fire and fury chapter 21 & 22

21
BANNON AND SCARAMUCCI
annon’s apartment in Arlington, Virginia, a fifteen-minute drive from downtown Washington,
was called the “safe house.” This seemed somehow to acknowledge his transience and to nod,
with whatever irony, to the underground and even romantic nature of his politics—the roguish and
joie de guerre alt-right. Bannon had decamped here from the Breitbart Embassy on A Street on
Capitol Hill. It was a one-bedroom graduate-student sort of apartment, in a mixed-use building over a
mega-McDonald’s—quite belying Bannon’s rumored fortune—with five or six hundred books
(emphasis on popular history) stacked against the wall without benefit of shelving. His lieutenant,
Alexandra Preate, also lived in the building, as did the American lawyer for Nigel Farage, the rightwing
British Brexit leader who was part of the greater Breitbart circle.
On the evening on Thursday, July 20, the day after the contentious meeting about Afghanistan,
Bannon was hosting a small dinner—organized by Preate, with Chinese takeout. Bannon was in an
expansive, almost celebratory, mood. Still, Bannon knew, just when you felt on top of the world in the
Trump administration, you could probably count on getting cut down. That was the pattern and price
of one-man leadership—insecure-man leadership. The other biggest guy in the room always had to be
reduced in size.
Many around him felt Bannon was going into another bad cycle. In his first run around the track,
he’d been punished by the president for his Time magazine cover and for the Saturday Night Live
portrayal of “President Bannon”—that cruelest of digs to Trump. Now there was a new book, The
Devil’s Bargain, and it claimed, often in Bannon’s own words, that Trump could not have done it
without him. The president was again greatly peeved.
Still, Bannon seemed to feel he had broken through. Whatever happened, he had clarity. It was
such a mess inside in the White House that, if nothing else, this clarity would put him on top. His
agenda was front and center, and his enemies sidelined. Jared and Ivanka were getting blown up
every day and were now wholly preoccupied with protecting themselves. Dina Powell was looking
for another job. McMaster had screwed himself on Afghanistan. Gary Cohn, once a killer enemy, was
now desperate to be named Fed chairman and currying favor with Bannon—“licking my balls,”
Bannon said with a quite a cackle. In return for supporting Cohn’s campaign to win the Fed job,
Bannon was extracting fealty from him for the right-wing trade agenda.
The geniuses were fucked. Even POTUS might be fucked. But Bannon had the vision and the
discipline—he was sure he did. “I’m cracking my shit every day. The nationalist agenda, we’re
fucking owning it. I’ll be there for the duration.”
Before the dinner, Bannon had sent around an article from the Guardian—though one of the
leading English-language left-leaning newspapers, it was nevertheless Bannon’s favorite paper—
about the backlash to globalization. The article, by the liberal journalist Nikil Saval, both accepted
Bannon’s central populist political premise—“the competition between workers in developing and
developed countries . . . helped drive down wages and job security for workers in developed
countries”—and elevated it to the epochal fight of our time. Davos was dead and Bannon was very
much alive. “Economists who were once ardent proponents of globalization have become some of its
most prominent critics,” wrote Saval. “Erstwhile supporters now concede, at least in part, that it has
produced inequality, unemployment and downward pressure on wages. Nuances and criticisms that
economists only used to raise in private seminars are finally coming out in the open.”
“I’m starting to get tired of winning” was all that Bannon said in his email with the link to the
article.
Now, restless and pacing, Bannon was recounting how Trump had dumped on McMaster and, as
well, savoring the rolling-on-the-floor absurdity of the geniuses’ Scaramucci gambit. But most of all
he was incredulous about something else that had happened the day before.
Unbeknownst to senior staff, or to the comms office—other than by way of a pro forma schedule
note—the president had given a major interview to the New York Times. Jared and Ivanka, along with
Hope Hicks, had set it up. The Times’s Maggie Haberman, Trump’s bête noire (“very mean, and not
smart”) and yet his go-to journalist for some higher sort of approval, had been called in to see the
president with her colleagues Peter Baker and Michael Schmidt. The result was one of the most
peculiar and ill-advised interviews in presidential history, from a president who had already, several
times before, achieved that milestone.
In the interview, Trump had done his daughter and son-in-law’s increasingly frantic bidding. He
had, even if to no clear end and without certain strategy, continued on his course of threatening the
attorney general for recusing himself and opening the door to a special prosecutor. He openly pushed
Sessions to resign—mocking and insulting him and daring him to try to stay. However much this
seemed to advance no one’s cause, except perhaps that of the special prosecutor, Bannon’s incredulity
—“Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is not going to go anywhere”—was most keenly focused on
another remarkable passage in the interview: the president had admonished the special counsel not to
cross the line into his family’s finances.
“Ehhh . . . ehhh . . . ehhh!” screeched Bannon, making the sound of an emergency alarm. “Don’t
look here! Let’s tell a prosecutor what not to look at!”
Bannon then described the conversation he’d had with the president earlier that day: “I went right
into him and said, ‘Why did you say that?’ And he says, ‘The Sessions thing?’ and I say, ‘No, that’s
bad, but it’s another day at the office.’ I said, ‘Why did you say it was off limits to go after your
family’s finances?’ And he says, ‘Well, it is . . . .’ I go, ‘Hey, they are going to determine their
mandate. . . . You may not like it, but you just guaranteed if you want to get anybody else in [the
special counsel] slot, every senator will make him swear that the first thing he’s going to do is come
in and subpoena your fucking tax returns.’ ”
Bannon, with further disbelief, recounted the details of a recent story from the Financial Times
about Felix Sater, one of the shadiest of the shady Trump-associated characters, who was closely
aligned with Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen (reportedly a target of the Mueller
investigation), and a key follow-the-money link to Russia. Sater, “get ready for it—I know this may
shock you, but wait for it”—had had major problems with the law before, “caught with a couple of
guys in Boca running Russian money through a boiler room.” And, it turns out, “Brother Sater” was
prosecuted by—“wait”—Andrew Weissmann. (Mueller had recently hired Weissmann, a highpowered
Washington lawyer who headed the DOJ’s criminal fraud division.) “You’ve got the LeBron
James of money laundering investigations on you, Jarvanka. My asshole just got so tight!”
Bannon quite literally slapped his sides and then returned to his conversation with the president.
“And he goes, ‘That’s not their mandate.’ Seriously, dude?”
Preate, putting out the Chinese food on a table, said, “It wasn’t their mandate to put Arthur
Andersen out of business during Enron, but that didn’t stop Andrew Weissmann”—one of the Enron
prosecutors.
“You realize where this is going,” Bannon continued. “This is all about money laundering.
Mueller chose Weissmann first and he is a money laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes
right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner . . . It’s as plain as a hair on your face. . . . It
goes through all the Kushner shit. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade
me. But . . . ‘executive privilege!’ ” Bannon mimicked. “ ‘We’ve got executive privilege!’ There’s no
executive privilege! We proved that in Watergate.”
An expressive man, Bannon seemed to have suddenly exhausted himself. After a pause, he added
wearily: “They’re sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five.”
With his hands in front of him, he mimed something like a force field that would isolate him from
danger. “It’s not my deal. He’s got the five geniuses around him: Jarvanka, Hope Hicks, Dina Powell,
and Josh Raffel.” He threw up his hands again, this time as if to say Hands off. “I know no Russians, I
don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. I’m not being a witness. I’m not hiring a lawyer. It is not going to be
my ass in front of a microphone on national TV answering questions. Hope Hicks is so fucked she
doesn’t even know it. They are going to lay her out. They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on
national TV. Michael Cohen, cracked like an egg. He”—the president—“said to me everybody would
take that Don Junior meeting with the Russians. I said, ‘Everybody would not take that meeting.’ I
said, ‘I’m a naval officer. I’m not going to take a meeting with Russian nationals, and do it in
headquarters, are you fucking insane?’ and he says, ‘But he’s a good boy.’ There were no meetings
like that after I took over the campaign.”
Bannon’s tone veered from ad absurdum desperation to resignation.
“If he fires Mueller it just brings the impeachment quicker. Why not, let’s do it. Let’s get it on.
Why not? What am I going to do? Am I going to go in and save him? He’s Donald Trump. He’s always
gonna do things. He wants an unrecused attorney general. I told him if Jeff Sessions goes, Rod
Rosenstein goes, and then Rachel Brand”—the associate attorney general, next in line after
Rosenstein—“goes, we’ll be digging down into Obama career guys. An Obama guy will be acting
attorney general. I said you’re not going to get Rudy”—Trump had again revived a wish for his
loyalists Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie to take the job—“because he was on the campaign and will
have to recuse himself, and Chris Christie, too, so those are masturbatory fantasies, get those out of
your brain. And, for anybody to get confirmed now, they are going to have to swear and ensure that
things will go ahead and they won’t fire anybody, because you said yesterday—Ehhh . . . ehhh . . .
.ehhh!—‘my family finances are off limits,’ and they’re going to demand that, whoever he is, he
promises and commits to make the family finances part of this investigation. I told him as night
follows day that’s a lock, so you better hope Sessions stays around.”
“He was calling people in New York last night asking what he should do,” added Preate. (Almost
everybody in the White House followed Trump’s thinking by tracking whom he had called the night
before.)
Bannon sat back and, with steam-rising frustration—almost a cartoon figure—he outlined his
Clinton-like legal plan. “They went to the mattresses with amazing discipline. They ground through
it.” But that was about discipline, he emphasized, and Trump, said Bannon, noting the obvious, was
the least disciplined man in politics.
It was clear where Mueller and his team were going, said Bannon: they would trace a money trail
through Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Jared Kushner and roll one or all of them
on the president.
It’s Shakespearean, he said, enumerating the bad advice from his family circle: “It’s the geniuses,
the same people who talked him into firing Comey, the same people on Air Force One who cut out his
outside legal team, knowing the email was out there, knowing that email existed, put the statement out
about Don Junior, that the meeting was all about adoptions . . . the same geniuses trying to get
Sessions fired.
“Look, Kasowitz has known him for twenty-five years. Kasowitz has gotten him out of all kinds of
jams. Kasowitz on the campaign—what did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of all of
them. And now he’s out in, what, four weeks? He’s New York’s toughest lawyer. Mark Corallo,
toughest motherfucker I ever met, just can’t do it.”
Jared and Ivanka believe, said Bannon, that if they advocate prison reform and save DACA—the
program to protect the children of illegal immigrants—the liberals will come to their defense. He
digressed briefly to characterize Ivanka Trump’s legislative acumen, and her difficulty—which had
become quite a White House preoccupation—in finding sponsorship for her family leave proposal.
“Here’s why, I keep telling her: there’s no political constituency in it. You know how easy it is to get
a bill sponsored, any schmendrick can do it. You know why your bill has no sponsorship? Because
people realize how dumb it is.” In fact, said, Bannon, eyes rolling and mouth agape, it was the
Jarvanka idea to try to trade off amnesty for the border wall. “If not the dumbest idea in Western
civilization, it’s up there in the top three. Do these geniuses even know who we are?”
Just then Bannon took a call, the caller telling him that it looked as if Scaramucci might indeed be
getting the job of communications director. “Don’t fuck with me, dude,” he laughed. “Don’t fuck with
me like that!”
He got off the phone expressing further wonder at the fantasy world of the geniuses—and added,
for good measure, an extra dollop of dripping contempt for them. “I literally do not talk to them. You
know why? I’m doing my shit, and they got nothing to do with it, and I don’t care what they’re doing .
. . I don’t care. . . . I’m not going to be alone with them, I’m not going to be in a room with them.
Ivanka walked into the Oval today . . . [and] as soon as she walked in, I looked at her and walked
right out. . . . I won’t be in a room . . . don’t want to do it. . . . Hope Hicks walked in, I walked out.”
“The FBI put Jared’s father in jail,” said Preate. “Don’t they understand you don’t mess—”
“Charlie Kushner,” said Bannon, smacking his head again in additional disbelief. “He’s going
crazy because they’re going to get down deep in his shit about how he’s financed everyfhing. . . . all
the shit coming out of Israel . . . and all these guys coming out of Eastern Europe . . . all these Russian
guys . . . and guys in Kazakhstan. . . . And he’s frozen on 666 [Fifth Avenue]. . . . [If] it goes under next
year, the whole thing’s cross-collateralized . . . he’s wiped, he’s gone, he’s done, it’s over. . . . Toast.”
He held his face in his hands for a moment and then looked up again.
“I’m pretty good at coming up with solutions, I came up with a solution for his broke-dick
campaign in about a day, but I don’t see this. I don’t see a plan for getting through. Now, I gave him a
plan, I said you seal the Oval Office, you send those two kids home, you get rid of Hope, all these
deadbeats, and you listen to your legal team—Kasowitz, and Mark Dowd, and Jay Sekulow, and
Mark Corallo, these are all professionals who have done this many times. You listen to those guys and
never talk about this stuff again, you just conduct yourself as commander in chief and then you can be
president for eight years. If you don’t, you’re not, simple. But he’s the president, he gets a choice, and
he’s clearly choosing to go down another path . . . and you can’t stop him. The guy is going to call his
own plays. He’s Trump. . . .”
And then another call came, this one from Sam Nunberg. He, too, was calling about Scaramucci,
and his words caused something like stupefaction in Bannon: “No fucking, fucking way.”
Bannon got off the phone and said, “Jesus. Scaramucci. I can’t even respond to this. It’s
Kafkaesque. Jared and Ivanka needed somebody to represent their shit. It’s madness. He’ll be on that
podium for two days and he’ll be so chopped he’ll bleed out everywhere. He’ll literally blow up in a
week. This is why I don’t take this stuff seriously. Hiring Scaramucci? He’s not qualified to do
anything. He runs a fund of funds. Do you know what a fund of funds is? It’s not a fund. Dude, it’s
sick. We look like buffoons.”
* * *
The ten days of Anthony Scaramucci, saw, on the first day, July 21, the resignation of Sean Spicer.
Oddly, this seemed to catch everyone unawares. In a meeting with Scaramucci, Spicer, and Priebus,
the president—who in his announcement of Scaramucci’s hire as communications director had
promoted Scaramucci not only over Spicer, but in effect over Priebus, his chief of staff—suggested
that the men ought to be able to work it out together.
Spicer went back to his office, printed out his letter of resignation, and then took it back to the
nonplussed president, who said again that he really wanted Spicer to be a part of things. But Spicer,
surely the most mocked man in America, understood that he had been handed a gift. His White House
days were over.
For Scaramucci, it was now payback time. Scaramucci blamed his six humiliating months out in
the cold on nobody so much as Reince Priebus—having announced his White House future, having
sold his business in anticipation of it, he had come away with nothing, or at least nothing of any value.
But now, in a reversal befitting a true master of the universe—befitting, actually, Trump himself—
Scaramucci was in the White House, bigger, better, and grander than even he had had the gall to
imagine. And Priebus was dead meat.
That was the signal the president had sent Scaramucci—deal with the mess. In Trump’s view, the
problems in his tenure so far were just problems about the team. If the team went, the problems went.
So Scaramucci had his marching orders. The fact that the president had been saying the same stuff
about his rotten team from the first day, that this riff had been a constant from the campaign on, that he
would often say he wanted everybody to go and then turn around and say he didn’t want everybody to
go—all that rather went over Scaramucci’s head.
Scaramucci began taunting Priebus publicly, and inside the West Wing he adopted a tough-guy
attitude about Bannon—“I won’t take his bullshit.” Trump seemed delighted with this behavior, which
led Scaramucci to feel that the president was urging him on. Jared and Ivanka were pleased, too; they
believed they had scored with Scaramucci and were confident that he would defend them against
Bannon and the rest.
Bannon and Priebus remained not just disbelieving but barely able not to crack up. For both men,
Scaramucci was either a hallucinatory episode—they wondered whether they ought to just shut their
eyes while it passed—or some further march into madness.
* * *
Even as measured against other trying weeks in the Trump White House, the week of July 24 was a
head-slammer. First, it opened the next episode in what had become a comic-opera effort to repeal
Obamacare in the Senate. As in the House, this had become much less about health care than a
struggle both among Republicans in Congress and between the Republican leadership and the White
House. The signature stand for the Republican Party had now become the symbol of its civil war.
On that Monday, the president’s son-in-law appeared at the microphones in front of the West Wing
to preview his statement to Senate investigators about the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia.
Having almost never spoken before in public, he now denied culpability in the Russian mess by
claiming feckless naïveté; speaking in a reedy, self-pitying voice, he portrayed himself as a Candidelike
figure who had become disillusioned by a harsh world.
And that evening, the president traveled to West Virginia to deliver a speech before the Boy
Scouts of America. Once more, his speech was tonally at odds with time, place, and good sense. It
prompted an immediate apology from the Boy Scouts to its members, their parents, and the country at
large. The quick trip did not seem to improve Trump’s mood: the next morning, seething, the president
again publicly attacked his attorney general and—for good measure and no evident reason—tweeted
his ban of transgender people in the military. (The president had been presented with four different
options related to the military’s transgender policy. The presentation was meant to frame an ongoing
discussion, but ten minutes after receiving the discussion points, and without further consultation,
Trump tweeted his transgender ban.)
The following day, Wednesday, Scaramucci learned that one of his financial disclosure forms
seemed to have been leaked; assuming he’d been sabotaged by his enemies, Scaramucci blamed
Priebus directly, implicitly accusing him of a felony. In fact, Scaramucci’s financial form was a
public document available to all.
That afternoon, Priebus told the president that he understood he should resign and they should start
talking about his replacement.
Then, that evening, there was a small dinner in the White House, with various current and former
Fox News people, including Kimberly Guilfoyle, in attendance—and this was leaked. Drinking more
than usual, trying desperately to contain the details of the meltdown of his personal life (being linked
to Guilfoyle wasn’t going to help his negotiation with his wife), and wired by events beyond his own
circuits’ capacity, Scaramucci called a reporter at the New Yorker magazine and unloaded.
The resulting article was surreal—so naked in its pain and fury, that for almost twenty-four hours
nobody seemed to be able to quite acknowledge that he had committed public suicide. The article
quoted Scaramucci speaking bluntly about the chief of staff: “Reince Priebus—if you want to leak
something—he’ll be asked to resign very shortly.” Saying that he had taken his new job “to serve the
country” and that he was “not trying to build my brand,” Scaramucci also took on Steve Bannon: “I’m
not Steve Bannon. I’m not trying to suck my own cock.” (In fact, Bannon learned about the piece when
fact-checkers from the magazine called him for comment about Scaramucci’s accusation that he
sucked his own cock.)
Scaramucci, who had in effect publicly fired Priebus, was behaving so bizarrely that it wasn’t at
all clear who would be the last man standing. Priebus, on the verge of being fired for so long,
realized that he might have agreed to resign too soon. He might have gotten the chance to fire
Scaramucci!
On Friday, as health care repeal cratered in the Senate, Priebus joined the president on board Air
Force One for a trip to New York for a speech. As it happened, so did Scaramucci, who, avoiding the
New Yorker fallout, had said he’d gone to New York to visit his mother but in fact had been hiding out
at the Trump Hotel in Washington. Now here he was, with his bags (he would indeed now stay in
New York and visit his mother), behaving as though nothing had happened.
On the way back from the trip, Priebus and the president talked on the plane and discussed the
timing of his departure, with the president urging him to do it the right way and to take his time. “You
tell me what works for you,” said Trump. “Let’s make it good.”
Minutes later, Priebus stepped onto the tarmac and an alert on his phone said the president had just
tweeted that there was a new chief of staff, Department of Homeland Security chief John Kelly, and
that Priebus was out.
The Trump presidency was six months old, but the question of who might replace Priebus had
been a topic of discussion almost from day one. Among the string of candidates were Powell and
Cohn, the Jarvanka favorites; OMB director Mick Mulvaney, one of the Bannon picks; and Kelly.
In fact, Kelly—who would soon abjectly apologize to Priebus for the basic lack of courtesy in the
way his dismissal was handled—had not been consulted about his appointment. The president’s tweet
was the first he knew of it.
But indeed there was no time to waste. Now the paramount issue before the Trump government
was that somebody would have to fire Scaramucci. Since Scaramucci had effectively gotten rid of
Priebus—the person who logically should have fired him—the new chief of staff was needed, more
or less immediately, to get rid of the Mooch.
And six days later, just hours after he was sworn in, Kelly fired Scaramucci.
Chastened themselves, the junior first couple, the geniuses of the Scaramucci hire, panicked that
they would, deservedly, catch the blame for one of the most ludicrous if not catastrophic hires in
modern White House history. Now they rushed to say how firmly they supported the decision to get
rid of Scaramucci.
“So I punch you in the face,” Sean Spicer noted from the sidelines, “and then say, ‘Oh my god,
we’ve got to get you to a hospital!’ ”
O
22
GENERAL KELLY
n August 4, the president and key members of the West Wing left for Trump’s golf club in
Bedminster. The new chief of staff, General Kelly, was in tow, but the president’s chief
strategist, Steve Bannon, had been left behind. Trump was grouchy about the planned seventeen-day
trip, bothered by how diligently his golf dates were being clocked by the media. So this was now
dubbed a “working” trip—another piece of Trump vanity that drew shrugs, eye rolling, and head
shaking from a staff that had been charged with planning events that looked like work even as they
were instructed to leave yawning expanses of time for golf.
During the president’s absence, the West Wing would be renovated—Trump, the hotelier and
decorator, was “disgusted” by its condition. The president did not want to move over to the nearby
Executive Office Building, where the West Wing business would temporarily be conducted—and
where Steve Bannon sat waiting for his call to go to Bedminster.
He was about to leave for Bedminster, Bannon kept telling everyone, but no invitation came.
Bannon, who claimed credit for bringing Kelly into the administration in the first place, was unsure
where he stood with the new chief. Indeed, the president himself was unsure about where he himself
stood; he kept asking people if Kelly liked him. More generally, Bannon wasn’t entirely clear what
Kelly was doing, other than his duty. Where exactly did the new chief of staff fit in Trumpworld?
While Kelly stood somewhere right of center on the political spectrum and had been a willing
tough immigration enforcer at Homeland Security, he was not anywhere near so right as Bannon or
Trump. “He’s not hardcore” was Bannon’s regretful appraisal. At the same time, Kelly was certainly
not close in any way to the New York liberals in the White House. But politics was not his purview.
As director of Homeland Security he had watched the chaos in the White House with disgust and
thought about quitting. Now he had agreed to try to tame it. He was sixty-seven, resolute, stern, and
grim. “Does he ever smile?” asked Trump, who had already begun to think that he had somehow been
tricked into the hire.
Some Trumpers, particularly those with over-the-transom access to the president, believed that he
had been tricked into some form of very-much-not-Trump submission. Roger Stone, one of those
people whose calls Kelly was now shielding the president from, spread the dark scenario that Mattis,
McMaster, and Kelly had agreed that no military action would ever be taken unless the three were in
accord—and that at least one of them would always remain in Washington if the others were away.
After Kelly dispatched Scaramucci, his two immediate issues, now on the table in Bedminster,
were the president’s relatives and Steve Bannon. One side or the other obviously had to go. Or
perhaps both should go.
It was far from clear whether a White House chief of staff who saw his function as establishing
command process and enforcing organizational hierarchy—directing a decision funnel to the
commander in chief—could operate effectively or even exist in a White House where the commander
in chief’s children had special access and overriding influence. As much as the president’s daughter
and son-in-law were now offering slavish regard for the new command principals, they would,
surely, by habit and temperament, override Kelly’s control of the West Wing. Not only did they have
obvious special influence with the president, but important members of the staff saw them as having
this juice, and hence believed that they were the true north of West Wing advancement and power.
Curiously, for all their callowness, Jared and Ivanka had become quite a fearsome presence, as
feared by others as the two of them feared Bannon. What’s more, they had become quite accomplished
infighters and leakers—they had front-room and back-channel power—although, with great
woundedness, they insisted, incredibly, that they never leaked. “If they hear someone talking about
them, because they are so careful about their image and have crafted this whole persona—it’s like
anyone who tries to pierce it or say something against it is like a big problem,” said one senior
staffer. “They get very upset and will come after you.”
On the other hand, while “the kids” might make Kelly’s job all but impossible, keeping Bannon on
board didn’t make a lot of sense, either. Whatever his gifts, he was a hopeless plotter and malcontent,
bound to do an end run around any organization. Besides, as the Bedminster hiatus—working or
otherwise—began, Bannon was once more on the president’s shit list.
The president continued to stew about The Devil’s Bargain, the book by Joshua Green that gave
Bannon credit for the election. Then, too, while the president tended to side with Bannon against
McMaster, the campaign to defend McMaster, supported by Jared and Ivanka, was having an effect.
Murdoch, enlisted by Jared to help defend McMaster, was personally lobbying the president for
Bannon’s head. Bannonites felt they had to defend Bannon against an impulsive move by the
president: so now, not only did they brand McMaster as weak on Israel, they persuaded Sheldon
Adelson to lobby Trump—Bannon, Adelson told the president, was the only person he trusted on
Israel in the White House. Adelson’s billions and implacability always impressed Trump, and his
endorsement, Bannon believed, significantly strengthened his hand.
But overriding the management of the harrowing West Wing dysfunction, Kelly’s success—or even
relevance, as he was informed by almost anyone who was in a position to offer him an opinion—
depended on his rising to the central challenge of his job, which was how to manage Trump. Or,
actually, how to live with not managing him. His desires, needs, and impulses had to exist
—necessarily had to exist—outside the organizational structure. Trump was the one variable that, in
management terms, simply could not be controlled. He was like a recalcitrant two-year-old. If you
tried to control him, it would only have the opposite effect. In this, then, the manager had to most
firmly manage his own expectations.
In an early meeting with the president, General Kelly had Jared and Ivanka on his agenda—how
the president saw their role; what he thought was working and not working about it; how he
envisioned it going forward. It was all intended to be a politic way of opening a discussion about
getting them out. But the president was, Kelly soon learned, delighted with all aspects of their
performance in the West Wing. Maybe at some point Jared would become secretary of state—that was
the only change the president seemed to foresee. The most Kelly could do was to get the president to
acknowledge that the couple should be part of a greater organizational discipline in the West Wing
and should not so readily jump the line.
This, at least, was something that the general could try to enforce. At a dinner in Bedminster—the
president dining with his daughter and son-in-law—the First Family were confused when Kelly
showed up at the meal and joined them. This, they shortly came to understand, was neither an attempt
at pleasant socializing nor an instance of unwarranted over-familiarity. It was enforcement: Jared and
Ivanka needed to go through him to talk to the president.
But Trump had made clear his feeling that the roles played by the kids in his administration needed
only minor adjustment, and this now presented a significant problem for Bannon. Bannon really had
believed that Kelly would find a way to send Jarvanka home. How could he not? Indeed, Bannon had
convinced himself that they represented the largest danger to Trump. They would take the president
down. As much, Bannon believed that he could not remain in the White House if they did.
Beyond Trump’s current irritation with Bannon, which many believed was just the usual constant
of Trump resentment and complaint, Bannonites felt that their leader had, at least policywise, gained
the upper hand. Jarvanka was marginalized; the Republican leadership, after health care, was
discredited; the Cohn-Mnuchin tax plan was a hash. Through one window, the future looked almost
rosy for Bannon. Sam Nunberg, the former Trump loyalist who was now wholly a Bannon loyalist,
believed that Bannon would stay in the White House for two years and then leave to run Trump’s
reelection campaign. “If you can get this idiot elected twice,” Nunberg marveled, you would achieve
something like immortality in politics.
But through another window, Bannon couldn’t possibly remain in place. He seemed to have moved
into a heightened state that allowed him to see just how ridiculous the White House had become. He
could barely hold his tongue—indeed, he couldn’t hold it. Pressed, he could not see the future of the
Trump administration. And, while many Bannonites argued the case for Jarvanka ineffectiveness and
irrelevance—just ignore them, they said—Bannon, with mounting ferocity and pubic venom, could
abide them less and less every day.
Bannon, continuing to wait for his call to join the president in Bedminster, decided that he would
force the situation and offered his resignation to Kelly. But this was in fact a game of chicken: he
wanted to stay. On the other hand, he wanted Jarvanka to go. And that became an effective ultimatum.
* * *
At lunch on August 8, in the Clubhouse at Bedminster—amid Trumpish chandeliers, golf trophies, and
tournament plaques—the president was flanked by Tom Price, the secretary of health and human
services, and his wife, Melania. Kellyanne Conway was at the lunch; so were Kushner and several
others. This was one of the “make-work” events—over lunch, there was a discussion of the opioid
crisis, which was then followed by a statement from the president and a brief round of questions from
reporters. While reading the statement in a monotone, Trump kept his head down, propping it on his
elbows.
After taking some humdrum questions about opioids, he was suddenly asked about North Korea,
and, quite as though in stop-action animation, he seemed to come alive.
North Korea had been a heavy-on-detail, short-on-answers problem that that he believed was the
product of lesser minds and weaker resolve—and that he had trouble paying attention to. What’s
more, he had increasingly personalized his antagonism with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un,
referring to him often with derogatory epithets.
His staff had not prepared him for this, but, in apparent relief that he could digress from the opioid
discussion, as well as sudden satisfaction at the opportunity to address this nagging problem, he
ventured out, in language that he’d repeated often in private—as he repeated everything often—to the
precipice of an international crisis.
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with the fire
and the fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and as
I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never
seen before. Thank you.”
* * *
North Korea, a situation the president had been consistently advised to downplay, now became the
central subject of the rest of the week—with most senior staff occupied not so much by the topic
itself, but by how to respond to the president, who was threatening to “blow” again.
Against this background, almost no one paid attention to the announcement by the Trump supporter
and American neo-Nazi Richard Spencer that he was organizing a protest at the University of
Virginia, in Charlottesville, over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. “Unite the Right,” the
theme of the rally called for Saturday, August 12, was explicitly designed to link Trump’s politics
with white nationalism.
On August 11, with the president in Bedminster continuing to threaten North Korea—and also,
inexplicably to almost everyone on his staff, threatening military intervention in Venezuela—Spencer
called for an evening protest.
At 8:45 p.m.—with the president in for the night in Bedminster—about 250 young men dressed in
khaki pants and polo shirts, quite a Trump style of dress, began an organized parade across the UVA
campus while carrying kerosene torches. Parade monitors with headsets directed the scene. At a
signal, the marchers began chanting official movement slogans: “Blood and soil!” “You will not
replace us!” “Jews will not replace us!” Soon, at the center of campus, near a statue of UVA’s
founder, Thomas Jefferson, Spencer’s group was met by a counterprotest. With virtually no police
presence, the first of the weekend’s melees and injuries ensued.
Beginning again at eight o’clock the next morning, the park near the Lee statue became the
battleground of a suddenly surging white racist movement, with clubs, shields, mace, pistols, and
automatic rifles (Virginia is an “open carry” state)—a movement seemingly, and to liberal horror,
born out of the Trump campaign and election, as in fact Richard Spencer intended it to seem.
Opposing the demonstrators was a hardened, militant left called to the barricades. You could hardly
have better set an end-times scene, no matter the limited numbers of protesters. Much of the morning
involved a series of charges and countercharges—a rocks-and-bottles combat, with a seemingly
hands-off police force standing by.
In Bedminster, there was still little awareness of the unfolding events in Charlottesville. But then,
at about one o’clock in the afternoon, James Alex Fields Jr., a twenty-year-old would-be Nazi,
plunged his Dodge Charger into a group of counterprotesters, killing thirty-two-year-old Heather
Heyer and injuring a score of others.
In a tweet hurriedly composed by his staff, the president declared: “We ALL must be united &
condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come
together as one!”
Otherwise, however, it was largely business as usual for the president—Charlottesville was a
mere distraction, and indeed, the staff’s goal was to keep him off North Korea. The main event in
Bedminster that day was the ceremonial signing of an act extending the funding of a program that let
veterans obtain medical care outside VA hospitals. The signing was held in a big ballroom at the
Clubhouse two hours after Alex Field’s attack.
During the signing, Trump took a moment to condemn the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many
sides” in Charlottesville. Almost immediately, the president came under attack for the distinction he
had appeared to refuse to draw between avowed racists and the other side. As Richard Spencer had
correctly understood, the president’s sympathies were muddled. However easy and obvious it was to
condemn white racists—even self-styled neo-Nazis—he instinctively resisted.
It wasn’t until the next morning that the White House finally tried to clarify Trump’s position with
a formal statement: “The President said very strongly in his statement yesterday that he condemns all
forms of violence, bigotry, and hatred. Of course that includes white supremacists, KKK neo-Nazi
and all extremist groups. He called for national unity and bringing all Americans together.”
But in fact he hadn’t condemned white supremacists, KKK, and neo-Nazis—and he continued to
be stubborn about not doing it.
In a call to Bannon, Trump sought help making his case: “Where does this all end? Are they going
to take down the Washington Monument, Mount Rushmore, Mount Vernon?” Bannon—still not
receiving his summons to Bedminster—urged this to be the line: the president should condemn
violence and misfits and also defend history (even with Trump’s weak grasp of it). Stressing the
literal issue of monuments would bedevil the left and comfort the right.
But Jared and Ivanka, with Kelly backing them, urged presidential behavior. Their plan was to
have Trump return to the White House and address the issue with a forceful censure of hate groups
and racial politics—exactly the unambiguous sort of position Richard Spencer had strategically bet
Trump would not willingly take.
Bannon, understanding these same currents in Trump, lobbied Kelly and told him that the Jarvanka
approach would backfire: It will be clear his heart’s not in it, said Bannon.
The president arrived shortly before eleven o’clock on Monday morning at a White House under
construction and a wall of shouted questions about Charlottesville: “Do you condemn the actions of
neo-Nazis? Do you condemn the actions of white supremacists?” Some ninety minutes later he stood
in the Diplomatic Reception Room, his eyes locked on to the teleprompter, and delivered a six-minute
statement.
Before getting to the point: “Our economy is now strong. The stock market continues to hit record
highs, unemployment is at a sixteen-year low, and businesses are more optimistic than ever before.
Companies are moving back to the United States and bringing many thousands of jobs with them. We
have already created over one million jobs since I took office.”
And only then: “We must love each other, show affection for each other and unite together in
condemnation of hatred, bigotry and violence. . . . We must rediscover the bonds of love and loyalty
that bring us together as Americans. . . . Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are
criminals and thugs including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups that are
repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”
It was a reluctant mini-grovel. It was something of a restaging of the take-it-back birther speech
about Obama during the campaign: much distraction and obfuscation, then a mumbled
acknowledgment. Similarly, he looked here, trying to tow the accepted line on Charlottesville, like a
kid called on the carpet. Resentful and petulant, he was clearly reading forced lines.
And in fact he got little credit for these presidential-style remarks, with reporters shouting
questions about why it had taken him so long to address the issue. As he got back on Marine One to
head to Andrews Air Force Base and on to JFK and then into Manhattan and Trump Tower, his mood
was dark and I-told-you-so. Privately, he kept trying to rationalize why someone would be a member
of the KKK—that is, they might not actually believe what the KKK believed, and the KKK probably
does not believe what it used to believe, and, anyway, who really knows what the KKK believes
now? In fact, he said, his own father was accused of being involved with the KKK—not true. (In fact,
yes, true.)
The next day, Tuesday, August 15, the White House had a news conference scheduled at Trump
Tower. Bannon urged Kelly to cancel it. It was a nothing conference anyway. Its premise was about
infrastructure—about undoing an environmental regulation that could help get projects started faster
—but it was really just another effort to show that Trump was working and not just on a holiday. So
why bother? What’s more, Bannon told Kelly, he could see the signs: the arrow on the Trump pressure
cooker was climbing, and before long he’d blow.
The news conference went ahead anyway. Standing at the lectern in the lobby of Trump Tower, the
president stayed on script for mere minutes. Defensive and self-justifying, he staked out a contritionis-
bunk, the-fault-lies-everywhere-else position and then dug in deep. He went on without an evident
ability to adjust his emotions to political circumstance or, really, even to make an effort to save
himself. It was yet one more example, among his many now, of the comic-absurd, movielike politician
who just says whatever is on his mind. Unmediated. Crazylike.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, altright? Do they have any semblance
of guilt? What about the fact they came charging with clubs in their hands? As far as I’m concerned
that was a horrible, horrible day. . . . I think there’s blame on both sides. I have no doubt about it, you
don’t have any doubt about it. If you reported it accurately, you would see.”
Steve Bannon, still waiting in his temporary office in the EOB, thought, Oh my god, there he goes.
I told you so.
* * *
Outside of the portion of the electorate that, as Trump once claimed, would let him shoot someone on
Fifth Avenue, the civilized world was pretty much universally aghast. Everybody came to a
dumbfounded moral attention. Anybody in any position of responsibility remotely tied to some idea of
establishment respectability had to disavow him. Every CEO of a public company who had
associated him- or herself with the Trump White House now needed to cut the ties. The overriding
issue might not even be what unreconstructed sentiments he actually seemed to hold in his heart—
Bannon averred that Trump was not in fact anti-Semitic, but on the other count he wasn’t sure—but
that he flat-out couldn’t control himself.
In the wake of the immolating news conference, all eyes were suddenly on Kelly—this was his
baptism of Trump fire. Spicer, Priebus, Cohn, Powell, Bannon, Tillerson, Mattis, Mnuchin—virtually
the entire senior staff and cabinet of the Trump presidency, past and present, had traveled through the
stages of adventure, challenge, frustration, battle, self-justification, and doubt, before finally having to
confront the very real likelihood that the president they worked for—whose presidency they bore
some official responsibility for—didn’t have the wherewithal to adequately function in his job. Now,
after less than two weeks on the job, it was Kelly’s turn to stand at that precipice.
The debate, as Bannon put it, was not about whether the president’s situation was bad, but whether
it was Twenty-Fifth-Amendment bad.
* * *
To Bannon, if not to Trump, the linchpin of Trumpism was China. The story of the next generation, he
believed, had been written, and it was about war with China. Commercial war, trade war, cultural
war, diplomatic war—it would be an all-encompassing war that few in the United States now
understood needed to be fought, and that almost nobody was prepared to fight.
Bannon had compiled a list of “China hawks” that crossed political lines, going from the Breitbart
gang, to former New Republic editor Peter Beinart—who regarded Bannon only with scorn—and
orthodox liberal-progressive stalwart Robert Kuttner, the editor of the small, public policy magazine
American Prospect. On Wednesday, August 16, the day after the president’s news conference in
Trump Tower, Bannon, out of the blue, called Kuttner from his EOB office to talk China.
By this point, Bannon was all but convinced that he was on the way out of the White House. He
had received no invitation to join the president in Bedminster, a withering sign. That day, he had
learned of the appointment of Hope Hicks as interim communications director—a Jarvanka victory.
Meanwhile, the steady whisper from the Jarvanka side continued about his certain demise; it had
become a constant background noise.
He was still not sure he would be fired, yet Bannon, in only the second on-the-record interview he
had given since the Trump victory, called Kuttner and in effect sealed his fate. He would later
maintain that the conversation was not on the record. But this was the Bannon method, in which he
merely tempted fate.
If Trump was helplessly Trump in his most recent news conference, Bannon was helplessly
Bannon in his chat with Kuttner. He tried to prop up what he made sound like a weak Trump on China.
He corrected, in mocking fashion, the president’s bluster on North Korea—“ten million people in
Seoul” will die, he declared. And he insulted his internal enemies—“they’re wetting themselves.”
If Trump was incapable of sounding like a president, Bannon had matched him: he was incapable
of sounding like a presidential aide.
* * *
That evening, a group of Bannonites gathered near the White House for dinner. The dinner was called
for the bar at the Hay-Adams hotel, but Arthur Schwartz, a Bannonite PR man, got into an altercation
with the Hay-Adams bartender about switching the television from CNN to Fox, where his client,
Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman of one of the president’s business councils, was
shortly to appear. The business council was hemorrhaging its CEO members after the president’s
Charlottesville news conference, and Trump, in a tweet, had announced that he was disbanding it.
(Schwarzman had advised the president that the council was collapsing and that the president ought to
at least make it look as if shutting it down was his decision.)
Schwartz, in high dudgeon, announced that he was checking out of the Hay-Adams and moving to
the Trump Hotel. He also insisted that the dinner be moved two blocks away to Joe’s, an outpost of
Miami’s Joe’s Stone Crab. Matthew Boyle, the Washington political editor of Breitbart News, was
swept into Schwartz’s furious departure, with Schwartz upbraiding the twenty-nine-year-old for
lighting a cigarette. “I don’t know anyone who smokes,” he sniffed. Although Schwartz was firmly in
the Bannon camp, this seemed to be a general dig at the Breitbart people for being low-class.
Both dedicated Bannonites debated the effect of Bannon’s interview, which had caught everybody
in the Bannon universe off guard. Neither man could understand why he would have given an
interview.
Was Bannon finished?
No, no, no, argued Schwartz. He might have been a few weeks ago when Murdoch had ganged up
with McMaster and gone to the president and pressed him to dump Bannon. But then Sheldon had
fixed it, Schwartz said.
“Steve stayed home when Abbas came,” said Schwartz. “He wasn’t going to breathe the air that a
terrorist breathed.” This was the precise line Schwartz would hand out to reporters in the coming
days in a further effort to establish Bannon’s right-wing virtue.
Alexandra Preate, Bannon’s lieutenant, arrived at Joe’s out of breath. Seconds later, Jason Miller,
another PR man in the Bannon fold, arrived. During the transition, Miller had been slated to be the
communications director, but then it had come out that Miller had had a relationship with another staff
member who announced in a tweet she was pregnant by Miller—as was also, at this point, Miller’s
wife. Miller, who had lost his promised White House job but continued serving as an outside Trump
and Bannon voice, was now, with the recent birth of the child—with the recent birth of both of his
children by different women—facing another wave of difficult press. Still, even he was obsessively
focused on what Bannon’s interview might mean.
By now the table was buzzing with speculation.
How would the president react?
How would Kelly react?
Was this curtains?
For a group of people in touch with Bannon on an almost moment-by-moment basis, it was
remarkable that nobody seemed to understand that, forcibly or otherwise, he would surely be moving
out of the White House. On the contrary, the damaging interview was, by consensus, converted into a
brilliant strategic move. Bannon was not going anywhere—not least because there was no Trump
without Bannon.
It was an excited dinner, a revved-up occasion involving a passionate group of people all attached
to the man who they believed was the most compelling figure in Washington. They saw him as some
sort of irreducible element: Bannon was Bannon was Bannon.
As the evening went on, Matt Boyle got in a furious text-message fight with Jonathan Swan, a
White House reporter who had written a story about Bannon being on the losing side in the Bannon-
McMaster showdown. Soon almost every well-connected reporter in the city was checking in with
somebody at the table. When a text came in, the recipient would hold up his or her phone if it showed
a notable reporter’s name. At one point, Bannon texted Schwartz some talking points. Could it be that
this was just one more day in the endless Trump drama?
Schwartz, who seemed to regard Trump’s stupidity as a political given, offered a vigorous
analysis of why Trump could not do without Bannon. Then, seeking more proof of his theory,
Schwartz said he was texting Sam Nunberg, generally regarded as the man who understood Trump’s
whims and impulses best, and who had sagely predicted Bannon’s survival at each doubtful moment
in the past months.
“Nunberg always knows,” said Schwartz.
Seconds later, Schwartz looked up. His eyes widened and for a moment he went silent. Then he
said: “Nunberg says Bannon’s dead.”
And, indeed, unbeknownst to the Bannonites, even those closest to him, Bannon was at that
moment finalizing his exit with Kelly. By the next day, he would be packing up his little office, and on
Monday, when Trump would return to a refurbished West Wing—a paint job, new furniture, and new
rugs, its look tilting toward the Trump Hotel—Steve Bannon would be back on Capitol Hill at the
Breitbart Embassy, still, he was confident, the chief strategist for the Trump revolution.