Donald Trump Didn't Want to Be President
By Michael Wolff, New York Magazine
04 January 18
One year ago: the plan to lose, and the administrations shocked first days.
On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway settled into her
glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the
campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to
distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few posters with
right-wing slogans.
Conway, the campaigns manager, was in a remarkably buoyant mood,
considering she was about to experience a resounding, if not cataclysmic,
defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election of this she was sure but he
would quite possibly hold the defeat to under six points. That was a
substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off:
It was Reince Priebuss fault, not hers.
She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the
political world and blaming Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National
Committee. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors whom
she had been carefully courting since joining the Trump campaign and with
whom she had been actively interviewing in the last few weeks, hoping to
land a permanent on-air job after the election.
Even though the numbers in a few key states had appeared to be changing to
Trumps advantage, neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law,
Jared Kushner the effective head of the campaign wavered in their
certainty: Their unexpected adventure would soon be over. Not only would
Trump not be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should
probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to
deal with the latter issue.
As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate
goal, after all, had never been to win. I can be the most famous man in the
world, he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His
longtime friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that
if you want a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump,
encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a
great future. He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with
a far more powerful brand and untold opportunities.
This is bigger than I ever dreamed of, he told Ailes a week before the
election. I dont think about losing, because it isnt losing. Weve
totally won.
From the start, the leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how
crappy it was, and how everybody involved in it was a loser. In August, when
he was trailing Hillary Clinton by more than 12 points, he couldnt conjure
even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. He was
baffled when the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer
whom Trump barely knew, offered him an infusion of $5 million. When Mercer
and his daughter Rebekah presented their plan to take over the campaign and
install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and Conway, Trump didnt resist. He
only expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that.
This thing, he told the Mercers, is so fucked up.
Bannon, who became chief executive of Trumps team in mid-August, called it
the broke-dick campaign. Almost immediately, he saw that it was hampered
by an even deeper structural flaw: The candidate who billed himself as a
billionaire ten times over refused to invest his own money in it. Bannon
told Kushner that, after the first debate in September, they would need
another $50 million to cover them until Election Day.
No way well get 50 million unless we can guarantee him victory, said a
clear-eyed Kushner.
Twenty-five million? prodded Bannon.
If we can say victory is more than likely.
In the end, the best Trump would do is to loan the campaign $10 million,
provided he got it back as soon as they could raise other money. Steve
Mnuchin, the campaigns finance chairman, came to collect the loan with the
wire instructions ready to go so Trump couldnt conveniently forget to send
the money.
Most presidential candidates spend their entire careers, if not their lives
from adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of elected
offices, perfect a public face, and prepare themselves to win and to govern.
The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate
and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits of almost
becoming president without having to change their behavior or their
worldview one whit. Almost everybody on the Trump team, in fact, came with
the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in office.
Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trumps opening act at
campaign rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good
idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. Well, it would only be
a problem if we won, Flynn assured them.
Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business
deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax
returns. Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous
and a martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared
would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto
head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star.
Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that he wouldnt become
president, could return to inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out
for everybody. Losing was winning.
Shortly after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend Trump
might actually win seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his
father, or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania
was in tears and not of joy.
There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannons not
unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump
and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final
transformation: Suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he
deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the United
States.
From the moment of victory, the Trump administration became a looking-glass
presidency: Every inverse assumption about how to assemble and run a White
House was enacted and compounded, many times over. The decisions that Trump
and his top advisers made in those first few months from the slapdash
transition to the disarray in the West Wing set the stage for the chaos
and dysfunction that have persisted throughout his first year in office.
This was a real-life version of Mel Brookss The Producers, where the
mistaken outcome trusted by everyone in Trumps inner circle that they
would lose the election wound up exposing them for who they really were.
On the Saturday after the election, 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, who had promised to pay a call on the president-elect, was running
late. When some of the guests made a move to leave, an increasingly agitated
Trump assured them that Rupert was on his way. Hes one of the greats, the
last of the greats, Trump said. You have to stay to see him. Not grasping
that he was now the most powerful man in the world, Trump was still trying
mightily to curry favor with a media mogul who had long disdained him as a
charlatan and fool.
Few people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was his appeal: He
was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul. Everybody in his
rich-guy social circle knew about his wide-ranging ignorance. Early in the
campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate.
I got as far as the Fourth Amendment, Nunberg recalled, before his finger
is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.
The day after the election, the bare-bones transition team that had been set
up during the campaign hurriedly shifted from Washington to Trump Tower. The
building now the headquarters of a populist revolution suddenly seemed
like an alien spaceship on Fifth Avenue. But its otherworldly air helped
obscure the fact that few in Trumps inner circle, with their overnight
responsibility for assembling a government, had any relevant experience.
Ailes, a veteran of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations, tried to
impress on Trump the need to create a White House structure that could serve
and protect him. You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff, he told
Trump. And you need a son of a bitch who knows Washington. Youll want to
be your own son of a bitch, but you dont know Washington. Ailes had a
suggestion: John Boehner, who had stepped down as Speaker of the House only
a year earlier.
Whos that? asked Trump.
As much as the president himself, the chief of staff determines how the
Executive branch which employs 4 million people will run. The job has
been construed as deputy president, or even prime minister. But Trump had no
interest in appointing a strong chief of staff with a deep knowledge of
Washington. Among his early choices for the job was Kushner a man with no
political experience beyond his role as a calm and flattering body man to
Trump during the campaign.
It was Ann Coulter who finally took the president-elect aside. Nobody is
apparently telling you this, she told him. But you cant. You just cant
hire your children.
Bowing to pressure, Trump floated the idea of giving the job to Steve
Bannon, only to have the notion soundly ridiculed. Murdoch told Trump that
Bannon would be a dangerous choice. Joe Scarborough, the former congressman
and co-host of MSNBCs Morning Joe, told the president-elect that
Washington will go up in flames if Bannon became chief of staff.
So Trump turned to Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman, who had became the
subject of intense lobbying by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell. If congressional leaders were going to have to deal
with an alien like Donald Trump, then best they do it with the help of one
of their own kind.
Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and
almost everybodys model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to
take the job. Priebus had his own reservations: He had come out of his first
long meeting with Trump thinking it had been a disconcertingly weird
experience. Trump talked nonstop and constantly repeated himself.
Heres the deal, a close Trump associate told Priebus. In an hour meeting
with him, youre going to hear 54 minutes of stories, and theyre going to
be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one point to
make, and you pepper it in whenever you can.
But the Priebus appointment, announced in mid-November, put Bannon on a
co-equal level to the new chief of staff. Even with the top job, Priebus
would be a weak figure, in the traditional mold of most Trump lieutenants
over the years. There would be one chief of staff in name the unimportant
one and others like Bannon and Kushner, more important in practice,
ensuring both chaos and Trumps independence.
Priebus demonstrated no ability to keep Trump from talking to anyone who
wanted his ear. The president-elect enjoyed being courted. On December 14, a
high-level delegation from Silicon Valley came to Trump Tower to meet him.
Later that afternoon, according to a source privy to details of the
conversation, Trump called Rupert Murdoch, who asked him how the meeting had
gone.
Oh, great, just great, said Trump. These guys really need my help. Obama
was not very favorable to them, too much regulation. This is really an
opportunity for me to help them.
Donald, said Murdoch, for eight years these guys had Obama in their
pocket. They practically ran the administration. They dont need your help.
Take this H-1B visa issue. They really need these H-1B visas.
Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas, which open
Americas doors to select immigrants, might be hard to square with his
promises to build a wall and close the borders. But Trump seemed
unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, Well figure it out.
What a fucking idiot, said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.
Steve Bannon, suddenly among the worlds most powerful men, was running
late. It was the evening of January 3, 2017 a little more than two weeks
before Trumps inauguration and Bannon had promised to come to a small
dinner arranged by mutual friends in a Greenwich Village townhouse to see
Roger Ailes.
Snow was threatening, and for a while the dinner appeared doubtful. But the
76-year-old Ailes, who was as dumbfounded by his old friend Donald Trumps
victory as everyone else, understood that he was passing the right-wing
torch to Bannon. Ailess Fox News, with its $1.5 billion in annual profits,
had dominated Republican politics for two decades. Now Bannons Breitbart
News, with its mere $1.5 million in annual profits, was claiming that role.
For 30 years, Ailes until recently the single most powerful person in
conservative politics had humored and tolerated Trump, but in the end
Bannon and Breitbart had elected him.
At 9:30, having extricated himself from Trump Tower, Bannon finally arrived
at the dinner, three hours late. Wearing a disheveled blazer, his signature
pairing of two shirts, and military fatigues, the unshaven, overweight
63-year-old immediately dived into an urgent download of information about
the world he was about to take over.
Were going to flood the zone so we have every Cabinet member for the next
seven days through their confirmation hearings, he said of the
business-and-military, 1950s-type Cabinet choices. Tillerson is two days,
Sessions is two days, Mattis is two days
Bannon veered from James Mad Dog Mattis the retired four-star general
whom Trump had nominated as secretary of Defense to the looming
appointment of Michael Flynn as national-security adviser. Hes fine. Hes
not Jim Mattis and hes not John Kelly
but hes fine. He just needs the
right staff around him. Still, Bannon averred: When you take out all the
Never Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us
in all these wars
its not a deep bench. Bannon said hed tried to push
John Bolton, the famously hawkish diplomat, for the job as national-security
adviser. Bolton was an Ailes favorite, too.
Hes a bomb thrower, said Ailes. And a strange little fucker. But you
need him. Who else is good on Israel? Flynn is a little nutty on Iran.
Tillerson just knows oil.
Boltons mustache is a problem, snorted Bannon. Trump doesnt think he
looks the part. You know Bolton is an acquired taste.
Well, he got in trouble because he got in a fight in a hotel one night and
chased some woman.
If I told Trump that, Bannon said slyly, he might have the job.
Bannon was curiously able to embrace Trump while at the same time suggesting
he did not take him entirely seriously. Great numbers of people, he
believed, were suddenly receptive to a new message the world needs borders
and Trump had become the platform for that message.
Does he get it? asked Ailes suddenly, looking intently at Bannon. Did
Trump get where history had put him?
Bannon took a sip of water. He gets it, he said, after hesitating for
perhaps a beat too long. Or he gets what he gets.
Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. Day
one were moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahus all-in. Sheldon
Adelson, the casino billionaire and far-right Israel defender is
all-in. We know where were heading on this
Let Jordan take the West Bank,
let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying.
Wheres Donald on this? asked Ailes, the clear implication being that
Bannon was far out ahead of his benefactor.
Hes totally onboard.
I wouldnt give Donald too much to think about, said an amused Ailes.
Bannon snorted. Too much, too little doesnt necessarily change things.
What has he gotten himself into with the Russians? pressed Ailes.
Mostly, said Bannon, he went to Russia and he thought he was going to
meet Putin. But Putin couldnt give a shit about him. So hes kept trying.
Again, as though setting the issue of Trump aside merely a large and
peculiar presence to both be thankful for and to have to abide Bannon, in
the role he had conceived for himself, the auteur of the Trump presidency,
charged forward. The real enemy, he said, was China. China was the first
front in a new Cold War.
Chinas everything. Nothing else matters. We dont get China right, we
dont get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where
Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the
most rational people in the world, until theyre not. And theyre gonna flip
like Germany in the 30s. Youre going to have a hypernationalist state, and
once that happens, you cant put the genie back in the bottle.
Donald might not be Nixon in China, said Ailes, deadpan.
Bannon smiled. Bannon in China, he said, with both remarkable grandiosity
and wry self-deprecation.
Hows the kid? asked Ailes, referring to Kushner.
Hes my partner, said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt
otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message.
Hes had a lot of lunches with Rupert, said a dubious Ailes.
In fact, said Bannon, I could use your help here. He then spent several
minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch. Since his ouster
from Fox over allegations of sexual harassment, Ailes had become only more
bitter toward Murdoch. Now Murdoch was frequently jawboning the
president-elect and encouraging him toward Establishment moderation. Bannon
wanted Ailes to suggest to Trump, a man whose many neuroses included a
horror of senility, that Murdoch might be losing it.
Ill call him, said Ailes. But Trump would jump through hoops for Rupert.
Like for Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about whos jerking
whose chain.
Trump did not enjoy his own inauguration. He was angry that A-level stars
had snubbed the event, disgruntled with the accommodations at Blair House,
and visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears.
Throughout the day, he wore what some around him had taken to calling his
golf face: angry and pissed off, shoulders hunched, arms swinging, brow
furled, lips pursed.
The first senior staffer to enter the White House that day was Bannon. On
the inauguration march, he had grabbed 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the newly
appointed deputy chief of staff, and together they had peeled off to inspect
the now-vacant West Wing. The carpet had been shampooed, but little else had
changed. It was a warren of tiny offices in need of paint, the décor
something like an admissions office at a public university. Bannon claimed
the nondescript office across from the much grander chief of staffs suite
and immediately requisitioned the whiteboards on which he intended to chart
the first 100 days of the Trump administration. He also began moving
furniture out. The point was to leave no room for anyone to sit. Limit
discussion. Limit debate. This was war.
Those who had worked on the campaign noticed the sudden change. Within the
first week, Bannon seemed to have put away the camaraderie of Trump Tower
and become far more remote, if not unreachable. Whats up with Steve?
Kushner began to ask. I dont understand. We were so close. Now that Trump
had been elected, Bannon was already focused on his next goal: capturing the
soul of the Trump White House.
He began by going after his enemies. Few fueled his rancor toward the
standard-issue Republican world as much as Rupert Murdoch not least
because Murdoch had Trumps ear. It was one of the key elements of Bannons
understanding of Trump: The last person the president spoke to ended up with
enormous influence. Trump would brag that Murdoch was always calling him;
Murdoch, for his part, would complain that he couldnt get Trump off the
phone.
He doesnt know anything about American politics, and has no feel for the
American people, Bannon told Trump, always eager to point out that Murdoch
wasnt an American. Yet in one regard, Murdochs message was useful to
Bannon. Having known every president since Harry Truman as Murdoch took
frequent opportunities to point out the media mogul warned Trump that a
president has only six months, max, to set his agenda and make an impact.
After that, it was just putting out fires and battling the opposition.
This was the message whose urgency Bannon had been trying to impress on an
often distracted Trump, who was already trying to limit his hours in the
office and keep to his normal golf habits. Bannons strategic view of
government was shock and awe. In his head, he carried a set of decisive
actions that would not just mark the new administrations opening days but
make it clear that nothing ever again would be the same. He had quietly
assembled a list of more than 200 executive orders to issue in the first 100
days. The very first EO, in his view, had to be a crackdown on immigration.
After all, it was one of Trumps core campaign promises. Plus, Bannon knew,
it was an issue that made liberals batshit mad.
Bannon could push through his agenda for a simple reason: because nobody in
the administration really had a job. Priebus, as chief of staff, had to
organize meetings, hire staff, and oversee the individual offices in the
Executive-branch departments. But Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump had no
specific responsibilities they did what they wanted. And for Bannon, the
will to get big things done was how big things got done. Chaos was Steves
strategy, said Walsh.
On Friday, January 27 only his eighth day in office Trump signed an
executive order issuing a sweeping exclusion of many Muslims from the United
States. In his mania to seize the day, with almost no one in the federal
government having seen it or even been aware of it, Bannon had succeeded in
pushing through an executive order that overhauled U.S. immigration policy
while bypassing the very agencies and personnel responsible for enforcing
it.
The result was an emotional outpouring of horror and indignation from
liberal media, terror in immigrant communities, tumultuous protests at major
airports, confusion throughout the government, and, in the White House, an
inundation of opprobrium from friends and family. What have you done? You
have to undo this! Youre finished before you even start! But Bannon was
satisfied. He could not have hoped to draw a more vivid line between Trumps
America and that of liberals. Almost the entire White House staff demanded
to know: Why did we do this on a Friday, when it would hit the airports
hardest and bring out the most protesters?
Errr
thats why, said Bannon. So the snowflakes would show up at the
airports and riot. That was the way to crush the liberals: Make them crazy
and drag them to the left.
On the Sunday after the immigration order was issued, Joe Scarborough and
his Morning Joe co-host, Mika Brzezinski, arrived for lunch at the White
House. Trump proudly showed them into the Oval Office. So how do you think
the first week has gone? he asked the couple, in a buoyant mood, seeking
flattery. When Scarborough ventured his opinion that the immigration order
might have been handled better, Trump turned defensive and derisive,
plunging into a long monologue about how well things had gone. I could have
invited Hannity! he told Scarborough.
After Jared and Ivanka joined them for lunch, Trump continued to cast for
positive impressions of his first week. Scarborough praised the president
for having invited leaders of the steel unions to the White House. At which
point Jared interjected that reaching out to unions, a Democratic
constituency, was Bannons doing, that this was the Bannon way.
Bannon? said the president, jumping on his son-in-law. That wasnt
Bannons idea. That was my idea. Its the Trump way, not the Bannon way.
Kushner, going concave, retreated from the discussion.
Trump, changing the topic, said to Scarborough and Brzezinski, So what
about you guys? Whats going on? He was referencing their not-so-secret
secret relationship. The couple said it was still complicated, but good.
You guys should just get married, prodded Trump.
I can marry you! Im an internet Unitarian minister, Kushner, otherwise an
Orthodox Jew, said suddenly.
What? said the president. What are you talking about? Why would they want
you to marry them when I could marry them? When they could be married by the
president! At Mar-a-Lago!
The First Children couple were having to navigate Trumps volatile nature
just like everyone else in the White House. And they were willing to do it
for the same reason as everyone else in the hope that Trumps unexpected
victory would catapult them into a heretofore unimagined big time. Balancing
risk against reward, both Jared and Ivanka decided to accept roles in the
West Wing over the advice of almost everyone they knew. It was a joint
decision by the couple, and, in some sense, a joint job. Between themselves,
the two had made an earnest deal: If sometime in the future the opportunity
arose, shed be the one to run for president. The first woman president,
Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.
Bannon, who had coined the term Jarvanka that was now in ever greater use
in the White House, was horrified when the couples deal was reported to
him. They didnt say that? he said. Stop. Oh, come on. They didnt
actually say that? Please dont tell me that. Oh my God.
The truth was, Ivanka and Jared were as much the chief of staff as Priebus
or Bannon, all of them reporting directly to the president. The couple had
opted for formal jobs in the West Wing, in part because they knew that
influencing Trump required you to be all-in. From phone call to phone call
and his day, beyond organized meetings, was almost entirely phone calls
you could lose him. He could not really converse, not in the sense of
sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth conversation. He
neither particularly listened to what was said to him nor particularly
considered what he said in response. He demanded you pay him attention, then
decided you were weak for groveling. In a sense, he was like an instinctive,
pampered, and hugely successful actor. Everybody was either a lackey who did
his bidding or a high-ranking film functionary trying to coax out his
performance without making him angry or petulant.
Ivanka maintained a relationship with her father that was in no way
conventional. She was a helper not just in his business dealings, but in his
marital realignments. If it wasnt pure opportunism, it was certainly
transactional. For Ivanka, it was all business building the Trump brand,
the presidential campaign, and now the White House. She treated her father
with a degree of detachment, even irony, going so far as to make fun of his
comb-over to others. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends:
an absolutely clean pate a contained island after scalp-reduction surgery
surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from
which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and
secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical
effect, was from a product called Just for Men the longer it was left on,
the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trumps orange-blond hair color.
Kushner, for his part, had little to no success at trying to restrain his
father-in-law. Ever since the transition, Jared had been negotiating to
arrange a meeting at the White House with Enrique Peña Nieto, the Mexican
president whom Trump had threatened and insulted throughout the campaign. On
the Wednesday after the inauguration, a high-level Mexican delegation the
first visit by any foreign leaders to the Trump White House met with
Kushner and Reince Priebus. That afternoon, Kushner triumphantly told his
father-in-law that Peña Nieto had signed on to a White House meeting and
planning for the visit could go forward.
The next day, on Twitter, Trump blasted Mexico for stealing American jobs.
If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, the president
declared, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting. At which
point Peña Nieto did just that, leaving Kushners negotiation and statecraft
as so much scrap on the floor.
Nothing contributed to the chaos and dysfunction of the White House as much
as Trumps own behavior. The big deal of being president was just not
apparent to him. Most victorious candidates, arriving in the White House
from ordinary political life, could not help but be reminded of their
transformed circumstances by their sudden elevation to a mansion with
palacelike servants and security, a plane at constant readiness, and
downstairs a retinue of courtiers and advisers. But this wasnt that
different from Trumps former life in Trump Tower, which was actually more
commodious and to his taste than the White House.
Trump, in fact, found the White House to be vexing and even a little scary.
He retreated to his own bedroom the first time since the Kennedy White
House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms. In the first
days, he ordered two television screens in addition to the one already
there, and a lock on the door, precipitating a brief standoff with the
Secret Service, who insisted they have access to the room. He reprimanded
the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: If my shirt
is on the floor, its because I want it on the floor. Then he imposed a set
of new rules: Nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had
a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at
McDonalds nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.)
Also, he would let housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he
would strip his own bed.
If he was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his
liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three
screens and making phone calls the phone was his true contact point with
the world to a small group of friends, who charted his rising and falling
levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one
another.
As details of Trumps personal life leaked out, he became obsessed with
identifying the leaker. The source of all the gossip, however, may well have
been Trump himself. In his calls throughout the day and at night from his
bed, he often spoke to people who had no reason to keep his confidences. He
was a river of grievances, which recipients of his calls promptly spread to
the ever-attentive media.
On February 6, in one of his seething, self-pitying, and unsolicited phone
calls to a casual acquaintance, Trump detailed his bent-out-of-shape
feelings about the relentless contempt of the media and the disloyalty of
his staff. The initial subject of his ire was the New York Times reporter
Maggie Haberman, whom he called a nut job. Gail Collins, who had written a
Times column unfavorably comparing Trump to Vice-President Mike Pence, was
a moron. Then, continuing under the rubric of media he hated, he veered to
CNN and the deep disloyalty of its chief, Jeff Zucker.
Zucker, who as the head of entertainment at NBC had commissioned The
Apprentice, had been made by Trump, Trump said of himself in the third
person. He had personally gotten Zucker his job at CNN. Yes, yes, I did,
said the president, launching into a favorite story about how he had once
talked Zucker up at a dinner with a high-ranking executive from CNNs parent
company. I probably shouldnt have, because Zucker is not that smart,
Trump lamented, but I like to show I can do that sort of thing. Then
Zucker had returned the favor by airing the unbelievably disgusting story
about the Russian dossier and the golden shower the practice CNN had
accused him of being party to in a Moscow hotel suite with assorted
prostitutes.
Having dispensed with Zucker, the president of the United States went on to
speculate on what was involved with a golden shower. And how this was all
just part of a media campaign that would never succeed in driving him from
the White House. Because they were sore losers and hated him for winning,
they spread total lies, 100 percent made-up things, totally untrue, for
instance, the cover that week of Time magazine which, Trump reminded his
listener, he had been on more than anyone in history that showed Steve
Bannon, a good guy, saying he was the real president. How much influence do
you think Steve Bannon has over me? Trump demanded. He repeated the
question, then repeated the answer: Zero! Zero! And that went for his
son-in-law, too, who had a lot to learn.
The media was not only hurting him, he said he was not looking for any
agreement or even any response but hurting his negotiating capabilities,
which hurt the nation. And that went for Saturday Night Live, which might
think it was very funny but was actually hurting everybody in the country.
And while he understood that SNL was there to be mean to him, they were
being very, very mean. It was fake comedy. He had reviewed the treatment
of all other presidents in the media, and there was nothing like this ever,
even of Nixon, who was treated very unfairly. Kellyanne, who is very fair,
has this all documented. You can look at it.
The point is, he said, that that very day, he had saved $700 million a year
in jobs that were going to Mexico, but the media was talking about him
wandering around the White House in his bathrobe, which I dont have
because Ive never worn a bathrobe. And would never wear one, because Im
not that kind of guy. And what the media was doing was undermining this
very dignified house, and dignity is so important. But Murdoch, who had
never called me, never once, was now calling all the time. So that should
tell people something.
The call went on for 26 minutes.
Without a strong chief of staff at the White House, there was no real
up-and-down structure in the administration merely a figure at the top and
everyone else scrambling for his attention. It wasnt task-based so much as
response-oriented whatever captured the bosss attention focused
everybodys attention. Priebus and Bannon and Kushner were all fighting to
be the power behind the Trump throne. And in these crosshairs was Katie
Walsh, the deputy chief of staff.
Walsh, who came to the White House from the RNC, represented a certain
Republican ideal: clean, brisk, orderly, efficient. A righteous bureaucrat
with a permanently grim expression, she was a fine example of the many
political professionals in whom competence and organizational skills
transcend ideology. To Walsh, it became clear almost immediately that the
three gentlemen running things, as she came to characterize them, had each
found his own way to appeal to the president. Bannon offered a rousing
fuck-you show of force; Priebus offered flattery from the congressional
leadership; Kushner offered the approval of blue-chip businessmen. Each
appeal was exactly what Trump wanted from the presidency, and he didnt
understand why he couldnt have them all. He wanted to break things, he
wanted Congress to give him bills to sign, and he wanted the love and
respect of New York machers and socialites.
As soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw, it
had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by him. Yet
the president, while proposing the most radical departure from governing and
policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to
turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making suggestions to him was
deeply complicated. Here, arguably, was the central issue of the Trump
presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: He
didnt process information in any conventional sense. He didnt read. He
didnt really even skim. Some believed that for all practical purposes he
was no more than semi-literate. He trusted his own expertise no matter how
paltry or irrelevant more than anyone elses. He was often confident, but
he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering
and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and
behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and
forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh, like trying to
figure out what a child wants.
By the end of the second week following the immigration EO, the three
advisers were in open conflict with one another. For Walsh, it was a daily
process of managing an impossible task: Almost as soon as she received
direction from one of the three men, it would be countermanded by one or
another of them.
I take a conversation at face value and move forward with it, she said. I
put what was decided on the schedule and bring in comms and build a press
plan around it
And then Jared says, Why did you do that? And I say,
Because we had a meeting three days ago with you and Reince and Steve where
you agreed to do this. And he says, But that didnt mean I wanted it on
the schedule
It almost doesnt matter what anyone says: Jared will agree,
and then it will get sabotaged, and then Jared goes to the president and
says, see, that was Reinces idea or Steves idea.
If Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner were now fighting a daily war with one
another, it was exacerbated by the running disinformation campaign about
them that was being prosecuted by the president himself. When he got on the
phone after dinner, hed speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each
member of his staff. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always looks
like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short a midget).
Kushner was a suck-up. Sean Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too).
Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.
During that first month, Walshs disbelief and even fear about what was
happening in the White House moved her to think about quitting. Every day
after that became a countdown toward the moment she knew she wouldnt be
able to take it anymore. To Walsh, the proud political pro, the chaos, the
rivalries, and the presidents own lack of focus were simply
incomprehensible. In early March, not long before she left, she confronted
Kushner with a simple request. Just give me the three things the president
wants to focus on, she demanded. What are the three priorities of this
White House?
It was the most basic question imaginable one that any qualified
presidential candidate would have answered long before he took up residence
at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Six weeks into Trumps presidency, Kushner was
wholly without an answer.
Yes, he said to Walsh. We should probably have that conversation.
e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
