fire and fury chapte 5&6

5
JARVANKA
n the Sunday after the immigration order was issued, Joe Scarborough and his cohost on the
MSNBC show Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski, came for lunch at the White House.
Scarborough is a former Republican congressman from Pensacola, Florida, and Brzezinski is the
daughter of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a high-ranking aide in the Johnson White House and Jimmy Carter’s
National Security Advisor. Morning Joe had gone on the air in 2007 and developed a following
among New York political and media types. Trump was a longtime devotee.
Early in the 2016 campaign, with a change of leadership at NBC News, it seemed likely that the
show, its ratings falling, would be canceled. But Scarborough and Brzezinski embraced their
relationship with Trump and became one of the few media outlets not only with a positive outlook on
him, but that seemed to know his thinking. Trump became a frequent call-in guest and the show a way
to speak more or less directly to him.
It was the kind of relationship Trump dreamed of: media people who took him seriously, talked
about him often, solicited his views, provided him with gossip, and retailed the gossip he offered
them. The effect was to make them all insiders together, which was exactly where Trump wanted to
be. Though he branded himself as a political outsider, actually finding himself on the outside
wounded him.
Trump believed that the media, which he propelled (in the case of Scarborough and Brzezinski,
helping them keep their jobs), owed him something, and the media, giving him vast amounts of free
coverage, believed he owed them, with Scarborough and Brzezinski seeing themselves as something
like semiofficial advisers, if not the political fixers who had put him in his job.
In August, they had had a public spat, resulting in Trump’s tweet: “Some day, when things calm
down, I’ll tell the real story of @JoeNBC and his very insecure long-time girlfriend, @morningmika.
Two clowns!” But Trump’s spats often ended in a tacit admission, however grudging, of mutual
advantage, and in short order they were back on cordial terms again.
On their arrival at the White House, the ninth day of his presidency, Trump proudly showed them
into the Oval Office and was momentarily deflated when Brzezinski said she had been there many
times before with her father, beginning at age nine. Trump showed them some of the memorabilia and,
eagerly, his new portrait of Andrew Jackson—the president whom Steve Bannon had made the totem
figure of the new administration.
“So how do you think the first week has gone?” Trump asked the couple, in a buoyant mood,
seeking flattery.
Scarborough, puzzled by Trump’s jauntiness in the face of the protests spreading across the nation,
demurred and then said, “Well, I love what you did with U.S. Steel and that you had the union guys
come into the Oval Office.” Trump had pledged to use U.S.-made steel in U.S. pipelines and, in a
Trump touch, met at the White House with union representatives from building and sheet metal unions
and then invited them back to the Oval Office—something Trump insisted Obama never did.
But Trump pressed his question, leaving Scarborough with the feeling that nobody had actually
told Trump that he had had a very bad week. Bannon and Priebus, wandering in and out of the office,
might actually have convinced him that the week had been a success, Scarborough thought.
Scarborough then ventured his opinion that the immigration order might have been handled better
and that, all in all, it seemed like a rough period.
Trump, surprised, plunged into a long monologue about how well things had gone, telling Bannon
and Priebus, with a gale of laughter, “Joe doesn’t think we had a good week.” And turning to
Scarborough: “I could have invited Hannity!”
At lunch—fish, which Brzezinski doesn’t eat—Jared and Ivanka joined the president and
Scarborough and Brzezinski. Jared had become quite a Scarborough confidant and would continue to
supply Scarborough with an inside view of the White House—that is, leaking to him. Scarborough
subsequently became a defender of Kushner’s White House position and view. But, for now, both
son-in-law and daughter were subdued and deferential as Scarborough and Brzezinski chatted with
the president, and the president—taking more of the air time as usual—held forth.
Trump continued to cast for positive impressions of his first week and Scarborough again reverted
to his praise of Trump’s handling of the steel union leadership. At which point, Jared interjected that
reaching out to unions, a traditional Democratic constituency, was Bannon’s doing, that this was “the
Bannon way.”
“Bannon?” said the president, jumping on his son-in-law. “That wasn’t Bannon’s idea. That was
my idea. It’s 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? What’s
going on?” He was referencing their not-so-secret secret relationship.
Scarborough and Brzezinski said it was all still complicated, and not public, officially, but it was
good and everything was getting resolved.
“You guys should just get married,” prodded Trump.
“I can marry you! I’m 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!”
* * *
Almost everybody advised Jared not to take the inside job. As a family member, he would command
extraordinary influence from a position that no one could challenge. As an insider, a staffer, not only
could his experience be challenged, but while the president himself might not yet be exposed, a family
member on staff would be where enemies and critics might quite effectively start chipping from.
Besides, inside Trump’s West Wing, if you had a title—that is, other than son-in-law—people would
surely want to take it from you.
Both Jared and Ivanka listened to this advice—from among others it came from Jared’s brother,
Josh, doubly making this case not only to protect his brother but also because of his antipathy to
Trump—but both, balancing risk against reward, ignored it. Trump himself variously encouraged his
son-in-law and his daughter in their new ambitions and, as their excitement mounted, tried to express
his skepticism—while at the same time telling others that he was helpless to stop them.
For Jared and Ivanka, as really for everybody else in the new administration, quite including the
president, this was a random and crazy turn of history such that how could you not seize it? It was a
joint decision by the couple, and, in some sense, a joint job. Jared and Ivanka had made an earnest
deal between themselves: if sometime in the future the time came, she’d be the one to run for
president (or the first one of them to take the shot). The first woman president, Ivanka entertained,
would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be Ivanka Trump.
Bannon, who had coined the Jarvanka conflation now in ever greater use, was horrified when the
couple’s deal was reported to him. “They didn’t say that? Stop. Oh come on. They didn’t actually say
that? Please don’t tell me that. Oh my god.”
And the truth was that at least by then Ivanka would have more experience than almost anybody
else now serving in the White House. She and Jared, or Jared, but by inference she, too, were in
effect the real chief of staff—or certainly as much a chief of staff as Priebus or Bannon, all of them
reporting directly to the president. Or, even more to the organizational point, Jared and Ivanka had a
wholly independent standing inside the West Wing. A super status. Even as Priebus and Bannon tried,
however diplomatically, to remind the couple of staff procedures and propriety, they would in turn
remind the West Wing leadership of their overriding First Family prerogatives. In addition, the
president had immediately handed Jared the Middle East portfolio, making him one of the significant
international players in the administration—indeed, in the world. In the first weeks, this brief
extended out to virtually every other international issue, about which nothing in Kushner’s previous
background would have prepared him for.
Kushner’s most cogent reason for entering the White House was “leverage,” by which he meant
proximity. Quite beyond the status of being inside the family circle, anyone who had proximity to the
president had leverage, the more proximity the more leverage. Trump himself you could see as a sort
of Delphic oracle, sitting in place and throwing out pronouncements which had to be interpreted. Or
as an energetic child, and whomever could placate or distract him became his favorite. Or as the Sun
God (which is effectively how he saw himself), the absolute center of attention, dispensing favor and
delegating power, which could, at any moment, be withdrawn. The added dimension was that this Sun
God had little calculation. His inspiration existed in the moment, hence all the more reason to be there
with him in the moment. Bannon, for one, joined Trump for dinner every night, or at least made
himself available—one bachelor there for the effective other bachelor. (Priebus would observe that
in the beginning everyone would try to be part of these dinners, but within a few months, they had
become a torturous duty to be avoided.)
Part of Jared and Ivanka’s calculation about the relative power and influence of a formal job in the
West Wing versus an outside advisory role was the knowledge 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. The subtleties here were immense, because while he was
often most influenced by the last person he spoke to, he did not actually listen to anyone. So it was not
so much the force of an individual argument or petition that moved him, but rather more just
someone’s presence, the connection of what was going through his mind—and although he was a
person of many obsessions, much of what was on his mind had no fixed view—to whomever he was
with and their views.
Ultimately Trump may not be that different in his fundamental solipsism from anyone of great
wealth who has lived most of his life in a highly controlled environment. But one clear difference
was that he had acquired almost no formal sort of social discipline—he could not even attempt to
imitate decorum. He could not really converse, for instance, 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 (one reason he was so repetitive). Nor did he
treat anyone with any sort of basic or reliable courtesy. If he wanted something, his focus might be
sharp and attention lavish, but if someone wanted something from him, he tended to become irritable
and quickly lost interest. 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
attention and performance—and to do this without making him angry or petulant.
The payoff was his enthusiasm, quickness, spontaneity, and—if he departed for a moment from the
nonstop focus on himself—an often incisive sense of the weaknesses of his opponents and a sense of
their deepest desires. Politics was handicapped by incrementalism, of people knowing too much who
were defeated by all the complexities and conflicting interests before they began. Trump, knowing
little, might, Trumpers tried to believe, give a kooky new hope to the system.
Jared Kushner in quite a short period of time—rather less than a year—had crossed over from the
standard Democratic view in which he was raised, to an acolyte of Trumpism, bewildering many
friends and, as well, his own brother, whose insurance company, Oscar, funded with Kushner-family
money, was destined to be dealt a blow by a repeal of Obamacare.
This seeming conversion was partly the result of Bannon’s insistent and charismatic tutoring—a
kind of real-life engagement with world-bending ideas that had escaped Kushner even at Harvard.
And it was helped by his own resentments toward the liberal elites whom he had tried to court with
his purchase of the New York Observer, an effort that had backfired terribly. And it was, once he
ventured onto the campaign trail, about having to convince himself that close up to the absurd
everything made sense—that Trumpism was a kind of unsentimental realpolitik that would show
everybody in the end. But most of all, it was that they had won. And he was determined not to look a
gift horse in the mouth. And, everything that was bad about Trumpism, he had convinced himself, he
could help fix.
* * *
As much as it might have surprised him—for many years, he had humored Trump more than embraced
him—Kushner was in fact rather like his father-in-law. Jared’s father, Charlie, bore an eerie
resemblance to Donald’s father, Fred. Both men dominated their children, and they did this so
completely that their children, despite their demands, became devoted to them. In both instances, this
was extreme stuff: belligerent, uncompromising, ruthless men creating long-suffering offspring who
were driven to achieve their father’s approval. (Trump’s older brother, Freddy, failing in this effort,
and, by many reports, gay, drank himself to death; he died in 1981 at age forty-three.) In business
meetings, observers would be nonplussed that Charlie and Jared Kushner invariably greeted each
other with a kiss and that the adult Jared called his father Daddy.
Neither Donald nor Jared, no matter their domineering fathers, went into the world with humility.
Insecurity was soothed by entitlement. Both out-of-towners who were eager to prove themselves or
lay rightful claim in Manhattan (Kushner from New Jersey, Trump from Queens), they were largely
seen as overweening, smug, and arrogant. Each cultivated a smooth affect, which could appear more
comical than graceful. Neither, by choice nor awareness, could seem to escape his privilege. “Some
people who are very privileged are aware of it and put it away; Kushner not only seemed in every
gesture and word to emphasize his privilege, but also not to be aware of it,” said one New York
media executive who dealt with Kushner. Both men were never out of their circle of privilege. The
main challenge they set for themselves was to enter further into the privileged circle. Social climbing
was their work.
Jared’s focus was often on older men. Rupert Murdoch spent a surprising amount of time with
Jared, who sought advice from the older media mogul about the media business—which the young
man was determined to break into. Kushner paid long court to Ronald Perelman, the billionaire
financier and takeover artist, who later would host Jared and Ivanka in his private shul on Jewish
high holy days. And, of course, Kushner wooed Trump himself, who became a fan of the young man
and was uncharacteristically tolerant about his daughter’s conversion to Orthodox Judaism when that
became a necessary next step toward marriage. Likewise, Trump as a young man had carefully
cultivated a set of older mentors, including Roy Cohn, the flamboyant lawyer and fixer who had
served as right-hand man to the red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy.
And then there was the harsh fact that the world of Manhattan and particular its living voice, the
media, seemed to cruelly reject them. The media long ago turned on Donald Trump as a wannabe and
lightweight, and wrote him off for that ultimate sin—anyway, the ultimate sin in media terms—of
trying to curry favor with the media too much. His fame, such as it was, was actually reverse fame—
he was famous for being infamous. It was joke fame.
To understand the media snub, and its many levels of irony, there is no better place to look than the
New York Observer, the Manhattan media and society weekly that Kushner bought in 2006 for $10
million—by almost every estimate $10 million more than it was worth.
* * *
The New York Observer was, when it launched in 1987, a rich man’s fancy, as much failed media
often is. It was a bland weekly chronicle of the Upper East Side, New York’s wealthiest
neighborhood. Its conceit was to treat this neighborhood like a small town. But nobody took any
notice. Its frustrated patron, Arthur Carter, who made his money in the first generation of Wall Street
consolidations, was introduced to Graydon Carter (no relation), who had started Spy magazine, a
New York imitation of the British satirical publication Private Eye. Spy was part of a set of 1980s
publications—Manhattan, Inc., a relaunched Vanity Fair, and New York— obsessed with the new
rich and what seemed to be a transformational moment in New York. Trump was both symbol of and
punch line for this new era of excess and celebrity and the media’s celebration of those things.
Graydon Carter became the editor of the New York Observer in 1991 and not only refocused the
weekly on big-money culture, but essentially made it a tip-sheet for the media writing about media
culture, and for members of the big-money culture who wanted to be in the media. There may never
have been such a self-conscious and self-referential publication as the New York Observer.
As Donald Trump, along with many others of this new-rich ilk, sought to be covered by the media
—Murdoch’s New York Post was the effective court recorder of this new publicity-hungry aristocracy
—the New York Observer covered the process of him being covered. The story of Trump was the
story of how he tried to make himself a story. He was shameless, campy, and instructive: if you were
willing to risk humiliation, the world could be yours. Trump became the objective correlative for the
rising appetite for fame and notoriety. Trump came to believe he understood everything about the
media—who you need to know, what pretense you need to maintain, what information you could
profitably trade, what lies you might tell, what lies the media expected you to tell. And the media
came to believe it knew everything about Trump—his vanities, delusions, and lies, and the levels,
uncharted, to which he would stoop for ever more media attention.
Graydon Carter soon used the New York Observer as his stepping-stone to Vanity Fair—where, he
believed, he might have access to a higher level of celebrity than Donald Trump. Carter was followed
at the Observer in 1994 by Peter Kaplan, an editor with a heightened sense of postmodern irony and
ennui.
Trump, in Kaplan’s telling, suddenly took on a new persona. Whereas he had before been the
symbol of success and mocked for it, now he became, in a shift of zeitgeist (and of having to refinance
a great deal of debt), a symbol of failure and mocked for it. This was a complicated reversal, not just
having to do with Trump, but of how the media was now seeing itself. Donald Trump became a
symbol of the media’s own self-loathing: the interest in and promotion of Donald Trump was a
morality tale about the media. Its ultimate end was Kaplan’s pronouncement that Trump should not be
covered anymore because every story about Donald Trump had become a cliché.
An important aspect of Kaplan’s New York Observer and its self-conscious inside media baseball
was that the paper became the prime school for a new generation of media reporters flooding every
other publication in New York as journalism itself became ever more self-conscious and selfreferential.
To everyone working in media in New York, Donald Trump represented the ultimate
shame of working in media in New York: you might have to write about Donald Trump. Not writing
about him, or certainly not taking him at face value, became a moral stand.
In 2006, after Kaplan had edited the paper for fifteen years, Arthur Carter sold the Observer—
which had never made a profit—to the then twenty-five-year-old Kushner, an unknown real estate heir
interested in gaining stature and notoriety in the city. Kaplan was now working for someone twentyfive
years his junior, a man who, ironically, was just the kind of arriviste he would otherwise have
covered.
For Kushner, owning the paper soon paid off, because, with infinite ironies not necessarily
apparent to him, it allowed him into the social circle where he met Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka,
whom he married in 2009. But the paper did not, irksomely for Kushner, pay off financially, which put
him into increasing tension with Kaplan. Kaplan, in turn, began telling witty and devastating tales
about the pretensions and callowness of his new boss, which spread, in constant retelling, among his
many media protégés and hence throughout the media itself.
In 2009, Kaplan left the paper, and Kushner—making a mistake that many rich men who have
bought vanity media properties are prone to making—tried to find a profit by cutting costs. In short
order, the media world came to regard Kushner as the man who not only took Peter Kaplan’s paper
from him, but also ruined it, brutally and incompetently. And worse: in 2013, Kaplan, at fifty-nine,
died of cancer. So, effectively, in the telling, Kushner had killed him, too.
Media is personal. It is a series of blood scores. The media in its often collective mind decides
who is going to rise and who is going to fall, who lives and who dies. If you stay around long enough
in the media eye, your fate, like that of a banana republic despot, is often an unkind one—a law
Hillary Clinton was not able to circumvent. The media has the last word.
Long before he ran for president, Trump and his sidekick son-in-law Kushner had been marked not
just for ignominy, but for slow torture by ridicule, contempt, and ever-more amusing persiflage. These
people are nothing. They are media debris. For goodness’ sake!
Trump, in a smart move, picked up his media reputation and relocated it from a hypercritical New
York to a more value-free Hollywood, becoming the star of his own reality show, The Apprentice,
and embracing a theory that would serve him well during his presidential campaign: in flyover
country, there is no greater asset than celebrity. To be famous is to be loved—or at least fawned over.
The fabulous, incomprehensible irony that the Trump family had, despite the media’s distaste,
despite everything the media knows and understands and has said about them, risen to a level not only
of ultimate consequence but even of immortality is beyond worst-case nightmare and into cosmic-joke
territory. In this infuriating circumstance, Trump and his son-in-law were united, always aware and
yet never quite understanding why they should be the butt of a media joke, and now the target of its
stunned outrage.
* * *
The fact that Trump and his son-in-law had many things in common did not mean they operated on a
common playing field. Kushner, no matter how close to Trump, was yet a member of the Trump
entourage, with no more ultimate control of his father-in-law than anybody else now in the business of
trying to control Trump.
Still, the difficulty of controlling him had been part of Kushner’s self-justification or
rationalization for stepping beyond his family role and taking a senior White House job: to exercise
restraint on his father-in-law and even—a considerable stretch for the inexperienced young man—to
help lend him some gravitas.
If Bannon was going to pursue as his first signature White House statement the travel ban, then
Kushner was going to pursue as his first leadership mark a meeting with the Mexican president, whom
his father-in-law had threatened and insulted throughout the campaign.
Kushner called up the ninety-three-year-old Kissinger for advice. This was both to flatter the old
man and to be able to drop his name, but it was also actually for real advice. Trump had done nothing
but cause problems for the Mexican president. To bring the Mexican president to the White House
would be, despite Bannon’s no-pivot policy from the campaign’s harshness, a truly meaningful pivot
for which Kushner would be able to claim credit (although don’t call it a pivot). It was what Kushner
believed he should be doing: quietly following behind the president and with added nuance and
subtlety clarifying the president’s real intentions, if not recasting them entirely.
The negotiation to bring Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto to the White House had begun
during the transition period. Kushner saw the chance to convert the issue of the wall into a bilateral
agreement addressing immigration—hence a tour de force of Trumpian politics. The negotiations
surrounding the visit reached their apogee on the Wednesday after the inaugural, with a high-level
Mexican delegation—the first visit by any foreign leader to the Trump White House—meeting with
Kushner and Reince Priebus. Kushner’s message to his father-in-law that afternoon was that Peña
Nieto had signed on to a White House meeting and planning for the visit could go forward.
The next day Trump tweeted: “The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has
been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers . . .” And he continued in
the next tweet . . . “of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed
wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting . . .”
At which point Peña Nieto did just that, leaving Kushner’s negotiation and statecraft as so much
scrap on the floor.
* * *
On Friday, February 3, at breakfast at the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown, an epicenter of the
swamp, Ivanka Trump, flustered, came down the stairs and entered the dining room, talking loudly on
her cell phone: “Things are so messed up and I don’t know how to fix it. . . .”
The week had been overwhelmed by continuing fallout from the immigration order—the
administration was in court and headed to a brutal ruling against it—and more embarrassing leaks of
two theoretically make-nice phone calls, one with the Mexican president (“bad hombres”) and the
other with the Australian prime minister (“my worst call by far”). What’s more, the day before,
Nordstrom had announced that it was dropping Ivanka Trump’s clothing line.
The thirty-five-year-old was a harried figure, a businesswoman who had had to abruptly shift
control of her business. She was also quite overwhelmed by the effort of having just moved her three
children into a new house in a new city—and having to do this largely on her own. Asked how his
children were adjusting to their new school several weeks after the move, Jared said that yes, they
were indeed in school—but he could not immediately identify where.
Still, in another sense, Ivanka was landing on her feet. Breakfast at the Four Seasons was a natural
place for her. She was among everyone who was anyone. In the restaurant that morning: House
Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman; Washington fixture, lobbyist,
and Clinton confidant Vernon Jordan; labor secretary nominee Wilbur Ross; Bloomberg Media CEO
Justin Smith; Washington Post national reporter Mark Berman; and a table full of women lobbyists
and fixers, including the music industry’s longtime representative in Washington, Hillary Rosen; Elon
Musk’s D.C. adviser, Juleanna Glover; Uber’s political and policy executive, Niki Christoff; and
Time Warner’s political affairs executive, Carol Melton.
In some sense—putting aside both her father’s presence in the White House and his tirades against
draining the swamp, which might otherwise include most everyone here, this was the type of room
Ivanka had worked hard to be in. Following the route of her father, she was crafting her name and
herself into a multifaceted, multiproduct brand; she was also transitioning from her father’s
aspirational male golf and business types to aspirational female mom and business types. She had,
well before her father’s presidency could have remotely been predicted, sold a book, Women Who
Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, for $1 million.
In many ways, it had been an unexpected journey, requiring more discipline than you might expect
from a contented, distracted, run-of-the-mill socialite. As a twenty-one-year-old, she appeared in a
film made by her then boyfriend, Jamie Johnson, a Johnson & Johnson heir. It’s a curious, even
somewhat unsettling film, in which Johnson corrals his set of rich-kid friends into openly sharing their
dissatisfactions, general lack of ambition, and contempt for their families. (One of his friends would
engage in long litigation with him over the portrayal.) Ivanka, speaking with something like a Valley
Girl accent—which would transform in the years ahead into something like a Disney princess voice
—seems no more ambitious or even employed than anyone else, but she is notably less angry with her
parents.
She treated her father with some lightness, even irony, and in at least one television interview she
made fun of his comb-over. 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
Trump’s orange-blond hair color.
Father and daughter got along almost peculiarly well. She was the real mini-Trump (a title that
many people now seemed to aspire to). She accepted him. She was a helper not just in his business
dealings, but in his marital realignments. She facilitated entrances and exits. If you have a douchebag
dad, and if everyone is open about it, then maybe it becomes fun and life a romantic comedy—sort of.
Reasonably, she ought to be much angrier. She grew up not just in the middle of a troubled family
but in one that was at all times immersed in bad press. But she was able to bifurcate reality and live
only in the uppermost part of it, where the Trump name, no matter how often tarnished, nevertheless
had come to be an affectionately tolerated presence. She resided in a bubble of other wealthy people
who thrived on their relationship with one another—at first among private school and Upper East
Side of Manhattan friends, then among social, fashion, and media contacts. What’s more, she tended
to find protection as well as status in her boyfriends’ families, aggressively bonding with a series of
wealthy suitors’ families—including Jamie Johnson’s before the Kushners—over her own.
The Ivanka-Jared relationship was shepherded by Wendi Murdoch, herself a curious social
example (to nobody so much as to her then husband, Rupert). The effort among a new generation of
wealthy women was to recast life as a socialite, turning a certain model of whimsy and noblesse
oblige into a new status as a power woman, a kind of postfeminist socialite. In this, you worked at
knowing other rich people, the best rich people, and of being an integral and valuable part of a
network of the rich, and of having your name itself evoke, well . . . riches. You weren’t satisfied with
what you had, you wanted more. This required quite a level of indefatigability. You were marketing a
product—yourself. You were your own start-up.
This was what her father had always done. This, more than real estate, was the family business.
She and Kushner then united as a power couple, consciously recasting themselves as figures of
ultimate attainment, ambition, and satisfaction in the new global world and as representatives of a
new eco-philanthropic-art sensibility. For Ivanka, this included her friendship with Wendi Murdoch
and with Dasha Zhukova, the then wife of the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, a fixture in the
international art world, and, just a few months before the election, attending a Deepak Chopra
seminar on mediation with Kushner. She was searching for meaning—and finding it. This
transformation was further expressed not just in ancillary clothing, jewelry, and footwear lines, as
well as reality TV projects, but in a careful social media presence. She became a superbly
coordinated everymom, who would, with her father’s election, recast herself again, this time as royal
family.
And yet, the larger truth was that Ivanka’s relationship with her father was in no way a
conventional family relationship. If it wasn’t pure opportunism, it was certainly transactional. It was
business. Building the brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House—it was all
business.
But what did Ivanka and Jared really think of their father and father-in-law? “There’s great, great,
great affection—you see it, you really do,” replied Kellyanne Conway, somewhat avoiding the
question.
“They’re not fools,” said Rupert Murdoch when asked the question.
“They understand him, I think truly,” reflected Joe Scarborough. “And they appreciate his energy.
But there’s detachment.” That is, Scarborough went on, they have tolerance but few illusions.
* * *
Ivanka’s breakfast that Friday at the Four Seasons was with Dina Powell, the latest Goldman Sachs
executive to join the White House.
In the days after the election, Ivanka and Jared had both met with a revolving door of lawyers and
PR people, most of them, the couple found, leery of involvement, not least because the couple seemed
less interested in bending to advice and more interested in shopping for the advice they wanted. In
fact, much of the advice they were getting had the same message: surround yourself—acquaint
yourselves—with figures of the greatest establishment credibility. In effect: you are amateurs, you
need professionals.
One name that kept coming up was Powell’s. A Republican operative who had gone on to high
influence and compensation at Goldman Sachs, she was quite the opposite of anyone’s notion of a
Trump Republican. Her family emigrated from Egypt when she was a girl, and she is fluent in Arabic.
She worked her way up through a series of stalwart Republicans, including Texas senator Kay Bailey
Hutchison and House Speaker Dick Armey. In the Bush White House she served as chief of the
personnel office and an assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs. She went to
Goldman in 2007 and became a partner in 2010, running its philanthropic outreach, the Goldman
Sachs Foundation. Following a trend in the careers of many poiitical operatives, she had become, as
well as an über networker, a corporate public affairs and PR-type adviser—someone who knew the
right people in power and had a keen sensitivity to how other people’s power can be used.
The table of women lobbyists and communications professionals in the Four Seasons that morning
was certainly as interested in Powell, and her presence in the new administration, as they were in the
president’s daughter. If Ivanka Trump was a figure more of novelty than of seriousness, the fact that
she had helped bring Powell into the White House and was now publicly conferring with her added a
further dimension to the president’s daughter. In a White House seeming to pursue a dead-set
Trumpian way, this was a hint of an alternative course. In the assessment of the other fixers and PR
women at the Four Seasons, this was a potential shadow White House—Trump’s own family not
assaulting the power structure but expressing an obvious enthusiasm for it.
Ivanka, after a long breakfast, made her way through the room. Between issuing snappish
instructions on her phone, she bestowed warm greetings and accepted business cards.
W
6
At HQME
ithin the first weeks of his presidency a theory emerged among Trump’s friends that he was not
acting presidential, or, really, in any way taking into account his new status or restraining his
behavior—from early morning tweets, to his refusal to follow scripted remarks, to his self-pitying
calls to friends, details of which were already making it into the press—because he hadn’t taken the
leap that others before him had taken. Most presidents arrived in the White House from more or less
ordinary political life, and could not help but be awed and 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 would not have been
that different from Trump’s former life in Trump Tower, which was more commodious and to his taste
than the White House, with servants, security, courtiers, and advisers always on the premises and a
plane at the ready. The big deal of being president was not so apparent to him.
But another theory of the case was exactly opposite: he was totally off-kilter here because
everything in his orderly world had been thrown on its head. In this view, the seventy-year-old Trump
was a creature of habit at a level few people without despotic control of their environment could ever
imagine. He had lived in the same home, a vast space in Trump Tower, since shortly after the building
was completed in 1983. Every morning since, he had made the same commute to his office a few
floors down. His corner office was a time capsule from the 1980s, the same gold-lined mirrors, the
same Time magazine covers fading on the wall; the only substantial change was the substitution of Joe
Namath’s football for Tom Brady’s. Outside the doors to his office, everywhere he looked there were
the same faces, the same retainers—servants, security, courtiers, the “yes people”—who had attended
him basically always.
“Can you imagine how disruptive it would be if that’s what you did every day and then suddenly
you’re in the White House?” marveled a longtime Trump friend, smiling broadly at this trick of fate, if
not abrupt comeuppance.
Trump found the White House, an old building with only sporadic upkeep and piecemeal
renovations—as well as a famous roach and rodent problem—to be vexing and even a little scary.
Friends who admired his skills as a hotelier wondered why he just didn’t remake the place, but he
seemed cowed by the weight of the watchful eyes on him.
Kellyanne Conway, whose family had remained in New Jersey, and who had anticipated that she
could commute home when the president went back to New York, was surprised that New York and
Trump Tower were suddenly stricken from his schedule. Conway thought that the president, in
addition to being aware of the hostility in New York, was making a conscious effort to be “part of this
great house.” (But, acknowledging the difficulties inherent in his change of circumstances and of
adapting to presidential lifestyle, she added, “How often will he go to Camp David?”—the Spartan,
woodsy presidential retreat in Catoctin Mountain Park in Maryland—“How ’bout never.”)
At the White House, he retreated to his own bedroom—the first time since the Kennedy White
House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms (although Melania was spending
scant time so far in the White House). 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, it’s 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 McDonald’s—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 six-thirty 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, among them most frequently
Tom Barrack, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then
compared notes with one another.
* * *
But after the rocky start, things started to look better—even, some argued, presidential.
On Tuesday, January 31, in an efficiently choreographed prime-time ceremony, an upbeat and
confident President Trump announced the nomination of federal appellate judge Neil Gorsuch to the
Supreme Court. Gorsuch was a perfect combination of impeccable conservative standing, admirable
probity, and gold-standard legal and judicial credentials. The nomination not only delivered on
Trump’s promise to the base and to the conservative establishment, but it was a choice that seemed
perfectly presidential.
Gorsuch’s nomination was also a victory for a staff that had seen Trump, with this plum job and
rich reward in his hand, waver again and again. Pleased by how the nomination was received,
especially by how little fault the media could find with it, Trump would shortly become a Gorsuch
fan. But before settling on Gorsuch, he wondered why the job wasn’t going to a friend and loyalist. In
the Trump view, it was rather a waste to give the job to someone he didn’t even know.
At various points in the process he had run through almost all his lawyer friends—all of them
unlikely, if not peculiar, choices, and, in almost every case, political nonstarters. The one unlikely,
peculiar, and nonstarter choice that he kept returning to was Rudy Giuliani.
Trump owed Giuliani; not that he was so terribly focused on his debts, but this was one that was
certainly unpaid. Not only was Giuliani a longtime New York friend, but when few Republicans were
offering Trump their support, and almost none with a national reputation, Giuliani was there for him
—and in combative, fiery, and relentless fashion. This was particularly true during the hard days
following Billy Bush: when virtually everybody, including the candidate himself, Bannon, Conway,
and his children, believed the campaign would implode, Giuliani barely allowed himself a break
from his nonstop, passionate, and unapologetic Trump defense.
Giuliani wanted to be the secretary of state, and Trump had in so many words offered him the job.
The resistance to Giuliani from the Trump circle derived from the same reason Trump was inclined to
give him the job—Giuliani had Trump’s ear and wouldn’t let go. The staff whispered about his health
and stability. Even his full-on pussygate defense now started to seem like a liability. He was offered
attorney general, Department of Homeland Security, and director of national intelligence, but he
turned them all down, continuing to hold out for State. Or, in what staffers took to be the ultimate
presumption, or grand triangulation, the Supreme Court. Since Trump could not put someone openly
pro-choice on the court without both sundering his base and risking defeat of his nominee, then, of
course, he’d have to give Giuliani State.
When this strategy failed—Rex Tillerson got the secretary of state job—that should have been the
end of it, but Trump kept returning to the idea of putting Giuliani on the court. On February 8, during
the confirmation process, Gorsuch took public exception to Trump’s disparagement of the courts.
Trump, in a moment of pique, decided to pull his nomination and, during conversations with his afterdinner
callers, went back to discussing how he should have given the nod to Rudy. He was the only
loyal guy. It was Bannon and Priebus who kept having to remind him, and to endlessly repeat, that in
one of the campaign’s few masterful pieces of issue-defusing politics, and perfect courtship of the
conservative base, it had let the Federalist Society produce a list of candidates. The campaign had
promised that the nominee would come from that list—and needless to say, Giuliani wasn’t on it.
Gorsuch was it. And Trump would shortly not remember when he had ever wanted anyone but
Gorsuch.
* * *
On February 3, the White House hosted a carefully orchestrated meeting of one of the newly
organized business councils, the president’s Strategic and Policy Forum. It was a group of highly
placed CEOs and weighty business types brought together by Blackstone chief Stephen Schwarzman.
The planning for the event—with a precise agenda, choreographed seating and introductions, and
fancy handouts—was more due to Schwarzman than to the White House. But it ended up being the
kind of event that Trump did very well at and very much enjoyed. Kellyanne Conway, often
referencing the Schwarzman gathering, would soon begin a frequent theme of complaint, namely that
these kinds of events—Trump sitting down with serious-minded people and looking for solutions to
the nation’s problems—were the soul of Trump’s White House and the media was giving them scant
coverage.
Hosting business advisory councils was a Kushner strategy. It was an enlightened business
approach, distracting Trump from what Kushner viewed as the unenlightened right-wing agenda. To
an increasingly scornful Bannon, its real purpose was to allow Kushner himself to consort with
CEOs.
Schwarzman reflected what to many was a surprising and sudden business and Wall Street affinity
for Trump. Although few major-company CEOs had publicly supported him—with many, if not all,
big companies planning for a Hillary Clinton victory and already hiring Clinton-connected public
policy teams and with a pervasive media belief that a Trump victory would assure a market tailspin
—there was suddenly an overnight warming. An antiregulatory White House and the promise of tax
reform outweighed the prospect of disruptive tweeting and other forms of Trump chaos; besides, the
market had not stopped climbing since November 9, the day after the election. What’s more, in oneon-
one meetings, CEOs were reporting good vibes from Trump’s effusive and artful flattery—and the
sudden relief of not having to deal with what some knew to be relentless Clinton-team hondling (what
can you do for us today and can we use your plan?).
On the other hand, while there was a warming C-suite feeling for Trump, there was also rising
concern about the consumer side of many big brands. The Trump brand was suddenly the world’s
biggest brand—the new Apple, except the opposite, since it was universally disdained (at least
among many of the consumers who most top brands sought to court).
Hence, on inaugural morning, the employees of Uber, the ride sharing company, whose then CEO
Travis Kalanick had signed on to the Schwarzman council, woke up to find people chained to the
doors of their San Francisco headquarters. The charge was that Uber and Kalanick were
“collaborating”—with its whiff of Vichy—a much different status than a business looking to sober
forums with the president as a way to influence the government. Indeed, the protesters who believed
they were seeing the company’s relationship with Trump in political terms were actually seeing this
in conventional brand terms and zooming in on the disconnect. Uber’s customer base is strongly
young, urban, and progressive, and therefore out of sync with the Trump base. Brand-conscious
millennials saw this as beyond policy dickering and as part of an epic identity clash. The Trump
White House stood less for government and the push-pull of competing interests and developing
policies, and more, in a brand-savvy world, as a fixed and unpopular cultural symbol.
Uber’s Kalanick resigned from the council. Disney CEO Bob Iger simply found that he was
otherwise occupied on the occasion of the forum’s first meeting.
But most of the people on the council—other than Elon Musk, the investor, inventor, and founder
of Tesla (who would later resign)—were not from media or tech companies, with their liberal bent,
but from old-line, when-America-was-great enterprises. They included Mary Barra, the CEO of
General Motors; Ginni Rometty of IBM; Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE; Jim McNerney, the
former CEO of Boeing; and Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo. If the new right had elected Trump, it was the
older Fortune 100 executives who most pleased him.
Trump attended the meeting with his full retinue—the circle that seemed always to move with him
in lockstep, including Bannon, Priebus, Kushner, Stephen Miller, and National Economic Council
chief Gary Cohn—but conducted it entirely himself. Each of the people at the table, taking a point of
interest, spoke for five minutes, with Trump then asking follow-up questions. Though Trump appeared
not to have particularly, or at all, prepared for any of the subjects being discussed, he asked engaged
and interested questions, pursuing things he wanted to know more about, making the meeting quite an
easy back-and-forth. One of the CEOs observed that this seemed like the way Trump preferred to get
information—talking about what he was interested in and getting other people to talk about his
interests.
The meeting went on for two hours. In the White House view, this was Trump at his best. He was
most at home around people he respected—and these were “the most respected people in the
country,” according to Trump—who seemed to respect him, too.
This became a staff goal—to create situations in which he was comfortable, to construct
something of a bubble, to wall him off from a mean-spirited world. Indeed, they sought to carefully
replicate this formula: Trump in the Oval or in a larger West Wing ceremonial room presiding in front
of a receptive audience, with a photo opportunity. Trump was often his own stage manager at these
events, directing people in and out of the picture.
* * *
The media has a careful if selective filter when it comes to portraying real life in the White House.
The president and First Family are not, at least not usually, subjected to the sort of paparazzi pursuit
that in celebrity media results in unflattering to embarrassing to mocking photographs, or in endless
speculation about their private lives. Even in the worst scandals, a businesslike suit-and-tie formality
is still accorded the president. Saturday Night Live presidential skits are funny in part because they
play on our belief that in reality, presidents are quite contained and buttoned-down figures, and their
families, trotting not far behind, colorless and obedient. The joke on Nixon was that he was pitiably
uptight—even at the height of Watergate, drinking heavily, he remained in his coat and tie, kneeling in
prayer. Gerald Ford merely tripped coming off Air Force One, providing great hilarity in this break
from formal presidential poise. Ronald Reagan, likely suffering the early effects of Alzheimer’s,
remained a carefully managed picture of calm and confidence. Bill Clinton, amid the greatest break in
presidential decorum in modern history, was even so always portrayed as a man in control. George
W. Bush, for all his disengagement, was allowed by the media to be presented as dramatically in
charge. Barack Obama, perhaps to his disadvantage, was consistently presented as thoughtful, steady,
and determined. This is partly a benefit of overweening image control, but it is also because the
president is thought to be the ultimate executive—or because the national myth requires him to be.
That was actually the kind of image that Donald Trump had worked to project throughout most of
his career. His is a 1950s businessman sort of ideal. He aspires to look like his father—or, anyway,
not to displease his father. Except when he’s in golf wear, it is hard to imagine him out of a suit and
tie, because he almost never is. Personal dignity—that is, apparent uprightness and respectability—is
one of his fixations. He is uncomfortable when the men around him are not wearing suit and ties.
Formality and convention—before he became president, almost everybody without high celebrity or a
billion dollars called him “Mr. Trump”—are a central part of his identity. Casualness is the enemy of
pretense. And his pretense was that the Trump brand stood for power, wealth, arrival.
On the February 5, the New York Times published an inside-the-White-House story that had the
president, two weeks into his term, stalking around in the late hours of the night in his bathrobe,
unable to work the light switches. Trump fell apart. It was, the president not incorrectly saw, a way of
portraying him as losing it, as Norma Desmond in the movie Sunset Boulevard, a faded or even senile
star living in a fantasy world. (This was Bannon’s interpretation of the Times’s image of Trump,
which was quickly adopted by everyone in the White House.) And, of course, once again, it was a
media thing—he was being treated in a way that no other president had ever been treated.
This was not incorrect. The New York Times, in its efforts to cover a presidency that it openly saw
as aberrant, had added to its White House beat something of a new form of coverage. Along with
highlighting White House announcements—separating the trivial from the significant—the paper
would also highlight, often in front-page coverage, the sense of the absurd, the pitiable, and the alltoo-
human. These stories turned Trump into a figure of ridicule. The two White House reporters most
consistently on this beat, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, would become part of Trump’s
constant refrain about the media being out to get him. Thrush would even become a fixture in
Saturday Night Live sketches that mocked the president, his children, his press secretary Sean Spicer,
and his advisers Bannon and Conway.
The president, while often a fabulist in his depiction of the world, was quite a literalist when it
came to how he saw himself. Hence he rebutted this picture of him as a half-demented or seriously
addled midnight stalker in the White House by insisting that he didn’t own a bathrobe.
“Do I seem like a bathrobe kind of guy, really?” he demanded, not humorously, of almost every
person with whom he spoke over the next forty-eight hours. “Seriously, can you see me in a
bathrobe?”
Who had leaked it? For Trump, the details of his personal life suddenly became a far greater
matter of concern than all the other kinds of leaks.
The New York Times Washington bureau, itself quite literal and worried by the possible lack of an
actual bathrobe, reverse-leaked that Bannon was the source of the story.
Bannon, who styled himself as a kind of black hole of silence, had also become a sort of official
black-hole voice, everybody’s Deep Throat. He was witty, intense, evocative, and bubbling over, his
theoretical discretion ever giving way to a constant semipublic commentary on the pretensions and
fatuousness and hopeless lack of seriousness of most everyone else in the White House. By the
second week of the Trump presidency, everybody in the White House seemed to be maintaining their
own list of likely leakers and doing their best to leak before being leaked about.
But another likely leak source about his angst in the White House was Trump himself. In his calls
throughout the day and at night from his bed, he frequently spoke to people who had no reason to keep
his confidences. He was a river of grievances—including about what a dump the White House was on
close inspection—examples of which many recipients of his calls promptly spread throughout the
ever attentive and merciless gossip world.
* * *
On February 6, Trump made one of his seething, self-pitying, and unsolicited phone calls without
presumption of confidentiality to a passing New York media acquaintance. The call had no
discernible point other than to express 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 and its reporter Maggie Haberman, whom he
called “a nut job.” The Times’s Gail Collins, who had written a column unfavorably comparing
Trump to Vice President Pence, was “a moron.” But 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
NBC had commissioned The Apprentice, had been “made by Trump,” Trump said of himself in the
third person. And Trump had “personally” gotten Zucker his job at CNN. “Yes, yes, I did,” said
Trump.
He then repeated a story that he was obsessively telling almost everyone he spoke to. He’d gone to
a dinner, he didn’t remember when, where he had sat next to “a gentleman named Kent”—undoubtedly
Phil Kent, a former CEO of Turner Broadcasting, the Time Warner division that oversaw CNN—“and
he had a list of four names.” Three of them Trump had never heard of, but he knew Jeff Zucker
because of The Apprentice. “Zucker was number four on the list, so I talked him up to number one. I
probably shouldn’t have because Zucker is not that smart but I like to show I can do that sort of thing.”
But Zucker, “a very bad guy who has done terrible with the ratings,” had turned around after Trump
had gotten him the job and had said, well, it’s “unbelievably disgusting.” This was the Russian
“dossier” and the “golden shower” story—the practice CNN had accused him of being party to in the
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 listeners, 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 and repeated the question, and
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 really even
any response—but hurting his negotiating capabilities, which hurt the nation. And that went for
Saturday Night Live, too, 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 in his bathrobe, which “I don’t have because I’ve
never worn a bathrobe. And would never wear one, because I’m 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 xall went on for twenty minutes.