Murdoch, already briefed by Kushner, said getting rid of Bannon was the only way to deal with the dysfunction in the White House. (Murdoch, of course, made the assumption that getting rid of Kushner was not an option.) It was the inevitable outcome, so do it now. Murdoch’s response made perfect sense: by now, he had become an active political supporter of the Kushner-Goldman moderates, seeing them as the people who would save the world from Bannon and, indeed, from Trump as well.
Ailes, blunt and declarative as always, said, “Donald, you can’t do it. You’ve made your bed and Steve is in it. You don’t have to listen to him, you don’t have to even get along with him. But you’re married to him. You can’t handle a divorce right now.”
Jared and Ivanka were gleeful at the prospect of Bannon’s ouster. His departure would return
the Trump organization to pure family control—the family and its functionaries, without an
internal rival for brand meaning and leadership. From the family’s point of view, it would also—
at least in theory—help facilitate one of the most implausible brand shifts in history: Donald
Trump to respectability. The dream, long differed, of the Trump pivot, might actually happen
without Bannon. Never mind that this Kushner ideal—saving Trump from himself and projecting
Jared and Ivanka into the future—was nearly as far-fetched and extreme as Bannon’s own
fantasy of a White House dedicated to the return of a pre-1965 American mythology.
If Bannon were to go, it also might cause the ultimate split in the already fractured Republican
Party. Before the election, one theory suggested that a defeated Trump would take his embittered
35 percent and make hay with a rancorous minority. Now the alarming theory was that as
Kushner tried to transform his father-in-law into the kind of latter-day Rockefeller that Trump,
however implausibly, had on occasion dreamed of becoming (Rockefeller Center being an
inspiration for his own real estate branding), Bannon could run off with some meaningful part of
that 35 percent.
This was the Breitbart threat. The Breitbart organization remained under the control of the
Mercers, and it could at any moment be handed back to Steve Bannon. And now, with Bannon’s
overnight transformation into political genius and kingmaker, and the triumph of the alt-right,
Breitbart was potentially much more powerful. Trump’s victory had, in some sense, handed the
Mercers the tool with which to destroy him. As push came to shove and the mainstream media
and swamp bureaucracy more and more militantly organized against him, Trump was certainly
going to need the Mercer-backed alt-right standing up in his defense. What, after all, was he
without them?
As the pressure mounted, Bannon—until now absolutely disciplined in his regard for Donald Trump as the ideal avatar of Trumpism (and Bannonism), rigidly staying in character as aide and supporter of a maverick political talent—began to crack. Trump, as almost anyone who had ever worked for him appreciated, was, despite what you hoped he might be, Trump—and he would invariably sour on everyone around him.
But the Mercers dug in. Without Bannon, they believed the Trump presidency, at least the Trump presidency they had imagined (and helped pay for), was over. The focus became how to make Steve’s life better. They made him pledge to leave the office at a reasonable time—no more waiting around for Trump to possibly need a dinner companion. (Recently, Jared and Ivanka had been heading this off anyway.) The solution included a search for a Bannon’s Bannon—a chief strategist for the chief strategist.
In late March, the Mercers came to an agreed-upon truce with the president: Bannon would not be fired. While this guaranteed nothing about his influence and standing, it did buy Bannon and his allies some time. They could regroup. A presidential aide was only as good as the last good advice he gave, and in this, Bannon believed the ineptness of his rivals, Kushner and his wife, would seal their fate.
* * *
Though the president agreed not to fire Bannon, he gave Kushner and his daughter something in exchange: he would enhance both their roles.
On March 27, the Office of American Innovation was created and Kushner was put in charge.
Its stated mission was to reduce federal bureaucracy—that is, to reduce it by creating more of it,
a committee to end committees. In addition, Kushner’s new outfit would study the government’s
internal technology, focus on job creation, encourage and suggest policies about apprenticeships,
enlist business in a partnership with government, and help with the opioid epidemic. It was, in
other words, business as usual, albeit with a new burst of enthusiasm for the administrative state.
But its real import was that it gave Kushner his own internal White House staff, a team of
people working not just on Kushner-supported projects—all largely antithetical to Bannon
projects—but, more broadly, as Kushner explained to one staffer, “on expanding my footprint.”
Kushner even got his own “comms person,” a dedicated spokesperson and Kushner promoter. It
was a bureaucratic build-out meant not only to enhance Kushner but to diminish Steve Bannon.
Two days after the announcement about Jared’s expanded power base, Ivanka was formally
given a White House job, too: adviser to the president. From the beginning she had been a key
adviser to her husband—and he to her. Still, it was an overnight consolidation of Trump family
power in the White House. It was, quite at Steve Bannon’s expense, a remarkable bureaucratic
coup: a divided White House had now all but been united under the president’s family.
His son-in-law and daughter hoped—they were even confident—that they could speak to DJT’s better self, or at least balance Republican needs with progressive rationality, compassion, and good works. Further, they could support this moderation by routing a steady stream of likeminded CEOs through the Oval Office. And, indeed, the president seldom disagreed with and was often enthusiastic about the Jared and Ivanka program. “If they tell him the whales need to be saved, he’s basically for it,” noted Katie Walsh.
But Bannon, suffering in his internal exile, remained convinced that he represented what
Donald Trump actually believed, or, more accurately, what the president felt. He knew Trump to
be a fundamentally emotional man, and he was certain that the deepest part of him was angry and
dark. However much the president wanted to support his daughter and her husband’s aspirations,
their worldview was not his. As Walsh saw it, “Steve believes he is Darth Vader and that Trump
is called to the dark side.”
Indeed, Trump’s fierce efforts to deny Bannon’s influence may well have been in inverse proportion to the influence Bannon actually had.
The president did not truly listen to anybody. The more you talked, the less he listened. “But
Steve is careful about what he says, and there is something, a timbre in his voice and his energy
and excitement, that the president can really hone in on, blocking everything else out,” said
Walsh.
As Jared and Ivanka were taking a victory lap, Trump signed Executive Order 13783, a change in environmental policy carefully shepherded by Bannon, which, he argued, effectively gutted the National Environmental Policy Act, the 1970 law that served as the foundation of modern environmental protections and that required all executive agencies to prepare environmental impact statements for agency actions. Among other impacts, EO 13783 removed a prior directive to consider climate change—a precursor to coming debates on the country’s position regarding the Paris Climate Accord.
On April 3, Kushner unexpectedly turned up in Iraq, accompanying Gen. Joseph Dunford,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to the White House press office, Kushner was
“traveling on behalf of the president to express the president’s support and commitment to the
government of Iraq and U.S. personnel currently engaged in the campaign.” Kushner, otherwise
a remote and clammed-up media presence, was copiously photographed throughout the trip.
Bannon, watching one of the many television screens that provided a constant background in
the West Wing, glimpsed Kushner wearing a headset while flying in a helicopter over Baghdad.
To no one in particular, recalling a foolish and callow George W. Bush in flight gear on the
aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln proclaiming the end of the Iraq War, he intoned, “Mission
accomplished.”
Gritting his teeth, Bannon saw the structure of the White House moving in the exact opposite direction from Trumpism-Bannonism. But even now, he was certain he perceived the real impulses of the administration coming his way. It was Bannon, stoic and resolute, the great if unheralded warrior, who, at least in his own mind, was destined to save the nation.
14
SITUATION ROOM
Just before seven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, April 4, the seventy-fourth day of the Trump presidency, Syrian government forces attacked the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun with chemical weapons. Scores of children were killed. It was the first time a major outside event had intruded into the Trump presidency.
Most presidencies are shaped by external crises. The presidency, in its most critical role, is a
reactive job. Much of the alarm about Donald Trump came from the widespread conviction that
he could not be counted on to be cool or deliberate in the face of a storm. He had been lucky so
far: ten weeks in, and he had not been seriously tested. In part this might have been because the
crises generated from inside the White House had overshadowed all outside contenders.
Even a gruesome attack, even one on children in an already long war, might not yet be a
presidential game changer of the kind that everyone knew would surely come. Still, these were
chemical weapons launched by a repeat offender, Bashar al-Assad. In any other presidency, such
an atrocity would command a considered and, ideally, skillful response. Obama’s consideration
had in fact been less than skillful in proclaiming the use of chemical weapons as a red line—and
then allowing it to be crossed.
Almost nobody in the Trump administration was willing to predict how the president might react—or even whether he would react. Did he think the chemical attack important or unimportant? No one could say.
If the Trump White House was as unsettling as any in American history, the president’s views of foreign policy and the world at large were among its most random, uninformed, and seemingly capricious aspects. His advisers didn’t know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or whether he could distinguish between the two. He was enamored with generals and determined that people with military command experience take the lead in foreign policy, but he hated to be told what to do. He was against nation building, but he believed there were few situations that he couldn’t personally make better. He had little to no experience in foreign policy, but he had no respect for the experts, either.
Suddenly, the question of how the president might respond to the attack in Khan Sheikhoun
was a litmus test for normality and those who hoped to represent it in Trump’s White House.
Here was the kind of dramatic juxtaposition that might make for a vivid and efficient piece of
theater: people working in the Trump White House who were trying to behave normally.
* * *
Surprisingly, perhaps, there were quite a few such people.
Acting normal, embodying normality—doing things the way a striving, achieving, rational person would do them—was how Dina Powell saw her job in the White House. At forty-three, Powell had made a career at the intersection of the corporate world and public policy; she did well (very, very well) by doing good. She had made great strides in George W. Bush’s White House and then later at Goldman Sachs. Returning to the White House at a penultimate level, with at least a chance of rising to one of the country’s highest unelected positions, would potentially be worth enormous sums when she returned to the corporate world.
In Trumpland, however, the exact opposite could happen. Powell’s carefully cultivated reputation, her brand (and she was one of those people who thought intently about their personal brand), could become inextricably tied to the Trump brand. Worse, she could become part of what might easily turn into historical calamity. Already, for many people who knew Dina Powell —and everybody who was anybody knew Dina Powell—the fact that she had taken a position in the Trump White House indicated either recklessness or seriously bad judgment.
“How,” wondered one of her longtime friends, “does she rationalize this?” Friends, family, and neighbors asked, silently or openly, Do you know what you’re doing? And how could you? And why would you?
Here was the line dividing those whose reason for being in the White House was a professed
loyalty to the president from the professionals they had needed to hire. Bannon, Conway, and
Hicks—along with an assortment of more or less peculiar ideologues that had attached
themselves to Trump and, of course, his family, all people without clearly monetizable
reputations before their association with Trump—were, for better or worse, hitched to him.
(Even among dedicated Trumpers there was always a certain amount of holding their breath and
constant reexamination of their options.) But those within the larger circle of White House
influence, those with some stature or at least an imagined stature, had to work through
significantly more complicated contortions of personal and career justification.
Often they wore their qualms on their sleeves. Mick Mulvaney, the OMB director, made a
point of stressing the fact that he worked in the Executive Office Building, not the West Wing.
Michael Anton, holding down Ben Rhodes’s former job at the NSC, had perfected a deft eye roll
(referred to as the Anton eye roll). H. R. McMaster seemed to wear a constant grimace and have
perpetual steam rising from his bald head. (“What’s wrong with him?” the president often
asked.)
There was, of course, a higher rationale: the White House needed normal, sane, logical, adult professionals. To a person, these pros saw themselves bringing positive attributes—rational minds, analytic powers, significant professional experience—to a situation sorely lacking those things. They were doing their bit to make things more normal and, therefore, more stable. They were bulwarks, or saw themselves that way, against chaos, impulsiveness, and stupidity. They were less Trump supporters than an antidote to Trump.
“If it all starts going south—more south than it is already going—I have no doubt that Joe Hagin would himself take personal responsibility, and do what needed to be done,” said a senior Republican figure in Washington, in an effort at self-reassurance, about the former Bush staffer who now served as Trump’s deputy chief of staff for operations.
But this sense of duty and virtue involved a complicated calculation about your positive effect
on the White House versus its negative effect on you. In April, an email originally copied to
more than a dozen people went into far wider circulation when it was forwarded and
reforwarded. Purporting to represent the views of Gary Cohn and quite succinctly summarizing
the appalled sense in much of the White House, the email read:
It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read
anything—not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway
through meetings with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner
is an entitled baby who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he’s smarter
than he is. Trump is less a person than a collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the
first year but his family. I hate the work, but feel I need to stay because I’m the only person
there with a clue what he’s doing. The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only
accept people who pass ridiculous purity tests, even for midlevel policy-making jobs where
the people will never see the light of day. I am in a constant state of shock and horror.
Still, the mess that might do serious damage to the nation, and, by association, to your own brand, might be transcended if you were seen as the person, by dint of competence and professional behavior, taking control of it.
Powell, who had come into the White House as an adviser to Ivanka Trump, rose, in weeks, to a position on the National Security Council, and was then, suddenly, along with Cohn, her Goldman colleague, a contender for some of the highest posts in the administration.
At the same time, both she and Cohn were spending a good deal of time with their ad hoc
outside advisers on which way they might jump out of the White House. Powell could eye seven-
figure comms jobs at various Fortune 100 companies, or a C-suite future at a tech company—
Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, after all, had a background in corporate philanthropy and in the
Obama administration. Cohn, on his part, already a centamillionaire, was thinking about the
World Bank or the Fed.
Ivanka Trump—dealing with some of the same personal and career considerations as Powell,
except without a viable escape strategy—was quite in her own corner. Inexpressive and even
botlike in public but, among friends, discursive and strategic, Ivanka had become both more
defensive about her father and more alarmed by where his White House was heading. She and
her husband blamed this on Bannon and his let-Trump-be-Trump philosophy (often interpreted
as let Trump be Bannon). The couple had come to regard him as more diabolical than Rasputin.
Hence it was their job to keep Bannon and the ideologues from the president, who, they believed,
was, in his heart, a practical-minded person (at least in his better moods), swayed only by people
preying on his short attention span.
In mutually codependent fashion, Ivanka relied on Dina to suggest management tactics that
would help her handle her father and the White House, while Dina relied on Ivanka to offer
regular assurances that not everyone named Trump was completely crazy. This link meant that
within the greater West Wing population, Powell was seen as part of the much tighter family
circle, which, while it conferred influence, also made her the target of ever sharper attacks. “She
will expose herself as being totally incompetent,” said a bitter Katie Walsh, seeing Powell as less
a normalizing influence than another aspect of the abnormal Trump family power play.
And indeed, both Powell and Cohn had privately concluded that the job they both had their eye on—chief of staff, that singularly necessary White House management position—would always be impossible to perform if the president’s daughter and son-in-law, no matter how much they were allied to them, were in de facto command whenever they wanted to exert it.
Dina and Ivanka were themselves spearheading an initiative that, otherwise, would have been
a fundamental responsibility of the chief of staff: controlling the president’s information flow.
* * *
The unique problem here was partly how to get information to someone who did not (or could
not or would not) read, and who at best listened only selectively. But the other part of the
problem was how best to qualify the information that he liked to get. Hope Hicks, after more
than a year at this side, had honed her instincts for the kind of information—the clips—that
would please him. Bannon, in his intense and confiding voice, could insinuate himself into the
president’s mind. Kellyanne Conway brought him the latest outrages against him. There were his
after-dinner calls—the billionaire chorus. And then cable, itself programmed to reach him—to
court him or enrage him.
The information he did not get was formal information. The data. The details. The options. The analysis. He didn’t do PowerPoint. For anything that smacked of a classroom or of being lectured to—“professor” was one of his bad words, and he was proud of never going to class, never buying a textbook, never taking a note—he got up and left the room.
This was a problem in multiple respects—indeed, in almost all the prescribed functions of the
presidency. But perhaps most of all, it was a problem in the evaluation of strategic military
options.
The president liked generals. The more fruit salad they wore, the better. The president was
very pleased with the compliments he got for appointing generals who commanded the respect
that Mattis and Kelly and McMaster were accorded (pay no attention to Michael Flynn). What
the president did not like was listening to generals, who, for the most part, were skilled in the
new army jargon of PowerPoint, data dumps, and McKinsey-like presentations. One of the things
that endeared Flynn to the president was that Flynn, quite the conspiracist and drama queen, had
a vivid storytelling sense.
By the time of the Syrian attack on Khan Sheikhoun, McMaster had been Trump’s National
Security Advisor for only about six weeks. Yet his efforts to inform the president had already
become an exercise in trying to tutor a recalcitrant and resentful student. Recently Trump’s
meetings with McMaster had ended up in near acrimony, and now the president was telling
several friends that his new National Security Advisor was too boring and that he was going to
fire him.
McMaster had been the default choice, a fact that Trump kept returning to: Why had he hired him? He blamed his son-in-law.
After the president fired Flynn in February, he had spent two days at Mar-a-Lago interviewing replacements, badly taxing his patience.
John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and Bannon’s consistent choice, made his aggressive light-up-the-world, go-to-war pitch.
Then Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, presented himself with what Trump viewed positively as old-fashioned military decorum. Yes, sir. No, sir. That’s correct, sir. Well, I think we know China has some problems, sir. And in short order it seemed that Trump was selling Caslen on the job.
“That’s the guy I want,” said Trump. “He’s got the look.”
But Caslen demurred. He had never really had a staff job. Kushner thought he might not be
ready.
“Yeah, but I liked that guy,” pressed Trump.
Then McMaster, wearing a uniform with his silver star, came in and immediately launched into a wide-ranging lecture on global strategy. Trump was soon, and obviously, distracted, and as the lecture continued he began sulking.
“That guy bores the shit out of me,” announced Trump after McMaster left the room. But Kushner pushed him to take another meeting with McMaster, who the next day showed up without his uniform and in a baggy suit.
“He looks like a beer salesman,” Trump said, announcing that he would hire McMaster but didn’t want to have another meeting with him.
Shortly after his appointment, McMaster appeared on Morning Joe. Trump saw the show and noted admiringly, “The guy sure gets good press.”
The president decided he had made a good hire.
* * *
By midmorning on April 4, a full briefing had been assembled at the White House for the
president about the chemical attacks. Along with his daughter and Powell, most members of the
president’s inner national security circle saw the bombing of Khan Sheikhoun as a
straightforward opportunity to register an absolute moral objection. The circumstance was
unequivocal: Bashar al-Assad’s government, once again defying international law, had used
chemical weapons. There was video documenting the attack and substantial agreement among
intelligence agencies about Assad’s responsibility. The politics were right: Barack Obama failed
to act when confronted with a Syrian chemical attack, and now Trump could. The downside was
small; it would be a contained response. And it had the added advantage of seeming to stand up
to the Russians, Assad’s effective partners in Syria, which would score a political point at home.
Bannon, at perhaps his lowest moment of influence in the White House—many still felt that his departure was imminent—was the only voice arguing against a military response. It was a purist’s rationale: keep the United States out of intractable problems, and certainly don’t increase our involvement in them. He was holding the line against the rising business-as-usual faction, making decisions based on the same set of assumptions, Bannon believed, that had resulted in the Middle East quagmire. It was time to break the standard-response pattern of behavior, represented by the Jarvanka-Powell-Cohn-McMaster alliance. Forget normal—in fact, to Bannon, normal was precisely the problem.
The president had already agreed to McMaster’s demand that Bannon be removed from the National Security Council, though the change wouldn’t be announced until the following day. But Trump was also drawn to Bannon’s strategic view: Why do anything, if you don’t have to? Or, why would you do something that doesn’t actually get you anything? Since taking office, the president had been developing an intuitive national security view: keep as many despots who might otherwise screw you as happy as possible. A self-styled strongman, he was also a fundamental appeaser. In this instance, then, why cross the Russians?
By the afternoon, the national security team was experiencing a sense of rising panic: the president, in their view, didn’t seem to be quite registering the situation. Bannon wasn’t helping. His hyperrationalist approach obviously appealed to the not-always-rational president. A chemical attack didn’t change the circumstances on the ground, Bannon argued; besides, there had been far worse attacks with far more casualties than this one. If you were looking for broken children, you could find them anywhere. Why these broken children?
The president was not a debater—well, not in any Socratic sense. Nor was he in any conventional sense a decision maker. And certainly he was not a student of foreign policy views and options. But this was nevertheless turning into a genuine philosophical face-off.
“Do nothing” had long been viewed as an unacceptable position of helplessness by American
foreign policy experts. The instinct to do something was driven by the desire to prove you were
not limited to nothing. You couldn’t do nothing and show strength. But Bannon’s approach was very much “A pox on all your houses,” it was not our mess, and judging by all recent evidence, no good would come of trying to help clean it up. That effort would cost military lives with no military reward. Bannon, believing in the need for a radical shift in foreign policy, was proposing a new doctrine: Fuck ’em. This iron-fisted isolationism appealed to the president’s transactional self: What was in it for us (or for him)?
Hence the urgency to get Bannon off the National Security Council. The curious thing is that in the beginning he was thought to be much more reasonable than Michael Flynn, with his fixation on Iran as the source of all evil. Bannon was supposed to babysit Flynn. But Bannon, quite to Kushner’s shock, had not just an isolationist worldview but an apocalyptic one. Much of the world would burn and there was nothing you could do about it.
The announcement of Bannon’s removal was made the day after the attack. That in itself was a
rather remarkable accomplishment on the part of the moderates. In little more than two months,
Trump’s radical, if not screwball, national security leadership had been replaced by so-called
reasonable people.
The job was now to bring the president into this circle of reason.
* * *
As the day wore on, both Ivanka Trump and Dina Powell were united in their determination to persuade the president to react . . . normally. At the very minimum, an absolute condemnation of the use of chemical weapons, a set of sanctions, and, ideally, a military response—although not a big one. None of this was in any way exceptional. Which was sort of the point: it was critical not to respond in a radical, destabilizing way—including a radical nonresponse.
Kushner was by now complaining to his wife that her father just didn’t get it. It had even been
difficult to get a consensus on releasing a firm statement about the unacceptability of the use of
chemical weapons at the noon press briefing. To both Kushner and McMaster it seemed obvious
that the president was more annoyed about having to think about the attack than by the attack
itself.
Finally, Ivanka told Dina they needed to show the president a different kind of presentation. Ivanka had long ago figured out how to make successful pitches to her father. You had to push his enthusiasm buttons. He may be a businessman, but numbers didn’t do it for him. He was not a spreadsheet jockey—his numbers guys dealt with spreadsheets. He liked big names. He liked the big picture—he liked literal big pictures. He liked to see it. He liked “impact.”
But in one sense, the military, the intelligence community, and the White House’s national security team remained behind the times. Theirs was a data world rather than a picture world. As it happened, the attack on Khan Sheikhoun had produced a wealth of visual evidence. Bannon might be right that this attack was no more mortal than countless others, but by focusing on this one and curating the visual proof, this atrocity became singular.
Late that afternoon, Ivanka and Dina created a presentation that Bannon, in disgust, characterized as pictures of kids foaming at the mouth. When the two women showed the presentation to the president, he went through it several times. He seemed mesmerized.
Watching the president’s response, Bannon saw Trumpism melting before his eyes. Trump— despite his visceral resistance to the establishment ass-covering and standard-issue foreign policy expertise that had pulled the country into hopeless wars—was suddenly putty. After seeing all the horrifying photos, he immediately adopted a completely conventional point of view: it seemed inconceivable to him that we couldn’t do something.
That evening, the president described the pictures in a call to a friend—the foam, all that foam.
These are just kids. He usually displayed a consistent contempt for anything but overwhelming
military response; now he expressed a sudden, wide-eyed interest in all kinds of other military
options.
On Wednesday, April 5, Trump received a briefing that outlined multiple options for how to respond. But again McMaster burdened him with detail. He quickly became frustrated, feeling that he was being manipulated.
The following day, the president and several of his top aides flew to Florida for a meeting with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping—a meeting organized by Kushner with the help of Henry Kissinger. While aboard Air Force One, he held a tightly choreographed meeting of the National Security Council, tying into the staff on the ground. By this point, the decision about how to respond to the chemical attack had already been made: the military would launch a Tomahawk cruise missile strike at Al Shayrat airfield. After a final round of discussion, while on board, the president, almost ceremonially, ordered the strike for the next day.
With the meeting over and the decision made, Trump, in a buoyant mood, came back to chat
with reporters traveling with him on Air Force One. In a teasing fashion, he declined to say what
he planned to do about Syria. An hour later, Air Force One landed and the president was hustled
to Mar-a-Lago.
The Chinese president and his wife arrived for dinner shortly after five o’clock and were greeted by a military guard on the Mar-a-Lago driveway. With Ivanka supervising arrangements, virtually the entire White House senior staff attended.
During a dinner of Dover sole, haricots verts, and thumbelina carrots—Kushner seated with
the Chinese first couple, Bannon at the end of the table—the attack on Al Shayrat airfield was
launched.
Shortly before ten, the president, reading straight off the teleprompter, announced that the mission had been completed. Dina Powell arranged a for-posterity photo of the president with his advisers and national security team in the makeshift situation room at Mar-a-Lago. She was the only woman in the room. Steve Bannon glowered from his seat at the table, revolted by the stagecraft and the “phoniness of the fucking thing.”
It was a cheerful and relieved Trump who mingled with his guests among the palm trees and mangroves. “That was a big one,” he confided to a friend. His national security staff were even more relieved. The unpredictable president seemed almost predictable. The unmanageable president, manageable.
15
MEDIA
On April 19, Bill O’Reilly, the Fox anchor and the biggest star in cable news, was pushed out
by the Murdoch family over charges of sexual harassment. This was a continuation of the purge
at the network that had begun nine months before with the firing of its chief, Roger Ailes. Fox
achieved its ultimate political influence with the election of Donald Trump, yet now the future of
the network seemed held in a peculiar Murdoch family limbo between conservative father and
liberal sons.
A few hours after the O’Reilly announcement, Ailes, from his new oceanfront home in Palm Beach—precluded by his separation agreement with Fox from any efforts to compete with it for eighteen months—sent an emissary into the West Wing with a question for Steve Bannon: O’Reilly and Hannity are in, what about you? Ailes, in secret, had been plotting his comeback with a new conservative network. Currently in internal exile inside the White House, Bannon —“the next Ailes”—was all ears.
This was not just the plotting of ambitious men, seeking both opportunity and revenge; the
idea for a new network was also driven by an urgent sense that the Trump phenomenon was
about, as much as anything else, right-wing media. For twenty years, Fox had honed its populist
message: liberals were stealing and ruining the country. Then, just at the moment that many
liberals—including Rupert Murdoch’s sons, who were increasingly in control of their father’s
company—had begun to believe that the Fox audience was beginning to age out, with its anti-
gay-marriage, anti-abortion, anti-immigrant social message, which seemed too hoary for younger
Republicans, along came Breitbart News. Breitbart not only spoke to a much younger right-wing
audience—here Bannon felt he was as much in tune with this audience as Ailes was with his—
but it had turned this audience into a huge army of digital activists (or social media trolls).
As right-wing media had fiercely coalesced around Trump—readily excusing all the ways he
might contradict the traditional conservative ethos—mainstream media had become as fiercely
resistant. The country was divided as much by media as by politics. Media was the avatar of
politics. A sidelined Ailes was eager to get back in the game. This was his natural playing field:
(1) Trump’s election proved the power of a significantly smaller but more dedicated electoral base—just as, in cable television terms, a smaller hardcore base was more valuable than a bigger, less committed one; (2) this meant an inverse dedication by an equally small circle of passionate enemies; (3) hence, there would be blood.
If Bannon was as finished as he appeared in the White House, this was his opportunity, too.
Indeed, the problem with Bannon’s $1.5 million a year Internetcentric Breitbart News was that it
couldn’t be monetized or scaled up in a big way, but with O’Reilly and Hannity on board, there
could be television riches fueled by, into the foreseeable future, a new Trump-inspired era of right-wing passion and hegemony.
Ailes’s message to his would-be protégé was plain: Not just the rise of Trump, but the fall of Fox could be Bannon’s moment.
In reply, Bannon let Ailes know that for now, he was trying to hold on to his position in the White House. But yes, the opportunity was obvious.
* * *
Even as O’Reilly’s fate was being debated by the Murdochs, Trump, understanding O’Reilly’s power and knowing how much O’Reilly’s audience overlapped with his own base, had expressed his support and approval—“I don’t think Bill did anything wrong……………………………………………….. He is a good person,” he told the New York Times.
But in fact a paradox of the new strength of conservative media was Trump himself. During
the campaign, when it suited him, he had turned on Fox. If there were other media opportunities,
he took them. (In the recent past, Republicans, particularly in the primary season, paid careful
obeisance to Fox over other media outlets.) Trump kept insisting that he was bigger than just
conservative media.
In the past month, Ailes, a frequent Trump caller and after-dinner adviser, had all but stopped
speaking to the president, piqued by the constant reports that Trump was bad-mouthing him as he
praised a newly attentive Murdoch, who had, before the election, only ever ridiculed Trump.
“Men who demand the most loyalty tend to be the least loyal pricks,” noted a sardonic Ailes (a man who himself demanded lots of loyalty).
The conundrum was that conservative media saw Trump as its creature, while Trump saw himself as a star, a vaunted and valued product of all media, one climbing ever higher. It was a cult of personality, and he was the personality. He was the most famous man in the world. Everybody loved him—or ought to.
On Trump’s part this was, arguably, something of a large misunderstanding about the nature of conservative media. He clearly did not understand that what conservative media elevated, liberal media would necessarily take down. Trump, goaded by Bannon, would continue to do the things that would delight conservative media and incur the wrath of liberal media. That was the program. The more your supporters loved you, the more your antagonists hated you. That’s how it was supposed to work. And that’s how it was working.
But Trump himself was desperately wounded by his treatment in the mainstream media. He
obsessed on every slight until it was overtaken by the next slight. Slights were singled out and
replayed again and again, his mood worsening with each replay (he was always rerunning the
DVR). Much of the president’s daily conversation was a repetitive rundown of what various
anchors and hosts had said about him. And he was upset not only when he was attacked, but
when the people around him were attacked. But he did not credit their loyalty, or blame himself
or the nature of liberal media for the indignities heaped on his staffers; he blamed them and their
inability to get good press.
Mainstream media’s self-righteousness and contempt for Trump helped provide a tsunami of clicks for right-wing media. But an often raging, self-pitying, tormented president had not gotten this memo, or had failed to comprehend it. He was looking for media love everywhere. In this, Trump quite profoundly seemed unable to distinguish between his political advantage and his personal needs—he thought emotionally, not strategically.
The great value of being president, in his view, was that you’re the most famous man in the
world, and fame is always venerated and adored by the media. Isn’t it? But, confusingly, Trump was president in large part because of his particular talent, conscious or reflexive, to alienate the media, which then turned him into a figure reviled by the media. This was not a dialectical space that was comfortable for an insecure man.
“For Trump,” noted Ailes, “the media represented power, much more so than politics, and he wanted the attention and respect of its most powerful men. Donald and I were really quite good friends for more than 25 years, but he would have preferred to be friends with Murdoch, who thought he was a moron—at least until he became president.”
* * *
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was set for April 29, the one hundredth day of the Trump administration. The annual dinner, once an insiders’ event, had become an opportunity for media organizations to promote themselves by recruiting celebrities—most of whom had nothing to do with journalism or politics—to sit at their tables. This had resulted in a notable Trump humiliation when, in 2011, Barack Obama singled out Trump for particular mockery. In Trump lore, this was the insult that pushed him to make the 2016 run.
Not long after the Trump team’s arrival in the White House, the Correspondents’ Dinner became a cause for worry. On a winter afternoon in Kellyanne Conway’s upstairs West Wing office, Conway and Hope Hicks engaged in a pained discussion about what to do.
The central problem was that the president was neither inclined to make fun of himself, nor
particularly funny himself—at least not, in Conway’s description, “in that kind of humorous
way.”
George W. Bush had famously resisted the Correspondents’ Dinner and suffered greatly at it,
but he had prepped extensively, and every year he pulled out an acceptable performance. But
neither woman, confiding their concerns around the small table in Conway’s office to a journalist
they regarded as sympathetic, thought Trump had a realistic chance of making the dinner
anything like a success.
“He doesn’t appreciate cruel humor,” said Conway. “His style is more old-fashioned,” said Hicks.
Both women, clearly seeing the Correspondents’ Dinner as an intractable problem, kept characterizing the event as “unfair,” which, more generally, is how they characterized the media’s view of Trump. “He’s unfairly portrayed.” “They don’t give him the benefit of the doubt.” “He’s just not treated the way other presidents have been treated.”
The burden here for Conway and Hicks was their understanding that the president did not see the media’s lack of regard for him as part of a political divide on which he stood on a particular side. Instead, he perceived it as a deep personal attack on him: for entirely unfair reasons, ad hominem reasons, the media just did not like him. Ridiculed him. Cruelly. Why?
The journalist, trying to offer some comfort, told the two women there was a rumor going around that Graydon Carter—the editor of Vanity Fair and host of one of the most important parties of the Correspondents’ Dinner weekend, and, for decades, one of Trump’s key tormentors in the media—was shortly going to be pushed out of the magazine.
“Really?” said Hicks, jumping up. “Oh my God, can I tell him? Would that be okay? He’ll want to know this.” She headed quickly downstairs to the Oval Office.
* * *
Curiously, Conway and Hicks each portrayed a side of the president’s alter ego media problem.
Conway was the bitter antagonist, the mud-in-your-eye messenger who reliably sent the media
into paroxysms of outrage against the president. Hicks was the confidante ever trying to get the
president a break and some good ink in the only media he really cared about—the media that
most hated him. But as different as they were in their media functions and temperament, both
women had achieved remarkable influence in the administration by serving as the key lieutenants
responsible for addressing the president’s most pressing concern, his media reputation.
While Trump was in most ways a conventional misogynist, in the workplace he was much
closer to women than to men. The former he confided in, the latter he held at arm’s length. He
liked and needed his office wives, and he trusted them with his most important personal issues.
Women, according to Trump, were simply more loyal and trustworthy than men. Men might be
more forceful and competent, but they were also more likely to have their own agendas. Women,
by their nature, or Trump’s version of their nature, were more likely to focus their purpose on a
man. A man like Trump.
It wasn’t happenstance or just casting balance that his Apprentice sidekick was a woman, nor
that his daughter Ivanka had become one of his closest confidants. He felt women understood
him. Or, the kind of women he liked—positive-outlook, can-do, loyal women, who also looked
good—understood him. Everybody who successfully worked for him understood that there was
always a subtext of his needs and personal tics that had to be scrupulously attended to; in this, he
was not all that different from other highly successful figures, just more so. It would be hard to
imagine someone who expected a greater awareness of and more catering to his peculiar whims,
rhythms, prejudices, and often inchoate desires. He needed special—extra special—handling.
Women, he explained to one friend with something like self-awareness, generally got this more
precisely than men. In particular, women who self-selected themselves as tolerant of or oblivious
to or amused by or steeled against his casual misogyny and constant sexual subtext—which was
somehow, incongruously and often jarringly, matched with paternal regard—got this.
* * *
Kellyanne Conway first met Donald Trump at a meeting of the condo board for the Trump International Hotel, which was directly across the street from the UN and was where, in the early 2000s, she lived with her husband and children. Conway’s husband, George, a graduate of Harvard College and Yale Law School, was a partner at the premier corporate mergers and acquisitions firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. (Though Wachtell was a Democratic-leaning firm, George had played a behind-the-scenes role on the team that represented Paula Jones in her pursuit of Bill Clinton.) In its professional and domestic balance, the Conway family was organized around George’s career. Kellyanne’s career was a sidelight.
Kellyanne, who in the Trump campaign would use her working-class biography to good effect, grew up in central New Jersey, the daughter of a trucker, raised by a single mother (and, always in her narrative, her grandmother and two unmarried aunts). She went to George Washington law school and afterward interned for Reagan’s pollster, Richard Wirthlin. Then she became the assistant to Frank Luntz, a curious figure in the Republican Party, known as much for his television deals and toupee as for his polling acumen. Conway herself began to make appearances on cable TV while working for Luntz.
One virtue of the research and polling business she started in 1995 was that it could adapt to
her husband’s career. But she never much rose above a midrank presence in Republican political
circles, nor did she become more than the also-ran behind Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham on
cable television—which is where Trump first saw her and why he singled her out at the condo board meeting.
In a real sense, however, her advantage was not meeting Trump but being taken up by the
Mercers. They recruited Conway in 2015 to work on the Cruz campaign, when Trump was still
far from the conservative ideal, and then, in August 2016, inserted her into the Trump campaign.
She understood her role. “I will only ever call you Mr. Trump,” she told the candidate with perfect-pitch solemnity when he interviewed her for the job. It was a trope she would repeat in interview after interview—Conway was a catalog of learned lines—a message repeated as much for Trump as for others.
Her title was campaign manager, but that was a misnomer. Bannon was the real manager, and she was the senior pollster. But Bannon shortly replaced her in that role and she was left in what Trump saw as the vastly more important role of cable spokesperson.
Conway seemed to have a convenient On-Off toggle. In private, in the Off position, she seemed to regard Trump as a figure of exhausting exaggeration or even absurdity—or, at least, if you regarded him that way, she seemed to suggest that she might, too. She illustrated her opinion of her boss with a whole series of facial expressions: eyes rolling, mouth agape, head snapping back. But in the On position, she metamorphosed into believer, protector, defender, and handler. Conway is an antifeminist (or, actually, in a complicated ideological somersault, she sees feminists as being antifeminists), ascribing her methods and temperament to her being a wife and mother. She’s instinctive and reactive. Hence her role as the ultimate Trump defender: she verbally threw herself in front of any bullet coming his way.
Trump loved her defend-at-all-costs shtick. Conway’s appearances were on his schedule to
watch live. His was often the first call she got after coming off the air. She channeled Trump: she
said exactly the kind of Trump stuff that would otherwise make her put a finger-gun to her head.
After the election—Trump’s victory setting off a domestic reordering in the Conway household, and a scramble to get her husband an administration job—Trump assumed she would be his press secretary. “He and my mother,” Conway said, “because they both watch a lot of television, thought this was one of the most important jobs.” In Conway’s version, she turned Trump down or demurred. She kept proposing alternatives in which she would be the key spokesperson but would be more as well. In fact, almost everyone else was maneuvering Trump around his desire to appoint Conway.