Theory 3: The Holy Grail proposition was that Trump and the Russians—perhaps even Putin himself—had gotten together to hack the Democratic National Committee.
Theory 4: But then there was the those-that-know-him-best theory, some version of which most Trumpers would come to embrace. He was just star-fucking. He took his beauty pageant to Russia because he thought Putin was going to be his friend. But Putin couldn’t have cared less, and in the end Trump found himself at the promised gala dinner seated on one side next to a guy who looked like he had never used a utensil and on the other side Jabba the Hutt in a golf shirt. In other words, Trump—however foolish his sucking-up might have been, and however suspicious it might look in hindsight—just wanted a little respect.
Theory 5: The Russians, holding damaging information about Trump, were blackmailing him.
He was a Manchurian Candidate.
* * *
On January 6, 2017—nearly six months to the day after Foer’s piece was published—the CIA,
FBI, and NSA announced their joint conclusion that “Vladimir Putin ordered an influence
campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.” From the Steele dossier, to the steady
leaks from the U.S. intelligence community, to testimony and statements from the leadership of
U.S. intelligence agencies, a firm consensus had emerged. There was a nefarious connection,
perhaps an ongoing one, between Trump and his campaign and the Russian government.
Still, this could yet be seen as highly wishful thinking by Trump opponents. “The underlying premise of the case is that spies tell the truth,” said the veteran intelligence community journalist Edward Jay Epstein. “Who knew?” And, indeed, the worry in the White House was not about collusion—which seemed implausible if not farcical—but what, if the unraveling began, would likely lead to the messy Trump (and Kushner) business dealings. On this subject every member of the senior staff shrugged helplessly, covering eyes, ears, and mouth.
This was the peculiar and haunting consensus—not that Trump was guilty of all that he was accused of, but that he was guilty of so much else. It was all too possible that the hardly plausible would lead to the totally credible.
* * *
On February 13, twenty-four days into the new administration, National Security Advisor
Michael Flynn became the first actual link between Russia and the White House.
Flynn had really only one supporter in the Trump administration, and that was the president
himself. They were best friends during the campaign—buddy movie stuff. Post-inauguration, this
translated into a total-access relationship. On Flynn’s part, it led to a set of misapprehensions that
was common inside Trump’s circle: that the president’s personal endorsement indicated your
status in the White House and that Trump’s level of flattery was a convincing indication that you
had an unbreakable bond with him and that you were, in his eyes, and in his White House,
something close to omnipotent. Trump, with his love of generals, had even for a moment wanted
to make Michael Flynn his vice president.
Intoxicated by Trump’s flattery during the campaign, Flynn—a lower-tier general and quite a flaky one at that—had become something of a Trump dancing monkey. When former generals make alliances with political candidates, they customarily position themselves as providers of expertise and figures of a special maturity. But Flynn had become quite a maniacal partisan, part of the Trump traveling road show, one of the ranters and ravers opening Trump rallies. This allin enthusiasm and loyalty had helped win him access to Trump’s ear, into which he poured his anti-intelligence-community theories.
During the early part of the transition, when Bannon and Kushner had seemed joined at the hip, this was part of their bond: an effort to disintermediate Flynn and his often problematic message. A subtext in the White House estimation of Flynn, slyly insinuated by Bannon, was that Defense Secretary Mattis was a four-star general and Flynn but a three-star.
“I like Flynn, he reminds me of my uncles,” said Bannon. “But that’s the problem: he reminds me of my uncles.”
Bannon used the general odor that had more and more attached to Flynn among everybody
except the president to help secure a seat for himself on the National Security Council. This was,
for many in the national security community, a signal moment in the effort by the nationalist
right wing to seize power. But Bannon’s presence on the council was just as much driven by the
need to babysit the impetuous Flynn, prone to antagonizing almost everyone else in the national
security community. (Flynn was “a colonel in a general’s uniform,” according to one senior
intelligence figure.)
Flynn, like everyone around Trump, was besotted by the otherworldly sense of opportunity that came with, against all odds, being in the White House. And inevitably, he had been made more grandiose by it.
In 2014, Flynn had been roughly cashiered out of government, for which he blamed his many enemies in the CIA. But he had energetically set himself up in business, joining the ranks of former government officials profiting off the ever growing globalist corporate-financial-
government policy and business networks. Then, after flirting with several other Republican presidential candidates, he bonded with Trump. Both Flynn and Trump were antiglobalists—or, anyway, they believed the United States was getting screwed in global transactions. Still, money was money, and Flynn, who, when he retired, had been receiving a few hundred thousand a year on his general’s pension, was not turning any of it down. Various friends and advisers— including Michael Ledeen, a longtime anti-Iran and anti-CIA crony, and the coauthor of Flynn’s book, whose daughter now worked for Flynn—advised Flynn that he ought not to accept fees from Russia or the larger “consulting” assignments from Turkey.
It was in fact the sort of carelessness that almost everyone in Trump’s world, including the
president and his family, was guilty of. They lived with parallel realities in which, while
proceeding with a presidential campaign, they also had to live in a vastly more likely world—
rather a certain world—in which Donald Trump would never be president. Hence, business as
usual.
In early February, an Obama administration lawyer friendly with Sally Yates remarked with
some relish and considerable accuracy: “It certainly is an odd circumstance if you live your life
without regard for being elected and then get elected—and quite an opportunity for your
enemies.”
In this, there was not only the Russian cloud hanging over the administration, but a sense that the intelligence community so distrusted Flynn, and so blamed its bad blood with Trump on him, that Flynn was the target here. Within the White House there was even a feeling that a soft trade was being implicitly offered: Flynn for the goodwill of the intelligence community.
At the same time, in what some thought a direct result of the president’s rage over the Russia
insinuations—particularly the insinuation about the golden shower—the president seemed to
bond even more strongly with Flynn, assuring his National Security Advisor over and over again
that he had his back, that the Russia accusations, those related both to Flynn and to himself, were
“garbage.” After Flynn’s dismissal, a narrative describing Trump’s increasing doubts about his
adviser would be offered to the press, but in fact the opposite was true: the more doubts gathered
around Flynn, the more certain the president became that Flynn was his all-important ally.
* * *
The final or deadliest leak during Michael Flynn’s brief tenure is as likely to have come from the
National Security Advisor’s antagonists inside the White House as from the Justice Department.
On Wednesday, February 8, the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung came to visit Flynn for
what was billed as an off-the-record interview. They met not in his office but in the most ornate
room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building—the same room where Japanese diplomats
waited to meet with Secretary of State Cordell Hull as he learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
To all outward appearances, it was an uneventful background interview, and DeYoung,
Columbo-like in her affect, aroused no suspicions when she broached the de rigueur question:
“My colleagues asked me to ask you this: Did you talk to the Russians about sanctions?”
Flynn declared that he had had no such conversations, absolutely no conversation, he confirmed again, and the interview, attended by senior National Security Council official and spokesman Michael Anton, ended soon thereafter.
But later that day, DeYoung called Anton and asked if she could use Flynn’s denial on the record. Anton said he saw no problem—after all, the White House wanted Flynn’s denial to be clear—and notified Flynn.
A few hours later, Flynn called Anton back with some worries about the statement. Anton applied an obvious test: “If you knew that there might be a tape of this conversation that could surface, would you still be a hundred percent sure?”
Flynn equivocated, and Anton, suddenly concerned, advised him that if he couldn’t be sure they ought to “walk it back.”
The Post piece, which appeared the next day under three other bylines—indicating that
DeYoung’s interview was hardly the point of the story—contained new leaked details of the
Kislyak phone call, which the Post now said had indeed dealt with the issue of sanctions. The
article also contained Flynn’s denial—“he twice said ‘no’ ”—as well as his walk-back: “On
Thursday, Flynn, through his spokesman, backed away from the denial. The spokesman said
Flynn ‘indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain
that the topic never came up.’ ”
After the Post story, Priebus and Bannon questioned Flynn again. Flynn professed not to
remember what he had said; if the subject of sanctions came up, he told them, it was at most
glossed over. Curiously, no one seemed to have actually heard the conversation with Kislyak or
seen a transcript.
Meanwhile, the vice president’s people, caught unaware by the sudden Flynn controversy,
were taking particular umbrage, less about Flynn’s possible misrepresentations than about the
fact that they had been kept out of the loop. But the president was undisturbed—or, in one
version, “aggressively defensive”—and, while the greater White House looked on askance,
Trump chose to take Flynn with him to Mar-a-Lago for his scheduled weekend with Shinzo Abe,
the Japanese prime minister.
That Saturday night, in a bizarre spectacle, the Mar-a-Lago terrace became a public Situation Room when President Trump and Prime Minister Abe openly discussed how to respond to North Korea’s launch of a missile three hundred miles into the Sea of Japan. Standing right over the president’s shoulder was Michael Flynn. If Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner believed that Flynn’s fate hung in the balance, the president seemed to have no such doubts.
For the senior White House staff, the underlying concern was less about getting rid of Flynn than about the president’s relationship with Flynn. What had Flynn, in essence a spy in a soldier’s uniform, roped the president into? What might they have got up to together?
On Monday morning, Kellyanne Conway appeared on MSNBC and offered a firm defense of the National Security Advisor. “Yes,” she said, “General Flynn does enjoy the full confidence of the president.” And while this seemed to many an indication that Conway was out of the loop, it was more accurately an indication that she had been talking directly to the president.
A White House meeting that morning failed to convince Trump to fire Flynn. He was
concerned about what it would look like to lose his National Security Advisor after just twenty-
four days. And he was adamant about not wanting to blame Flynn for talking to the Russians, even about sanctions. In Trump’s view, condemning his adviser would connect him to a plot where there was no plot. His fury wasn’t directed toward Flynn but to the “incidental” wiretap that had surveilled him. Making clear his confidence in his adviser, Trump insisted that Flynn come to Monday’s lunch with the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau.
Lunch was followed by another meeting about the furor. There were yet more details of the
phone call and a growing itemization of the money Flynn had been paid by various Russian
entities; there was also increasing focus on the theory that the leaks from the intel community—
that is, the whole Russia mess—was directed at Flynn. Finally, there was a new rationale that
Flynn should be fired not because of his Russian contacts, but because he had lied about them to
the vice president. This was a convenient invention of a chain of command: in fact, Flynn did not
report to Vice President Pence, and he was arguably a good deal more powerful than Pence.
The new rationale appealed to Trump, and he at last agreed that Flynn had to go.
Still, the president did not waiver in his belief in Flynn. Rather, Flynn’s enemies were his enemies. And Russia was a gun to his head. He might, however ruefully, have had to fire Flynn, but Flynn was still his guy.
Flynn, ejected from the White House, had become the first established direct link between Trump and Russia. And depending on what he might say to whom, he was now potentially the most powerful person in Washington.
8
ORG CHART
T he White House, realized former naval officer Steve Bannon after a few weeks, was really a
military base, a government-issue office with a mansion’s façade and a few ceremonial rooms
sitting on top of a secure installation under military command. The juxtaposition was striking:
military hierarchy and order in the background, the chaos of the temporary civilian occupants in
the fore.
You could hardly find an entity more at odds with military discipline than a Trump organization. There was no real up-and-down structure, but merely a figure at the top and then everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasn’t task-based so much as response-oriented— whatever captured the boss’s attention focused everybody’s attention. That was the way in Trump Tower, just as it was now the way in the Trump White House.
The Oval Office itself had been used by prior occupants as the ultimate power symbol, a
ceremonial climax. But as soon as Trump arrived, he moved in a collection of battle flags to
frame him sitting at his desk, and the Oval immediately became the scene of a daily Trump
cluster-fuck. It’s likely that more people had easy access to this president than any president
before. Nearly all meetings in the Oval with the president were invariably surrounded and
interrupted by a long list of retainers—indeed, everybody strove to be in every meeting. Furtive
people skulked around without clear purpose: Bannon invariably found some reason to study
papers in the corner and then to have a last word; Priebus kept his eye on Bannon; Kushner kept
constant tabs on the whereabouts of the others. Trump liked to keep Hicks, Conway, and, often,
his old Apprentice sidekick Omarosa Manigault—now with a confounding White House title—in
constant hovering presence. As always, Trump wanted an eager audience, encouraging as many
people as possible to make as many attempts as possible to be as close to him as possible. In
time, however, he would take derisive notice of those who seemed most eager to suck up to him.
Good management reduces ego. But in the Trump White House, it could often seem that nothing happened, that reality simply did not exist, if it did not happen in Trump’s presence. This made an upside-down kind of sense: if something happened and he wasn’t present, he didn’t care about it and barely recognized it. His response then was often just a blank stare. It also fed one theory of why hiring in the West Wing and throughout the executive branch was so slow—filling out the vast bureaucracy was out of his view and thus he couldn’t care less. Likewise, visitors with appointments were befuddled by the West Wing’s own lack of staff: after being greeted with a smart military salute by the dress marine at the West Wing door, they discovered that the West Wing often lacked a political-appointee receptionist, leaving guests to find their own way through the warren that was the Western world’s pinnacle of power.
Trump, a former military academy cadet—albeit not an enthusiastic one—had touted a return to military values and expertise. In fact, he most of all sought to preserve his personal right to defy or ignore his own organization. This, too, made sense, since not really having an organization was the most efficient way to sidestep the people in your organization and to dominate them. It was just one irony of his courtship of admired military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly: they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command principles.
* * *
Almost from the beginning, the West Wing was run against the near-daily report that the person
charged with running it, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, was about to lose his job. Or, if he was
not about to lose his job, the only reason he was keeping it was that he had not had it long
enough to yet be fired from it. But no one in Trump’s inner circle doubted that he would lose his
job as soon as, practically speaking, his losing it would not embarrass the president too much.
So, they reasoned, no one need pay any attention to him. Priebus, who, during the transition,
doubted he would make it to the inauguration, and then, once in, wondered if he could endure the
torture for the minimally respectable period of a year, shortly reduced his goal to six months.
The president himself, absent any organizational rigor, often acted as his own chief of staff, or,
in a sense, elevated the press secretary job to the primary staff job, and then functioned as his
own press secretary—reviewing press releases, dictating quotes, getting reporters on the phone—
which left the actual press secretary as a mere flunky and whipping boy. Moreover, his relatives
acted as ad hoc general managers of whatever areas they might choose to be general managers in.
Then there was Bannon, conducting something of an alternate-universe operation, often
launching far-reaching undertakings that no one else knew about. And thus Priebus, at the center
of an operation that had no center, found it easy to think there was no reason for him to be there
at all.
At the same time, the president seemed to like Priebus more and more quite for the reason that he seemed entirely expendable. He took Trump’s verbal abuse about his height and stature affably, or anyway stoically. He was a convenient punching bag when things went wrong—and he didn’t punch back, to Trump’s pleasure and disgust.
“I love Reince,” said the president, with the faintest praise. “Who else would do this job?”
Among the three men with effectively equal rank in the West Wing—Priebus and Bannon and
Kushner—only a shared contempt kept them from ganging up on one another.
In the early days of Trump’s presidency, the situation seemed clear to everybody: three men
were fighting to run the White House, to be the real chief of staff and power behind the Trump
throne. And of course there was Trump himself, who didn’t want to relinquish power to anyone.
In these crosshairs was thirty-two-year-old Katie Walsh.
* * *
Walsh, the White House deputy chief of staff, represented, at least to herself, a certain
Republican ideal: clean, brisk, orderly, efficient. A righteous bureaucrat, pretty but with a
permanently grim expression, Walsh was a fine example of the many political professionals in
whom competence and organizational skills transcend ideology. (To wit: “I would much rather
be part of an organization that has a clear chain of command that I disagree with than a chaotic
organization that might seem to better reflect my views.”) Walsh was an inside-the-Beltway
figure—a swamp creature. Her expertise was prioritizing Beltway goals, coordinating Beltway personnel, marshaling Beltway resources. A head-down-get-things-done kind of person was how she saw herself. And no nonsense.
“Any time someone goes into a meeting with the president there are like sixty-five things that have to happen first,” she enumerated. “What cabinet secretary has to be alerted about what person is going in there; what people on the Hill should be consulted; the president needs a policy briefing, so who’s owning the brief and getting it to appropriate staff members, oh and by the way you have to vet the guy Then you have to give it to comms and figure out if it’s a national story, a regional story and are we doing op-eds, going on national TV . . . and that’s before you get to political affairs or public liaison….. And for anybody who meets with the president, it has to be explained why other people are not meeting with him, or else they’ll go out there and shit all over the last person who was in…………………………………………. ”
Walsh was what politics is supposed to be—or what it has been. A business supported by, tended to, and, indeed, ennobled, by a professional political class. Politics, evident in the sameness and particular joylessness of Washington dress, a determined anti-fashion statement, is about procedure and temperament. Flash passes. No flash stays in the game.
From an all-girl Catholic school in St. Louis (still wearing a diamond cross around her neck)
and volunteer work on local political campaigns, Walsh went to George Washington University
—D.C. area colleges being among the most reliable feeders of swamp talent (government is not
really an Ivy League profession). Most government and political organizations are not run, for
better or worse, by MBAs, but by young people distinguished only by their earnestness and
public sector idealism and ambition. (It is an anomaly of Republican politics that young people
motivated to work in the public sector find themselves working to limit the public sector.)
Careers advance by how well you learn on the job and how well you get along with the rest of
the swamp and play its game.
In 2008, Walsh became the McCain campaign’s midwest regional finance director—having majored in marketing and finance at GW, she was trusted to hold the checkbook. Then on to deputy finance director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, deputy finance director and then finance director of the Republican National Committee, and finally, pre-White House, chief of staff of the RNC and its chairman, Reince Priebus.
In retrospect, the key moment in saving the Trump campaign might be less the Mercer-led
takeover and imposition of Bannon and Conway in mid-August than the acceptance that the
bare-bones and still largely one-man organization would need to depend on the largesse of the
RNC. The RNC had the ground game and the data infrastructure; other campaigns might not
normally trust the national committee, with its many snakes in the grass, but the Trump
campaign had chosen not to build this sort of organization or make this investment. In late
August, Bannon and Conway, with Kushner’s consent, made a deal with the deep-swamp RNC
despite Trump’s continued insistence that they’d gotten this far without the RNC, so why come
crawling now?
Almost right away Walsh became a key player in the campaign, a dedicated, make-the-trains-
run-on-time power centralizer—a figure without which few organizations can run. Commuting between RNC headquarters in Washington and Trump Tower, she was the quartermaster who made national political resources available to the campaign.
If Trump himself was often a disruption in the final months of the race and during the
transition, the campaign around him, in part because its only option was to smoothly integrate
with the RNC, was a vastly more responsive and unified organization than, say, the Hillary
Clinton campaign with its significantly greater resources. Facing catastrophe and seeming certain humiliation, the Trump campaign pulled together—with Priebus, Bannon, and Kushner all starring in buddy-movie roles.
The camaraderie barely survived a few days in the West Wing.
* * *
To Katie Walsh, it became almost immediately clear that the common purpose of the campaign
and the urgency of the transition were lost as soon as the Trump team stepped into the White
House. They had gone from managing Donald Trump to the expectation of being managed by
him—or at least through him and almost solely for his purposes. Yet the president, while
proposing the most radical departure from governing and policy norms in several generations,
had few specific ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy, nor a team that could
reasonably unite behind him.
In most White Houses, policy and action flow down, with staff trying to implement what the
president wants—or, at the very least, what the chief of staff says the president wants. In the
Trump White House, policy making, from the very first instance of Bannon’s immigration EO,
flowed up. It was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president
might want, and hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself (a result that was
often helped along with the suggestion that he had in fact already had the thought).
Trump, observed Walsh, had a set of beliefs and impulses, much of them on his mind for
many years, some of them fairly contradictory, and little of them fitting legislative or political
conventions or form. Hence, she and everyone else was translating a set of desires and urges into
a program, a process that required a lot of guess work. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure
out what a child wants.”
But making suggestions was deeply complicated. Here was, arguably, the central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: he didn’t process information in any conventional sense—or, in a way, he didn’t process it at all.
Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. (There was some argument about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on articles about himself, and the gossip squibs on the New York Post’s Page Six.) Some thought him dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he just didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate—total television.
But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he
trusted his own expertise—no matter how paltry or irrelevant—more than anyone else’s. What’s
more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you were worthy of
attention.
The organization therefore needed a set of internal rationalizations that would allow it to trust a man who, while he knew little, was entirely confident of his own gut instincts and reflexive opinions, however frequently they might change.
Here was a key Trump White House rationale: expertise, that liberal virtue, was overrated. After all, so often people who had worked hard to know what they knew made the wrong decisions. So maybe the gut was as good, or maybe better, at getting to the heart of the matter than the wonkish and data-driven inability to see the forest for the trees that often seemed to plague U.S. policy making. Maybe. Hopefully.
Of course, nobody really believed that, except the president himself.
Still, here was the basic faith, overriding his impetuousness and eccentricities and limited
knowledge base: nobody became the president of the United States—that camel-through-the-eye-
of-the-needle accomplishment—without unique astuteness and cunning. Right? In the early days
of the White House, this was the fundamental hypothesis of the senior staff, shared by Walsh and
everyone else: Trump must know what he was doing, his intuition must be profound.
But then there was the other aspect of his supposedly superb insight and apprehension, and it was hard to miss: he was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant in these instances than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and behave as if his gut, however silent and confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful way telling him what to do.
During the campaign, he became a kind of vaunted action figure. His staff marveled at his willingness to keep moving, getting back on the plane and getting off the plane and getting back on, and doing rally after rally, with a pride in doing more events than anybody else—double Hillary’s!—and ever ridiculing his opponent’s slow pace. He performed. “This man never takes a break from being Donald Trump,” noted Bannon, with a complicated sort of faint praise, a few weeks after joining the campaign full time.
It was during Trump’s early intelligence briefings, held soon after he captured the nomination,
that alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to
take in third-party information. Or maybe he lacked the interest; whichever, he seemed almost
phobic about having formal demands on his attention. He stonewalled every written page and
balked at every explanation. “He’s a guy who really hated school,” said Bannon. “And he’s not
going to start liking it now.”
However alarming, Trump’s way of operating also presented an opportunity to the people in closest proximity to him: by understanding him, by observing the kind of habits and reflexive responses that his business opponents had long learned to use to their advantage, they might be able to game him, to move him. Still, while he might be moved today, nobody underestimated the complexities of continuing to move him in the same direction tomorrow.
* * *
One of the ways to establish what Trump wanted and where he stood and what his underlying policy intentions were—or at least the intentions that you could convince him were his—came to involve an improbably close textual analysis of his largely off-the-cuff speeches, random remarks, and reflexive tweets during the campaign.
Bannon doggedly went through the Trump oeuvre highlighting possible insights and policy
proscriptions. Part of Bannon’s authority in the new White House was as keeper of the Trump
promises, meticulously logged onto the white board in his office. Some of these promises Trump
enthusiastically remembered making, others he had little memory of, but was happy to accept
that he had said it. Bannon acted as disciple and promoted Trump to guru—or inscrutable God.
This devolved into a further rationalization, or Trump truth: “The president was very clear on what he wanted to deliver to the American public,” said Walsh. He was “excellent in communicating this.” At the same time, she acknowledged that it was not at all clear in any specific sense what he wanted. Hence, there was another rationalization: Trump was “inspirational not operational.”
Kushner, understanding that Bannon’s white board represented Bannon’s agenda more than
the president’s agenda, got to wondering how much of this source text was being edited by
Bannon. He made several attempts to comb through his father-in-law’s words on his own before expressing frustration with the task and giving up.
Mick Mulvaney, the former South Carolina congressman now head of the Office of Management and Budget and directly charged with creating the Trump budget that would underlie the White House program, also fell back on the Trump spoken record. Bob Woodward’s 1994 book, The Agenda, is a blow-by-blow account of the first eighteen months of the Clinton White House, most of it focused on creating the Clinton budget, with the single largest block of the president’s time devoted to deep contemplation and arguments about how to allocate resources. In Trump’s case, this sort of close and continuous engagement was inconceivable; budgeting was simply too small-bore for him.
“The first couple of times when I went to the White House, someone had to say, This is Mick
Mulvaney, he’s the budget director,” said Mulvaney. And in Mulvaney’s telling Trump was too
scattershot to ever be of much help, tending to interrupt planning with random questions that
seem to have come from someone’s recent lobbying or by some burst of free association. If
Trump cared about something, he usually already had a fixed view based on limited information.
If he didn’t care, he had no view and no information. Hence, the Trump budget team was also
largely forced to return to Trump’s speeches when searching for the general policy themes they
could then fasten into a budget program.
* * *
Walsh, sitting within sight of the Oval Office, was located at something like the ground zero of
the information flow between the president and his staff. As Trump’s primary scheduler, her job
was to ration the president’s time and organize the flow of information to him around the
priorities that the White House had set. In this, Walsh became the effective middle person among
the three men working hardest to maneuver the president—Bannon, Kushner, and Priebus.
Each man saw the president as something of a blank page—or a scrambled one. And each,
Walsh came to appreciate with increasing incredulity, had a radically different idea of how to fill
or remake that page. Bannon was the alt-right militant. Kushner was the New York Democrat.
And Priebus was the establishment Republican. “Steve wants to force a million people out of the
country and repeal the nation’s health law and lay on a bunch of tariffs that will completely
decimate how we trade, and Jared wants to deal with human trafficking and protecting Planned
Parenthood.” And Priebus wanted Donald Trump to be another kind of Republican altogether.
As Walsh saw it, Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner
was running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul
Ryan White House. It was a 1970s video game, the white ball pinging back and forth in the black
triangle.
Priebus—who was supposed to be the weak link, thus allowing both Bannon and Kushner,
variously, to be the effective chief of staff—was actually turning out to be quite a barking dog,
even if a small one. In the Bannon world and in the Kushner world, Trumpism represented
politics with no connection to the Republican mainstream, with Bannon reviling that mainstream
and Kushner operating as a Democrat. Priebus, meanwhile, was the designated mainstream
terrier.
Bannon and Kushner were therefore more than a little irritated to discover that the unimposing
Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s prescription that
“this president will sign whatever is put in front of him,” while also taking advantage of the
White House’s lack of political and legislative experience and outsourcing as much policy as
possible to Capitol Hill.
In the early weeks of the administration, Priebus arranged for House Speaker Paul Ryan,
however much a Trumpist bête noire for much of the campaign, to come into the White House
with a group of ranking committee chairmen. In the meeting, the president blithely announced
that he had never had much patience for committees and so was glad someone else did. Ryan,
henceforth, became another figure with unfettered access to the president—and to whom the
president, entirely uninterested in legislative strategy or procedures, granted virtual carte
blanche.
Almost nobody represented what Bannon opposed as well as Paul Ryan. The essence of Bannonism (and Mercerism) was a radical isolationism, a protean protectionism, and a determined Keynesianism. Bannon ascribed these principles to Trumpism, and they ran as counter to Republicanism as it was perhaps possible to get. What’s more, Bannon found Ryan, in theory the House’s policy whiz, to be slow-witted if not incompetent, and an easy and constant target of Bannon’s under-his-breath ridicule. Still, if the president had unaccountably embraced Priebus-Ryan, he also could not do without Bannon.
Bannon’s unique ability—partly through becoming more familiar with the president’s own
words than the president was himself, and partly through a cunning self-effacement (upended by
his bursts of self-promotion)—was to egg the president on by convincing him that Bannon’s own
views were entirely derived from the president’s views. Bannon didn’t promote internal debate,
provide policy rationale, or deliver Power-Point presentations; instead, he was the equivalent of
Trump’s personal talk radio. Trump could turn him on at any moment, and it pleased him that
Bannon’s pronouncements and views would consistently be fully formed and ever available, a
bracing, unified-field narrative. As well, he could turn him off, and Bannon would be tactically
quiet until turned on again.
Kushner had neither Bannon’s policy imagination nor Priebus’s institutional ties. But, of course, he had family status, carrying its own high authority. In addition, he had billionaire status. He had cultivated a wide range of New York and international money people, Trump acquaintances and cronies, and, often, people whom Trump would have wished to like him better than they did. In this, Kushner became the representative in the White House of the liberal status quo. He was something like what used to be called a Rockefeller Republican and now might more properly be a Goldman Sachs Democrat. He—and, perhaps even more, Ivanka—was at diametric odds with both Priebus, the stout-right, Sun Belt-leaning, evangelical dependent Republican, and Bannon, the alt-right, populist, anti-party disruptor.
From their separate corners each man pursued his own strategy. Bannon did all he could to roll
over Priebus and Kushner in an effort to prosecute the war for Trumpism/Bannonism as quickly
as possible. Priebus, already complaining about “political neophytes and the boss’s relatives,”
subcontracted his agenda out to Ryan and the Hill. And Kushner, on one of the steepest learning
curves in the history of politics (not that everyone in the White House wasn’t on a steep curve,
but Kushner’s was perhaps the steepest), and often exhibiting a painful naïveté as he aspired to
be one of the world’s savviest players, was advocating doing nothing fast and everything in
moderation. Each had coteries opposed to the other: Bannonites pursued their goal of breaking
everything fast, Priebus’s RNC faction focused on the opportunities for the Republican agenda,
Kushner and his wife did their best to make their unpredictable relative look temperate and
rational.
And in the middle was Trump.
* * *
“The three gentlemen running things,” as Walsh came to coolly characterize them, all served
Trump in different ways. Walsh understood that Bannon provided the president with inspiration
and purpose, while the Priebus-Ryan connection promised to do what to Trump seemed like the
specialized work of government. For his part, Kushner best coordinated the rich men who spoke
to Trump at night, with Kushner often urging them to caution him against both Bannon and
Priebus.
The three advisers were in open conflict by the end of the second week following the immigration EO and travel ban debacle. This internal rivalry was the result of stylistic, philosophic, and temperamental differences; perhaps more important, it was the direct result of the lack of a rational org chart or chain of command. For Walsh, it was a daily process of managing an impossible task: almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, she would be countermanded by one or another of them.
“I take a conversation at face value and move forward with it,” she defended herself. “I put
what was decided on the schedule and bring in comms and build a press plan around it and bring
in political affairs and office of public liaison. And then Jared says, Why did you do that. And I
say, ‘Because we had a meeting three days ago with you and Reince and Steve where you agreed
to do this.’ And he says, ‘But that didn’t mean I wanted it on the schedule. That’s not why I had
that conversation.’ It almost doesn’t matter what anyone says: Jared will agree, and then it will
get sabotaged, and then Jared goes to the president and says, See, that was Reince’s idea or
Steve’s idea.”
Bannon concentrated on a succession of EOs that would move the new administration forward
without having to wade through Congress. That focus was countermanded by Priebus, who was
cultivating the Trump-Ryan romance and the Republican agenda, which in turn was
countermanded by Kushner, who was concentrating on presidential bonhomie and CEO
roundtables, not least because he knew how much the president liked them (and, as Bannon
pointed out, because Kushner himself liked them). And instead of facing the inherent conflicts in
each strategy, the three men recognized that the conflicts were largely irresolvable and avoided
facing that fact by avoiding each other.
Each man had, in his own astute fashion, found his own way to appeal to the president and to communicate with him. Bannon offered a rousing fuck-you show of force; Priebus offered flattery from the congressional leadership; Kushner offered the approval of blue-chip businessmen. So strong were these particular appeals that the president typically preferred not to distinguish among them. They were all exactly what he wanted from the presidency, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t have them all. He wanted to break things, he wanted a Republican Congress to give him bills to sign, and he wanted the love and respect of New York machers and socialites. Some inside the White House perceived that Bannon’s EOs were meant to be a workaround in response to Priebus’s courtship of the party, and that Kushner’s CEOs were appalled by Bannon’s EOs and resistant to much of the Republican agenda. But if the president understood this, it did not particularly trouble him.
* * *
Having achieved something like executive paralysis within the first month of the new administration—each of the three gentlemen was as powerful in his allure to the president as the others and each, at times, was equally annoying to the president—Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner all built their own mechanisms to influence the president and undermine the others.
Analysis or argument or PowerPoint did not work. But who said what to Trump and when
often did. If, at Bannon’s prodding, Rebekah Mercer called him, that had an effect. Priebus could count on Paul Ryan’s clout with him. If Kushner set up Murdoch to call, that registered. At the same time, each successive call mostly canceled the others out.
This paralysis led the three advisers to rely on the other particularly effective way to move
him, which was to use the media. Hence each man became an inveterate and polished leaker.
Bannon and Kushner studiously avoided press exposure; two of the most powerful people in
government were, for the most part, entirely silent, eschewing almost all interviews and even the
traditional political conversations on Sunday morning television. Curiously, however, both men
became the background voices to virtually all media coverage of the White House. Early on,
before getting down to attacking each other, Bannon and Kushner were united in their separate
offensives against Priebus. Kushner’s preferred outlet was Joe Scarborough and Mika
Brzezinski’s Morning Joe, one of the president’s certain morning shows. Bannon’s first port of
call was the alt-right media (“Bannon’s Breitbart shenanigans,” in Walsh’s view). By the end of
the first month in the White House, Bannon and Kushner had each built a network of primary
outlets, as well as secondary ones to deflect from the obviousness of the primary ones, creating a
White House that simultaneously displayed extreme animosity toward the press and yet great
willingness to leak to it. In this, at least, Trump’s administration was achieving a landmark
transparency.
The constant leaking was often blamed on lower minions and permanent executive branch staff, culminating in late February with an all-hands meeting of staffers called by Sean Spicer— cell phones surrendered at the door—during which the press secretary issued threats of random phone checks and admonitions about the use of encrypted texting apps. Everybody was a potential leaker; everybody was accusing everybody else of being a leaker.
Everybody was a leaker.
One day, when Kushner accused Walsh of leaking about him, she challenged him back: “My phone records versus yours, my email versus yours.”
But most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups—not to mention from the person occupying the topmost echelon.
The president couldn’t stop talking. He was plaintive and self-pitying, and it was obvious to everyone that if he had a north star, it was just to be liked. He was ever uncomprehending about why everyone did not like him, or why it should be so difficult to get everyone to like him. He might be happy throughout the day as a parade of union steel workers or CEOs trooped into the White House, with the president praising his visitors and them praising him, but that good cheer would sour in the evening after several hours of cable television. Then he would get on the phone, and in unguarded ramblings to friends and others, conversations that would routinely last for thirty or forty minutes, and could go much longer, he would vent, largely at the media and his staff. In what was termed by some of the self-appointed Trump experts around him—and everyone was a Trump expert—he seemed intent on “poisoning the well,” in which he created a loop of suspicion, disgruntlement, and blame heaped on others.
When the president got on the phone after dinner, it was often a rambling affair. In paranoid or
sadistic fashion, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff.
Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to
mention he was short—a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible
too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.
His callers, largely because they found his conversation peculiar, alarming, or completely
contrary to reason and common sense, often overrode what they might otherwise have assumed
to be the confidential nature of the calls and shared the content with someone else. Hence news about the inner workings of the White House went into free circulation. Except it was not so much the inner workings of the White House—although it would often be reported as such—but the perambulations of the president’s mind, which changed direction almost as fast as he could express himself. Yet there were constant tropes in his own narrative: Bannon was about to be cast out, Priebus too, and Kushner needed his protection from the other bullies.
So if Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner were now fighting a daily war with one another, it was mightily exacerbated by something of a running disinformation campaign about them that was being prosecuted by the president himself. A chronic naysayer, he viewed each member of his inner circle as a problem child whose fate he held in his hand. “We are sinners and he is God” was one view; “We serve at the president’s displeasure,” another.
* * *
In the West Wing of every administration since at least that of Clinton and Gore, the vice president has occupied a certain independent power base in the organization. And yet Vice President Mike Pence—the fallback guy in an administration the length of whose term remained the subject of something like a national office betting pool—was a cipher, a smiling presence either resisting his own obvious power or unable to seize it.
“I do funerals and ribbon cuttings,” he told a former Republican Hill colleague. In this, he was seen as either feigning an old-fashioned, what-me-worry, standard-issue veep identity lest he upset his patron or, in fact, honestly acknowledging who he was.
Katie Walsh, amid the chaos, saw the vice president’s office as a point of calm in the storm. Pence’s staff was not only known by people outside the White House for the alacrity with which it returned calls and for the ease with which it seemed to accomplish West Wing tasks, it also seemed to be comprised of people who liked each other and who were dedicated to a common goal: eliminating as much friction as possible around the vice president.
Pence started nearly every speech saying, “I bring greetings from our forty-fifth president of
the United States, Donald J. Trump . . .”—a salutation directed more to the president than to the
audience.
Pence cast himself as blandly uninteresting, sometimes barely seeming to exist in the shadow of Donald Trump. Little leaked out of the Pence side of the White House. The people who worked for the vice president, were, like Pence himself, people of few words.
In a sense, he had solved the riddle of how to serve as the junior partner to a president who could not tolerate any kind of comparisons: extreme self-effacement.
“Pence,” said Walsh, “is not dumb.”
Actually, well short of intelligent was exactly how others in the West Wing saw him. And because he wasn’t smart, he was not able to provide any leadership ballast.
On the Jarvanka side, Pence became a point of grateful amusement. He was almost absurdly happy to be Donald Trump’s vice president, happy to play the role of exactly the kind of vice president that would not ruffle Trump’s feathers. The Jarvanka side credited Pence’s wife, Karen, as the guiding hand behind his convenient meekness. Indeed, he took to this role so well that, later, his extreme submissiveness struck some as suspicious.
The Priebus side, where Walsh firmly sat, saw Pence as one of the few senior West Wing figures who treated Priebus as though he was truly the chief of staff. Pence often seemed like a mere staffer, the ever present note taker in so many meetings.
From the Bannon side, Pence garnered only contempt. “Pence is like the husband in Ozzie and
Harriet, a nonevent,” said one Bannonite.
Although many saw him as a vice president who might well assume the presidency someday,
he was also perceived as the weakest vice president in decades and, in organizational terms, an
empty suit who was useless in the daily effort to help restrain the president and stabilize the West
Wing.
* * *
During that first month, Walsh’s disbelief and even fear about what was happening in the White House moved her to think about quitting. Every day after that became its own countdown toward the moment she knew she wouldn’t be able to take it anymore—which would finally come at the end of March. To Walsh, the proud political pro, the chaos, the rivalries, and the president’s own lack of focus and lack of concern were simply incomprehensible.
In early March, Walsh confronted Kushner and demanded: “Just give me the three things the
president wants to focus on. What are the three priorities of this White House?”
“Yes,” said Kushner, wholly absent an answer, “we should probably have that conversation.”
9
CPAC
On February 23, a 75-degree day in Washington, the president woke up complaining about an
overheated White House. But for once, the president’s complaints were not the main concern.
The excited focus in the West Wing was organizing a series of car pools out to the Conservative
Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of conservative movement activists, which had
outgrown the accommodations of Washington hotels and moved to the Gaylord Resort on
Maryland’s National Harbor waterfront. CPAC, right of right-of-center and trying to hold steady
there, ambivalent about all the conservative vectors that further diverged from that point, had
long had an uncomfortable relationship with Trump, viewing him as an unlikely conservative, if
not a charlatan. CPAC, too, saw Bannon and Breitbart as practicing an outré conservatism. For
several years Breitbart had staged a nearby competitive conference dubbed “The Uninvited.”
But the Trump White House would dominate or even subsume the conference this year, and everybody wanted to turn out for this sweet moment. The president, set to speak on the second day, would, like Ronald Reagan, address the conference in his first year in office, whereas both Bushes, wary of CPAC and conservative activists, had largely snubbed the gathering.
Kellyanne Conway, a conference opener, was accompanied by her assistant, two daughters,
and a babysitter. Bannon was making his first official pubic appearance of the Trump presidency,
and his retinue included Rebekah Mercer, the pivotal Trump donor and Breitbart funder, her
young daughter, and Allie Hanley, a Palm Beach aristocrat, conservative donor, and Mercer
friend. (The imperious Hanley, who had not met Bannon before, pronounced him “dirty”
looking.)
Bannon was scheduled to be interviewed in the afternoon session by CPAC chairman Matt
Schlapp, a figure of strained affability who seemed to be trying to embrace the Trump takeover
of his conference. A few days before, Bannon had decided to add Priebus to the interview, as
both a private gesture of goodwill and a public display of unity—a sign of a budding alliance
against Kushner.
In nearby Alexandria, Virginia, Richard Spencer, the president of the National Policy Institute,
which is sometimes described as a “white supremacist think tank,” who had, peskily for the
White House, adopted the Trump presidency as a personal victory, was organizing his trip to
CPAC, which would be as much a victory march for him as it was for the Trump team. Spencer
—who, in 2016, he had declared, “Let’s party like it’s 1933,” as in the year Hitler came to power
—provoked an outcry with his widely covered “Heil Trump” (or “Hail Trump,” which of course
amounts to the same thing) salute after the election, and then achieved a kind of reverse
martyrdom by taking a punch from a protester on Inauguration Day that was memorialized on
YouTube.
CPAC, organized by the remnants of the conservative movement after Barry Goldwater’s
apocalyptic defeat in 1964, had, with stoic indefatigability, turned itself into the backbone of
conservative survival and triumph. It had purged John Birchers and the racist right and embraced
the philosophic conservative tenets of Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley. In time, it endorsed
Reagan-era small government and antiregulatory reform, and then added the components of the
cultural wars—antiabortion, anti-gay-marriage, and a tilt toward evangelicals—and married itself
to conservative media, first right-wing radio and later Fox News. From this agglomeration it
spun an ever more elaborate and all-embracing argument of conservative purity, synchronicity,
and intellectual weight. Part of the fun of a CPAC conference, which attracted a wide assortment
of conservative young people (reliably mocked as the Alex P. Keaton crowd by the growing
throng of liberal press that covered the conference), was the learning of the conservative
catechism.
But after a great Clinton surge in the 1990s, CPAC started to splinter during the George W.
Bush years. Fox News became the emotional center of American conservativism. Bush neocons
and the Iraq War were increasingly rejected by the libertarians and other suddenly breakaway
factions (among them the paleocons); the family values right, meanwhile, was more and more
challenged by younger conservatives. In the Obama years, the conservative movement was
increasingly bewildered by Tea Party rejectionism and a new iconoclastic right-wing media,
exemplified by Breitbart News, which was pointedly excluded from the CPAC conference.
In 2011, professing conservative fealty, Trump lobbied the group for a speaking slot and, with
reports of a substantial cash contribution, was awarded a fifteen-minute berth. If CPAC was
supposedly about honing a certain sort of conservative party line, it was also attentive to a wide
variety of conservative celebrities, including, over the years, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and
various Fox News stars. The year before Obama’s reelection, Trump fell into this category. But
he was viewed quite differently four years later. In the winter of 2016, during the still
competitive Republican primary race, Trump—now eyed as much as a Republican apostate as a
Republican crowd pleaser—decided to forgo CPAC and what he feared would be less than a
joyous welcome.
This year, as part of its new alignment with the Trump-Bannon White House, CPAC’s personality headliner was slated to be the alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay British rightwing provocateur attached to Breitbart News. Yiannopoulos—whose entire position, rather more like a circa-1968 left-wing provocateur, seemed to be about flouting political correctness and social convention, resulting in left-wing hysteria and protests against him—was as confounding a conservative figure as could be imagined. Indeed, there was a subtle suggestion that CPAC had chosen Yiannopoulos precisely to hoist Bannon and the White House on the implicit connection to him—Yiannopoulos had been something of a Bannon protégé. When, two days before CPAC opened, a conservative blogger discovered a video of Yiannopoulos in bizarre revelry seeming to rationalize pedophilia, the White House made it clear he had to go.
Still, the White House presence at CPAC—which included, along with the president, Bannon,
Conway, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the oddball White House foreign policy adviser
and former Breitbart writer Sebastian Gorka—seemed to push the Yiannopoulos mess to the
side. If CPAC was always looking to leaven boring politicians with star power, Trump, and
anyone connected him, were now the biggest stars. With her family positioned out in front of a
full house, Conway was interviewed in Oprah-like style by Mercedes Schlapp (wife of Matt
Schlapp—CPAC was a family affair), a columnist for the conservative Washington Times who
would later join the White House communications staff. It was an intimate and inspirational view
of a woman of high achievement, the kind of interview that Conway believed she would have
been treated to on network and cable television if she were not a Trump Republican—the type of
treatment, she’d point out, that had been given to Democratic predecessors like Valerie Jarrett.
At about the time that Conway was explaining her particular brand of antifeminist feminism,
Richard Spencer arrived at the convention center hoping to attend the breakout session “The Alt-
Right Ain’t Right at All,” a modest effort to reaffirm CPAC’s traditional values. Spencer, who
since the Trump victory had committed himself to full-time activism and press opportunities, had
planned to position himself to get in the first question. But almost immediately upon arriving and
paying his $150 registration fee, he had attracted first one reporter and then a growing circle, a
spontaneous press scrum, and he responded by giving an ad hoc news conference. Like
Yiannopoulos, and in many ways like Trump and Bannon, Spencer helped frame the ironies of
the modern conservative movement. He was a racist but hardly a conservative—he doggedly
supported single-payer health care, for instance. And the attention he received was somehow less
a credit to conservatism than another effort by the liberal media to smear conservatism. Hence, as
the scrum around him increased to as many as thirty people, the CPAC irony police stepped in.
“You’re not welcome on the property,” announced one of the security guards. “They want you off the property. They want you to cease. They want you off the property.”
“Wow,” said Spencer. “Can they?”
“Enough debate,” the guard said. “This is private property and CPAC wants you off the
property.”
Relieved of his credentials, Spencer was ushered to the CPAC perimeter of the hotel, where, his pride not all that wounded, he turned, in the comfort of the atrium lounge area, to social media and to texting and emailing reporters on his contact list.
The point Spencer was making was that his presence here was not really so disruptive or ironic as Bannon’s, or, for that matter, Trump’s. He might be ejected, but in a larger historical sense it was the conservatives who were now being ejected from their own movement by the new cadre —which included Trump and Bannon—of what Spencer called the identitarians, proponents of “white interests, values, customs, and culture.”
Spencer was, he believed, the true Trumper and the rest of CPAC now the outliers.
* * *
In the green room, after Bannon, Priebus, and their retinues had arrived, Bannon—in dark shirt, dark jacket, and white pants—stood off to the side talking to his aide, Alexandra Preate. Priebus sat in the makeup chair, patiently receiving a layer of foundation, powder, and lip gloss.
“Steve—” said Priebus, gesturing to the chair as he got up.
“That’s okay,” said Bannon. He put up his hand, making another of the continual small
gestures meant, pointedly, to define himself as something other than every phony baloney in
swampland politics—and something other than Reince Priebus, with his heavy powder
foundation.
The significance of Bannon’s first appearance in public—after days of apparent West Wing
turmoil, a Time magazine cover story about him, nearly endless speculation about his power and
true intentions, and his elevation at least in the media mind to the essential mystery of the Trump
White House—could hardly be underestimated. For Bannon himself this was, in his own mind, a
carefully choreographed moment. It was his victory walk. He had, he thought, prevailed in the
West Wing. He had, again in his own mind, projected his superiority over both Priebus and the
idiot son-in-law. And he would now dominate CPAC. But for the moment he attempted a
shucks-nothing-to-it lack of self-consciousness even as, at the same time, he was unquestionably
the preening man of the hour. Demurring about accepting makeup was not just a way to belittle
Priebus, but also a way to say that, ever the commando, he went into battle fully exposed.
“You know what he thinks even when you don’t know what he thinks,” explained Alexandra
Preate. “He’s a bit like a good boy who everybody knows is a bad boy.”
When the two men emerged onto the stage and appeared on the big-screen monitors, the
contrast between them could hardly have been greater. The powder made Priebus look
mannequin-like, and his suit with lapel pin, little-boyish. Bannon, the supposedly publicity-shy
man, was eating up the camera. He was a country music star—he was Johnny Cash. He seized
Priebus’s hand in a power handshake, then relaxed in his chair as Priebus came too eagerly
forward in his.
Priebus opened with traditional bromides. Bannon, taking his turn, went wryly for the dig: “I want to thank you for finally inviting me to CPAC.”
“We decided to say that everybody is a part of our conservative family,” said Matt Schlapp, resigned. He then welcomed “the back of the room,” where the hundreds of reporters covering the event were positioned.
“Is that the opposition party?” asked Bannon, shielding his eyes.
Schlapp went to the setup question: “We read a lot about you two. Ahem . . .” “It’s all good,” replied Priebus tightly.
“I’ll bet not all of it’s accurate,” said Schlapp. “I’ll bet there’s things that don’t get written correctly. Let me ask both of you, what’s the biggest misconception about what’s going on in the Donald Trump White House?”
Bannon responded with something just less than a smirk and said nothing.
Priebus offered a testimonial to the closeness of his relationship with Bannon.
Bannon, eyes dancing, lifted the microphone trumpetlike and made a joke about Priebus’s
commodious office—two couches and a fireplace—and his own rough-and-ready one.
Priebus hewed to the message. “It’s, ahh . . . it’s actually . . . something that you all have
helped build, which is, when you bring together, and what this election shows, and what
President Trump showed, and let’s not kid ourselves, I can talk about data and ground game and
Steve can talk about big ideas but the truth of the matter is Donald Trump, President Trump,
brought together the party and the conservative movement, and I tell you if the party and the
conservative movement are together”—Priebus knocked his fists—“similar to Steve and I, it
can’t be stopped. And President Trump is the one guy, he was the one person, and I can say this
after overseeing sixteen people kill each other, it was Donald Trump who was able to bring this
country, this party, and this movement together. And Steve and I know that and we live it every
day and our job is to get the agenda of President Trump through the door and on pen and paper.”
With Priebus gasping for breath, Bannon snatched the relay baton. “I think if you look at the
opposition party”—throwing his hand out to the back of the room—“and how they portrayed the
campaign, how they portrayed the transition, and now how they are portraying the
administration, it’s always wrong. I mean on the very first day that Kellyanne and I started, we
reached out to Reince, Sean Spicer, Katie……. It’s the same team, you know, that every day was
grinding away at the campaign, the same team that did the transition, and if you remember, the
campaign was the most chaotic, in the media’s description, most chaotic, most disorganized,
most unprofessional, had no earthly idea what they were doing, and then you saw ’em all crying
and weeping that night on November 8.”
Back in the White House, Jared Kushner, watching the proceedings casually and then more attentively, suddenly felt a rising anger. Thin-skinned, defensive, on guard, he perceived Bannon’s speech as a message sent directly to him. Bannon has just credited the Trump victory to everybody else. Kushner was certain he was being taunted.
When Schlapp asked the two men to enumerate the accomplishments of the last thirty days,
Priebus floundered and then seized on Judge Gorsuch and the deregulation executive orders, all
things, said Priebus, “that”—he paused, struggling—“eighty percent of Americans agree with.”
After a brief pause, as though waiting for the air to clear, Bannon raised the microphone: “I
kind of break it down into three verticals, three buckets; the first, national security and
sovereignty, and that’s your intelligence, defense department, homeland security. The second
line of work is what I refer to as economic nationalism, and that is Wilbur Ross at Commerce,
Steve Mnuchin at Treasury, [Robert] Lighthizer at Trade, Peter Navarro, [and] Stephen Miller,
who are rethinking how we are going to reconstruct our trade arrangements around the world.
The third, broadly, line of work is deconstruction of the administrative state—” Bannon stopped
for a moment; the phrase, which had never before been uttered in American politics, drew wild
applause. “The way the progressive left runs is that if they can’t get it passed they’re just going
to put it in some sort of regulation in an agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed.”
Schlapp fed another setup question, this one about the media.