Dissuaded by everyone from focusing his anger on Mueller (at least for now), the president focused on Sessions.
Sessions—“Beauregard”—was a close Bannon ally, and in May and June the president’s
almost daily digs against the attorney general—beyond even his loyalty and resolve, Trump
issued scathing criticism of his stature, voice, and dress—provided a sudden bit of good news for
the anti-Bannon side of the house. Bannon, they reasoned, couldn’t really be on top if his key
proxy was now being blamed for everything bad in Trump’s life. As always, Trump’s regard or
scorn was infectious. If you were in favor, then whatever and whomever he associated with you
was also in favor. If you weren’t, then everything associated with you was poisonous.
The brutality of Trump’s dissatisfaction kept increasing. A small man with a Mr. Magoo stature and an old-fashioned Southern accent, Sessions was bitterly mocked by the president, who drew a corrosive portrait of physical and mental weakness. Insult trauma radiated out of the Oval Office. You could hear it when passing by.
Bannon’s efforts to talk the president down—reminding Trump of the difficulties they would
encounter during another attorney general confirmation, the importance of Sessions to the hard
conservative base, the loyalty that Sessions had shown during the Trump campaign—backfired.
To the anti-Bannon side’s satisfaction, they resulted in another round of Trump’s dissing
Bannon.
The attack on Sessions now became, at least in the president’s mind, the opening salvo in an active effort to replace Sessions as attorney general. But there were only two candidates to run the Justice Department from whom Trump believed he could extract absolute loyalty, Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani. He believed they would both perform kamikaze acts for him—just as everyone else knew they would almost certainly never be confirmed.
* * *
As James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee approached—it would take place on June 8, twelve days after the presidential traveling party returned home from the long trip to the Middle East and Europe—there began among senior staffers an almost open inquiry into Trump’s motives and state of mind.
This seemed spurred by an obvious question: Why hadn’t he fired Comey during his first days of office, when it would likely have been seen as a natural changing of the guard with no clear connection to the Russian investigation? There were many equivocal answers: general disorganization, the fast pace of events, and a genuine sense of innocence and naïveté about the Russian charges. But now there seemed to be a new understanding: Donald Trump believed he had vastly more power, authority, and control than in fact he had, and he believed his talent for manipulating people and bending and dominating them was vastly greater than it was. Pushing this line of reasoning just a little further: senior staff believed the president had a problem with reality, and reality was now overwhelming him.
If true, this notion directly contravened the basic premise of the support for Trump among his
staff. In some sense, not too closely questioned, they believed he had almost magical powers.
Since his success was not explainable, he must have talents beyond what they could fathom. His
instincts. Or his salesman’s gifts. Or his energy. Or just the fact that he was the opposite of what
he was supposed to be. This was out-of-the-ordinary politics—shock-to-the-system politics—but
it could work.
But what if it didn’t? What if they were all profoundly wrong?
Comey’s firing and the Mueller investigation prompted a delayed reckoning that ended
months of willing suspension of disbelief. These sudden doubts and considerations—at the
highest level of government—did not quite yet go to the president’s ability to adequately
function in his job. But they did, arguably for the first time in open discussions, go to the view
that he was hopelessly prone to self-sabotaging his ability to function in the job. This insight, scary as it was, at least left open the possibility that if all the elements of self-sabotage were carefully controlled—his information, his contacts, his public remarks, and the sense of danger and threat to him—he might yet be able to pull it together and successfully perform.
Quite suddenly, this became the prevailing view of the Trump presidency and the opportunity that still beckoned: you can be saved by those around you or brought down by them.
Bannon believed the Trump presidency would fail in some more or less apocalyptic fashion if Kushner and his wife remained Trump’s most influential advisers. Their lack of political or realworld experience had already hobbled the presidency, but since the Comey disaster it was getting worse: as Bannon saw it, they were now acting out of personal panic.
The Kushner side believed that Bannon or Bannonism had pushed the president into a harshness that undermined his natural salesman’s abilities to charm and reach out. Bannon and his ilk had made him the monster he more and more seemed to be.
Meanwhile, virtually everybody believed that a large measure of the fault lay in Reince
Priebus, who had failed to create a White House that could protect the president from himself—
or from Bannon or from his own children. At the same time, believing that the fundamental
problem lay in Priebus was easy scapegoating, not to mention little short of risible: with so little
power, the chief of staff simply wasn’t capable of directing either Trump or those around him.
Priebus himself could, not too helpfully, argue only that no one had any idea how much worse all
this would have been without his long-suffering mediation among the president’s relatives, his
Svengali, and Trump’s own terrible instincts. There might be two or three debacles a day, but
without Priebus’s stoic resolve, and the Trump blows that he absorbed, there might have been a
dozen more.
* * *
On June 8, from a little after ten in the morning to nearly one in the afternoon, James Comey
testified in public before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The former FBI director’s
testimony, quite a tour de force of directness, moral standing, personal honor, and damning
details, left the country with a simple message: the president was likely a fool and certainly a liar.
In the age of modern media politesse, few presidents had been so directly challenged and
impugned before Congress.
Here it was, stark in Comey’s telling: the president regarded the FBI director as working
directly for him, of owing his job to him, and now he wanted something back. “My common
sense,” said Comey, “again, I could be wrong, but my common sense told me what’s going on
here is he’s looking to get something in exchange for granting my request to stay in the job.”
In Comey’s telling, the president wanted the FBI to lay off Michael Flynn. And he wanted to stop the FBI from pursuing its Russia-related investigation. The point could hardly have been clearer: if the president was pressuring the director because he feared that an investigation of Michael Flynn would damage him, then this was an obstruction of justice.
The contrast between the two men, Comey and Trump, was in essence the contrast between good government and Trump himself. Comey came across as precise, compartmentalized, scrupulous in his presentation of the details of what transpired and the nature of his responsibility —he was as by-the-book as it gets. Trump, in the portrait offered by Comey, was shady, shootfrom-the-hip, heedless or even unaware of the rules, deceptive, and in it for himself.
After the hearing ended, the president told everybody he had not watched it, but everybody
knew he had. To the extent that this was, as Trump saw it, a contest between the two men, it was
as direct a juxtaposition as might be imagined. The entire point of the Comey testimony was to recast and contradict what the president had said in his angry and defensive tweets and statements, and to cast suspicion on his actions and motives—and to suggest that the president’s intention was to suborn the director of the FBI.
Even among Trump loyalists who believed, as Trump did, that Comey was a phony and this
was all a put-up job, the nearly universal feeling was that in this mortal game, Trump was quite
defenseless.
* * *
Five days later, on June 13, it was Jeff Sessions’s turn to testify before the Senate Intelligence
Committee. His task was to try to explain the contacts he had had with the Russian ambassador,
contacts that had later caused him to recuse himself—and made him the president’s punching
bag. Unlike Comey, who had been invited to the Senate to show off his virtue—and had seized
the opportunity—Sessions had been invited to defend his equivocation, deception, or stupidity.
In an often testy exchange, the attorney general provided a squirrelly view of executive privilege. Though the president had not in fact evoked executive privilege, Sessions deemed it appropriate to try to protect it anyway.
Bannon, watching the testimony from the West Wing, quickly became frustrated. “Come on, Beauregard,” he said.
Unshaven, Bannon sat at the head of the long wooden conference table in the chief of staff’s office and focused intently on the flat-screen monitor across the room.
“They thought the cosmopolitans would like it if we fired Comey,” he said, with “they” being Jared and Ivanka. “The cosmopolitans would be cheering for us for taking down the man who took Hillary down.” Where the president saw Sessions as the cause of the Comey fiasco, Bannon saw Sessions as a victim of it.
A sylphlike Kushner, wearing a skinny gray suit and skinny black tie, slipped into the room.
(Recently making the rounds was a joke about Kushner being the best-dressed man in
Washington, which is quite the opposite of a compliment.) On occasion the power struggle
between Bannon and Kushner seemed to take physical form. Bannon’s demeanor rarely changed,
but Kushner could be petulant, condescending, and dismissive—or, as he was now, hesitating,
abashed, and respectful.
Bannon ignored Kushner until the younger man cleared his throat. “How’s it going?” Bannon indicated the television set: as in, Watch for yourself.
Finally Bannon spoke. “They don’t realize this is about institutions, not people.”
“They” would appear to be the Jarvanka side—or an even broader construct referring to all those who mindlessly stood with Trump.
“This town is about institutions,” Bannon continued. “We fire the FBI director and we fire the whole FBI. Trump is a man against institutions, and the institutions know it. How do you think that goes down?”
This was shorthand for a favorite Bannon riff: In the course of the campaign, Donald Trump
had threatened virtually every institution in American political life. He was a clown-prince
version of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Trump believed, offering catnip to
deep American ire and resentment, that one man could be bigger than the system. This analysis
presupposed that the institutions of political life were as responsive as those in the commercial
life that Trump was from—and that they yearned to meet the market and find the Zeitgeist. But
what if these institutions—the media, the judiciary, the intelligence community, the greater
executive branch itself, and the “swamp” with its law firms, consultants, influence peddlers, and leakers—were in no way eager to adapt? If, by their nature, they were determined to endure, then this accidental president was up against it.
Kushner seemed unpersuaded. “I wouldn’t put it like that,” he said.
“I think that’s the lesson of the first hundred days that some people around here have learned,” said Bannon, ignoring Kushner. “It’s not going to get better. This is what it’s like.”
“I don’t know,” said Kushner.
“Know it,” said Bannon.
“I think Sessions is doing okay,” said Kushner. “Don’t you?”
19
MIKA WHO?
The media had unlocked the value of Donald Trump, but few in the media had unlocked it more
directly and personally than Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. Their MSNBC breakfast
show was an ongoing soap-opera-ish or possibly Oprahesque drama about their relationship with
Trump—how he had disappointed them, how far they had come from their original regard for
him, and how much and how pathetically he regularly embarrassed himself. The bond he once
had with them, forged through mutual celebrity and a shared proprietary sense of politics
(Scarborough, the former congressman, seemed to feel that he ought reasonably to be president
as much as Donald Trump felt he should be), had distinguished the show during the campaign;
now its public fraying became part of the daily news cycle. Scarborough and Brzezinski lectured
him, channeled the concerns of his friends and family, upbraided him, and openly worried about
him—that he was getting the wrong advice (Bannon) and, too, that his mental powers were
slipping. They also staked a claim at representing the reasonable center-right alternative to the
president, and indeed were quite a good barometer of both the center-right’s efforts to deal with
him and its day-to-day difficulties of living with him.
Trump, believing he had been used and abused by Scarborough and Brzezinski, claimed he’d
stopped watching the show. But Hope Hicks, every morning, quaking, had to recount it for him.
Morning Joe was a ground-zero study in the way the media had over-invested in Trump. He
was the whale against which media emotions, self-regard, ego, joie de guerre, career
advancement, and desire to be at the center of the story, too, all churned in nearly ecstatic
obsession. In reverse regard, the media was the same whale, serving the same function, for
Trump.
To this Trump added another tic, a lifelong sense that people were constantly taking unfair advantage of him. This perhaps came from his father’s cheapness and lack of generosity, or from his own overawareness of being a rich kid (and, no doubt, his insecurities about this), or from a negotiator’s profound understanding that it is never win-win, that where there is profit there is loss. Trump simply could not abide the knowledge that somebody was getting a leg up at his expense. His was a zero-sum ecosystem. In the world of Trump, anything that he deemed of value either accrued to him or had been robbed from him.
Scarborough and Brzezinski had taken their relationship with Trump and amply monetized it,
while putting no percentage in his pocket—and in this instance, he judged his commission
should be slavishly favorable treatment. To say this drove him mad would be an understatement.
He dwelled and fixated on the perceived injustice. Don’t mention Joe or Mika to him was a
standing proscription.
His wounded feelings and incomprehension at the failure of people whose embrace he sought
to, in return, embrace him was “deep, crazy deep,” said his former aide Sam Nunberg, who had
run afoul of his need for 100 percent approbation and his bitter suspicion of being profited from.