Priebus grabbed it, rambled and fumphered for a while, and ended up, somehow, on a positive note: We’ll all come together.
Lifting the microphone, once again Joshua-like, and with a sweeping wave of his hand,
Bannon pronounced, “It’s not only not going to get better, it’s going to get worse every day”—
his fundamental apocalyptic song—“and here’s why—and by the way, the internal logic makes
sense, corporatist, globalist media, that are adamantly opposed, adamantly opposed, to an
economic nationalist agenda like Donald Trump has. And here’s why it’s going to get worse:
because he’s going to continue to press his agenda. And as economic conditions continue to get
better, as more jobs get better, they’re going to continue to fight. If you think they’re going to
give you your country back without a fight you are sadly mistaken. Every day it is going to be a
fight. This is why I’m proudest of Donald Trump. All the opportunities he had to waver off this.
All the people he had coming to him saying ‘Oh, you got to moderate.’ ” Another dig at
Kushner. “Every day in the Oval Office he tells Reince and me, ‘I committed this to the
American people. I promised this when I ran. And I’m going to deliver on this.’ ”
And then the final, agreed-upon-beforehand question: “Can this Trump movement be combined with what’s happening at CPAC and other conservative movements for fifty years? Can this be brought together . . . and is this going to save the country?”
“Well, we have to stick together as a team,” said Priebus. “It’s gonna take all of us working together to make it happen.”
As Bannon started into his answer, he spoke slowly, looking out at his captive and riveted
audience: “I’ve said that there is a new political order being formed out of this and it’s still being
formed. If you look at the wide degree of opinions in this room, whether you are a populist,
whether you’re a limited-government conservative, whether you’re a libertarian, whether you’re
an economic nationalist, we have wide and sometimes divergent opinions, but I think the center
core of what we believe, that we’re a nation with an economy, not an economy just in some
global market place with open borders, but that we are a nation with a culture, and a reason for
being. I think that’s what unites us. And that’s what’s going to unite this movement going
forward.”
Bannon lowered the microphone to, after what might be interpreted as a beat of uncertainty, suddenly thunderous applause.
Watching from the White House, Kushner—who had come to believe that there was
something insidious when Bannon used the words “borders,” “global,” “culture,” and “unite,”
and who was more and more convinced that they were personally directed against him—was
now in a rage.
* * *
Kellyanne Conway had increasingly been worrying about the seventy-year-old president’s sleeplessness and his worn look. It was the president’s indefatigability—a constant restlessness —that she believed carried the team. On the campaign trail, he would always add stops and speeches. He doubled his own campaign time. Hillary worked at half time; he worked at double time. He sucked in the energy from the crowds. Now that he was living alone in the White House, though, he had seemed to lose a step.
But today he was back. He had been under the sunlamp and lightened his hair, and when the
climate-change-denying president woke up on another springlike morning, 77 degrees in the
middle of winter, on the second day of CPAC, he seemed practically a different person, or
anyway a noticeably younger one. At the appointed hour, to the locked-down ballroom at the
Gaylord Resort, filled to capacity with all stripes of the conservative faithful—Rebekah Mercer
and her daughter up front—and hundreds of media people in an SRO gallery, the president
emerged onto the stage, not in an energetic television-style rush, but with a slow swagger to the
low strains of “I’m Proud to Be an American.” He came to the stage as a political strongman, a
man occupying his moment, clapping—here he reverted to entertainer pose—as he slowly
approached the podium, mouthing “Thank you,” crimson tie dipping over his belt.
This would be Trump’s fifth CPAC address. As much as Steve Bannon liked to see himself as
the author of Donald Trump, he also seemed to find it proof of some added legitimacy—and
somehow amazing in itself—that since 2011 Trump had basically come to CPAC with the same
message. He wasn’t a cipher, he was a messenger. The country was a “mess”—a word that had
stood the Trump test of time. Its leaders were weak. Its greatness had been lost. The only thing
different was that in 2011 he was still reading his speeches with only occasional ad-libs, and now
he ad-libbed everything.
“My first major speech was at CPAC,” the president began. “Probably five or six years ago. My first major political speech. You were there. I loved it. I loved the people. I loved the commotion. They did these polls where I went through the roof. I wasn’t even running, right? But it gave me an idea! And I got a little bit concerned when I saw what was happening in the country so I said let’s go to it. It was very exciting. I walked the stage at CPAC. I had very little notes and even less preparation.” (In fact, he read his 2011 speech from a sheet of paper.) “So when you have practically no notes and no preparation and then you leave and everybody was thrilled. I said, I think I like this business.”
This first preamble gave way to the next preamble.
“I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s phony. Fake. A few days ago I
called the fake news the enemy of the people. Because they have no sources. They just make ’em
up when there are none. I saw one story recently where they said nine people have confirmed.
There are no nine people. I don’t believe there was one or two people. Nine people. And I said,
Give me a break. I know the people. I know who they talk to. There were no nine people. But
they say nine people…… ”
A few minutes into the forty-eight-minute speech and it was already off the rails, riff sustained by repetition.
“Maybe they’re just bad at polling. Or maybe they’re not legit. It’s one or the other. They’re
very smart. They’re very cunning. And they’re very dishonest……… Just to conclude”—although
he would go on for thirty-seven minutes more—“it’s a very sensitive topic and they get upset
when we expose their false stories. They say we can’t criticize their dishonest coverage because
of the First Amendment. You know they always bring up”—he went into a falsetto voice—“the
First Amendment. Now I love the First Amendment. Nobody loves it better than me. Nobody.”
Each member of the Trump traveling retinue was now maintaining a careful poker face. When
they did break it, it was as though on a delay, given permission by the crowd’s cheering or
laughter. Otherwise, they seemed not to know whether the president had in fact gotten away with
his peculiar rambles.
“By the way, you folks in here, the place is packed, there are lines that go back six blocks”— there were no lines outside the crowded lobby—“I tell you that because you won’t read about it. But there are lines that go back six blocks……………………………………………………..
“There is one allegiance that unites us all, to America, America………. We all salute with pride
the same American flag . . . and we are all equal, equal in the eyes of Almighty God………. We’re
equal . . . and I want to thank, by the way, the evangelical community, the Christian community, communities of faith, rabbis and priests and pastors, ministers, because the support for me, as you know, was a record, not only numbers of people but percentages of those numbers who voted for Trump . . . an amazing outpouring and I will not disappoint you . . . as long as we have faith in each other and trust in God then there is no goal beyond our reach . . . there is no dream too large . . . no task too great . . . we are Americans and the future belongs to us . . . America is roaring. It’s going to be bigger and better and stronger than ever before…… ”
Inside the West Wing, some had idly speculated about how long he would go on if he could command time as well as language. The consensus seemed to be forever. The sound of his own voice, his lack of inhibition, the fact that linear thought and presentation turned out not at all to be necessary, the wonder that this random approach seemed to command, and his own replenishing supply of free association—all this suggested that he was limited only by everyone else’s schedule and attention span.
Trump’s extemporaneous moments were always existential, but more so for his aides than for him. He spoke obliviously and happily, believing himself to be a perfect pitch raconteur and public performer, while everyone with him held their breath. If a wackadoo moment occurred on the occasions—the frequent occasions—when his remarks careened in no clear direction, his staff had to go into intense method-acting response. It took absolute discipline not to acknowledge what everyone could see.
* * *
As the president finished up his speech, Richard Spencer, who in less than four months from the Trump election was on his way to becoming the most famous neo-Nazi in America since George Lincoln Rockwell, had returned to a seat in the atrium of the Gaylord Resort to argue his affinity for Donald Trump—and, he believed, vice versa.
Spencer, curiously, was one of the few people trying to ascribe an intellectual doctrine to
Trumpism. Between those taking him literally but not seriously, and those taking him seriously
but not literally, there was Richard Spencer. Practically speaking, he was doing both, arguing the
case that if Trump and Bannon were the pilot fish for a new conservative movement, Spencer
himself—the owner of altright.com and, he believed, the purest exponent of the movement—was
their pilot fish, whether they knew it or not.
As close to a real-life Nazi as most reporters had ever seen, Spencer was a kind of catnip for the liberal press crowded at CPAC. Arguably, he was offering as good an explanation of Trump’s anomalous politics as anyone else.
Spencer had come up through writing gigs on conservative publications, but he was hardly recognizable in any sort of official Republican or conservative way. He was a post-right-wing provocateur but with none of the dinner party waspishness or bite of Ann Coulter or Milo Yiannopoulos. They were a stagey type of reactionary. He was a real one—a genuine racist with a good education, in his case UVA, the University of Chicago, and Duke.
It was Bannon who effectively gave Spencer flight by pronouncing Breitbart to be “the platform for the alt-right”—the movement Spencer claimed to have founded, or at least owned the domain name for.
“I don’t think Bannon or Trump are identitarians or alt-rightists,” Spencer explained while camped out just over CPAC’s property line at the Gaylord. They were not, like Spencer, philosophic racists (itself different from a knee-jerk racist). “But they are open to these ideas. And open to the people who are open to these ideas. We’re the spice in the mix.”
Spencer was right. Trump and Bannon, with Sessions in the mix, too, had come closer than
any major national politician since the Civil Rights movement to tolerating a race-tinged political
view.
“Trump has said things that conservatives never would have thought………. His criticism of the
Iraq War, bashing the Bush family, I couldn’t believe he did that . . . but he did…….. Fuck them .
. . if at the end of the day an Anglo Wasp family produces Jeb and W then clearly that’s a clear sign of denegation………………………………… And now they marry Mexicans . . . Jeb’s wife . . . he married his housekeeper or something.
“In Trump’s 2011 CPAC address he specifically calls for a relaxation of immigration
restrictions for Europeans . . . that we should re-create an America that was far more stable and
more beautiful……. No other conservative politician would say those things . . . but on the other
hand pretty much everyone thought it . . . so it’s powerful to say it………………. Clearly [there’s] a
normalization process going on.”
“We are the Trump vanguard. The left will say Trump is a nationalist and an implicit or quasiracialist. Conservatives, because they are just so douchey, say Oh, no, of course not, he’s a constitutionalist, or whatever. We on the alt-right will say, He is a nationalist and he is a racialist. His movement is a white movement. Duh.”
Looking very satisfied with himself, Spencer paused and then said: “We give him a kind of permission.”
* * *
Nearby, in the Gaylord atrium, Rebekah Mercer sat having a snack with her home-schooled daughter and her friend and fellow conservative donor Allie Hanley. Both women agreed that the president’s CPAC speech showed him at his most gracious and charming.
10
GQLDMAN
The Jarvanka side of the White House increasingly felt that rumors leaked by Bannon and his
allies were undermining them. Jared and Ivanka, ever eager to enhance their status as the adults
in the room, felt personally wounded by these backdoor attacks. Kushner, in fact, now believed
Bannon would do anything to destroy them. This was personal. After months of defending
Bannon against liberal media innuendo, Kushner had concluded that Bannon was an anti-Semite.
That was the bottom-line issue. This was a complicated and frustrating business—and quite hard
to communicate to his father-in-law—because one of Bannon’s accusations against Kushner, the
administration’s point person on the Middle East, was that he was not nearly tough enough in his
defense of Israel.
After the election, the Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson with sly jocularity privately pointed out to the president that by offhandedly giving the Israel portfolio to his son-in-law—who would, Trump said, make peace in the Middle East—he hadn’t really done Kushner any favors.
“I know,” replied Trump, quite enjoying the joke.
Jews and Israel were a curious Trump subtext. Trump’s brutish father was an often vocal anti-
Semite. In the split in New York real estate between the Jews and non-Jews, the Trumps were
clearly on the lesser side. The Jews were white shoe, and Donald Trump, even more than his
father, was perceived as a vulgarian—after all, he put his name on his buildings, quite a déclassé
thing to do. (Ironically, this proved to be a significant advance in real estate marketing and,
arguably, Trump’s greatest accomplishment as a developer—branding buildings.) But Trump
had grown up and built his business in New York, the world’s largest Jewish city. He had made
his reputation in the media, that most Jewish of industries, with some keen understanding of
media tribal dynamics. His mentor, Roy Cohn, was a demimonde, semiunderworld, tough-guy
Jew. He courted other figures he considered “tough-guy Jews” (one of his accolades): Carl Icahn,
the billionaire hedge funder; Ike Perlmutter, the billionaire investor who had bought and sold
Marvel Comics; Ronald Perelman, the billionaire Revlon chairman; Steven Roth, the New York
billionaire real estate tycoon; and Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino magnate. Trump had
adopted a sort of 1950s Jewish uncle (tough-guy variety) delivery, with assorted Yiddishisms—
Hillary Clinton, he declared, had been “shlonged” in the 2008 primary—helping to give an
inarticulate man an unexpected expressiveness. Now his daughter, a de facto First Lady, was,
through her conversion, the first Jew in the White House.
The Trump campaign and the White House were constantly supplying off-note messages
about Jews, from their equivocal regard for David Duke to their apparent desire to tinker with
Holocaust history—or at least tendency to stumble over it. At one point early in the campaign,
Trump’s son-in-law, challenged by his own staff at the New York Observer and feeling pressure about his own bona fides, as well as seeking to stand by his father-in-law, wrote an impassioned defense of Trump in an attempt to prove that he was not an anti-Semite. For his efforts, Jared was rebuked by various members of his own family, who clearly seemed worried about both the direction of Trumpism and Jared’s opportunism.
There was also the flirtation with European populism. Whenever possible, Trump seemed to
side with and stoke Europe’s rising right, with its anti-Semitic associations, piling on more
portent and bad vibes. And then there was Bannon, who had allowed himself to become—
through his orchestration of right-wing media themes and stoking of liberal outrage—a winking
suggestion of anti-Semitism. It was certainly good right-wing business to annoy liberal Jews.
Kushner, for his part, was the prepped-out social climber who had rebuffed all entreaties in the
past to support traditional Jewish organizations. When called upon, the billionaire scion had
refused to contribute. Nobody was more perplexed by the sudden rise of Jared Kushner to his
new position as Israel’s great protector than U.S. Jewish organizations. Now, the Jewish great
and the good, the venerated and the tried, the mandarins and myrmidons, had to pay court to
Jared Kushner . . . who until little more than a few minutes ago had truly been a nobody.
For Trump, giving Israel to Kushner was not only a test, it was a Jewish test: the president was singling him out for being Jewish, rewarding him for being Jewish, saddling him with an impossible hurdle for being Jewish—and, too, defaulting to the stereotyping belief in the negotiating powers of Jews. “Henry Kissinger says Jared is going to be the new Henry Kissinger,” Trump said more than once, rather a combined compliment and slur.
Bannon, meanwhile, did not hesitate to ding Kushner on Israel, that peculiar right-wing litmus test. Bannon could bait Jews—globalist, cosmopolitan, Davoscentric liberal Jews like Kushner— because the farther right you were, the more correct you were on Israel. Netanyahu was an old Kushner family friend, but when, in the fall, the Israeli prime minister came to New York to meet with Trump and Kushner, he made a point of seeking out Steve Bannon.
On Israel, Bannon had partnered with Sheldon Adelson, titan of Las Vegas, big-check rightwing contributor, and, in the president’s mind, quite the toughest tough-guy Jew (that is, the richest). Adelson regularly disparaged Kushner’s motives and abilities. The president, to Bannon’s great satisfaction, kept telling his son-in-law, as he strategized on Israel, to check with Sheldon and, hence, Bannon.
Bannon’s effort to grab the stronger-on-Israel label was deeply confounding to Kushner, who had been raised as an Orthodox Jew. His closest lieutenants in the White House, Avi Berkowitz and Josh Raffel, were Orthodox Jews. On Friday afternoons, all Kushner business in the White House stopped before sunset for the Sabbath observance.
For Kushner, Bannon’s right-wing defense of Israel, embraced by Trump, somehow became a jujitsu piece of anti-Semitism aimed directly at him. Bannon seemed determined to make Kushner appear weak and inadequate—a cuck, in alt-right speak.
So Kushner had struck back, bringing into the White House his own tough-guy Jews— Goldman Jews.
* * *
Kushner had pushed for the then president of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, to run the National Economic Council and to be the president’s chief economic adviser. Bannon’s choice had been CNBC’s conservative anchor and commentator Larry Kudlow. For Trump, the Goldman cachet outdrew even a television personality.
It was a Richie Rich moment. Kushner had been a summer intern at Goldman when Cohn was head of commodities trading. Cohn then became president of Goldman in 2006. Once Cohn joined Trump’s team, Kushner often found occasion to mention that the president of Goldman Sachs was working for him. Bannon, depending on whom he wanted to slight, either referred to Kushner as Cohn’s intern or pointed out that Cohn was now working for his intern. The president, for his part, was continually pulling Cohn into meetings, especially with foreign leaders, just to introduce him as the former president of Goldman Sachs.
Bannon had announced himself as Trump’s brain, a boast that vastly irritated the president.
But in Cohn, Kushner saw a better brain for the White House: not only was it much more politic
for Cohn to be Kushner’s brain than Trump’s, but installing Cohn was the perfect countermove
to Bannon’s chaos management philosophy. Cohn was the only person in the West Wing who
had ever managed a large organization (Goldman has thirty-five thousand employees). And, not
to put too fine a point on it—though Kushner was happy to do so—Bannon had rolled out of
Goldman having barely reached midlevel management status, whereas Cohn, his contemporary,
had continued on to the firm’s highest level, making hundreds of millions of dollars in the
process. Cohn—a Democrat globalist-cosmopolitan Manhattanite who voted for Hillary Clinton
and who still spoke frequently to former Goldman chief and former Democratic New Jersey
senator and governor Jon Corzine—immediately became Bannon’s antithesis.
For Bannon, the ideologue, Cohn was the exact inverse, a commodities trader doing what traders do—read the room and figure out which way the wind is blowing. “Getting Gary to take a position on something is like nailing butterflies to the wall,” commented Katie Walsh.
Cohn started to describe a soon-to-be White House that would be business-focused and committed to advancing center-right to moderate positions. In this new configuration, Bannon would be marginalized and Cohn, who was dismissive of Priebus, would be the chief of staff in waiting. To Cohn, it seemed like easy street. Of course it would work out this way: Priebus was a lightweight and Bannon a slob who couldn’t run anything.
Within weeks of Cohn’s arrival on the transition team, Bannon nixed Cohn’s plan to expand
the National Economic Council by as many as thirty people. (Kushner, not to be denied, nixed
Bannon’s plan to have David Bossie build and lead his staff.) Bannon also retailed the likely not-
too-far-off-the-mark view (or, anyway, a popular view inside Goldman Sachs) that Cohn, once
slated to become Goldman’s CEO, had been forced out for an untoward Haig-like grasping for
power—in 1981 then secretary of state Alexander Haig had tried to insist he held the power after
Ronald Reagan was shot—when Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein underwent cancer treatment. In
the Bannon version, Kushner had bought damaged goods. The White House was clearly Cohn’s
professional lifeline—why else would he have come into the Trump administration? (Much of
this was retailed to reporters by Sam Nunberg, the former Trump factotum who was now doing
duty for Bannon. Nunberg was frank about his tactics: “I beat the shit out of Gary whenever
possible.”)
It is a measure of the power of blood (or blood by marriage), and likely the power of Goldman
Sachs, too, that in the middle of a Republican-controlled Washington and a virulent, if not anti-
Semitic (at least toward liberal Jews), right-wing West Wing, the Kushner-Cohn Democrats
appeared to be ascendant. Part of the credit went to Kushner, who showed an unexpected
tenacity. Conflict averse—in the Kushner household, his father, monopolizing all the conflict,
forced everyone else to be a mollifier—confronting neither Bannon nor his father-in-law, he
began to see himself in a stoic sense: he was the last man of moderation, the true figure of self-
effacement, the necessary ballast of the ship. This would all be made manifest by a spectacular
accomplishment. He would complete the mission his father-in-law had foisted on him, the one he was more and more seeing as his, yes, destiny. He would make peace in the Middle East.
“He’s going to make peace in the Middle East,” Bannon said often, his voice reverent and his expression deadpan, cracking up all the Bannonites.
So in one sense Kushner was a figure of heightened foolishness and ridicule. In another, he was a man, encouraged by his wife and by Cohn, who saw himself on the world stage carrying out a singular mission.
Here was yet another battle to be won or lost. Bannon regarded Kushner and Cohn (and Ivanka) as occupying an alternative reality that had little bearing on the real Trump revolution. Kushner and Cohn saw Bannon as not just destructive but self-destructive, and they were confident he would destroy himself before he destroyed them.
In the Trump White House, observed Henry Kissinger, “it is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”
* * *
For Dina Powell, the other Goldman hire in the West Wing, the main consideration when Ivanka pitched her on coming to work at the White House was the downside assessment of being associated with a Trump presidency. Powell ran the Goldman Sachs philanthropic arm, a public relations initiative as well as a courtship of the increasingly powerful pools of philanthropic money. Representing Goldman, she had become something of a legend at Davos, a supreme networker among the world’s supreme networkers. She stood at an intersection of image and fortune, in a world increasingly swayed by private wealth and personal brands.
It was a function of both her ambition and Ivanka Trump’s sales talents during swift meetings in New York and Washington that Powell, swallowing her doubts, had come on board. That, and the politically risky but high-return gamble that she, aligned with Jared and Ivanka, and working closely with Cohn, her Goldman friend and ally, could take over the White House. That was the implicit plan: nothing less. Specifically, the idea was that Cohn or Powell—and quite possibly both over the course of the next four or eight years—would, as Bannon and Priebus faltered, come to hold the chief of staff job. The president’s own constant grumbling about Bannon and Priebus, noted by Ivanka, encouraged this scenario.
This was no small point: a motivating force behind Powell’s move was the certain belief on the part of Jared and Ivanka (a belief that Cohn and Powell found convincing) that the White House was theirs to take. For Cohn and Powell, the offer to join the Trump administration was transmuted beyond opportunity and became something like duty. It would be their job, working with Jared and Ivanka, to help manage and shape a White House that might otherwise become the opposite of the reason and moderation they could bring. They could be instrumental in saving the place—and, as well, take a quantum personal leap forward.
More immediately for Ivanka, who was focused on concerns about women in the Trump
White House, Powell was an image correction to Kellyanne Conway, whom, quite apart from
their war with Bannon, Ivanka and Jared disdained. Conway, who continued to hold the
president’s favor and to be his preferred defender on the cable news shows, had publicly declared
herself the face of the administration—and for Ivanka and Jared, this was a horrifying face. The
president’s worst impulses seem to run through Conway without benefit of a filter. She
compounded Trump’s anger, impulsiveness, and miscues. Whereas a presidential adviser was
supposed to buffer and interpret his gut calls, Conway expressed them, doubled down on them,
made opera out of them. She took Trump’s demand for loyalty too literally. In Ivanka and
Jared’s view, Conway was a cussed, antagonistic, self-dramatizing cable head, and Powell, they
hoped, would be a deliberate, circumspect, adult guest on the Sunday morning shows.
By late February, after the first helter-skelter month in the West Wing, the campaign by Jared
and Ivanka to undermine Bannon seemed to be working. The couple had created a feedback
loop, which included Scarborough and Murdoch, that reinforced the president’s deep annoyance
with and frustration about Bannon’s purported importance in the White House. For weeks after
the Time magazine cover story featuring Bannon, there was hardly a conversation in which
Trump didn’t refer to it bitterly. (“He views Time covers as zero sum,” said Roger Ailes. “If
someone else gets on it, he doesn’t.”) Scarborough, cruelly, kept up a constant patter about
President Bannon. Murdoch forcefully lectured the president about the oddness and extremism of
Bannonism, linking Bannon with Ailes: “They’re both crazy,” he told Trump.
Kushner also pressed the view to the president—ever phobic about any age-related weakness
—that the sixty-three-year-old Bannon wouldn’t hold up under the strain of working in the White
House. Indeed, Bannon was working sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, and,
for fear of missing a presidential summons or afraid that someone else might grab it, he
considered himself on call pretty much all night. As the weeks went by, Bannon seemed
physically to deteriorate in front of everybody’s eyes: his face became more puffy, his legs more
swollen, his eyes more bleary, his clothes more slept in, his attention more distracted.
* * *
As Trump’s second month in office began, the Jared-Ivanka-Gary-Dina camp focused on the president’s February 28 speech to the joint session of Congress.
“Reset,” declared Kushner. “Total reset.”
The occasion provided an ideal opportunity. Trump would have to deliver the speech in front of him. It was not only on the teleprompter but distributed widely beforehand. What’s more, the well-mannered crowd wouldn’t egg him on. His handlers were in control. And for this occasion at least, Jared-Ivanka-Gary-Dina were the handlers.
“Steve will take credit for this speech if there’s even one word of his in it,” Ivanka told her father. She knew well that for Trump, credit, much more than content, was the hot-button driver, and her comment ensured that Trump would keep it out of Bannon’s hands.
“The Goldman speech,” Bannon called it.
The inaugural, largely written by Bannon and Stephen Miller, had shocked Jared and Ivanka. But a particular peculiarity of the Trump White House, compounding its messaging problems, was its lack of a speech-writing team. There was the literate and highly verbal Bannon, who did not really do any actual writing himself; there was Stephen Miller, who did little more than produce bullet points. Beyond that, it was pretty much just catch as catch can. There was a lack of coherent message because there was nobody to write a coherent message—just one more instance of disregarding political craft.
Ivanka grabbed firm control of the joint session draft and quickly began pulling in contributions from the Jarvanka camp. In the event, the president behaved exactly as they hoped. Here was an upbeat Trump, a salesman Trump, a nothing-to-be-afraid-of Trump, a happy-warrior Trump. Jared, Ivanka, and all their allies judged it a magnificent night, agreeing that finally, amid the pageantry—Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States—the president really did seem presidential. And for once, even the media agreed.
The hours following the president’s speech were Trump’s best time in the White House. It
was, for at least one news cycle, a different presidency. For a moment, there was even something
like a crisis of conscience among parts of the media: Had this president been grievously misread?
Had the media, the biased media, missed well-intentioned Donald Trump? Was he finally
showing his better nature? The president himself spent almost two full days doing nothing but
reviewing his good press. He had arrived, finally, at a balmy shore (with appreciative natives on
the beach). What’s more, the success of the speech confirmed the Jared and Ivanka strategy: look
for common ground. It also confirmed Ivanka’s understanding of her father: he just wanted to be
loved. And, likewise, it confirmed Bannon’s worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a
marshmallow.
The Trump on view the night of the joint session was not just a new Trump, but a declaration of a new West Wing brain trust (which Ivanka was making plans to formally join in just a few weeks). Jared and Ivanka, with an assist from their Goldman Sachs advisers, were changing the message, style, and themes of the White House. “Reaching out” was the new theme.
Bannon, hardly helping his cause, cast himself as a Cassandra to anyone who would listen. He
insisted that only disaster would come from trying to mollify your mortal enemies. You need to
keep taking the fight to them; you’re fooling yourself if you believe that compromise is possible.
The virtue of Donald Trump—the virtue, anyway, of Donald Trump to Steve Bannon—was that
the cosmopolitan elite was never going to accept him. He was, after all, Donald Trump, however
much you shined him up.