fire and fury chapter 9&10

9
CPAC
n February 23, a 75-degree day in Washington, the president woke up complaining about an
overheated White House. But for once, the president’s complaints were not the main concern.
The excited focus in the West Wing was organizing a series of car pools out to the Conservative
Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of conservative movement activists, which had
outgrown the accommodations of Washington hotels and moved to the Gaylord Resort on Maryland’s
National Harbor waterfront. CPAC, right of right-of-center and trying to hold steady there, ambivalent
about all the conservative vectors that further diverged from that point, had long had an uncomfortable
relationship with Trump, viewing him as an unlikely conservative, if not a charlatan. CPAC, too, saw
Bannon and Breitbart as practicing an outré conservatism. For several years Breitbart had staged a
nearby competitive conference dubbed “The Uninvited.”
But the Trump White House would dominate or even subsume the conference this year, and
everybody wanted to turn out for this sweet moment. The president, set to speak on the second day,
would, like Ronald Reagan, address the conference in his first year in office, whereas both Bushes,
wary of CPAC and conservative activists, had largely snubbed the gathering.
Kellyanne Conway, a conference opener, was accompanied by her assistant, two daughters, and a
babysitter. Bannon was making his first official pubic appearance of the Trump presidency, and his
retinue included Rebekah Mercer, the pivotal Trump donor and Breitbart funder, her young daughter,
and Allie Hanley, a Palm Beach aristocrat, conservative donor, and Mercer friend. (The imperious
Hanley, who had not met Bannon before, pronounced him “dirty” looking.)
Bannon was scheduled to be interviewed in the afternoon session by CPAC chairman Matt
Schlapp, a figure of strained affability who seemed to be trying to embrace the Trump takeover of his
conference. A few days before, Bannon had decided to add Priebus to the interview, as both a private
gesture of goodwill and a public display of unity—a sign of a budding alliance against Kushner.
In nearby Alexandria, Virginia, Richard Spencer, the president of the National Policy Institute,
which is sometimes described as a “white supremacist think tank,” who had, peskily for the White
House, adopted the Trump presidency as a personal victory, was organizing his trip to CPAC, which
would be as much a victory march for him as it was for the Trump team. Spencer—who, in 2016, he
had declared, “Let’s party like it’s 1933,” as in the year Hitler came to power—provoked an outcry
with his widely covered “Heil Trump” (or “Hail Trump,” which of course amounts to the same thing)
salute after the election, and then achieved a kind of reverse martyrdom by taking a punch from a
protester on Inauguration Day that was memorialized on YouTube.
CPAC, organized by the remnants of the conservative movement after Barry Goldwater’s
apocalyptic defeat in 1964, had, with stoic indefatigability, turned itself into the backbone of
conservative survival and triumph. It had purged John Birchers and the racist right and embraced the
philosophic conservative tenets of Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley. In time, it endorsed Reaganera
small government and antiregulatory reform, and then added the components of the cultural wars
—antiabortion, anti-gay-marriage, and a tilt toward evangelicals—and married itself to conservative
media, first right-wing radio and later Fox News. From this agglomeration it spun an ever more
elaborate and all-embracing argument of conservative purity, synchronicity, and intellectual weight.
Part of the fun of a CPAC conference, which attracted a wide assortment of conservative young
people (reliably mocked as the Alex P. Keaton crowd by the growing throng of liberal press that
covered the conference), was the learning of the conservative catechism.
But after a great Clinton surge in the 1990s, CPAC started to splinter during the George W. Bush
years. Fox News became the emotional center of American conservativism. Bush neocons and the
Iraq War were increasingly rejected by the libertarians and other suddenly breakaway factions
(among them the paleocons); the family values right, meanwhile, was more and more challenged by
younger conservatives. In the Obama years, the conservative movement was increasingly bewildered
by Tea Party rejectionism and a new iconoclastic right-wing media, exemplified by Breitbart News,
which was pointedly excluded from the CPAC conference.
In 2011, professing conservative fealty, Trump lobbied the group for a speaking slot and, with
reports of a substantial cash contribution, was awarded a fifteen-minute berth. If CPAC was
supposedly about honing a certain sort of conservative party line, it was also attentive to a wide
variety of conservative celebrities, including, over the years, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and
various Fox News stars. The year before Obama’s reelection, Trump fell into this category. But he
was viewed quite differently four years later. In the winter of 2016, during the still competitive
Republican primary race, Trump—now eyed as much as a Republican apostate as a Republican
crowd pleaser—decided to forgo CPAC and what he feared would be less than a joyous welcome.
This year, as part of its new alignment with the Trump-Bannon White House, CPAC’s personality
headliner was slated to be the alt-right figure Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay British right-wing
provocateur attached to Breitbart News. Yiannopoulos—whose entire position, rather more like a
circa-1968 left-wing provocateur, seemed to be about flouting political correctness and social
convention, resulting in left-wing hysteria and protests against him—was as confounding a
conservative figure as could be imagined. Indeed, there was a subtle suggestion that CPAC had
chosen Yiannopoulos precisely to hoist Bannon and the White House on the implicit connection to
him—Yiannopoulos had been something of a Bannon protégé. When, two days before CPAC opened,
a conservative blogger discovered a video of Yiannopoulos in bizarre revelry seeming to rationalize
pedophilia, the White House made it clear he had to go.
Still, the White House presence at CPAC—which included, along with the president, Bannon,
Conway, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and the oddball White House foreign policy adviser and
former Breitbart writer Sebastian Gorka—seemed to push the Yiannopoulos mess to the side. If
CPAC was always looking to leaven boring politicians with star power, Trump, and anyone
connected him, were now the biggest stars. With her family positioned out in front of a full house,
Conway was interviewed in Oprah-like style by Mercedes Schlapp (wife of Matt Schlapp—CPAC
was a family affair), a columnist for the conservative Washington Times who would later join the
White House communications staff. It was an intimate and inspirational view of a woman of high
achievement, the kind of interview that Conway believed she would have been treated to on network
and cable television if she were not a Trump Republican—the type of treatment, she’d point out, that
had been given to Democratic predecessors like Valerie Jarrett.
At about the time that Conway was explaining her particular brand of antifeminist feminism,
Richard Spencer arrived at the convention center hoping to attend the breakout session “The Alt-Right
Ain’t Right at All,” a modest effort to reaffirm CPAC’s traditional values. Spencer, who since the
Trump victory had committed himself to full-time activism and press opportunities, had planned to
position himself to get in the first question. But almost immediately upon arriving and paying his $150
registration fee, he had attracted first one reporter and then a growing circle, a spontaneous press
scrum, and he responded by giving an ad hoc news conference. Like Yiannopoulos, and in many ways
like Trump and Bannon, Spencer helped frame the ironies of the modern conservative movement. He
was a racist but hardly a conservative—he doggedly supported single-payer health care, for instance.
And the attention he received was somehow less a credit to conservatism than another effort by the
liberal media to smear conservatism. Hence, as the scrum around him increased to as many as thirty
people, the CPAC irony police stepped in.
“You’re not welcome on the property,” announced one of the security guards. “They want you off
the property. They want you to cease. They want you off the property.”
“Wow,” said Spencer. “Can they?”
“Enough debate,” the guard said. “This is private property and CPAC wants you off the property.”
Relieved of his credentials, Spencer was ushered to the CPAC perimeter of the hotel, where, his
pride not all that wounded, he turned, in the comfort of the atrium lounge area, to social media and to
texting and emailing reporters on his contact list.
The point Spencer was making was that his presence here was not really so disruptive or ironic as
Bannon’s, or, for that matter, Trump’s. He might be ejected, but in a larger historical sense it was the
conservatives who were now being ejected from their own movement by the new cadre—which
included Trump and Bannon—of what Spencer called the identitarians, proponents of “white
interests, values, customs, and culture.”
Spencer was, he believed, the true Trumper and the rest of CPAC now the outliers.
* * *
In the green room, after Bannon, Priebus, and their retinues had arrived, Bannon—in dark shirt, dark
jacket, and white pants—stood off to the side talking to his aide, Alexandra Preate. Priebus sat in the
makeup chair, patiently receiving a layer of foundation, powder, and lip gloss.
“Steve—” said Priebus, gesturing to the chair as he got up.
“That’s okay,” said Bannon. He put up his hand, making another of the continual small gestures
meant, pointedly, to define himself as something other than every phony baloney in swampland
politics—and something other than Reince Priebus, with his heavy powder foundation.
The significance of Bannon’s first appearance in public—after days of apparent West Wing
turmoil, a Time magazine cover story about him, nearly endless speculation about his power and true
intentions, and his elevation at least in the media mind to the essential mystery of the Trump White
House—could hardly be underestimated. For Bannon himself this was, in his own mind, a carefully
choreographed moment. It was his victory walk. He had, he thought, prevailed in the West Wing. He
had, again in his own mind, projected his superiority over both Priebus and the idiot son-in-law. And
he would now dominate CPAC. But for the moment he attempted a shucks-nothing-to-it lack of selfconsciousness
even as, at the same time, he was unquestionably the preening man of the hour.
Demurring about accepting makeup was not just a way to belittle Priebus, but also a way to say that,
ever the commando, he went into battle fully exposed.
“You know what he thinks even when you don’t know what he thinks,” explained Alexandra
Preate. “He’s a bit like a good boy who everybody knows is a bad boy.”
When the two men emerged onto the stage and appeared on the big-screen monitors, the contrast
between them could hardly have been greater. The powder made Priebus look mannequin-like, and
his suit with lapel pin, little-boyish. Bannon, the supposedly publicity-shy man, was eating up the
camera. He was a country music star—he was Johnny Cash. He seized Priebus’s hand in a power
handshake, then relaxed in his chair as Priebus came too eagerly forward in his.
Priebus opened with traditional bromides. Bannon, taking his turn, went wryly for the dig: “I want
to thank you for finally inviting me to CPAC.”
“We decided to say that everybody is a part of our conservative family,” said Matt Schlapp,
resigned. He then welcomed “the back of the room,” where the hundreds of reporters covering the
event were positioned.
“Is that the opposition party?” asked Bannon, shielding his eyes.
Schlapp went to the setup question: “We read a lot about you two. Ahem . . .”
“It’s all good,” replied Priebus tightly.
“I’ll bet not all of it’s accurate,” said Schlapp. “I’ll bet there’s things that don’t get written
correctly. Let me ask both of you, what’s the biggest misconception about what’s going on in the
Donald Trump White House?”
Bannon responded with something just less than a smirk and said nothing.
Priebus offered a testimonial to the closeness of his relationship with Bannon.
Bannon, eyes dancing, lifted the microphone trumpetlike and made a joke about Priebus’s
commodious office—two couches and a fireplace—and his own rough-and-ready one.
Priebus hewed to the message. “It’s, ahh . . . it’s actually . . . something that you all have helped
build, which is, when you bring together, and what this election shows, and what President Trump
showed, and let’s not kid ourselves, I can talk about data and ground game and Steve can talk about
big ideas but the truth of the matter is Donald Trump, President Trump, brought together the party and
the conservative movement, and I tell you if the party and the conservative movement are together”—
Priebus knocked his fists—“similar to Steve and I, it can’t be stopped. And President Trump is the
one guy, he was the one person, and I can say this after overseeing sixteen people kill each other, it
was Donald Trump who was able to bring this country, this party, and this movement together. And
Steve and I know that and we live it every day and our job is to get the agenda of President Trump
through the door and on pen and paper.”
With Priebus gasping for breath, Bannon snatched the relay baton. “I think if you look at the
opposition party”—throwing his hand out to the back of the room—“and how they portrayed the
campaign, how they portrayed the transition, and now how they are portraying the administration, it’s
always wrong. I mean on the very first day that Kellyanne and I started, we reached out to Reince,
Sean Spicer, Katie. . . . It’s the same team, you know, that every day was grinding away at the
campaign, the same team that did the transition, and if you remember, the campaign was the most
chaotic, in the media’s description, most chaotic, most disorganized, most unprofessional, had no
earthly idea what they were doing, and then you saw ’em all crying and weeping that night on
November 8.”
Back in the White House, Jared Kushner, watching the proceedings casually and then more
attentively, suddenly felt a rising anger. Thin-skinned, defensive, on guard, he perceived Bannon’s
speech as a message sent directly to him. Bannon has just credited the Trump victory to everybody
else. Kushner was certain he was being taunted.
When Schlapp asked the two men to enumerate the accomplishments of the last thirty days, Priebus
floundered and then seized on Judge Gorsuch and the deregulation executive orders, all things, said
Priebus, “that”—he paused, struggling—“eighty percent of Americans agree with.”
After a brief pause, as though waiting for the air to clear, Bannon raised the microphone: “I kind of
break it down into three verticals, three buckets; the first, national security and sovereignty, and that’s
your intelligence, defense department, homeland security. The second line of work is what I refer to
as economic nationalism, and that is Wilbur Ross at Commerce, Steve Mnuchin at Treasury, [Robert]
Lighthizer at Trade, Peter Navarro, [and] Stephen Miller, who are rethinking how we are going to
reconstruct our trade arrangements around the world. The third, broadly, line of work is
deconstruction of the administrative state—” Bannon stopped for a moment; the phrase, which had
never before been uttered in American politics, drew wild applause. “The way the progressive left
runs is that if they can’t get it passed they’re just going to put it in some sort of regulation in an
agency. That’s all going to be deconstructed.”
Schlapp fed another setup question, this one about the media.
Priebus grabbed it, rambled and fumphered for a while, and ended up, somehow, on a positive
note: We’ll all come together.
Lifting the microphone, once again Joshua-like, and with a sweeping wave of his hand, Bannon
pronounced, “It’s not only not going to get better, it’s going to get worse every day”—his fundamental
apocalyptic song—“and here’s why—and by the way, the internal logic makes sense, corporatist,
globalist media, that are adamantly opposed, adamantly opposed, to an economic nationalist agenda
like Donald Trump has. And here’s why it’s going to get worse: because he’s going to continue to
press his agenda. And as economic conditions continue to get better, as more jobs get better, they’re
going to continue to fight. If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight you
are sadly mistaken. Every day it is going to be a fight. This is why I’m proudest of Donald Trump. All
the opportunities he had to waver off this. All the people he had coming to him saying ‘Oh, you got to
moderate.’ ” Another dig at Kushner. “Every day in the Oval Office he tells Reince and me, ‘I
committed this to the American people. I promised this when I ran. And I’m going to deliver on this.’
”
And then the final, agreed-upon-beforehand question: “Can this Trump movement be combined
with what’s happening at CPAC and other conservative movements for fifty years? Can this be
brought together . . . and is this going to save the country?”
“Well, we have to stick together as a team,” said Priebus. “It’s gonna take all of us working
together to make it happen.”
As Bannon started into his answer, he spoke slowly, looking out at his captive and riveted
audience: “I’ve said that there is a new political order being formed out of this and it’s still being
formed. If you look at the wide degree of opinions in this room, whether you are a populist, whether
you’re a limited-government conservative, whether you’re a libertarian, whether you’re an economic
nationalist, we have wide and sometimes divergent opinions, but I think the center core of what we
believe, that we’re a nation with an economy, not an economy just in some global market place with
open borders, but that we are a nation with a culture, and a reason for being. I think that’s what unites
us. And that’s what’s going to unite this movement going forward.”
Bannon lowered the microphone to, after what might be interpreted as a beat of uncertainty,
suddenly thunderous applause.
Watching from the White House, Kushner—who had come to believe that there was something
insidious when Bannon used the words “borders,” “global,” “culture,” and “unite,” and who was
more and more convinced that they were personally directed against him—was now in a rage.
* * *
Kellyanne Conway had increasingly been worrying about the seventy-year-old president’s
sleeplessness and his worn look. It was the president’s indefatigability—a constant restlessness—that
she believed carried the team. On the campaign trail, he would always add stops and speeches. He
doubled his own campaign time. Hillary worked at half time; he worked at double time. He sucked in
the energy from the crowds. Now that he was living alone in the White House, though, he had seemed
to lose a step.
But today he was back. He had been under the sunlamp and lightened his hair, and when the
climate-change-denying president woke up on another springlike morning, 77 degrees in the middle of
winter, on the second day of CPAC, he seemed practically a different person, or anyway a noticeably
younger one. At the appointed hour, to the locked-down ballroom at the Gaylord Resort, filled to
capacity with all stripes of the conservative faithful—Rebekah Mercer and her daughter up front—
and hundreds of media people in an SRO gallery, the president emerged onto the stage, not in an
energetic television-style rush, but with a slow swagger to the low strains of “I’m Proud to Be an
American.” He came to the stage as a political strongman, a man occupying his moment, clapping—
here he reverted to entertainer pose—as he slowly approached the podium, mouthing “Thank you,”
crimson tie dipping over his belt.
This would be Trump’s fifth CPAC address. As much as Steve Bannon liked to see himself as the
author of Donald Trump, he also seemed to find it proof of some added legitimacy—and somehow
amazing in itself—that since 2011 Trump had basically come to CPAC with the same message. He
wasn’t a cipher, he was a messenger. The country was a “mess”—a word that had stood the Trump
test of time. Its leaders were weak. Its greatness had been lost. The only thing different was that in
2011 he was still reading his speeches with only occasional ad-libs, and now he ad-libbed
everything.
“My first major speech was at CPAC,” the president began. “Probably five or six years ago. My
first major political speech. You were there. I loved it. I loved the people. I loved the commotion.
They did these polls where I went through the roof. I wasn’t even running, right? But it gave me an
idea! And I got a little bit concerned when I saw what was happening in the country so I said let’s go
to it. It was very exciting. I walked the stage at CPAC. I had very little notes and even less
preparation.” (In fact, he read his 2011 speech from a sheet of paper.) “So when you have practically
no notes and no preparation and then you leave and everybody was thrilled. I said, I think I like this
business.”
This first preamble gave way to the next preamble.
“I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s phony. Fake. A few days ago I
called the fake news the enemy of the people. Because they have no sources. They just make ’em up
when there are none. I saw one story recently where they said nine people have confirmed. There are
no nine people. I don’t believe there was one or two people. Nine people. And I said, Give me a
break. I know the people. I know who they talk to. There were no nine people. But they say nine
people. . . .”
A few minutes into the forty-eight-minute speech and it was already off the rails, riff sustained by
repetition.
“Maybe they’re just bad at polling. Or maybe they’re not legit. It’s one or the other. They’re very
smart. They’re very cunning. And they’re very dishonest. . . . Just to conclude”—although he would
go on for thirty-seven minutes more—“it’s a very sensitive topic and they get upset when we expose
their false stories. They say we can’t criticize their dishonest coverage because of the First
Amendment. You know they always bring up”—he went into a falsetto voice—“the First Amendment.
Now I love the First Amendment. Nobody loves it better than me. Nobody.”
Each member of the Trump traveling retinue was now maintaining a careful poker face. When they
did break it, it was as though on a delay, given permission by the crowd’s cheering or laughter.
Otherwise, they seemed not to know whether the president had in fact gotten away with his peculiar
rambles.
“By the way, you folks in here, the place is packed, there are lines that go back six blocks”—there
were no lines outside the crowded lobby—“I tell you that because you won’t read about it. But there
are lines that go back six blocks. . . .
“There is one allegiance that unites us all, to America, America. . . . We all salute with pride the
same American flag . . . and we are all equal, equal in the eyes of Almighty God. . . . We’re equal . . .
and I want to thank, by the way, the evangelical community, the Christian community, communities of
faith, rabbis and priests and pastors, ministers, because the support for me, as you know, was a
record, not only numbers of people but percentages of those numbers who voted for Trump . . . an
amazing outpouring and I will not disappoint you . . . as long as we have faith in each other and trust
in God then there is no goal beyond our reach . . . there is no dream too large . . . no task too great . . .
we are Americans and the future belongs to us . . . America is roaring. It’s going to be bigger and
better and stronger than ever before. . . .”
Inside the West Wing, some had idly speculated about how long he would go on if he could
command time as well as language. The consensus seemed to be forever. The sound of his own voice,
his lack of inhibition, the fact that linear thought and presentation turned out not at all to be necessary,
the wonder that this random approach seemed to command, and his own replenishing supply of free
association—all this suggested that he was limited only by everyone else’s schedule and attention
span.
Trump’s extemporaneous moments were always existential, but more so for his aides than for him.
He spoke obliviously and happily, believing himself to be a perfect pitch raconteur and public
performer, while everyone with him held their breath. If a wackadoo moment occurred on the
occasions—the frequent occasions—when his remarks careened in no clear direction, his staff had to
go into intense method-acting response. It took absolute discipline not to acknowledge what everyone
could see.
* * *
As the president finished up his speech, Richard Spencer, who in less than four months from the
Trump election was on his way to becoming the most famous neo-Nazi in America since George
Lincoln Rockwell, had returned to a seat in the atrium of the Gaylord Resort to argue his affinity for
Donald Trump—and, he believed, vice versa.
Spencer, curiously, was one of the few people trying to ascribe an intellectual doctrine to
Trumpism. Between those taking him literally but not seriously, and those taking him seriously but not
literally, there was Richard Spencer. Practically speaking, he was doing both, arguing the case that if
Trump and Bannon were the pilot fish for a new conservative movement, Spencer himself—the owner
of altright.com and, he believed, the purest exponent of the movement—was their pilot fish, whether
they knew it or not.
As close to a real-life Nazi as most reporters had ever seen, Spencer was a kind of catnip for the
liberal press crowded at CPAC. Arguably, he was offering as good an explanation of Trump’s
anomalous politics as anyone else.
Spencer had come up through writing gigs on conservative publications, but he was hardly
recognizable in any sort of official Republican or conservative way. He was a post-right-wing
provocateur but with none of the dinner party waspishness or bite of Ann Coulter or Milo
Yiannopoulos. They were a stagey type of reactionary. He was a real one—a genuine racist with a
good education, in his case UVA, the University of Chicago, and Duke.
It was Bannon who effectively gave Spencer flight by pronouncing Breitbart to be “the platform
for the alt-right”—the movement Spencer claimed to have founded, or at least owned the domain
name for.
“I don’t think Bannon or Trump are identitarians or alt-rightists,” Spencer explained while camped
out just over CPAC’s property line at the Gaylord. They were not, like Spencer, philosophic racists
(itself different from a knee-jerk racist). “But they are open to these ideas. And open to the people
who are open to these ideas. We’re the spice in the mix.”
Spencer was right. Trump and Bannon, with Sessions in the mix, too, had come closer than any
major national politician since the Civil Rights movement to tolerating a race-tinged political view.
“Trump has said things that conservatives never would have thought. . . . His criticism of the Iraq
War, bashing the Bush family, I couldn’t believe he did that . . . but he did . . . . Fuck them . . . if at the
end of the day an Anglo Wasp family produces Jeb and W then clearly that’s a clear sign of
denegation. . . . And now they marry Mexicans . . . Jeb’s wife . . . he married his housekeeper or
something.
“In Trump’s 2011 CPAC address he specifically calls for a relaxation of immigration restrictions
for Europeans . . . that we should re-create an America that was far more stable and more beautiful. . .
. No other conservative politician would say those things . . . but on the other hand pretty much
everyone thought it . . . so it’s powerful to say it. . . . Clearly [there’s] a normalization process going
on.”
“We are the Trump vanguard. The left will say Trump is a nationalist and an implicit or quasiracialist.
Conservatives, because they are just so douchey, say Oh, no, of course not, he’s a
constitutionalist, or whatever. We on the alt-right will say, He is a nationalist and he is a racialist. His
movement is a white movement. Duh.”
Looking very satisfied with himself, Spencer paused and then said: “We give him a kind of
permission.”
* * *
Nearby, in the Gaylord atrium, Rebekah Mercer sat having a snack with her home-schooled daughter
and her friend and fellow conservative donor Allie Hanley. Both women agreed that the president’s
CPAC speech showed him at his most gracious and charming.
T
10
GQLDMAN
he Jarvanka side of the White House increasingly felt that rumors leaked by Bannon and his
allies were undermining them. Jared and Ivanka, ever eager to enhance their status as the adults
in the room, felt personally wounded by these backdoor attacks. Kushner, in fact, now believed
Bannon would do anything to destroy them. This was personal. After months of defending Bannon
against liberal media innuendo, Kushner had concluded that Bannon was an anti-Semite. That was the
bottom-line issue. This was a complicated and frustrating business—and quite hard to communicate
to his father-in-law—because one of Bannon’s accusations against Kushner, the administration’s point
person on the Middle East, was that he was not nearly tough enough in his defense of Israel.
After the election, the Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson with sly jocularity privately pointed out
to the president that by offhandedly giving the Israel portfolio to his son-in-law—who would, Trump
said, make peace in the Middle East—he hadn’t really done Kushner any favors.
“I know,” replied Trump, quite enjoying the joke.
Jews and Israel were a curious Trump subtext. Trump’s brutish father was an often vocal anti-
Semite. In the split in New York real estate between the Jews and non-Jews, the Trumps were clearly
on the lesser side. The Jews were white shoe, and Donald Trump, even more than his father, was
perceived as a vulgarian—after all, he put his name on his buildings, quite a déclassé thing to do.
(Ironically, this proved to be a significant advance in real estate marketing and, arguably, Trump’s
greatest accomplishment as a developer—branding buildings.) But Trump had grown up and built his
business in New York, the world’s largest Jewish city. He had made his reputation in the media, that
most Jewish of industries, with some keen understanding of media tribal dynamics. His mentor, Roy
Cohn, was a demimonde, semiunderworld, tough-guy Jew. He courted other figures he considered
“tough-guy Jews” (one of his accolades): Carl Icahn, the billionaire hedge funder; Ike Perlmutter, the
billionaire investor who had bought and sold Marvel Comics; Ronald Perelman, the billionaire
Revlon chairman; Steven Roth, the New York billionaire real estate tycoon; and Sheldon Adelson, the
billionaire casino magnate. Trump had adopted a sort of 1950s Jewish uncle (tough-guy variety)
delivery, with assorted Yiddishisms—Hillary Clinton, he declared, had been “shlonged” in the 2008
primary—helping to give an inarticulate man an unexpected expressiveness. Now his daughter, a de
facto First Lady, was, through her conversion, the first Jew in the White House.
The Trump campaign and the White House were constantly supplying off-note messages about
Jews, from their equivocal regard for David Duke to their apparent desire to tinker with Holocaust
history—or at least tendency to stumble over it. At one point early in the campaign, Trump’s son-inlaw,
challenged by his own staff at the New York Observer and feeling pressure about his own bona
fides, as well as seeking to stand by his father-in-law, wrote an impassioned defense of Trump in an
attempt to prove that he was not an anti-Semite. For his efforts, Jared was rebuked by various
members of his own family, who clearly seemed worried about both the direction of Trumpism and
Jared’s opportunism.
There was also the flirtation with European populism. Whenever possible, Trump seemed to side
with and stoke Europe’s rising right, with its anti-Semitic associations, piling on more portent and
bad vibes. And then there was Bannon, who had allowed himself to become—through his
orchestration of right-wing media themes and stoking of liberal outrage—a winking suggestion of
anti-Semitism. It was certainly good right-wing business to annoy liberal Jews.
Kushner, for his part, was the prepped-out social climber who had rebuffed all entreaties in the
past to support traditional Jewish organizations. When called upon, the billionaire scion had refused
to contribute. Nobody was more perplexed by the sudden rise of Jared Kushner to his new position as
Israel’s great protector than U.S. Jewish organizations. Now, the Jewish great and the good, the
venerated and the tried, the mandarins and myrmidons, had to pay court to Jared Kushner . . . who
until little more than a few minutes ago had truly been a nobody.
For Trump, giving Israel to Kushner was not only a test, it was a Jewish test: the president was
singling him out for being Jewish, rewarding him for being Jewish, saddling him with an impossible
hurdle for being Jewish—and, too, defaulting to the stereotyping belief in the negotiating powers of
Jews. “Henry Kissinger says Jared is going to be the new Henry Kissinger,” Trump said more than
once, rather a combined compliment and slur.
Bannon, meanwhile, did not hesitate to ding Kushner on Israel, that peculiar right-wing litmus test.
Bannon could bait Jews—globalist, cosmopolitan, Davoscentric liberal Jews like Kushner—because
the farther right you were, the more correct you were on Israel. Netanyahu was an old Kushner family
friend, but when, in the fall, the Israeli prime minister came to New York to meet with Trump and
Kushner, he made a point of seeking out Steve Bannon.
On Israel, Bannon had partnered with Sheldon Adelson, titan of Las Vegas, big-check right-wing
contributor, and, in the president’s mind, quite the toughest tough-guy Jew (that is, the richest).
Adelson regularly disparaged Kushner’s motives and abilities. The president, to Bannon’s great
satisfaction, kept telling his son-in-law, as he strategized on Israel, to check with Sheldon and, hence,
Bannon.
Bannon’s effort to grab the stronger-on-Israel label was deeply confounding to Kushner, who had
been raised as an Orthodox Jew. His closest lieutenants in the White House, Avi Berkowitz and Josh
Raffel, were Orthodox Jews. On Friday afternoons, all Kushner business in the White House stopped
before sunset for the Sabbath observance.
For Kushner, Bannon’s right-wing defense of Israel, embraced by Trump, somehow became a
jujitsu piece of anti-Semitism aimed directly at him. Bannon seemed determined to make Kushner
appear weak and inadequate—a cuck, in alt-right speak.
So Kushner had struck back, bringing into the White House his own tough-guy Jews—Goldman
Jews.
* * *
Kushner had pushed for the then president of Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, to run the National
Economic Council and to be the president’s chief economic adviser. Bannon’s choice had been
CNBC’s conservative anchor and commentator Larry Kudlow. For Trump, the Goldman cachet
outdrew even a television personality.
It was a Richie Rich moment. Kushner had been a summer intern at Goldman when Cohn was head
of commodities trading. Cohn then became president of Goldman in 2006. Once Cohn joined Trump’s
team, Kushner often found occasion to mention that the president of Goldman Sachs was working for
him. Bannon, depending on whom he wanted to slight, either referred to Kushner as Cohn’s intern or
pointed out that Cohn was now working for his intern. The president, for his part, was continually
pulling Cohn into meetings, especially with foreign leaders, just to introduce him as the former
president of Goldman Sachs.
Bannon had announced himself as Trump’s brain, a boast that vastly irritated the president. But in
Cohn, Kushner saw a better brain for the White House: not only was it much more politic for Cohn to
be Kushner’s brain than Trump’s, but installing Cohn was the perfect countermove to Bannon’s chaos
management philosophy. Cohn was the only person in the West Wing who had ever managed a large
organization (Goldman has thirty-five thousand employees). And, not to put too fine a point on it—
though Kushner was happy to do so—Bannon had rolled out of Goldman having barely reached
midlevel management status, whereas Cohn, his contemporary, had continued on to the firm’s highest
level, making hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. Cohn—a Democrat globalistcosmopolitan
Manhattanite who voted for Hillary Clinton and who still spoke frequently to former
Goldman chief and former Democratic New Jersey senator and governor Jon Corzine—immediately
became Bannon’s antithesis.
For Bannon, the ideologue, Cohn was the exact inverse, a commodities trader doing what traders
do—read the room and figure out which way the wind is blowing. “Getting Gary to take a position on
something is like nailing butterflies to the wall,” commented Katie Walsh.
Cohn started to describe a soon-to-be White House that would be business-focused and committed
to advancing center-right to moderate positions. In this new configuration, Bannon would be
marginalized and Cohn, who was dismissive of Priebus, would be the chief of staff in waiting. To
Cohn, it seemed like easy street. Of course it would work out this way: Priebus was a lightweight and
Bannon a slob who couldn’t run anything.
Within weeks of Cohn’s arrival on the transition team, Bannon nixed Cohn’s plan to expand the
National Economic Council by as many as thirty people. (Kushner, not to be denied, nixed Bannon’s
plan to have David Bossie build and lead his staff.) Bannon also retailed the likely not-too-far-offthe-
mark view (or, anyway, a popular view inside Goldman Sachs) that Cohn, once slated to become
Goldman’s CEO, had been forced out for an untoward Haig-like grasping for power—in 1981 then
secretary of state Alexander Haig had tried to insist he held the power after Ronald Reagan was shot
—when Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein underwent cancer treatment. In the Bannon version, Kushner
had bought damaged goods. The White House was clearly Cohn’s professional lifeline—why else
would he have come into the Trump administration? (Much of this was retailed to reporters by Sam
Nunberg, the former Trump factotum who was now doing duty for Bannon. Nunberg was frank about
his tactics: “I beat the shit out of Gary whenever possible.”)
It is a measure of the power of blood (or blood by marriage), and likely the power of Goldman
Sachs, too, that in the middle of a Republican-controlled Washington and a virulent, if not anti-
Semitic (at least toward liberal Jews), right-wing West Wing, the Kushner-Cohn Democrats appeared
to be ascendant. Part of the credit went to Kushner, who showed an unexpected tenacity. Conflict
averse—in the Kushner household, his father, monopolizing all the conflict, forced everyone else to
be a mollifier—confronting neither Bannon nor his father-in-law, he began to see himself in a stoic
sense: he was the last man of moderation, the true figure of self-effacement, the necessary ballast of
the ship. This would all be made manifest by a spectacular accomplishment. He would complete the
mission his father-in-law had foisted on him, the one he was more and more seeing as his, yes,
destiny. He would make peace in the Middle East.
“He’s going to make peace in the Middle East,” Bannon said often, his voice reverent and his
expression deadpan, cracking up all the Bannonites.
So in one sense Kushner was a figure of heightened foolishness and ridicule. In another, he was a
man, encouraged by his wife and by Cohn, who saw himself on the world stage carrying out a singular
mission.
Here was yet another battle to be won or lost. Bannon regarded Kushner and Cohn (and Ivanka) as
occupying an alternative reality that had little bearing on the real Trump revolution. Kushner and
Cohn saw Bannon as not just destructive but self-destructive, and they were confident he would
destroy himself before he destroyed them.
In the Trump White House, observed Henry Kissinger, “it is a war between the Jews and the non-
Jews.”
* * *
For Dina Powell, the other Goldman hire in the West Wing, the main consideration when Ivanka
pitched her on coming to work at the White House was the downside assessment of being associated
with a Trump presidency. Powell ran the Goldman Sachs philanthropic arm, a public relations
initiative as well as a courtship of the increasingly powerful pools of philanthropic money.
Representing Goldman, she had become something of a legend at Davos, a supreme networker among
the world’s supreme networkers. She stood at an intersection of image and fortune, in a world
increasingly swayed by private wealth and personal brands.
It was a function of both her ambition and Ivanka Trump’s sales talents during swift meetings in
New York and Washington that Powell, swallowing her doubts, had come on board. That, and the
politically risky but high-return gamble that she, aligned with Jared and Ivanka, and working closely
with Cohn, her Goldman friend and ally, could take over the White House. That was the implicit plan:
nothing less. Specifically, the idea was that Cohn or Powell—and quite possibly both over the course
of the next four or eight years—would, as Bannon and Priebus faltered, come to hold the chief of staff
job. The president’s own constant grumbling about Bannon and Priebus, noted by Ivanka, encouraged
this scenario.
This was no small point: a motivating force behind Powell’s move was the certain belief on the
part of Jared and Ivanka (a belief that Cohn and Powell found convincing) that the White House was
theirs to take. For Cohn and Powell, the offer to join the Trump administration was transmuted beyond
opportunity and became something like duty. It would be their job, working with Jared and Ivanka, to
help manage and shape a White House that might otherwise become the opposite of the reason and
moderation they could bring. They could be instrumental in saving the place—and, as well, take a
quantum personal leap forward.
More immediately for Ivanka, who was focused on concerns about women in the Trump White
House, Powell was an image correction to Kellyanne Conway, whom, quite apart from their war with
Bannon, Ivanka and Jared disdained. Conway, who continued to hold the president’s favor and to be
his preferred defender on the cable news shows, had publicly declared herself the face of the
administration—and for Ivanka and Jared, this was a horrifying face. The president’s worst impulses
seem to run through Conway without benefit of a filter. She compounded Trump’s anger,
impulsiveness, and miscues. Whereas a presidential adviser was supposed to buffer and interpret his
gut calls, Conway expressed them, doubled down on them, made opera out of them. She took Trump’s
demand for loyalty too literally. In Ivanka and Jared’s view, Conway was a cussed, antagonistic, selfdramatizing
cable head, and Powell, they hoped, would be a deliberate, circumspect, adult guest on
the Sunday morning shows.
By late February, after the first helter-skelter month in the West Wing, the campaign by Jared and
Ivanka to undermine Bannon seemed to be working. The couple had created a feedback loop, which
included Scarborough and Murdoch, that reinforced the president’s deep annoyance with and
frustration about Bannon’s purported importance in the White House. For weeks after the Time
magazine cover story featuring Bannon, there was hardly a conversation in which Trump didn’t refer
to it bitterly. (“He views Time covers as zero sum,” said Roger Ailes. “If someone else gets on it, he
doesn’t.”) Scarborough, cruelly, kept up a constant patter about President Bannon. Murdoch forcefully
lectured the president about the oddness and extremism of Bannonism, linking Bannon with Ailes:
“They’re both crazy,” he told Trump.
Kushner also pressed the view to the president—ever phobic about any age-related weakness—
that the sixty-three-year-old Bannon wouldn’t hold up under the strain of working in the White House.
Indeed, Bannon was working sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, and, for fear of
missing a presidential summons or afraid that someone else might grab it, he considered himself on
call pretty much all night. As the weeks went by, Bannon seemed physically to deteriorate in front of
everybody’s eyes: his face became more puffy, his legs more swollen, his eyes more bleary, his
clothes more slept in, his attention more distracted.
* * *
As Trump’s second month in office began, the Jared-Ivanka-Gary-Dina camp focused on the
president’s February 28 speech to the joint session of Congress.
“Reset,” declared Kushner. “Total reset.”
The occasion provided an ideal opportunity. Trump would have to deliver the speech in front of
him. It was not only on the teleprompter but distributed widely beforehand. What’s more, the wellmannered
crowd wouldn’t egg him on. His handlers were in control. And for this occasion at least,
Jared-Ivanka-Gary-Dina were the handlers.
“Steve will take credit for this speech if there’s even one word of his in it,” Ivanka told her father.
She knew well that for Trump, credit, much more than content, was the hot-button driver, and her
comment ensured that Trump would keep it out of Bannon’s hands.
“The Goldman speech,” Bannon called it.
The inaugural, largely written by Bannon and Stephen Miller, had shocked Jared and Ivanka. But a
particular peculiarity of the Trump White House, compounding its messaging problems, was its lack
of a speech-writing team. There was the literate and highly verbal Bannon, who did not really do any
actual writing himself; there was Stephen Miller, who did little more than produce bullet points.
Beyond that, it was pretty much just catch as catch can. There was a lack of coherent message because
there was nobody to write a coherent message—just one more instance of disregarding political craft.
Ivanka grabbed firm control of the joint session draft and quickly began pulling in contributions
from the Jarvanka camp. In the event, the president behaved exactly as they hoped. Here was an
upbeat Trump, a salesman Trump, a nothing-to-be-afraid-of Trump, a happy-warrior Trump. Jared,
Ivanka, and all their allies judged it a magnificent night, agreeing that finally, amid the pageantry
—Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States—the president really did seem presidential. And
for once, even the media agreed.
The hours following the president’s speech were Trump’s best time in the White House. It was, for
at least one news cycle, a different presidency. For a moment, there was even something like a crisis
of conscience among parts of the media: Had this president been grievously misread? Had the media,
the biased media, missed well-intentioned Donald Trump? Was he finally showing his better nature?
The president himself spent almost two full days doing nothing but reviewing his good press. He had
arrived, finally, at a balmy shore (with appreciative natives on the beach). What’s more, the success
of the speech confirmed the Jared and Ivanka strategy: look for common ground. It also confirmed
Ivanka’s understanding of her father: he just wanted to be loved. And, likewise, it confirmed
Bannon’s worst fear: Trump, in his true heart, was a marshmallow.
The Trump on view the night of the joint session was not just a new Trump, but a declaration of a
new West Wing brain trust (which Ivanka was making plans to formally join in just a few weeks).
Jared and Ivanka, with an assist from their Goldman Sachs advisers, were changing the message,
style, and themes of the White House. “Reaching out” was the new theme.
Bannon, hardly helping his cause, cast himself as a Cassandra to anyone who would listen. He
insisted that only disaster would come from trying to mollify your mortal enemies. You need to keep
taking the fight to them; you’re fooling yourself if you believe that compromise is possible. The virtue
of Donald Trump—the virtue, anyway, of Donald Trump to Steve Bannon—was that the cosmopolitan
elite was never going to accept him. He was, after all, Donald Trump, however much you shined him
up.