After the attorney general’s recusal, the president, whose instinctive reaction to every problem was to fire someone, right away, thought he should just get rid of Sessions. At the same time, there was little doubt in his mind about what was happening here. He knew where this Russia stuff was coming from, and if these Obama people thought they were going to get away with it they had another think coming. He would expose them all!
* * *
One of Jared Kushner’s many new patrons was Tony Blair, the former —British prime minister,
whom Kushner had gotten to know when, on the banks of the River Jordan in 2010, they both
attended the baptism of Grace and Chloe Murdoch, the young daughters of Rupert Murdoch and
his then wife, Wendi. Jared and Ivanka had also lived in the same Trump building on Park
Avenue where the Murdochs lived (for the Murdochs it was a temporary rental apartment while their grand triplex on Fifth Avenue was —renovated, but the renovation had lasted for four years), and during that period Ivanka Trump had become one of Wendi Murdoch’s closest friends. Blair, godfather to Grace, would later be accused by Murdoch of having an affair with his wife, and of being the cause of their breakup (something Blair has categorically denied). In the divorce, Wendi got the Trumps.
But once in the White House, the president’s daughter and son-in-law became the target of a
renewed and eager cultivation by, with quite some irony, both Blair and Murdoch. Lacking a
circle of influence in almost all of the many areas of government with which he was now
involved, Kushner was both susceptible to cultivation and more than a little desperate for the
advice his cultivators had to offer. Blair, now with philanthropic, private diplomatic, and varied
business interests in the Middle East, was particularly intent on helping shepherd some of Jared’s
Middle East initiatives.
In February, Blair visited Kushner in the White House.
On this trip, the now freelance diplomat, perhaps seeking to prove his usefulness to this new White House, mentioned a juicy rumor: the possibility that the British had had the Trump campaign staff under surveillance, monitoring its telephone calls and other communications and possibly even Trump himself. This was, as Kushner might understand, the Sabbath goy theory of intelligence. On the Sabbath, observant Jews could not turn on the lights, nor ask someone else to turn on the lights. But if they expressed the view that it would be much easier to see with light, and if a non-Jew then happened to turn them on, that would be fine. So although the Obama administration would not have asked the British to spy on the Trump campaign, the Brits would have been led to understand how helpful it might be if they did.
It was unclear whether the information was rumor, informed conjecture, speculation, or solid stuff. But, as it churned and festered in the president’s mind, Kushner and Bannon went out to CIA headquarters in Langley to meet with Mike Pompeo and his deputy director Gina Haspel to check it out. A few days later, the CIA opaquely reported back that the information was not correct; it was a “miscommunication.”
* * *
Politics had seemed to become, even well before the age of Trump, a mortal affair. It was now zero-sum: When one side profited, another lost. One side’s victory was another’s death. The old notion that politics was a trader’s game, an understanding that somebody else had something you wanted—a vote, goodwill, old-fashioned patronage—and that in the end the only issue was cost, had gone out of fashion. Now it was a battle between good and evil.
Curiously, for a man who seemed to have led a movement based in anger and retribution, Trump was very much (or believed he was very much) a politician of the old stripe—a let’swork-it-out guy. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. He was, in his mind, the ultimate tactician, always knowing what the other guy wanted.
Steve Bannon had pressed him to invoke Andrew Jackson as his populist model, and he had
loaded up on Jackson books (they remained unread). But his real beau ideal was Lyndon
Johnson. LBJ was a big man who could knock heads, do deals, and bend lesser men to his will.
Trade it out so in the end everyone got something, and the better dealmaker got a little more.
(Trump did not, however, appreciate the irony of where Lyndon Johnson ended up—one of the
first modern politicians to have found himself on the wrong end of both mortal and moral
politics.)
But now, after little more than seven weeks in office, Trump saw his own predicament as unique and overwhelming. Like no other president before (though he did make some allowances for Bill Clinton), his enemies were out to get him. Worse, the system was rigged against him. The bureaucratic swamp, the intelligence agencies, the unfair courts, the lying media—they were all lined up against him. This was, for his senior staff, a reliable topic of conversation with him: the possible martyrdom of Donald Trump.
In the president’s nighttime calls, he kept coming back to how unfair this was, and to what Tony Blair had said—and others, too! It all added up. There was a plot against him.
Now, it was certainly true that Trump’s closest staff appreciated his volatility, and, to a person, was alarmed by it. At points on the day’s spectrum of adverse political developments, he could have moments of, almost everyone would admit, irrationality. When that happened, he was alone in his anger and not approachable by anyone. His senior staff largely dealt with these dark hours by agreeing with him, no matter what he said. And if some of them occasionally tried to hedge, Hope Hicks never did. She agreed absolutely with all of it.
At Mar-a-Lago on the evening of March 3, the president watched Bret Baier interview Paul Ryan on Fox. Baier asked the Speaker about a report on the online news site Circa—owned by Sinclair, the conservative broadcast group—involving allegations that Trump Tower had been surveilled during the campaign.
On March 4, Trump’s early morning tweets began:
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism! (4:35 a.m.)
Is it legal for a sitting President to be “wire tapping” a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW! (4:49 a.m.)
How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy! (5:02 a.m.)
At 6:40 he called Priebus, waking him up. “Did you see my tweet?” he asked. “We’ve caught
them red-handed!” Then the president held his phone so Priebus could hear the playback of the
Baier show.
He had no interest in precision, or even any ability to be precise. This was pure public
exclamation, a window into pain and frustration. With his misspellings and his use of 1970s
lingo—“wire tapping” called up an image of FBI agents crouched in a van on Fifth Avenue—it
seemed kooky and farcical. Of the many tweets that Trump had seemed to hoist himself by, from
the point of view of the media, intelligence community, and extremely satisfied Democrats, the
wiretap tweets had pulled him highest and most left him dangling in ignorance and
embarrassment.
According to CNN, “Two former senior U.S. officials quickly dismissed Trump’s accusations out of hand. ‘Just nonsense,’ said one former senior U.S. intelligence official.” Inside the White House, the “just nonsense” quote was thought to be from Ben Rhodes, offered in cat-that-
swallowed-the-canary fashion.
Ryan, for his part, told Priebus he had no idea what Baier was talking about and that he was just BSing through the interview.
But if tapping Trump’s phones wasn’t literally true, there was a sudden effort to find something that might be, and a frantic White House dished up a Breitbart article that linked to a piece by Louise Mensch, a former British politician who, now living in the United States, had become a kind of conspiracy-central of the Trump-Russia connection.
There was a further effort to push aggressive incidental collection and unmasking back onto the Obama White House. But in the end, this was another—and to some quite the ultimate— example of how difficult it was for the president to function in a literal, definitional, lawyerly, cause-and-effect political world.
It was a turning point. Until now, Trump’s inner circle had been mostly game to defend him. But after the wiretap tweets, everybody, save perhaps Hope Hicks, moved into a state of queasy sheepishness, if not constant incredulity.
Sean Spicer, for one, kept repeating his daily, if not hourly, mantra: “You can’t make this shit
up.”
12
REPEAL AND REPLACE
Afew days after the election, Steve Bannon told the president-elect—in what Katie Walsh
would characterize with a raised eyebrow as more “Breitbart shenanigans”—that they had the
votes to replace Paul Ryan as Speaker of the House with Mark Meadows, the head of the Tea
Party-inspired Freedom Caucus and an early Trump supporter. (Meadows’s wife had a particular
place of regard in the Trump camp for continuing a campaign swing across the Bible Belt over
Billy Bush weekend.)
Nearly as much as winning the presidency itself, removing Ryan—indeed, humiliating him—
was an ultimate expression of what Bannon sought to accomplish and of the mind-meld of
Bannonism and Trumpism. From the beginning, the Breitbart campaign against Paul Ryan was a
central part of its campaign for Donald Trump. Its embrace of Trump, and Bannon’s personal
enlistment in the campaign fourteen months after it began, was in part because Trump, throwing
political sense to the wind, was willing to lead the charge against Ryan and the GOP godfathers.
Still, there was a difference between the way Breitbart viewed Ryan and the way Trump viewed
him.
For Breitbart, the House rebellion and transformation that had driven the former Speaker, John
Boehner, from office, and which, plausibly, was set to remake the House into the center of the
new radical Republicanism had been halted by Ryan’s election as Speaker. Mitt Romney’s
running mate, and a figure who had merged a conservative fiscal wonkishness—he had been the
chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and, as well, chairman of the House Budget
Committee—with an old-fashioned idea of unassailable Republican rectitude, Ryan was the
official last, best hope of the Republican Party. (Bannon, typically, had turned this trope into an
official Trumpist talking point: “Ryan was created in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation.”) If
the Republican Party had been moved further right by the Tea Party rebellion, Ryan was part of
the ballast that would prevent it from moving further, or at least at a vastly slower pace. In this
he represented an adult, older-brother steadiness in contrast to the Tea Party’s ADD-hyper
immaturity—and a stoic, almost martyrlike resistance to the Trump movement.
Where the Republican establishment had promoted Ryan into this figure of not only maturity but sagaciousness, the Tea Party-Bannon-Breitbart wing mounted an ad hominem campaign pushing an image of Ryan as uncommitted to the cause, an inept strategist and incompetent leader. He was the Tea Party-Bannon-Breitbart punch line: the ultimate empty suit, a hee-haw sort of joke and an embarrassment.
Trump’s distaste for Ryan was significantly less structural. He had no views about Ryan’s
political abilities, and had paid no real attention to Ryan’s actual positions. His view was
personal. Ryan had insulted him—again and again. Ryan had kept betting against him. Ryan had
become the effective symbol of the Republican establishment’s horror and disbelief about
Trump. Adding insult to injury, Ryan had even achieved some moral stature by dissing Trump
(and, as usual, he considered anybody’s gain at his expense a double insult). By the spring of
2016, Ryan was still, and by then the only, alternative to Trump as the nominee. Say the word,
many Republicans felt, and the convention would stampede to Ryan. But Ryan’s seemingly
smarter calculation was to let Trump win the nomination, and then to emerge as the obvious
figure to lead the party after Trump’s historic defeat and the inevitable purge of the Tea Party-
Trump-Breitbart wing.
Instead, the election destroyed Paul Ryan, at least in Steve Bannon’s eyes. Trump had not only saved the Republican Party but had given it a powerful majority. The entire Bannon dream had been realized. The Tea Party movement, with Trump as its remarkable face and voice, had come to power—something like total power. It owned the Republican Party. Publicly breaking Paul Ryan was the obvious and necessary step.
But a great deal could fall into the chasm between Bannon’s structural contempt for Ryan and Trump’s personal resentment. If Bannon saw Ryan as being unwilling and unable to carry out the new Bannon-Trump agenda, Trump saw a chastened Ryan as suddenly and satisfyingly abject, submissive, and useful. Bannon wanted to get rid of the entire Republican establishment; Trump was wholly satisfied that it now seemed to bend to him.
“He’s quite a smart guy,” Trump said after his first postelection conversation with the Speaker. “A very serious man. Everybody respects him.”
Ryan, “rising to a movie-version level of flattery and sucking-up painful to witness,” according to one senior Trump aide, was able to delay his execution. As Bannon pressed his case for Meadows—who was significantly less yielding than Ryan—Trump dithered and then finally decided that not only was he not going to push for Ryan’s ouster, but Ryan was going to be his man, his partner. In an example of the odd and unpredictable effects of personal chemistry on Trump—of how easy it can be to sell the salesman—Trump would now eagerly back Ryan’s agenda instead of the other way around.
“I don’t think that we quite calculated that the president would give him carte blanche,”
reflected Katie Walsh. “The president and Paul went from such a bad place during the campaign
to such a romance afterward that the president was happy to go along with whatever he wanted.”
It didn’t exactly surprise Bannon when Trump flipped; Bannon understood how easy it was to bullshit a bullshitter. Bannon also recognized that the Ryan rapprochement spoke to Trump’s new appreciation of where he found himself. It was not just that Ryan had been willing to bow to Trump, but that Trump was willing to bow to his own fears about how little he actually knew about being president. If Ryan could be counted on to handle Congress, thought the president, well, phew, that takes care of that.
* * *
Trump had little or no interest in the central Republican goal of repealing Obamacare. An
overweight seventy-year-old man with various physical phobias (for instance, he lied about his
height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him as obese), he personally
found health care and medical treatments of all kinds a distasteful subject. The details of the
contested legislation were, to him, particularly boring; his attention would begin wandering from
the first words of a policy discussion. He would have been able to enumerate few of the
particulars of Obamacare—other than expressing glee about the silly Obama pledge that
everyone could keep his or her doctor—and he certainly could not make any kind of meaningful
distinction, positive or negative, between the health care system before Obamacare and the one
after.
Prior to his presidency, he had likely never had a meaningful discussion in his life about health
insurance. “No one in the country, or on earth, has given less thought to health insurance than
Donald,” said Roger Ailes. Pressed in a campaign interview about the importance of Obamacare
repeal and reform, Trump was, to say the least, quite unsure of its place on the agenda: “This is
an important subject but there are a lot of important subjects. Maybe it is in the top ten. Probably
is. But there is heavy competition. So you can’t be certain. Could be twelve. Or could be fifteen.
Definitely top twenty for sure.”
It was another one of his counterintuitive connections to many voters: Obama and Hillary Clinton seemed actually to want to talk about health care plans, whereas Trump, like most everybody else, absolutely did not.
All things considered, he probably preferred the notion of more people having health insurance than fewer people having it. He was even, when push came to shove, rather more for Obamacare than for repealing Obamacare. As well, he had made a set of rash Obama-like promises, going so far as to say that under a forthcoming Trumpcare plan (he had to be strongly discouraged from using this kind of rebranding—political wise men told him that this was one instance where he might not want to claim ownership with his name), no one would lose their health insurance, and that preexisting conditions would continue to be covered. In fact, he probably favored government-funded health care more than any other Republican. “Why can’t Medicare simply cover everybody?” he had impatiently wondered aloud during one discussion with aides, all of whom were careful not to react to this heresy.
It was Bannon who held the line, insisting, sternly, that Obamacare was a litmus Republican
issue, and that, holding a majority in Congress, they could not face Republican voters without
having made good on the by now Republican catechism of repeal. Repeal, in Bannon’s view,
was the pledge, and repeal would be the most satisfying, even cathartic, result. It would also be
the easiest one to achieve, since virtually every Republican was already publicly committed to
voting for repeal. But Bannon, seeing health care as a weak link in Bannonism-Trumpism’s
appeal to the workingman, was careful to take a back seat in the debate. Later, he hardly even
made an effort to rationalize how he’d washed his hands of the mess, saying just, “I hung back
on health care because it’s not my thing.”
It was Ryan who, with “repeal and replace,” obfuscated the issue and won over Trump. Repeal would satisfy the Republican bottom line, while replace would satisfy the otherwise off-the-cuff pledges that Trump had made on his own. (Pay no attention to the likelihood that what the president construed as repeal and replace might be very different from what Ryan construed as repeal and replace.) “Repeal and replace” was a useful slogan, too, in that it came to have meaning without having any actual or specific meaning.
The week after the election, Ryan, bringing Tom Price—the Georgia congressman and
orthopedist who had become Ryan’s resident heath care expert—traveled to Trump’s
Bedminster, New Jersey, estate for a repeal and replace briefing. The two men summed up for
Trump—who kept wandering off topic and trying to turn the conversation to golf—seven years
of Republican legislative thinking about Obamacare and the Republican alternatives. Here was a
perfect example of an essential Trump paradigm: he acceded to anyone who seemed to know
more about any issue he didn’t care about, or simply one whose details he couldn’t bring himself
to focus on closely. Great! he would say, punctuating every statement with a similar exclamation
and regularly making an effort to jump from his chair. On the spot, Trump eagerly agreed to let
Ryan run the health care bill and to make Price the Health and Human Services secretary.
Kushner, largely staying silent during the health care debate, publicly seemed to accept the
fact that a Republican administration had to address Obamacare, but he privately suggested that
he was personally against both repeal alone and repeal and replace. He and his wife took a
conventional Democratic view on Obamacare (it was better than the alternatives; its problems
could be fixed in the future) and strategically believed it was best for the new administration to
get some easier victories under its belt before entering a hard-to-win or no-win fight. (What’s
more, Kushner’s brother Josh ran a health insurance company that depended on Obamacare.)
Not for the last time, then, the White House would be divided along the political spectrum, Bannon taking an absolutist base position, Priebus aligned with Ryan in support of the Republican leadership, and Kushner maintaining, and seeing no contradiction in, a moderate Democratic view. As for Trump himself, here was a man who was simply trying to get out from under something he didn’t especially care about.