The foreign policy establishment had a long and well-honed relationship with MBS’s rival, the
crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN). Key NSA and State Department figures were
alarmed that Kushner’s discussions and fast-advancing relationship with MBS would send a
dangerous message to MBN. And of course it did. The foreign policy people believed Kushner
was being led by MBS, whose real views were entirely untested. The Kushner view was either,
naïvely, that he wasn’t being led, or, with the confidence of a thirty-six-year-old assuming the
new prerogatives of the man in charge, that he didn’t care: let’s embrace anybody who will
embrace us.
The Kushner/MBS plan that emerged was straightforward in a way that foreign policy usually
isn’t: If you give us what we want, we’ll give you what you want. On MBS’s assurance that he
would deliver some seriously good news, he was invited to visit the White House in March. (The
Saudis arrived with a big delegation, but they were received at the White House by only the
president’s small circle—and the Saudis took particular note that Trump ordered Priebus to jump
up and fetch him things during the meeting.) The two large men, the older Trump and much
younger MBS—both charmers, flatterers, and country club jokers, each in their way—grandly
hit it off.
It was an aggressive bit of diplomacy. MBS was using this Trump embrace as part of his own
power play in the kingdom. And the Trump White House, ever denying this was the case, let
him. In return, MBS offered a basket of deals and announcements that would coincide with a
scheduled presidential visit to Saudi Arabia—Trump’s first trip abroad. Trump would get a
“win.”
Planned before the Comey firing and Mueller hiring, the trip had State Department
professionals alarmed. The itinerary—May 19 to May 27—was too long for any president,
particularly such an untested and untutored one. (Trump himself, full of phobias about travel and
unfamiliar locations, had been grumbling about the burdens of the trip.) But coming immediately
after Comey and Mueller it was a get-out-of-Dodge godsend. There couldn’t have been a better
time to be making headlines far from Washington. A road trip could transform everything.
Almost the entire West Wing, along with State Department and National Security staff, was on board for the trip: Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Stephen Bannon, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Hope Hicks, Sean Spicer, Stephen Miller, Joe Hagin, Rex Tillerson, and Michael Anton. Also included were Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary; Dan Scavino, the administration’s social media director; Keith Schiller, the president’s personal security adviser; and Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. (Ross was widely ridiculed for never missing an Air Force One opportunity—as Bannon put it, “Wilbur is Zelig, every time you turn around he’s in a picture.”) This trip and the robust American delegation was the antidote, and alternate universe to the Mueller appointment.
The president and his son-in-law could barely contain their confidence and enthusiasm. They felt certain that they had set out on the road to peace in the Middle East—and in this, they were much like a number of other administrations that had come before them.
Trump was effusive in his praise for Kushner. “Jared’s gotten the Arabs totally on our side.
Done deal,” he assured one of his after-dinner callers before leaving on the trip. “It’s going to be
beautiful.”
“He believed,” said the caller, “that this trip could pull it out, like a twist in a bad movie.”
* * *
On the empty roads of Riyadh, the presidential motorcade passed billboards with pictures of
Trump and the Saudi king (MBS’s eighty-one-year-old father) with the legend TOGETHER WE
PREVAIL.
In part, the president’s enthusiasm seemed to be born out of—or perhaps had caused—a
substantial exaggeration of what had actually been agreed to during the negotiations ahead of the
trip. In the days before his departure, he was telling people that the Saudis were going to finance
an entirely new military presence in the kingdom, supplanting and even replacing the U.S.
command headquarters in Qatar. And there would be “the biggest breakthrough in Israel-
Palestine negotiations ever.” It would be “the game changer, major like has never been seen.”
In truth, his version of what would be accomplished was a quantum leap beyond what was
actually agreed, but that did not seem to alter his feelings of zeal and delight.
The Saudis would immediately buy $110 billion’s worth of American arms, and a total of
$350 billion over ten years. “Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States
and jobs, jobs, jobs,” declared the president. Plus, the Americans and the Saudis would together
“counter violent extremist messaging, disrupt financing of terrorism, and advance defense
cooperation.” And they would establish a center in Riyadh to fight extremism. And if this was
not exactly peace in the Middle East, the president, according to the secretary of state, “feels like
there’s a moment in time here. The president’s going to talk with Netanyahu about the process
going forward. He’s going to be talking to President Abbas about what he feels is necessary for
the Palestinians to be successful.”
It was all a Trumpian big deal. Meanwhile, the First Family—POTUS, FLOTUS, and Jared
and Ivanka—were ferried around in gold golf carts, and the Saudis threw a $75 million party in
Trump’s honor, with Trump getting to sit on a thronelike chair. (The president, while receiving
an honor from the Saudi king, appeared in a photograph to have bowed, arousing some right-
wing ire.)
Fifty Arab and Muslim nations were summoned by the Saudis to pay the president court. The
president called home to tell his friends how natural and easy this was, and how, inexplicably
and suspiciously, Obama had messed it all up. There “has been a little strain, but there won’t be
strain with this administration,” the president assured Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the king of
Bahrain.
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian strongman, ably stroked the president and said, “You are a
unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible.” (To Sisi, Trump replied, “Love your
shoes. Boy, those shoes. Man…… ”)
It was, in dramatic ways, a shift in foreign policy attitude and strategy—and its effects were almost immediate. The president, ignoring if not defying foreign policy advice, gave a nod to the Saudis’ plan to bully Qatar. Trump’s view was that Qatar was providing financial support to terror groups—pay no attention to a similar Saudi history. (Only some members of the Saudi royal family had provided such support, went the new reasoning.) Within weeks of the trip, MBS, detaining MBN quite in the dead of night, would force him to relinquish the Crown Prince title, which MBS would then assume for himself. Trump would tell friends that he and Jared had engineered this: “We’ve put our man on top!”
From Riyadh, the presidential party went on to Jerusalem, where the president met with
Netanyahu and, in Bethlehem, with Abbas, expressing ever greater certainty that, in his third-
person guise, “Trump will make peace.” Then to Rome to meet the pope. Then to Brussels,
where, in character, he meaningfully drew the line between Western-alliance-based foreign
policy, which had been firmly in place since World War II, and the new America First ethos.
In Trump’s view, all this should have been presidency-shaping stuff. He couldn’t believe his
dramatic accomplishments weren’t getting bigger play. He was simply in denial, Bannon,
Priebus, and others noted, about the continuing and competing Comey and Mueller headlines.
One of Trump’s deficiencies—a constant in the campaign and, so far, in the presidency—was
his uncertain grasp of cause and effect. Until now, whatever problems he might have caused in
the past had reliably been supplanted by new events, giving him the confidence that one bad
story can always be replaced by a better, more dramatic story. He could always change the
conversation. The Saudi trip and his bold campaign to upend the old foreign policy world order
should have accomplished exactly that. But the president continued to find himself trapped,
incredulously on his part, by Comey and Mueller. Nothing seemed to move on from those two
events.
After the Saudi leg of the trip, Bannon and Priebus, both exhausted by the trip’s intense proximity to the president and his family, peeled off and headed back to Washington. It was now their job to deal with what had become, in the White House staff’s absence, the actual, even ultimate, presidency-shaping crisis.
* * *
What did the people around Trump actually think of Trump? This was not just a reasonable question, it was the question those around Trump most asked themselves. They constantly struggled to figure out what they themselves actually thought and what they thought everybody else was truly thinking.
Mostly they kept their answers to themselves, but in the instance of Comey and Mueller, beyond all the usual dodging and weaving rationalizations, there really wasn’t anybody, other than the president’s family, who didn’t very pointedly blame Trump himself.
This was the point at which an emperors-new-clothes threshold was crossed. Now you could, out loud, rather freely doubt his judgment, acumen, and, most of all, the advice he was getting. “He’s not only crazy,” declared Tom Barrack to a friend, “he’s stupid.”
But Bannon, along with Priebus, had strongly opposed the Comey firing, while Ivanka and
Jared had not only supported it, but insisted on it. This seismic event prompted a new theme
from Bannon, repeated by him widely, which was that every piece of advice from the couple was
bad advice.
Nobody now believed that firing Comey was a good idea; even the president seemed sheepish. Hence, Bannon saw his new role as saving Trump—and Trump would always need saving. He might be a brilliant actor but he could not manage his own career.
And for Bannon, this new challenge brought a clear benefit: when Trump’s fortune sank, Bannon’s rose.
On the trip to the Middle East, Bannon went to work. He became focused on the figure of Lanny Davis, one of the Clinton impeachment lawyers who, for the better part of two years, became a near round-the-clock spokesperson and public defender of the Clinton White House. Bannon judged Comey-Mueller to be as threatening to the Trump White House as Monica Lewinsky and Ken Starr were to the Clinton White House, and he saw the model for escaping a mortal fate in the Clinton response.
“What the Clintons did was to go to the mattresses with amazing discipline,” he explained. “They set up an outside shop and then Bill and Hillary never mentioned it again. They ground through it. Starr had them dead to rights and they got through it.”
Bannon knew exactly what needed to be done: seal off the West Wing and build a separate
legal and communications staff to defend the president. In this construct, the president would
occupy a parallel reality, removed from and uninvolved with what would become an obvious
partisan blood sport—as it had in the Clinton model. Politics would be relegated to its nasty
corner, and Trump would conduct himself as the president and as the commander in chief.
“So we’re going to do it,” insisted Bannon, with joie de guerre and manic energy, “the way they did it. Separate war room, separate lawyers, separate spokespeople. It’s keeping that fight over there so we can wage this other fight over here. Everybody gets this. Well, maybe not Trump so much. Not clear. Maybe a little. Not what he imagined.”
Bannon, in great excitement, and Priebus, grateful for an excuse to leave the president’s side, rushed back to the West Wing to begin to cordon it off.
It did not escape Priebus’s notice that Bannon had in mind to create a rear guard of defenders
—David Bossie, Corey Lewandowski, and Jason Miller, all of whom would be outside
spokespeople—that would largely be loyal to him. Most of all, it did not escape Priebus that
Bannon was asking the president to play a role entirely out of character: the cool, steady, long-
suffering chief executive.
And it certainly didn’t help that they were unable to hire a law firm with a top-notch whitecollar government practice. By the time Bannon and Priebus were back in Washington, three blue-chip firms had said no. All of them were afraid they would face a rebellion among the younger staff if they represented Trump, afraid Trump would publicly humiliate them if the going got tough, and afraid Trump would stiff them for the bill.
In the end, nine top firms turned them down.
18
BANNON REDUX
Bannon was back, according to the Bannon faction. According to Bannon himself: “I’m good. I’m good. I’m back. I said don’t do it. You don’t fire the director of the FBI. The geniuses around here thought otherwise.”
Was Bannon back? asked the worried other side of the house—Jared and Ivanka, Dina Powell, Gary Cohn, Hope Hicks, H. R. McMaster.
If he was back, that meant he had successfully defied the organizational premise of the Trump
White House: the family would always prevail. Steve Bannon had, even in his internal exile, not
stopped his running public verbal assault on Jared and Ivanka. Off the record became Bannon’s
effective on the record. These were bitter, sometimes hilarious, denunciations of the couple’s
acumen, intelligence, and motives: “They think they’re defending him, but they are always
defending themselves.”
Now he declared they were finished as a power center—destroyed. And if not, they would
destroy the president with their terrible and self-serving advice. Even worse than Jared was
Ivanka. “She was a nonevent on the campaign. She became a White House staffer and that’s
when people suddenly realized she’s dumb as a brick. A little marketing savvy and has a look,
but as far as understanding actually how the world works and what politics is and what it means
—nothing. Once you expose that, you lose such credibility. Jared just kind of flits in and does the
Arab stuff.”
The folks on the Jarvanka side seemed more and more genuinely afraid of what might happen
if they crossed the Bannon side. Because the Bannonites, they truly seemed to fear, were
assassins.
On the flight to Riyadh, Dina Powell approached Bannon about a leak involving her to a rightwing news site. She told him she knew the leak had come from Julia Hahn, one of Bannon’s people and a former Breitbart writer.
“You should take it up with her,” said an amused Bannon. “But she’s a beast. And she will come at you. Let me know how it works out.”
Among Bannon’s many regular targets, Powell had become a favorite. She was often billed as Deputy National Security Advisor; that was her sometime designation even in the New York Times. Actually, she was Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy—the difference, Bannon pointed out, between the COO of a hotel chain and the concierge.
Coming back from the overseas trip, Powell began to talk in earnest to friends about her timetable to get out of the White House and back into a private-sector job. Sheryl Sandberg, she said, was her model.
“Oh my fucking god,” said Bannon.
On May 26, the day before the presidential party returned from the overseas trip, the
Washington Post reported that during the transition, Kushner and Sergey Kislyak, the Russian
ambassador, had, at Kushner’s instigation, discussed the possibility of having the Russians set up
a private communications channel between the transition team and the Kremlin. The Post cited
“U.S. officials briefed on intelligence reports.” The Jarvanka side believed that Bannon was the
source.
Part of the by now deep enmity between the First Family couple and their allies and Bannon and his team was the Jarvanka conviction that Bannon had played a part in many of the reports of Kushner’s interactions with the Russians. This was not, in other words, merely an internal policy war; it was a death match. For Bannon to live, Kushner would have to be wholly discredited— pilloried, investigated, possibly even jailed.
Bannon, assured by everyone that there was no winning against the Trump family, hardly tried
to hide his satisfied belief that he was going to outplay them. In the Oval Office, in front of her
father, Bannon openly attacked her. “You,” he said, pointing at her as the president watched, “are
a fucking liar.” Ivanka’s bitter complaints to her father, which in the past had diminished
Bannon, were now met by a hands-off Trump: “I told you this is a tough town, baby.”
* * *
But if Bannon was back, it was far from clear what being back meant. Trump being Trump, was this true rehabilitation, or did he feel an even deeper rancor toward Bannon for having survived his initial intention to kill him? Nobody really thought Trump forgot—instead, he dwelled and ruminated and chewed. “One of the worst things is when he believes you’ve succeeded at his expense,” explained Sam Nunberg, once on the inside of the Trump circle, then cast to the outside. “If your win is in any way perceived as his loss, phew.”
For his part, Bannon believed he was back because, at a pivotal moment, his advice had proved vastly better than that of the “geniuses.” Firing Comey, the solve-all-problems Jarvanka solution, had indeed unleashed a set of terrible consequences.
The Jarvanka side believed that Bannon was in essence blackmailing the president. As Bannon went, so went the virulence of right-wing digital media. Despite his apparent obsession with the “fake news” put out by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, for the president the threat of fake news was actually greater on the right. Though he would never call out fake news on Fox, Breitbart, and the others, these outlets—which could conceivably spew a catchall of conspiracies in which a weak Trump sold out to a powerful establishment—were potentially far more dangerous than their counterparts on the left.
Bannon, too, was seen to be rectifying an earlier bureaucratic mistake. Where initially he had been content to be the brains of the operation—confident that he was vastly smarter than everybody else (and, indeed, few tried to challenge him for that title)—and not staff up, now he was putting his organization and loyalists firmly in place. His off-balance-sheet communications staff—Bossie, Lewandowski, Jason Miller, Sam Nunberg (even though he had long fallen out with Trump himself), and Alexandra Preate—formed quite a private army of leakers and defenders. What’s more, whatever breach there had been between Bannon and Priebus came smoothly together over their mutual loathing of Jared and Ivanka. The professional White House was united against the amateur family White House.
Adding to Bannon’s new bureaucratic advantage, he had maximum influence on the staffing
of the new firewall team, the lawyers and comm staff who would collectively become the Lanny
Davis of the Trump defense. Unable to hire prestige talent, Bannon turned to one of the president’s longtime hit-man lawyers, Marc Kasowitz. Bannon had previously bonded with Kasowitz when the attorney had handled a series of near-death problems on the campaign, including dealing with a vast number of allegations and legal threats from an ever growing list of women accusing Trump of molesting and harassing them.
On May 31, the Bannon firewall plan went into effect. Henceforth, all discussion related to Russia, the Mueller and congressional investigations, and other personal legal issues would be entirely handled by the Kasowitz team. The president, as Bannon described the plan in private and as he urged his boss, would no longer be addressing any of these areas. Among the many, many efforts to force Trump into presidential mode, this was the latest.
Bannon then installed Mark Corallo, a former Karl Rove communications staffer, as the firewall spokesperson. He was also planning to put in Bossie and Lewandowski as part of the crisis management team. And at Bannon’s prompting, Kasowitz attempted to further insulate the president by giving his client a central piece of advice: send the kids home.
Bannon was indeed back. It was his team. It was his wall around the president—one that he hoped would keep Jarvanka out.
Bannon’s formal moment of being back was marked by a major milestone. On June 1, after a long and bitter internal debate, the president announced that he had decided to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. For Bannon, it was a deeply satisfying slap in the face of liberal rectitude—Elon Musk and Bob Iger immediately resigned from Trump’s business council—and confirmation of Trump’s true Bannonite instincts.
It was, likewise, the move that Ivanka Trump had campaigned hardest against in the White
House.
“Score,” said Bannon. “The bitch is dead.”
* * *
There are few modern political variables more disruptive than a dedicated prosecutor. It’s the ultimate wild card.
A prosecutor means that the issue under investigation—or, invariably, cascading issues—will be a constant media focus. Setting their own public stage, prosecutors are certain leakers.
It means that everybody in a widening circle has to hire a lawyer. Even tangential involvement can cost six figures; central involvement quickly rises into the millions.
By early summer, there was already an intense seller’s market in Washington for top criminal legal talent. As the Mueller investigation got under way, White House staffers made a panicky rush to get the best firm before someone else got there first and created a conflict.
“Can’t talk about Russia, nothing, can’t go there,” said Katie Walsh, now three months removed from the White House, on advice of her new counsel.
Any interviews or depositions given to investigators risked putting you in jeopardy. What’s more, every day in the White House brought new dangers: any random meeting you might find yourself in exposed you more.
Bannon kept insisting on the absolute importance of this point—and for him the strategic
importance. If you didn’t want to find yourself getting wrung out in front of Congress, your
career and your net worth in jeopardy, be careful who you spoke to. More to the point: you must
not under any circumstances speak to Jared and Ivanka, who were now Russia toxic. It was
Bannon’s widely advertised virtue and advantage: “I’ve never been to Russia. I don’t know
anybody from Russia. I’ve never spoken to any Russians. And I’d just as well not speak to
anyone who has.”
Bannon observed a hapless Pence in a lot of “wrong meetings,” and helped to bring in the Republican operative Nick Ayers as Pence’s chief of staff, and to get “our fallback guy” out of the White House and “running around the world and looking like a vice president.”
And beyond the immediate fears and disruption, there was the virtually certain outcome that a special prosecutor delegated to find a crime would find one—likely many. Everybody became a potential agent of implicating others. Dominos would fall. Targets would flip.
Paul Manafort, making a good living in international financial gray areas, his risk calculation based on the long-shot odds that an under-the-radar privateer would ever receive close scrutiny, would now be subjected to microscopic review. His nemesis, Oleg Deripaska—still pursuing his $17 million claim against Manafort and himself looking for favorable treatment from federal authorities who had restricted his travel to the United States—was continuing his own deep investigation into Manafort’s Russian and Ukrainian business affairs.
Tom Barrack, privy to the president’s stream of consciousness as well as his financial history, was suddenly taking stock of his own exposure. Indeed, all the billionaire friends with whom Trump got on the phone and gossiped and rambled were potential witnesses.
In the past, administrations forced to deal with a special prosecutor appointed to investigate and prosecute matters with which the president might have been involved usually became consumed by the effort to cope. Their tenure broke into “before” and “after” periods—with the “after” period hopelessly bogged down in the soap opera of G-man pursuit. Now it looked like the “after” period would be almost the entirety of the Trump administration.
The idea of formal collusion and artful conspiracy—as media and Democrats more or less
breathlessly believed or hoped had happened between Trump and the Russians—seemed
unlikely to everybody in the White House. (Bannon’s comment that the Trump campaign was
not organized enough to collude with its own state organizations became everybody’s favorite
talking point—not least because it was true.) But nobody was vouching for the side deals and
freelance operations and otherwise nothing-burger stuff that was a prosecutor’s daily bread and
the likely detritus of the Trump hangers-on. And everybody believed that if the investigation
moved into the long chain of Trump financial transactions, it would almost certainly reach the
Trump family and the Trump White House.
And then there was the president’s insistent claim that he could do something. I can fire him, he would say. Indeed, it was another of his repetitive loops: I can fire him. I can fire him. Mueller. The idea of a showdown in which the stronger, more determined, more intransigent, more damn-the-consequences man prevails was central to Trump’s own personal mythology. He lived in a mano a mano world, one in which if your own respectability and sense of personal dignity were not a paramount issue—if you weren’t weak in the sense of needing to seem like a reasonable and respectable person—you had a terrific advantage. And if you made it personal, if you believed that when the fight really mattered that it was kill or be killed, you were unlikely to meet someone willing to make it as personal as you were.
This was Bannon’s fundamental insight about Trump: he made everything personal, and he was helpless not to.
* * *