trump was a longtime
devotee.
Early in the 2016 campaign, with a change of leadership at NBC News, it seemed likely that the show, its ratings falling, would be canceled. But Scarborough and Brzezinski embraced their relationship with Trump and became one of the few media outlets not only with a positive outlook on him, but that seemed to know his thinking. Trump became a frequent call-in guest and the show a way to speak more or less directly to him.
It was the kind of relationship Trump dreamed of: media people who took him seriously,
talked about him often, solicited his views, provided him with gossip, and retailed the gossip he
offered them. The effect was to make them all insiders together, which was exactly where Trump
wanted to be. Though he branded himself as a political outsider, actually finding himself on the
outside wounded him.
Trump believed that the media, which he propelled (in the case of Scarborough and
Brzezinski, helping them keep their jobs), owed him something, and the media, giving him vast
amounts of free coverage, believed he owed them, with Scarborough and Brzezinski seeing
themselves as something like semiofficial advisers, if not the political fixers who had put him in
his job.
In August, they had had a public spat, resulting in Trump’s tweet: “Some day, when things
calm down, I’ll tell the real story of @JoeNBC and his very insecure long-time girlfriend,
@morningmika. Two clowns!” But Trump’s spats often ended in a tacit admission, however
grudging, of mutual advantage, and in short order they were back on cordial terms again.
On their arrival at the White House, the ninth day of his presidency, Trump proudly showed them into the Oval Office and was momentarily deflated when Brzezinski said she had been there many times before with her father, beginning at age nine. Trump showed them some of the memorabilia and, eagerly, his new portrait of Andrew Jackson—the president whom Steve Bannon had made the totem figure of the new administration.
“So how do you think the first week has gone?” Trump asked the couple, in a buoyant mood, seeking flattery.
Scarborough, puzzled by Trump’s jauntiness in the face of the protests spreading across the nation, demurred and then said, “Well, I love what you did with U.S. Steel and that you had the union guys come into the Oval Office.” Trump had pledged to use U.S.-made steel in U.S. pipelines and, in a Trump touch, met at the White House with union representatives from building and sheet metal unions and then invited them back to the Oval Office—something Trump insisted Obama never did.
But Trump pressed his question, leaving Scarborough with the feeling that nobody had
actually told Trump that he had had a very bad week. Bannon and Priebus, wandering in and out
of the office, might actually have convinced him that the week had been a success, Scarborough
thought.
Scarborough then ventured his opinion that the immigration order might have been handled better and that, all in all, it seemed like a rough period.
Trump, surprised, plunged into a long monologue about how well things had gone, telling Bannon and Priebus, with a gale of laughter, “Joe doesn’t think we had a good week.” And turning to Scarborough: “I could have invited Hannity!”
At lunch—fish, which Brzezinski doesn’t eat—Jared and Ivanka joined the president and
Scarborough and Brzezinski. Jared had become quite a Scarborough confidant and would
continue to supply Scarborough with an inside view of the White House—that is, leaking to him.
Scarborough subsequently became a defender of Kushner’s White House position and view. But,
for now, both son-in-law and daughter were subdued and deferential as Scarborough and
Brzezinski chatted with the president, and the president—taking more of the air time as usual—
held forth.
Trump continued to cast for positive impressions of his first week and Scarborough again reverted to his praise of Trump’s handling of the steel union leadership. At which point, Jared interjected that reaching out to unions, a traditional Democratic constituency, was Bannon’s doing, that this was “the Bannon way.”
“Bannon?” said the president, jumping on his son-in-law. “That wasn’t Bannon’s idea. That was my idea. It’s the Trump way, not the Bannon way.”
Kushner, going concave, retreated from the discussion.
Trump, changing the topic, said to Scarborough and Brzezinski, “So what about you guys? What’s going on?” He was referencing their not-so-secret secret relationship.
Scarborough and Brzezinski said it was all still complicated, and not public, officially, but it was good and everything was getting resolved.
“You guys should just get married,” prodded Trump.
“I can marry you! I’m an Internet Unitarian minister,” Kushner, otherwise an Orthodox Jew, said suddenly.
“What?” said the president. “What are you talking about? Why would they want you to marry
them when I could marry them? When they could be married by the president! At Mar-a-Lago!”
* * *
Almost everybody advised Jared not to take the inside job. As a family member, he would command extraordinary influence from a position that no one could challenge. As an insider, a staffer, not only could his experience be challenged, but while the president himself might not yet be exposed, a family member on staff would be where enemies and critics might quite effectively start chipping from. Besides, inside Trump’s West Wing, if you had a title—that is, other than son-in-law—people would surely want to take it from you.
Both Jared and Ivanka listened to this advice—from among others it came from Jared’s
brother, Josh, doubly making this case not only to protect his brother but also because of his
antipathy to Trump—but both, balancing risk against reward, ignored it. Trump himself
variously encouraged his son-in-law and his daughter in their new ambitions and, as their
excitement mounted, tried to express his skepticism—while at the same time telling others that
he was helpless to stop them.
For Jared and Ivanka, as really for everybody else in the new administration, quite including the president, this was a random and crazy turn of history such that how could you not seize it? It was a joint decision by the couple, and, in some sense, a joint job. Jared and Ivanka had made an earnest deal between themselves: if sometime in the future the time came, she’d be the one to run for president (or the first one of them to take the shot). The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be Ivanka Trump.
Bannon, who had coined the Jarvanka conflation now in ever greater use, was horrified when the couple’s deal was reported to him. “They didn’t say that? Stop. Oh come on. They didn’t actually say that? Please don’t tell me that. Oh my god.”
And the truth was that at least by then Ivanka would have more experience than almost
anybody else now serving in the White House. She and Jared, or Jared, but by inference she, too,
were in effect the real chief of staff—or certainly as much a chief of staff as Priebus or Bannon,
all of them reporting directly to the president. Or, even more to the organizational point, Jared
and Ivanka had a wholly independent standing inside the West Wing. A super status. Even as
Priebus and Bannon tried, however diplomatically, to remind the couple of staff procedures and
propriety, they would in turn remind the West Wing leadership of their overriding First Family
prerogatives. In addition, the president had immediately handed Jared the Middle East portfolio,
making him one of the significant international players in the administration—indeed, in the
world. In the first weeks, this brief extended out to virtually every other international issue, about
which nothing in Kushner’s previous background would have prepared him for.
Kushner’s most cogent reason for entering the White House was “leverage,” by which he
meant proximity. Quite beyond the status of being inside the family circle, anyone who had
proximity to the president had leverage, the more proximity the more leverage. Trump himself
you could see as a sort of Delphic oracle, sitting in place and throwing out pronouncements
which had to be interpreted. Or as an energetic child, and whomever could placate or distract him
became his favorite. Or as the Sun God (which is effectively how he saw himself), the absolute
center of attention, dispensing favor and delegating power, which could, at any moment, be
withdrawn. The added dimension was that this Sun God had little calculation. His inspiration
existed in the moment, hence all the more reason to be there with him in the moment. Bannon,
for one, joined Trump for dinner every night, or at least made himself available—one bachelor
there for the effective other bachelor. (Priebus would observe that in the beginning everyone
would try to be part of these dinners, but within a few months, they had become a torturous duty
to be avoided.)
Part of Jared and Ivanka’s calculation about the relative power and influence of a formal job in
the West Wing versus an outside advisory role was the knowledge that influencing Trump
required you to be all in. From phone call to phone call—and his day, beyond organized
meetings, was almost entirely phone calls—you could lose him. The subtleties here were
immense, because while he was often most influenced by the last person he spoke to, he did not
actually listen to anyone. So it was not so much the force of an individual argument or petition
that moved him, but rather more just someone’s presence, the connection of what was going
through his mind—and although he was a person of many obsessions, much of what was on his mind had no fixed view—to whomever he was with and their views.
Ultimately Trump may not be that different in his fundamental solipsism from anyone of great
wealth who has lived most of his life in a highly controlled environment. But one clear
difference was that he had acquired almost no formal sort of social discipline—he could not even
attempt to imitate decorum. He could not really converse, for instance, not in the sense of sharing
information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation. He neither particularly listened to
what was said to him, nor particularly considered what he said in response (one reason he was so
repetitive). Nor did he treat anyone with any sort of basic or reliable courtesy. If he wanted
something, his focus might be sharp and attention lavish, but if someone wanted something from
him, he tended to become irritable and quickly lost interest. He demanded you pay him attention,
then decided you were weak for groveling. In a sense, he was like an instinctive, pampered, and
hugely successful actor. Everybody was either a lackey who did his bidding or a high-ranking
film functionary trying to coax out his attention and performance—and to do this without making
him angry or petulant.
The payoff was his enthusiasm, quickness, spontaneity, and—if he departed for a moment
from the nonstop focus on himself—an often incisive sense of the weaknesses of his opponents
and a sense of their deepest desires. Politics was handicapped by incrementalism, of people
knowing too much who were defeated by all the complexities and conflicting interests before
they began. Trump, knowing little, might, Trumpers tried to believe, give a kooky new hope to
the system.
Jared Kushner in quite a short period of time—rather less than a year—had crossed over from the standard Democratic view in which he was raised, to an acolyte of Trumpism, bewildering many friends and, as well, his own brother, whose insurance company, Oscar, funded with Kushner-family money, was destined to be dealt a blow by a repeal of Obamacare.
This seeming conversion was partly the result of Bannon’s insistent and charismatic tutoring
—a kind of real-life engagement with world-bending ideas that had escaped Kushner even at
Harvard. And it was helped by his own resentments toward the liberal elites whom he had tried
to court with his purchase of the New York Observer, an effort that had backfired terribly. And it
was, once he ventured onto the campaign trail, about having to convince himself that close up to
the absurd everything made sense—that Trumpism was a kind of unsentimental realpolitik that
would show everybody in the end. But most of all, it was that they had won. And he was
determined not to look a gift horse in the mouth. And, everything that was bad about Trumpism,
he had convinced himself, he could help fix.
* * *
As much as it might have surprised him—for many years, he had humored Trump more than
embraced him—Kushner was in fact rather like his father-in-law. Jared’s father, Charlie, bore an
eerie resemblance to Donald’s father, Fred. Both men dominated their children, and they did this
so completely that their children, despite their demands, became devoted to them. In both
instances, this was extreme stuff: belligerent, uncompromising, ruthless men creating long-
suffering offspring who were driven to achieve their father’s approval. (Trump’s older brother,
Freddy, failing in this effort, and, by many reports, gay, drank himself to death; he died in 1981
at age forty-three.) In business meetings, observers would be nonplussed that Charlie and Jared
Kushner invariably greeted each other with a kiss and that the adult Jared called his father
Daddy.
Neither Donald nor Jared, no matter their domineering fathers, went into the world with humility. Insecurity was soothed by entitlement. Both out-of-towners who were eager to prove themselves or lay rightful claim in Manhattan (Kushner from New Jersey, Trump from Queens), they were largely seen as overweening, smug, and arrogant. Each cultivated a smooth affect, which could appear more comical than graceful. Neither, by choice nor awareness, could seem to escape his privilege. “Some people who are very privileged are aware of it and put it away; Kushner not only seemed in every gesture and word to emphasize his privilege, but also not to be aware of it,” said one New York media executive who dealt with Kushner. Both men were never out of their circle of privilege. The main challenge they set for themselves was to enter further into the privileged circle. Social climbing was their work.
Jared’s focus was often on older men. Rupert Murdoch spent a surprising amount of time with
Jared, who sought advice from the older media mogul about the media business—which the
young man was determined to break into. Kushner paid long court to Ronald Perelman, the
billionaire financier and takeover artist, who later would host Jared and Ivanka in his private shul
on Jewish high holy days. And, of course, Kushner wooed Trump himself, who became a fan of
the young man and was uncharacteristically tolerant about his daughter’s conversion to Orthodox
Judaism when that became a necessary next step toward marriage. Likewise, Trump as a young
man had carefully cultivated a set of older mentors, including Roy Cohn, the flamboyant lawyer
and fixer who had served as right-hand man to the red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy.
And then there was the harsh fact that the world of Manhattan and particular its living voice, the media, seemed to cruelly reject them. The media long ago turned on Donald Trump as a wannabe and lightweight, and wrote him off for that ultimate sin—anyway, the ultimate sin in media terms—of trying to curry favor with the media too much. His fame, such as it was, was actually reverse fame—he was famous for being infamous. It was joke fame.
To understand the media snub, and its many levels of irony, there is no better place to look than the New York Observer, the Manhattan media and society weekly that Kushner bought in 2006 for $10 million—by almost every estimate $10 million more than it was worth.
* * *
The New York Observer was, when it launched in 1987, a rich man’s fancy, as much failed
media often is. It was a bland weekly chronicle of the Upper East Side, New York’s wealthiest
neighborhood. Its conceit was to treat this neighborhood like a small town. But nobody took any
notice. Its frustrated patron, Arthur Carter, who made his money in the first generation of Wall
Street consolidations, was introduced to Graydon Carter (no relation), who had started Spy
magazine, a New York imitation of the British satirical publication Private Eye. Spy was part of
a set of 1980s publications—Manhattan, Inc., a relaunched Vanity Fair, and New York—
obsessed with the new rich and what seemed to be a transformational moment in New York.
Trump was both symbol of and punch line for this new era of excess and celebrity and the
media’s celebration of those things. Graydon Carter became the editor of the New York Observer
in 1991 and not only refocused the weekly on big-money culture, but essentially made it a tip-
sheet for the media writing about media culture, and for members of the big-money culture who
wanted to be in the media. There may never have been such a self-conscious and self-referential
publication as the New York Observer.
As Donald Trump, along with many others of this new-rich ilk, sought to be covered by the
media—Murdoch’s New York Post was the effective court recorder of this new publicity-hungry
aristocracy—the New York Observer covered the process of him being covered. The story of
Trump was the story of how he tried to make himself a story. He was shameless, campy, and
instructive: if you were willing to risk humiliation, the world could be yours. Trump became the
objective correlative for the rising appetite for fame and notoriety. Trump came to believe he
understood everything about the media—who you need to know, what pretense you need to
maintain, what information you could profitably trade, what lies you might tell, what lies the
media expected you to tell. And the media came to believe it knew everything about Trump—his
vanities, delusions, and lies, and the levels, uncharted, to which he would stoop for ever more
media attention.
Graydon Carter soon used the New York Observer as his stepping-stone to Vanity Fair— where, he believed, he might have access to a higher level of celebrity than Donald Trump. Carter was followed at the Observer in 1994 by Peter Kaplan, an editor with a heightened sense of postmodern irony and ennui.
Trump, in Kaplan’s telling, suddenly took on a new persona. Whereas he had before been the
symbol of success and mocked for it, now he became, in a shift of zeitgeist (and of having to
refinance a great deal of debt), a symbol of failure and mocked for it. This was a complicated
reversal, not just having to do with Trump, but of how the media was now seeing itself. Donald
Trump became a symbol of the media’s own self-loathing: the interest in and promotion of
Donald Trump was a morality tale about the media. Its ultimate end was Kaplan’s
pronouncement that Trump should not be covered anymore because every story about Donald
Trump had become a cliché.
An important aspect of Kaplan’s New York Observer and its self-conscious inside media
baseball was that the paper became the prime school for a new generation of media reporters
flooding every other publication in New York as journalism itself became ever more self-
conscious and self-referential. To everyone working in media in New York, Donald Trump
represented the ultimate shame of working in media in New York: you might have to write about
Donald Trump. Not writing about him, or certainly not taking him at face value, became a moral
stand.
In 2006, after Kaplan had edited the paper for fifteen years, Arthur Carter sold the Observer— which had never made a profit—to the then twenty-five-year-old Kushner, an unknown real estate heir interested in gaining stature and notoriety in the city. Kaplan was now working for someone twenty-five years his junior, a man who, ironically, was just the kind of arriviste he would otherwise have covered.
For Kushner, owning the paper soon paid off, because, with infinite ironies not necessarily
apparent to him, it allowed him into the social circle where he met Donald Trump’s daughter,
Ivanka, whom he married in 2009. But the paper did not, irksomely for Kushner, pay off
financially, which put him into increasing tension with Kaplan. Kaplan, in turn, began telling
witty and devastating tales about the pretensions and callowness of his new boss, which spread,
in constant retelling, among his many media protégés and hence throughout the media itself.
In 2009, Kaplan left the paper, and Kushner—making a mistake that many rich men who have
bought vanity media properties are prone to making—tried to find a profit by cutting costs. In
short order, the media world came to regard Kushner as the man who not only took Peter
Kaplan’s paper from him, but also ruined it, brutally and incompetently. And worse: in 2013,
Kaplan, at fifty-nine, died of cancer. So, effectively, in the telling, Kushner had killed him, too.
Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collective mind decides
who is going to rise and who is going to fall, who lives and who dies. If you stay around long
enough in the media eye, your fate, like that of a banana republic despot, is often an unkind one
—a law Hillary Clinton was not able to circumvent. The media has the last word.
Long before he ran for president, Trump and his sidekick son-in-law Kushner had been marked not just for ignominy, but for slow torture by ridicule, contempt, and ever-more amusing persiflage. These people are nothing. They are media debris. For goodness’ sake!
Trump, in a smart move, picked up his media reputation and relocated it from a hypercritical
New York to a more value-free Hollywood, becoming the star of his own reality show, The
Apprentice, and embracing a theory that would serve him well during his presidential campaign:
in flyover country, there is no greater asset than celebrity. To be famous is to be loved—or at
least fawned over.
The fabulous, incomprehensible irony that the Trump family had, despite the media’s distaste, despite everything the media knows and understands and has said about them, risen to a level not only of ultimate consequence but even of immortality is beyond worst-case nightmare and into cosmic-joke territory. In this infuriating circumstance, Trump and his son-in-law were united, always aware and yet never quite understanding why they should be the butt of a media joke, and now the target of its stunned outrage.
* * *
The fact that Trump and his son-in-law had many things in common did not mean they operated on a common playing field. Kushner, no matter how close to Trump, was yet a member of the Trump entourage, with no more ultimate control of his father-in-law than anybody else now in the business of trying to control Trump.
Still, the difficulty of controlling him had been part of Kushner’s self-justification or rationalization for stepping beyond his family role and taking a senior White House job: to exercise restraint on his father-in-law and even—a considerable stretch for the inexperienced young man—to help lend him some gravitas.
If Bannon was going to pursue as his first signature White House statement the travel ban, then Kushner was going to pursue as his first leadership mark a meeting with the Mexican president, whom his father-in-law had threatened and insulted throughout the campaign.
Kushner called up the ninety-three-year-old Kissinger for advice. This was both to flatter the
old man and to be able to drop his name, but it was also actually for real advice. Trump had done
nothing but cause problems for the Mexican president. To bring the Mexican president to the
White House would be, despite Bannon’s no-pivot policy from the campaign’s harshness, a truly
meaningful pivot for which Kushner would be able to claim credit (although don’t call it a
pivot). It was what Kushner believed he should be doing: quietly following behind the president
and with added nuance and subtlety clarifying the president’s real intentions, if not recasting
them entirely.
The negotiation to bring Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto to the White House had begun
during the transition period. Kushner saw the chance to convert the issue of the wall into a
bilateral agreement addressing immigration—hence a tour de force of Trumpian politics. The
negotiations surrounding the visit reached their apogee on the Wednesday after the inaugural,
with a high-level Mexican delegation—the first visit by any foreign leader to the Trump White
House—meeting with Kushner and Reince Priebus. Kushner’s message to his father-in-law that
afternoon was that Peña Nieto had signed on to a White House meeting and planning for the visit
could go forward.
The next day Trump tweeted: “The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It
has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers . . .” And he
continued in the next tweet . . . “of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting . . .”
At which point Peña Nieto did just that, leaving Kushner’s negotiation and statecraft as so much scrap on the floor.
* * *
On Friday, February 3, at breakfast at the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown, an epicenter of the swamp, Ivanka Trump, flustered, came down the stairs and entered the dining room, talking loudly on her cell phone: “Things are so messed up and I don’t know how to fix it…………………………………………………………. ”
The week had been overwhelmed by continuing fallout from the immigration order—the
administration was in court and headed to a brutal ruling against it—and more embarrassing
leaks of two theoretically make-nice phone calls, one with the Mexican president (“bad
hombres”) and the other with the Australian prime minister (“my worst call by far”). What’s
more, the day before, Nordstrom had announced that it was dropping Ivanka Trump’s clothing
line.
The thirty-five-year-old was a harried figure, a businesswoman who had had to abruptly shift control of her business. She was also quite overwhelmed by the effort of having just moved her three children into a new house in a new city—and having to do this largely on her own. Asked how his children were adjusting to their new school several weeks after the move, Jared said that yes, they were indeed in school—but he could not immediately identify where.
Still, in another sense, Ivanka was landing on her feet. Breakfast at the Four Seasons was a
natural place for her. She was among everyone who was anyone. In the restaurant that morning:
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman; Washington
fixture, lobbyist, and Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan; labor secretary nominee Wilbur Ross;
Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith; Washington Post national reporter Mark Berman; and a
table full of women lobbyists and fixers, including the music industry’s longtime representative
in Washington, Hillary Rosen; Elon Musk’s D.C. adviser, Juleanna Glover; Uber’s political and
policy executive, Niki Christoff; and Time Warner’s political affairs executive, Carol Melton.
In some sense—putting aside both her father’s presence in the White House and his tirades against draining the swamp, which might otherwise include most everyone here, this was the type of room Ivanka had worked hard to be in. Following the route of her father, she was crafting her name and herself into a multifaceted, multiproduct brand; she was also transitioning from her father’s aspirational male golf and business types to aspirational female mom and business types. She had, well before her father’s presidency could have remotely been predicted, sold a book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, for $1 million.
In many ways, it had been an unexpected journey, requiring more discipline than you might expect from a contented, distracted, run-of-the-mill socialite. As a twenty-one-year-old, she appeared in a film made by her then boyfriend, Jamie Johnson, a Johnson & Johnson heir. It’s a curious, even somewhat unsettling film, in which Johnson corrals his set of rich-kid friends into openly sharing their dissatisfactions, general lack of ambition, and contempt for their families. (One of his friends would engage in long litigation with him over the portrayal.) Ivanka, speaking with something like a Valley Girl accent—which would transform in the years ahead into something like a Disney princess voice—seems no more ambitious or even employed than anyone else, but she is notably less angry with her parents.
She treated her father with some lightness, even irony, and in at least one television interview
she made fun of his comb-over. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an
absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp reduction surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men—the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.
Father and daughter got along almost peculiarly well. She was the real mini-Trump (a title that
many people now seemed to aspire to). She accepted him. She was a helper not just in his
business dealings, but in his marital realignments. She facilitated entrances and exits. If you have
a douchebag dad, and if everyone is open about it, then maybe it becomes fun and life a romantic
comedy—sort of.
Reasonably, she ought to be much angrier. She grew up not just in the middle of a troubled family but in one that was at all times immersed in bad press. But she was able to bifurcate reality and live only in the uppermost part of it, where the Trump name, no matter how often tarnished, nevertheless had come to be an affectionately tolerated presence. She resided in a bubble of other wealthy people who thrived on their relationship with one another—at first among private school and Upper East Side of Manhattan friends, then among social, fashion, and media contacts. What’s more, she tended to find protection as well as status in her boyfriends’ families, aggressively bonding with a series of wealthy suitors’ families—including Jamie Johnson’s before the Kushners—over her own.
The Ivanka-Jared relationship was shepherded by Wendi Murdoch, herself a curious social example (to nobody so much as to her then husband, Rupert). The effort among a new generation of wealthy women was to recast life as a socialite, turning a certain model of whimsy and noblesse oblige into a new status as a power woman, a kind of postfeminist socialite. In this, you worked at knowing other rich people, the best rich people, and of being an integral and valuable part of a network of the rich, and of having your name itself evoke, well . . . riches. You weren’t satisfied with what you had, you wanted more. This required quite a level of indefatigability. You were marketing a product—yourself. You were your own start-up.
This was what her father had always done. This, more than real estate, was the family
business.
She and Kushner then united as a power couple, consciously recasting themselves as figures of
ultimate attainment, ambition, and satisfaction in the new global world and as representatives of
a new eco-philanthropic-art sensibility. For Ivanka, this included her friendship with Wendi
Murdoch and with Dasha Zhukova, the then wife of the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, a
fixture in the international art world, and, just a few months before the election, attending a
Deepak Chopra seminar on mediation with Kushner. She was searching for meaning—and
finding it. This transformation was further expressed not just in ancillary clothing, jewelry, and
footwear lines, as well as reality TV projects, but in a careful social media presence. She became
a superbly coordinated everymom, who would, with her father’s election, recast herself again,
this time as royal family.
And yet, the larger truth was that Ivanka’s relationship with her father was in no way a
conventional family relationship. If it wasn’t pure opportunism, it was certainly transactional. It
was business. Building the brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House—it was
all business.
But what did Ivanka and Jared really think of their father and father-in-law? “There’s great,
great, great affection—you see it, you really do,” replied Kellyanne Conway, somewhat avoiding
the question.
“They’re not fools,” said Rupert Murdoch when asked the question.
“They understand him, I think truly,” reflected Joe Scarborough. “And they appreciate his
energy. But there’s detachment.” That is, Scarborough went on, they have tolerance but few
illusions.
* * *
Ivanka’s breakfast that Friday at the Four Seasons was with Dina Powell, the latest Goldman Sachs executive to join the White House.
In the days after the election, Ivanka and Jared had both met with a revolving door of lawyers and PR people, most of them, the couple found, leery of involvement, not least because the couple seemed less interested in bending to advice and more interested in shopping for the advice they wanted. In fact, much of the advice they were getting had the same message: surround yourself—acquaint yourselves—with figures of the greatest establishment credibility. In effect: you are amateurs, you need professionals.
One name that kept coming up was Powell’s. A Republican operative who had gone on to
high influence and compensation at Goldman Sachs, she was quite the opposite of anyone’s
notion of a Trump Republican. Her family emigrated from Egypt when she was a girl, and she is
fluent in Arabic. She worked her way up through a series of stalwart Republicans, including
Texas senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and House Speaker Dick Armey. In the Bush White House
she served as chief of the personnel office and an assistant secretary of state for educational and
cultural affairs. She went to Goldman in 2007 and became a partner in 2010, running its
philanthropic outreach, the Goldman Sachs Foundation. Following a trend in the careers of many
poiitical operatives, she had become, as well as an über networker, a corporate public affairs and
PR-type adviser—someone who knew the right people in power and had a keen sensitivity to
how other people’s power can be used.
The table of women lobbyists and communications professionals in the Four Seasons that
morning was certainly as interested in Powell, and her presence in the new administration, as
they were in the president’s daughter. If Ivanka Trump was a figure more of novelty than of
seriousness, the fact that she had helped bring Powell into the White House and was now
publicly conferring with her added a further dimension to the president’s daughter. In a White
House seeming to pursue a dead-set Trumpian way, this was a hint of an alternative course. In
the assessment of the other fixers and PR women at the Four Seasons, this was a potential
shadow White House—Trump’s own family not assaulting the power structure but expressing an
obvious enthusiasm for it.
Ivanka, after a long breakfast, made her way through the room. Between issuing snappish instructions on her phone, she bestowed warm greetings and accepted business cards.
6
At HQME
Within the first weeks of his presidency a theory emerged among Trump’s friends that he was
not acting presidential, or, really, in any way taking into account his new status or restraining his
behavior—from early morning tweets, to his refusal to follow scripted remarks, to his self-
pitying calls to friends, details of which were already making it into the press—because he
hadn’t taken the leap that others before him had taken. Most presidents arrived in the White
House from more or less ordinary political life, and could not help but be awed and reminded of
their transformed circumstances by their sudden elevation to a mansion with palacelike servants
and security, a plane at constant readiness, and downstairs a retinue of courtiers and advisers. But
this would not have been that different from Trump’s former life in Trump Tower, which was
more commodious and to his taste than the White House, with servants, security, courtiers, and
advisers always on the premises and a plane at the ready. The big deal of being president was not
so apparent to him.
But another theory of the case was exactly opposite: he was totally off-kilter here because everything in his orderly world had been thrown on its head. In this view, the seventy-year-old Trump was a creature of habit at a level few people without despotic control of their environment could ever imagine. He had lived in the same home, a vast space in Trump Tower, since shortly after the building was completed in 1983. Every morning since, he had made the same commute to his office a few floors down. His corner office was a time capsule from the 1980s, the same gold-lined mirrors, the same Time magazine covers fading on the wall; the only substantial change was the substitution of Joe Namath’s football for Tom Brady’s. Outside the doors to his office, everywhere he looked there were the same faces, the same retainers—servants, security, courtiers, the “yes people”—who had attended him basically always.
“Can you imagine how disruptive it would be if that’s what you did every day and then suddenly you’re in the White House?” marveled a longtime Trump friend, smiling broadly at this trick of fate, if not abrupt comeuppance.
Trump found the White House, an old building with only sporadic upkeep and piecemeal renovations—as well as a famous roach and rodent problem—to be vexing and even a little scary. Friends who admired his skills as a hotelier wondered why he just didn’t remake the place, but he seemed cowed by the weight of the watchful eyes on him.
Kellyanne Conway, whose family had remained in New Jersey, and who had anticipated that
she could commute home when the president went back to New York, was surprised that New
York and Trump Tower were suddenly stricken from his schedule. Conway thought that the
president, in addition to being aware of the hostility in New York, was making a conscious effort
to be “part of this great house.” (But, acknowledging the difficulties inherent in his change of circumstances and of adapting to presidential lifestyle, she added, “How often will he go to Camp David?”—the Spartan, woodsy presidential retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland —“How ’bout never.”)
At the White House, he retreated to his own bedroom—the first time since the Kennedy White
House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms (although Melania was spending
scant time so far in the White House). In the first days he ordered two television screens in
addition to the one already there, and a lock on the door, precipitating a brief standoff with the
Secret Service, who insisted they have access to the room. He reprimanded the housekeeping
staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: “If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on
the floor.” Then he imposed a set of new rules: nobody touch anything, especially not his
toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at
McDonald’s—nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would
let housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his own bed.
If he was not having his six-thirty dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls—the phone was his true contact point with the world—to a small group of friends, among them most frequently Tom Barrack, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another.
* * *
But after the rocky start, things started to look better—even, some argued, presidential.
On Tuesday, January 31, in an efficiently choreographed prime-time ceremony, an upbeat and confident President Trump announced the nomination of federal appellate judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Gorsuch was a perfect combination of impeccable conservative standing, admirable probity, and gold-standard legal and judicial credentials. The nomination not only delivered on Trump’s promise to the base and to the conservative establishment, but it was a choice that seemed perfectly presidential.
Gorsuch’s nomination was also a victory for a staff that had seen Trump, with this plum job
and rich reward in his hand, waver again and again. Pleased by how the nomination was
received, especially by how little fault the media could find with it, Trump would shortly become
a Gorsuch fan. But before settling on Gorsuch, he wondered why the job wasn’t going to a friend
and loyalist. In the Trump view, it was rather a waste to give the job to someone he didn’t even
know.
At various points in the process he had run through almost all his lawyer friends—all of them unlikely, if not peculiar, choices, and, in almost every case, political nonstarters. The one unlikely, peculiar, and nonstarter choice that he kept returning to was Rudy Giuliani.
Trump owed Giuliani; not that he was so terribly focused on his debts, but this was one that
was certainly unpaid. Not only was Giuliani a longtime New York friend, but when few
Republicans were offering Trump their support, and almost none with a national reputation,
Giuliani was there for him—and in combative, fiery, and relentless fashion. This was particularly
true during the hard days following Billy Bush: when virtually everybody, including the
candidate himself, Bannon, Conway, and his children, believed the campaign would implode,
Giuliani barely allowed himself a break from his nonstop, passionate, and unapologetic Trump
defense.
Giuliani wanted to be the secretary of state, and Trump had in so many words offered him the
job. The resistance to Giuliani from the Trump circle derived from the same reason Trump was
inclined to give him the job—Giuliani had Trump’s ear and wouldn’t let go. The staff whispered
about his health and stability. Even his full-on pussygate defense now started to seem like a
liability. He was offered attorney general, Department of Homeland Security, and director of
national intelligence, but he turned them all down, continuing to hold out for State. Or, in what
staffers took to be the ultimate presumption, or grand triangulation, the Supreme Court. Since
Trump could not put someone openly pro-choice on the court without both sundering his base
and risking defeat of his nominee, then, of course, he’d have to give Giuliani State.
When this strategy failed—Rex Tillerson got the secretary of state job—that should have been
the end of it, but Trump kept returning to the idea of putting Giuliani on the court. On February
8, during the confirmation process, Gorsuch took public exception to Trump’s disparagement of
the courts. Trump, in a moment of pique, decided to pull his nomination and, during
conversations with his after-dinner callers, went back to discussing how he should have given the
nod to Rudy. He was the only loyal guy. It was Bannon and Priebus who kept having to remind
him, and to endlessly repeat, that in one of the campaign’s few masterful pieces of issue-defusing
politics, and perfect courtship of the conservative base, it had let the Federalist Society produce a
list of candidates. The campaign had promised that the nominee would come from that list—and
needless to say, Giuliani wasn’t on it.
Gorsuch was it. And Trump would shortly not remember when he had ever wanted anyone but
Gorsuch.
* * *
On February 3, the White House hosted a carefully orchestrated meeting of one of the newly organized business councils, the president’s Strategic and Policy Forum. It was a group of highly placed CEOs and weighty business types brought together by Blackstone chief Stephen Schwarzman. The planning for the event—with a precise agenda, choreographed seating and introductions, and fancy handouts—was more due to Schwarzman than to the White House. But it ended up being the kind of event that Trump did very well at and very much enjoyed. Kellyanne Conway, often referencing the Schwarzman gathering, would soon begin a frequent theme of complaint, namely that these kinds of events—Trump sitting down with serious-minded people and looking for solutions to the nation’s problems—were the soul of Trump’s White House and the media was giving them scant coverage.
Hosting business advisory councils was a Kushner strategy. It was an enlightened business
approach, distracting Trump from what Kushner viewed as the unenlightened right-wing agenda.
To an increasingly scornful Bannon, its real purpose was to allow Kushner himself to consort
with CEOs.
Schwarzman reflected what to many was a surprising and sudden business and Wall Street
affinity for Trump. Although few major-company CEOs had publicly supported him—with
many, if not all, big companies planning for a Hillary Clinton victory and already hiring Clinton-
connected public policy teams and with a pervasive media belief that a Trump victory would
assure a market tailspin—there was suddenly an overnight warming. An antiregulatory White
House and the promise of tax reform outweighed the prospect of disruptive tweeting and other
forms of Trump chaos; besides, the market had not stopped climbing since November 9, the day
after the election. What’s more, in one-on-one meetings, CEOs were reporting good vibes from
Trump’s effusive and artful flattery—and the sudden relief of not having to deal with what some
knew to be relentless Clinton-team hondling (what can you do for us today and can we use your
plan?).
On the other hand, while there was a warming C-suite feeling for Trump, there was also rising concern about the consumer side of many big brands. The Trump brand was suddenly the world’s biggest brand—the new Apple, except the opposite, since it was universally disdained (at least among many of the consumers who most top brands sought to court).
Hence, on inaugural morning, the employees of Uber, the ride sharing company, whose then
CEO Travis Kalanick had signed on to the Schwarzman council, woke up to find people chained
to the doors of their San Francisco headquarters. The charge was that Uber and Kalanick were
“collaborating”—with its whiff of Vichy—a much different status than a business looking to
sober forums with the president as a way to influence the government. Indeed, the protesters who
believed they were seeing the company’s relationship with Trump in political terms were
actually seeing this in conventional brand terms and zooming in on the disconnect. Uber’s
customer base is strongly young, urban, and progressive, and therefore out of sync with the
Trump base. Brand-conscious millennials saw this as beyond policy dickering and as part of an
epic identity clash. The Trump White House stood less for government and the push-pull of
competing interests and developing policies, and more, in a brand-savvy world, as a fixed and
unpopular cultural symbol.
Uber’s Kalanick resigned from the council. Disney CEO Bob Iger simply found that he was otherwise occupied on the occasion of the forum’s first meeting.
But most of the people on the council—other than Elon Musk, the investor, inventor, and founder of Tesla (who would later resign)—were not from media or tech companies, with their liberal bent, but from old-line, when-America-was-great enterprises. They included Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors; Ginni Rometty of IBM; Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE; Jim McNerney, the former CEO of Boeing; and Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo. If the new right had elected Trump, it was the older Fortune 100 executives who most pleased him.
Trump attended the meeting with his full retinue—the circle that seemed always to move with him in lockstep, including Bannon, Priebus, Kushner, Stephen Miller, and National Economic Council chief Gary Cohn—but conducted it entirely himself. Each of the people at the table, taking a point of interest, spoke for five minutes, with Trump then asking follow-up questions. Though Trump appeared not to have particularly, or at all, prepared for any of the subjects being discussed, he asked engaged and interested questions, pursuing things he wanted to know more about, making the meeting quite an easy back-and-forth. One of the CEOs observed that this seemed like the way Trump preferred to get information—talking about what he was interested in and getting other people to talk about his interests.
The meeting went on for two hours. In the White House view, this was Trump at his best. He was most at home around people he respected—and these were “the most respected people in the country,” according to Trump—who seemed to respect him, too.
This became a staff goal—to create situations in which he was comfortable, to construct something of a bubble, to wall him off from a mean-spirited world. Indeed, they sought to carefully replicate this formula: Trump in the Oval or in a larger West Wing ceremonial room presiding in front of a receptive audience, with a photo opportunity. Trump was often his own stage manager at these events, directing people in and out of the picture.
* * *
The media has a careful if selective filter when it comes to portraying real life in the White
House. The president and First Family are not, at least not usually, subjected to the sort of
paparazzi pursuit that in celebrity media results in unflattering to embarrassing to mocking
photographs, or in endless speculation about their private lives. Even in the worst scandals, a
businesslike suit-and-tie formality is still accorded the president. Saturday Night Live
presidential skits are funny in part because they play on our belief that in reality, presidents are
quite contained and buttoned-down figures, and their families, trotting not far behind, colorless
and obedient. The joke on Nixon was that he was pitiably uptight—even at the height of
Watergate, drinking heavily, he remained in his coat and tie, kneeling in prayer. Gerald Ford
merely tripped coming off Air Force One, providing great hilarity in this break from formal
presidential poise. Ronald Reagan, likely suffering the early effects of Alzheimer’s, remained a
carefully managed picture of calm and confidence. Bill Clinton, amid the greatest break in
presidential decorum in modern history, was even so always portrayed as a man in control.
George W. Bush, for all his disengagement, was allowed by the media to be presented as
dramatically in charge. Barack Obama, perhaps to his disadvantage, was consistently presented
as thoughtful, steady, and determined. This is partly a benefit of overweening image control, but
it is also because the president is thought to be the ultimate executive—or because the national
myth requires him to be.
That was actually the kind of image that Donald Trump had worked to project throughout
most of his career. His is a 1950s businessman sort of ideal. He aspires to look like his father—
or, anyway, not to displease his father. Except when he’s in golf wear, it is hard to imagine him
out of a suit and tie, because he almost never is. Personal dignity—that is, apparent uprightness
and respectability—is one of his fixations. He is uncomfortable when the men around him are
not wearing suit and ties. Formality and convention—before he became president, almost
everybody without high celebrity or a billion dollars called him “Mr. Trump”—are a central part
of his identity. Casualness is the enemy of pretense. And his pretense was that the Trump brand
stood for power, wealth, arrival.
On the February 5, the New York Times published an inside-the-White-House story that had
the president, two weeks into his term, stalking around in the late hours of the night in his
bathrobe, unable to work the light switches. Trump fell apart. It was, the president not incorrectly
saw, a way of portraying him as losing it, as Norma Desmond in the movie Sunset Boulevard, a
faded or even senile star living in a fantasy world. (This was Bannon’s interpretation of the
Times’s image of Trump, which was quickly adopted by everyone in the White House.) And, of
course, once again, it was a media thing—he was being treated in a way that no other president
had ever been treated.
This was not incorrect. The New York Times, in its efforts to cover a presidency that it openly saw as aberrant, had added to its White House beat something of a new form of coverage. Along with highlighting White House announcements—separating the trivial from the significant—the paper would also highlight, often in front-page coverage, the sense of the absurd, the pitiable, and the all-too-human. These stories turned Trump into a figure of ridicule. The two White House reporters most consistently on this beat, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, would become part of Trump’s constant refrain about the media being out to get him. Thrush would even become a fixture in Saturday Night Live sketches that mocked the president, his children, his press secretary Sean Spicer, and his advisers Bannon and Conway.
The president, while often a fabulist in his depiction of the world, was quite a literalist when it
came to how he saw himself. Hence he rebutted this picture of him as a half-demented or
seriously addled midnight stalker in the White House by insisting that he didn’t own a bathrobe.
“Do I seem like a bathrobe kind of guy, really?” he demanded, not humorously, of almost
every person with whom he spoke over the next forty-eight hours. “Seriously, can you see me in a bathrobe?”
Who had leaked it? For Trump, the details of his personal life suddenly became a far greater matter of concern than all the other kinds of leaks.
The New York Times Washington bureau, itself quite literal and worried by the possible lack
of an actual bathrobe, reverse-leaked that Bannon was the source of the story.
Bannon, who styled himself as a kind of black hole of silence, had also become a sort of
official black-hole voice, everybody’s Deep Throat. He was witty, intense, evocative, and
bubbling over, his theoretical discretion ever giving way to a constant semipublic commentary
on the pretensions and fatuousness and hopeless lack of seriousness of most everyone else in the
White House. By the second week of the Trump presidency, everybody in the White House
seemed to be maintaining their own list of likely leakers and doing their best to leak before being
leaked about.
But another likely leak source about his angst in the White House was Trump himself. In his calls throughout the day and at night from his bed, he frequently spoke to people who had no reason to keep his confidences. He was a river of grievances—including about what a dump the White House was on close inspection—examples of which many recipients of his calls promptly spread throughout the ever attentive and merciless gossip world.
* * *
On February 6, Trump made one of his seething, self-pitying, and unsolicited phone calls without presumption of confidentiality to a passing New York media acquaintance. The call had no discernible point other than to express his bent-out-of-shape feelings about the relentless contempt of the media and the disloyalty of his staff.
The initial subject of his ire was the New York Times and its reporter Maggie Haberman,
whom he called “a nut job.” The Times’s Gail Collins, who had written a column unfavorably
comparing Trump to Vice President Pence, was “a moron.” But then, continuing under the rubric
of media he hated, he veered to CNN and the deep disloyalty of its chief, Jeff Zucker. Zucker,
who as the head of NBC had commissioned The Apprentice, had been “made by Trump,” Trump
said of himself in the third person. And Trump had “personally” gotten Zucker his job at CNN.
“Yes, yes, I did,” said Trump.
He then repeated a story that he was obsessively telling almost everyone he spoke to. He’d
gone to a dinner, he didn’t remember when, where he had sat next to “a gentleman named
Kent”—undoubtedly Phil Kent, a former CEO of Turner Broadcasting, the Time Warner division
that oversaw CNN—“and he had a list of four names.” Three of them Trump had never heard of,
but he knew Jeff Zucker because of The Apprentice. “Zucker was number four on the list, so I
talked him up to number one. I probably shouldn’t have because Zucker is not that smart but I
like to show I can do that sort of thing.” But Zucker, “a very bad guy who has done terrible with
the ratings,” had turned around after Trump had gotten him the job and had said, well, it’s
“unbelievably disgusting.” This was the Russian “dossier” and the “golden shower” story—the
practice CNN had accused him of being party to in the Moscow hotel suite with assorted
prostitutes.
Having dispensed with Zucker, the president of the United States went on to speculate on what
was involved with a golden shower. And how this was all just part of a media campaign that
would never succeed in driving him from the White House. Because they were sore losers and
hated him for winning, they spread total lies, 100 percent made-up things, totally untrue, for
instance, the cover that week of Time magazine—which, Trump reminded his listeners, he had been on more than anyone in history—that showed Steve Bannon, a good guy, saying he was the real president. “How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me?” Trump demanded and repeated the question, and then repeated the answer: “Zero! Zero!” And that went for his son-in-law, too, who had a lot to learn.
The media was not only hurting him, he said—he was not looking for any agreement or really
even any response—but hurting his negotiating capabilities, which hurt the nation. And that went
for Saturday Night Live, too, which might think it was very funny but was actually hurting
everybody in the country. And while he understood that SNL was there to be mean to him, they
were being very, very mean. It was “fake comedy.” He had reviewed the treatment of all other
presidents in the media and there was nothing like this ever, even of Nixon who was treated very
unfairly. “Kellyanne, who is very fair, has this all documented. You can look at it.”
The point is, he said, that that very day, he had saved $700 million a year in jobs that were going to Mexico but the media was talking about him in his bathrobe, which “I don’t have because I’ve never worn a bathrobe. And would never wear one, because I’m not that kind of guy.” And what the media was doing was undermining this very dignified house, and “dignity is so important.” But Murdoch, “who had never called me, never once,” was now calling all the time. So that should tell people something.
The call went on for twenty-six minutes.
7
RUSSIA
Even before there was reason to suspect Sally Yates, they suspected her. The transition report
said Trump wouldn’t like the fifty-six-year-old Atlanta-born University of Georgia career Justice
Department lawyer slated to step up to acting attorney general. There was something about a
particular kind of Obama person. Something about the way they walked and held themselves.
Superiority. And about a certain kind of woman who would immediately rub Trump the wrong
way—Obama women being a good tip-off, Hillary women another. Later this would be extended
to “DOJ women.”
Here was an elemental divide: between Trump and career government employees. He could understand politicians, but he was finding it hard to get a handle on these bureaucrat types, their temperament and motives. He couldn’t grasp what they wanted. Why would they, or anyone, be a permanent government employee? “They max out at what? Two hundred grand? Tops,” he said, expressing something like wonder.
Sally Yates could have been passed over for the acting AG spot—to serve in place while the
attorney-general-designate, Jeff Sessions, waited for confirmation—and before long Trump
would be furious about why she wasn’t. But she was the sitting deputy and she’d been confirmed
by the Senate, and the acting AG job needed someone with Senate confirmation. And even
though she seemed to see herself as something of a prisoner held in hostile territory, Yates
accepted the job.
Given this context, the curious information she presented to White House counsel Don McGahn during the administration’s first week—this was before, in the second week, she refused to enforce the immigration order and was thereupon promptly fired—seemed not only unwelcome but suspect.
The newly confirmed National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, had brushed off reports in the Washington Post about a conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. It was a simple meet and greet, he said. He assured the transition team—among others, Vice Presidentelect Pence—that there were no discussions of Obama administration sanctions against the Russians, an assurance Pence publicly repeated.
Yates now told the White House that Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak had actually been captured as part of an “incidental collection” of authorized wiretaps. That is, a wiretap had presumably been authorized on the Russian ambassador by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and, incidentally, picked up Flynn.
The FISA court had achieved a moment of notoriety after the Edward Snowden revelations
briefly made it a bête noire for liberals who were angry about privacy incursions. Now it was
achieving another moment, but this time as the friend of liberals, who hoped to use these
“incidental” wiretaps as a way to tie the Trump camp to a wide-ranging conspiracy with Russia.
In short order, McGahn, Priebus, and Bannon, each with prior doubts about Flynn’s reliability
and judgment—“a fuck-up,” according to Bannon—conferred about the Yates message. Flynn
was asked again about his call with Kislyak; he was also told that a recording might exist. Again
he scoffed at any suggestion that this was a meaningful conversation about anything.
In one White House view, Yates’s tattling was little more than “like she found out her
girlfriend’s husband flirted with somebody else and, standing on principle, had to tell on him.”
Of more alarm to the White House was how, in an incidental collection wherein the names of
American citizens are supposedly “masked”—with complicated procedures required to
“unmask” them—had Yates so handily and conveniently picked up Flynn? Her report would also
seem to confirm that the leak to the Post about these recordings came from the FBI, DOJ, or
Obama White House sources—part of the growing river of leaks, with the Times and the Post the
leakers’ favored destinations.
The White House in its assessment of the Yates message ended up seeing this as less a problem with an always hard-to-handle Flynn than as a problem with Yates, even as a threat from her: the Justice Department, with its vast staff of career and Obama-inclined prosecutors, had ears on the Trump team.
* * *
“It’s unfair,” said Kellyanne Conway, sitting in her yet undecorated second-floor office while representing the president’s hurt feelings. “It’s obviously unfair. It’s very unfair. They lost. They didn’t win. This is so unfair. So POTUS just doesn’t want to talk about it.”
There was nobody in the White House who wanted to talk about—or even anyone who had been officially delegated to talk about—Russia, the story that, evident to most, even before they entered the White House, was certain to overwhelm the first year of the Trump administration at the very least. Nobody was prepared to deal with it.
“There’s no reason to even talk about it,” said Sean Spicer, sitting on the couch in his office,
firmly crossing his arms. “There’s no reason to even talk about it,” he said again, stubbornly.
For his part, the president did not use, though he might have, the word “Kafkaesque.” He
regarded the Russia story as senseless and inexplicable and having no basis in reality. They were
just being sucked in.
They had survived scandal during the campaign—the Billy Bush weekend—which virtually no one in Trump’s inner circle had thought they could survive, only to be hit by the Russia scandal. Compared to Pussy-gate, Russia seemed like the only-desperate-thing-left-gate. What seemed unfair now was that the issue still wasn’t going away, and that, incomprehensibly, people took it seriously. When at best it was . . . nothing.
It was the media.
The White House had quickly become accustomed to media-led scandals, but they were also used to their passing. But now this one was, frustratingly, holding on.
If there was any single piece of proof not just of media bias but of the intention of the media to
do anything it could to undermine this president, it was—in the view of the Trump circle—this,
the Russia story, what the Washington Post termed “Russia’s attack on our political system.”
(“So terribly, terribly unfair, with no proof of one vote changed,” according to Conway.) It was
insidious. It was, to them, although they didn’t put it this way, similar to the kind of dark
Clinton-like conspiracies that Republicans were more wont to accuse liberals of—Whitewater,
Benghazi, Email-gate. That is, an obsessive narrative that leads to investigations, which lead to other investigations, and to more obsessive no-escape media coverage. This was modern politics: blood-sport conspiracies that were about trying to destroy people and careers.
When the comparison to Whitewater was made to Conway, she, rather proving the point about
obsessions, immediately began to argue the particulars involving Webster Hubbell, a mostly
forgotten figure in the Whitewater affair, and the culpability of the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas,
where Hillary Clinton was a partner. Everybody believed their side’s conspiracies, while utterly,
and righteously, rejecting the conspiracies leveled at them. To call something a conspiracy was
to dismiss it.
As for Bannon, who had himself promoted many conspiracies, he dismissed the Russia story in textbook fashion: “It’s just a conspiracy theory.” And, he added, the Trump team wasn’t capable of conspiring about anything.
* * *
The Russia story was—just two weeks into the new presidency—a dividing line with each side viewing the other as pushing fake news.
The greater White House wholly believed that the story was an invented construct of weak if not preposterous narrative threads, with a mind-boggling thesis: We fixed the election with the Russians, OMG! The anti-Trump world, and especially its media—that is, the media—believed that there was a high, if not overwhelming, likelihood that there was something significant there, and a decent chance that it could be brought home.
If the media, self-righteously, saw it as the Holy Grail and silver bullet of Trump destruction, and the Trump White House saw it, with quite some self-pity, as a desperate effort to concoct a scandal, there was also a range of smart money in the middle.
The congressional Democrats had everything to gain by insisting, Benghazi-like, that where
there was smoke (even if they were desperately working the bellows) there was fire, and by
using investigations as a forum to promote their minority opinion (and for members to promote
themselves).
For Republicans in Congress, the investigations were a card to play against Trump’s
vengefulness and unpredictability. Defending him—or something less than defending him and,
indeed, possibly pursuing him—offered Republicans a new source of leverage in their dealings
with him.
The intelligence community—with its myriad separate fiefdoms as suspicious of Trump as of any incoming president in memory—would, at will, have the threat of drip-drip-drip leaks to protect its own interests.
The FBI and DOJ would evaluate the evidence—and the opportunity—through their own
lenses of righteousness and careerism. (“The DOJ is filled with women prosecutors like Yates
who hate him,” said a Trump aide, with a curiously gender-biased view of the growing
challenge.)
If all politics is a test of your opponent’s strength, acumen, and forbearance, then this,
regardless of the empirical facts, was quite a clever test, with many traps that many people might
fall into. Indeed, in many ways the issue was not Russia but, in fact, strength, acumen, and
forbearance, the qualities Trump seemed clearly to lack. The constant harping about a possible
crime, even if there wasn’t an actual crime—and no one was yet pointing to a specific act of
criminal collusion, or in fact any other clear violation of the law—could force a cover-up which
might then turn into a crime. Or turn up a perfect storm of stupidity and cupidity.
“They take everything I’ve ever said and exaggerate it,” said the president in his first week in
the White House during a late-night call. “It’s all exaggerated. My exaggerations are
exaggerated.”
* * *
Franklin Foer, the Washington-based former editor of the New Republic, made an early case for a
Trump-Putin conspiracy on July 4, 2016, in Slate. His piece reflected the incredulity that had
suddenly possessed the media and political intelligentsia: Trump, the unserious candidate, had,
however incomprehensibly, become a more or less serious one. And somehow, because of his
prior unseriousness, and his what-you-see-is-what-you-get nature, the braggart businessman,
with his bankruptcies, casinos, and beauty pageants, had avoided serious vetting. For Trump
students—which, over his thirty years of courting attention, many in the media had become—the
New York real estate deals were dirty, the Atlantic City ventures were dirty, the Trump airline
was dirty, Mar-a-Lago, the golf courses, and the hotels all dirty. No reasonable candidate could
have survived a recounting of even one of these deals. But somehow a genial amount of
corruption had been figured into the Trump candidacy—that, after all, was the platform he was
running on. I’ll do for you what a tough businessman does for himself.
To really see his corruption, you had to see it on a bigger stage. Foer was suggesting a fabulous one.
Assembling a detailed road map for a scandal that did not yet exist, Foer, without anything resembling smoking guns or even real evidence, pulled together in July virtually all of the circumstantial and thematic threads and many of the various characters that would play out over the next eighteen months. (Unbeknownst to the public or even most media or political insiders, Fusion GPS had by this point hired the former British spy Christopher Steele to investigate a connection between Trump and the Russian government.)
Putin was seeking a resurgence of Russian power and, as well, to block encroachments by the European Union and NATO. Trump’s refusal to treat Putin as a semi-outlaw—not to mention what often seemed like a man crush on him—meant, ipso facto, that Trump was sanguine about a return of Russian power and might actually be promoting it.
Why? What could possibly be in it for an American politician to publicly embrace—
sycophantically embrace—Vladimir Putin and to encourage what the West saw as Russian
adventurism?
Theory 1: Trump was drawn to authoritarian strongmen. Foer recounted Trump’s longtime
fascination with Russia, including being duped by a Gorbachev look-alike who visited Trump
Tower in the 1980s, and his many fulsome and unnecessary “odes to Putin.” This suggested a lie-
down-with-dogs-wake-up-with-fleas vulnerability: consorting with or looking favorably upon
politicians whose power lies partly in their tolerance of corruption brings you closer to
corruption. Likewise, Putin was drawn to populist strongmen in his own image: hence, Foer
asked, “Why wouldn’t the Russians offer him the same furtive assistance they’ve lavished on Le
Pen, Berlusconi, and the rest?”
Theory 2: Trump was part of a less-than-blue-chip (much less) international business set,
feeding off the rivers of dubious wealth that had been unleashed by all the efforts to move cash,
much of it from Russia and China, out of political harm’s way. Such money, or rumors of such
money, became an explanation—still only a circumstantial one—in trying to assess all the
Trump business dealings that largely remained hidden from view. (There were two contradictory
theories here: he had hidden these dealings because he didn’t want to admit their paucity, or he
had hidden them to mask their disreputableness.) Because Trump is less than creditworthy, Foer
was among many who concluded that Trump needed to turn to other sources—more or less dirty
money, or money with other sorts of strings attached. (One way the process can work is, roughly
speaking, as follows: an oligarch makes an investment in a more or less legitimate third-party
investment fund, which, quid pro quo, makes an investment in Trump.) And while Trump would
categorically deny that he had any loans or investments from Russia, one would, of course, not
have dirty money on one’s books.
As a subset of this theory, Trump—never very scrupulous about vetting his people—
surrounded himself with a variety of hustlers working their own deals, and, plausibly, aiding
Trump’s deals. Foer identified the following characters as part of a possible Russian conspiracy:
- Tevfik Arif, a former Rus sian official who ran the Bayrock Group, a middleman in Trump financings with an office in Trump Tower.
- Felix Sater (sometimes spelled Satter), a Russian-born immigrant to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, who had previously served time in prison in connection with a fraud at a Mafiarun brokerage and who went to work for Bayrock and had a business card identifying him as senior adviser to Donald Trump. (When Sater’s name later continued to surface, Trump assured Bannon he didn’t know Sater at all.)
- Carter Page, a banker of uncertain portfolio who had spent time in Russia and billed
himself as having advised the state-run oil company, Gazprom, and who showed up on a hastily assembled list of Trump foreign policy advisers and who, it would turn out, the FBI was closely monitoring in what it said was a Russian intelligence effort to turn him. (Trump would later deny ever meeting Page, and the FBI would say that it believed Russian
intelligence had targeted Page in an effort to turn him.) - Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency—fired by Obama for unclear reasons—who had yet to emerge as Trump’s key foreign policy counselor and
future National Security Advisor, but who was accompanying him on many campaign trips and who earlier in the year had been paid a $45,000 speaking fee in Moscow and been
photographed sitting at a dinner with Putin. - Paul Manafort, whom, along with serving as Trump’s campaign manager, Foer
highlighted as a political operative and consultant who had generated substantial income advising Kremlin-backed Viktor Yanukovych, who successfully ran for the presidency of Ukraine in 2010, was later deposed in 2014, and had been in business with the Russian oligarch and Putin crony Oleg Deripaska.
More than a year later, each of these men would be part of the near-daily Russia-Trump news
cycle.