fire and fury chapter 17 & 18

17
ABROAD AND AT HOME
n May 12, Roger Ailes was scheduled to return to New York from Palm Beach to meet with
Peter Thiel, an early and lonely Trump supporter in Silicon Valley who had become
increasingly astonished by Trump’s unpredictability. Ailes and Thiel, both worried that Trump could
bring Trumpism down, were set to discuss the funding and launch of a new cable news network. Thiel
would pay for it and Ailes would bring O’Reilly, Hannity, himself, and maybe Bannon to it.
But two days before the meeting, Ailes fell in his bathroom and hit his head. Before slipping into a
coma, he told his wife not to reschedule the meeting with Thiel. A week later, Ailes, that singular
figure in the march from Nixon’s silent majority to Reagan’s Democrats to Trump’s passionate base,
was dead.
His funeral in Palm Beach on May 20 was quite a study in the currents of right-wing ambivalence
and even mortification. Right-wing professionals remained passionate in their outward defense of
Trump but were rattled, if not abashed, among one another. At the funeral, Rush Limbaugh and Laura
Ingraham struggled to parse support for Trumpism even as they distanced themselves from Trump
himself.
The president had surely become the right wing’s meal ticket. He was the ultimate antiliberal: an
authoritarian who was the living embodiment of resistance to authority. He was the exuberant inverse
of everything the right wing found patronizing and gullible and sanctimonious about the left. And yet,
obviously, Trump was Trump—careless, capricious, disloyal, far beyond any sort of control. Nobody
knew that as well as the people who knew him best.
Ailes’s wife, Beth, had militantly invited only Ailes loyalists to the funeral. Anyone who had
wavered in her husband’s defense since his firing or had decided that a better future lay with the
Murdoch family was excluded. This put Trump, still enthralled by his new standing with Murdoch, on
the other side of the line. Hours and then days—carefully tracked by Beth Ailes—ticked off without a
condolence call from the president.
The morning of the funeral, Sean Hannity’s private plane took off for Palm Beach from Republic
Airport in Farmingdale, Long Island. Accompanying Hannity was a small group of current and former
Fox employees, all Ailes and Trump partisans. But each felt some open angst, or even incredulity,
about Trump being Trump: first there was the difficulty of grasping the Comey rationale, and now his
failure to give even a nod to his late friend Ailes.
“He’s an idiot, obviously,” said the former Fox correspondent Liz Trotta.
Fox anchor Kimberly Guilfoyle spent much of the flight debating Trump’s entreaties to have her
replace Sean Spicer at the White House. “There are a lot of issues, including personal survival.”
As for Hannity himself, his view of the right-wing world was shifting from Foxcentric to
Trumpcentric. He did not think much more than a year would pass before he, too, would be pushed
from the network, or find it too inhospitable to stay on. And yet he was pained by Trump’s slavish
attentions to Murdoch, who had not only ousted Ailes but whose conservatism was at best utilitarian.
“He was for Hillary!” said Hannity.
Ruminating out loud, Hannity said he would leave the network and go work full time for Trump,
because nothing was more important than that Trump succeed—“in spite of himself,” Hannity added,
laughing.
But he was pissed off that Trump hadn’t called Beth. “Mueller,” he concluded, drawing deeply on
an electronic cigarette, had distracted him.
Trump may be a Frankenstein creation, but he was the right wing’s creation, the first, true, rightwing
original. Hannity could look past the Comey disaster. And Jared. And the mess in the White
House.
Still, he hadn’t called Beth.
“What the fuck is wrong with him?” asked Hannity.
* * *
Trump believed he was one win away from turning everything around. Or, perhaps more to the point,
one win away from good press that would turn everything around. The fact that he had largely
squandered his first hundred days—whose victories should have been the currency of the next
hundred days—was immaterial. You could be down in the media one day and then the next have a hit
that made you a success.
“Big things, we need big things,” he said, angrily and often. “This isn’t big. I need big. Bring me
big. Do you even know what big is?”
Repeal and replace, infrastructure, true tax reform—the rollout Trump had promised and then
depended on Paul Ryan to deliver—was effectively in tatters. Every senior staff member was now
maintaining that they shouldn’t have done health care, the precursor to the legislative rollout, in the
first place. Whose idea was that, anyway?
The natural default might be to do smaller things, incremental versions of the program. But Trump
showed little interest in the small stuff. He became listless and irritable.
So, okay, it would have to be peace in the Middle East.
For Trump, as for many showmen or press release entrepreneurs, the enemy of everything is
complexity and red tape, and the solution for everything is cutting corners. Bypass or ignore the
difficulties; just move in a straight line to the vision, which, if it’s bold enough, or grandiose enough,
will sell itself. In this formula, there is always a series of middlemen who will promise to help you
cut the corners, as well as partners who will be happy to piggyback on your grandiosity.
Enter the Crown Prince of the House of Saud, Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, age
thirty-one. Aka MBS.
The fortuitous circumstance was that the king of Saudi Arabia, MBS’s father, was losing it. The
consensus in the Saudi royal family about a need to modernize was growing stronger (somewhat).
MBS—an inveterate player of video games—was a new sort of personality in the Saudi leadership.
He was voluble, open, and expansive, a charmer and an international player, a canny salesman rather
than a remote, taciturn grandee. He had seized the economic portfolio and was pursuing a vision—
quite a Trumpian vision—to out-Dubai Dubai and diversify the economy. His would be a new,
modern—well, a bit more modern—kingdom (yes, women would soon be allowed to drive—so thank
God self-driving cars were coming!). Saudi leadership was marked by age, traditionalism, relative
anonymity, and careful consensus thinking. The Saudi royal family, on the other hand, whence the
leadership class comes, was often marked by excess, flash, and the partaking of the joys of modernity
in foreign ports. MBS, a man in a hurry, was trying to bridge the Saudi royal selves.
Global liberal leadership had been all but paralyzed by the election of Donald Trump—indeed, by
the very existence of Donald Trump. But it was an inverted universe in the Middle East. The Obama
truculence and hyperrationalization and micromanaging, preceded by the Bush moral militarism and
ensuing disruptions, preceded by Clinton deal making, quid pro quo, and backstabbing, had opened
the way for Trump’s version of realpolitik. He had no patience with the our-hands-are-tied ennui of
the post-cold war order, that sense of the chess board locked in place, of incremental movement being
the best-case scenario—the alternative being only war. His was a much simpler view: Who’s got the
power? Give me his number.
And, just as basically: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If Trump had one fixed point of
reference in the Middle East, it was—mostly courtesy of Michael Flynn’s tutoring—that Iran was the
bad guy. Hence everybody opposed to Iran was a pretty good guy.
After the election, MBS had reached out to Kushner. In the confusion of the Trump transition,
nobody with foreign policy stature and an international network had been put in place—even the new
secretary of state designate, Rex Tillerson, had no real experience in foreign policy. To bewildered
foreign secretaries, it seemed logical to see the presidentelect’s son-in-law as a figure of stability.
Whatever happened, he would be there. And for certain regimes, especially the familycentric Saudis,
Kushner, the son-in-law, was much more reassuring than a policy person. He wasn’t in his job
because of his ideas.
Of the many Trump gashes in modern major-power governing, you could certainly drive a Trojan
horse through his lack of foreign policy particulars and relationships. This presented a do-over
opportunity for the world in its relationship with the United States—or it did if you were willing to
speak the new Trump language, whatever that was. There wasn’t much of a road map here, just pure
opportunism, a new transactional openness. Or, even more, a chance to use the powers of charm and
seduction to which Trump responded as enthusiastically as he did to offers of advantageous new
deals.
It was Kissingeresque realpolitik. Kissinger himself, long familiar with Trump by way of the New
York social world and now taking Kushner under his wing, was successfully reinserting himself,
helping to organize meetings with the Chinese and the Russians.
Most of America’s usual partners, and even many antagonists, were unsettled if not horrified. Still,
some saw opportunity. The Russians could see a free pass on the Ukraine and Georgia, as well as a
lifting of sanctions, in return for giving up on Iran and Syria. Early in the transition, a high-ranking
official in the Turkish government reached out in genuine confusion to a prominent U.S. business
figure to inquire whether Turkey would have better leverage by putting pressure on the U.S. military
presence in Turkey or by offering the new president an enviable hotel site on the Bosporus.
There was something curiously aligned between the Trump family and MBS. Like the entire Saudi
leadership, MBS had, practically speaking, no education outside of Saudi Arabia. In the past, this had
worked to limit the Saudi options—nobody was equipped to confidently explore new intellectual
possibilities. As a consequence, everybody was wary of trying to get them to imagine change. But
MBS and Trump were on pretty much equal footing. Knowing little made them oddly comfortable
with each other. When MBS offered himself to Kushner as his guy in the Saudi kingdom, that was
“like meeting someone nice at your first day of boarding school,” said Kushner’s friend.
Casting aside, in very quick order, previously held assumptions—in fact, not really aware of those
assumptions—the new Trump thinking about the Middle East became the following: There are
basically four players (or at least we can forget everybody else)—Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and
Iran. The first three can be united against the fourth. And Egypt and Saudi Arabia, given what they
want with respect to Iran—and anything else that does not interfere with the United States’ interests—
will pressure the Palestinians to make a deal. Voilà.
This represented a queasy-making mishmash of thought. Bannon’s isolationism (a pox on all your
houses—and keep us out of it); Flynn’s anti-Iranism (of all the world’s perfidy and toxicity, there is
none like that of the mullahs); and Kushner’s Kissingerism (not so much Kissingerism as, having no
point of view himself, a dutiful attempt to follow the ninety-four-year-old’s advice).
But the fundamental point was that the last three administrations had gotten the Middle East wrong.
It was impossible to overstate how much contempt the Trump people felt for the business-as-usual
thinking that had gotten it so wrong. Hence, the new operating principle was simple: do the opposite
of what they (Obama, but the Bush neocons, too) would do. Their behavior, their conceits, their ideas
—in some sense even their backgrounds, education, and class—were all suspect. And, what’s more,
you don’t really have to know all that much yourself; you just do it differently than it was done before.
The old foreign policy was based on the idea of nuance: facing an infinitely complex multilateral
algebra of threats, interests, incentives, deals, and ever evolving relationships, we strain to reach a
balanced future. In practice, the new foreign policy, an effective Trump doctrine, was to reduce the
board to three elements: powers we can work with, powers we cannot work with, and those without
enough power whom we can functionally disregard or sacrifice. It was cold war stuff. And, indeed, in
the larger Trump view, it was during the cold war that time and circumstance gave the United States
its greatest global advantage. That was when America was great.
* * *
Kushner was the driver of the Trump doctrine. His test cases were China, Mexico, Canada, and Saudi
Arabia. He offered each country the opportunity to make his father-in-law happy.
In the first days of the administration, Mexico blew its chance. In transcripts of conversations
between Trump and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto that would later become public, it was
vividly clear that Mexico did not understand or was unwilling to play the new game. The Mexican
president refused to construct a pretense for paying for the wall, a pretense that might have redounded
to his vast advantage (without his having to actually pay for the wall).
Not long after, Canada’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, a forty-five-year-old globalist in the
style of Clinton and Blair, came to Washington and repeatedly smiled and bit his tongue. And that did
the trick: Canada quickly became Trump’s new best friend.
The Chinese, who Trump had oft maligned during the campaign, came to Mar-a-Lago for a summit
advanced by Kushner and Kissinger. (This required some tutoring for Trump, who referred to the
Chinese leader as “Mr. X-i”; the president was told to think of him as a woman and call him “she.”)
They were in an agreeable mood, evidently willing to humor Trump. And they quickly figured out that
if you flatter him, he flatters you.
But it was the Saudis, also often maligned during the campaign, who, with their intuitive
understanding of family, ceremony, and ritual and propriety, truly scored.
The foreign policy establishment had a long and well-honed relationship with MBS’s rival, the
crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN). Key NSA and State Department figures were alarmed
that Kushner’s discussions and fast-advancing relationship with MBS would send a dangerous
message to MBN. And of course it did. The foreign policy people believed Kushner was being led by
MBS, whose real views were entirely untested. The Kushner view was either, naïvely, that he wasn’t
being led, or, with the confidence of a thirty-six-year-old assuming the new prerogatives of the man in
charge, that he didn’t care: let’s embrace anybody who will embrace us.
The Kushner/MBS plan that emerged was straightforward in a way that foreign policy usually
isn’t: If you give us what we want, we’ll give you what you want. On MBS’s assurance that he would
deliver some seriously good news, he was invited to visit the White House in March. (The Saudis
arrived with a big delegation, but they were received at the White House by only the president’s
small circle—and the Saudis took particular note that Trump ordered Priebus to jump up and fetch
him things during the meeting.) The two large men, the older Trump and much younger MBS—both
charmers, flatterers, and country club jokers, each in their way—grandly hit it off.
It was an aggressive bit of diplomacy. MBS was using this Trump embrace as part of his own
power play in the kingdom. And the Trump White House, ever denying this was the case, let him. In
return, MBS offered a basket of deals and announcements that would coincide with a scheduled
presidential visit to Saudi Arabia—Trump’s first trip abroad. Trump would get a “win.”
Planned before the Comey firing and Mueller hiring, the trip had State Department professionals
alarmed. The itinerary—May 19 to May 27—was too long for any president, particularly such an
untested and untutored one. (Trump himself, full of phobias about travel and unfamiliar locations, had
been grumbling about the burdens of the trip.) But coming immediately after Comey and Mueller it
was a get-out-of-Dodge godsend. There couldn’t have been a better time to be making headlines far
from Washington. A road trip could transform everything.
Almost the entire West Wing, along with State Department and National Security staff, was on
board for the trip: Melania Trump, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Stephen Bannon,
Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Hope Hicks, Sean Spicer, Stephen Miller, Joe Hagin, Rex Tillerson, and
Michael Anton. Also included were Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary; Dan
Scavino, the administration’s social media director; Keith Schiller, the president’s personal security
adviser; and Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary. (Ross was widely ridiculed for never missing an
Air Force One opportunity—as Bannon put it, “Wilbur is Zelig, every time you turn around he’s in a
picture.”) This trip and the robust American delegation was the antidote, and alternate universe to the
Mueller appointment.
The president and his son-in-law could barely contain their confidence and enthusiasm. They felt
certain that they had set out on the road to peace in the Middle East—and in this, they were much like
a number of other administrations that had come before them.
Trump was effusive in his praise for Kushner. “Jared’s gotten the Arabs totally on our side. Done
deal,” he assured one of his after-dinner callers before leaving on the trip. “It’s going to be beautiful.”
“He believed,” said the caller, “that this trip could pull it out, like a twist in a bad movie.”
* * *
On the empty roads of Riyadh, the presidential motorcade passed billboards with pictures of Trump
and the Saudi king (MBS’s eighty-one-year-old father) with the legend TOGETHER WE PREVAIL.
In part, the president’s enthusiasm seemed to be born out of—or perhaps had caused—a
substantial exaggeration of what had actually been agreed to during the negotiations ahead of the trip.
In the days before his departure, he was telling people that the Saudis were going to finance an
entirely new military presence in the kingdom, supplanting and even replacing the U.S. command
headquarters in Qatar. And there would be “the biggest breakthrough in Israel-Palestine negotiations
ever.” It would be “the game changer, major like has never been seen.”
In truth, his version of what would be accomplished was a quantum leap beyond what was
actually agreed, but that did not seem to alter his feelings of zeal and delight.
The Saudis would immediately buy $110 billion’s worth of American arms, and a total of $350
billion over ten years. “Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs,
jobs, jobs,” declared the president. Plus, the Americans and the Saudis would together “counter
violent extremist messaging, disrupt financing of terrorism, and advance defense cooperation.” And
they would establish a center in Riyadh to fight extremism. And if this was not exactly peace in the
Middle East, the president, according to the secretary of state, “feels like there’s a moment in time
here. The president’s going to talk with Netanyahu about the process going forward. He’s going to be
talking to President Abbas about what he feels is necessary for the Palestinians to be successful.”
It was all a Trumpian big deal. Meanwhile, the First Family—POTUS, FLOTUS, and Jared and
Ivanka—were ferried around in gold golf carts, and the Saudis threw a $75 million party in Trump’s
honor, with Trump getting to sit on a thronelike chair. (The president, while receiving an honor from
the Saudi king, appeared in a photograph to have bowed, arousing some right-wing ire.)
Fifty Arab and Muslim nations were summoned by the Saudis to pay the president court. The
president called home to tell his friends how natural and easy this was, and how, inexplicably and
suspiciously, Obama had messed it all up. There “has been a little strain, but there won’t be strain
with this administration,” the president assured Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, the king of Bahrain.
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Egyptian strongman, ably stroked the president and said, “You are a
unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible.” (To Sisi, Trump replied, “Love your
shoes. Boy, those shoes. Man. . . .”)
It was, in dramatic ways, a shift in foreign policy attitude and strategy—and its effects were
almost immediate. The president, ignoring if not defying foreign policy advice, gave a nod to the
Saudis’ plan to bully Qatar. Trump’s view was that Qatar was providing financial support to terror
groups—pay no attention to a similar Saudi history. (Only some members of the Saudi royal family
had provided such support, went the new reasoning.) Within weeks of the trip, MBS, detaining MBN
quite in the dead of night, would force him to relinquish the Crown Prince title, which MBS would
then assume for himself. Trump would tell friends that he and Jared had engineered this: “We’ve put
our man on top!”
From Riyadh, the presidential party went on to Jerusalem, where the president met with Netanyahu
and, in Bethlehem, with Abbas, expressing ever greater certainty that, in his third-person guise,
“Trump will make peace.” Then to Rome to meet the pope. Then to Brussels, where, in character, he
meaningfully drew the line between Western-alliance-based foreign policy, which had been firmly in
place since World War II, and the new America First ethos.
In Trump’s view, all this should have been presidency-shaping stuff. He couldn’t believe his
dramatic accomplishments weren’t getting bigger play. He was simply in denial, Bannon, Priebus,
and others noted, about the continuing and competing Comey and Mueller headlines.
One of Trump’s deficiencies—a constant in the campaign and, so far, in the presidency—was his
uncertain grasp of cause and effect. Until now, whatever problems he might have caused in the past
had reliably been supplanted by new events, giving him the confidence that one bad story can always
be replaced by a better, more dramatic story. He could always change the conversation. The Saudi
trip and his bold campaign to upend the old foreign policy world order should have accomplished
exactly that. But the president continued to find himself trapped, incredulously on his part, by Comey
and Mueller. Nothing seemed to move on from those two events.
After the Saudi leg of the trip, Bannon and Priebus, both exhausted by the trip’s intense proximity
to the president and his family, peeled off and headed back to Washington. It was now their job to
deal with what had become, in the White House staff’s absence, the actual, even ultimate, presidencyshaping
crisis.
* * *
What did the people around Trump actually think of Trump? This was not just a reasonable question,
it was the question those around Trump most asked themselves. They constantly struggled to figure out
what they themselves actually thought and what they thought everybody else was truly thinking.
Mostly they kept their answers to themselves, but in the instance of Comey and Mueller, beyond
all the usual dodging and weaving rationalizations, there really wasn’t anybody, other than the
president’s family, who didn’t very pointedly blame Trump himself.
This was the point at which an emperors-new-clothes threshold was crossed. Now you could, out
loud, rather freely doubt his judgment, acumen, and, most of all, the advice he was getting.
“He’s not only crazy,” declared Tom Barrack to a friend, “he’s stupid.”
But Bannon, along with Priebus, had strongly opposed the Comey firing, while Ivanka and Jared
had not only supported it, but insisted on it. This seismic event prompted a new theme from Bannon,
repeated by him widely, which was that every piece of advice from the couple was bad advice.
Nobody now believed that firing Comey was a good idea; even the president seemed sheepish.
Hence, Bannon saw his new role as saving Trump—and Trump would always need saving. He might
be a brilliant actor but he could not manage his own career.
And for Bannon, this new challenge brought a clear benefit: when Trump’s fortune sank, Bannon’s
rose. On the trip to the Middle East, Bannon went to work. He became focused on the figure of Lanny
Davis, one of the Clinton impeachment lawyers who, for the better part of two years, became a near
round-the-clock spokesperson and public defender of the Clinton White House. Bannon judged
Comey-Mueller to be as threatening to the Trump White House as Monica Lewinsky and Ken Starr
were to the Clinton White House, and he saw the model for escaping a mortal fate in the Clinton
response.
“What the Clintons did was to go to the mattresses with amazing discipline,” he explained. “They
set up an outside shop and then Bill and Hillary never mentioned it again. They ground through it.
Starr had them dead to rights and they got through it.”
Bannon knew exactly what needed to be done: seal off the West Wing and build a separate legal
and communications staff to defend the president. In this construct, the president would occupy a
parallel reality, removed from and uninvolved with what would become an obvious partisan blood
sport—as it had in the Clinton model. Politics would be relegated to its nasty corner, and Trump
would conduct himself as the president and as the commander in chief.
“So we’re going to do it,” insisted Bannon, with joie de guerre and manic energy, “the way they
did it. Separate war room, separate lawyers, separate spokespeople. It’s keeping that fight over there
so we can wage this other fight over here. Everybody gets this. Well, maybe not Trump so much. Not
clear. Maybe a little. Not what he imagined.”
Bannon, in great excitement, and Priebus, grateful for an excuse to leave the president’s side,
rushed back to the West Wing to begin to cordon it off.
It did not escape Priebus’s notice that Bannon had in mind to create a rear guard of defenders—
David Bossie, Corey Lewandowski, and Jason Miller, all of whom would be outside spokespeople—
that would largely be loyal to him. Most of all, it did not escape Priebus that Bannon was asking the
president to play a role entirely out of character: the cool, steady, long-suffering chief executive.
And it certainly didn’t help that they were unable to hire a law firm with a top-notch white-collar
government practice. By the time Bannon and Priebus were back in Washington, three blue-chip firms
had said no. All of them were afraid they would face a rebellion among the younger staff if they
represented Trump, afraid Trump would publicly humiliate them if the going got tough, and afraid
Trump would stiff them for the bill.
In the end, nine top firms turned them down.
B
18
BANNON REDUX
annon was back, according to the Bannon faction. According to Bannon himself: “I’m good. I’m
good. I’m back. I said don’t do it. You don’t fire the director of the FBI. The geniuses around
here thought otherwise.”
Was Bannon back? asked the worried other side of the house—Jared and Ivanka, Dina Powell,
Gary Cohn, Hope Hicks, H. R. McMaster.
If he was back, that meant he had successfully defied the organizational premise of the Trump
White House: the family would always prevail. Steve Bannon had, even in his internal exile, not
stopped his running public verbal assault on Jared and Ivanka. Off the record became Bannon’s
effective on the record. These were bitter, sometimes hilarious, denunciations of the couple’s acumen,
intelligence, and motives: “They think they’re defending him, but they are always defending
themselves.”
Now he declared they were finished as a power center—destroyed. And if not, they would destroy
the president with their terrible and self-serving advice. Even worse than Jared was Ivanka. “She
was a nonevent on the campaign. She became a White House staffer and that’s when people suddenly
realized she’s dumb as a brick. A little marketing savvy and has a look, but as far as understanding
actually how the world works and what politics is and what it means—nothing. Once you expose that,
you lose such credibility. Jared just kind of flits in and does the Arab stuff.”
The folks on the Jarvanka side seemed more and more genuinely afraid of what might happen if
they crossed the Bannon side. Because the Bannonites, they truly seemed to fear, were assassins.
On the flight to Riyadh, Dina Powell approached Bannon about a leak involving her to a rightwing
news site. She told him she knew the leak had come from Julia Hahn, one of Bannon’s people
and a former Breitbart writer.
“You should take it up with her,” said an amused Bannon. “But she’s a beast. And she will come at
you. Let me know how it works out.”
Among Bannon’s many regular targets, Powell had become a favorite. She was often billed as
Deputy National Security Advisor; that was her sometime designation even in the New York Times.
Actually, she was Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategy—the difference, Bannon pointed
out, between the COO of a hotel chain and the concierge.
Coming back from the overseas trip, Powell began to talk in earnest to friends about her timetable
to get out of the White House and back into a private-sector job. Sheryl Sandberg, she said, was her
model.
“Oh my fucking god,” said Bannon.
On May 26, the day before the presidential party returned from the overseas trip, the Washington
Post reported that during the transition, Kushner and Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador, had, at
Kushner’s instigation, discussed the possibility of having the Russians set up a private
communications channel between the transition team and the Kremlin. The Post cited “U.S. officials
briefed on intelligence reports.” The Jarvanka side believed that Bannon was the source.
Part of the by now deep enmity between the First Family couple and their allies and Bannon and
his team was the Jarvanka conviction that Bannon had played a part in many of the reports of
Kushner’s interactions with the Russians. This was not, in other words, merely an internal policy
war; it was a death match. For Bannon to live, Kushner would have to be wholly discredited—
pilloried, investigated, possibly even jailed.
Bannon, assured by everyone that there was no winning against the Trump family, hardly tried to
hide his satisfied belief that he was going to outplay them. In the Oval Office, in front of her father,
Bannon openly attacked her. “You,” he said, pointing at her as the president watched, “are a fucking
liar.” Ivanka’s bitter complaints to her father, which in the past had diminished Bannon, were now met
by a hands-off Trump: “I told you this is a tough town, baby.”
* * *
But if Bannon was back, it was far from clear what being back meant. Trump being Trump, was this
true rehabilitation, or did he feel an even deeper rancor toward Bannon for having survived his initial
intention to kill him? Nobody really thought Trump forgot—instead, he dwelled and ruminated and
chewed. “One of the worst things is when he believes you’ve succeeded at his expense,” explained
Sam Nunberg, once on the inside of the Trump circle, then cast to the outside. “If your win is in any
way perceived as his loss, phew.”
For his part, Bannon believed he was back because, at a pivotal moment, his advice had proved
vastly better than that of the “geniuses.” Firing Comey, the solve-all-problems Jarvanka solution, had
indeed unleashed a set of terrible consequences.
The Jarvanka side believed that Bannon was in essence blackmailing the president. As Bannon
went, so went the virulence of right-wing digital media. Despite his apparent obsession with the “fake
news” put out by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, for the president the threat of
fake news was actually greater on the right. Though he would never call out fake news on Fox,
Breitbart, and the others, these outlets—which could conceivably spew a catchall of conspiracies in
which a weak Trump sold out to a powerful establishment—were potentially far more dangerous than
their counterparts on the left.
Bannon, too, was seen to be rectifying an earlier bureaucratic mistake. Where initially he had been
content to be the brains of the operation—confident that he was vastly smarter than everybody else
(and, indeed, few tried to challenge him for that title)—and not staff up, now he was putting his
organization and loyalists firmly in place. His off-balance-sheet communications staff—Bossie,
Lewandowski, Jason Miller, Sam Nunberg (even though he had long fallen out with Trump himself),
and Alexandra Preate—formed quite a private army of leakers and defenders. What’s more, whatever
breach there had been between Bannon and Priebus came smoothly together over their mutual loathing
of Jared and Ivanka. The professional White House was united against the amateur family White
House.
Adding to Bannon’s new bureaucratic advantage, he had maximum influence on the staffing of the
new firewall team, the lawyers and comm staff who would collectively become the Lanny Davis of
the Trump defense. Unable to hire prestige talent, Bannon turned to one of the president’s longtime
hit-man lawyers, Marc Kasowitz. Bannon had previously bonded with Kasowitz when the attorney
had handled a series of near-death problems on the campaign, including dealing with a vast number of
allegations and legal threats from an ever growing list of women accusing Trump of molesting and
harassing them.
On May 31, the Bannon firewall plan went into effect. Henceforth, all discussion related to
Russia, the Mueller and congressional investigations, and other personal legal issues would be
entirely handled by the Kasowitz team. The president, as Bannon described the plan in private and as
he urged his boss, would no longer be addressing any of these areas. Among the many, many efforts to
force Trump into presidential mode, this was the latest.
Bannon then installed Mark Corallo, a former Karl Rove communications staffer, as the firewall
spokesperson. He was also planning to put in Bossie and Lewandowski as part of the crisis
management team. And at Bannon’s prompting, Kasowitz attempted to further insulate the president by
giving his client a central piece of advice: send the kids home.
Bannon was indeed back. It was his team. It was his wall around the president—one that he hoped
would keep Jarvanka out.
Bannon’s formal moment of being back was marked by a major milestone. On June 1, after a long
and bitter internal debate, the president announced that he had decided to withdraw from the Paris
Climate Agreement. For Bannon, it was a deeply satisfying slap in the face of liberal rectitude—Elon
Musk and Bob Iger immediately resigned from Trump’s business council—and confirmation of
Trump’s true Bannonite instincts.
It was, likewise, the move that Ivanka Trump had campaigned hardest against in the White House.
“Score,” said Bannon. “The bitch is dead.”
* * *
There are few modern political variables more disruptive than a dedicated prosecutor. It’s the
ultimate wild card.
A prosecutor means that the issue under investigation—or, invariably, cascading issues—will be a
constant media focus. Setting their own public stage, prosecutors are certain leakers.
It means that everybody in a widening circle has to hire a lawyer. Even tangential involvement can
cost six figures; central involvement quickly rises into the millions.
By early summer, there was already an intense seller’s market in Washington for top criminal legal
talent. As the Mueller investigation got under way, White House staffers made a panicky rush to get
the best firm before someone else got there first and created a conflict.
“Can’t talk about Russia, nothing, can’t go there,” said Katie Walsh, now three months removed
from the White House, on advice of her new counsel.
Any interviews or depositions given to investigators risked putting you in jeopardy. What’s more,
every day in the White House brought new dangers: any random meeting you might find yourself in
exposed you more.
Bannon kept insisting on the absolute importance of this point—and for him the strategic
importance. If you didn’t want to find yourself getting wrung out in front of Congress, your career and
your net worth in jeopardy, be careful who you spoke to. More to the point: you must not under any
circumstances speak to Jared and Ivanka, who were now Russia toxic. It was Bannon’s widely
advertised virtue and advantage: “I’ve never been to Russia. I don’t know anybody from Russia. I’ve
never spoken to any Russians. And I’d just as well not speak to anyone who has.”
Bannon observed a hapless Pence in a lot of “wrong meetings,” and helped to bring in the
Republican operative Nick Ayers as Pence’s chief of staff, and to get “our fallback guy” out of the
White House and “running around the world and looking like a vice president.”
And beyond the immediate fears and disruption, there was the virtually certain outcome that a
special prosecutor delegated to find a crime would find one—likely many. Everybody became a
potential agent of implicating others. Dominos would fall. Targets would flip.
Paul Manafort, making a good living in international financial gray areas, his risk calculation
based on the long-shot odds that an under-the-radar privateer would ever receive close scrutiny,
would now be subjected to microscopic review. His nemesis, Oleg Deripaska—still pursuing his $17
million claim against Manafort and himself looking for favorable treatment from federal authorities
who had restricted his travel to the United States—was continuing his own deep investigation into
Manafort’s Russian and Ukrainian business affairs.
Tom Barrack, privy to the president’s stream of consciousness as well as his financial history, was
suddenly taking stock of his own exposure. Indeed, all the billionaire friends with whom Trump got
on the phone and gossiped and rambled were potential witnesses.
In the past, administrations forced to deal with a special prosecutor appointed to investigate and
prosecute matters with which the president might have been involved usually became consumed by
the effort to cope. Their tenure broke into “before” and “after” periods—with the “after” period
hopelessly bogged down in the soap opera of G-man pursuit. Now it looked like the “after” period
would be almost the entirety of the Trump administration.
The idea of formal collusion and artful conspiracy—as media and Democrats more or less
breathlessly believed or hoped had happened between Trump and the Russians—seemed unlikely to
everybody in the White House. (Bannon’s comment that the Trump campaign was not organized
enough to collude with its own state organizations became everybody’s favorite talking point—not
least because it was true.) But nobody was vouching for the side deals and freelance operations and
otherwise nothing-burger stuff that was a prosecutor’s daily bread and the likely detritus of the Trump
hangers-on. And everybody believed that if the investigation moved into the long chain of Trump
financial transactions, it would almost certainly reach the Trump family and the Trump White House.
And then there was the president’s insistent claim that he could do something. I can fire him, he
would say. Indeed, it was another of his repetitive loops: I can fire him. I can fire him. Mueller. The
idea of a showdown in which the stronger, more determined, more intransigent, more damn-theconsequences
man prevails was central to Trump’s own personal mythology. He lived in a mano a
mano world, one in which if your own respectability and sense of personal dignity were not a
paramount issue—if you weren’t weak in the sense of needing to seem like a reasonable and
respectable person—you had a terrific advantage. And if you made it personal, if you believed that
when the fight really mattered that it was kill or be killed, you were unlikely to meet someone willing
to make it as personal as you were.
This was Bannon’s fundamental insight about Trump: he made everything personal, and he was
helpless not to.
* * *
Dissuaded by everyone from focusing his anger on Mueller (at least for now), the president focused
on Sessions.
Sessions—“Beauregard”—was a close Bannon ally, and in May and June the president’s almost
daily digs against the attorney general—beyond even his loyalty and resolve, Trump issued scathing
criticism of his stature, voice, and dress—provided a sudden bit of good news for the anti-Bannon
side of the house. Bannon, they reasoned, couldn’t really be on top if his key proxy was now being
blamed for everything bad in Trump’s life. As always, Trump’s regard or scorn was infectious. If you
were in favor, then whatever and whomever he associated with you was also in favor. If you weren’t,
then everything associated with you was poisonous.
The brutality of Trump’s dissatisfaction kept increasing. A small man with a Mr. Magoo stature
and an old-fashioned Southern accent, Sessions was bitterly mocked by the president, who drew a
corrosive portrait of physical and mental weakness. Insult trauma radiated out of the Oval Office. You
could hear it when passing by.
Bannon’s efforts to talk the president down—reminding Trump of the difficulties they would
encounter during another attorney general confirmation, the importance of Sessions to the hard
conservative base, the loyalty that Sessions had shown during the Trump campaign—backfired. To the
anti-Bannon side’s satisfaction, they resulted in another round of Trump’s dissing Bannon.
The attack on Sessions now became, at least in the president’s mind, the opening salvo in an active
effort to replace Sessions as attorney general. But there were only two candidates to run the Justice
Department from whom Trump believed he could extract absolute loyalty, Chris Christie and Rudy
Giuliani. He believed they would both perform kamikaze acts for him—just as everyone else knew
they would almost certainly never be confirmed.
* * *
As James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee approached—it would take
place on June 8, twelve days after the presidential traveling party returned home from the long trip to
the Middle East and Europe—there began among senior staffers an almost open inquiry into Trump’s
motives and state of mind.
This seemed spurred by an obvious question: Why hadn’t he fired Comey during his first days of
office, when it would likely have been seen as a natural changing of the guard with no clear
connection to the Russian investigation? There were many equivocal answers: general
disorganization, the fast pace of events, and a genuine sense of innocence and naïveté about the
Russian charges. But now there seemed to be a new understanding: Donald Trump believed he had
vastly more power, authority, and control than in fact he had, and he believed his talent for
manipulating people and bending and dominating them was vastly greater than it was. Pushing this
line of reasoning just a little further: senior staff believed the president had a problem with reality,
and reality was now overwhelming him.
If true, this notion directly contravened the basic premise of the support for Trump among his staff.
In some sense, not too closely questioned, they believed he had almost magical powers. Since his
success was not explainable, he must have talents beyond what they could fathom. His instincts. Or
his salesman’s gifts. Or his energy. Or just the fact that he was the opposite of what he was supposed
to be. This was out-of-the-ordinary politics—shock-to-the-system politics—but it could work.
But what if it didn’t? What if they were all profoundly wrong?
Comey’s firing and the Mueller investigation prompted a delayed reckoning that ended months of
willing suspension of disbelief. These sudden doubts and considerations—at the highest level of
government—did not quite yet go to the president’s ability to adequately function in his job. But they
did, arguably for the first time in open discussions, go to the view that he was hopelessly prone to
self-sabotaging his ability to function in the job. This insight, scary as it was, at least left open the
possibility that if all the elements of self-sabotage were carefully controlled—his information, his
contacts, his public remarks, and the sense of danger and threat to him—he might yet be able to pull it
together and successfully perform.
Quite suddenly, this became the prevailing view of the Trump presidency and the opportunity that
still beckoned: you can be saved by those around you or brought down by them.
Bannon believed the Trump presidency would fail in some more or less apocalyptic fashion if
Kushner and his wife remained Trump’s most influential advisers. Their lack of political or realworld
experience had already hobbled the presidency, but since the Comey disaster it was getting
worse: as Bannon saw it, they were now acting out of personal panic.
The Kushner side believed that Bannon or Bannonism had pushed the president into a harshness
that undermined his natural salesman’s abilities to charm and reach out. Bannon and his ilk had made
him the monster he more and more seemed to be.
Meanwhile, virtually everybody believed that a large measure of the fault lay in Reince Priebus,
who had failed to create a White House that could protect the president from himself—or from
Bannon or from his own children. At the same time, believing that the fundamental problem lay in
Priebus was easy scapegoating, not to mention little short of risible: with so little power, the chief of
staff simply wasn’t capable of directing either Trump or those around him. Priebus himself could, not
too helpfully, argue only that no one had any idea how much worse all this would have been without
his long-suffering mediation among the president’s relatives, his Svengali, and Trump’s own terrible
instincts. There might be two or three debacles a day, but without Priebus’s stoic resolve, and the
Trump blows that he absorbed, there might have been a dozen more.
* * *
On June 8, from a little after ten in the morning to nearly one in the afternoon, James Comey testified
in public before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The former FBI director’s testimony, quite a tour
de force of directness, moral standing, personal honor, and damning details, left the country with a
simple message: the president was likely a fool and certainly a liar. In the age of modern media
politesse, few presidents had been so directly challenged and impugned before Congress.
Here it was, stark in Comey’s telling: the president regarded the FBI director as working directly
for him, of owing his job to him, and now he wanted something back. “My common sense,” said
Comey, “again, I could be wrong, but my common sense told me what’s going on here is he’s looking
to get something in exchange for granting my request to stay in the job.”
In Comey’s telling, the president wanted the FBI to lay off Michael Flynn. And he wanted to stop
the FBI from pursuing its Russia-related investigation. The point could hardly have been clearer: if
the president was pressuring the director because he feared that an investigation of Michael Flynn
would damage him, then this was an obstruction of justice.
The contrast between the two men, Comey and Trump, was in essence the contrast between good
government and Trump himself. Comey came across as precise, compartmentalized, scrupulous in his
presentation of the details of what transpired and the nature of his responsibility—he was as by-thebook
as it gets. Trump, in the portrait offered by Comey, was shady, shoot-from-the-hip, heedless or
even unaware of the rules, deceptive, and in it for himself.
After the hearing ended, the president told everybody he had not watched it, but everybody knew
he had. To the extent that this was, as Trump saw it, a contest between the two men, it was as direct a
juxtaposition as might be imagined. The entire point of the Comey testimony was to recast and
contradict what the president had said in his angry and defensive tweets and statements, and to cast
suspicion on his actions and motives—and to suggest that the president’s intention was to suborn the
director of the FBI.
Even among Trump loyalists who believed, as Trump did, that Comey was a phony and this was
all a put-up job, the nearly universal feeling was that in this mortal game, Trump was quite
defenseless.
* * *
Five days later, on June 13, it was Jeff Sessions’s turn to testify before the Senate Intelligence
Committee. His task was to try to explain the contacts he had had with the Russian ambassador,
contacts that had later caused him to recuse himself—and made him the president’s punching bag.
Unlike Comey, who had been invited to the Senate to show off his virtue—and had seized the
opportunity—Sessions had been invited to defend his equivocation, deception, or stupidity.
In an often testy exchange, the attorney general provided a squirrelly view of executive privilege.
Though the president had not in fact evoked executive privilege, Sessions deemed it appropriate to try
to protect it anyway.
Bannon, watching the testimony from the West Wing, quickly became frustrated. “Come on,
Beauregard,” he said.
Unshaven, Bannon sat at the head of the long wooden conference table in the chief of staff’s office
and focused intently on the flat-screen monitor across the room.
“They thought the cosmopolitans would like it if we fired Comey,” he said, with “they” being
Jared and Ivanka. “The cosmopolitans would be cheering for us for taking down the man who took
Hillary down.” Where the president saw Sessions as the cause of the Comey fiasco, Bannon saw
Sessions as a victim of it.
A sylphlike Kushner, wearing a skinny gray suit and skinny black tie, slipped into the room.
(Recently making the rounds was a joke about Kushner being the best-dressed man in Washington,
which is quite the opposite of a compliment.) On occasion the power struggle between Bannon and
Kushner seemed to take physical form. Bannon’s demeanor rarely changed, but Kushner could be
petulant, condescending, and dismissive—or, as he was now, hesitating, abashed, and respectful.
Bannon ignored Kushner until the younger man cleared his throat. “How’s it going?”
Bannon indicated the television set: as in, Watch for yourself.
Finally Bannon spoke. “They don’t realize this is about institutions, not people.”
“They” would appear to be the Jarvanka side—or an even broader construct referring to all those
who mindlessly stood with Trump.
“This town is about institutions,” Bannon continued. “We fire the FBI director and we fire the
whole FBI. Trump is a man against institutions, and the institutions know it. How do you think that
goes down?”
This was shorthand for a favorite Bannon riff: In the course of the campaign, Donald Trump had
threatened virtually every institution in American political life. He was a clown-prince version of
Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Trump believed, offering catnip to deep American
ire and resentment, that one man could be bigger than the system. This analysis presupposed that the
institutions of political life were as responsive as those in the commercial life that Trump was from—
and that they yearned to meet the market and find the Zeitgeist. But what if these institutions—the
media, the judiciary, the intelligence community, the greater executive branch itself, and the “swamp”
with its law firms, consultants, influence peddlers, and leakers—were in no way eager to adapt? If,
by their nature, they were determined to endure, then this accidental president was up against it.
Kushner seemed unpersuaded. “I wouldn’t put it like that,” he said.
“I think that’s the lesson of the first hundred days that some people around here have learned,” said
Bannon, ignoring Kushner. “It’s not going to get better. This is what it’s like.”
“I don’t know,” said Kushner.
“Know it,” said Bannon.
“I think Sessions is doing okay,” said Kushner. “Don’t you?”