fire and fury chapter 7&8

E
7
RUSSIA
ven before there was reason to suspect Sally Yates, they suspected her. The transition report said
Trump wouldn’t like the fifty-six-year-old Atlanta-born University of Georgia career Justice
Department lawyer slated to step up to acting attorney general. There was something about a
particular kind of Obama person. Something about the way they walked and held themselves.
Superiority. And about a certain kind of woman who would immediately rub Trump the wrong way—
Obama women being a good tip-off, Hillary women another. Later this would be extended to “DOJ
women.”
Here was an elemental divide: between Trump and career government employees. He could
understand politicians, but he was finding it hard to get a handle on these bureaucrat types, their
temperament and motives. He couldn’t grasp what they wanted. Why would they, or anyone, be a
permanent government employee? “They max out at what? Two hundred grand? Tops,” he said,
expressing something like wonder.
Sally Yates could have been passed over for the acting AG spot—to serve in place while the
attorney-general-designate, Jeff Sessions, waited for confirmation—and before long Trump would be
furious about why she wasn’t. But she was the sitting deputy and she’d been confirmed by the Senate,
and the acting AG job needed someone with Senate confirmation. And even though she seemed to see
herself as something of a prisoner held in hostile territory, Yates accepted the job.
Given this context, the curious information she presented to White House counsel Don McGahn
during the administration’s first week—this was before, in the second week, she refused to enforce
the immigration order and was thereupon promptly fired—seemed not only unwelcome but suspect.
The newly confirmed National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, had brushed off reports in the
Washington Post about a conversation with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak. It was a simple
meet and greet, he said. He assured the transition team—among others, Vice President-elect Pence—
that there were no discussions of Obama administration sanctions against the Russians, an assurance
Pence publicly repeated.
Yates now told the White House that Flynn’s conversation with Kislyak had actually been captured
as part of an “incidental collection” of authorized wiretaps. That is, a wiretap had presumably been
authorized on the Russian ambassador by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and,
incidentally, picked up Flynn.
The FISA court had achieved a moment of notoriety after the Edward Snowden revelations briefly
made it a bête noire for liberals who were angry about privacy incursions. Now it was achieving
another moment, but this time as the friend of liberals, who hoped to use these “incidental” wiretaps
as a way to tie the Trump camp to a wide-ranging conspiracy with Russia.
In short order, McGahn, Priebus, and Bannon, each with prior doubts about Flynn’s reliability and
judgment—“a fuck-up,” according to Bannon—conferred about the Yates message. Flynn was asked
again about his call with Kislyak; he was also told that a recording might exist. Again he scoffed at
any suggestion that this was a meaningful conversation about anything.
In one White House view, Yates’s tattling was little more than “like she found out her girlfriend’s
husband flirted with somebody else and, standing on principle, had to tell on him.”
Of more alarm to the White House was how, in an incidental collection wherein the names of
American citizens are supposedly “masked”—with complicated procedures required to “unmask”
them—had Yates so handily and conveniently picked up Flynn? Her report would also seem to
confirm that the leak to the Post about these recordings came from the FBI, DOJ, or Obama White
House sources—part of the growing river of leaks, with the Times and the Post the leakers’ favored
destinations.
The White House in its assessment of the Yates message ended up seeing this as less a problem
with an always hard-to-handle Flynn than as a problem with Yates, even as a threat from her: the
Justice Department, with its vast staff of career and Obama-inclined prosecutors, had ears on the
Trump team.
* * *
“It’s unfair,” said Kellyanne Conway, sitting in her yet undecorated second-floor office while
representing the president’s hurt feelings. “It’s obviously unfair. It’s very unfair. They lost. They
didn’t win. This is so unfair. So POTUS just doesn’t want to talk about it.”
There was nobody in the White House who wanted to talk about—or even anyone who had been
officially delegated to talk about—Russia, the story that, evident to most, even before they entered the
White House, was certain to overwhelm the first year of the Trump administration at the very least.
Nobody was prepared to deal with it.
“There’s no reason to even talk about it,” said Sean Spicer, sitting on the couch in his office,
firmly crossing his arms. “There’s no reason to even talk about it,” he said again, stubbornly.
For his part, the president did not use, though he might have, the word “Kafkaesque.” He regarded
the Russia story as senseless and inexplicable and having no basis in reality. They were just being
sucked in.
They had survived scandal during the campaign—the Billy Bush weekend—which virtually no
one in Trump’s inner circle had thought they could survive, only to be hit by the Russia scandal.
Compared to Pussy-gate, Russia seemed like the only-desperate-thing-left-gate. What seemed unfair
now was that the issue still wasn’t going away, and that, incomprehensibly, people took it seriously.
When at best it was . . . nothing.
It was the media.
The White House had quickly become accustomed to media-led scandals, but they were also used
to their passing. But now this one was, frustratingly, holding on.
If there was any single piece of proof not just of media bias but of the intention of the media to do
anything it could to undermine this president, it was—in the view of the Trump circle—this, the
Russia story, what the Washington Post termed “Russia’s attack on our political system.” (“So
terribly, terribly unfair, with no proof of one vote changed,” according to Conway.) It was insidious.
It was, to them, although they didn’t put it this way, similar to the kind of dark Clinton-like
conspiracies that Republicans were more wont to accuse liberals of—Whitewater, Benghazi, Emailgate.
That is, an obsessive narrative that leads to investigations, which lead to other investigations,
and to more obsessive no-escape media coverage. This was modern politics: blood-sport
conspiracies that were about trying to destroy people and careers.
When the comparison to Whitewater was made to Conway, she, rather proving the point about
obsessions, immediately began to argue the particulars involving Webster Hubbell, a mostly forgotten
figure in the Whitewater affair, and the culpability of the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, where Hillary
Clinton was a partner. Everybody believed their side’s conspiracies, while utterly, and righteously,
rejecting the conspiracies leveled at them. To call something a conspiracy was to dismiss it.
As for Bannon, who had himself promoted many conspiracies, he dismissed the Russia story in
textbook fashion: “It’s just a conspiracy theory.” And, he added, the Trump team wasn’t capable of
conspiring about anything.
* * *
The Russia story was—just two weeks into the new presidency—a dividing line with each side
viewing the other as pushing fake news.
The greater White House wholly believed that the story was an invented construct of weak if not
preposterous narrative threads, with a mind-boggling thesis: We fixed the election with the Russians,
OMG! The anti-Trump world, and especially its media—that is, the media—believed that there was
a high, if not overwhelming, likelihood that there was something significant there, and a decent
chance that it could be brought home.
If the media, self-righteously, saw it as the Holy Grail and silver bullet of Trump destruction, and
the Trump White House saw it, with quite some self-pity, as a desperate effort to concoct a scandal,
there was also a range of smart money in the middle.
The congressional Democrats had everything to gain by insisting, Benghazi-like, that where there
was smoke (even if they were desperately working the bellows) there was fire, and by using
investigations as a forum to promote their minority opinion (and for members to promote themselves).
For Republicans in Congress, the investigations were a card to play against Trump’s vengefulness
and unpredictability. Defending him—or something less than defending him and, indeed, possibly
pursuing him—offered Republicans a new source of leverage in their dealings with him.
The intelligence community—with its myriad separate fiefdoms as suspicious of Trump as of any
incoming president in memory—would, at will, have the threat of drip-drip-drip leaks to protect its
own interests.
The FBI and DOJ would evaluate the evidence—and the opportunity—through their own lenses of
righteousness and careerism. (“The DOJ is filled with women prosecutors like Yates who hate him,”
said a Trump aide, with a curiously gender-biased view of the growing challenge.)
If all politics is a test of your opponent’s strength, acumen, and forbearance, then this, regardless
of the empirical facts, was quite a clever test, with many traps that many people might fall into.
Indeed, in many ways the issue was not Russia but, in fact, strength, acumen, and forbearance, the
qualities Trump seemed clearly to lack. The constant harping about a possible crime, even if there
wasn’t an actual crime—and no one was yet pointing to a specific act of criminal collusion, or in fact
any other clear violation of the law—could force a cover-up which might then turn into a crime. Or
turn up a perfect storm of stupidity and cupidity.
“They take everything I’ve ever said and exaggerate it,” said the president in his first week in the
White House during a late-night call. “It’s all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated.”
* * *
Franklin Foer, the Washington-based former editor of the New Republic, made an early case for a
Trump-Putin conspiracy on July 4, 2016, in Slate. His piece reflected the incredulity that had
suddenly possessed the media and political intelligentsia: Trump, the unserious candidate, had,
however incomprehensibly, become a more or less serious one. And somehow, because of his prior
unseriousness, and his what-you-see-is-what-you-get nature, the braggart businessman, with his
bankruptcies, casinos, and beauty pageants, had avoided serious vetting. For Trump students—which,
over his thirty years of courting attention, many in the media had become—the New York real estate
deals were dirty, the Atlantic City ventures were dirty, the Trump airline was dirty, Mar-a-Lago, the
golf courses, and the hotels all dirty. No reasonable candidate could have survived a recounting of
even one of these deals. But somehow a genial amount of corruption had been figured into the Trump
candidacy—that, after all, was the platform he was running on. I’ll do for you what a tough
businessman does for himself.
To really see his corruption, you had to see it on a bigger stage. Foer was suggesting a fabulous
one. Assembling a detailed road map for a scandal that did not yet exist, Foer, without anything
resembling smoking guns or even real evidence, pulled together in July virtually all of the
circumstantial and thematic threads and many of the various characters that would play out over the
next eighteen months. (Unbeknownst to the public or even most media or political insiders, Fusion
GPS had by this point hired the former British spy Christopher Steele to investigate a connection
between Trump and the Russian government.)
Putin was seeking a resurgence of Russian power and, as well, to block encroachments by the
European Union and NATO. Trump’s refusal to treat Putin as a semi-outlaw—not to mention what
often seemed like a man crush on him—meant, ipso facto, that Trump was sanguine about a return of
Russian power and might actually be promoting it.
Why? What could possibly be in it for an American politician to publicly embrace—
sycophantically embrace—Vladimir Putin and to encourage what the West saw as Russian
adventurism?
Theory 1: Trump was drawn to authoritarian strongmen. Foer recounted Trump’s longtime
fascination with Russia, including being duped by a Gorbachev look-alike who visited Trump Tower
in the 1980s, and his many fulsome and unnecessary “odes to Putin.” This suggested a lie-down-withdogs-
wake-up-with-fleas vulnerability: consorting with or looking favorably upon politicians whose
power lies partly in their tolerance of corruption brings you closer to corruption. Likewise, Putin was
drawn to populist strongmen in his own image: hence, Foer asked, “Why wouldn’t the Russians offer
him the same furtive assistance they’ve lavished on Le Pen, Berlusconi, and the rest?”
Theory 2: Trump was part of a less-than-blue-chip (much less) international business set, feeding
off the rivers of dubious wealth that had been unleashed by all the efforts to move cash, much of it
from Russia and China, out of political harm’s way. Such money, or rumors of such money, became an
explanation—still only a circumstantial one—in trying to assess all the Trump business dealings that
largely remained hidden from view. (There were two contradictory theories here: he had hidden these
dealings because he didn’t want to admit their paucity, or he had hidden them to mask their
disreputableness.) Because Trump is less than creditworthy, Foer was among many who concluded
that Trump needed to turn to other sources—more or less dirty money, or money with other sorts of
strings attached. (One way the process can work is, roughly speaking, as follows: an oligarch makes
an investment in a more or less legitimate third-party investment fund, which, quid pro quo, makes an
investment in Trump.) And while Trump would categorically deny that he had any loans or
investments from Russia, one would, of course, not have dirty money on one’s books.
As a subset of this theory, Trump—never very scrupulous about vetting his people—surrounded
himself with a variety of hustlers working their own deals, and, plausibly, aiding Trump’s deals. Foer
identified the following characters as part of a possible Russian conspiracy:
• Tevfik Arif, a former Rus sian official who ran the Bayrock Group, a middleman in Trump
financings with an office in Trump Tower.
• Felix Sater (sometimes spelled Satter), a Russian-born immigrant to Brighton Beach in
Brooklyn, who had previously served time in prison in connection with a fraud at a Mafia-run
brokerage and who went to work for Bayrock and had a business card identifying him as senior
adviser to Donald Trump. (When Sater’s name later continued to surface, Trump assured
Bannon he didn’t know Sater at all.)
• Carter Page, a banker of uncertain portfolio who had spent time in Russia and billed himself as
having advised the state-run oil company, Gazprom, and who showed up on a hastily assembled
list of Trump foreign policy advisers and who, it would turn out, the FBI was closely
monitoring in what it said was a Russian intelligence effort to turn him. (Trump would later
deny ever meeting Page, and the FBI would say that it believed Russian intelligence had
targeted Page in an effort to turn him.)
• Michael Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency—fired by Obama for
unclear reasons—who had yet to emerge as Trump’s key foreign policy counselor and future
National Security Advisor, but who was accompanying him on many campaign trips and who
earlier in the year had been paid a $45,000 speaking fee in Moscow and been photographed
sitting at a dinner with Putin.
• Paul Manafort, whom, along with serving as Trump’s campaign manager, Foer highlighted as a
political operative and consultant who had generated substantial income advising Kremlinbacked
Viktor Yanukovych, who successfully ran for the presidency of Ukraine in 2010, was
later deposed in 2014, and had been in business with the Russian oligarch and Putin crony Oleg
Deripaska.
More than a year later, each of these men would be part of the near-daily Russia-Trump news
cycle.
Theory 3: The Holy Grail proposition was that Trump and the Russians—perhaps even Putin
himself—had gotten together to hack the Democratic National Committee.
Theory 4: But then there was the those-that-know-him-best theory, some version of which most
Trumpers would come to embrace. He was just star-fucking. He took his beauty pageant to Russia
because he thought Putin was going to be his friend. But Putin couldn’t have cared less, and in the end
Trump found himself at the promised gala dinner seated on one side next to a guy who looked like he
had never used a utensil and on the other side Jabba the Hutt in a golf shirt. In other words, Trump—
however foolish his sucking-up might have been, and however suspicious it might look in hindsight—
just wanted a little respect.
Theory 5: The Russians, holding damaging information about Trump, were blackmailing him. He
was a Manchurian Candidate.
* * *
On January 6, 2017—nearly six months to the day after Foer’s piece was published—the CIA, FBI,
and NSA announced their joint conclusion that “Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in
2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.” From the Steele dossier, to the steady leaks from the
U.S. intelligence community, to testimony and statements from the leadership of U.S. intelligence
agencies, a firm consensus had emerged. There was a nefarious connection, perhaps an ongoing one,
between Trump and his campaign and the Russian government.
Still, this could yet be seen as highly wishful thinking by Trump opponents. “The underlying
premise of the case is that spies tell the truth,” said the veteran intelligence community journalist
Edward Jay Epstein. “Who knew?” And, indeed, the worry in the White House was not about
collusion—which seemed implausible if not farcical—but what, if the unraveling began, would likely
lead to the messy Trump (and Kushner) business dealings. On this subject every member of the senior
staff shrugged helplessly, covering eyes, ears, and mouth.
This was the peculiar and haunting consensus—not that Trump was guilty of all that he was
accused of, but that he was guilty of so much else. It was all too possible that the hardly plausible
would lead to the totally credible.
* * *
On February 13, twenty-four days into the new administration, National Security Advisor Michael
Flynn became the first actual link between Russia and the White House.
Flynn had really only one supporter in the Trump administration, and that was the president
himself. They were best friends during the campaign—buddy movie stuff. Post-inauguration, this
translated into a total-access relationship. On Flynn’s part, it led to a set of misapprehensions that
was common inside Trump’s circle: that the president’s personal endorsement indicated your status in
the White House and that Trump’s level of flattery was a convincing indication that you had an
unbreakable bond with him and that you were, in his eyes, and in his White House, something close to
omnipotent. Trump, with his love of generals, had even for a moment wanted to make Michael Flynn
his vice president.
Intoxicated by Trump’s flattery during the campaign, Flynn—a lower-tier general and quite a flaky
one at that—had become something of a Trump dancing monkey. When former generals make
alliances with political candidates, they customarily position themselves as providers of expertise
and figures of a special maturity. But Flynn had become quite a maniacal partisan, part of the Trump
traveling road show, one of the ranters and ravers opening Trump rallies. This all-in enthusiasm and
loyalty had helped win him access to Trump’s ear, into which he poured his anti-intelligencecommunity
theories.
During the early part of the transition, when Bannon and Kushner had seemed joined at the hip, this
was part of their bond: an effort to disintermediate Flynn and his often problematic message. A
subtext in the White House estimation of Flynn, slyly insinuated by Bannon, was that Defense
Secretary Mattis was a four-star general and Flynn but a three-star.
“I like Flynn, he reminds me of my uncles,” said Bannon. “But that’s the problem: he reminds me
of my uncles.”
Bannon used the general odor that had more and more attached to Flynn among everybody except
the president to help secure a seat for himself on the National Security Council. This was, for many in
the national security community, a signal moment in the effort by the nationalist right wing to seize
power. But Bannon’s presence on the council was just as much driven by the need to babysit the
impetuous Flynn, prone to antagonizing almost everyone else in the national security community.
(Flynn was “a colonel in a general’s uniform,” according to one senior intelligence figure.)
Flynn, like everyone around Trump, was besotted by the otherworldly sense of opportunity that
came with, against all odds, being in the White House. And inevitably, he had been made more
grandiose by it.
In 2014, Flynn had been roughly cashiered out of government, for which he blamed his many
enemies in the CIA. But he had energetically set himself up in business, joining the ranks of former
government officials profiting off the ever growing globalist corporate-financial-government policy
and business networks. Then, after flirting with several other Republican presidential candidates, he
bonded with Trump. Both Flynn and Trump were antiglobalists—or, anyway, they believed the United
States was getting screwed in global transactions. Still, money was money, and Flynn, who, when he
retired, had been receiving a few hundred thousand a year on his general’s pension, was not turning
any of it down. Various friends and advisers—including Michael Ledeen, a longtime anti-Iran and
anti-CIA crony, and the coauthor of Flynn’s book, whose daughter now worked for Flynn—advised
Flynn that he ought not to accept fees from Russia or the larger “consulting” assignments from Turkey.
It was in fact the sort of carelessness that almost everyone in Trump’s world, including the
president and his family, was guilty of. They lived with parallel realities in which, while proceeding
with a presidential campaign, they also had to live in a vastly more likely world—rather a certain
world—in which Donald Trump would never be president. Hence, business as usual.
In early February, an Obama administration lawyer friendly with Sally Yates remarked with some
relish and considerable accuracy: “It certainly is an odd circumstance if you live your life without
regard for being elected and then get elected—and quite an opportunity for your enemies.”
In this, there was not only the Russian cloud hanging over the administration, but a sense that the
intelligence community so distrusted Flynn, and so blamed its bad blood with Trump on him, that
Flynn was the target here. Within the White House there was even a feeling that a soft trade was being
implicitly offered: Flynn for the goodwill of the intelligence community.
At the same time, in what some thought a direct result of the president’s rage over the Russia
insinuations—particularly the insinuation about the golden shower—the president seemed to bond
even more strongly with Flynn, assuring his National Security Advisor over and over again that he
had his back, that the Russia accusations, those related both to Flynn and to himself, were “garbage.”
After Flynn’s dismissal, a narrative describing Trump’s increasing doubts about his adviser would be
offered to the press, but in fact the opposite was true: the more doubts gathered around Flynn, the
more certain the president became that Flynn was his all-important ally.
* * *
The final or deadliest leak during Michael Flynn’s brief tenure is as likely to have come from the
National Security Advisor’s antagonists inside the White House as from the Justice Department.
On Wednesday, February 8, the Washington Post’s Karen DeYoung came to visit Flynn for what
was billed as an off-the-record interview. They met not in his office but in the most ornate room in the
Eisenhower Executive Office Building—the same room where Japanese diplomats waited to meet
with Secretary of State Cordell Hull as he learned of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
To all outward appearances, it was an uneventful background interview, and DeYoung, Columbolike
in her affect, aroused no suspicions when she broached the de rigueur question: “My colleagues
asked me to ask you this: Did you talk to the Russians about sanctions?”
Flynn declared that he had had no such conversations, absolutely no conversation, he confirmed
again, and the interview, attended by senior National Security Council official and spokesman
Michael Anton, ended soon thereafter.
But later that day, DeYoung called Anton and asked if she could use Flynn’s denial on the record.
Anton said he saw no problem—after all, the White House wanted Flynn’s denial to be clear—and
notified Flynn.
A few hours later, Flynn called Anton back with some worries about the statement. Anton applied
an obvious test: “If you knew that there might be a tape of this conversation that could surface, would
you still be a hundred percent sure?”
Flynn equivocated, and Anton, suddenly concerned, advised him that if he couldn’t be sure they
ought to “walk it back.”
The Post piece, which appeared the next day under three other bylines—indicating that DeYoung’s
interview was hardly the point of the story—contained new leaked details of the Kislyak phone call,
which the Post now said had indeed dealt with the issue of sanctions. The article also contained
Flynn’s denial—“he twice said ‘no’ ”—as well as his walk-back: “On Thursday, Flynn, through his
spokesman, backed away from the denial. The spokesman said Flynn ‘indicated that while he had no
recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.’ ”
After the Post story, Priebus and Bannon questioned Flynn again. Flynn professed not to remember
what he had said; if the subject of sanctions came up, he told them, it was at most glossed over.
Curiously, no one seemed to have actually heard the conversation with Kislyak or seen a transcript.
Meanwhile, the vice president’s people, caught unaware by the sudden Flynn controversy, were
taking particular umbrage, less about Flynn’s possible misrepresentations than about the fact that they
had been kept out of the loop. But the president was undisturbed—or, in one version, “aggressively
defensive”—and, while the greater White House looked on askance, Trump chose to take Flynn with
him to Mar-a-Lago for his scheduled weekend with Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister.
That Saturday night, in a bizarre spectacle, the Mar-a-Lago terrace became a public Situation
Room when President Trump and Prime Minister Abe openly discussed how to respond to North
Korea’s launch of a missile three hundred miles into the Sea of Japan. Standing right over the
president’s shoulder was Michael Flynn. If Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner believed that Flynn’s fate
hung in the balance, the president seemed to have no such doubts.
For the senior White House staff, the underlying concern was less about getting rid of Flynn than
about the president’s relationship with Flynn. What had Flynn, in essence a spy in a soldier’s uniform,
roped the president into? What might they have got up to together?
On Monday morning, Kellyanne Conway appeared on MSNBC and offered a firm defense of the
National Security Advisor. “Yes,” she said, “General Flynn does enjoy the full confidence of the
president.” And while this seemed to many an indication that Conway was out of the loop, it was
more accurately an indication that she had been talking directly to the president.
A White House meeting that morning failed to convince Trump to fire Flynn. He was concerned
about what it would look like to lose his National Security Advisor after just twenty-four days. And
he was adamant about not wanting to blame Flynn for talking to the Russians, even about sanctions. In
Trump’s view, condemning his adviser would connect him to a plot where there was no plot. His fury
wasn’t directed toward Flynn but to the “incidental” wiretap that had surveilled him. Making clear
his confidence in his adviser, Trump insisted that Flynn come to Monday’s lunch with the Canadian
prime minister, Justin Trudeau.
Lunch was followed by another meeting about the furor. There were yet more details of the phone
call and a growing itemization of the money Flynn had been paid by various Russian entities; there
was also increasing focus on the theory that the leaks from the intel community—that is, the whole
Russia mess—was directed at Flynn. Finally, there was a new rationale that Flynn should be fired not
because of his Russian contacts, but because he had lied about them to the vice president. This was a
convenient invention of a chain of command: in fact, Flynn did not report to Vice President Pence, and
he was arguably a good deal more powerful than Pence.
The new rationale appealed to Trump, and he at last agreed that Flynn had to go.
Still, the president did not waiver in his belief in Flynn. Rather, Flynn’s enemies were his
enemies. And Russia was a gun to his head. He might, however ruefully, have had to fire Flynn, but
Flynn was still his guy.
Flynn, ejected from the White House, had become the first established direct link between Trump
and Russia. And depending on what he might say to whom, he was now potentially the most powerful person in Russia.
8
ORG CHART
he White House, realized former naval officer Steve Bannon after a few weeks, was really a
military base, a government-issue office with a mansion’s façade and a few ceremonial rooms
sitting on top of a secure installation under military command. The juxtaposition was striking: military
hierarchy and order in the background, the chaos of the temporary civilian occupants in the fore.
You could hardly find an entity more at odds with military discipline than a Trump organization.
There was no real up-and-down structure, but merely a figure at the top and then everyone else
scrambling for his attention. It wasn’t task-based so much as response-oriented—whatever captured
the boss’s attention focused everybody’s attention. That was the way in Trump Tower, just as it was
now the way in the Trump White House.
The Oval Office itself had been used by prior occupants as the ultimate power symbol, a
ceremonial climax. But as soon as Trump arrived, he moved in a collection of battle flags to frame
him sitting at his desk, and the Oval immediately became the scene of a daily Trump cluster-fuck. It’s
likely that more people had easy access to this president than any president before. Nearly all
meetings in the Oval with the president were invariably surrounded and interrupted by a long list of
retainers—indeed, everybody strove to be in every meeting. Furtive people skulked around without
clear purpose: Bannon invariably found some reason to study papers in the corner and then to have a
last word; Priebus kept his eye on Bannon; Kushner kept constant tabs on the whereabouts of the
others. Trump liked to keep Hicks, Conway, and, often, his old Apprentice sidekick Omarosa
Manigault—now with a confounding White House title—in constant hovering presence. As always,
Trump wanted an eager audience, encouraging as many people as possible to make as many attempts
as possible to be as close to him as possible. In time, however, he would take derisive notice of those
who seemed most eager to suck up to him.
Good management reduces ego. But in the Trump White House, it could often seem that nothing
happened, that reality simply did not exist, if it did not happen in Trump’s presence. This made an
upside-down kind of sense: if something happened and he wasn’t present, he didn’t care about it and
barely recognized it. His response then was often just a blank stare. It also fed one theory of why
hiring in the West Wing and throughout the executive branch was so slow—filling out the vast
bureaucracy was out of his view and thus he couldn’t care less. Likewise, visitors with appointments
were befuddled by the West Wing’s own lack of staff: after being greeted with a smart military salute
by the dress marine at the West Wing door, they discovered that the West Wing often lacked a
political-appointee receptionist, leaving guests to find their own way through the warren that was the
Western world’s pinnacle of power.
Trump, a former military academy cadet—albeit not an enthusiastic one—had touted a return to
military values and expertise. In fact, he most of all sought to preserve his personal right to defy or
ignore his own organization. This, too, made sense, since not really having an organization was the
most efficient way to sidestep the people in your organization and to dominate them. It was just one
irony of his courtship of admired military figures like James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and John Kelly:
they found themselves working in an administration that was in every way inimical to basic command
principles.
* * *
Almost from the beginning, the West Wing was run against the near-daily report that the person
charged with running it, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, was about to lose his job. Or, if he was not
about to lose his job, the only reason he was keeping it was that he had not had it long enough to yet
be fired from it. But no one in Trump’s inner circle doubted that he would lose his job as soon as,
practically speaking, his losing it would not embarrass the president too much. So, they reasoned, no
one need pay any attention to him. Priebus, who, during the transition, doubted he would make it to the
inauguration, and then, once in, wondered if he could endure the torture for the minimally respectable
period of a year, shortly reduced his goal to six months.
The president himself, absent any organizational rigor, often acted as his own chief of staff, or, in a
sense, elevated the press secretary job to the primary staff job, and then functioned as his own press
secretary—reviewing press releases, dictating quotes, getting reporters on the phone—which left the
actual press secretary as a mere flunky and whipping boy. Moreover, his relatives acted as ad hoc
general managers of whatever areas they might choose to be general managers in. Then there was
Bannon, conducting something of an alternate-universe operation, often launching far-reaching
undertakings that no one else knew about. And thus Priebus, at the center of an operation that had no
center, found it easy to think there was no reason for him to be there at all.
At the same time, the president seemed to like Priebus more and more quite for the reason that he
seemed entirely expendable. He took Trump’s verbal abuse about his height and stature affably, or
anyway stoically. He was a convenient punching bag when things went wrong—and he didn’t punch
back, to Trump’s pleasure and disgust.
“I love Reince,” said the president, with the faintest praise. “Who else would do this job?”
Among the three men with effectively equal rank in the West Wing—Priebus and Bannon and
Kushner—only a shared contempt kept them from ganging up on one another.
In the early days of Trump’s presidency, the situation seemed clear to everybody: three men were
fighting to run the White House, to be the real chief of staff and power behind the Trump throne. And
of course there was Trump himself, who didn’t want to relinquish power to anyone.
In these crosshairs was thirty-two-year-old Katie Walsh.
* * *
Walsh, the White House deputy chief of staff, represented, at least to herself, a certain Republican
ideal: clean, brisk, orderly, efficient. A righteous bureaucrat, pretty but with a permanently grim
expression, Walsh was a fine example of the many political professionals in whom competence and
organizational skills transcend ideology. (To wit: “I would much rather be part of an organization that
has a clear chain of command that I disagree with than a chaotic organization that might seem to better
reflect my views.”) Walsh was an inside-the-Beltway figure—a swamp creature. Her expertise was
prioritizing Beltway goals, coordinating Beltway personnel, marshaling Beltway resources. A headdown-
get-things-done kind of person was how she saw herself. And no nonsense.
“Any time someone goes into a meeting with the president there are like sixty-five things that have
to happen first,” she enumerated. “What cabinet secretary has to be alerted about what person is going
in there; what people on the Hill should be consulted; the president needs a policy briefing, so who’s
owning the brief and getting it to appropriate staff members, oh and by the way you have to vet the
guy. . . . Then you have to give it to comms and figure out if it’s a national story, a regional story and
are we doing op-eds, going on national TV . . . and that’s before you get to political affairs or public
liaison. . . . And for anybody who meets with the president, it has to be explained why other people
are not meeting with him, or else they’ll go out there and shit all over the last person who was in. . . .”
Walsh was what politics is supposed to be—or what it has been. A business supported by, tended
to, and, indeed, ennobled, by a professional political class. Politics, evident in the sameness and
particular joylessness of Washington dress, a determined anti-fashion statement, is about procedure
and temperament. Flash passes. No flash stays in the game.
From an all-girl Catholic school in St. Louis (still wearing a diamond cross around her neck) and
volunteer work on local political campaigns, Walsh went to George Washington University—D.C.
area colleges being among the most reliable feeders of swamp talent (government is not really an Ivy
League profession). Most government and political organizations are not run, for better or worse, by
MBAs, but by young people distinguished only by their earnestness and public sector idealism and
ambition. (It is an anomaly of Republican politics that young people motivated to work in the public
sector find themselves working to limit the public sector.) Careers advance by how well you learn on
the job and how well you get along with the rest of the swamp and play its game.
In 2008, Walsh became the McCain campaign’s midwest regional finance director—having
majored in marketing and finance at GW, she was trusted to hold the checkbook. Then on to deputy
finance director of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, deputy finance director and then
finance director of the Republican National Committee, and finally, pre-White House, chief of staff of
the RNC and its chairman, Reince Priebus.
In retrospect, the key moment in saving the Trump campaign might be less the Mercer-led takeover
and imposition of Bannon and Conway in mid-August than the acceptance that the bare-bones and still
largely one-man organization would need to depend on the largesse of the RNC. The RNC had the
ground game and the data infrastructure; other campaigns might not normally trust the national
committee, with its many snakes in the grass, but the Trump campaign had chosen not to build this sort
of organization or make this investment. In late August, Bannon and Conway, with Kushner’s consent,
made a deal with the deep-swamp RNC despite Trump’s continued insistence that they’d gotten this
far without the RNC, so why come crawling now?
Almost right away Walsh became a key player in the campaign, a dedicated, make-the-trains-runon-
time power centralizer—a figure without which few organizations can run. Commuting between
RNC headquarters in Washington and Trump Tower, she was the quartermaster who made national
political resources available to the campaign.
If Trump himself was often a disruption in the final months of the race and during the transition, the
campaign around him, in part because its only option was to smoothly integrate with the RNC, was a
vastly more responsive and unified organization than, say, the Hillary Clinton campaign with its
significantly greater resources. Facing catastrophe and seeming certain humiliation, the Trump
campaign pulled together—with Priebus, Bannon, and Kushner all starring in buddy-movie roles.
The camaraderie barely survived a few days in the West Wing.
* * *
To Katie Walsh, it became almost immediately clear that the common purpose of the campaign and the
urgency of the transition were lost as soon as the Trump team stepped into the White House. They had
gone from managing Donald Trump to the expectation of being managed by him—or at least through
him and almost solely for his purposes. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure
from governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific ideas about how to turn his
themes and vitriol into policy, nor a team that could reasonably unite behind him.
In most White Houses, policy and action flow down, with staff trying to implement what the
president wants—or, at the very least, what the chief of staff says the president wants. In the Trump
White House, policy making, from the very first instance of Bannon’s immigration EO, flowed up. It
was a process of suggesting, in throw-it-against-the-wall style, what the president might want, and
hoping he might then think that he had thought of this himself (a result that was often helped along with
the suggestion that he had in fact already had the thought).
Trump, observed Walsh, had a set of beliefs and impulses, much of them on his mind for many
years, some of them fairly contradictory, and little of them fitting legislative or political conventions
or form. Hence, she and everyone else was translating a set of desires and urges into a program, a
process that required a lot of guess work. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to figure out what a child
wants.”
But making suggestions was deeply complicated. Here was, arguably, the central issue of the
Trump presidency, informing every aspect of Trumpian policy and leadership: he didn’t process
information in any conventional sense—or, in a way, he didn’t process it at all.
Trump didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. If it was print, it might as well not exist. Some
believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than semiliterate. (There was some argument
about this, because he could read headlines and articles about himself, or at least headlines on
articles about himself, and the gossip squibs on the New York Post’s Page Six.) Some thought him
dyslexic; certainly his comprehension was limited. Others concluded that he didn’t read because he
just didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate
—total television.
But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted
his own expertise—no matter how paltry or irrelevant—more than anyone else’s. What’s more, he
had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you were worthy of attention.
The organization therefore needed a set of internal rationalizations that would allow it to trust a
man who, while he knew little, was entirely confident of his own gut instincts and reflexive opinions,
however frequently they might change.
Here was a key Trump White House rationale: expertise, that liberal virtue, was overrated. After
all, so often people who had worked hard to know what they knew made the wrong decisions. So
maybe the gut was as good, or maybe better, at getting to the heart of the matter than the wonkish and
data-driven inability to see the forest for the trees that often seemed to plague U.S. policy making.
Maybe. Hopefully.
Of course, nobody really believed that, except the president himself.
Still, here was the basic faith, overriding his impetuousness and eccentricities and limited
knowledge base: nobody became the president of the United States—that camel-through-the-eye-ofthe-
needle accomplishment—without unique astuteness and cunning. Right? In the early days of the
White House, this was the fundamental hypothesis of the senior staff, shared by Walsh and everyone
else: Trump must know what he was doing, his intuition must be profound.
But then there was the other aspect of his supposedly superb insight and apprehension, and it was
hard to miss: he was often confident, but he was just as often paralyzed, less a savant in these
instances than a figure of sputtering and dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to
lash out and behave as if his gut, however silent and confused, was in fact in some clear and forceful
way telling him what to do.
During the campaign, he became a kind of vaunted action figure. His staff marveled at his
willingness to keep moving, getting back on the plane and getting off the plane and getting back on,
and doing rally after rally, with a pride in doing more events than anybody else—double Hillary’s!—
and ever ridiculing his opponent’s slow pace. He performed. “This man never takes a break from
being Donald Trump,” noted Bannon, with a complicated sort of faint praise, a few weeks after
joining the campaign full time.
It was during Trump’s early intelligence briefings, held soon after he captured the nomination, that
alarm signals first went off among his new campaign staff: he seemed to lack the ability to take in
third-party information. Or maybe he lacked the interest; whichever, he seemed almost phobic about
having formal demands on his attention. He stonewalled every written page and balked at every
explanation. “He’s a guy who really hated school,” said Bannon. “And he’s not going to start liking it
now.”
However alarming, Trump’s way of operating also presented an opportunity to the people in
closest proximity to him: by understanding him, by observing the kind of habits and reflexive
responses that his business opponents had long learned to use to their advantage, they might be able to
game him, to move him. Still, while he might be moved today, nobody underestimated the
complexities of continuing to move him in the same direction tomorrow.
* * *
One of the ways to establish what Trump wanted and where he stood and what his underlying policy
intentions were—or at least the intentions that you could convince him were his—came to involve an
improbably close textual analysis of his largely off-the-cuff speeches, random remarks, and reflexive
tweets during the campaign.
Bannon doggedly went through the Trump oeuvre highlighting possible insights and policy
proscriptions. Part of Bannon’s authority in the new White House was as keeper of the Trump
promises, meticulously logged onto the white board in his office. Some of these promises Trump
enthusiastically remembered making, others he had little memory of, but was happy to accept that he
had said it. Bannon acted as disciple and promoted Trump to guru—or inscrutable God.
This devolved into a further rationalization, or Trump truth: “The president was very clear on
what he wanted to deliver to the American public,” said Walsh. He was “excellent in communicating
this.” At the same time, she acknowledged that it was not at all clear in any specific sense what he
wanted. Hence, there was another rationalization: Trump was “inspirational not operational.”
Kushner, understanding that Bannon’s white board represented Bannon’s agenda more than the
president’s agenda, got to wondering how much of this source text was being edited by Bannon. He
made several attempts to comb through his father-in-law’s words on his own before expressing
frustration with the task and giving up.
Mick Mulvaney, the former South Carolina congressman now head of the Office of Management
and Budget and directly charged with creating the Trump budget that would underlie the White House
program, also fell back on the Trump spoken record. Bob Woodward’s 1994 book, The Agenda, is a
blow-by-blow account of the first eighteen months of the Clinton White House, most of it focused on
creating the Clinton budget, with the single largest block of the president’s time devoted to deep
contemplation and arguments about how to allocate resources. In Trump’s case, this sort of close and
continuous engagement was inconceivable; budgeting was simply too small-bore for him.
“The first couple of times when I went to the White House, someone had to say, This is Mick
Mulvaney, he’s the budget director,” said Mulvaney. And in Mulvaney’s telling Trump was too
scattershot to ever be of much help, tending to interrupt planning with random questions that seem to
have come from someone’s recent lobbying or by some burst of free association. If Trump cared about
something, he usually already had a fixed view based on limited information. If he didn’t care, he had
no view and no information. Hence, the Trump budget team was also largely forced to return to
Trump’s speeches when searching for the general policy themes they could then fasten into a budget
program.
* * *
Walsh, sitting within sight of the Oval Office, was located at something like the ground zero of the
information flow between the president and his staff. As Trump’s primary scheduler, her job was to
ration the president’s time and organize the flow of information to him around the priorities that the
White House had set. In this, Walsh became the effective middle person among the three men working
hardest to maneuver the president—Bannon, Kushner, and Priebus.
Each man saw the president as something of a blank page—or a scrambled one. And each, Walsh
came to appreciate with increasing incredulity, had a radically different idea of how to fill or remake
that page. Bannon was the alt-right militant. Kushner was the New York Democrat. And Priebus was
the establishment Republican. “Steve wants to force a million people out of the country and repeal the
nation’s health law and lay on a bunch of tariffs that will completely decimate how we trade, and
Jared wants to deal with human trafficking and protecting Planned Parenthood.” And Priebus wanted
Donald Trump to be another kind of Republican altogether.
As Walsh saw it, Steve Bannon was running the Steve Bannon White House, Jared Kushner was
running the Michael Bloomberg White House, and Reince Priebus was running the Paul Ryan White
House. It was a 1970s video game, the white ball pinging back and forth in the black triangle.
Priebus—who was supposed to be the weak link, thus allowing both Bannon and Kushner,
variously, to be the effective chief of staff—was actually turning out to be quite a barking dog, even if
a small one. In the Bannon world and in the Kushner world, Trumpism represented politics with no
connection to the Republican mainstream, with Bannon reviling that mainstream and Kushner
operating as a Democrat. Priebus, meanwhile, was the designated mainstream terrier.
Bannon and Kushner were therefore more than a little irritated to discover that the unimposing
Priebus had an agenda of his own: heeding Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s prescription that “this
president will sign whatever is put in front of him,” while also taking advantage of the White House’s
lack of political and legislative experience and outsourcing as much policy as possible to Capitol
Hill.
In the early weeks of the administration, Priebus arranged for House Speaker Paul Ryan, however
much a Trumpist bête noire for much of the campaign, to come into the White House with a group of
ranking committee chairmen. In the meeting, the president blithely announced that he had never had
much patience for committees and so was glad someone else did. Ryan, henceforth, became another
figure with unfettered access to the president—and to whom the president, entirely uninterested in
legislative strategy or procedures, granted virtual carte blanche.
Almost nobody represented what Bannon opposed as well as Paul Ryan. The essence of
Bannonism (and Mercerism) was a radical isolationism, a protean protectionism, and a determined
Keynesianism. Bannon ascribed these principles to Trumpism, and they ran as counter to
Republicanism as it was perhaps possible to get. What’s more, Bannon found Ryan, in theory the
House’s policy whiz, to be slow-witted if not incompetent, and an easy and constant target of
Bannon’s under-his-breath ridicule. Still, if the president had unaccountably embraced Priebus-Ryan,
he also could not do without Bannon.
Bannon’s unique ability—partly through becoming more familiar with the president’s own words
than the president was himself, and partly through a cunning self-effacement (upended by his bursts of
self-promotion)—was to egg the president on by convincing him that Bannon’s own views were
entirely derived from the president’s views. Bannon didn’t promote internal debate, provide policy
rationale, or deliver Power-Point presentations; instead, he was the equivalent of Trump’s personal
talk radio. Trump could turn him on at any moment, and it pleased him that Bannon’s pronouncements
and views would consistently be fully formed and ever available, a bracing, unified-field narrative.
As well, he could turn him off, and Bannon would be tactically quiet until turned on again.
Kushner had neither Bannon’s policy imagination nor Priebus’s institutional ties. But, of course, he
had family status, carrying its own high authority. In addition, he had billionaire status. He had
cultivated a wide range of New York and international money people, Trump acquaintances and
cronies, and, often, people whom Trump would have wished to like him better than they did. In this,
Kushner became the representative in the White House of the liberal status quo. He was something
like what used to be called a Rockefeller Republican and now might more properly be a Goldman
Sachs Democrat. He—and, perhaps even more, Ivanka—was at diametric odds with both Priebus, the
stout-right, Sun Belt–leaning, evangelical dependent Republican, and Bannon, the alt-right, populist,
anti-party disruptor.
From their separate corners each man pursued his own strategy. Bannon did all he could to roll
over Priebus and Kushner in an effort to prosecute the war for Trumpism/Bannonism as quickly as
possible. Priebus, already complaining about “political neophytes and the boss’s relatives,”
subcontracted his agenda out to Ryan and the Hill. And Kushner, on one of the steepest learning
curves in the history of politics (not that everyone in the White House wasn’t on a steep curve, but
Kushner’s was perhaps the steepest), and often exhibiting a painful naïveté as he aspired to be one of
the world’s savviest players, was advocating doing nothing fast and everything in moderation. Each
had coteries opposed to the other: Bannonites pursued their goal of breaking everything fast,
Priebus’s RNC faction focused on the opportunities for the Republican agenda, Kushner and his wife
did their best to make their unpredictable relative look temperate and rational.
And in the middle was Trump.
* * *
“The three gentlemen running things,” as Walsh came to coolly characterize them, all served Trump in
different ways. Walsh understood that Bannon provided the president with inspiration and purpose,
while the Priebus-Ryan connection promised to do what to Trump seemed like the specialized work
of government. For his part, Kushner best coordinated the rich men who spoke to Trump at night, with
Kushner often urging them to caution him against both Bannon and Priebus.
The three advisers were in open conflict by the end of the second week following the immigration
EO and travel ban debacle. This internal rivalry was the result of stylistic, philosophic, and
temperamental differences; perhaps more important, it was the direct result of the lack of a rational
org chart or chain of command. For Walsh, it was a daily process of managing an impossible task:
almost as soon as she received direction from one of the three men, she would be countermanded by
one or another of them.
“I take a conversation at face value and move forward with it,” she defended herself. “I put what
was decided on the schedule and bring in comms and build a press plan around it and bring in
political affairs and office of public liaison. And then Jared says, Why did you do that. And I say,
‘Because we had a meeting three days ago with you and Reince and Steve where you agreed to do
this.’ And he says, ‘But that didn’t mean I wanted it on the schedule. That’s not why I had that
conversation.’ It almost doesn’t matter what anyone says: Jared will agree, and then it will get
sabotaged, and then Jared goes to the president and says, See, that was Reince’s idea or Steve’s
idea.”
Bannon concentrated on a succession of EOs that would move the new administration forward
without having to wade through Congress. That focus was countermanded by Priebus, who was
cultivating the Trump-Ryan romance and the Republican agenda, which in turn was countermanded by
Kushner, who was concentrating on presidential bonhomie and CEO roundtables, not least because he
knew how much the president liked them (and, as Bannon pointed out, because Kushner himself liked
them). And instead of facing the inherent conflicts in each strategy, the three men recognized that the
conflicts were largely irresolvable and avoided facing that fact by avoiding each other.
Each man had, in his own astute fashion, found his own way to appeal to the president and to
communicate with him. Bannon offered a rousing fuck-you show of force; Priebus offered flattery
from the congressional leadership; Kushner offered the approval of blue-chip businessmen. So strong
were these particular appeals that the president typically preferred not to distinguish among them.
They were all exactly what he wanted from the presidency, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t
have them all. He wanted to break things, he wanted a Republican Congress to give him bills to sign,
and he wanted the love and respect of New York machers and socialites. Some inside the White
House perceived that Bannon’s EOs were meant to be a workaround in response to Priebus’s
courtship of the party, and that Kushner’s CEOs were appalled by Bannon’s EOs and resistant to
much of the Republican agenda. But if the president understood this, it did not particularly trouble
him.
* * *
Having achieved something like executive paralysis within the first month of the new administration
—each of the three gentlemen was as powerful in his allure to the president as the others and each, at
times, was equally annoying to the president—Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner all built their own
mechanisms to influence the president and undermine the others.
Analysis or argument or PowerPoint did not work. But who said what to Trump and when often
did. If, at Bannon’s prodding, Rebekah Mercer called him, that had an effect. Priebus could count on
Paul Ryan’s clout with him. If Kushner set up Murdoch to call, that registered. At the same time, each
successive call mostly canceled the others out.
This paralysis led the three advisers to rely on the other particularly effective way to move him,
which was to use the media. Hence each man became an inveterate and polished leaker. Bannon and
Kushner studiously avoided press exposure; two of the most powerful people in government were, for
the most part, entirely silent, eschewing almost all interviews and even the traditional political
conversations on Sunday morning television. Curiously, however, both men became the background
voices to virtually all media coverage of the White House. Early on, before getting down to attacking
each other, Bannon and Kushner were united in their separate offensives against Priebus. Kushner’s
preferred outlet was Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski’s Morning Joe, one of the president’s
certain morning shows. Bannon’s first port of call was the alt-right media (“Bannon’s Breitbart
shenanigans,” in Walsh’s view). By the end of the first month in the White House, Bannon and
Kushner had each built a network of primary outlets, as well as secondary ones to deflect from the
obviousness of the primary ones, creating a White House that simultaneously displayed extreme
animosity toward the press and yet great willingness to leak to it. In this, at least, Trump’s
administration was achieving a landmark transparency.
The constant leaking was often blamed on lower minions and permanent executive branch staff,
culminating in late February with an all-hands meeting of staffers called by Sean Spicer—cell phones
surrendered at the door—during which the press secretary issued threats of random phone checks and
admonitions about the use of encrypted texting apps. Everybody was a potential leaker; everybody
was accusing everybody else of being a leaker.
Everybody was a leaker.
One day, when Kushner accused Walsh of leaking about him, she challenged him back: “My phone
records versus yours, my email versus yours.”
But most of the leaks, certainly the juiciest ones, were coming from the higher-ups—not to mention
from the person occupying the topmost echelon.
The president couldn’t stop talking. He was plaintive and self-pitying, and it was obvious to
everyone that if he had a north star, it was just to be liked. He was ever uncomprehending about why
everyone did not like him, or why it should be so difficult to get everyone to like him. He might be
happy throughout the day as a parade of union steel workers or CEOs trooped into the White House,
with the president praising his visitors and them praising him, but that good cheer would sour in the
evening after several hours of cable television. Then he would get on the phone, and in unguarded
ramblings to friends and others, conversations that would routinely last for thirty or forty minutes, and
could go much longer, he would vent, largely at the media and his staff. In what was termed by some
of the self-appointed Trump experts around him—and everyone was a Trump expert—he seemed
intent on “poisoning the well,” in which he created a loop of suspicion, disgruntlement, and blame
heaped on others.
When the president got on the phone after dinner, it was often a rambling affair. In paranoid or
sadistic fashion, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of each member of his staff. Bannon was
disloyal (not to mention he always looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short—
a midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Spicer was stupid (and looks terrible too). Conway was a
crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have come to Washington.
His callers, largely because they found his conversation peculiar, alarming, or completely contrary
to reason and common sense, often overrode what they might otherwise have assumed to be the
confidential nature of the calls and shared the content with someone else. Hence news about the inner
workings of the White House went into free circulation. Except it was not so much the inner workings
of the White House—although it would often be reported as such—but the perambulations of the
president’s mind, which changed direction almost as fast as he could express himself. Yet there were
constant tropes in his own narrative: Bannon was about to be cast out, Priebus too, and Kushner
needed his protection from the other bullies.
So if Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner were now fighting a daily war with one another, it was
mightily exacerbated by something of a running disinformation campaign about them that was being
prosecuted by the president himself. A chronic naysayer, he viewed each member of his inner circle
as a problem child whose fate he held in his hand. “We are sinners and he is God” was one view;
“We serve at the president’s displeasure,” another.
* * *
In the West Wing of every administration since at least that of Clinton and Gore, the vice president has
occupied a certain independent power base in the organization. And yet Vice President Mike Pence—
the fallback guy in an administration the length of whose term remained the subject of something like a
national office betting pool—was a cipher, a smiling presence either resisting his own obvious power
or unable to seize it.
“I do funerals and ribbon cuttings,” he told a former Republican Hill colleague. In this, he was
seen as either feigning an old-fashioned, what-me-worry, standard-issue veep identity lest he upset
his patron or, in fact, honestly acknowledging who he was.
Katie Walsh, amid the chaos, saw the vice president’s office as a point of calm in the storm.
Pence’s staff was not only known by people outside the White House for the alacrity with which it
returned calls and for the ease with which it seemed to accomplish West Wing tasks, it also seemed to
be comprised of people who liked each other and who were dedicated to a common goal: eliminating
as much friction as possible around the vice president.
Pence started nearly every speech saying, “I bring greetings from our forty-fifth president of the
United States, Donald J. Trump . . .”—a salutation directed more to the president than to the audience.
Pence cast himself as blandly uninteresting, sometimes barely seeming to exist in the shadow of
Donald Trump. Little leaked out of the Pence side of the White House. The people who worked for
the vice president, were, like Pence himself, people of few words.
In a sense, he had solved the riddle of how to serve as the junior partner to a president who could
not tolerate any kind of comparisons: extreme self-effacement.
“Pence,” said Walsh, “is not dumb.”
Actually, well short of intelligent was exactly how others in the West Wing saw him. And because
he wasn’t smart, he was not able to provide any leadership ballast.
On the Jarvanka side, Pence became a point of grateful amusement. He was almost absurdly happy
to be Donald Trump’s vice president, happy to play the role of exactly the kind of vice president that
would not ruffle Trump’s feathers. The Jarvanka side credited Pence’s wife, Karen, as the guiding
hand behind his convenient meekness. Indeed, he took to this role so well that, later, his extreme
submissiveness struck some as suspicious.
The Priebus side, where Walsh firmly sat, saw Pence as one of the few senior West Wing figures
who treated Priebus as though he was truly the chief of staff. Pence often seemed like a mere staffer,
the ever present note taker in so many meetings.
From the Bannon side, Pence garnered only contempt. “Pence is like the husband in Ozzie and
Harriet, a nonevent,” said one Bannonite.
Although many saw him as a vice president who might well assume the presidency someday, he
was also perceived as the weakest vice president in decades and, in organizational terms, an empty
suit who was useless in the daily effort to help restrain the president and stabilize the West Wing.
* * *
During that first month, Walsh’s disbelief and even fear about what was happening in the White House
moved her to think about quitting. Every day after that became its own countdown toward the moment
she knew she wouldn’t be able to take it anymore—which would finally come at the end of March. To
Walsh, the proud political pro, the chaos, the rivalries, and the president’s own lack of focus and lack
of concern were simply incomprehensible.
In early March, Walsh confronted Kushner and demanded: “Just give me the three things the
president wants to focus on. What are the three priorities of this White House?”

“Yes,” said Kushner, wholly absent an answer, “we should probably have that conversation.”