the two sides. For the Jarvankas, Bannon’s rant was also a display that they believed they could use against him. The Jarvanka people pushed Priebus to refer the matter to the White House counsel, billing this as the most verbally abusive moment in the history of the West Wing, or at least certainly up among the most abusive episodes ever.
For Bannon, this was just more Jarvanka desperation—they were the ones, not him, saddled with Comey-Mueller. They were the ones panicking and out of control.
For the rest of his time in the White House, Bannon would not speak to Hicks again.
20
MCMASTER AND SCARAMUCCI
Trump was impetuous and yet did not like to make decisions, at least not ones that seemed to corner him into having to analyze a problem. And no decision hounded him so much—really from the first moment of his presidency—as what to do about Afghanistan. It was a conundrum that became a battle. It involved not only his own resistance to analytic reasoning, but the left brain/right brain divide of his White House, the split between those who argued for disruption and those who wanted to uphold the status quo.
In this, Bannon became the disruptive and unlikely White House voice for peace—or anyway
a kind of peace. In Bannon’s view, only he and the not-too-resolute backbone of Donald Trump
stood between consigning fifty thousand more American soldiers to hopelessness in Afghanistan.
Representing the status quo—and, ideally, a surge on top of the status quo—was H. R.
McMaster, who, next to Jarvanka, had become Bannon’s prime target for abuse. On this front,
Bannon forged an easy bond with the president, who didn’t much hide his contempt for the
Power-Point general. Bannon and the president enjoyed trash-talking McMaster together.
McMaster was a protégé of David Petraeus, the former CENTCOM and Afghanistan commander who became Obama’s CIA director before resigning in a scandal involving a love affair and the mishandling of classified information. Petraeus and now McMaster represented a kind of business-as-usual approach in Afghanistan and the Middle East. A stubborn McMaster kept proposing to the president new versions of the surge, but at each pitch Trump would wave him out of the Oval Office and roll his eyes in despair and disbelief.
The president’s distaste and rancor for McMaster grew on pace with the approaching need to finally make a decision on Afghanistan, a decision he continued to put off. His position on Afghanistan—a military quagmire he knew little about, other than that it was a quagmire—had always been a derisive and caustic kiss-off of the sixteen-year war. Having inherited it did not make his feelings warmer or inspire him to want to dwell on it further. He knew the war was cursed and, knowing that, felt no need to know more. He put the responsibility for it on two of his favorite people to blame: Bush and Obama.
For Bannon, Afghanistan represented one more failure of establishment thinking. More
precisely, it represented the establishment’s inability to confront failure.
Curiously, McMaster had written a book on exactly this subject, a scathing critique of the
unchallenged assumptions with which military leaders pursued the Vietnam War. The book was
embraced by liberals and the establishment, with whom, in Bannon’s view, McMaster had
become hopelessly aligned. And now—ever afraid of the unknown, intent on keeping options
open, dedicated to stability, and eager to protect his establishment cred—McMaster was
recommending a huge troop surge in Afghanistan.
* * *
By early July, the pressure to make a decision was approaching the boiling point. Trump had
already authorized the Pentagon to deploy the troop resources it believed were needed, but
Defense Secretary Mattis refused to act without a specific authorization from the president.
Trump would finally have to make the call—unless he could find a way to put it off again.
Bannon’s thought was that the decision could be made for the president—a way the president
liked to have decisions made—if Bannon could get rid of McMaster. That would both head off
the strongest voice for more troops and also avenge Bannon’s ouster by McMaster’s hand from
the NSC.
With the president promising that he would make up his mind by August, and McMaster, Mattis, and Tillerson pressing for a decision as soon as possible, Bannon-inspired media began a campaign to brand McMaster as a globalist, interventionist, and all around not-our-kind-of-
Trumper—and, to boot, soft on Israel.
It was a scurrilous, albeit partly true, attack. McMaster was in fact talking to Petraeus often. The kicker was the suggestion that McMaster was giving inside dope to Petraeus, a pariah because of his guilty plea regarding his mishandling of classified information. It was also the case that McMaster was disliked by the president and on the point of being dismissed.
It was Bannon, riding high again, enjoying himself in a moment of supreme overconfidence. Indeed, in part to prove there were other options beyond more troops or humiliating defeat— and logically there probably weren’t more options—Bannon became a sponsor of Blackwaterfounder Erik Prince’s obviously self-serving idea to replace the U.S. military force with private contractors and CIA and Special Operations personnel. The notion was briefly embraced by the president, then ridiculed by the military.
By now Bannon believed McMaster would be out by August. He was sure he had the president’s word on this. Done deal. “McMaster wants to send more troops to Afghanistan, so we’re going to send him,” said a triumphal Bannon. In Bannon’s scenario, Trump would give McMaster a fourth star and “promote” him to top military commander in Afghanistan.
As with the chemical attack in Syria, it was Dina Powell—even as she made increasingly determined efforts to get herself out of the White House, either on a Sheryl Sandberg trajectory or, stopping first at a way station, as ambassador to the United Nations—who struggled to help support the least disruptive, most keep-all-options-open approach. In this, both because the approach seemed like the safest course and because it was the opposite of Bannon’s course, she readily recruited Jared and Ivanka.
The solution Powell endorsed, which was designed to put the problem and the reckoning off
for another year or two or three, was likely to make the United States’ position in Afghanistan
even more hopeless. Instead of sending fifty or sixty thousand troops—which, at insupportable
cost and the risk of national fury, might in fact win the war—the Pentagon would send some
much lower number, one which would arouse little notice and merely prevent us from losing the
war. In the Powell and Jarvanka view, it was the moderate, best-case, easiest-to-sell course, and
it struck just the right balance between the military’s unacceptable scenarios: retreat and dishonor
or many more troops.
Before long, a plan to send four, five, six, or (tops) seven thousand troops became the middle-
course strategy supported by the national security establishment and most everyone else save for
Bannon and the president. Powell even helped design a PowerPoint deck that McMaster began
using with the president: pictures of Kabul in the 1970s when it still looked something like a modern city. It could be like this again, the president was told, if we are resolute!
But even with almost everyone arrayed against him, Bannon was confident he was winning. He had a united right-wing press with him, and, he believed, a fed-up, working-class Trump base —its children the likely Afghanistan fodder. Most of all, he had the president. Pissed off that he was being handed the same problem and the same options that were handed Obama, Trump continued to heap spleen and mockery on McMaster.
Kushner and Powell organized a leak campaign in McMaster’s defense. Their narrative was
not a pro-troops defense; instead, it was about Bannon’s leaks and his use of right-wing media to
besmirch McMaster, “one of the most decorated and respected generals of his generation.” The
issue was not Afghanistan, the issue was Bannon. In this narrative, it was McMaster, a figure of
stability, against Bannon, a figure of disruption. It was the New York Times and the Washington
Post, who came to the defense of McMaster, against Breitbart and its cronies and satellites.
It was the establishment and never-Trumpers against the America-first Trumpkins. In many
respects, Bannon was outgunned and outnumbered, yet he still thought he had it nailed. And
when he won, not only would another grievously stupid chapter in the war in Afghanistan be
avoided, but Jarvanka, and Powell, their factotum, would be further consigned to irrelevance and
powerlessness.
* * *
As the debate moved toward resolution, the NSC, in its role as a presenter of options rather than an advocate for them (although of course it was advocating, too), presented three: withdrawal; Erik Prince’s army of contractors; and a conventional, albeit limited, surge.
Withdrawal, whatever its merits—and however much a takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban could be delayed or mitigated—still left Donald Trump with having lost a war, an insupportable position for the president.
The second option, a force of contractors and the CIA, was largely deep-sixed by the CIA. The
agency had spent sixteen years successfully avoiding Afghanistan, and everyone knew that
careers were not advanced in Afghanistan, they died in Afghanistan. So please keep us out of it.
That left McMaster’s position, a modest surge, argued by Secretary of State Tillerson: more troops in Afghanistan, which, somehow, slightly, would be there on a different basis, somewhat, with a different mission, subtly, than that of troops sent there before.
The military fully expected the president to sign off on the third option. But on July 19, at a
meeting of the national security team in the situation room at the White House, Trump lost it.
For two hours, he angrily railed against the mess he had been handed. He threatened to fire
almost every general in the chain of command. He couldn’t fathom, he said, how it had taken so
many months of study to come up with this nothing-much-different plan. He disparaged the
advice that came from generals and praised the advice from enlisted men. If we have to be in
Afghanistan, he demanded, why can’t we make money off it? China, he complained, has mining
rights, but not the United States. (He was referring to a ten-year-old U.S.-backed deal.) This is
just like the 21 Club, he said, suddenly confusing everyone with this reference to a New York
restaurant, one of his favorites. In the 1980s, 21 closed for a year and hired a large number of
consultants to analyze how to make the restaurant more profitable. In the end, their advice was:
Get a bigger kitchen. Exactly what any waiter would have said, Trump shouted.
To Bannon, the meeting was a high point of the Trump presidency to date. The generals were
punting and waffling and desperately trying to save face—they were, according to Bannon,
talking pure “gobbledygook” in the situation room. “Trump was standing up to them,” said a happy Bannon. “Hammering them. He left a bowel movement in the middle of their Afghan plans. Again and again, he came back to the same point: we’re stuck and losing and nobody here has a plan to do much better than that.”
Though there was still no hint of a viable alternative strategy in Afghanistan, Bannon, his Jarvanka frustration cresting, was sure he was the winner here. McMaster was toast.