fire and fury chapter 13 & 14

13
BANNON AGONISTES
e, too, felt like a prisoner, he had told Katie Walsh when she came to tell him she was leaving.
By ten weeks in, Steve Bannon’s mastery of the Trump agenda, or at least of Trump himself,
appeared to have crumbled. His current misery was both Catholic in nature—the self-flagellation of a
man who believed he lived on a higher moral plane than all others—and fundamentally misanthropic.
As an antisocial, maladjusted, post-middle-aged man, he had to make a supreme effort to get along
with others, an effort that often did not go well. Most especially, he was miserable because of Donald
Trump, whose cruelties, always great even when they were casual, were unbearable when he truly
turned against you.
“I hated being on the campaign, I hated the transition, I hate being here in the White House,” said
Bannon, sitting one evening in Reince Priebus’s office, on an unseasonably warm evening in early
spring, with the French doors open to the arbor-covered patio where he and Priebus, now firm friends
and allies in their antipathy toward Jarvanka, had set an outdoor table.
But Bannon was, he believed, here for a reason. And it was his firm belief—a belief he was
unable to keep to himself, thus continually undermining his standing with the president—that his
efforts had brought everybody else here. Even more important, he was the only person showing up for
work every day who was committed to the purpose of actually changing the country. Changing it
quickly, radically, and truly.
The idea of a split electorate—of blue and red states, of two opposing currents of values, of
globalists and nationalists, of an establishment and populist revolt—was media shorthand for cultural
angst and politically roiled times, and, to a large degree, for business as usual. But Bannon believed
the split was literal. The United States had become a country of two hostile peoples. One would
necessarily win and the other lose. Or one would dominate while the other would become marginal.
This was modern civil war—Bannon’s war. The country built on the virtue and the character and
the strength of the American workingman circa 1955–65 was the ideal he meant to defend and restore:
trade agreements, or trade wars, that supported American manufacturing; immigration policies that
protected American workers (and, hence, American culture, or at least America’s identity from 1955
to 1965); and an international isolation that would conserve American resources and choke off the
ruling class’s Davos sensibility (and also save working-class military lives). This was, in the view of
almost everyone but Donald Trump and the alt-right, a crazy bit of voodoo economic and political
nonsense. But it was, for Bannon, a revolutionary and religious idea.
For most others in the White House, it was Bannon’s pipe dream. “Steve is . . . Steve,” became the
gentle term of art for tolerating him. “A lot of stuff goes on in his head,” said the president, pursuing
one of his reliable conversational themes, dismissing Bannon.
But it wasn’t Bannon versus everybody else so much as it was Bannon Trump versus non-Bannon
Trump. If Trump, in his dark, determined, and aggressive mood, could represent Bannon and his
views, he could just as easily represent nothing at all—or represent solely his own need for instant
gratification. That’s what the non-Bannon people understood about Trump. If the boss was happy, then
a normal, incremental, two-steps-forward-one-step-back approach to politics might prevail. Even a
new sort of centrism, as inimical to Bannonism as it was possible to conceive, could emerge.
Bannon’s pronouncements about a fifty-year rule for Trumpism might then be supplanted by the rule of
Jared, Ivanka, and Goldman Sachs.
By the end of March, this was the side that was winning. Bannon’s efforts to use the epic health
care fail as evidence that the establishment was the enemy had hopelessly backfired. Trump saw the
health care failure as his own failure, but since he didn’t have failures, it couldn’t be a failure, and
would in fact be a success—if not now, soon. So Bannon, a Cassandra on the sidelines, was the
problem.
Trump rationalized his early embrace of Bannon by heaping scorn on him—and by denying that he
had ever embraced him. If there was anything wrong with his White House, it was Steve Bannon.
Maligning Bannon was Trump’s idea of fun. When it came to Bannon, Trump rose to something like
high analysis: “Steve Bannon’s problem is PR. He doesn’t understand it. Everybody hates him.
Because . . . look at him. His bad PR rubs off on other people.”
The real question, of course, was how Bannon, the fuck-the-system populist, had ever come to
think that he might get along with Donald Trump, the use-the-system-to-his-own-advantage
billionaire. For Bannon, Trump was the game he had to play. But in truth he hardly played it—or
couldn’t help undermining it. While ever proclaiming it Trump’s victory, he would helplessly point
out that when he had joined the campaign it was facing a polling deficit that no campaign, ten weeks
from election day, had ever recovered from. Trump without Bannon, according to Bannon, was
Wendell Willkie.
Bannon understood the necessity not to take what otherwise might be Trump’s own spotlight; he
was well aware that the president meticulously logged all claims against credit that he believed
solely to be his. Both he and Kushner, the two most important figures in the White House after the
president, seemed professionally mute. Still, Bannon seemed to be everywhere, and the president was
convinced—rightly—that it was the result of Bannon’s private press operation. More often than selfmockery
could sustain, Bannon referred to himself as “President Bannon.” A bitter Kellyanne
Conway, regularly dissed for her own spotlight grabbing, confirmed the president’s observation that
Bannon stepped into as many White House photo ops as possible. (Everybody seemed to keep count
of everybody else’s photo bombs.) Bannon also did not much bother to disguise his innumerable blind
quotes, nor to make much of an effort to temper his not-so-private slurs against Kushner, Cohn,
Powell, Conway, Priebus, and even the president’s daughter (often, most especially, the president’s
daughter).
Curiously, Bannon never expressed a sideways thought about Trump—not yet. Trump’s own
righteousness and soundness was perhaps too central to Bannon’s construct of Trumpism. Trump was
the idea you had to support. This could seem to approach the traditional idea of respecting the office.
In fact, it was the inverse. The man was the vessel: there was no Bannon without Trump. However
much he might stand on his unique, even magical-seeming, contributions to the Trump victory,
Bannon’s opportunity was wholly provided by Trump’s peculiar talent. He was no more than the man
behind the man—Trump’s Cromwell, as he put it, even though he was perfectly aware of Cromwell’s
fate. But his loyalty to the idea of Trump hardly protected him from the actual Trump’s constant briefs
against him. The president had assembled a wide jury to weigh Bannon’s fate, putting before it, in an
insulting Borscht Belt style, a long list of Bannon’s annoyances: “Guy looks homeless. Take a shower,
Steve. You’ve worn those pants for six days. He says he’s made money, I don’t believe it.” (The
president, notably, never much took issue with Bannon’s policy views.) The Trump administration
was hardly two months old, yet every media outlet was predicting Bannon’s coming defenestration.
One particularly profitable transaction with the president was to bring him new, ever harsher
criticism of his chief strategist, or reports of other people criticizing him. It was important to know
not to say anything positive to Trump about Bannon. Even faint praise before the “but”—“Steve is
obviously smart, but . . .”—could produce a scowl and pout if you didn’t hurry to the “but.” (Then
again, saying anyone was “smart” invariably incurred Trump’s annoyance.) Kushner enlisted
Scarborough and Brzezinski in something of a regular morning television Bannon slag-a-thon.
H. R. McMaster, the three-star general who had replaced Michael Flynn as National Security
Advisor, had secured the president’s pledge that he could veto members of the NSC. Kushner, a
supporter of McMaster’s appointment, had quickly ensured that Dina Powell, a key player in the
Kushner faction, would join the NSC and Bannon would be removed.
Bannonites would, with lowered voices and certain pity, ask each other how he seemed and how
he was holding up; invariably they would agree about how bad he looked, the strain etching ever
deeper into his already ruined face. David Bossie thought Bannon “looked like he would die.”
“I now understand what it is like to be in the court of the Tudors,” reflected Bannon. On the
campaign trail, he recalled, Newt Gingrich “would come with all these dumb ideas. When we won he
was my new best friend. Every day a hundred ideas. When”—by spring in the White House—“I got
cold, when I went through my Valley of Death, I saw him one day in the lobby and he looks down,
avoiding my eyes with a kind of mumbled ‘Hey, Steve.’ And I say, ‘What are you doing here, let’s get
you inside,’ and he says, ‘No, no, I’m fine, I’m waiting for Dina Powell.’ ”
Having attained the unimaginable—bringing a fierce alt-right, anti-liberal ethnopopulism into a
central place in the White House—Bannon found himself face to face with the untenable: undermined
by and having to answer to rich, entitled Democrats.
* * *
The paradox of the Trump presidency was that it was both the most ideologically driven and the least.
It represented a deeply structural assault on liberal values—Bannon’s deconstruction of the
administrative state meant to take with it media, academic, and not-for-profit institutions. But from the
start it also was apparent that the Trump administration could just as easily turn into a country club
Republican or a Wall Street Democrat regime. Or just a constant effort to keep Donald Trump happy.
Trump had his collection of pet-peeve issues, test-marketed in various media rollouts and
megarallies, but none seemed so significant as his greater goal of personally coming out ahead of the
game.
As the drumbeat for Bannon’s removal grew, the Mercers stepped in to protect their investment in
radical government overthrow and the future of Steve Bannon.
In an age when all successful political candidates are surrounded by, if not at the beck and call of,
difficult, rich people pushing the bounds of their own power—and the richer they were, the more
difficult they might be—Bob and Rebekah Mercer were quite onto themselves. If Trump’s ascent was
unlikely, the Mercers’ was all the more so.
Even the difficult rich—the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson on the right, David Geffen and
George Soros on the left—are leavened and restrained by the fact that money exists in a competitive
market. Obnoxiousness has its limits. The world of the rich is, in its fashion, self-regulating. Social
climbing has rules.
But among the difficult and entitled rich, the Mercers cut a path through disbelief and incredulity.
Unlike other people contributing vast sums to political candidates, they were willing not to win—
ever. Their bubble was their bubble.
So when they did win, by the fluke alignment of the stars for Donald Trump, they were yet pure.
Now, having found themselves—by odds that were perfect-storm outlandish—in power, they were
not going to give it up because Steve Bannon had hurt feelings and wasn’t getting enough sleep.
Toward the end of March, the Mercers organized a set of emergency meetings. At least one of them
was with the president himself. It was exactly the kind of meeting Trump usually avoided: he had no
interest in personnel problems, since they put the emphasis on other people. Suddenly he was being
forced to deal with Steve Bannon, rather than the other way around. What’s more, it was a problem he
had in part created with his constant Bannon dissing, and now he was being asked to eat crow. Even
though the president kept saying he could and should fire Bannon, he was aware of the costs—a rightwing
backlash of unpredictable proportions.
Trump thought the Mercers were super-strange bedfellows too. He didn’t like Bob Mercer looking
at him and not saying a word; he didn’t like being in the same room with Mercer or his daughter. But
though he refused to admit that the Mercers’ decision to back him and their imposition of Bannon on
the campaign in August was, likely, the event without which he would not now be in the White House,
he did understand that if crossed, the Mercers and Bannon were potential world-class troublemakers.
The complexity of the Bannon-Mercer problem prompted Trump to consult two contradictory
figures: Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes. Even as the president did so, perhaps he knew he would
come up with a zero-sum answer.
Murdoch, already briefed by Kushner, said getting rid of Bannon was the only way to deal with the
dysfunction in the White House. (Murdoch, of course, made the assumption that getting rid of Kushner
was not an option.) It was the inevitable outcome, so do it now. Murdoch’s response made perfect
sense: by now, he had become an active political supporter of the Kushner-Goldman moderates,
seeing them as the people who would save the world from Bannon and, indeed, from Trump as well.
Ailes, blunt and declarative as always, said, “Donald, you can’t do it. You’ve made your bed and
Steve is in it. You don’t have to listen to him, you don’t have to even get along with him. But you’re
married to him. You can’t handle a divorce right now.”
Jared and Ivanka were gleeful at the prospect of Bannon’s ouster. His departure would return the
Trump organization to pure family control—the family and its functionaries, without an internal rival
for brand meaning and leadership. From the family’s point of view, it would also—at least in theory
—help facilitate one of the most implausible brand shifts in history: Donald Trump to respectability.
The dream, long differed, of the Trump pivot, might actually happen without Bannon. Never mind that
this Kushner ideal—saving Trump from himself and projecting Jared and Ivanka into the future—was
nearly as far-fetched and extreme as Bannon’s own fantasy of a White House dedicated to the return
of a pre-1965 American mythology.
If Bannon were to go, it also might cause the ultimate split in the already fractured Republican
Party. Before the election, one theory suggested that a defeated Trump would take his embittered 35
percent and make hay with a rancorous minority. Now the alarming theory was that as Kushner tried
to transform his father-in-law into the kind of latter-day Rockefeller that Trump, however
implausibly, had on occasion dreamed of becoming (Rockefeller Center being an inspiration for his
own real estate branding), Bannon could run off with some meaningful part of that 35 percent.
This was the Breitbart threat. The Breitbart organization remained under the control of the
Mercers, and it could at any moment be handed back to Steve Bannon. And now, with Bannon’s
overnight transformation into political genius and kingmaker, and the triumph of the alt-right, Breitbart
was potentially much more powerful. Trump’s victory had, in some sense, handed the Mercers the
tool with which to destroy him. As push came to shove and the mainstream media and swamp
bureaucracy more and more militantly organized against him, Trump was certainly going to need the
Mercer-backed alt-right standing up in his defense. What, after all, was he without them?
As the pressure mounted, Bannon—until now absolutely disciplined in his regard for Donald
Trump as the ideal avatar of Trumpism (and Bannonism), rigidly staying in character as aide and
supporter of a maverick political talent—began to crack. Trump, as almost anyone who had ever
worked for him appreciated, was, despite what you hoped he might be, Trump—and he would
invariably sour on everyone around him.
But the Mercers dug in. Without Bannon, they believed the Trump presidency, at least the Trump
presidency they had imagined (and helped pay for), was over. The focus became how to make Steve’s
life better. They made him pledge to leave the office at a reasonable time—no more waiting around
for Trump to possibly need a dinner companion. (Recently, Jared and Ivanka had been heading this off
anyway.) The solution included a search for a Bannon’s Bannon—a chief strategist for the chief
strategist.
In late March, the Mercers came to an agreed-upon truce with the president: Bannon would not be
fired. While this guaranteed nothing about his influence and standing, it did buy Bannon and his allies
some time. They could regroup. A presidential aide was only as good as the last good advice he gave,
and in this, Bannon believed the ineptness of his rivals, Kushner and his wife, would seal their fate.
* * *
Though the president agreed not to fire Bannon, he gave Kushner and his daughter something in
exchange: he would enhance both their roles.
On March 27, the Office of American Innovation was created and Kushner was put in charge. Its
stated mission was to reduce federal bureaucracy—that is, to reduce it by creating more of it, a
committee to end committees. In addition, Kushner’s new outfit would study the government’s internal
technology, focus on job creation, encourage and suggest policies about apprenticeships, enlist
business in a partnership with government, and help with the opioid epidemic. It was, in other words,
business as usual, albeit with a new burst of enthusiasm for the administrative state.
But its real import was that it gave Kushner his own internal White House staff, a team of people
working not just on Kushner-supported projects—all largely antithetical to Bannon projects—but,
more broadly, as Kushner explained to one staffer, “on expanding my footprint.” Kushner even got his
own “comms person,” a dedicated spokesperson and Kushner promoter. It was a bureaucratic buildout
meant not only to enhance Kushner but to diminish Steve Bannon.
Two days after the announcement about Jared’s expanded power base, Ivanka was formally given
a White House job, too: adviser to the president. From the beginning she had been a key adviser to
her husband—and he to her. Still, it was an overnight consolidation of Trump family power in the
White House. It was, quite at Steve Bannon’s expense, a remarkable bureaucratic coup: a divided
White House had now all but been united under the president’s family.
His son-in-law and daughter hoped—they were even confident—that they could speak to DJT’s
better self, or at least balance Republican needs with progressive rationality, compassion, and good
works. Further, they could support this moderation by routing a steady stream of like-minded CEOs
through the Oval Office. And, indeed, the president seldom disagreed with and was often enthusiastic
about the Jared and Ivanka program. “If they tell him the whales need to be saved, he’s basically for
it,” noted Katie Walsh.
But Bannon, suffering in his internal exile, remained convinced that he represented what Donald
Trump actually believed, or, more accurately, what the president felt. He knew Trump to be a
fundamentally emotional man, and he was certain that the deepest part of him was angry and dark.
However much the president wanted to support his daughter and her husband’s aspirations, their
worldview was not his. As Walsh saw it, “Steve believes he is Darth Vader and that Trump is called
to the dark side.”
Indeed, Trump’s fierce efforts to deny Bannon’s influence may well have been in inverse
proportion to the influence Bannon actually had.
The president did not truly listen to anybody. The more you talked, the less he listened. “But Steve
is careful about what he says, and there is something, a timbre in his voice and his energy and
excitement, that the president can really hone in on, blocking everything else out,” said Walsh.
As Jared and Ivanka were taking a victory lap, Trump signed Executive Order 13783, a change in
environmental policy carefully shepherded by Bannon, which, he argued, effectively gutted the
National Environmental Policy Act, the 1970 law that served as the foundation of modern
environmental protections and that required all executive agencies to prepare environmental impact
statements for agency actions. Among other impacts, EO 13783 removed a prior directive to consider
climate change—a precursor to coming debates on the country’s position regarding the Paris Climate
Accord.
On April 3, Kushner unexpectedly turned up in Iraq, accompanying Gen. Joseph Dunford,
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. According to the White House press office, Kushner was
“traveling on behalf of the president to express the president’s support and commitment to the
government of Iraq and U.S. personnel currently engaged in the campaign.” Kushner, otherwise a
remote and clammed-up media presence, was copiously photographed throughout the trip.
Bannon, watching one of the many television screens that provided a constant background in the
West Wing, glimpsed Kushner wearing a headset while flying in a helicopter over Baghdad. To no
one in particular, recalling a foolish and callow George W. Bush in flight gear on the aircraft carrier
USS Abraham Lincoln proclaiming the end of the Iraq War, he intoned, “Mission accomplished.”
Gritting his teeth, Bannon saw the structure of the White House moving in the exact opposite
direction from Trumpism-Bannonism. But even now, he was certain he perceived the real impulses of
the administration coming his way. It was Bannon, stoic and resolute, the great if unheralded warrior,
who, at least in his own mind, was destined to save the nation.
J
14
SITUATION ROOM
ust before seven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, April 4, the seventy-fourth day of the Trump
presidency, Syrian government forces attacked the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhoun with
chemical weapons. Scores of children were killed. It was the first time a major outside event had
intruded into the Trump presidency.
Most presidencies are shaped by external crises. The presidency, in its most critical role, is a
reactive job. Much of the alarm about Donald Trump came from the widespread conviction that he
could not be counted on to be cool or deliberate in the face of a storm. He had been lucky so far: ten
weeks in, and he had not been seriously tested. In part this might have been because the crises
generated from inside the White House had overshadowed all outside contenders.
Even a gruesome attack, even one on children in an already long war, might not yet be a
presidential game changer of the kind that everyone knew would surely come. Still, these were
chemical weapons launched by a repeat offender, Bashar al-Assad. In any other presidency, such an
atrocity would command a considered and, ideally, skillful response. Obama’s consideration had in
fact been less than skillful in proclaiming the use of chemical weapons as a red line—and then
allowing it to be crossed.
Almost nobody in the Trump administration was willing to predict how the president might react
—or even whether he would react. Did he think the chemical attack important or unimportant? No one
could say.
If the Trump White House was as unsettling as any in American history, the president’s views of
foreign policy and the world at large were among its most random, uninformed, and seemingly
capricious aspects. His advisers didn’t know whether he was an isolationist or a militarist, or
whether he could distinguish between the two. He was enamored with generals and determined that
people with military command experience take the lead in foreign policy, but he hated to be told what
to do. He was against nation building, but he believed there were few situations that he couldn’t
personally make better. He had little to no experience in foreign policy, but he had no respect for the
experts, either.
Suddenly, the question of how the president might respond to the attack in Khan Sheikhoun was a
litmus test for normality and those who hoped to represent it in Trump’s White House. Here was the
kind of dramatic juxtaposition that might make for a vivid and efficient piece of theater: people
working in the Trump White House who were trying to behave normally.
* * *
Surprisingly, perhaps, there were quite a few such people.
Acting normal, embodying normality—doing things the way a striving, achieving, rational person
would do them—was how Dina Powell saw her job in the White House. At forty-three, Powell had
made a career at the intersection of the corporate world and public policy; she did well (very, very
well) by doing good. She had made great strides in George W. Bush’s White House and then later at
Goldman Sachs. Returning to the White House at a penultimate level, with at least a chance of rising
to one of the country’s highest unelected positions, would potentially be worth enormous sums when
she returned to the corporate world.
In Trumpland, however, the exact opposite could happen. Powell’s carefully cultivated reputation,
her brand (and she was one of those people who thought intently about their personal brand), could
become inextricably tied to the Trump brand. Worse, she could become part of what might easily turn
into historical calamity. Already, for many people who knew Dina Powell—and everybody who was
anybody knew Dina Powell—the fact that she had taken a position in the Trump White House
indicated either recklessness or seriously bad judgment.
“How,” wondered one of her longtime friends, “does she rationalize this?” Friends, family, and
neighbors asked, silently or openly, Do you know what you’re doing? And how could you? And why
would you?
Here was the line dividing those whose reason for being in the White House was a professed
loyalty to the president from the professionals they had needed to hire. Bannon, Conway, and Hicks—
along with an assortment of more or less peculiar ideologues that had attached themselves to Trump
and, of course, his family, all people without clearly monetizable reputations before their association
with Trump—were, for better or worse, hitched to him. (Even among dedicated Trumpers there was
always a certain amount of holding their breath and constant reexamination of their options.) But those
within the larger circle of White House influence, those with some stature or at least an imagined
stature, had to work through significantly more complicated contortions of personal and career
justification.
Often they wore their qualms on their sleeves. Mick Mulvaney, the OMB director, made a point of
stressing the fact that he worked in the Executive Office Building, not the West Wing. Michael Anton,
holding down Ben Rhodes’s former job at the NSC, had perfected a deft eye roll (referred to as the
Anton eye roll). H. R. McMaster seemed to wear a constant grimace and have perpetual steam rising
from his bald head. (“What’s wrong with him?” the president often asked.)
There was, of course, a higher rationale: the White House needed normal, sane, logical, adult
professionals. To a person, these pros saw themselves bringing positive attributes—rational minds,
analytic powers, significant professional experience—to a situation sorely lacking those things. They
were doing their bit to make things more normal and, therefore, more stable. They were bulwarks, or
saw themselves that way, against chaos, impulsiveness, and stupidity. They were less Trump
supporters than an antidote to Trump.
“If it all starts going south—more south than it is already going—I have no doubt that Joe Hagin
would himself take personal responsibility, and do what needed to be done,” said a senior
Republican figure in Washington, in an effort at self-reassurance, about the former Bush staffer who
now served as Trump’s deputy chief of staff for operations.
But this sense of duty and virtue involved a complicated calculation about your positive effect on
the White House versus its negative effect on you. In April, an email originally copied to more than a
dozen people went into far wider circulation when it was forwarded and reforwarded. Purporting to
represent the views of Gary Cohn and quite succinctly summarizing the appalled sense in much of the
White House, the email read:
It’s worse than you can imagine. An idiot surrounded by clowns. Trump won’t read anything—
not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings
with world leaders because he is bored. And his staff is no better. Kushner is an entitled baby
who knows nothing. Bannon is an arrogant prick who thinks he’s smarter than he is. Trump is
less a person than a collection of terrible traits. No one will survive the first year but his
family. I hate the work, but feel I need to stay because I’m the only person there with a clue
what he’s doing. The reason so few jobs have been filled is that they only accept people who
pass ridiculous purity tests, even for midlevel policy-making jobs where the people will never
see the light of day. I am in a constant state of shock and horror.
Still, the mess that might do serious damage to the nation, and, by association, to your own brand,
might be transcended if you were seen as the person, by dint of competence and professional
behavior, taking control of it.
Powell, who had come into the White House as an adviser to Ivanka Trump, rose, in weeks, to a
position on the National Security Council, and was then, suddenly, along with Cohn, her Goldman
colleague, a contender for some of the highest posts in the administration.
At the same time, both she and Cohn were spending a good deal of time with their ad hoc outside
advisers on which way they might jump out of the White House. Powell could eye seven-figure
comms jobs at various Fortune 100 companies, or a C-suite future at a tech company—Facebook’s
Sheryl Sandberg, after all, had a background in corporate philanthropy and in the Obama
administration. Cohn, on his part, already a centamillionaire, was thinking about the World Bank or
the Fed.
Ivanka Trump—dealing with some of the same personal and career considerations as Powell,
except without a viable escape strategy—was quite in her own corner. Inexpressive and even botlike
in public but, among friends, discursive and strategic, Ivanka had become both more defensive about
her father and more alarmed by where his White House was heading. She and her husband blamed
this on Bannon and his let-Trump-be-Trump philosophy (often interpreted as let Trump be Bannon).
The couple had come to regard him as more diabolical than Rasputin. Hence it was their job to keep
Bannon and the ideologues from the president, who, they believed, was, in his heart, a practicalminded
person (at least in his better moods), swayed only by people preying on his short attention
span.
In mutually codependent fashion, Ivanka relied on Dina to suggest management tactics that would
help her handle her father and the White House, while Dina relied on Ivanka to offer regular
assurances that not everyone named Trump was completely crazy. This link meant that within the
greater West Wing population, Powell was seen as part of the much tighter family circle, which,
while it conferred influence, also made her the target of ever sharper attacks. “She will expose
herself as being totally incompetent,” said a bitter Katie Walsh, seeing Powell as less a normalizing
influence than another aspect of the abnormal Trump family power play.
And indeed, both Powell and Cohn had privately concluded that the job they both had their eye on
—chief of staff, that singularly necessary White House management position—would always be
impossible to perform if the president’s daughter and son-in-law, no matter how much they were
allied to them, were in de facto command whenever they wanted to exert it.
Dina and Ivanka were themselves spearheading an initiative that, otherwise, would have been a
fundamental responsibility of the chief of staff: controlling the president’s information flow.
* * *
The unique problem here was partly how to get information to someone who did not (or could not or
would not) read, and who at best listened only selectively. But the other part of the problem was how
best to qualify the information that he liked to get. Hope Hicks, after more than a year at this side, had
honed her instincts for the kind of information—the clips—that would please him. Bannon, in his
intense and confiding voice, could insinuate himself into the president’s mind. Kellyanne Conway
brought him the latest outrages against him. There were his after-dinner calls—the billionaire chorus.
And then cable, itself programmed to reach him—to court him or enrage him.
The information he did not get was formal information. The data. The details. The options. The
analysis. He didn’t do PowerPoint. For anything that smacked of a classroom or of being lectured to
—“professor” was one of his bad words, and he was proud of never going to class, never buying a
textbook, never taking a note—he got up and left the room.
This was a problem in multiple respects—indeed, in almost all the prescribed functions of the
presidency. But perhaps most of all, it was a problem in the evaluation of strategic military options.
The president liked generals. The more fruit salad they wore, the better. The president was very
pleased with the compliments he got for appointing generals who commanded the respect that Mattis
and Kelly and McMaster were accorded (pay no attention to Michael Flynn). What the president did
not like was listening to generals, who, for the most part, were skilled in the new army jargon of
PowerPoint, data dumps, and McKinsey-like presentations. One of the things that endeared Flynn to
the president was that Flynn, quite the conspiracist and drama queen, had a vivid storytelling sense.
By the time of the Syrian attack on Khan Sheikhoun, McMaster had been Trump’s National
Security Advisor for only about six weeks. Yet his efforts to inform the president had already become
an exercise in trying to tutor a recalcitrant and resentful student. Recently Trump’s meetings with
McMaster had ended up in near acrimony, and now the president was telling several friends that his
new National Security Advisor was too boring and that he was going to fire him.
McMaster had been the default choice, a fact that Trump kept returning to: Why had he hired him?
He blamed his son-in-law.
After the president fired Flynn in February, he had spent two days at Mar-a-Lago interviewing
replacements, badly taxing his patience.
John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and Bannon’s consistent choice,
made his aggressive light-up-the-world, go-to-war pitch.
Then Lt. Gen. Robert L. Caslen Jr., superintendent of the United States Military Academy at West
Point, presented himself with what Trump viewed positively as old-fashioned military decorum. Yes,
sir. No, sir. That’s correct, sir. Well, I think we know China has some problems, sir. And in short
order it seemed that Trump was selling Caslen on the job.
“That’s the guy I want,” said Trump. “He’s got the look.”
But Caslen demurred. He had never really had a staff job. Kushner thought he might not be ready.
“Yeah, but I liked that guy,” pressed Trump.
Then McMaster, wearing a uniform with his silver star, came in and immediately launched into a
wide-ranging lecture on global strategy. Trump was soon, and obviously, distracted, and as the lecture
continued he began sulking.
“That guy bores the shit out of me,” announced Trump after McMaster left the room. But Kushner
pushed him to take another meeting with McMaster, who the next day showed up without his uniform
and in a baggy suit.
“He looks like a beer salesman,” Trump said, announcing that he would hire McMaster but didn’t
want to have another meeting with him.
Shortly after his appointment, McMaster appeared on Morning Joe. Trump saw the show and
noted admiringly, “The guy sure gets good press.”
The president decided he had made a good hire.
* * *
By midmorning on April 4, a full briefing had been assembled at the White House for the president
about the chemical attacks. Along with his daughter and Powell, most members of the president’s
inner national security circle saw the bombing of Khan Sheikhoun as a straightforward opportunity to
register an absolute moral objection. The circumstance was unequivocal: Bashar al-Assad’s
government, once again defying international law, had used chemical weapons. There was video
documenting the attack and substantial agreement among intelligence agencies about Assad’s
responsibility. The politics were right: Barack Obama failed to act when confronted with a Syrian
chemical attack, and now Trump could. The downside was small; it would be a contained response.
And it had the added advantage of seeming to stand up to the Russians, Assad’s effective partners in
Syria, which would score a political point at home.
Bannon, at perhaps his lowest moment of influence in the White House—many still felt that his
departure was imminent—was the only voice arguing against a military response. It was a purist’s
rationale: keep the United States out of intractable problems, and certainly don’t increase our
involvement in them. He was holding the line against the rising business-as-usual faction, making
decisions based on the same set of assumptions, Bannon believed, that had resulted in the Middle
East quagmire. It was time to break the standard-response pattern of behavior, represented by the
Jarvanka-Powell-Cohn-McMaster alliance. Forget normal—in fact, to Bannon, normal was precisely
the problem.
The president had already agreed to McMaster’s demand that Bannon be removed from the
National Security Council, though the change wouldn’t be announced until the following day. But
Trump was also drawn to Bannon’s strategic view: Why do anything, if you don’t have to? Or, why
would you do something that doesn’t actually get you anything? Since taking office, the president had
been developing an intuitive national security view: keep as many despots who might otherwise
screw you as happy as possible. A self-styled strongman, he was also a fundamental appeaser. In this
instance, then, why cross the Russians?
By the afternoon, the national security team was experiencing a sense of rising panic: the
president, in their view, didn’t seem to be quite registering the situation. Bannon wasn’t helping. His
hyperrationalist approach obviously appealed to the not-always-rational president. A chemical attack
didn’t change the circumstances on the ground, Bannon argued; besides, there had been far worse
attacks with far more casualties than this one. If you were looking for broken children, you could find
them anywhere. Why these broken children?
The president was not a debater—well, not in any Socratic sense. Nor was he in any conventional
sense a decision maker. And certainly he was not a student of foreign policy views and options. But
this was nevertheless turning into a genuine philosophical face-off.
“Do nothing” had long been viewed as an unacceptable position of helplessness by American
foreign policy experts. The instinct to do something was driven by the desire to prove you were not
limited to nothing. You couldn’t do nothing and show strength. But Bannon’s approach was very much
“A pox on all your houses,” it was not our mess, and judging by all recent evidence, no good would
come of trying to help clean it up. That effort would cost military lives with no military reward.
Bannon, believing in the need for a radical shift in foreign policy, was proposing a new doctrine:
Fuck ’em. This iron-fisted isolationism appealed to the president’s transactional self: What was in it
for us (or for him)?
Hence the urgency to get Bannon off the National Security Council. The curious thing is that in the
beginning he was thought to be much more reasonable than Michael Flynn, with his fixation on Iran as
the source of all evil. Bannon was supposed to babysit Flynn. But Bannon, quite to Kushner’s shock,
had not just an isolationist worldview but an apocalyptic one. Much of the world would burn and
there was nothing you could do about it.
The announcement of Bannon’s removal was made the day after the attack. That in itself was a
rather remarkable accomplishment on the part of the moderates. In little more than two months,
Trump’s radical, if not screwball, national security leadership had been replaced by so-called
reasonable people.
The job was now to bring the president into this circle of reason.
* * *
As the day wore on, both Ivanka Trump and Dina Powell were united in their determination to
persuade the president to react . . . normally. At the very minimum, an absolute condemnation of the
use of chemical weapons, a set of sanctions, and, ideally, a military response—although not a big one.
None of this was in any way exceptional. Which was sort of the point: it was critical not to respond
in a radical, destabilizing way—including a radical nonresponse.
Kushner was by now complaining to his wife that her father just didn’t get it. It had even been
difficult to get a consensus on releasing a firm statement about the unacceptability of the use of
chemical weapons at the noon press briefing. To both Kushner and McMaster it seemed obvious that
the president was more annoyed about having to think about the attack than by the attack itself.
Finally, Ivanka told Dina they needed to show the president a different kind of presentation. Ivanka
had long ago figured out how to make successful pitches to her father. You had to push his enthusiasm
buttons. He may be a businessman, but numbers didn’t do it for him. He was not a spreadsheet jockey
—his numbers guys dealt with spreadsheets. He liked big names. He liked the big picture—he liked
literal big pictures. He liked to see it. He liked “impact.”
But in one sense, the military, the intelligence community, and the White House’s national security
team remained behind the times. Theirs was a data world rather than a picture world. As it happened,
the attack on Khan Sheikhoun had produced a wealth of visual evidence. Bannon might be right that
this attack was no more mortal than countless others, but by focusing on this one and curating the
visual proof, this atrocity became singular.
Late that afternoon, Ivanka and Dina created a presentation that Bannon, in disgust, characterized
as pictures of kids foaming at the mouth. When the two women showed the presentation to the
president, he went through it several times. He seemed mesmerized.
Watching the president’s response, Bannon saw Trumpism melting before his eyes. Trump—
despite his visceral resistance to the establishment ass-covering and standard-issue foreign policy
expertise that had pulled the country into hopeless wars—was suddenly putty. After seeing all the
horrifying photos, he immediately adopted a completely conventional point of view: it seemed
inconceivable to him that we couldn’t do something.
That evening, the president described the pictures in a call to a friend—the foam, all that foam.
These are just kids. He usually displayed a consistent contempt for anything but overwhelming
military response; now he expressed a sudden, wide-eyed interest in all kinds of other military
options.
On Wednesday, April 5, Trump received a briefing that outlined multiple options for how to
respond. But again McMaster burdened him with detail. He quickly became frustrated, feeling that he
was being manipulated.
The following day, the president and several of his top aides flew to Florida for a meeting with
the Chinese president, Xi Jinping—a meeting organized by Kushner with the help of Henry Kissinger.
While aboard Air Force One, he held a tightly choreographed meeting of the National Security
Council, tying into the staff on the ground. By this point, the decision about how to respond to the
chemical attack had already been made: the military would launch a Tomahawk cruise missile strike
at Al Shayrat airfield. After a final round of discussion, while on board, the president, almost
ceremonially, ordered the strike for the next day.
With the meeting over and the decision made, Trump, in a buoyant mood, came back to chat with
reporters traveling with him on Air Force One. In a teasing fashion, he declined to say what he
planned to do about Syria. An hour later, Air Force One landed and the president was hustled to Mara-
Lago.
The Chinese president and his wife arrived for dinner shortly after five o’clock and were greeted
by a military guard on the Mar-a-Lago driveway. With Ivanka supervising arrangements, virtually the
entire White House senior staff attended.
During a dinner of Dover sole, haricots verts, and thumbelina carrots—Kushner seated with the
Chinese first couple, Bannon at the end of the table—the attack on Al Shayrat airfield was launched.
Shortly before ten, the president, reading straight off the teleprompter, announced that the mission
had been completed. Dina Powell arranged a for-posterity photo of the president with his advisers
and national security team in the makeshift situation room at Mar-a-Lago. She was the only woman in
the room. Steve Bannon glowered from his seat at the table, revolted by the stagecraft and the
“phoniness of the fucking thing.”
It was a cheerful and relieved Trump who mingled with his guests among the palm trees and
mangroves. “That was a big one,” he confided to a friend. His national security staff were even more
relieved. The unpredictable president seemed almost predictable. The unmanageable president,
manageable.