fire and fury chapter 15 & 16

15
MEDIA
n April 19, Bill O’Reilly, the Fox anchor and the biggest star in cable news, was pushed out by
the Murdoch family over charges of sexual harassment. This was a continuation of the purge at
the network that had begun nine months before with the firing of its chief, Roger Ailes. Fox achieved
its ultimate political influence with the election of Donald Trump, yet now the future of the network
seemed held in a peculiar Murdoch family limbo between conservative father and liberal sons.
A few hours after the O’Reilly announcement, Ailes, from his new oceanfront home in Palm Beach
—precluded by his separation agreement with Fox from any efforts to compete with it for eighteen
months—sent an emissary into the West Wing with a question for Steve Bannon: O’Reilly and
Hannity are in, what about you? Ailes, in secret, had been plotting his comeback with a new
conservative network. Currently in internal exile inside the White House, Bannon—“the next
Ailes”—was all ears.
This was not just the plotting of ambitious men, seeking both opportunity and revenge; the idea for
a new network was also driven by an urgent sense that the Trump phenomenon was about, as much as
anything else, right-wing media. For twenty years, Fox had honed its populist message: liberals were
stealing and ruining the country. Then, just at the moment that many liberals—including Rupert
Murdoch’s sons, who were increasingly in control of their father’s company—had begun to believe
that the Fox audience was beginning to age out, with its anti-gay-marriage, anti-abortion, antiimmigrant
social message, which seemed too hoary for younger Republicans, along came Breitbart
News. Breitbart not only spoke to a much younger right-wing audience—here Bannon felt he was as
much in tune with this audience as Ailes was with his—but it had turned this audience into a huge
army of digital activists (or social media trolls).
As right-wing media had fiercely coalesced around Trump—readily excusing all the ways he
might contradict the traditional conservative ethos—mainstream media had become as fiercely
resistant. The country was divided as much by media as by politics. Media was the avatar of politics.
A sidelined Ailes was eager to get back in the game. This was his natural playing field: (1) Trump’s
election proved the power of a significantly smaller but more dedicated electoral base—just as, in
cable television terms, a smaller hardcore base was more valuable than a bigger, less committed one;
(2) this meant an inverse dedication by an equally small circle of passionate enemies; (3) hence, there
would be blood.
If Bannon was as finished as he appeared in the White House, this was his opportunity, too.
Indeed, the problem with Bannon’s $1.5 million a year Internetcentric Breitbart News was that it
couldn’t be monetized or scaled up in a big way, but with O’Reilly and Hannity on board, there could
be television riches fueled by, into the foreseeable future, a new Trump-inspired era of right-wing
passion and hegemony.
Ailes’s message to his would-be protégé was plain: Not just the rise of Trump, but the fall of Fox
could be Bannon’s moment.
In reply, Bannon let Ailes know that for now, he was trying to hold on to his position in the White
House. But yes, the opportunity was obvious.
* * *
Even as O’Reilly’s fate was being debated by the Murdochs, Trump, understanding O’Reilly’s power
and knowing how much O’Reilly’s audience overlapped with his own base, had expressed his
support and approval—“I don’t think Bill did anything wrong. . . . He is a good person,” he told the
New York Times.
But in fact a paradox of the new strength of conservative media was Trump himself. During the
campaign, when it suited him, he had turned on Fox. If there were other media opportunities, he took
them. (In the recent past, Republicans, particularly in the primary season, paid careful obeisance to
Fox over other media outlets.) Trump kept insisting that he was bigger than just conservative media.
In the past month, Ailes, a frequent Trump caller and after-dinner adviser, had all but stopped
speaking to the president, piqued by the constant reports that Trump was bad-mouthing him as he
praised a newly attentive Murdoch, who had, before the election, only ever ridiculed Trump.
“Men who demand the most loyalty tend to be the least loyal pricks,” noted a sardonic Ailes (a
man who himself demanded lots of loyalty).
The conundrum was that conservative media saw Trump as its creature, while Trump saw himself
as a star, a vaunted and valued product of all media, one climbing ever higher. It was a cult of
personality, and he was the personality. He was the most famous man in the world. Everybody loved
him—or ought to.
On Trump’s part this was, arguably, something of a large misunderstanding about the nature of
conservative media. He clearly did not understand that what conservative media elevated, liberal
media would necessarily take down. Trump, goaded by Bannon, would continue to do the things that
would delight conservative media and incur the wrath of liberal media. That was the program. The
more your supporters loved you, the more your antagonists hated you. That’s how it was supposed to
work. And that’s how it was working.
But Trump himself was desperately wounded by his treatment in the mainstream media. He
obsessed on every slight until it was overtaken by the next slight. Slights were singled out and
replayed again and again, his mood worsening with each replay (he was always rerunning the DVR).
Much of the president’s daily conversation was a repetitive rundown of what various anchors and
hosts had said about him. And he was upset not only when he was attacked, but when the people
around him were attacked. But he did not credit their loyalty, or blame himself or the nature of liberal
media for the indignities heaped on his staffers; he blamed them and their inability to get good press.
Mainstream media’s self-righteousness and contempt for Trump helped provide a tsunami of clicks
for right-wing media. But an often raging, self-pitying, tormented president had not gotten this memo,
or had failed to comprehend it. He was looking for media love everywhere. In this, Trump quite
profoundly seemed unable to distinguish between his political advantage and his personal needs—he
thought emotionally, not strategically.
The great value of being president, in his view, was that you’re the most famous man in the world,
and fame is always venerated and adored by the media. Isn’t it? But, confusingly, Trump was
president in large part because of his particular talent, conscious or reflexive, to alienate the media,
which then turned him into a figure reviled by the media. This was not a dialectical space that was
comfortable for an insecure man.
“For Trump,” noted Ailes, “the media represented power, much more so than politics, and he
wanted the attention and respect of its most powerful men. Donald and I were really quite good
friends for more than 25 years, but he would have preferred to be friends with Murdoch, who thought
he was a moron—at least until he became president.”
* * *
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was set for April 29, the one hundredth day of the Trump
administration. The annual dinner, once an insiders’ event, had become an opportunity for media
organizations to promote themselves by recruiting celebrities—most of whom had nothing to do with
journalism or politics—to sit at their tables. This had resulted in a notable Trump humiliation when,
in 2011, Barack Obama singled out Trump for particular mockery. In Trump lore, this was the insult
that pushed him to make the 2016 run.
Not long after the Trump team’s arrival in the White House, the Correspondents’ Dinner became a
cause for worry. On a winter afternoon in Kellyanne Conway’s upstairs West Wing office, Conway
and Hope Hicks engaged in a pained discussion about what to do.
The central problem was that the president was neither inclined to make fun of himself, nor
particularly funny himself—at least not, in Conway’s description, “in that kind of humorous way.”
George W. Bush had famously resisted the Correspondents’ Dinner and suffered greatly at it, but
he had prepped extensively, and every year he pulled out an acceptable performance. But neither
woman, confiding their concerns around the small table in Conway’s office to a journalist they
regarded as sympathetic, thought Trump had a realistic chance of making the dinner anything like a
success.
“He doesn’t appreciate cruel humor,” said Conway.
“His style is more old-fashioned,” said Hicks.
Both women, clearly seeing the Correspondents’ Dinner as an intractable problem, kept
characterizing the event as “unfair,” which, more generally, is how they characterized the media’s
view of Trump. “He’s unfairly portrayed.” “They don’t give him the benefit of the doubt.” “He’s just
not treated the way other presidents have been treated.”
The burden here for Conway and Hicks was their understanding that the president did not see the
media’s lack of regard for him as part of a political divide on which he stood on a particular side.
Instead, he perceived it as a deep personal attack on him: for entirely unfair reasons, ad hominem
reasons, the media just did not like him. Ridiculed him. Cruelly. Why?
The journalist, trying to offer some comfort, told the two women there was a rumor going around
that Graydon Carter—the editor of Vanity Fair and host of one of the most important parties of the
Correspondents’ Dinner weekend, and, for decades, one of Trump’s key tormentors in the media—
was shortly going to be pushed out of the magazine.
“Really?” said Hicks, jumping up. “Oh my God, can I tell him? Would that be okay? He’ll want to
know this.” She headed quickly downstairs to the Oval Office.
* * *
Curiously, Conway and Hicks each portrayed a side of the president’s alter ego media problem.
Conway was the bitter antagonist, the mud-in-your-eye messenger who reliably sent the media into
paroxysms of outrage against the president. Hicks was the confidante ever trying to get the president a
break and some good ink in the only media he really cared about—the media that most hated him. But
as different as they were in their media functions and temperament, both women had achieved
remarkable influence in the administration by serving as the key lieutenants responsible for
addressing the president’s most pressing concern, his media reputation.
While Trump was in most ways a conventional misogynist, in the workplace he was much closer
to women than to men. The former he confided in, the latter he held at arm’s length. He liked and
needed his office wives, and he trusted them with his most important personal issues. Women,
according to Trump, were simply more loyal and trustworthy than men. Men might be more forceful
and competent, but they were also more likely to have their own agendas. Women, by their nature, or
Trump’s version of their nature, were more likely to focus their purpose on a man. A man like Trump.
It wasn’t happenstance or just casting balance that his Apprentice sidekick was a woman, nor that
his daughter Ivanka had become one of his closest confidants. He felt women understood him. Or, the
kind of women he liked—positive-outlook, can-do, loyal women, who also looked good—understood
him. Everybody who successfully worked for him understood that there was always a subtext of his
needs and personal tics that had to be scrupulously attended to; in this, he was not all that different
from other highly successful figures, just more so. It would be hard to imagine someone who expected
a greater awareness of and more catering to his peculiar whims, rhythms, prejudices, and often
inchoate desires. He needed special—extra special—handling. Women, he explained to one friend
with something like self-awareness, generally got this more precisely than men. In particular, women
who self-selected themselves as tolerant of or oblivious to or amused by or steeled against his casual
misogyny and constant sexual subtext—which was somehow, incongruously and often jarringly,
matched with paternal regard—got this.
* * *
Kellyanne Conway first met Donald Trump at a meeting of the condo board for the Trump
International Hotel, which was directly across the street from the UN and was where, in the early
2000s, she lived with her husband and children. Conway’s husband, George, a graduate of Harvard
College and Yale Law School, was a partner at the premier corporate mergers and acquisitions firm
Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. (Though Wachtell was a Democratic-leaning firm, George had
played a behind-the-scenes role on the team that represented Paula Jones in her pursuit of Bill
Clinton.) In its professional and domestic balance, the Conway family was organized around
George’s career. Kellyanne’s career was a sidelight.
Kellyanne, who in the Trump campaign would use her working-class biography to good effect,
grew up in central New Jersey, the daughter of a trucker, raised by a single mother (and, always in her
narrative, her grandmother and two unmarried aunts). She went to George Washington law school and
afterward interned for Reagan’s pollster, Richard Wirthlin. Then she became the assistant to Frank
Luntz, a curious figure in the Republican Party, known as much for his television deals and toupee as
for his polling acumen. Conway herself began to make appearances on cable TV while working for
Luntz.
One virtue of the research and polling business she started in 1995 was that it could adapt to her
husband’s career. But she never much rose above a midrank presence in Republican political circles,
nor did she become more than the also-ran behind Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham on cable
television—which is where Trump first saw her and why he singled her out at the condo board
meeting.
In a real sense, however, her advantage was not meeting Trump but being taken up by the Mercers.
They recruited Conway in 2015 to work on the Cruz campaign, when Trump was still far from the
conservative ideal, and then, in August 2016, inserted her into the Trump campaign.
She understood her role. “I will only ever call you Mr. Trump,” she told the candidate with
perfect-pitch solemnity when he interviewed her for the job. It was a trope she would repeat in
interview after interview—Conway was a catalog of learned lines—a message repeated as much for
Trump as for others.
Her title was campaign manager, but that was a misnomer. Bannon was the real manager, and she
was the senior pollster. But Bannon shortly replaced her in that role and she was left in what Trump
saw as the vastly more important role of cable spokesperson.
Conway seemed to have a convenient On-Off toggle. In private, in the Off position, she seemed to
regard Trump as a figure of exhausting exaggeration or even absurdity—or, at least, if you regarded
him that way, she seemed to suggest that she might, too. She illustrated her opinion of her boss with a
whole series of facial expressions: eyes rolling, mouth agape, head snapping back. But in the On
position, she metamorphosed into believer, protector, defender, and handler. Conway is an
antifeminist (or, actually, in a complicated ideological somersault, she sees feminists as being
antifeminists), ascribing her methods and temperament to her being a wife and mother. She’s
instinctive and reactive. Hence her role as the ultimate Trump defender: she verbally threw herself in
front of any bullet coming his way.
Trump loved her defend-at-all-costs shtick. Conway’s appearances were on his schedule to watch
live. His was often the first call she got after coming off the air. She channeled Trump: she said
exactly the kind of Trump stuff that would otherwise make her put a finger-gun to her head.
After the election—Trump’s victory setting off a domestic reordering in the Conway household,
and a scramble to get her husband an administration job—Trump assumed she would be his press
secretary. “He and my mother,” Conway said, “because they both watch a lot of television, thought
this was one of the most important jobs.” In Conway’s version, she turned Trump down or demurred.
She kept proposing alternatives in which she would be the key spokesperson but would be more as
well. In fact, almost everyone else was maneuvering Trump around his desire to appoint Conway.
Loyalty was Trump’s most valued attribute, and in Conway’s view her kamikaze-like media
defense of the president had earned her a position of utmost primacy in the White House. But in her
public persona, she had pushed the boundaries of loyalty too far; she was so hyperbolic that even
Trump loyalists found her behavior extreme and were repelled. None were more put off than Jared
and Ivanka, who, appalled at the shamelessness of her television appearances, extended this into a
larger critique of Conway’s vulgarity. When referring to her, they were particularly partial to using
the shorthand “nails,” a reference to her Cruella de Vil-length manicure treatments.
By mid-February she was already the subject of leaks—many coming from Jared and Ivanka—
about how she had been sidelined. She vociferously defended herself, producing a list of television
appearances still on her schedule, albeit lesser ones. But she also had a teary scene with Trump in the
Oval Office, offering to resign if the president had lost faith in her. Almost invariably, when
confronted with self-abnegation, Trump offered copious reassurances. “You will always have a place
in my administration,” he told her. “You will be here for eight years.”
But she had indeed been sidelined, reduced to second-rate media, to being a designated emissary
to right-wing groups, and left out of any meaningful decision making. This she blamed on the media, a
scourge that further united her in self-pity with Donald Trump. In fact, her relationship with the
president deepened as they bonded over their media wounds.
* * *
Hope Hicks, then age twenty-six, was the campaign’s first hire. She knew the president vastly better
than Conway did, and she understood that her most important media function was not to be in the
media.
Hicks grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut. Her father was a PR executive who now worked for
the Glover Park Group, the Democratic-leaning communications and political consulting firm; her
mother was a former staffer for a democratic congressman. An indifferent student, Hicks went to
Southern Methodist University and then did some modeling before getting a PR job. She first went to
work for Matthew Hiltzik, who ran a small New York-based PR firm and was noted for his ability to
work with high-maintenance clients, including the movie producer Harvey Weinstein (later pilloried
for years of sexual harassment and abuse—accusations that Hiltzik and his staff had long helped
protect him from) and the television personality Katie Couric. Hiltzik, an active Democrat who had
worked for Hillary Clinton, also represented Ivanka Trump’s fashion line; Hicks started to do some
work for the account and then joined Ivanka’s company full time. In 2015, Ivanka seconded her to her
father’s campaign; as the campaign progressed, moving from novelty project to political factor to
juggernaut, Hicks’s family increasingly, and incredulously, viewed her as rather having been taken
captive. (Following the Trump victory and her move into the White House, her friends and intimates
talked with great concern about what kind of therapies and recuperation she would need after her
tenure was finally over.)
Over the eighteen months of the campaign, the traveling group usually consisted of the candidate,
Hicks, and the campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. In time, she became—in addition to an
inadvertent participant in history, about which she was quite as astonished as anyone—a kind of
Stepford factotum, as absolutely dedicated to and tolerant of Mr. Trump as anyone who had ever
worked for him.
Shortly after Lewandowski, with whom Hicks had an on-and-off romantic relationship, was fired
in June 2016 for clashing with Trump family members, Hicks sat in Trump Tower with Trump and his
sons, worrying about Lewandowski’s treatment in the press and wondering aloud how she might help
him. Trump, who otherwise seemed to treat Hicks in a protective and even paternal way, looked up
and said, “Why? You’ve already done enough for him. You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have,”
sending Hicks running from the room.
As new layers began to form around Trump, first as nominee and then as president-elect, Hicks
continued playing the role of his personal PR woman. She would remain his constant shadow and the
person with the best access to him. “Have you spoken to Hope?” were among the words most
frequently uttered in the West Wing.
Hicks, sponsored by Ivanka and ever loyal to her, was in fact thought of as Trump’s real daughter,
while Ivanka was thought of as his real wife. More functionally, but as elementally, Hicks was the
president’s chief media handler. She worked by the president’s side, wholly separate from the White
House’s forty-person-strong communications office. The president’s personal message and image
were entrusted to her—or, more accurately, she was the president’s agent in retailing that message
and image, which he trusted to no one but himself. Together they formed something of a freelance
operation.
Without any particular politics of her own, and, with her New York PR background, quite looking
down on the right-wing press, she was the president’s official liaison to the mainstream media. The
president had charged her with the ultimate job: a good write-up in the New York Times.
That, in the president’s estimation, had yet failed to happen, “but Hope tries and tries,” the
president said.
On more than one occasion, after a day—one of the countless days—of particularly bad notices,
the president greeted her, affectionately, with “You must be the world’s worst PR person.”
* * *
In the early days of the transition, with Conway out of the running for the press secretary job, Trump
became determined to find a “star.” The conservative radio host Laura Ingraham, who had spoken at
the convention, was on the list, as was Ann Coulter. Fox Business’s Maria Bartiromo was also under
consideration. (This was television, the president-elect said, and it ought to be a good-looking
woman.) When none of those ideas panned out, the job was offered to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson,
who turned it down.
But there was a counterview: the press secretary ought to be the opposite of a star. In fact, the
entire press operation ought to be downgraded. If the press was the enemy, why pander to it, why give
it more visibility? This was fundamental Bannonism: stop thinking you can somehow get along with
your enemies.
As the debate went on, Priebus pushed for one of his deputies at the Republican National
Committee, Sean Spicer, a well-liked forty-five-year-old Washington political professional with a
string of posts on the Hill in the George W. Bush years as well as with the RNC. Spicer, hesitant to
take the job, kept anxiously posing the question to colleagues in the Washington swamp: “If I do this,
will I ever be able to work again?”
There were conflicting answers.
During the transition, many members of Trump’s team came to agree with Bannon that their
approach to White House press management ought to be to push it off—and the longer the arm’s length
the better. For the press, this initiative, or rumors of it, became another sign of the incoming
administration’s antipress stance and its systematic efforts to cut off the information supply. In truth,
the suggestions about moving the briefing room away from the White House, or curtailing the briefing
schedule, or limiting broadcast windows or press pool access, were variously discussed by other
incoming administrations. In her husband’s White House, Hillary Clinton had been a proponent of
limiting press access.
It was Donald Trump who was not able to relinquish this proximity to the press and the stage in
his own house. He regularly berated Spicer for his ham-handed performances, often giving his full
attention to them. His response to Spicer’s briefings was part of his continuing belief that nobody
could work the media like he could, that somehow he had been stuck with an F-Troop
communications team that was absent charisma, magnetism, and proper media connections.
Trump’s pressure on Spicer—a constant stream of directorial castigation and instruction that
reliably rattled the press secretary—helped turn the briefings into a can’t-miss train wreck.
Meanwhile, the real press operation had more or less devolved into a set of competing press
organizations within the White House.
There was Hope Hicks and the president, living in what other West Wingers characterized as an
alternative universe in which the mainstream media would yet discover the charm and wisdom of
Donald Trump. Where past presidents might have spent portions of their day talking about the needs,
desires, and points of leverage among various members of Congress, the president and Hicks spent a
great deal of time talking about a fixed cast of media personalities, trying to second-guess the real
agendas and weak spots among cable anchors and producers and Times and Post reporters.
Often the focus of this otherworldly ambition was directed at Times reporter Maggie Haberman.
Haberman’s front-page beat at the paper, which might be called the “weirdness of Donald Trump”
beat, involved producing vivid tales of eccentricities, questionable behavior, and shit the president
says, told in a knowing, deadpan style. Beyond acknowledging that Trump was a boy from Queens yet
in awe of the Times, nobody in the West Wing could explain why he and Hicks would so often turn to
Haberman for what would so reliably be a mocking and hurtful portrayal. There was some feeling that
Trump was returning to scenes of past success: the Times might be against him, but Haberman had
worked at the New York Post for many years. “She’s very professional,” Conway said, speaking in
defense of the president and trying to justify Haberman’s extraordinary access. But however intent he
remained on getting good ink in the Times, the president saw Haberman as “mean and horrible.” And
yet, on a near-weekly basis, he and Hicks plotted when next to have the Times come in.
* * *
Kushner had his personal press operation and Bannon had his. The leaking culture had become so
open and overt—most of the time everybody could identify everybody else’s leaks—that it was now
formally staffed.
Kushner’s Office of American Innovation employed, as its spokesperson, Josh Raffel, who, like
Hicks, came out of Matthew Hiltzik’s PR shop. Raffel, a Democrat who had been working in
Hollywood, acted as Kushner and his wife’s personal rep—not least of all because the couple felt
that Spicer, owing his allegiance to Priebus, was not aggressively representing them. This was
explicit. “Josh is Jared’s Hope,” was his internal West Wing job description.
Raffel coordinated all of Kushner and Ivanka’s personal press, though there was more of this for
Ivanka than for Kushner. But, more importantly, Raffel coordinated all of Kushner’s substantial
leaking, or, as it were, his off-the-record briefings and guidance—no small part of it against Bannon.
Kushner, who with great conviction asserted that he never leaked, in part justified his press operation
as a defense against Bannon’s press operation.
Bannon’s “person,” Alexandra Preate—a witty conservative socialite partial to champagne—had
previously represented Breitbart News and other conservative figures like CNBC’s Larry Kudlow,
and was close friends with Rebekah Mercer. In a relationship that nobody seemed quite able to
explain, she handled all of Bannon’s press “outreach” but was not employed by the White House,
although she maintained an office, or at least an officelike presence, there. The point was clear: her
client was Bannon and not the Trump administration.
Bannon, to Jared and Ivanka’s continued alarm, had unique access to Breitbart’s significant
abilities to change the right-wing mood and focus. Bannon insisted he had cut his ties to his former
colleagues at Breitbart, but that strained everybody’s credulity—and everybody figured nobody was
supposed to believe it. Rather, everybody was supposed to fear it.
There was, curiously, general agreement in the West Wing that Donald Trump, the media president,
had one of the most dysfunctional communication operations in modern White House history. Mike
Dubke, a Republican PR operative who was hired as White House communications director, was, by
all estimations, from the first day on his way out the door. In the end he lasted only three months.
* * *
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner rose, as much as any other challenge for the new president
and his team, as a test of his abilities. He wanted to do it. He was certain that the power of his charm
was greater than the rancor that he bore this audience—or that they bore him.
He recalled his 2015 Saturday Night Live appearance—which, in his view, was entirely
successful. In fact, he had refused to prepare, had kept saying he would “improvise,” no problem.
Comedians don’t actually improvise, he was told; it’s all scripted and rehearsed. But this counsel had
only marginal effect.
Almost nobody except the president himself thought he could pull off the Correspondents’ Dinner.
His staff was terrified that he would die up there in front of a seething and contemptuous audience.
Though he could dish it out, often very harshly, no one thought he could take it. Still, the president
seemed eager to appear at the event, if casual about it, too—with Hicks, ordinarily encouraging his
every impulse, trying not to.
Bannon pressed the symbolic point: the president should not be seen currying the favor of his
enemies, or trying to entertain them. The media was a much better whipping boy than it was a partner
in crime. The Bannon principle, the steel stake in the ground, remained: don’t bend, don’t
accommodate, don’t meet halfway. And in the end, rather than implying that Trump did not have the
talent and wit to move this crowd, that was a much better way to persuade the president that he should
not appear at the dinner.
When Trump finally agreed to forgo the event, Conway, Hicks, and virtually everybody else in the
West Wing breathed a lot easier.
* * *
Shortly after five o’clock on the one hundredth day of his presidency—a particularly muggy one—
while twenty-five hundred or so members of news organizations and their friends gathered at the
Washington Hilton for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the president left the West Wing for
Marine One, which was soon en route to Andrews Air Force Base. Accompanying him were Steve
Bannon, Stephen Miller, Reince Priebus, Hope Hicks, and Kellyanne Conway. Vice President Pence
and his wife joined the group at Andrews for the brief flight on Air Force One to Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania, where the president would give a speech. During the flight, crab cakes were served,
and Face the Nation’s John Dickerson was granted a special hundredth-day interview.
The first Harrisburg event was held at a factory that manufactured landscaping and gardening
tools, where the president closely inspected a line of colorful wheelbarrows. The next event, where
the speech would be delivered, was at a rodeo arena in the Farm Show Complex and Expo Center.
And that was the point of this little trip. It had been designed both to remind the rest of the country
that the president was not just another phony baloney in a tux like those at the White House
Correspondents’ Dinner (this somehow presupposed that the president’s base cared about or was
even aware of the event) and to keep the president’s mind off the fact that he was missing the dinner.
But the president kept asking for updates on the jokes.
“I
16
COMEY
t’s impossible to make him understand you can’t stop these investigations,” said Roger Ailes in
early May, a frustrated voice in the Trump kitchen cabinet. “In the old days, you could say leave it
alone. Now you say leave it alone and you’re the one who gets investigated. He can’t get this through
his head.”
In fact, as various members of the billionaires’ cabinet tried to calm down the president during
their evening phone calls, they were largely egging him on by expressing deep concern about his DOJ
and FBI peril. Many of Trump’s wealthy friends saw themselves as having particular DOJ expertise.
In their own careers, they had had enough issues with the Justice Department to prompt them to
develop DOJ relationships and sources, and now they were always up on DOJ gossip. Flynn was
going to throw him in the soup. Manafort was going to roll. And it wasn’t just Russia. It was Atlantic
City. And Mar-a-Lago. And Trump SoHo.
Both Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani—each a self-styled expert on the DOJ and the FBI, and
ever assuring Trump of their inside sources—encouraged him to take the view that the DOJ was
resolved against him; it was all part of a holdover Obama plot.
Even more urgent was Charlie Kushner’s fear, channeled through his son and daughter-in-law, that
the Kushner family’s dealings were getting wrapped up in the pursuit of Trump. Leaks in January had
put the kibosh on the Kushners’ deal with the Chinese financial colossus Anbang Insurance Group to
refinance the family’s large debt in one of its major real estate holdings, 666 Fifth Avenue. At the end
of April, the New York Times, supplied with leaks from the DOJ, linked the Kushner business in a
front-page article to Beny Steinmetz—an Israeli diamond, mining, and real estate billionaire with
Russian ties who was under chronic investigation around the world. (The Kushner position was not
helped by the fact that the president had been gleefully telling multiple people that Jared could solve
the Middle East problem because the Kushners knew all the best people in Israel.) During the first
week of May, the Times and the Washington Post covered the Kushner family’s supposed efforts to
attract Chinese investors with the promise of U.S. visas.
“The kids”—Jared and Ivanka—exhibited an increasingly panicked sense that the FBI and DOJ
were moving beyond Russian election interference and into finances. “Ivanka is terrified,” said a
satisfied Bannon.
Trump turned to suggesting to his billionaire chorus that he fire FBI director Comey. He had raised
this idea many times before, but always, seemingly, at the same time and in the same context that he
brought up the possibility of firing everybody. Should I fire Bannon? Should I fire Reince? Should I
fire McMaster? Should I fire Spicer? Should I fire Tillerson? This ritual was, everyone understood,
more a pretext to a discussion of the power he held than it was, strictly, about personnel decisions.
Still, in Trump’s poison-the-well fashion, the should-I-fire-so-and-so question, and any consideration
of it by any of the billionaires, was translated into agreement, as in: Carl Icahn thinks I should fire
Comey (or Bannon, or Priebus, or McMaster, or Tillerson).
His daughter and son-in-law, their urgency compounded by Charlie Kushner’s concern,
encouraged him, arguing that the once possibly charmable Comey was now a dangerous and
uncontrollable player whose profit would inevitably be their loss. When Trump got wound up about
something, Bannon noted, someone was usually winding him up. The family focus of discussion—
insistent, almost frenzied—became wholly about Comey’s ambition. He would rise by damaging
them. And the drumbeat grew.
“That son of a bitch is going to try to fire the head of the FBI,” said Ailes.
During the first week of May, the president had a ranting meeting with Sessions and his deputy
Rod Rosenstein. It was a humiliating meeting for both men, with Trump insisting they couldn’t control
their own people and pushing them to find a reason to fire Comey—in effect, he blamed them for not
having come up with that reason months ago. (It was their fault, he implied, that Comey hadn’t been
fired right off the bat.)
Also that week, there was a meeting that included the president, Jared and Ivanka, Bannon,
Priebus, and White House counsel Don McGahn. It was a closed-door meeting—widely noted
because it was unusual for the Oval Office door ever to be closed.
All the Democrats hate Comey, said the president, expressing his certain and self-justifying view.
All the FBI agents hate him, too—75 percent of them can’t stand him. (This was a number that
Kushner had somehow alighted on, and Trump had taken it up.) Firing Comey will be a huge
fundraising advantage, declared the president, a man who almost never talked about fundraising.
McGahn tried to explain that in fact Comey himself was not running the Russia investigation, that
without Comey the investigation would proceed anyway. McGahn, the lawyer whose job was
necessarily to issue cautions, was a frequent target of Trump rages. Typically these would begin as a
kind of exaggeration or acting and then devolve into the real thing: uncontrollable, vein-popping,
ugly-face, tantrum stuff. It got primal. Now the president’s denunciations focused in a vicious fury on
McGahn and his cautions about Comey.
“Comey was a rat,” repeated Trump. There were rats everywhere and you had to get rid of them.
John Dean, John Dean, he repeated. “Do you know what John Dean did to Nixon?”
Trump, who saw history through personalities—people he might have liked or disliked—was a
John Dean freak. He went bananas when a now gray and much aged Dean appeared on talk shows to
compare the Trump-Russia investigation to Watergate. That would bring the president to instant
attention and launch an inevitable talk-back monologue to the screen about loyalty and what people
would do for media attention. It might also be accompanied by several revisionist theories Trump had
about Watergate and how Nixon had been framed. And always there were rats. A rat was someone
who would take you down for his own advantage. If you had a rat, you needed to kill it. And there
were rats all around.
(Later, it was Bannon who had to take the president aside and tell him that John Dean had been the
White House counsel in the Nixon administration, so maybe it would be a good idea to lighten up on
McGahn.)
As the meeting went on, Bannon, from the doghouse and now, in their mutual antipathy to Jarvanka,
allied with Priebus, seized the opportunity to make an impassioned case opposing any move against
Comey—which was also, as much, an effort to make the case against Jared and Ivanka and their
allies, “the geniuses.” (“The geniuses” was one of Trump’s terms of derision for anybody who might
annoy him or think they were smarter than him, and Bannon now appropriated the term and applied it
to Trump’s family.) Offering forceful and dire warnings, Bannon told the president: “This Russian
story is a third-tier story, but you fire Comey and it’ll be the biggest story in the world.”
By the time the meeting ended, Bannon and Priebus believed they had prevailed. But that weekend,
at Bedminster, the president, again listening to the deep dismay of his daughter and son-in-law, built
up another head of steam. With Jared and Ivanka, Stephen Miller was also along for the weekend. The
weather was bad and the president missed his golf game, dwelling, with Jared, on his Comey fury. It
was Jared, in the version told by those outside the Jarvanka circle, that pushed for action, once more
winding up his father-in-law. With the president’s assent, Kushner, in this version, gave Miller notes
on why the FBI director should be fired and asked him to draft a letter that could set out the basis for
immediate dismissal. Miller—less than a deft drafting hand—recruited Hicks to help, another person
without clearly relevant abilities. (Miller would later be admonished by Bannon for letting himself
get tied up, and potentially implicated, in the Comey mess.)
The letter, in the panicky draft assembled by Miller and Hicks, either from Kushner’s directions or
on instructions directly coming from the president, was an off-the-wall mishmash containing the
talking points—Comey’s handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation; the assertion (from Kushner)
that the FBI itself had turned against Comey; and, the president’s key obsession, the fact that Comey
wouldn’t publicly acknowledge that the president wasn’t under investigation—that would form the
Trump family’s case for firing Comey. That is, everything but the fact that Comey’s FBI was
investigating the president.
The Kushner side, for its part, bitterly fought back against any characterization of Kushner as the
prime mover or mastermind, in effect putting the entire Bedminster letter effort—as well as the
determination to get rid of Comey—entirely on the president’s head and casting Kushner as passive
bystander. (The Kushner side’s position was articulated as follows: “Did he [Kushner] support the
decision? Yes. Was he told this was happening? Yes. Did he encourage it? No. Was he fighting for it
[Comey’s ouster] for weeks and months? No. Did he fight [the ouster]? No. Did he say it would go
badly? No.”)
Horrified, McGahn quashed sending it. Nevertheless, it was passed to Sessions and Rosenstein,
who quickly began drafting their own version of what Kushner and the president obviously wanted.
“I knew when he got back he might blow at any moment,” said Bannon after the president returned
from his Bedminster weekend.
* * *
On Monday morning, May 8, in a meeting in the Oval Office, the president told Priebus and Bannon
that he had made his decision: he would fire Director Comey. Both men again made heated pleas
against the move, arguing for, at the very least, more discussion. Here was a key technique for
managing the president: delay. Rolling something forward likely meant that something else—an equal
or greater fiasco—would come along to preempt whatever fiasco was currently at hand. What’s more,
delay worked advantageously with Trump’s attention span; whatever the issue of the moment, he
would shortly be on to something else. When the meeting ended, Priebus and Bannon thought they had
bought some breathing room.
Later that day, Sally Yates and former director of National Intelligence James Clapper appeared
before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Crime and Terrorism subcommittee—and were greeted by a
series of furious tweets from the president.
Here was, Bannon saw again, the essential Trump problem. He hopelessly personalized
everything. He saw the world in commercial and show business terms: someone else was always
trying to one-up you, someone else was always trying to take the limelight. The battle was between
you and someone else who wanted what you had. For Bannon, reducing the political world to faceoffs
and spats belittled the place in history Trump and his administration had achieved. But it also
belied the real powers they were up against. Not people—institutions.
To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, “such a cunt.”
Since her firing on January 30, Yates had remained suspiciously quiet. When journalists
approached her, she, or her intermediaries, explained that per her lawyers she was shut down on all
media. The president believed she was merely lying in wait. In phone calls to friends, he worried
about her “plan” and “strategy,” and he continued to press his after-dinner sources for what they
thought she and Ben Rhodes, Trump’s favorite Obama plotter, had “up their sleeves.”
For each of his enemies—and, actually, for each of his friends—the issue for him came down, in
many ways, to their personal press plan. The media was the battlefield. Trump assumed everybody
wanted his or her fifteen minutes and that everybody had a press strategy for when they got them. If
you couldn’t get press directly for yourself, you became a leaker. There was no happenstance news,
in Trump’s view. All news was manipulated and designed, planned and planted. All news was to
some extent fake—he understood that very well, because he himself had faked it so many times in his
career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the “fake news” label. “I’ve made stuff up
forever, and they always print it,” he bragged.
The return of Sally Yates, with her appointment before the Senate Judiciary Committee, marked the
beginning, Trump believed, of a sustained and well-organized media rollout for her. (His press view
was confirmed later in May by a lavish, hagiographic profile of Yates in the New Yorker. “How long
do you think she was planning this?” he asked, rhetorically. “You know she was. It’s her payday.”)
“Yates is only famous because of me,” the president complained bitterly. “Otherwise, who is she?
Nobody.”
In front of Congress that Monday morning, Yates delivered a cinematic performance—cool,
temperate, detailed, selfless—compounding Trump’s fury and agitation.
* * *
On the morning of Tuesday, May 9, with the president still fixated on Comey, and with Kushner and
his daughter behind him, Priebus again moved to delay: “There’s a right way to do this and a wrong
way to do this,” he told the president. “We don’t want him learning about this on television. I’m going
to say this one last time: this is not the right way to do this. If you want to do this, the right way is to
have him in and have a conversation. This is the decent way and the professional way.” Once more,
the president seemed to calm down and become more focused on the necessary process.
But that was a false flag. In fact, the president, in order to avoid embracing conventional process
—or, for that matter, any real sense of cause and effect—merely eliminated everybody else from his
process. For most of the day, almost no one would know that he had decided to take matters into his
own hands. In presidential annals, the firing of FBI director James Comey may be the most
consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.
As it happened, the Justice Department—Attorney General Sessions and Deputy Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein—were, independent of the president’s own course, preparing their case against
Comey. They would take the Bedminster line and blame Comey for errors of his handling of the
Clinton email mess—a problematic charge, because if that was truly the issue, why wasn’t Comey
dismissed on that basis as soon as the Trump administration took office? But in fact, quite regardless
of the Sessions and Rosenstein case, the president had determined to act on his own.
Jared and Ivanka were urging the president on, but even they did not know that the axe would
shortly fall. Hope Hicks, Trump’s steadfast shadow, who otherwise knew everything the president
thought—not least because he was helpless not to express it out loud—didn’t know. Steve Bannon,
however much he worried that the president might blow, didn’t know. His chief of staff didn’t know.
And his press secretary didn’t know. The president, on the verge of starting a war with the FBI, the
DOJ, and many in Congress, was going rogue.
At some point that afternoon Trump told his daughter and son-in-law about his plan. They
immediately became coconspirators and firmly shut out any competing advice.
Eerily, it was a notably on-time and unruffled day in the West Wing. Mark Halperin, the political
reporter and campaign chronicler, was waiting in the reception area for Hope Hicks, who fetched him
a bit before 5:00 p.m. Fox’s Howard Kurtz was there, too, waiting for his appointment with Sean
Spicer. And Reince Priebus’s assistant had just been out to tell his five o’clock appointment it would
be only a few more minutes.
Just before five, in fact, the president, having not too long before notified McGahn of his intention,
pulled the trigger. Trump’s personal security guard, Keith Schiller, delivered the termination letter to
Comey’s office at the FBI just after five o’clock. The letter’s second sentence included the words
“You are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.”
Shortly thereafter, most of the West Wing staff, courtesy of an erroneous report from Fox News,
was for a brief moment under the impression that Comey had resigned. Then, in a series of
information synapses throughout the offices of the West Wing, it became clear what had actually
happened.
“So next it’s a special prosecutor!” said Priebus in disbelief, to no one in particular, when he
learned shortly before five o’clock what was happening.
Spicer, who would later be blamed for not figuring out how to positively spin the Comey firing,
had only minutes to process it.
Not only had the decision been made by the president with almost no consultation except that of
his inner family circle, but the response, and explanation, and even legal justifications, were also
almost exclusively managed by him and his family. Rosenstein and Sessions’s parallel rationale for
the firing was shoehorned in at the last minute, at which point, at Kushner’s direction, the initial
explanation of Comey’s firing became that the president had acted solely on their recommendation.
Spicer was forced to deliver this unlikely rationale, as was the vice president. But this pretense
unraveled almost immediately, not least because most everyone in the West Wing, wanting nothing to
do with the decision to fire Comey, was helping to unravel it.
The president, along with his family, stood on one side of the White House divide, while the staff
—mouths agape, disbelieving and speechless—stood on the other.
But the president seemed also to want it known that he, aroused and dangerous, personally took
down Comey. Forget Rosenstein and Sessions, it was personal. It was a powerful president and a
vengeful one, in every way galled and affronted by those in pursuit of him, and determined to protect
his family, who were in turn determined to have him protect them.
“The daughter will take down the father,” said Bannon, in a Shakespearian mood.
Within the West Wing there was much replaying of alternative scenarios. If you wanted to get rid
of Comey, there were surely politic ways of doing it—which had in fact been suggested to Trump. (A
curious one—an idea that later would seem ironic—was to get rid of General Kelly at Homeland
Security and move Comey into that job.) But the point really was that Trump had wanted to confront
and humiliate the FBI director. Cruelty was a Trump attribute.
The firing had been carried out publicly and in front of his family—catching Comey entirely off
guard as he gave a speech in California. Then the president had further personalized the blow with an
ad hominem attack on the director, suggesting that the FBI itself was on Trump’s side and that it, too,
had only contempt for Comey.
The next day, as though to further emphasize and delight in both the insult and his personal
impunity, the president met with Russian bigwigs in the Oval Office, including Russia’s Ambassador
Kislyak, the very focus of much of the Trump-Russia investigation. To the Russians he said: “I just
fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia.
That’s taken off.” Then, to boot, he revealed information supplied to the United States by Israel from
its agent in place in Syria about ISIS using laptops to smuggle bombs onto airlines—revealing enough
information to compromise the Israeli agent. (This incident did not help Trump’s reputation in
intelligence circles, since, in spycraft, human sources are to be protected above all other secrets.)
“It’s Trump,” said Bannon. “He thinks he can fire the FBI.”
* * *
Trump believed that firing Comey would make him a hero. Over the next forty-eight hours he spun his
side to various friends. It was simple: he had stood up to the FBI. He proved that he was willing to
take on the state power. The outsider against the insiders. After all, that’s why he was elected.
At some level he had a point. One reason presidents don’t fire the director of the FBI is that they
fear the consequences. It’s the Hoover syndrome: any president can be hostage to what the FBI
knows, and a president who treats the FBI with something less than deference does so at his own
peril. But this president had stood up to the feds. One man against the unaccountable power that the
left had long railed against—and that more recently the right had taken as a Holy Grail issue, too.
“Everybody should be rooting for me,” the president said to friends, more and more plaintively.
Here was another peculiar Trump attribute: an inability to see his actions the way most others saw
them. Or to fully appreciate how people expected him to behave. The notion of the presidency as an
institutional and political concept, with an emphasis on ritual and propriety and semiotic messaging—
statesmanship—was quite beyond him.
Inside the government, the response to Comey’s firing was a kind of bureaucratic revulsion.
Bannon had tried to explain to Trump the essential nature of career government officials, people
whose comfort zone was in their association with hegemonic organizations and a sense of a higher
cause—they were different, very different, from those who sought individual distinction. Whatever
else Comey might be, he was first and foremost a bureaucrat. Casting him ignominiously out was yet
another Trump insult to the bureaucracy.
Rod Rosenstein, the author of the letter that ostensibly provided the justification for firing Comey,
now stood in the line of fire. The fifty-two-year-old Rosenstein, who, in rimless glasses, seemed to
style himself as a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat, was the longest-serving U.S. attorney in the country. He
lived within the system, all by the book, his highest goal seeming to be to have people say he did
things by the book. He was a straight shooter—and he wanted everyone to know it.
All this was undermined by Trump—trashed, even. The brow-beating and snarling president had
hectored the country’s two top law enforcement officials into an ill-considered or, at the very least, an
ill-timed indictment of the director of the FBI. Rosenstein was already feeling used and abused. And
then he was shown to have been tricked, too. He was a dupe.
The president had forced Rosenstein and Sessions to construct a legal rationale, yet then he could
not even maintain the bureaucratic pretense of following it. Having enlisted Rosenstein and Sessions
in his plot, Trump now exposed their efforts to present a reasonable and aboveboard case as a sham
—and, arguably, a plan to obstruct justice. The president made it perfectly clear that he hadn’t fired
the director of the FBI because he did Hillary wrong; he fired Comey because the FBI was too
aggressively investigating him and his administration.
Hyper-by-the-book Rod Rosenstein—heretofore the quintessential apolitical player—immediately
became, in Washington eyes, a hopeless Trump tool. But Rosenstein’s revenge was deft, swift,
overwhelming, and (of course) by the book.
Given the decision of the attorney general to recuse himself from the Russia investigation, it fell
under the authority of the deputy attorney general to determine whether a conflict existed—that is,
whether the deputy attorney general, because of self-interest, might not be able to act objectively—
and if, in his sole discretion, he judged a conflict to exist, to appoint an outside special counsel with
wide powers and responsibilities to conduct an investigation and, potentially, a prosecution.
On May 17, twelve days after FBI director Comey was fired, without consulting the White House
or the attorney general, Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to oversee the
investigation of Trump’s, his campaign’s, and his staff’s ties to Russia. If Michael Flynn had recently
become the most powerful man in Washington for what he might reveal about the president, now
Mueller arguably assumed that position because he had the power to make Flynn, and all other
assorted Trump cronies and flunkies, squeal.
Rosenstein, of course, perhaps with some satisfaction, understood that he had delivered what
could be a mortal blow to the Trump presidency.
Bannon, shaking his head in wonder about Trump, commented drily: “He doesn’t necessarily see
what’s coming.”