fire and fury chapter 19 & 20

19
MIKA WHO?
he media had unlocked the value of Donald Trump, but few in the media had unlocked it more
directly and personally than Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. Their MSNBC breakfast
show was an ongoing soap-opera-ish or possibly Oprahesque drama about their relationship with
Trump—how he had disappointed them, how far they had come from their original regard for him,
and how much and how pathetically he regularly embarrassed himself. The bond he once had with
them, forged through mutual celebrity and a shared proprietary sense of politics (Scarborough, the
former congressman, seemed to feel that he ought reasonably to be president as much as Donald
Trump felt he should be), had distinguished the show during the campaign; now its public fraying
became part of the daily news cycle. Scarborough and Brzezinski lectured him, channeled the
concerns of his friends and family, upbraided him, and openly worried about him—that he was getting
the wrong advice (Bannon) and, too, that his mental powers were slipping. They also staked a claim
at representing the reasonable center-right alternative to the president, and indeed were quite a good
barometer of both the center-right’s efforts to deal with him and its day-to-day difficulties of living
with him.
Trump, believing he had been used and abused by Scarborough and Brzezinski, claimed he’d
stopped watching the show. But Hope Hicks, every morning, quaking, had to recount it for him.
Morning Joe was a ground-zero study in the way the media had over-invested in Trump. He was
the whale against which media emotions, self-regard, ego, joie de guerre, career advancement, and
desire to be at the center of the story, too, all churned in nearly ecstatic obsession. In reverse regard,
the media was the same whale, serving the same function, for Trump.
To this Trump added another tic, a lifelong sense that people were constantly taking unfair
advantage of him. This perhaps came from his father’s cheapness and lack of generosity, or from his
own overawareness of being a rich kid (and, no doubt, his insecurities about this), or from a
negotiator’s profound understanding that it is never win-win, that where there is profit there is loss.
Trump simply could not abide the knowledge that somebody was getting a leg up at his expense. His
was a zero-sum ecosystem. In the world of Trump, anything that he deemed of value either accrued to
him or had been robbed from him.
Scarborough and Brzezinski had taken their relationship with Trump and amply monetized it,
while putting no percentage in his pocket—and in this instance, he judged his commission should be
slavishly favorable treatment. To say this drove him mad would be an understatement. He dwelled
and fixated on the perceived injustice. Don’t mention Joe or Mika to him was a standing
proscription.
His wounded feelings and incomprehension at the failure of people whose embrace he sought to,
in return, embrace him was “deep, crazy deep,” said his former aide Sam Nunberg, who had run afoul
of his need for 100 percent approbation and his bitter suspicion of being profited from.
* * *
Out of this accumulated rage came his June 29 tweet about Mika Brzezinski.
It was classic Trump: there was no mediation between off-the-record language and the public
statement. Referring to “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” in one tweet, he wrote in another that she was
“bleeding badly from a facelift” when she and Scarborough visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago on the
previous New Year’s Eve. Many of his tweets were not, as they might seem, spontaneous utterances,
but constant ones. Trump’s rifts often began as insult comedy and solidified as bitter accusations and
then, in an uncontainable moment, became an official proclamation.
The next step, in his tweet paradigm, was universal liberal opprobrium. Almost a week of social
media fury, cable breast-beating, and front-page condemnation followed his tweet about Brzezinski.
That was accompanied by the other part of the Trump tweet dynamic: by unifying liberal opinion
against him, he unified its opposite for him.
In truth, he was often neither fully aware of the nature of what he had said nor fully cognizant of
why there should be such a passionate reaction to it. As often as not, he surprised himself. “What did
I say?” he would ask after getting severe blowback.
He wasn’t serving up these insults for effect—well, not entirely. And his behavior wasn’t
carefully calculated; it was tit for tat, and he likely would have said what he’d said even if no one
was left standing with him. (This very lack of calculation, this inability to be political, was part of his
political charm.) It was just his good luck that the Trumpian 35 percent—that standing percentage of
people who, according to most polls, seemed to support him no matter what (who would, in his
estimation, let him get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue)—was largely unfazed and
maybe even buoyed by every new expression of Trumpness.
Now, having expressed himself and gotten in the last word, Trump was cheery again.
“Mika and Joe totally love this. It’s big ratings for them,” said the president, with certain
satisfaction and obvious truth.
* * *
Ten days later, a large table of Bannonites was having dinner at the Bombay Club, a high-end Indian
restaurant two blocks from the White House. One of the group—Arthur Schwartz, a PR consultant—
asked a question about the Mika and Joe affair.
Perhaps it was the noise, but it was also a fitting measure of the speed of events in the Trump era:
Bannon lieutenant Alexandra Preate replied, with genuine fogginess, “Who?”
The operetta of the Mika tweets—the uncouthness and verbal abuse demonstrated by the president,
his serious lack of control and judgment, and the worldwide censure heaped upon him for it—had
already far receded, wholly overshadowed by more Trump eruptions and controversy.
But before moving on to the next episode of ohmygodness, it is worth considering the possibility
that this constant, daily, often more than once-a-day, pileup of events—each one canceling out the one
before—is the true aberration and novelty at the heart of the Trump presidency.
Perhaps never before in history—not through world wars, the overthrow of empires, periods of
extraordinary social transformation, or episodes of government-shaking scandal—have real-life
events unfolded with such emotional and plot-thickening impact. In the fashion of binge-watching a
television show, one’s real life became quite secondary to the public drama. It was not unreasonable
to say Whoa, wait just a minute: public life doesn’t happen like this. Public life in fact lacks
coherence and drama. (History, by contrast, attains coherence and drama only in hindsight.)
The process of accomplishing the smallest set of tasks within the sprawling and resistant executive
branch is a turtle process. The burden of the White House is the boredom of bureaucracy. All White
Houses struggle to rise above that, and they succeed only on occasion. In the age of hypermedia, this
has not gotten easier for the White House, it’s gotten harder.
It’s a distracted nation, fragmented and preoccupied. It was, arguably, the peculiar tragedy of
Barack Obama that even as a transformational figure—and inspirational communicator—he couldn’t
really command much interest. As well, it might be a central tragedy of the news media that its oldfashioned
and even benighted civic-minded belief that politics is the highest form of news has helped
transform it from a mass business to a narrow-cast one. Alas, politics itself has more and more
become a discrete business. Its appeal is B-to-B—business-to-business. The real swamp is the
swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests. This isn’t corruption so much as overspecialization.
It’s a wonk’s life. Politics has gone one way, the culture another. The left-right junkies might pretend
otherwise, but the great middle doesn’t put political concerns at the top of their minds.
And yet, contravening all cultural and media logic, Donald Trump produced on a daily basis an
astonishing, can’t-stop-following-it narrative. And this was not even because he was changing or
upsetting the fundamentals of American life. In six months as president, failing to master almost any
aspect of the bureaucratic process, he had, beyond placing his nominee on the Supreme Court,
accomplished, practically speaking, nothing. And yet, OMG!!! There almost was no other story in
America—and in much of the world. That was the radical and transformational nature of the Trump
presidency: it held everybody’s attention.
Inside the White House, the daily brouhaha and world’s fascination was no cause for joy. It was,
in the White House staff’s bitter view, the media that turned every day into a climactic, dastardly
moment. And, in a sense, this was correct: every development cannot be climactic. The fact that
yesterday’s climax would soon, compared to the next climax, be piddling, rather bore out the
disproportion. The media was failing to judge the relative importance of Trump events: most Trump
events came to naught (arguably all of them did), and yet all were greeted with equal shock and
horror. The White House staff believed that the media’s Trump coverage lacked “context”—by this,
they meant that people ought to realize that Trump was mostly just huffing and puffing.
At the same time, few in the White House did not assign blame to Trump for this as well. He
seemed to lack the most basic understanding that a president’s words and actions would, necessarily,
be magnified to the nth power. In some convenient sense, he failed to understand this because he
wanted the attention, no matter how often it disappointed him. But he also wanted it because again
and again the response surprised him—and, as though every time was the first time, he could not
modify his behavior.
Sean Spicer caught the brunt of the daily drama, turning this otherwise reasonable, mild-mannered,
process-oriented professional into a joke figure standing at the White House door. In his daily out-ofbody
experience, as a witness to his own humiliation and loss for words, Spicer understood after a
while—although he began to understand this beginning his first day on the job when dealing with the
dispute about the inaugural audience numbers—that he had “gone down a rabbit hole.” In this
disorienting place, all public artifice, pretense, proportion, savvy, and self-awareness had been cast
off, or—possibly another result of Trump never really intending to be president—never really figured
into the state of being president.
On the other hand, constant hysteria did have one unintended political virtue. If every new event
canceled out every other event, like some wacky news-cycle pyramid scheme, then you always
survived another day.
* * *
Donald Trump’s sons, Don Jr., thirty-nine, and Eric, thirty-three, existed in an enforced infantile
relationship to their father, a role that embarrassed them, but one that they also professionally
embraced. The role was to be Donald Trump’s heirs and attendees. Their father took some regular
pleasure in pointing out that they were in the back of the room when God handed out brains—but, then
again, Trump tended to scorn anyone who might be smarter than he was. Their sister Ivanka, certainly
no native genius, was the designated family smart person, her husband Jared the family’s smooth
operator. That left Don and Eric to errands and admin. In fact, the brothers had grown into reasonably
competent family-owned-company executives (this is not saying all that much) because their father
had little or no patience for actually running his company. Of course, quite a good amount of their
professional time was spent on the whims, projects, promotions, and general way of life of DJT.
One benefit of their father’s run for president was that it kept him away from the office. Still, the
campaign’s administration was largely their responsibility, so when the campaign went from caprice
to a serious development in the Trump business and family, it caused a disruption in the family
dynamic. Other people were suddenly eager to be Donald Trump’s key lieutenants. There were the
outsiders, like Corey Lewandowski, the campaign manager, but there was also the insider, brother-inlaw
Jared. Trump, not unusually for a family-run company, made everybody compete for his favor.
The company was about him; it existed because of his name, personality, and charisma, so the highest
standing in the company was reserved for those who could best serve him. There wasn’t all that much
competition for this role before he ran for president, but in early 2016, with the Republican Party
collapsing and Trump rising, his sons faced a new professional and family situation.
Their brother-ln-law had been slowly drawn into the campaign, partly at his wife’s urging because
her father’s lack of constraint might actually affect the Trump business if they didn’t keep an eye on
him. And then he, with his brothers-in-law, was pulled in by the excitement of the campaign itself. By
late spring 2016, when the nomination was all but clinched, the Trump campaign was a set of
competing power centers with the knives out.
Lewandowski regarded both brothers and their brother-in-law with rolling-on-the-floor contempt:
not only were Don Jr. and Eric stupid, and Jared somehow both supercilious and obsequious (the
butler), but nobody knew a whit about politics—indeed, there wasn’t an hour of political experience
among them.
As time went on, Lewandowski became particularly close to the candidate. To the family,
especially to Kushner, Lewandowski was an enabler. Trump’s worst instincts flowed through
Lewandowski. In early June, a little more than a month before the Republican National Convention,
Jared and Ivanka decided that what was needed—for the sake of the campaign, for the sake of the
Trump business—was an intervention.
Making common cause with Don Jr. and Eric, Jared and Ivanka pushed for a united front to
convince Trump to oust Lewandowski. Don Jr., feeling squeezed not only by Lewandowski but by
Jared, too, seized the opportunity. He would push out Lewandowski and become his replacement—
and indeed, eleven days later Lewandowski would be gone.
All this was part of the background to one of the most preposterous meetings in modern politics.
On June 9, 2016, Don Jr., Jared, and Paul Manafort met with a movieworthy cast of dubious
characters in Trump Tower after having been promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
Don Jr., encouraged by Jared and Ivanka, was trying to impress his father that he had the stuff to rise
in the campaign.
When this meeting became public thirteen months later, it would, for the Trump White House,
encapsulate both the case against collusion with the Russians and the case for it. It was a case, or the
lack of one, not of masterminds and subterfuge, but of senseless and benighted people so guileless and
unconcerned that they enthusiastically colluded in plain sight.
* * *
Walking into Trump Tower that June day were a well-connected lawyer from Moscow, who was a
likely Russian agent; associates of the Azerbaijani Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov; a U.S. music
promoter who managed Agalarov’s son, a Russian pop star; and a Russian government lobbyist in
Washington. Their purpose in visiting the campaign headquarters of a presumptive major party
nominee for president of the United States was to meet with three of the most highly placed people on
the campaign. This meeting was preceded by an email chain addressed to multiple recipients inside
the Trump campaign of almost joyful intent: the Russians were offering a dump of negative or even
incriminating information about their opponent.
Among the why-and-how theories of this imbecilic meeting:
• The Russians, in organized or freelance fashion, were trying to entrap the Trump campaign into
a compromising relationship.
• The meeting was part of an already active cooperation on the part of the Trump campaign with
the Russians to obtain and distribute damaging information about Hillary Clinton—and, indeed,
within days of the Don Jr. meeting, WikiLeaks announced that it had obtained Clinton emails.
Less than a month later, it started to release them.
• The wide-eyed Trump campaign, largely still playacting at running for president—and with no
thought whatsoever of actually winning the election—was open to any and all entreaties and
offers, because it had nothing to lose. Dopey Don Jr. (Fredo, as Steve Bannon would dub him,
in one of his frequent Godfather borrowings) was simply trying to prove he was a player and a
go-to guy.
• The meeting included the campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and the campaign’s most
influential voice, Jared Kushner, because: (a) a high-level conspiracy was being coordinated;
(b) Manafort and Kushner, not taking the campaign very seriously, and without a thought of any
consequence here, were merely entertained by the possibility of dirty tricks; (c) the three men
were united in their plan to get rid of Lewandowski—with Don Jr. as the hatchet man—and, as
part of this unity, Manafort and Kushner need to show up at Don Jr.’s silly meeting.
Whatever the reason for the meeting, no matter which of the above scenarios most accurately
describes how this comical and alarming group came together, a year later, practically nobody
doubted that Don Jr. would have wanted his father to know that he seized the initiative.
“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth
floor is zero,” said an astonished and derisive Bannon, not long after the meeting was revealed.
“The three senior guys in the campaign,” an incredulous Bannon went on, “thought it was a good
idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the twentyfifth
floor—with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not
treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the
FBI immediately. Even if you didn’t think to do that, and you’re totally amoral, and you wanted that
information, you do it in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet
with these people and go through everything and then they verbally come and tell another lawyer in a
cut-out, and if you’ve got something, then you figure out how to dump it down to Breitbart or
something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication. You never see it, you never
know it, because you don’t need to. . . . But that’s the brain trust that they had.”
All of the participants would ultimately plead that the meeting was utterly inconsequential,
whatever the hope for it might have been, and admit that it was hapless. But even if that was true, a
year later the revelation of the meeting had three profound and probably transformational effects:
First, the constant, ever repeated denials about there having been no discussion between campaign
officials and the Russians connected to the Kremlin about the campaign, and, indeed, no meaningful
contact between campaign officials and the Russian government, were exploded.
Second, the certainty among the White House staff that Trump himself would have not only been
apprised of the details of this meeting, but have met the principals, meant that the president was
caught out as a liar by those whose trust he most needed. It was another inflection point between
hunkered-in-the-bunker and signed-on-for-the-wild-ride, and get-me-out-of-here.
Third, it was now starkly clear that everyone’s interests diverged. The fortunes of Don Jr., Paul
Manafort, and Jared Kushner hung individually in the balance. Indeed, the best guess by many in the
West Wing was that the details of the meeting had been leaked by the Kushner side, thus sacrificing
Don Jr. in an attempt to deflect responsibility away from themselves.
* * *
Even before word of the June 2016 meeting leaked out, Kushner’s legal team—largely assembled in a
rush since the appointment of Mueller, the special counsel—had been piecing together a forensic
picture of both the campaign’s Russian contacts and Kushner Companies’ finances and money trail. In
January, ignoring almost everybody’s caution against it, Jared Kushner had entered the White House
as a senior figure in the administration; now, six months later, he faced acute legal jeopardy. He had
tried to keep a low profile, seeing himself as a behind-the-scenes counselor, but now his public
position was not only endangering himself but the future of his family’s business. As long as he
remained exposed, his family was effectively blocked from most financial sources. Without access to
this market, their holdings risked becoming distress debt situations.
Jared and Ivanka’s self-created fantasylike life—two ambitious, well-mannered, well-liked young
people living at the top of New York’s social and financial world after having, in their version of
humble fashion, accepted global power—had now, even with neither husband nor wife in office long
enough to have taken any real action at all, come to the precipice of disgrace.
Jail was possible. So was bankruptcy. Trump may have been talking defiantly about offering
pardons, or bragging about his power to give them, but that did not solve Kushner’s business
problems, nor did it provide a way to mollify Charlie Kushner, Jared’s choleric and often irrational
father. What’s more, successfully navigating through the eye of the legal needle would require a
careful touch and nuanced strategic approach on the part of the president—quite an unlikely
development.
Meanwhile, the couple blamed everyone else in the White House. They blamed Priebus for the
disarray that had produced a warlike atmosphere that propelled constant and damaging leaks, they
blamed Bannon for leaking, and they blamed Spicer for poorly defending their virtue and interests.
They needed to defend themselves. One strategy was to get out of town (Bannon had a list of all
the tense moments when the couple had taken a convenient holiday), and it happened that Trump
would be attending the G20 summit Hamburg, Germany, on July 7 and 8. Jared and Ivanka
accompanied the president on the trip, and while at the summit they learned that word of Don Jr.’s
meeting with the Russians—and the couple kept pointedly presenting it as Don Jr.’s meeting—had
leaked. Worse, they learned that the story was about to break in the New York Times.
Originally, Trump’s staff was expecting details of the Don Jr. meeting to break on the website
Circa. The lawyers, and spokesperson Mark Corallo, had been working to manage this news. But
while in Hamburg, the president’s staff learned that the Times was developing a story that had far
more details about the meeting—quite possibly supplied by the Kushner side—which it would
publish on Saturday, July 8. Advance knowledge of this article was kept from the president’s legal
team for the ostensible reason that it didn’t involve the president.
In Hamburg, Ivanka, knowing the news would shortly get out, was presenting her signature effort:
a World Bank fund to aid women entrepreneurs in developing countries. This was another instance of
what White House staffers saw as the couple’s extraordinarily off-message direction. Nowhere in the
Trump campaign, nowhere on Bannon’s white boards, nowhere in the heart of this president was there
an interest in women entrepreneurs in developing countries. The daughter’s agenda was singularly at
odds with the father’s—or at least the agenda that had elected him. Ivanka, in the view of almost
every White House staffer, profoundly misunderstood the nature of her job and had converted
traditional First Lady noblesse oblige efforts into White House staff work.
Shortly before boarding Air Force One for the return trip home, Ivanka—with what by now was
starting to seem like an almost anarchic tone deafness—sat in for her father between Chinese
president Xi Jinping and British prime minister Theresa May at the main G20 conference table. But
this was mere distraction: as the president and his team huddled on the plane, the central subject was
not the conference, it was how to respond to the Times story about Don Jr.’s and Jared’s Trump Tower
meeting, now only hours away from breaking.
En route to Washington, Sean Spicer and everybody else from the communications office was
relegated to the back of the plane and excluded from the panicky discussions. Hope Hicks became the
senior communications strategist, with the president, as always, her singular client. In the days
following, that highest political state of being “in the room” was turned on its head. Not being in the
room—in this case, the forward cabin on Air Force One—became an exalted status and get-out-ofjail-
free card. “It used to hurt my feelings when I saw them running around doing things that were my
job,” said Spicer. “Now I’m glad to be out of the loop.”
Included in the discussion on the plane were the president, Hicks, Jared and Ivanka, and their
spokesperson, Josh Raffel. Ivanka, according to the later recollection of her team, would shortly
leave the meeting, take a pill, and go to sleep. Jared, in the telling of his team, might have been there,
but he was “not taking a pencil to anything.” Nearby, in a small conference room watching the movie
Fargo, were Dina Powell, Gary Cohn, Stephen Miller, and H. R. McMaster, all of whom would later
insist that they were, however physically close to the unfolding crisis, removed from it. And, indeed,
anyone “in the room” was caught in a moment that would shortly receive the special counsel’s close
scrutiny, with the relevant question being whether one or more federal employees had induced other
federal employees to lie.
An aggrieved, unyielding, and threatening president dominated the discussion, pushing into line his
daughter and her husband, Hicks, and Raffel. Kasowitz—the lawyer whose specific job was to keep
Trump at arm’s length from Russian-related matters—was kept on hold on the phone for an hour and
then not put through. The president insisted that the meeting in Trump Tower was purely and simply
about Russian adoption policy. That’s what was discussed, period. Period. Even though it was likely,
if not certain, that the Times had the incriminating email chain—in fact, it was quite possible that
Jared and Ivanka and the lawyers knew the Times had this email chain—the president ordered that no
one should let on to the more problematic discussion about Hillary Clinton.
It was a real-time example of denial and cover-up. The president believed, belligerently, what he
believed. Reality was what he was convinced it was—or should be. Hence the official story: there
was a brief courtesy meeting in Trump Tower about adoption policy, to no result, attended by senior
aides and unaffiliated Russian nationals. The crafting of this manufactured tale was a rogue operation
by rookies—always the two most combustible elements of a cover-up.
In Washington, Kasowitz and the legal team’s spokesperson, Mark Corallo, weren’t informed of
either the Times article or the plan for how to respond to it until Don Jr.’s initial statement went out
just before the story broke that Saturday.
Over the course of next seventy-two hours or so, the senior staff found itself wholly separate from
—and, once again, looking on in astonishment at—the actions of the president’s innermost circle of
aides. In this, the relationship of the president and Hope Hicks, long tolerated as a quaint bond
between the older man and a trustworthy young woman, began to be seen as anomalous and alarming.
Completely devoted to accommodating him, she, his media facilitator, was the ultimate facilitator of
unmediated behavior. His impulses and thoughts—unedited, unreviewed, unchallenged—not only
passed through him, but, via Hicks, traveled out into the world without any other White House
arbitration.
“The problem isn’t Twitter, it’s Hope,” observed one communication staffer.
On July 9, a day after publishing its first story, the Times noted that the Trump Tower meeting was
specifically called to discuss the Russian offer of damaging material about Clinton. The next day, as
the Times prepared to publish the full email chain, Don Jr. hurriedly dumped it himself. There
followed an almost daily count of new figures—all, in their own way, peculiar and unsettling—who
emerged as participants in the meeting.
But the revelation of the Trump Tower meeting had another, perhaps even larger dimension. It
marked the collapse of the president’s legal strategy: the demise of Steve Bannon’s Clinton-emulating
firewall around the president.
The lawyers, in disgust and alarm, saw, in effect, each principal becoming a witness to another
principal’s potential misdeeds—all conspiring with one another to get their stories straight. The client
and his family were panicking and running their own defense. Short-term headlines were
overwhelming any sort of long-term strategy. “The worst thing you can do is lie to a prosecutor,” said
one member of the legal team. The persistent Trump idea that it is not a crime to lie to the media was
regarded by the legal team as at best reckless and, in itself, potentially actionable: an explicit attempt
to throw sand into the investigation’s gears.
Mark Corallo was instructed not to speak to the press, indeed not to even answer his phone. Later
that week, Corallo, seeing no good outcome—and privately confiding that he believed the meeting on
Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice—quit. (The Jarvanka side would put it out
that Corallo was fired.)
“These guys are not going to be second-guessed by the kids,” said a frustrated Bannon about the
firewall team.
Likewise, the Trump family, no matter its legal exposure, was not going to be run by its lawyers.
Jared and Ivanka helped to coordinate a set of lurid leaks—alleging drinking, bad behavior, personal
life in disarray—about Marc Kasowitz, who had advised the president to send the couple home.
Shortly after the presidential party returned to Washington, Kasowitz was out.
* * *
Blame continued to flow. The odor of a bitter new reality, if not doom, that attached to the Comey-
Mueller debacle was compounded by everyone’s efforts not to be tagged by it.
The sides in the White House—Jared, Ivanka, Hope Hicks, and an increasingly ambivalent Dina
Powell and Gary Cohn on one side, and almost everyone else, including Priebus, Spicer, Conway,
and most clearly Bannon, on the other—were most distinguished by their culpability in or distance
from the Comey-Mueller calamity. It was, as the non-Jarvanka side would unceasingly point out, a
calamity of their own making. Therefore it became an effort of the Jarvankas not only to achieve
distance for themselves from the causes of the debacle—such involvement as they had they now cast
as strictly passive involvement or just following orders—but to suggest that their adversaries were at
least equally at fault.
Shortly after the Don Jr. story broke, the president not unsuccessfully changed the subject by
focusing the blame for the Comey-Mueller mess on Sessions, even more forcefully belittling and
threatening him and suggesting that his days were numbered.
Bannon, who continued to defend Sessions, and who believed that he had militantly—indeed with
scathing attacks on the Jarvankas for their stupidity—walled himself off from the Comey smashup,
was now suddenly getting calls from reporters with leaks that painted him as an engaged participant
in the Comey decision.
In a furious phone call to Hicks, Bannon blamed the leaks on her. In time, he had come to see the
twenty-eight-year-old as nothing more than a hapless presidential enabler and poor-fish Jarvanka
flunky—and he believed she had now deeply implicated herself in the entire disaster by participating
in the Air Force One meeting. The next day, with more inquiries coming from reporters, he confronted
Hicks inside the cabinet room, accusing her of doing Jared and Ivanka’s dirty work. The face-off
quickly escalated into an existential confrontation between the two sides of the White House—two
sides on a total war footing.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” shouted a livid Bannon at Hicks, demanding to know who
she worked for, the White House or Jared and Ivanka. “You don’t know how much trouble you are
in,” he screamed, telling her that if she didn’t get a lawyer he would call her father and tell him he
had better get her one. “You are dumb as a stone!” Moving from the cabinet room across the open
area into the president’s earshot, “a loud, scary, clearly threatening” Bannon, in the Jarvanka telling,
yelled, “I am going to fuck you and your little group!” with a baffled president plaintively wanting
to know, “What’s going on?”
In the Jarvanka-side account, Hicks then ran from Bannon, hysterically sobbing and “visibly
terrified.” Others in the West Wing marked this as the high point of the boiling enmity between the two
sides. For the Jarvankas, Bannon’s rant was also a display that they believed they could use against
him. The Jarvanka people pushed Priebus to refer the matter to the White House counsel, billing this
as the most verbally abusive moment in the history of the West Wing, or at least certainly up among
the most abusive episodes ever.
For Bannon, this was just more Jarvanka desperation—they were the ones, not him, saddled with
Comey-Mueller. They were the ones panicking and out of control.
For the rest of his time in the White House, Bannon would not speak to Hicks again.
T
20
MCMASTER AND SCARAMUCCI
rump was impetuous and yet did not like to make decisions, at least not ones that seemed to
corner him into having to analyze a problem. And no decision hounded him so much—really
from the first moment of his presidency—as what to do about Afghanistan. It was a conundrum that
became a battle. It involved not only his own resistance to analytic reasoning, but the left brain/right
brain divide of his White House, the split between those who argued for disruption and those who
wanted to uphold the status quo.
In this, Bannon became the disruptive and unlikely White House voice for peace—or anyway a
kind of peace. In Bannon’s view, only he and the not-too-resolute backbone of Donald Trump stood
between consigning fifty thousand more American soldiers to hopelessness in Afghanistan.
Representing the status quo—and, ideally, a surge on top of the status quo—was H. R. McMaster,
who, next to Jarvanka, had become Bannon’s prime target for abuse. On this front, Bannon forged an
easy bond with the president, who didn’t much hide his contempt for the Power-Point general. Bannon
and the president enjoyed trash-talking McMaster together.
McMaster was a protégé of David Petraeus, the former CENTCOM and Afghanistan commander
who became Obama’s CIA director before resigning in a scandal involving a love affair and the
mishandling of classified information. Petraeus and now McMaster represented a kind of business-asusual
approach in Afghanistan and the Middle East. A stubborn McMaster kept proposing to the
president new versions of the surge, but at each pitch Trump would wave him out of the Oval Office
and roll his eyes in despair and disbelief.
The president’s distaste and rancor for McMaster grew on pace with the approaching need to
finally make a decision on Afghanistan, a decision he continued to put off. His position on
Afghanistan—a military quagmire he knew little about, other than that it was a quagmire—had always
been a derisive and caustic kiss-off of the sixteen-year war. Having inherited it did not make his
feelings warmer or inspire him to want to dwell on it further. He knew the war was cursed and,
knowing that, felt no need to know more. He put the responsibility for it on two of his favorite people
to blame: Bush and Obama.
For Bannon, Afghanistan represented one more failure of establishment thinking. More precisely,
it represented the establishment’s inability to confront failure.
Curiously, McMaster had written a book on exactly this subject, a scathing critique of the
unchallenged assumptions with which military leaders pursued the Vietnam War. The book was
embraced by liberals and the establishment, with whom, in Bannon’s view, McMaster had become
hopelessly aligned. And now—ever afraid of the unknown, intent on keeping options open, dedicated
to stability, and eager to protect his establishment cred—McMaster was recommending a huge troop
surge in Afghanistan.
* * *
By early July, the pressure to make a decision was approaching the boiling point. Trump had already
authorized the Pentagon to deploy the troop resources it believed were needed, but Defense Secretary
Mattis refused to act without a specific authorization from the president. Trump would finally have to
make the call—unless he could find a way to put it off again.
Bannon’s thought was that the decision could be made for the president—a way the president liked
to have decisions made—if Bannon could get rid of McMaster. That would both head off the strongest
voice for more troops and also avenge Bannon’s ouster by McMaster’s hand from the NSC.
With the president promising that he would make up his mind by August, and McMaster, Mattis,
and Tillerson pressing for a decision as soon as possible, Bannon-inspired media began a campaign
to brand McMaster as a globalist, interventionist, and all around not-our-kind-of-Trumper—and, to
boot, soft on Israel.
It was a scurrilous, albeit partly true, attack. McMaster was in fact talking to Petraeus often. The
kicker was the suggestion that McMaster was giving inside dope to Petraeus, a pariah because of his
guilty plea regarding his mishandling of classified information. It was also the case that McMaster
was disliked by the president and on the point of being dismissed.
It was Bannon, riding high again, enjoying himself in a moment of supreme overconfidence.
Indeed, in part to prove there were other options beyond more troops or humiliating defeat—and
logically there probably weren’t more options—Bannon became a sponsor of Blackwater-founder
Erik Prince’s obviously self-serving idea to replace the U.S. military force with private contractors
and CIA and Special Operations personnel. The notion was briefly embraced by the president, then
ridiculed by the military.
By now Bannon believed McMaster would be out by August. He was sure he had the president’s
word on this. Done deal. “McMaster wants to send more troops to Afghanistan, so we’re going to
send him,” said a triumphal Bannon. In Bannon’s scenario, Trump would give McMaster a fourth star
and “promote” him to top military commander in Afghanistan.
As with the chemical attack in Syria, it was Dina Powell—even as she made increasingly
determined efforts to get herself out of the White House, either on a Sheryl Sandberg trajectory or,
stopping first at a way station, as ambassador to the United Nations—who struggled to help support
the least disruptive, most keep-all-options-open approach. In this, both because the approach seemed
like the safest course and because it was the opposite of Bannon’s course, she readily recruited Jared
and Ivanka.
The solution Powell endorsed, which was designed to put the problem and the reckoning off for
another year or two or three, was likely to make the United States’ position in Afghanistan even more
hopeless. Instead of sending fifty or sixty thousand troops—which, at insupportable cost and the risk
of national fury, might in fact win the war—the Pentagon would send some much lower number, one
which would arouse little notice and merely prevent us from losing the war. In the Powell and
Jarvanka view, it was the moderate, best-case, easiest-to-sell course, and it struck just the right
balance between the military’s unacceptable scenarios: retreat and dishonor or many more troops.
Before long, a plan to send four, five, six, or (tops) seven thousand troops became the middlecourse
strategy supported by the national security establishment and most everyone else save for
Bannon and the president. Powell even helped design a PowerPoint deck that McMaster began using
with the president: pictures of Kabul in the 1970s when it still looked something like a modern city. It
could be like this again, the president was told, if we are resolute!
But even with almost everyone arrayed against him, Bannon was confident he was winning. He
had a united right-wing press with him, and, he believed, a fed-up, working-class Trump base—its
children the likely Afghanistan fodder. Most of all, he had the president. Pissed off that he was being
handed the same problem and the same options that were handed Obama, Trump continued to heap
spleen and mockery on McMaster.
Kushner and Powell organized a leak campaign in McMaster’s defense. Their narrative was not a
pro-troops defense; instead, it was about Bannon’s leaks and his use of right-wing media to besmirch
McMaster, “one of the most decorated and respected generals of his generation.” The issue was not
Afghanistan, the issue was Bannon. In this narrative, it was McMaster, a figure of stability, against
Bannon, a figure of disruption. It was the New York Times and the Washington Post, who came to the
defense of McMaster, against Breitbart and its cronies and satellites.
It was the establishment and never-Trumpers against the America-first Trumpkins. In many
respects, Bannon was outgunned and outnumbered, yet he still thought he had it nailed. And when he
won, not only would another grievously stupid chapter in the war in Afghanistan be avoided, but
Jarvanka, and Powell, their factotum, would be further consigned to irrelevance and powerlessness.
* * *
As the debate moved toward resolution, the NSC, in its role as a presenter of options rather than an
advocate for them (although of course it was advocating, too), presented three: withdrawal; Erik
Prince’s army of contractors; and a conventional, albeit limited, surge.
Withdrawal, whatever its merits—and however much a takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban
could be delayed or mitigated—still left Donald Trump with having lost a war, an insupportable
position for the president.
The second option, a force of contractors and the CIA, was largely deep-sixed by the CIA. The
agency had spent sixteen years successfully avoiding Afghanistan, and everyone knew that careers
were not advanced in Afghanistan, they died in Afghanistan. So please keep us out of it.
That left McMaster’s position, a modest surge, argued by Secretary of State Tillerson: more
troops in Afghanistan, which, somehow, slightly, would be there on a different basis, somewhat, with
a different mission, subtly, than that of troops sent there before.
The military fully expected the president to sign off on the third option. But on July 19, at a
meeting of the national security team in the situation room at the White House, Trump lost it.
For two hours, he angrily railed against the mess he had been handed. He threatened to fire almost
every general in the chain of command. He couldn’t fathom, he said, how it had taken so many months
of study to come up with this nothing-much-different plan. He disparaged the advice that came from
generals and praised the advice from enlisted men. If we have to be in Afghanistan, he demanded,
why can’t we make money off it? China, he complained, has mining rights, but not the United States.
(He was referring to a ten-year-old U.S.-backed deal.) This is just like the 21 Club, he said, suddenly
confusing everyone with this reference to a New York restaurant, one of his favorites. In the 1980s,
21 closed for a year and hired a large number of consultants to analyze how to make the restaurant
more profitable. In the end, their advice was: Get a bigger kitchen. Exactly what any waiter would
have said, Trump shouted.
To Bannon, the meeting was a high point of the Trump presidency to date. The generals were
punting and waffling and desperately trying to save face—they were, according to Bannon, talking
pure “gobbledygook” in the situation room. “Trump was standing up to them,” said a happy Bannon.
“Hammering them. He left a bowel movement in the middle of their Afghan plans. Again and again, he
came back to the same point: we’re stuck and losing and nobody here has a plan to do much better
than that.”
Though there was still no hint of a viable alternative strategy in Afghanistan, Bannon, his Jarvanka
frustration cresting, was sure he was the winner here. McMaster was toast.
* * *
Later on the day of the Afghanistan briefing, Bannon heard about yet another harebrained Jarvanka
scheme. They planned to hire Anthony Scaramucci, aka “the Mooch.”
After Trump had clinched the nomination more than a year before, Scaramucci—a hedge funder
and go-to Trump surrogate for cable business news (mostly Fox Business Channel)—had become a
reliable presence at Trump Tower. But then, in the last month of the campaign, with polls predicting a
humiliating Trump defeat, he was suddenly nowhere to be seen. The question “Where’s the Mooch?”
seemed to be just one more indicator of the campaign’s certain and pitiless end.
But on the day after the election, Steve Bannon—soon to be named chief strategist for the fortyfifth
president-elect—was greeted as he arrived midmorning in Trump Tower by Anthony
Scaramucci, holding a Starbucks coffee for him.
Over the next three months, Scaramucci, although no longer needed as a surrogate and without
anything else particularly to do, became a constant hovering—or even lurking—presence at Trump
Tower. Ever unflagging, he interrupted a meeting in Kellyanne Conway’s office in early January just
to make sure she knew that her husband’s firm, Wachtell, Lipton, was representing him. Having made
that point, name-dropping and vastly praising the firm’s key partners, he then helped himself to a chair
in Conway’s meeting and, for both Conway’s and her visitor’s benefit, offered a stirring testimonial to
the uniqueness and sagacity of Donald Trump and the working-class people—speaking of which, he
took the opportunity to provide a résumé of his own Long Island working-class bona fides—who had
elected him.
Scaramucci was hardly the only hanger-on and job seeker in the building, but his method was
among the most dogged. He spent his days looking for meetings to be invited into, or visitors to
engage with—this was easy because every other job seeker was looking for someone with whom to
chat it up, so he soon became something like the unofficial official greeter. Whenever possible, he
would grab a few minutes with any senior staffer who would not rebuff him. As he waited to be
offered a high White House position, he was, he seemed personally certain, reaffirming his loyalty
and team spirit and unique energy. He was so confident about his future that he made a deal to sell his
hedge fund, Skybridge Capital, to HNA Group, the Chinese megaconglomerate.
Political campaigns, substantially based on volunteer help, attract a range of silly, needy, and
opportunistic figures. The Trump campaign perhaps scraped lower in the barrel than most. The
Mooch, for one, might not have been the most peculiar volunteer in the Trump run for president, but
many figured him to be among the most shameless.
It was not just that before he became a dedicated supporter of Donald Trump, he was a dedicated
naysayer, or that he had once been an Obama and Hillary Clinton supporter. The problem was that,
really, nobody liked him. Even for someone in politics, he was immodest and incorrigible, and
followed by a trail of self-serving and often contradictory statements made to this person about that
person, which invariably made it back to whatever person was being most negatively talked about.
He was not merely a shameless self-promoter; he was a proud self-promoter. He was, by his own
account, a fantastic networker. (This boast was surely true, since Skybridge Capital was a fund of
funds, which is less a matter of investment acumen than of knowing top fund managers and being able
to invest with them.) He had paid as much as half a million dollars to have his firm’s logo appear in
the movie Wall Street 2 and to buy himself a cameo part in the film. He ran a yearly conference for
hedge funders at which he himself was the star. He had a television gig at Fox Business Channel. He
was a famous partier every year at Davos, once exuberantly dancing alongside the son of Muammar
Gaddafi.
As for the presidential campaign, when signing on with Donald Trump—after he had bet big
against Trump—he billed himself as a version of Trump, and he saw the two of them as a new kind of
showman and communicator set to transform politics.
Although his persistence and his constant on-the-spot personal lobbying might not have endeared
him to anybody, it did prompt the “What to do with Scaramucci?” question, which somehow came to
beg an answer. Priebus, trying to deal with the Mooch problem and dispose of him at the same time,
suggested that he take a money-raising job as finance director of the RNC—an offer Scaramucci
rebuffed in a blowup in Trump Tower, loudly bad-mouthing Priebus in vivid language, a mere
preview of what was to come.
While he wanted a job with the Trump administration, the Mooch specifically wanted one of the
jobs that would give him a tax break on the sale of his business. A federal program provides for
deferred payment of capital gains in the event of a sale of property to meet ethical requirements.
Scaramucci needed a job that would get him a “certificate of divestiture,” which is what an envious
Scaramucci knew Gary Cohn had received for the sale of his Goldman stock.
A week before the inaugural he was finally offered such a job: director of the White House Office
of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs. He would be the president’s representative and
cheerleader before Trump-partial interest groups.
But the White House ethics office balked—the sale of his business would take months to complete
and he would be directly negotiating with an entity that was at least in part controlled by the Chinese
government. And because Scaramucci had little support from anybody else, he was effectively
blocked. It was, a resentful Scaramucci noted, one of the few instances in the Trump government
when someone’s business conflicts interfered with a White House appointment.
And yet with a salesman’s tenacity, the Mooch pressed on. He appointed himself a Trump
ambassador without portfolio. He declared himself Trump’s man on Wall Street, even if, practically
speaking, he wasn’t a Trump man and he was exiting his firm on Wall Street. He was also in constant
touch with anybody from the Trump circle who was willing to be in touch with him.
The “What to do with the Mooch” question persisted. Kushner, with whom Scaramucci had
exercised a rare restraint during the campaign, and who had steadily heard from other New York
contacts about Scaramucci’s continued loyalty, helped push the question.
Priebus and others held Scaramucci at bay until June and then, as a bit of a punch line, Scaramucci
was offered and, degradingly, had to accept, being named senior vice president and chief strategy
officer for the U.S. Export-Import Bank, an executive branch agency Trump had long vowed to
eliminate. But the Mooch was not ready to give up the fight: after yet more lobbying, he was offered,
at Bannon’s instigation, the post of ambassador to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development. The job came with a twenty-room apartment on the Seine, a full staff, and—Bannon
found this part particularly amusing—absolutely no influence or responsibilities.
* * *
Meanwhile, another persistent question, “What to do with Spicer,” seemed to somehow have been
joined to the disaster involving the bungled response to the news of the June 2016 meeting between
Don Jr., Jared, and the Russians. Since the president, while traveling on Air Force One, had actually
dictated Don Jr.’s response to the initial Times report about the meeting, the blame for this should
have been laid at the feet of Trump and Hope Hicks: Trump dictated, Hicks transcribed. But because
no disasters could be laid at the president’s feet, Hicks herself was spared. And, even though he had
been pointedly excluded from the Trump Tower crisis, the blame for the episode was now put at
Spicer’s feet, precisely because, his loyalty in doubt, he and the communications staff had to be
excluded.
In this, the comms team was judged to be antagonistic if not hostile to the interests of Jared and
Ivanka; Spicer and his people had failed to mount an inclusive defense for them, nor had the comms
team adequately defended the White House. This of course homed in on the essential and obvious
point: although the junior first couple were mere staffers and not part of the institutional standing of
the White House, they thought and acted as if they were part of the presidential entity. Their ire and
increasing bitterness came from some of the staff’s reluctance—really, a deep and intensifying
resistance—to treat them as part and parcel of the presidency. (Once Priebus had to take Ivanka aside
to make sure she understood that in her official role, she was just a staffer. Ivanka had insisted on the
distinction that she was a staffer-slash-First Daughter.)
Bannon was their public enemy; they expected nothing of him. But Priebus and Spicer they
regarded as functionaries, and their job was to support the White House’s goals, which included their
goals and interests.
Spicer, ever ridiculed in the media for his cockamamie defense of the White House and a seeming
dumb loyalty, had been judged by the president, quite from the inauguration, to be not loyal enough
and not nearly as aggressive as he should be in Trump’s defense. Or, in Jared and Ivanka’s view, in
his family’s defense. “What does Spicer’s forty-member comm staff actually do?” was a persistent
First Family question.
* * *
Almost from the beginning, the president had been interviewing potential new press secretaries. He
appeared to have offered the job to various people, one of whom was Kimberly Guilfoyle, the Fox
News personality and cohost of The Five. Guilfoyle, the former wife of California Democrat Gavin
Newsom, was also reported to be Anthony Scaramucci’s girlfriend, a rumor he denied. Unbeknownst
to the White House, Scaramucci’s personal life was in dramatic free fall. On July 9, nine months
pregnant with their second child, Scaramucci’s wife filed for divorce.
Guilfoyle, knowing that Spicer was on his way out but having decided not to take his job—or,
according to others in the White House, never having been offered it—suggested Scaramucci, who set
to work convincing Jared and Ivanka that theirs was largely a PR problem and that they were ill
served by the current communications team.
Scaramucci called a reporter he knew to urge that an upcoming story about Kushner’s Russian
contacts be spiked. He followed up by having another mutual contact call the reporter to say that if the
story was spiked it would help the Mooch get into the White House, whereupon the reporter would
have special Mooch access. The Mooch then assured Jared and Ivanka that he had, in this clever way,
killed the story.
Now Scaramucci had their attention. We need some new thinking, the couple thought; we need
somebody who is more on our side. The fact that Scaramucci was from New York, and Wall Street,
and was rich, reassured them that he understood what the deal was. And that he would understand the
stakes and know that an aggressive game needed to be played.
On the other hand, the couple did not want to be perceived as being heavy-handed. So, after
bitterly accusing Spicer of not defending them adequately, they suddenly backed off and suggested that
they were just looking to add a new voice to the mix. The job of White House communications
director, which had no precise purview, had been vacant since May, when Mike Dubke, whose
presence at the White House had hardly registered, resigned. Scaramucci could take this job, the
couple figured, and in that role he could be their ally.
“He’s good on television,” Ivanka told Spicer when she explained the rationale for hiring a former
hedge fund manager as White House communications director. “Maybe he can help us.”
It was the president who, meeting with Scaramucci, was won over by the Mooch’s cringeworthy
Wall Street hortatory flattery. (“I can only hope to realize a small part of your genius as a
communicator, but you are my example and model” was one report of the gist of the Scaramucci
supplication.) And it was Trump who then urged that Scaramucci become the true communications
chief, reporting directly to the president.
On July 19, Jared and Ivanka, through intermediaries, put a feeler out to Bannon: What would he
think about Scaramucci’s coming on board in the comms job?
So preposterous did this seem to Bannon—it was a cry of haplessness, and certain evidence that
the couple had become truly desperate—that he refused to consider or even reply to the question.
Now he was sure: Jarvanka was losing it.