Ryan and Priebus’s salesmanship promised to get the president out from under other issues as
well. Health care reform, according to the Ryan plan, was something of a magic bullet. The
reform the Speaker would push through Congress would fund the tax cuts Trump had
guaranteed, which, in turn, would make all that Trump-promised infrastructure investment
possible.
On this basis—this domino theory that was meant to triumphantly carry the Trump administration through to the August recess and mark it as one of the most transformational presidencies in modern times—Ryan kept his job as Speaker, rising from hated campaign symbol to the administration’s man on the Hill. In effect, the president, quite aware of his and his staff’s inexperience in drafting legislation (in fact, nobody on his senior staff had any experience at all), decided to outsource his agenda—and to a heretofore archenemy.
Watching Ryan steal the legislative initiative during the transition, Bannon faced an early realpolitik moment. If the president was willing to cede major initiatives, Bannon would need to run a counteroperation and be ready with more Breitbart shenanigans. Kushner, for his part, developed a certain Zen—you just had to go with the president’s whims. As for the president, it was quite clear that deciding between contradictory policy approaches was not his style of leadership. He simply hoped that difficult decisions would make themselves.
* * *
Bannon was not merely contemptuous of Ryan’s ideology; he had no respect, either, for his craft. In Bannon’s view, what the new Republican majority needed was a man like John McCormick, the Democratic Speaker of the House who had served during Bannon’s teenage years and had shepherded Johnson’s Great Society legislation. McCormick and other Democrats from the 1960s were Bannon’s political heroes—put Tip O’Neill in that pantheon, too. An Irish Catholic working-class man was philosophically separate from aristocrats and gentry—and without aspirations to be either. Bannon venerated old-fashioned pols. He looked like one himself: liver spots, jowls, edema. And he hated modern politicians; they lacked, in addition to political talents, authenticity and soul. Ryan was an Irish Catholic altar boy who had stayed an altar boy. He had not grown up to be a thug, cop, or priest—or a true politician.
Ryan certainly wasn’t a vote counter. He was a benighted figure who had no ability to see
around corners. His heart was in tax reform, but as far as he could tell the only path to tax reform
was through health care. But he cared so little about the issue that—just as the White House had
outsourced health care to him—he outsourced the writing of the bill to insurance companies and K Street lobbyists.
In fact, Ryan had tried to act like McCormick or O’Neill, offering absolute assurances of his hold on the legislation. It was, he told the president during his several daily calls, a “done deal.” Trump’s trust in Ryan rose still higher, and it seemed to become in his own mind proof that he had achieved a kind of mastery over the Hill. If the president had been worried, he was worried no more. Done deal. The White House, having had to sweat hardly at all, was about to get a big victory, bragged Kushner, embracing the expected win over his dislike of the bill.
The sudden concern that the outcome might be otherwise began in early March. Katie Walsh, who Kushner now described as “demanding and petulant,” began to sound the alarm. But her efforts to personally involve the president in vote collecting were blocked by Kushner in a set of increasingly tense face-offs. The unraveling had begun.
* * *
Trump still dismissively called it “the Russian thing—a whole lot of nothing.” But on March 20, FBI director James Comey appeared before the House Intelligence Committee and tied the story up in a neat package:
I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our
counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in
the 2016 presidential election, and that includes investigating the nature of any links
between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and
whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts. As with any
counter intelligence investigation, this will also include an assessment of whether any
crimes were committed. Because it is an open, ongoing investigation and is classified I
cannot say more about what we are doing and whose conduct we are examining.
He had, however, said quite enough. Comey converted rumor, leaks, theory, innuendo, and
pundit hot air—and until this moment that was all there was, at best the hope of a scandal—into
a formal pursuit of the White House. Efforts to pooh-pooh the narrative—the fake news label,
the president’s germaphobe defense against the golden shower accusations, the haughty
dismissal of minor associates and hopeless hangers-on, the plaintive, if real, insistence that no
crime had even been alleged, and the president’s charge that he was the victim of an Obama
wiretap—had failed. Comey himself dismissed the wiretap allegation. By the evening of
Comey’s appearance, it was evident to everyone that the Russia plot line, far from petering out,
had a mighty and bloody life to come.
Kushner, ever mindful of his father’s collision with the Justice Department, was especially agitated by Comey’s increasing focus on the White House. Doing something about Comey became a Kushner theme. What can we do about him? was a constant question. And it was one he kept raising with the president.
Yet this was also—as Bannon, without too much internal success, tried to explain—a structural issue. It was an opposition move. You could express surprise at how fierce, creative, and diabolical the moves turned out to be, but you shouldn’t be surprised that your enemies would try to hurt you. This was check, but far from checkmate, and you had to continue to play the game, knowing that it would be a very long one. The only way to win the game, Bannon argued, was with a disciplined strategy.
But the president, prodded here by his family, was an obsessive and not a strategist. In his mind, this was not a problem to address, this was a person to focus on: Comey. Trump eschewed abstractions and, ad hominem, zeroed in on his opponent. Comey had been a difficult puzzle for Trump: Comey had declined to have the FBI pursue charges against Clinton for her email dodge. Then, in October, Comey had single-handedly boosted Trump’s fortunes with the letter reopening the Clinton email investigation.
In their personal interactions, Trump had found Comey to be a stiff—he had no banter, no
game. But Trump, who invariably thought people found him irresistible, believed that Comey
admired his banter and game. When pressed, by Bannon and others, to fire Comey as one of his
early acts—an idea opposed by Kushner, and thus another bullet on Bannon’s list of bad
recommendations by Kushner—the president said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got him.” That is, he had
no doubt that he could woo and flatter the FBI director into positive feeling for him, if not
outright submission.
Some seducers are preternaturally sensitive to the signals of those they try to seduce; others indiscriminately attempt to seduce, and, by the law of averages, often succeed (this latter group of men might now be regarded as harassers). That was Trump’s approach to women—pleased when he scored, unconcerned when he didn’t (and, often, despite the evidence, believing that he had). And so it was with Director Comey.
In their several meetings since he took office—when Comey received a presidential hug on January 22; at their dinner on January 27, during which Comey was asked to stay on as FBI director; at their Valentine’s Day chat after emptying the office of everybody else, including Sessions, Comey’s titular boss—Trump was confident that he had laid on the moves. The president was all but certain that Comey, understanding that he, Trump, had his back (i.e., had let him keep his job), would have Trump’s back, too.
But now this testimony. It made no sense. What did make sense to Trump was that Comey wanted it to be about him. He was a media whore—this Trump understood. All right, then, he, too, could play it this way.
Indeed, health care, a no-fun issue—suddenly becoming much less fun, if, as seemed increasingly possible, Ryan couldn’t deliver—palled before the clarity of Comey, and the fury, enmity, and bitterness Trump, and Trump’s relatives, now bore him.
Comey was the larger-than-life problem. Taking Comey down was the obvious solution. Getting Comey became the mission.
In Keystone Cops fashion, the White House enlisted House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes in a farcical effort to discredit Comey and support the wiretap theory. The scheme shortly collapsed in universal ridicule.
Bannon, taking a public hands-off with respect to both health care and Comey, began to advise
reporters that the important story wasn’t health care but Russia. This was cryptic advice: it was
not clear whether he was trying to distract attention from the coming health care debacle, or
couple it with this new dangerous variable, thus amping up the kind of chaos that he usually
benefited from.
But Bannon was unequivocal about one thing. As the Russia story unfolds, he advised reporters, keep your eye on Kushner.
* * *
By mid-March, Gary Cohn had been drafted into the effort to salvage the faltering health care
bill. This might have seemed like a form of hazing for Cohn, whose grasp of legislative matters
was even more limited than that of most in the White House.
On Friday, March 24, the morning of the theoretical House vote for the Republican health care bill, Politico’s Playbook characterized the chances of a vote actually coming to the floor as a “toss-up.” In that morning’s senior staff meeting, Cohn was asked for an assessment of where things stood and promptly said, “I think it’s a toss-up.”
“Really?” thought Katie Walsh. “That’s what you think?”
Bannon, joining Walsh in a pitiless contempt for the White House effort, targeted Kushner,
Cohn, Priebus, Price, and Ryan in a series of calls to reporters. Kushner and Cohn could, per
Bannon, be counted on to run at the first sound of gunfire. (Kushner, in fact, had spent much of
the week on a skiing holiday.) Priebus mouthed Ryan talking points and excuses. Price,
supposedly the health care guru, was an oafish imposter; he would stand up in meetings and
mumble nothing but nonsense.
These were the bad guys, setting up the administration to lose the House in 2018, thereby assuring the president’s impeachment. This was vintage Bannon analysis: a certain and immediate political apocalypse that sat side by side with the potential for a half century of Bannonism-Trumpism rule.
Convinced he knew the direction of success, keenly aware of his own age and finite opportunities, and—if for no clear reason—seeing himself as a talented political infighter, Bannon sought to draw the line between believers and sell-outs, being and nothingness. For him to succeed, he needed to isolate the Ryan, Cohn, and Kushner factions.
The Bannon faction held tight on forcing a vote on the health care bill—even knowing defeat was inevitable. “I want it as a report on Ryan’s job as Speaker,” said Bannon. That is, a devastating report, an epic fail.
The day of the vote, Pence was sent to the Hill to make one last pitch to Meadows’s Freedom
Caucus. (Ryan’s people believed that Bannon was secretly urging Meadows to hold out, though
earlier in the week Bannon had harshly ordered the Freedom Caucus to vote for the bill—“a silly
Bannon show,” according to Walsh.) At three-thirty, Ryan called the president to say he was
short fifteen to twenty votes and needed to pull the vote. Bannon, backed by Mulvaney, who had
become the White House’s Hill operative, continued to urge an immediate vote. A defeat here
would be a major defeat for the Republican leadership. That suited Bannon just fine: let them
fail.
But the president backed down. Faced with this singular opportunity to make the Republican
leadership the issue, and to name them as the problem, Trump wobbled, provoking in Bannon a
not-so-silent rage. Ryan then leaked that it was the president who had asked him to cancel the
vote.
Over the weekend, Bannon called a long list of reporters and told them—off the record, but hardly—“I don’t see Ryan hanging around a long time.”
* * *
After the bill had been pulled that Friday, Katie Walsh, feeling both angry and disgusted, told Kushner she wanted out. Outlining what she saw as the grim debacle of the Trump White House, she spoke with harsh candor about bitter rivalries joined to vast incompetence and an uncertain mission. Kushner, understanding that she needed to be discredited immediately, leaked that she had been leaking and hence had to be pushed out.
On Sunday evening, Walsh had dinner with Bannon in his Capitol Hill redoubt, the Breitbart
Embassy, during which, to no avail, he implored her to stay. On Monday she sorted out the
details with Priebus—she would leave to work part time for the RNC and part time for the Trump (c)(4), the outside campaign group. By Thursday she was gone.
Ten weeks into the new administration, the Trump White House had lost, after Michael Flynn, its second senior staff member—and the one whose job it was to actually get things done.
13
BANNON AGONISTES
He, too, felt like a prisoner, he had told Katie Walsh when she came to tell him she was
leaving.
By ten weeks in, Steve Bannon’s mastery of the Trump agenda, or at least of Trump himself, appeared to have crumbled. His current misery was both Catholic in nature—the self-flagellation of a man who believed he lived on a higher moral plane than all others—and fundamentally misanthropic. As an antisocial, maladjusted, post-middle-aged man, he had to make a supreme effort to get along with others, an effort that often did not go well. Most especially, he was miserable because of Donald Trump, whose cruelties, always great even when they were casual, were unbearable when he truly turned against you.
“I hated being on the campaign, I hated the transition, I hate being here in the White House,” said Bannon, sitting one evening in Reince Priebus’s office, on an unseasonably warm evening in early spring, with the French doors open to the arbor-covered patio where he and Priebus, now firm friends and allies in their antipathy toward Jarvanka, had set an outdoor table.
But Bannon was, he believed, here for a reason. And it was his firm belief—a belief he was unable to keep to himself, thus continually undermining his standing with the president—that his efforts had brought everybody else here. Even more important, he was the only person showing up for work every day who was committed to the purpose of actually changing the country. Changing it quickly, radically, and truly.
The idea of a split electorate—of blue and red states, of two opposing currents of values, of
globalists and nationalists, of an establishment and populist revolt—was media shorthand for
cultural angst and politically roiled times, and, to a large degree, for business as usual. But
Bannon believed the split was literal. The United States had become a country of two hostile
peoples. One would necessarily win and the other lose. Or one would dominate while the other
would become marginal.
This was modern civil war—Bannon’s war. The country built on the virtue and the character
and the strength of the American workingman circa 1955-65 was the ideal he meant to defend
and restore: trade agreements, or trade wars, that supported American manufacturing;
immigration policies that protected American workers (and, hence, American culture, or at least
America’s identity from 1955 to 1965); and an international isolation that would conserve
American resources and choke off the ruling class’s Davos sensibility (and also save working-
class military lives). This was, in the view of almost everyone but Donald Trump and the alt-
right, a crazy bit of voodoo economic and political nonsense. But it was, for Bannon, a
revolutionary and religious idea.
For most others in the White House, it was Bannon’s pipe dream. “Steve is . . . Steve,” became the gentle term of art for tolerating him. “A lot of stuff goes on in his head,” said the president, pursuing one of his reliable conversational themes, dismissing Bannon.
But it wasn’t Bannon versus everybody else so much as it was Bannon Trump versus nonBannon Trump. If Trump, in his dark, determined, and aggressive mood, could represent Bannon and his views, he could just as easily represent nothing at all—or represent solely his own need for instant gratification. That’s what the non-Bannon people understood about Trump. If the boss was happy, then a normal, incremental, two-steps-forward-one-step-back approach to politics might prevail. Even a new sort of centrism, as inimical to Bannonism as it was possible to conceive, could emerge. Bannon’s pronouncements about a fifty-year rule for Trumpism might then be supplanted by the rule of Jared, Ivanka, and Goldman Sachs.
By the end of March, this was the side that was winning. Bannon’s efforts to use the epic health care fail as evidence that the establishment was the enemy had hopelessly backfired. Trump saw the health care failure as his own failure, but since he didn’t have failures, it couldn’t be a failure, and would in fact be a success—if not now, soon. So Bannon, a Cassandra on the sidelines, was the problem.
Trump rationalized his early embrace of Bannon by heaping scorn on him—and by denying
that he had ever embraced him. If there was anything wrong with his White House, it was Steve
Bannon. Maligning Bannon was Trump’s idea of fun. When it came to Bannon, Trump rose to
something like high analysis: “Steve Bannon’s problem is PR. He doesn’t understand it.
Everybody hates him. Because . . . look at him. His bad PR rubs off on other people.”
The real question, of course, was how Bannon, the fuck-the-system populist, had ever come to
think that he might get along with Donald Trump, the use-the-system-to-his-own-advantage
billionaire. For Bannon, Trump was the game he had to play. But in truth he hardly played it—or
couldn’t help undermining it. While ever proclaiming it Trump’s victory, he would helplessly
point out that when he had joined the campaign it was facing a polling deficit that no campaign,
ten weeks from election day, had ever recovered from. Trump without Bannon, according to
Bannon, was Wendell Willkie.
Bannon understood the necessity not to take what otherwise might be Trump’s own spotlight;
he was well aware that the president meticulously logged all claims against credit that he
believed solely to be his. Both he and Kushner, the two most important figures in the White
House after the president, seemed professionally mute. Still, Bannon seemed to be everywhere,
and the president was convinced—rightly—that it was the result of Bannon’s private press
operation. More often than self-mockery could sustain, Bannon referred to himself as “President
Bannon.” A bitter Kellyanne Conway, regularly dissed for her own spotlight grabbing,
confirmed the president’s observation that Bannon stepped into as many White House photo ops
as possible. (Everybody seemed to keep count of everybody else’s photo bombs.) Bannon also
did not much bother to disguise his innumerable blind quotes, nor to make much of an effort to
temper his not-so-private slurs against Kushner, Cohn, Powell, Conway, Priebus, and even the
president’s daughter (often, most especially, the president’s daughter).
Curiously, Bannon never expressed a sideways thought about Trump—not yet. Trump’s own
righteousness and soundness was perhaps too central to Bannon’s construct of Trumpism. Trump
was the idea you had to support. This could seem to approach the traditional idea of respecting
the office. In fact, it was the inverse. The man was the vessel: there was no Bannon without
Trump. However much he might stand on his unique, even magical-seeming, contributions to the
Trump victory, Bannon’s opportunity was wholly provided by Trump’s peculiar talent. He was
no more than the man behind the man—Trump’s Cromwell, as he put it, even though he was perfectly aware of Cromwell’s fate.
But his loyalty to the idea of Trump hardly protected him from the actual Trump’s constant briefs against him. The president had assembled a wide jury to weigh Bannon’s fate, putting before it, in an insulting Borscht Belt style, a long list of Bannon’s annoyances: “Guy looks homeless. Take a shower, Steve. You’ve worn those pants for six days. He says he’s made money, I don’t believe it.” (The president, notably, never much took issue with Bannon’s policy views.) The Trump administration was hardly two months old, yet every media outlet was predicting Bannon’s coming defenestration.
One particularly profitable transaction with the president was to bring him new, ever harsher
criticism of his chief strategist, or reports of other people criticizing him. It was important to
know not to say anything positive to Trump about Bannon. Even faint praise before the
“but”—“Steve is obviously smart, but . . .”—could produce a scowl and pout if you didn’t hurry
to the “but.” (Then again, saying anyone was “smart” invariably incurred Trump’s annoyance.)
Kushner enlisted Scarborough and Brzezinski in something of a regular morning television
Bannon slag-a-thon.
- R. McMaster, the three-star general who had replaced Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor, had secured the president’s pledge that he could veto members of the NSC. Kushner, a supporter of McMaster’s appointment, had quickly ensured that Dina Powell, a key player in the Kushner faction, would join the NSC and Bannon would be removed.
Bannonites would, with lowered voices and certain pity, ask each other how he seemed and
how he was holding up; invariably they would agree about how bad he looked, the strain etching
ever deeper into his already ruined face. David Bossie thought Bannon “looked like he would
die.”
“I now understand what it is like to be in the court of the Tudors,” reflected Bannon. On the
campaign trail, he recalled, Newt Gingrich “would come with all these dumb ideas. When we
won he was my new best friend. Every day a hundred ideas. When”—by spring in the White
House—“I got cold, when I went through my Valley of Death, I saw him one day in the lobby
and he looks down, avoiding my eyes with a kind of mumbled ‘Hey, Steve.’ And I say, ‘What
are you doing here, let’s get you inside,’ and he says, ‘No, no, I’m fine, I’m waiting for Dina
Powell.’ ”
Having attained the unimaginable—bringing a fierce alt-right, anti-liberal ethnopopulism into a central place in the White House—Bannon found himself face to face with the untenable: undermined by and having to answer to rich, entitled Democrats.
* * *
The paradox of the Trump presidency was that it was both the most ideologically driven and the
least. It represented a deeply structural assault on liberal values—Bannon’s deconstruction of the
administrative state meant to take with it media, academic, and not-for-profit institutions. But
from the start it also was apparent that the Trump administration could just as easily turn into a
country club Republican or a Wall Street Democrat regime. Or just a constant effort to keep
Donald Trump happy. Trump had his collection of pet-peeve issues, test-marketed in various
media rollouts and megarallies, but none seemed so significant as his greater goal of personally
coming out ahead of the game.
As the drumbeat for Bannon’s removal grew, the Mercers stepped in to protect their investment in radical government overthrow and the future of Steve Bannon.
In an age when all successful political candidates are surrounded by, if not at the beck and call of, difficult, rich people pushing the bounds of their own power—and the richer they were, the more difficult they might be—Bob and Rebekah Mercer were quite onto themselves. If Trump’s ascent was unlikely, the Mercers’ was all the more so.
Even the difficult rich—the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson on the right, David Geffen and George Soros on the left—are leavened and restrained by the fact that money exists in a competitive market. Obnoxiousness has its limits. The world of the rich is, in its fashion, selfregulating. Social climbing has rules.
But among the difficult and entitled rich, the Mercers cut a path through disbelief and incredulity. Unlike other people contributing vast sums to political candidates, they were willing not to win—ever. Their bubble was their bubble.
So when they did win, by the fluke alignment of the stars for Donald Trump, they were yet
pure. Now, having found themselves—by odds that were perfect-storm outlandish—in power,
they were not going to give it up because Steve Bannon had hurt feelings and wasn’t getting
enough sleep.
Toward the end of March, the Mercers organized a set of emergency meetings. At least one of them was with the president himself. It was exactly the kind of meeting Trump usually avoided: he had no interest in personnel problems, since they put the emphasis on other people. Suddenly he was being forced to deal with Steve Bannon, rather than the other way around. What’s more, it was a problem he had in part created with his constant Bannon dissing, and now he was being asked to eat crow. Even though the president kept saying he could and should fire Bannon, he was aware of the costs—a right-wing backlash of unpredictable proportions.
Trump thought the Mercers were super-strange bedfellows too. He didn’t like Bob Mercer looking at him and not saying a word; he didn’t like being in the same room with Mercer or his daughter. But though he refused to admit that the Mercers’ decision to back him and their imposition of Bannon on the campaign in August was, likely, the event without which he would not now be in the White House, he did understand that if crossed, the Mercers and Bannon were potential world-class troublemakers.
The complexity of the Bannon-Mercer problem prompted Trump to consult two contradictory figures: Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes. Even as the president did so, perhaps he knew he would come up with a zero-sum answer.