2TRUMP TOWER
On the Saturday after the election, Donald Trump received a small group of well-wishers in his
triplex apartment in Trump Tower. Even his close friends were still shocked and bewildered, and
there was a dazed quality to the gathering. But Trump himself was mostly looking at the clock.
Rupert Murdoch, heretofore doubtlessly certain Trump was a charlatan and a fool, said he and
his new wife, Jerry Hall, would pay a call on the president-elect. But Murdoch was late—quite
late. Trump kept assuring his guests that Rupert was on his way, coming soon. When some of the
guests made a move to leave, Trump cajoled them to stay a little longer. You’ll want to stay to
see Rupert. (Or, one of the guests interpreted, you’ll want to stay to see Trump with Rupert.)
Murdoch, who, with his then wife, Wendi, had often socialized with Jared and Ivanka, in the
past made little effort to hide his lack of interest in Trump. Murdoch’s fondness for Kushner
created a curious piece of the power dynamic between Trump and his son-in-law, one that
Kushner, with reasonable subtly, played to his advantage, often dropping Murdoch’s name into
conversations with his father-in-law. When, in 2015, Ivanka Trump told Murdoch that her father
really, truly was going to run for president, Murdoch dismissed the possibility out of hand.
But now, the new president-elect—after the most astonishing upset in American history—was
on tenterhooks waiting for Murdoch. “He’s one of the greats,” he told his guests, becoming more
agitated as he waited. “Really, he’s one of the greats, the last of the greats. You have to stay to
see him.”
It was a matched set of odd reversals—an ironic symmetry. Trump, perhaps not yet appreciating the difference between becoming president and elevating his social standing, was trying mightily to curry favor with the previously disdainful media mogul. And Murdoch, finally arriving at the party he was in more than one way sorely late to, was as subdued and thrown as everyone else, and struggling to adjust his view of a man who, for more than a generation, had been at best a clown prince among the rich and famous.
* * *
Murdoch was hardly the only billionaire who had been dismissive of Trump. In the years before
the election, Carl Icahn, whose friendship Trump often cited, and who Trump had suggested he’d
appoint to high office, openly ridiculed his fellow billionaire (whom he said was not remotely a
billionaire).
Few people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was almost his appeal: he was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul.
But now he was the president-elect. And that, in a reality jujitsu, changed everything. So say whatever you want about him, he had done this. Pulled the sword from the stone. That meant something. Everything.
The billionaires had to rethink. So did everyone in the Trump orbit. The campaign staff, now
suddenly in a position to snag West Wing jobs—career- and history-making jobs—had to see
this odd, difficult, even ridiculous, and, on the face of it, ill-equipped person in a new light. He
had been elected president. So he was, as Kellyanne Conway liked to point out, by definition,
presidential.
Still, nobody had yet seen him be presidential—that is, make a public bow to political ritual and propriety. Or even to exercise some modest self-control.
Others were now recruited and, despite their obvious impressions of the man, agreed to sign on. Jim Mattis, a retired four-star general, one of the most respected commanders in the U.S. armed forces; Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil; Scott Pruitt and Betsy DeVos, Jeb Bush loyalists—all of them were now focused on the singular fact that while he might be a peculiar figure, even an absurd-seeming one, he had been elected president.
We can make this work, is what everybody in the Trump orbit was suddenly saying. Or, at the very least, this could possibly work.
In fact, up close, Trump was not the bombastic and pugilistic man who had stirred rabid
crowds on the campaign trail. He was neither angry nor combative. He may have been the most
threatening and frightening and menacing presidential candidate in modern history, but in person
he could seem almost soothing. His extreme self-satisfaction rubbed off. Life was sunny. Trump
was an optimist—at least about himself. He was charming and full of flattery; he focused on you.
He was funny—self-deprecating even. And incredibly energetic—Let’s do it whatever it is, let’s
do it. He wasn’t a tough guy. He was “a big warm-hearted monkey,” said Bannon, with rather
faint praise.
PayPal cofounder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel—really the only significant Silicon
Valley voice to support Trump—was warned by another billionaire and longtime Trump friend
that Trump would, in an explosion of flattery, offer Thiel his undying friendship. Everybody says
you’re great, you and I are going to have an amazing working relationship, anything you want,
call me and we’ll get it done! Thiel was advised not to take Trump’s offer too seriously. But
Thiel, who gave a speech supporting Trump at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, reported
back that, even having been forewarned, he absolutely was certain of Trump’s sincerity when he
said they’d be friends for life—only never to basically hear from him again or have his calls
returned. Still, power provides its own excuses for social lapses. Other aspects of the Trump
character were more problematic.
Almost all the professionals who were now set to join him were coming face to face with the
fact that it appeared he knew nothing. There was simply no subject, other than perhaps building
construction, that he had substantially mastered. Everything with him was off the cuff. Whatever
he knew he seemed to have learned an hour before—and that was mostly half-baked. But each
member of the new Trump team was convincing him- or herself otherwise—because what did
they know, the man had been elected president. He offered something, obviously. Indeed, while
everybody in his rich-guy social circle knew about his wide-ranging ignorance—Trump, the
businessman, could not even read a balance sheet, and Trump, who had campaigned on his deal-
making skills, was, with his inattention to details, a terrible negotiator—they yet found him
somehow instinctive. That was the word. He was a force of personality. He could make you
believe.
“Is Trump a good person, an intelligent person, a capable person?” asked Sam Nunberg,
Trump’s longtime political aide. “I don’t even know. But I know he’s a star.”
Trying to explain Trump’s virtues and his attraction, Piers Morgan—the British newspaper
man and ill-fated CNN anchor who had appeared on Celebrity Apprentice and stayed a loyal
Trump friend—said it was all in Trump’s book The Art of the Deal. Everything that made him
Trump and that defined his savvy, energy, and charisma was there. If you wanted to know
Trump, just read the book. But Trump had not written The Art of the Deal. His co-writer, Tony
Schwartz, insisted that he had hardly contributed to it and might not even have read all of it. And
that was perhaps the point. Trump was not a writer, he was a character—a protagonist and hero.
A pro wrestling fan who became a World Wrestling Entertainment supporter and personality
(inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame), Trump lived, like Hulk Hogan, as a real-life fictional
character. To the amusement of his friends, and unease of many of the people now preparing to
work for him at the highest levels of the federal government, Trump often spoke of himself in the
third person. Trump did this. The Trumpster did that. So powerful was this persona, or role, that
he seemed reluctant, or unable, to give it up in favor of being president—or presidential.
However difficult he was, many of those now around him tried to justify his behavior—tried to find an explanation for his success in it, to understand it as an advantage, not a limitation. For Steve Bannon, Trump’s unique political virtue was as an alpha male, maybe the last of the alpha males. A 1950s man, a Rat Pack type, a character out of Mad Men.
Trump’s understanding of his own essential nature was even more precise. Once, coming back
on his plane with a billionaire friend who had brought along a foreign model, Trump, trying to
move in on his friend’s date, urged a stop in Atlantic City. He would provide a tour of his casino.
His friend assured the model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City. It was a place
overrun by white trash.
“What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model.
“They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.”
He looked for a license not to conform, not to be respectable. It was something of an outlaw prescription for winning—and winning, however you won, was what it was all about.
Or, as his friends would observe, mindful themselves not to be taken in, he simply had no scruples. He was a rebel, a disruptor, and, living outside the rules, contemptuous of them. A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar—except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not.
One manifestation of this outlaw personality, for both Trump and Clinton, was their brand of womanizing—and indeed, harassing. Even among world-class womanizers and harassers, they seemed exceptionally free of doubt or hesitation.
Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends’ wives into bed. In pursuing a friend’s wife, he would try to persuade the wife that her husband was perhaps not what she thought. Then he’d have his secretary ask the friend into his office; once the friend arrived, Trump would engage in what was, for him, more or less constant sexual banter. Do you still like having sex with your wife? How often? You must have had a better fuck than your wife? Tell me about it. I have girls coming in from Los Angeles at three o’clock. We can go upstairs and have a great time. I promise . . . And all the while, Trump would have his friend’s wife on the speakerphone, listening in.
Previous presidents, and not just Clinton, have of course lacked scruples. What was, to many
of the people who knew Trump well, much more confounding was that he had managed to win
this election, and arrive at this ultimate accomplishment, wholly lacking what in some obvious
sense must be the main requirement of the job, what neuroscientists would call executive
function. He had somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of
performing what would be essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize
and pay attention and switch focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the
goals at hand reasonably required. On the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and
effect.
The charge that Trump colluded with the Russians to win the election, which he scoffed at, was, in the estimation of some of his friends, a perfect example of his inability to connect the dots. Even if he hadn’t personally conspired with the Russians to fix the election, his efforts to curry favor with, of all people, Vladimir Putin had no doubt left a trail of alarming words and deeds likely to have enormous political costs.
Shortly after the election, his friend Ailes told him, with some urgency, “You’ve got to get right on Russia.” Even exiled from Fox News, Ailes still maintained a fabled intelligence network. He warned Trump of potentially damaging material coming his way. “You need to take this seriously, Donald.”
“Jared has this,” said a happy Trump. “It’s all worked out.”
* * *
Trump Tower, next door to Tiffany and now headquarters of a populist revolution, suddenly seemed like an alien spaceship—the Death Star—on Fifth Avenue. As the great and good and ambitious, as well as angry protesters and the curious hoi polloi, began beating a path to the next president’s door, mazelike barricades were hurriedly thrown up to shield him.
The Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act of 2010 established funding for presidential
nominees to start the process of vetting thousands of candidates for jobs in a new administration,
codifying policies that would determine the early actions of a new White House, and preparing
for the handoff of bureaucratic responsibilities on January 20. During the campaign, New Jersey
governor Chris Christie, the nominal head of the Trump transition office, had to forcefully tell
the candidate that he couldn’t redirect these funds, that the law required him to spend the money
and plan for a transition—even one he did not expect to need. A frustrated Trump said he didn’t
want to hear any more about it.
The day after the election, Trump’s close advisers—suddenly eager to be part of a process that
almost everybody had ignored—immediately began blaming Christie for a lack of transition
preparations. Hurriedly, the bare-bones transition team moved from downtown Washington to
Trump Tower.
This was certainly some of the most expensive real estate ever occupied by a transition team (and, for that matter, a presidential campaign). And that was part of the point. It sent a Trumpstyle message: we’re not only outsiders, but we’re more powerful than you insiders. Richer. More famous. With better real estate.
And, of course, it was personalized: his name, fabulously, was on the door. Upstairs was his triplex apartment, vastly larger than the White House living quarters. Here was his private office, which he’d occupied since the 1980s. And here were the campaign and now transition floors— firmly in his orbit and not that of Washington and the “swamp.”
Trump’s instinct in the face of his unlikely, if not preposterous, success was the opposite of
humility. It was, in some sense, to rub everybody’s face in it. Washington insiders, or would-be
insiders, would have to come to him. Trump Tower immediately upstaged the White House.
Everybody who came to see the president-elect was acknowledging, or accepting, an outsider
government. Trump forced them to endure what was gleefully called by insiders the “perp walk” in front of press and assorted gawkers. An act of obeisance, if not humiliation.
The otherworldly sense of Trump Tower helped obscure the fact that few in the thin ranks of Trump’s inner circle, with their overnight responsibility for assembling a government, had almost any relevant experience. Nobody had a political background. Nobody had a policy background. Nobody had a legislative background.
Politics is a network business, a who-you-know business. But unlike other presidents-elect—
all of whom invariably suffered from their own management defects—Trump did not have a
career’s worth of political and government contacts to call on. He hardly even had his own
political organization. For most of the last eighteen months on the road, it had been, at its core, a
three-person enterprise: his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski (until he was forced out a
month before the Republican National Convention); his spokesperson-bodyperson-intern, the
campaign’s first hire, twenty-six-year-old Hope Hicks; and Trump himself. Lean and mean and
gut instincts—the more people you had to deal with, Trump found, the harder it was to turn the
plane around and get home to bed at night.
The professional team—although in truth there was hardly a political professional among them —that had joined the campaign in August was a last-ditch bid to avoid hopeless humiliation. But these were people he’d worked with for just a few months.
Reince Priebus, getting ready to shift over from the RNC to the White House, noted, with alarm, how often Trump offered people jobs on the spot, many of whom he had never met before, for positions whose importance Trump did not particularly understand.
Ailes, a veteran of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 White Houses, was growing worried by
the president-elect’s lack of immediate focus on a White House structure that could serve and
protect him. He tried to impress on Trump the ferocity of the opposition that would greet him.
“You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff. And you need a son of a bitch who knows
Washington,” Ailes told Trump not long after the election. “You’ll want to be your own son of a
bitch, but you don’t know Washington.” Ailes had a suggestion: “Speaker Boehner.” (John
Boehner had been the Speaker of the House until he was forced out in a Tea Party putsch in
2011.)
“Who’s that?” asked Trump.
Everybody in Trump’s billionaire circle, concerned about his contempt for other people’s expertise, tried to impress upon him the importance of the people, the many people, he would need with him in the White House, people who understood Washington. Your people are more important than your policies. Your people are your policies.
“Frank Sinatra was wrong,” said David Bossie, one of Trump’s longtime political advisers. “If you can make it in New York, you can’t necessarily make it in Washington.”
* * *
The nature of the role of the modern chief of staff is a focus of much White House scholarship.
As much as the president himself, the chief of staff determines how the White House and
executive branch—which employs 4 million people, including 1.3 million people in the armed
services—will run.
The job has been construed as deputy president, or chief operating officer, or even prime
minister. Larger-than-life chiefs have included Richard Nixon’s H. R. Haldeman and Alexander
Haig; Gerald Ford’s Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney; Jimmy Carter’s Hamilton Jordan;
Ronald Reagan’s James Baker; George H. W. Bush’s return of James Baker; Bill Clinton’s Leon
Panetta, Erskine Bowles, and John Podesta; George W. Bush’s Andrew Card; and Barack Obama’s Rahm Emanuel and Bill Daley. Anyone studying the position would conclude that a stronger chief of staff is better than a weaker one, and a chief of staff with a history in Washington and the federal government is better than an outsider.
Donald Trump had little, if any, awareness of the history of or the thinking about this role.
Instead, he substituted his own management style and experience. For decades, he had relied on
longtime retainers, cronies, and family. Even though Trump liked to portray his business as an
empire, it was actually a discrete holding company and boutique enterprise, catering more to his
peculiarities as proprietor and brand representative than to any bottom line or other performance
measures.
His sons, Don Jr. and Eric—jokingly behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein—wondered if there couldn’t somehow be two parallel White House structures, one dedicated to their father’s big-picture views, personal appearances, and salesmanship and the other concerned with day-to-day management issues. In this construct, they saw themselves tending to the day-to-day operations.