Loyalty was Trump’s most valued attribute, and in Conway’s view her kamikaze-like media
defense of the president had earned her a position of utmost primacy in the White House. But in
her public persona, she had pushed the boundaries of loyalty too far; she was so hyperbolic that
even Trump loyalists found her behavior extreme and were repelled. None were more put off
than Jared and Ivanka, who, appalled at the shamelessness of her television appearances,
extended this into a larger critique of Conway’s vulgarity. When referring to her, they were
particularly partial to using the shorthand “nails,” a reference to her Cruella de Vil-length
manicure treatments.
By mid-February she was already the subject of leaks—many coming from Jared and Ivanka
—about how she had been sidelined. She vociferously defended herself, producing a list of
television appearances still on her schedule, albeit lesser ones. But she also had a teary scene
with Trump in the Oval Office, offering to resign if the president had lost faith in her. Almost
invariably, when confronted with self-abnegation, Trump offered copious reassurances. “You
will always have a place in my administration,” he told her. “You will be here for eight years.”
But she had indeed been sidelined, reduced to second-rate media, to being a designated
emissary to right-wing groups, and left out of any meaningful decision making. This she blamed on the media, a scourge that further united her in self-pity with Donald Trump. In fact, her relationship with the president deepened as they bonded over their media wounds.
* * *
Hope Hicks, then age twenty-six, was the campaign’s first hire. She knew the president vastly better than Conway did, and she understood that her most important media function was not to be in the media.
Hicks grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her father was a PR executive who now worked
for the Glover Park Group, the Democratic-leaning communications and political consulting
firm; her mother was a former staffer for a democratic congressman. An indifferent student,
Hicks went to Southern Methodist University and then did some modeling before getting a PR
job. She first went to work for Matthew Hiltzik, who ran a small New York-based PR firm and
was noted for his ability to work with high-maintenance clients, including the movie producer
Harvey Weinstein (later pilloried for years of sexual harassment and abuse—accusations that
Hiltzik and his staff had long helped protect him from) and the television personality Katie
Couric. Hiltzik, an active Democrat who had worked for Hillary Clinton, also represented Ivanka
Trump’s fashion line; Hicks started to do some work for the account and then joined Ivanka’s
company full time. In 2015, Ivanka seconded her to her father’s campaign; as the campaign
progressed, moving from novelty project to political factor to juggernaut, Hicks’s family
increasingly, and incredulously, viewed her as rather having been taken captive. (Following the
Trump victory and her move into the White House, her friends and intimates talked with great
concern about what kind of therapies and recuperation she would need after her tenure was
finally over.)
Over the eighteen months of the campaign, the traveling group usually consisted of the candidate, Hicks, and the campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. In time, she became—in addition to an inadvertent participant in history, about which she was quite as astonished as anyone—a kind of Stepford factotum, as absolutely dedicated to and tolerant of Mr. Trump as anyone who had ever worked for him.
Shortly after Lewandowski, with whom Hicks had an on-and-off romantic relationship, was fired in June 2016 for clashing with Trump family members, Hicks sat in Trump Tower with Trump and his sons, worrying about Lewandowski’s treatment in the press and wondering aloud how she might help him. Trump, who otherwise seemed to treat Hicks in a protective and even paternal way, looked up and said, “Why? You’ve already done enough for him. You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have,” sending Hicks running from the room.
As new layers began to form around Trump, first as nominee and then as president-elect, Hicks continued playing the role of his personal PR woman. She would remain his constant shadow and the person with the best access to him. “Have you spoken to Hope?” were among the words most frequently uttered in the West Wing.
Hicks, sponsored by Ivanka and ever loyal to her, was in fact thought of as Trump’s real daughter, while Ivanka was thought of as his real wife. More functionally, but as elementally, Hicks was the president’s chief media handler. She worked by the president’s side, wholly separate from the White House’s forty-person-strong communications office. The president’s personal message and image were entrusted to her—or, more accurately, she was the president’s agent in retailing that message and image, which he trusted to no one but himself. Together they formed something of a freelance operation.
Without any particular politics of her own, and, with her New York PR background, quite
looking down on the right-wing press, she was the president’s official liaison to the mainstream
media. The president had charged her with the ultimate job: a good write-up in the New York
Times.
That, in the president’s estimation, had yet failed to happen, “but Hope tries and tries,” the president said.
On more than one occasion, after a day—one of the countless days—of particularly bad
notices, the president greeted her, affectionately, with “You must be the world’s worst PR
person.”
* * *
In the early days of the transition, with Conway out of the running for the press secretary job, Trump became determined to find a “star.” The conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, who had spoken at the convention, was on the list, as was Ann Coulter. Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo was also under consideration. (This was television, the president-elect said, and it ought to be a good-looking woman.) When none of those ideas panned out, the job was offered to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who turned it down.
But there was a counterview: the press secretary ought to be the opposite of a star. In fact, the entire press operation ought to be downgraded. If the press was the enemy, why pander to it, why give it more visibility? This was fundamental Bannonism: stop thinking you can somehow get along with your enemies.
As the debate went on, Priebus pushed for one of his deputies at the Republican National Committee, Sean Spicer, a well-liked forty-five-year-old Washington political professional with a string of posts on the Hill in the George W. Bush years as well as with the RNC. Spicer, hesitant to take the job, kept anxiously posing the question to colleagues in the Washington swamp: “If I do this, will I ever be able to work again?”
There were conflicting answers.
During the transition, many members of Trump’s team came to agree with Bannon that their approach to White House press management ought to be to push it off—and the longer the arm’s length the better. For the press, this initiative, or rumors of it, became another sign of the incoming administration’s antipress stance and its systematic efforts to cut off the information supply. In truth, the suggestions about moving the briefing room away from the White House, or curtailing the briefing schedule, or limiting broadcast windows or press pool access, were variously discussed by other incoming administrations. In her husband’s White House, Hillary Clinton had been a proponent of limiting press access.
It was Donald Trump who was not able to relinquish this proximity to the press and the stage
in his own house. He regularly berated Spicer for his ham-handed performances, often giving his
full attention to them. His response to Spicer’s briefings was part of his continuing belief that
nobody could work the media like he could, that somehow he had been stuck with an F-Troop
communications team that was absent charisma, magnetism, and proper media connections.
Trump’s pressure on Spicer—a constant stream of directorial castigation and instruction that reliably rattled the press secretary—helped turn the briefings into a can’t-miss train wreck. Meanwhile, the real press operation had more or less devolved into a set of competing press organizations within the White House.
There was Hope Hicks and the president, living in what other West Wingers characterized as
an alternative universe in which the mainstream media would yet discover the charm and
wisdom of Donald Trump. Where past presidents might have spent portions of their day talking
about the needs, desires, and points of leverage among various members of Congress, the
president and Hicks spent a great deal of time talking about a fixed cast of media personalities,
trying to second-guess the real agendas and weak spots among cable anchors and producers and
Times and Post reporters.
Often the focus of this otherworldly ambition was directed at Times reporter Maggie
Haberman. Haberman’s front-page beat at the paper, which might be called the “weirdness of
Donald Trump” beat, involved producing vivid tales of eccentricities, questionable behavior, and
shit the president says, told in a knowing, deadpan style. Beyond acknowledging that Trump was
a boy from Queens yet in awe of the Times, nobody in the West Wing could explain why he and
Hicks would so often turn to Haberman for what would so reliably be a mocking and hurtful
portrayal. There was some feeling that Trump was returning to scenes of past success: the Times
might be against him, but Haberman had worked at the New York Post for many years. “She’s
very professional,” Conway said, speaking in defense of the president and trying to justify
Haberman’s extraordinary access. But however intent he remained on getting good ink in the
Times, the president saw Haberman as “mean and horrible.” And yet, on a near-weekly basis, he
and Hicks plotted when next to have the Times come in.
* * *
Kushner had his personal press operation and Bannon had his. The leaking culture had become so open and overt—most of the time everybody could identify everybody else’s leaks—that it was now formally staffed.
Kushner’s Office of American Innovation employed, as its spokesperson, Josh Raffel, who, like Hicks, came out of Matthew Hiltzik’s PR shop. Raffel, a Democrat who had been working in Hollywood, acted as Kushner and his wife’s personal rep—not least of all because the couple felt that Spicer, owing his allegiance to Priebus, was not aggressively representing them. This was explicit. “Josh is Jared’s Hope,” was his internal West Wing job description.
Raffel coordinated all of Kushner and Ivanka’s personal press, though there was more of this for Ivanka than for Kushner. But, more importantly, Raffel coordinated all of Kushner’s substantial leaking, or, as it were, his off-the-record briefings and guidance—no small part of it against Bannon. Kushner, who with great conviction asserted that he never leaked, in part justified his press operation as a defense against Bannon’s press operation.
Bannon’s “person,” Alexandra Preate—a witty conservative socialite partial to champagne— had previously represented Breitbart News and other conservative figures like CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, and was close friends with Rebekah Mercer. In a relationship that nobody seemed quite able to explain, she handled all of Bannon’s press “outreach” but was not employed by the White House, although she maintained an office, or at least an officelike presence, there. The point was clear: her client was Bannon and not the Trump administration.
Bannon, to Jared and Ivanka’s continued alarm, had unique access to Breitbart’s significant abilities to change the right-wing mood and focus. Bannon insisted he had cut his ties to his former colleagues at Breitbart, but that strained everybody’s credulity—and everybody figured nobody was supposed to believe it. Rather, everybody was supposed to fear it.
There was, curiously, general agreement in the West Wing that Donald Trump, the media
president, had one of the most dysfunctional communication operations in modern White House
history. Mike Dubke, a Republican PR operative who was hired as White House
communications director, was, by all estimations, from the first day on his way out the door. In
the end he lasted only three months.
* * *
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner rose, as much as any other challenge for the new
president and his team, as a test of his abilities. He wanted to do it. He was certain that the power
of his charm was greater than the rancor that he bore this audience—or that they bore him.
He recalled his 2015 Saturday Night Live appearance—which, in his view, was entirely successful. In fact, he had refused to prepare, had kept saying he would “improvise,” no problem. Comedians don’t actually improvise, he was told; it’s all scripted and rehearsed. But this counsel had only marginal effect.
Almost nobody except the president himself thought he could pull off the Correspondents’ Dinner. His staff was terrified that he would die up there in front of a seething and contemptuous audience. Though he could dish it out, often very harshly, no one thought he could take it. Still, the president seemed eager to appear at the event, if casual about it, too—with Hicks, ordinarily encouraging his every impulse, trying not to.
Bannon pressed the symbolic point: the president should not be seen currying the favor of his enemies, or trying to entertain them. The media was a much better whipping boy than it was a partner in crime. The Bannon principle, the steel stake in the ground, remained: don’t bend, don’t accommodate, don’t meet halfway. And in the end, rather than implying that Trump did not have the talent and wit to move this crowd, that was a much better way to persuade the president that he should not appear at the dinner.
When Trump finally agreed to forgo the event, Conway, Hicks, and virtually everybody else in the West Wing breathed a lot easier.
* * *
Shortly after five o’clock on the one hundredth day of his presidency—a particularly muggy one
—while twenty-five hundred or so members of news organizations and their friends gathered at
the Washington Hilton for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the president left the West
Wing for Marine One, which was soon en route to Andrews Air Force Base. Accompanying him
were Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, Reince Priebus, Hope Hicks, and Kellyanne Conway. Vice
President Pence and his wife joined the group at Andrews for the brief flight on Air Force One to
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where the president would give a speech. During the flight, crab cakes
were served, and Face the Nation’s John Dickerson was granted a special hundredth-day
interview.
The first Harrisburg event was held at a factory that manufactured landscaping and gardening
tools, where the president closely inspected a line of colorful wheelbarrows. The next event,
where the speech would be delivered, was at a rodeo arena in the Farm Show Complex and Expo
Center.
And that was the point of this little trip. It had been designed both to remind the rest of the
country that the president was not just another phony baloney in a tux like those at the White
House Correspondents’ Dinner (this somehow presupposed that the president’s base cared about
or was even aware of the event) and to keep the president’s mind off the fact that he was missing
the dinner.
But the president kept asking for updates on the jokes.
16
COMEY
“It’s impossible to make him understand you can’t stop these investigations,” said Roger Ailes in early May, a frustrated voice in the Trump kitchen cabinet. “In the old days, you could say leave it alone. Now you say leave it alone and you’re the one who gets investigated. He can’t get this through his head.”
In fact, as various members of the billionaires’ cabinet tried to calm down the president during their evening phone calls, they were largely egging him on by expressing deep concern about his DOJ and FBI peril. Many of Trump’s wealthy friends saw themselves as having particular DOJ expertise. In their own careers, they had had enough issues with the Justice Department to prompt them to develop DOJ relationships and sources, and now they were always up on DOJ gossip. Flynn was going to throw him in the soup. Manafort was going to roll. And it wasn’t just Russia. It was Atlantic City. And Mar-a-Lago. And Trump SoHo.
Both Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani—each a self-styled expert on the DOJ and the FBI, and ever assuring Trump of their inside sources—encouraged him to take the view that the DOJ was resolved against him; it was all part of a holdover Obama plot.
Even more urgent was Charlie Kushner’s fear, channeled through his son and daughter-in-law,
that the Kushner family’s dealings were getting wrapped up in the pursuit of Trump. Leaks in
January had put the kibosh on the Kushners’ deal with the Chinese financial colossus Anbang
Insurance Group to refinance the family’s large debt in one of its major real estate holdings, 666
Fifth Avenue. At the end of April, the New York Times, supplied with leaks from the DOJ, linked
the Kushner business in a front-page article to Beny Steinmetz—an Israeli diamond, mining, and
real estate billionaire with Russian ties who was under chronic investigation around the world.
(The Kushner position was not helped by the fact that the president had been gleefully telling
multiple people that Jared could solve the Middle East problem because the Kushners knew all
the best people in Israel.) During the first week of May, the Times and the Washington Post
covered the Kushner family’s supposed efforts to attract Chinese investors with the promise of
U.S. visas.
“The kids”—Jared and Ivanka—exhibited an increasingly panicked sense that the FBI and DOJ were moving beyond Russian election interference and into finances. “Ivanka is terrified,” said a satisfied Bannon.
Trump turned to suggesting to his billionaire chorus that he fire FBI director Comey. He had
raised this idea many times before, but always, seemingly, at the same time and in the same
context that he brought up the possibility of firing everybody. Should I fire Bannon? Should I
fire Reince? Should I fire McMaster? Should I fire Spicer? Should I fire Tillerson? This ritual
was, everyone understood, more a pretext to a discussion of the power he held than it was,
strictly, about personnel decisions. Still, in Trump’s poison-the-well fashion, the should-I-fire-
so-and-so question, and any consideration of it by any of the billionaires, was translated into
agreement, as in: Carl Icahn thinks I should fire Comey (or Bannon, or Priebus, or McMaster, or
Tillerson).
His daughter and son-in-law, their urgency compounded by Charlie Kushner’s concern, encouraged him, arguing that the once possibly charmable Comey was now a dangerous and uncontrollable player whose profit would inevitably be their loss. When Trump got wound up about something, Bannon noted, someone was usually winding him up. The family focus of discussion—insistent, almost frenzied—became wholly about Comey’s ambition. He would rise by damaging them. And the drumbeat grew.
“That son of a bitch is going to try to fire the head of the FBI,” said Ailes.
During the first week of May, the president had a ranting meeting with Sessions and his deputy Rod Rosenstein. It was a humiliating meeting for both men, with Trump insisting they couldn’t control their own people and pushing them to find a reason to fire Comey—in effect, he blamed them for not having come up with that reason months ago. (It was their fault, he implied, that Comey hadn’t been fired right off the bat.)
Also that week, there was a meeting that included the president, Jared and Ivanka, Bannon, Priebus, and White House counsel Don McGahn. It was a closed-door meeting—widely noted because it was unusual for the Oval Office door ever to be closed.
All the Democrats hate Comey, said the president, expressing his certain and self-justifying
view. All the FBI agents hate him, too—75 percent of them can’t stand him. (This was a number
that Kushner had somehow alighted on, and Trump had taken it up.) Firing Comey will be a
huge fundraising advantage, declared the president, a man who almost never talked about
fundraising.
McGahn tried to explain that in fact Comey himself was not running the Russia investigation, that without Comey the investigation would proceed anyway. McGahn, the lawyer whose job was necessarily to issue cautions, was a frequent target of Trump rages. Typically these would begin as a kind of exaggeration or acting and then devolve into the real thing: uncontrollable, vein-popping, ugly-face, tantrum stuff. It got primal. Now the president’s denunciations focused in a vicious fury on McGahn and his cautions about Comey.
“Comey was a rat,” repeated Trump. There were rats everywhere and you had to get rid of
them. John Dean, John Dean, he repeated. “Do you know what John Dean did to Nixon?”
Trump, who saw history through personalities—people he might have liked or disliked—was
a John Dean freak. He went bananas when a now gray and much aged Dean appeared on talk
shows to compare the Trump-Russia investigation to Watergate. That would bring the president
to instant attention and launch an inevitable talk-back monologue to the screen about loyalty and
what people would do for media attention. It might also be accompanied by several revisionist
theories Trump had about Watergate and how Nixon had been framed. And always there were
rats. A rat was someone who would take you down for his own advantage. If you had a rat, you
needed to kill it. And there were rats all around.
(Later, it was Bannon who had to take the president aside and tell him that John Dean had been the White House counsel in the Nixon administration, so maybe it would be a good idea to lighten up on McGahn.)
As the meeting went on, Bannon, from the doghouse and now, in their mutual antipathy to
Jarvanka, allied with Priebus, seized the opportunity to make an impassioned case opposing any
move against Comey—which was also, as much, an effort to make the case against Jared and Ivanka and their allies, “the geniuses.” (“The geniuses” was one of Trump’s terms of derision for anybody who might annoy him or think they were smarter than him, and Bannon now appropriated the term and applied it to Trump’s family.) Offering forceful and dire warnings, Bannon told the president: “This Russian story is a third-tier story, but you fire Comey and it’ll be the biggest story in the world.”
By the time the meeting ended, Bannon and Priebus believed they had prevailed. But that
weekend, at Bedminster, the president, again listening to the deep dismay of his daughter and
son-in-law, built up another head of steam. With Jared and Ivanka, Stephen Miller was also
along for the weekend. The weather was bad and the president missed his golf game, dwelling,
with Jared, on his Comey fury. It was Jared, in the version told by those outside the Jarvanka
circle, that pushed for action, once more winding up his father-in-law. With the president’s
assent, Kushner, in this version, gave Miller notes on why the FBI director should be fired and
asked him to draft a letter that could set out the basis for immediate dismissal. Miller—less than
a deft drafting hand—recruited Hicks to help, another person without clearly relevant abilities.
(Miller would later be admonished by Bannon for letting himself get tied up, and potentially
implicated, in the Comey mess.)
The letter, in the panicky draft assembled by Miller and Hicks, either from Kushner’s directions or on instructions directly coming from the president, was an off-the-wall mishmash containing the talking points—Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation; the assertion (from Kushner) that the FBI itself had turned against Comey; and, the president’s key obsession, the fact that Comey wouldn’t publicly acknowledge that the president wasn’t under investigation—that would form the Trump family’s case for firing Comey. That is, everything but the fact that Comey’s FBI was investigating the president.
The Kushner side, for its part, bitterly fought back against any characterization of Kushner as
the prime mover or mastermind, in effect putting the entire Bedminster letter effort—as well as
the determination to get rid of Comey—entirely on the president’s head and casting Kushner as
passive bystander. (The Kushner side’s position was articulated as follows: “Did he [Kushner]
support the decision? Yes. Was he told this was happening? Yes. Did he encourage it? No. Was
he fighting for it [Comey’s ouster] for weeks and months? No. Did he fight [the ouster]? No. Did
he say it would go badly? No.”)
Horrified, McGahn quashed sending it. Nevertheless, it was passed to Sessions and Rosenstein, who quickly began drafting their own version of what Kushner and the president obviously wanted.
“I knew when he got back he might blow at any moment,” said Bannon after the president returned from his Bedminster weekend.
* * *
On Monday morning, May 8, in a meeting in the Oval Office, the president told Priebus and Bannon that he had made his decision: he would fire Director Comey. Both men again made heated pleas against the move, arguing for, at the very least, more discussion. Here was a key technique for managing the president: delay. Rolling something forward likely meant that something else—an equal or greater fiasco—would come along to preempt whatever fiasco was currently at hand. What’s more, delay worked advantageously with Trump’s attention span; whatever the issue of the moment, he would shortly be on to something else. When the meeting ended, Priebus and Bannon thought they had bought some breathing room.
Later that day, Sally Yates and former director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Crime and Terrorism subcommittee—and were greeted by a series of furious tweets from the president.
Here was, Bannon saw again, the essential Trump problem. He hopelessly personalized
everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always
trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight. The battle was
between you and someone else who wanted what you had. For Bannon, reducing the political
world to face-offs and spats belittled the place in history Trump and his administration had
achieved. But it also belied the real powers they were up against. Not people—institutions.
To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, “such a cunt.”
Since her firing on January 30, Yates had remained suspiciously quiet. When journalists
approached her, she, or her intermediaries, explained that per her lawyers she was shut down on
all media. The president believed she was merely lying in wait. In phone calls to friends, he
worried about her “plan” and “strategy,” and he continued to press his after-dinner sources for
what they thought she and Ben Rhodes, Trump’s favorite Obama plotter, had “up their sleeves.”
For each of his enemies—and, actually, for each of his friends—the issue for him came down,
in many ways, to their personal press plan. The media was the battlefield. Trump assumed
everybody wanted his or her fifteen minutes and that everybody had a press strategy for when
they got them. If you couldn’t get press directly for yourself, you became a leaker. There was no
happenstance news, in Trump’s view. All news was manipulated and designed, planned and
planted. All news was to some extent fake—he understood that very well, because he himself
had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the “fake
news” label. “I’ve made stuff up forever, and they always print it,” he bragged.
The return of Sally Yates, with her appointment before the Senate Judiciary Committee, marked the beginning, Trump believed, of a sustained and well-organized media rollout for her. (His press view was confirmed later in May by a lavish, hagiographic profile of Yates in the New Yorker. “How long do you think she was planning this?” he asked, rhetorically. “You know she was. It’s her payday.”) “Yates is only famous because of me,” the president complained bitterly. “Otherwise, who is she? Nobody.”
In front of Congress that Monday morning, Yates delivered a cinematic performance—cool, temperate, detailed, selfless—compounding Trump’s fury and agitation.
* * *
On the morning of Tuesday, May 9, with the president still fixated on Comey, and with Kushner
and his daughter behind him, Priebus again moved to delay: “There’s a right way to do this and a
wrong way to do this,” he told the president. “We don’t want him learning about this on
television. I’m going to say this one last time: this is not the right way to do this. If you want to
do this, the right way is to have him in and have a conversation. This is the decent way and the
professional way.” Once more, the president seemed to calm down and become more focused on
the necessary process.
But that was a false flag. In fact, the president, in order to avoid embracing conventional
process—or, for that matter, any real sense of cause and effect—merely eliminated everybody
else from his process. For most of the day, almost no one would know that he had decided to
take matters into his own hands. In presidential annals, the firing of FBI director James Comey
may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his
own.
As it happened, the Justice Department—Attorney General Sessions and Deputy Attorney
General Rod Rosenstein—were, independent of the president’s own course, preparing their case
against Comey. They would take the Bedminster line and blame Comey for errors of his
handling of the Clinton email mess—a problematic charge, because if that was truly the issue,
why wasn’t Comey dismissed on that basis as soon as the Trump administration took office? But
in fact, quite regardless of the Sessions and Rosenstein case, the president had determined to act
on his own.
Jared and Ivanka were urging the president on, but even they did not know that the axe would shortly fall. Hope Hicks, Trump’s steadfast shadow, who otherwise knew everything the president thought—not least because he was helpless not to express it out loud—didn’t know. Steve Bannon, however much he worried that the president might blow, didn’t know. His chief of staff didn’t know. And his press secretary didn’t know. The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue.
At some point that afternoon Trump told his daughter and son-in-law about his plan. They immediately became coconspirators and firmly shut out any competing advice.
Eerily, it was a notably on-time and unruffled day in the West Wing. Mark Halperin, the political reporter and campaign chronicler, was waiting in the reception area for Hope Hicks, who fetched him a bit before 5:00 p.m. Fox’s Howard Kurtz was there, too, waiting for his appointment with Sean Spicer. And Reince Priebus’s assistant had just been out to tell his five o’clock appointment it would be only a few more minutes.
Just before five, in fact, the president, having not too long before notified McGahn of his
intention, pulled the trigger. Trump’s personal security guard, Keith Schiller, delivered the
termination letter to Comey’s office at the FBI just after five o’clock. The letter’s second
sentence included the words “You are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective
immediately.”
Shortly thereafter, most of the West Wing staff, courtesy of an erroneous report from Fox
News, was for a brief moment under the impression that Comey had resigned. Then, in a series
of information synapses throughout the offices of the West Wing, it became clear what had
actually happened.
“So next it’s a special prosecutor!” said Priebus in disbelief, to no one in particular, when he learned shortly before five o’clock what was happening.
Spicer, who would later be blamed for not figuring out how to positively spin the Comey firing, had only minutes to process it.
Not only had the decision been made by the president with almost no consultation except that
of his inner family circle, but the response, and explanation, and even legal justifications, were
also almost exclusively managed by him and his family. Rosenstein and Sessions’s parallel
rationale for the firing was shoehorned in at the last minute, at which point, at Kushner’s
direction, the initial explanation of Comey’s firing became that the president had acted solely on
their recommendation. Spicer was forced to deliver this unlikely rationale, as was the vice
president. But this pretense unraveled almost immediately, not least because most everyone in
the West Wing, wanting nothing to do with the decision to fire Comey, was helping to unravel it.
The president, along with his family, stood on one side of the White House divide, while the staff—mouths agape, disbelieving and speechless—stood on the other.
But the president seemed also to want it known that he, aroused and dangerous, personally
took down Comey. Forget Rosenstein and Sessions, it was personal. It was a powerful president
and a vengeful one, in every way galled and affronted by those in pursuit of him, and determined
to protect his family, who were in turn determined to have him protect them.
“The daughter will take down the father,” said Bannon, in a Shakespearian mood.
Within the West Wing there was much replaying of alternative scenarios. If you wanted to get rid of Comey, there were surely politic ways of doing it—which had in fact been suggested to Trump. (A curious one—an idea that later would seem ironic—was to get rid of General Kelly at Homeland Security and move Comey into that job.) But the point really was that Trump had wanted to confront and humiliate the FBI director. Cruelty was a Trump attribute.
The firing had been carried out publicly and in front of his family—catching Comey entirely off guard as he gave a speech in California. Then the president had further personalized the blow with an ad hominem attack on the director, suggesting that the FBI itself was on Trump’s side and that it, too, had only contempt for Comey.
The next day, as though to further emphasize and delight in both the insult and his personal
impunity, the president met with Russian bigwigs in the Oval Office, including Russia’s
Ambassador Kislyak, the very focus of much of the Trump-Russia investigation. To the Russians
he said: “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure
because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Then, to boot, he revealed information supplied to the
United States by Israel from its agent in place in Syria about ISIS using laptops to smuggle
bombs onto airlines—revealing enough information to compromise the Israeli agent. (This
incident did not help Trump’s reputation in intelligence circles, since, in spycraft, human sources
are to be protected above all other secrets.)
“It’s Trump,” said Bannon. “He thinks he can fire the FBI.”
* * *
Trump believed that firing Comey would make him a hero. Over the next forty-eight hours he
spun his side to various friends. It was simple: he had stood up to the FBI. He proved that he was
willing to take on the state power. The outsider against the insiders. After all, that’s why he was
elected.
At some level he had a point. One reason presidents don’t fire the director of the FBI is that
they fear the consequences. It’s the Hoover syndrome: any president can be hostage to what the
FBI knows, and a president who treats the FBI with something less than deference does so at his
own peril. But this president had stood up to the feds. One man against the unaccountable power
that the left had long railed against—and that more recently the right had taken as a Holy Grail
issue, too. “Everybody should be rooting for me,” the president said to friends, more and more
plaintively.
Here was another peculiar Trump attribute: an inability to see his actions the way most others saw them. Or to fully appreciate how people expected him to behave. The notion of the presidency as an institutional and political concept, with an emphasis on ritual and propriety and semiotic messaging—statesmanship—was quite beyond him.
Inside the government, the response to Comey’s firing was a kind of bureaucratic revulsion. Bannon had tried to explain to Trump the essential nature of career government officials, people whose comfort zone was in their association with hegemonic organizations and a sense of a higher cause—they were different, very different, from those who sought individual distinction. Whatever else Comey might be, he was first and foremost a bureaucrat. Casting him ignominiously out was yet another Trump insult to the bureaucracy.
Rod Rosenstein, the author of the letter that ostensibly provided the justification for firing
Comey, now stood in the line of fire. The fifty-two-year-old Rosenstein, who, in rimless glasses,
seemed to style himself as a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, was the longest-serving U.S. attorney in the
country. He lived within the system, all by the book, his highest goal seeming to be to have
people say he did things by the book. He was a straight shooter—and he wanted everyone to
know it.
All this was undermined by Trump—trashed, even. The brow-beating and snarling president had hectored the country’s two top law enforcement officials into an ill-considered or, at the very least, an ill-timed indictment of the director of the FBI. Rosenstein was already feeling used and abused. And then he was shown to have been tricked, too. He was a dupe.
The president had forced Rosenstein and Sessions to construct a legal rationale, yet then he
could not even maintain the bureaucratic pretense of following it. Having enlisted Rosenstein
and Sessions in his plot, Trump now exposed their efforts to present a reasonable and
aboveboard case as a sham—and, arguably, a plan to obstruct justice. The president made it
perfectly clear that he hadn’t fired the director of the FBI because he did Hillary wrong; he fired
Comey because the FBI was too aggressively investigating him and his administration.
Hyper-by-the-book Rod Rosenstein—heretofore the quintessential apolitical player— immediately became, in Washington eyes, a hopeless Trump tool. But Rosenstein’s revenge was deft, swift, overwhelming, and (of course) by the book.
Given the decision of the attorney general to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, it
fell under the authority of the deputy attorney general to determine whether a conflict existed—
that is, whether the deputy attorney general, because of self-interest, might not be able to act
objectively—and if, in his sole discretion, he judged a conflict to exist, to appoint an outside
special counsel with wide powers and responsibilities to conduct an investigation and,
potentially, a prosecution.
On May 17, twelve days after FBI director Comey was fired, without consulting the White House or the attorney general, Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to oversee the investigation of Trump’s, his campaign’s, and his staff’s ties to Russia. If Michael Flynn had recently become the most powerful man in Washington for what he might reveal about the president, now Mueller arguably assumed that position because he had the power to make Flynn, and all other assorted Trump cronies and flunkies, squeal.
Rosenstein, of course, perhaps with some satisfaction, understood that he had delivered what could be a mortal blow to the Trump presidency.
Bannon, shaking his head in wonder about Trump, commented drily: “He doesn’t necessarily see what’s coming.”