Clinton-like legal plan. “They went to the mattresses with amazing discipline. They ground through it.” But that was about discipline, he emphasized, and Trump, said Bannon, noting the obvious, was the least disciplined man in politics.
It was clear where Mueller and his team were going, said Bannon: they would trace a money trail through Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Jared Kushner and roll one or all of them on the president.
It’s Shakespearean, he said, enumerating the bad advice from his family circle: “It’s the geniuses, the same people who talked him into firing Comey, the same people on Air Force One who cut out his outside legal team, knowing the email was out there, knowing that email existed, put the statement out about Don Junior, that the meeting was all about adoptions . . . the same geniuses trying to get Sessions fired.
“Look, Kasowitz has known him for twenty-five years. Kasowitz has gotten him out of all kinds of jams. Kasowitz on the campaign—what did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of all of them. And now he’s out in, what, four weeks? He’s New York’s toughest lawyer. Mark Corallo, toughest motherfucker I ever met, just can’t do it.”
Jared and Ivanka believe, said Bannon, that if they advocate prison reform and save DACA—
the program to protect the children of illegal immigrants—the liberals will come to their defense.
He digressed briefly to characterize Ivanka Trump’s legislative acumen, and her difficulty—
which had become quite a White House preoccupation—in finding sponsorship for her family
leave proposal. “Here’s why, I keep telling her: there’s no political constituency in it. You know
how easy it is to get a bill sponsored, any schmendrick can do it. You know why your bill has no
sponsorship? Because people realize how dumb it is.” In fact, said, Bannon, eyes rolling and
mouth agape, it was the Jarvanka idea to try to trade off amnesty for the border wall. “If not the
dumbest idea in Western civilization, it’s up there in the top three. Do these geniuses even know
who we are?”
Just then Bannon took a call, the caller telling him that it looked as if Scaramucci might indeed be getting the job of communications director. “Don’t fuck with me, dude,” he laughed. “Don’t fuck with me like that!”
He got off the phone expressing further wonder at the fantasy world of the geniuses—and
added, for good measure, an extra dollop of dripping contempt for them. “I literally do not talk to
them. You know why? I’m doing my shit, and they got nothing to do with it, and I don’t care
what they’re doing . . . I don’t care……. I’m not going to be alone with them, I’m not going to be
in a room with them. Ivanka walked into the Oval today . . . [and] as soon as she walked in, I
looked at her and walked right out………. I won’t be in a room . . . don’t want to do it………… Hope
Hicks walked in, I walked out.”
“The FBI put Jared’s father in jail,” said Preate. “Don’t they understand you don’t mess—”
“Charlie Kushner,” said Bannon, smacking his head again in additional disbelief. “He’s going
crazy because they’re going to get down deep in his shit about how he’s financed everyfhing……
all the shit coming out of Israel . . . and all these guys coming out of Eastern Europe . . . all these
Russian guys . . . and guys in Kazakhstan……. And he’s frozen on 666 [Fifth Avenue]……. [If] it
goes under next year, the whole thing’s cross-collateralized . . . he’s wiped, he’s gone, he’s done,
it’s over…… Toast.”
He held his face in his hands for a moment and then looked up again.
“I’m pretty good at coming up with solutions, I came up with a solution for his broke-dick
campaign in about a day, but I don’t see this. I don’t see a plan for getting through. Now, I gave
him a plan, I said you seal the Oval Office, you send those two kids home, you get rid of Hope,
all these deadbeats, and you listen to your legal team—Kasowitz, and Mark Dowd, and Jay Sekulow, and Mark Corallo, these are all professionals who have done this many times. You listen to those guys and never talk about this stuff again, you just conduct yourself as commander in chief and then you can be president for eight years. If you don’t, you’re not, simple. But he’s the president, he gets a choice, and he’s clearly choosing to go down another path . . . and you can’t stop him. The guy is going to call his own plays. He’s Trump ”
And then another call came, this one from Sam Nunberg. He, too, was calling about
Scaramucci, and his words caused something like stupefaction in Bannon: “No fucking, fucking
way.”
Bannon got off the phone and said, “Jesus. Scaramucci. I can’t even respond to this. It’s Kafkaesque. Jared and Ivanka needed somebody to represent their shit. It’s madness. He’ll be on that podium for two days and he’ll be so chopped he’ll bleed out everywhere. He’ll literally blow up in a week. This is why I don’t take this stuff seriously. Hiring Scaramucci? He’s not qualified to do anything. He runs a fund of funds. Do you know what a fund of funds is? It’s not a fund. Dude, it’s sick. We look like buffoons.”
* * *
The ten days of Anthony Scaramucci, saw, on the first day, July 21, the resignation of Sean Spicer. Oddly, this seemed to catch everyone unawares. In a meeting with Scaramucci, Spicer, and Priebus, the president—who in his announcement of Scaramucci’s hire as communications director had promoted Scaramucci not only over Spicer, but in effect over Priebus, his chief of staff—suggested that the men ought to be able to work it out together.
Spicer went back to his office, printed out his letter of resignation, and then took it back to the nonplussed president, who said again that he really wanted Spicer to be a part of things. But Spicer, surely the most mocked man in America, understood that he had been handed a gift. His White House days were over.
For Scaramucci, it was now payback time. Scaramucci blamed his six humiliating months out in the cold on nobody so much as Reince Priebus—having announced his White House future, having sold his business in anticipation of it, he had come away with nothing, or at least nothing of any value. But now, in a reversal befitting a true master of the universe—befitting, actually, Trump himself—Scaramucci was in the White House, bigger, better, and grander than even he had had the gall to imagine. And Priebus was dead meat.
That was the signal the president had sent Scaramucci—deal with the mess. In Trump’s view,
the problems in his tenure so far were just problems about the team. If the team went, the
problems went. So Scaramucci had his marching orders. The fact that the president had been
saying the same stuff about his rotten team from the first day, that this riff had been a constant
from the campaign on, that he would often say he wanted everybody to go and then turn around
and say he didn’t want everybody to go—all that rather went over Scaramucci’s head.
Scaramucci began taunting Priebus publicly, and inside the West Wing he adopted a toughguy attitude about Bannon—“I won’t take his bullshit.” Trump seemed delighted with this behavior, which led Scaramucci to feel that the president was urging him on. Jared and Ivanka were pleased, too; they believed they had scored with Scaramucci and were confident that he would defend them against Bannon and the rest.
Bannon and Priebus remained not just disbelieving but barely able not to crack up. For both men, Scaramucci was either a hallucinatory episode—they wondered whether they ought to just shut their eyes while it passed—or some further march into madness.
* * *
Even as measured against other trying weeks in the Trump White House, the week of July 24
was a head-slammer. First, it opened the next episode in what had become a comic-opera effort
to repeal Obamacare in the Senate. As in the House, this had become much less about health care
than a struggle both among Republicans in Congress and between the Republican leadership and
the White House. The signature stand for the Republican Party had now become the symbol of
its civil war.
On that Monday, the president’s son-in-law appeared at the microphones in front of the West Wing to preview his statement to Senate investigators about the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia. Having almost never spoken before in public, he now denied culpability in the Russian mess by claiming feckless naïveté; speaking in a reedy, self-pitying voice, he portrayed himself as a Candide-like figure who had become disillusioned by a harsh world.
And that evening, the president traveled to West Virginia to deliver a speech before the Boy
Scouts of America. Once more, his speech was tonally at odds with time, place, and good sense.
It prompted an immediate apology from the Boy Scouts to its members, their parents, and the
country at large. The quick trip did not seem to improve Trump’s mood: the next morning,
seething, the president again publicly attacked his attorney general and—for good measure and
no evident reason—tweeted his ban of transgender people in the military. (The president had
been presented with four different options related to the military’s transgender policy. The
presentation was meant to frame an ongoing discussion, but ten minutes after receiving the
discussion points, and without further consultation, Trump tweeted his transgender ban.)
The following day, Wednesday, Scaramucci learned that one of his financial disclosure forms seemed to have been leaked; assuming he’d been sabotaged by his enemies, Scaramucci blamed Priebus directly, implicitly accusing him of a felony. In fact, Scaramucci’s financial form was a public document available to all.
That afternoon, Priebus told the president that he understood he should resign and they should start talking about his replacement.
Then, that evening, there was a small dinner in the White House, with various current and former Fox News people, including Kimberly Guilfoyle, in attendance—and this was leaked. Drinking more than usual, trying desperately to contain the details of the meltdown of his personal life (being linked to Guilfoyle wasn’t going to help his negotiation with his wife), and wired by events beyond his own circuits’ capacity, Scaramucci called a reporter at the New Yorker magazine and unloaded.
The resulting article was surreal—so naked in its pain and fury, that for almost twenty-four hours nobody seemed to be able to quite acknowledge that he had committed public suicide. The article quoted Scaramucci speaking bluntly about the chief of staff: “Reince Priebus—if you want to leak something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” Saying that he had taken his new job “to serve the country” and that he was “not trying to build my brand,” Scaramucci also took on Steve Bannon: “I’m not Steve Bannon. I’m not trying to suck my own cock.” (In fact, Bannon learned about the piece when fact-checkers from the magazine called him for comment about Scaramucci’s accusation that he sucked his own cock.)
Scaramucci, who had in effect publicly fired Priebus, was behaving so bizarrely that it wasn’t
at all clear who would be the last man standing. Priebus, on the verge of being fired for so long,
realized that he might have agreed to resign too soon. He might have gotten the chance to fire
Scaramucci!
On Friday, as health care repeal cratered in the Senate, Priebus joined the president on board
Air Force One for a trip to New York for a speech. As it happened, so did Scaramucci, who,
avoiding the New Yorker fallout, had said he’d gone to New York to visit his mother but in fact
had been hiding out at the Trump Hotel in Washington. Now here he was, with his bags (he
would indeed now stay in New York and visit his mother), behaving as though nothing had
happened.
On the way back from the trip, Priebus and the president talked on the plane and discussed the timing of his departure, with the president urging him to do it the right way and to take his time. “You tell me what works for you,” said Trump. “Let’s make it good.”
Minutes later, Priebus stepped onto the tarmac and an alert on his phone said the president had just tweeted that there was a new chief of staff, Department of Homeland Security chief John Kelly, and that Priebus was out.
The Trump presidency was six months old, but the question of who might replace Priebus had
been a topic of discussion almost from day one. Among the string of candidates were Powell and
Cohn, the Jarvanka favorites; OMB director Mick Mulvaney, one of the Bannon picks; and
Kelly.
In fact, Kelly—who would soon abjectly apologize to Priebus for the basic lack of courtesy in the way his dismissal was handled—had not been consulted about his appointment. The president’s tweet was the first he knew of it.
But indeed there was no time to waste. Now the paramount issue before the Trump government was that somebody would have to fire Scaramucci. Since Scaramucci had effectively gotten rid of Priebus—the person who logically should have fired him—the new chief of staff was needed, more or less immediately, to get rid of the Mooch.
And six days later, just hours after he was sworn in, Kelly fired Scaramucci.
Chastened themselves, the junior first couple, the geniuses of the Scaramucci hire, panicked that they would, deservedly, catch the blame for one of the most ludicrous if not catastrophic hires in modern White House history. Now they rushed to say how firmly they supported the decision to get rid of Scaramucci.
“So I punch you in the face,” Sean Spicer noted from the sidelines, “and then say, ‘Oh my god, we’ve got to get you to a hospital!’ ”
22
GENERAL KELLY
On August 4, the president and key members of the West Wing left for Trump’s golf club in Bedminster. The new chief of staff, General Kelly, was in tow, but the president’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, had been left behind. Trump was grouchy about the planned seventeenday trip, bothered by how diligently his golf dates were being clocked by the media. So this was now dubbed a “working” trip—another piece of Trump vanity that drew shrugs, eye rolling, and head shaking from a staff that had been charged with planning events that looked like work even as they were instructed to leave yawning expanses of time for golf.
During the president’s absence, the West Wing would be renovated—Trump, the hotelier and decorator, was “disgusted” by its condition. The president did not want to move over to the nearby Executive Office Building, where the West Wing business would temporarily be conducted—and where Steve Bannon sat waiting for his call to go to Bedminster.
He was about to leave for Bedminster, Bannon kept telling everyone, but no invitation came.
Bannon, who claimed credit for bringing Kelly into the administration in the first place, was
unsure where he stood with the new chief. Indeed, the president himself was unsure about where
he himself stood; he kept asking people if Kelly liked him. More generally, Bannon wasn’t
entirely clear what Kelly was doing, other than his duty. Where exactly did the new chief of staff
fit in Trumpworld?
While Kelly stood somewhere right of center on the political spectrum and had been a willing tough immigration enforcer at Homeland Security, he was not anywhere near so right as Bannon or Trump. “He’s not hardcore” was Bannon’s regretful appraisal. At the same time, Kelly was certainly not close in any way to the New York liberals in the White House. But politics was not his purview. As director of Homeland Security he had watched the chaos in the White House with disgust and thought about quitting. Now he had agreed to try to tame it. He was sixty-seven, resolute, stern, and grim. “Does he ever smile?” asked Trump, who had already begun to think that he had somehow been tricked into the hire.
Some Trumpers, particularly those with over-the-transom access to the president, believed that
he had been tricked into some form of very-much-not-Trump submission. Roger Stone, one of
those people whose calls Kelly was now shielding the president from, spread the dark scenario
that Mattis, McMaster, and Kelly had agreed that no military action would ever be taken unless
the three were in accord—and that at least one of them would always remain in Washington if
the others were away.
After Kelly dispatched Scaramucci, his two immediate issues, now on the table in Bedminster,
were the president’s relatives and Steve Bannon. One side or the other obviously had to go. Or
perhaps both should go.
It was far from clear whether a White House chief of staff who saw his function as establishing command process and enforcing organizational hierarchy—directing a decision funnel to the commander in chief—could operate effectively or even exist in a White House where the commander in chief’s children had special access and overriding influence. As much as the president’s daughter and son-in-law were now offering slavish regard for the new command principals, they would, surely, by habit and temperament, override Kelly’s control of the West Wing. Not only did they have obvious special influence with the president, but important members of the staff saw them as having this juice, and hence believed that they were the true north of West Wing advancement and power.
Curiously, for all their callowness, Jared and Ivanka had become quite a fearsome presence, as feared by others as the two of them feared Bannon. What’s more, they had become quite accomplished infighters and leakers—they had front-room and back-channel power—although, with great woundedness, they insisted, incredibly, that they never leaked. “If they hear someone talking about them, because they are so careful about their image and have crafted this whole persona—it’s like anyone who tries to pierce it or say something against it is like a big problem,” said one senior staffer. “They get very upset and will come after you.”
On the other hand, while “the kids” might make Kelly’s job all but impossible, keeping
Bannon on board didn’t make a lot of sense, either. Whatever his gifts, he was a hopeless plotter
and malcontent, bound to do an end run around any organization. Besides, as the Bedminster
hiatus—working or otherwise—began, Bannon was once more on the president’s shit list.
The president continued to stew about The Devil’s Bargain, the book by Joshua Green that
gave Bannon credit for the election. Then, too, while the president tended to side with Bannon
against McMaster, the campaign to defend McMaster, supported by Jared and Ivanka, was
having an effect. Murdoch, enlisted by Jared to help defend McMaster, was personally lobbying
the president for Bannon’s head. Bannonites felt they had to defend Bannon against an impulsive
move by the president: so now, not only did they brand McMaster as weak on Israel, they
persuaded Sheldon Adelson to lobby Trump—Bannon, Adelson told the president, was the only
person he trusted on Israel in the White House. Adelson’s billions and implacability always
impressed Trump, and his endorsement, Bannon believed, significantly strengthened his hand.
But overriding the management of the harrowing West Wing dysfunction, Kelly’s success—or even relevance, as he was informed by almost anyone who was in a position to offer him an opinion—depended on his rising to the central challenge of his job, which was how to manage Trump. Or, actually, how to live with not managing him. His desires, needs, and impulses had to exist—necessarily had to exist—outside the organizational structure. Trump was the one variable that, in management terms, simply could not be controlled. He was like a recalcitrant two-year-
old. If you tried to control him, it would only have the opposite effect. In this, then, the manager had to most firmly manage his own expectations.
In an early meeting with the president, General Kelly had Jared and Ivanka on his agenda— how the president saw their role; what he thought was working and not working about it; how he envisioned it going forward. It was all intended to be a politic way of opening a discussion about getting them out. But the president was, Kelly soon learned, delighted with all aspects of their performance in the West Wing. Maybe at some point Jared would become secretary of state— that was the only change the president seemed to foresee. The most Kelly could do was to get the president to acknowledge that the couple should be part of a greater organizational discipline in the West Wing and should not so readily jump the line.
This, at least, was something that the general could try to enforce. At a dinner in Bedminster— the president dining with his daughter and son-in-law—the First Family were confused when Kelly showed up at the meal and joined them. This, they shortly came to understand, was neither an attempt at pleasant socializing nor an instance of unwarranted over-familiarity. It was enforcement: Jared and Ivanka needed to go through him to talk to the president.
But Trump had made clear his feeling that the roles played by the kids in his administration
needed only minor adjustment, and this now presented a significant problem for Bannon. Bannon
really had believed that Kelly would find a way to send Jarvanka home. How could he not?
Indeed, Bannon had convinced himself that they represented the largest danger to Trump. They
would take the president down. As much, Bannon believed that he could not remain in the White
House if they did.
Beyond Trump’s current irritation with Bannon, which many believed was just the usual constant of Trump resentment and complaint, Bannonites felt that their leader had, at least policywise, gained the upper hand. Jarvanka was marginalized; the Republican leadership, after health care, was discredited; the Cohn-Mnuchin tax plan was a hash. Through one window, the future looked almost rosy for Bannon. Sam Nunberg, the former Trump loyalist who was now wholly a Bannon loyalist, believed that Bannon would stay in the White House for two years and then leave to run Trump’s reelection campaign. “If you can get this idiot elected twice,” Nunberg marveled, you would achieve something like immortality in politics.
But through another window, Bannon couldn’t possibly remain in place. He seemed to have moved into a heightened state that allowed him to see just how ridiculous the White House had become. He could barely hold his tongue—indeed, he couldn’t hold it. Pressed, he could not see the future of the Trump administration. And, while many Bannonites argued the case for Jarvanka ineffectiveness and irrelevance—just ignore them, they said—Bannon, with mounting ferocity and pubic venom, could abide them less and less every day.
Bannon, continuing to wait for his call to join the president in Bedminster, decided that he
would force the situation and offered his resignation to Kelly. But this was in fact a game of
chicken: he wanted to stay. On the other hand, he wanted Jarvanka to go. And that became an
effective ultimatum.
* * *
At lunch on August 8, in the Clubhouse at Bedminster—amid Trumpish chandeliers, golf trophies, and tournament plaques—the president was flanked by Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, and his wife, Melania. Kellyanne Conway was at the lunch; so were Kushner and several others. This was one of the “make-work” events—over lunch, there was a discussion of the opioid crisis, which was then followed by a statement from the president and a brief round of questions from reporters. While reading the statement in a monotone, Trump kept his head down, propping it on his elbows.
After taking some humdrum questions about opioids, he was suddenly asked about North Korea, and, quite as though in stop-action animation, he seemed to come alive.
North Korea had been a heavy-on-detail, short-on-answers problem that that he believed was the product of lesser minds and weaker resolve—and that he had trouble paying attention to. What’s more, he had increasingly personalized his antagonism with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, referring to him often with derogatory epithets.
His staff had not prepared him for this, but, in apparent relief that he could digress from the
opioid discussion, as well as sudden satisfaction at the opportunity to address this nagging
problem, he ventured out, in language that he’d repeated often in private—as he repeated everything often—to the precipice of an international crisis.
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with the fire and the fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. Thank you.”
* * *
North Korea, a situation the president had been consistently advised to downplay, now became the central subject of the rest of the week—with most senior staff occupied not so much by the topic itself, but by how to respond to the president, who was threatening to “blow” again.
Against this background, almost no one paid attention to the announcement by the Trump supporter and American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer that he was organizing a protest at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville, over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. “Unite the Right,” the theme of the rally called for Saturday, August 12, was explicitly designed to link Trump’s politics with white nationalism.
On August 11, with the president in Bedminster continuing to threaten North Korea—and also, inexplicably to almost everyone on his staff, threatening military intervention in Venezuela —Spencer called for an evening protest.
At 8:45 p.m.—with the president in for the night in Bedminster—about 250 young men
dressed in khaki pants and polo shirts, quite a Trump style of dress, began an organized parade
across the UVA campus while carrying kerosene torches. Parade monitors with headsets directed
the scene. At a signal, the marchers began chanting official movement slogans: “Blood and soil!”
“You will not replace us!” “Jews will not replace us!” Soon, at the center of campus, near a
statue of UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, Spencer’s group was met by a counterprotest. With
virtually no police presence, the first of the weekend’s melees and injuries ensued.
Beginning again at eight o’clock the next morning, the park near the Lee statue became the battleground of a suddenly surging white racist movement, with clubs, shields, mace, pistols, and automatic rifles (Virginia is an “open carry” state)—a movement seemingly, and to liberal horror, born out of the Trump campaign and election, as in fact Richard Spencer intended it to seem. Opposing the demonstrators was a hardened, militant left called to the barricades. You could hardly have better set an end-times scene, no matter the limited numbers of protesters. Much of the morning involved a series of charges and countercharges—a rocks-and-bottles combat, with a seemingly hands-off police force standing by.
In Bedminster, there was still little awareness of the unfolding events in Charlottesville. But then, at about one o’clock in the afternoon, James Alex Fields Jr., a twenty-year-old would-be Nazi, plunged his Dodge Charger into a group of counterprotesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring a score of others.
In a tweet hurriedly composed by his staff, the president declared: “We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!”
Otherwise, however, it was largely business as usual for the president—Charlottesville was a mere distraction, and indeed, the staff’s goal was to keep him off North Korea. The main event in Bedminster that day was the ceremonial signing of an act extending the funding of a program that let veterans obtain medical care outside VA hospitals. The signing was held in a big ballroom at the Clubhouse two hours after Alex Field’s attack.
During the signing, Trump took a moment to condemn the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on
many sides” in Charlottesville. Almost immediately, the president came under attack for the
distinction he had appeared to refuse to draw between avowed racists and the other side. As
Richard Spencer had correctly understood, the president’s sympathies were muddled. However
easy and obvious it was to condemn white racists—even self-styled neo-Nazis—he instinctively
resisted.
It wasn’t until the next morning that the White House finally tried to clarify Trump’s position
with a formal statement: “The President said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he
condemns all forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred. Of course that includes white supremacists,
KKK neo-Nazi and all extremist groups. He called for national unity and bringing all Americans
together.”
But in fact he hadn’t condemned white supremacists, KKK, and neo-Nazis—and he continued to be stubborn about not doing it.
In a call to Bannon, Trump sought help making his case: “Where does this all end? Are they
going to take down the Washington Monument, Mount Rushmore, Mount Vernon?” Bannon—
still not receiving his summons to Bedminster—urged this to be the line: the president should
condemn violence and misfits and also defend history (even with Trump’s weak grasp of it).
Stressing the literal issue of monuments would bedevil the left and comfort the right.
But Jared and Ivanka, with Kelly backing them, urged presidential behavior. Their plan was to have Trump return to the White House and address the issue with a forceful censure of hate groups and racial politics—exactly the unambiguous sort of position Richard Spencer had strategically bet Trump would not willingly take.
Bannon, understanding these same currents in Trump, lobbied Kelly and told him that the
Jarvanka approach would backfire: It will be clear his heart’s not in it, said Bannon.
The president arrived shortly before eleven o’clock on Monday morning at a White House
under construction and a wall of shouted questions about Charlottesville: “Do you condemn the
actions of neo-Nazis? Do you condemn the actions of white supremacists?” Some ninety minutes
later he stood in the Diplomatic Reception Room, his eyes locked on to the teleprompter, and
delivered a six-minute statement.
Before getting to the point: “Our economy is now strong. The stock market continues to hit record highs, unemployment is at a sixteen-year low, and businesses are more optimistic than ever before. Companies are moving back to the United States and bringing many thousands of jobs with them. We have already created over one million jobs since I took office.”
And only then: “We must love each other, show affection for each other and unite together in
condemnation of hatred, bigotry and violence………. We must rediscover the bonds of love and
loyalty that bring us together as Americans……. Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in
its name are criminals and thugs including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other
hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
It was a reluctant mini-grovel. It was something of a restaging of the take-it-back birther
speech about Obama during the campaign: much distraction and obfuscation, then a mumbled
acknowledgment. Similarly, he looked here, trying to tow the accepted line on Charlottesville,
like a kid called on the carpet. Resentful and petulant, he was clearly reading forced lines.
And in fact he got little credit for these presidential-style remarks, with reporters shouting
questions about why it had taken him so long to address the issue. As he got back on Marine One
to head to Andrews Air Force Base and on to JFK and then into Manhattan and Trump Tower,
his mood was dark and I-told-you-so. Privately, he kept trying to rationalize why someone would
be a member of the KKK—that is, they might not actually believe what the KKK believed, and the KKK probably does not believe what it used to believe, and, anyway, who really knows what the KKK believes now? In fact, he said, his own father was accused of being involved with the KKK—not true. (In fact, yes, true.)
The next day, Tuesday, August 15, the White House had a news conference scheduled at
Trump Tower. Bannon urged Kelly to cancel it. It was a nothing conference anyway. Its premise
was about infrastructure—about undoing an environmental regulation that could help get
projects started faster—but it was really just another effort to show that Trump was working and
not just on a holiday. So why bother? What’s more, Bannon told Kelly, he could see the signs:
the arrow on the Trump pressure cooker was climbing, and before long he’d blow.
The news conference went ahead anyway. Standing at the lectern in the lobby of Trump
Tower, the president stayed on script for mere minutes. Defensive and self-justifying, he staked
out a contrition-is-bunk, the-fault-lies-everywhere-else position and then dug in deep. He went
on without an evident ability to adjust his emotions to political circumstance or, really, even to
make an effort to save himself. It was yet one more example, among his many now, of the
comic-absurd, movielike politician who just says whatever is on his mind. Unmediated.
Crazylike.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, altright? Do they have any
semblance of guilt? What about the fact they came charging with clubs in their hands? As far as
I’m concerned that was a horrible, horrible day…… I think there’s blame on both sides. I have no
doubt about it, you don’t have any doubt about it. If you reported it accurately, you would see.”
Steve Bannon, still waiting in his temporary office in the EOB, thought, Oh my god, there he goes. I told you so.
* * *
Outside of the portion of the electorate that, as Trump once claimed, would let him shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, the civilized world was pretty much universally aghast. Everybody came to a dumbfounded moral attention. Anybody in any position of responsibility remotely tied to some idea of establishment respectability had to disavow him. Every CEO of a public company who had associated him- or herself with the Trump White House now needed to cut the ties. The overriding issue might not even be what unreconstructed sentiments he actually seemed to hold in his heart—Bannon averred that Trump was not in fact anti-Semitic, but on the other count he wasn’t sure—but that he flat-out couldn’t control himself.
In the wake of the immolating news conference, all eyes were suddenly on Kelly—this was his
baptism of Trump fire. Spicer, Priebus, Cohn, Powell, Bannon, Tillerson, Mattis, Mnuchin—
virtually the entire senior staff and cabinet of the Trump presidency, past and present, had
traveled through the stages of adventure, challenge, frustration, battle, self-justification, and
doubt, before finally having to confront the very real likelihood that the president they worked
for—whose presidency they bore some official responsibility for—didn’t have the wherewithal
to adequately function in his job. Now, after less than two weeks on the job, it was Kelly’s turn
to stand at that precipice.
The debate, as Bannon put it, was not about whether the president’s situation was bad, but whether it was Twenty-Fifth-Amendment bad.
* * *
To Bannon, if not to Trump, the linchpin of Trumpism was China. The story of the next
generation, he believed, had been written, and it was about war with China. Commercial war,
trade war, cultural war, diplomatic war—it would be an all-encompassing war that few in the
United States now understood needed to be fought, and that almost nobody was prepared to
fight.
Bannon had compiled a list of “China hawks” that crossed political lines, going from the
Breitbart gang, to former New Republic editor Peter Beinart—who regarded Bannon only with
scorn—and orthodox liberal-progressive stalwart Robert Kuttner, the editor of the small, public
policy magazine American Prospect. On Wednesday, August 16, the day after the president’s
news conference in Trump Tower, Bannon, out of the blue, called Kuttner from his EOB office
to talk China.
By this point, Bannon was all but convinced that he was on the way out of the White House. He had received no invitation to join the president in Bedminster, a withering sign. That day, he had learned of the appointment of Hope Hicks as interim communications director—a Jarvanka victory. Meanwhile, the steady whisper from the Jarvanka side continued about his certain demise; it had become a constant background noise.
He was still not sure he would be fired, yet Bannon, in only the second on-the-record interview he had given since the Trump victory, called Kuttner and in effect sealed his fate. He would later maintain that the conversation was not on the record. But this was the Bannon method, in which he merely tempted fate.
If Trump was helplessly Trump in his most recent news conference, Bannon was helplessly
Bannon in his chat with Kuttner. He tried to prop up what he made sound like a weak Trump on
China. He corrected, in mocking fashion, the president’s bluster on North Korea—“ten million
people in Seoul” will die, he declared. And he insulted his internal enemies—“they’re wetting
themselves.”
If Trump was incapable of sounding like a president, Bannon had matched him: he was incapable of sounding like a presidential aide.
* * *
That evening, a group of Bannonites gathered near the White House for dinner. The dinner was
called for the bar at the Hay-Adams hotel, but Arthur Schwartz, a Bannonite PR man, got into an
altercation with the Hay-Adams bartender about switching the television from CNN to Fox,
where his client, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman of one of the president’s
business councils, was shortly to appear. The business council was hemorrhaging its CEO
members after the president’s Charlottesville news conference, and Trump, in a tweet, had
announced that he was disbanding it. (Schwarzman had advised the president that the council
was collapsing and that the president ought to at least make it look as if shutting it down was his
decision.)
Schwartz, in high dudgeon, announced that he was checking out of the Hay-Adams and moving to the Trump Hotel. He also insisted that the dinner be moved two blocks away to Joe’s, an outpost of Miami’s Joe’s Stone Crab. Matthew Boyle, the Washington political editor of Breitbart News, was swept into Schwartz’s furious departure, with Schwartz upbraiding the twenty-nine-year-old for lighting a cigarette. “I don’t know anyone who smokes,” he sniffed. Although Schwartz was firmly in the Bannon camp, this seemed to be a general dig at the Breitbart people for being low-class.
Both dedicated Bannonites debated the effect of Bannon’s interview, which had caught
everybody in the Bannon universe off guard. Neither man could understand why he would have given an interview.
Was Bannon finished?
No, no, no, argued Schwartz. He might have been a few weeks ago when Murdoch had ganged up with McMaster and gone to the president and pressed him to dump Bannon. But then Sheldon had fixed it, Schwartz said.
“Steve stayed home when Abbas came,” said Schwartz. “He wasn’t going to breathe the air that a terrorist breathed.” This was the precise line Schwartz would hand out to reporters in the coming days in a further effort to establish Bannon’s right-wing virtue.
Alexandra Preate, Bannon’s lieutenant, arrived at Joe’s out of breath. Seconds later, Jason
Miller, another PR man in the Bannon fold, arrived. During the transition, Miller had been slated
to be the communications director, but then it had come out that Miller had had a relationship
with another staff member who announced in a tweet she was pregnant by Miller—as was also,
at this point, Miller’s wife. Miller, who had lost his promised White House job but continued
serving as an outside Trump and Bannon voice, was now, with the recent birth of the child—with
the recent birth of both of his children by different women—facing another wave of difficult
press. Still, even he was obsessively focused on what Bannon’s interview might mean.
By now the table was buzzing with speculation.
How would the president react?
How would Kelly react? Was this curtains?
For a group of people in touch with Bannon on an almost moment-by-moment basis, it was remarkable that nobody seemed to understand that, forcibly or otherwise, he would surely be moving out of the White House. On the contrary, the damaging interview was, by consensus, converted into a brilliant strategic move. Bannon was not going anywhere—not least because there was no Trump without Bannon.
It was an excited dinner, a revved-up occasion involving a passionate group of people all attached to the man who they believed was the most compelling figure in Washington. They saw him as some sort of irreducible element: Bannon was Bannon was Bannon.
As the evening went on, Matt Boyle got in a furious text-message fight with Jonathan Swan, a
White House reporter who had written a story about Bannon being on the losing side in the
Bannon-McMaster showdown. Soon almost every well-connected reporter in the city was
checking in with somebody at the table. When a text came in, the recipient would hold up his or
her phone if it showed a notable reporter’s name. At one point, Bannon texted Schwartz some
talking points. Could it be that this was just one more day in the endless Trump drama?
Schwartz, who seemed to regard Trump’s stupidity as a political given, offered a vigorous analysis of why Trump could not do without Bannon. Then, seeking more proof of his theory, Schwartz said he was texting Sam Nunberg, generally regarded as the man who understood Trump’s whims and impulses best, and who had sagely predicted Bannon’s survival at each doubtful moment in the past months.
“Nunberg always knows,” said Schwartz.
Seconds later, Schwartz looked up. His eyes widened and for a moment he went silent. Then he said: “Nunberg says Bannon’s dead.”
And, indeed, unbeknownst to the Bannonites, even those closest to him, Bannon was at that
moment finalizing his exit with Kelly. By the next day, he would be packing up his little office,
and on Monday, when Trump would return to a refurbished West Wing—a paint job, new
furniture, and new rugs, its look tilting toward the Trump Hotel—Steve Bannon would be back on Capitol Hill at the Breitbart Embassy, still, he was confident, the chief strategist for the Trump revolution.
EPILOGUE:
BANNON AND TRUMP
On a sweltering morning in October 2017, the man who had more or less single-handedly brought about the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, stood on the steps of the Breitbart town house and said, with a hearty laugh, “I guess global warming is real.”
Steve Bannon had lost twenty pounds since his exit from the White House six weeks before—
he was on a crash all-sushi diet. “That building,” said his friend David Bossie, speaking about all
White Houses but especially the Trump White House, “takes perfectly healthy people and turns
them into old, unhealthy people.” But Bannon, who Bossie had declared on virtual life support
during his final days in the West Wing, was again, by his own description, “on fire.” He had
moved out of the Arlington “safe house” and reestablished himself back at the Breitbart
Embassy, turning it into a headquarters for the next stage of the Trump movement, which might
not include Trump at all.
Asked about Trump’s leadership of the nationalist-populist movement, Bannon registered a not inconsiderable change in the country’s political landscape: “I am the leader of the nationalpopulist movement.”
One cause of Bannon’s boast and new resolve was that Trump, for no reason that Bannon
could quite divine, had embraced Mitch McConnell’s establishment candidate in the recent
Republican run-off in Alabama rather than support the nat-pop choice for the Senate seat vacated
by now attorney general Jeff Sessions. After all, McConnell and the president were barely on
speaking terms. From his August “working holiday” in Bedminster, the president’s staff had
tried to organize a makeup meeting with McConnell, but McConnell’s staff had sent back word
that it wouldn’t be possible because the Senate leader would be getting a haircut.
But the president—ever hurt and confused by his inability to get along with the congressional leadership, and then, conversely, enraged by their refusal to get along with him—had gone all-in for the McConnell-backed Luther Strange, who had run against Bannon’s candidate, the rightwing firebrand Roy Moore. (Even by Alabama standards, Moore was far right: he had been removed as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court for defying a federal court order to take down a monument of the Ten Commandments in the Alabama judicial building.)
For Bannon, the president’s political thinking had been obtuse at best. He was unlikely to get anything from McConnell—and indeed Trump had demanded nothing for his support for Luther Strange, which came via an unplanned tweet in August. Strange’s prospects were not only dim, but he was likely to lose in a humiliating fashion. Roy Moore was the clear candidate of the Trump base—and he was Bannon’s candidate. Hence, that would be the contest: Trump against Bannon. In fact, the president really didn’t have to support anyone—no one would have complained if he’d stayed neutral in a primary race. Or, he could have tacitly supported Strange and not doubled down with more and more insistent tweets.
For Bannon, this episode was not only about the president’s continuing and curious confusion about what he represented, but about his mercurial, intemperate, and often cockamamie motivations. Against all political logic, Trump had supported Luther Strange, he told Bannon, because “Luther’s my friend.”
“He said it like a nine-year-old,” said Bannon, recoiling, and noting that there was no universe in which Trump and Strange were actually friends.
For every member of the White House senior staff this would be the lasting conundrum of
dealing with President Trump: the “why” of his often baffling behavior.
“The president fundamentally wants to be liked” was Katie Walsh’s analysis. “He just
fundamentally needs to be liked so badly that it’s always . . . everything is a struggle for him.”
This translated into a constant need to win something—anything. Equally important, it was
essential that he look like a winner. Of course, trying to win without consideration, plan, or clear
goals had, in the course of the administration’s first nine months, resulted in almost nothing but
losses. At the same time, confounding all political logic, that lack of a plan, that impulsivity, that
apparent joie de guerre, had helped create the disruptiveness that seemed to so joyously shatter
the status quo for so many.
But now, Bannon thought, that novelty was finally wearing off.