fire and fury chapter 1 & 2

1
ELECTION DAY
n the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway—Donald Trump’s campaign manager
and a central, indeed starring, personality of Trumpworld—settled into her glass office at
Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the Trump campaign headquarters had
remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office were a few
posters with right-wing slogans.
Conway now was in a remarkably buoyant mood considering she was about to experience a
resounding if not cataclysmic defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election—of this she was sure—
but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under 6 points. That was a substantial victory. As for
the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: it was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.
She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming
Priebus. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors with whom she’d built strong
relationships—and with whom, actively interviewing in the last few weeks, she was hoping to land a
permanent on-air job after the election. She’d carefully courted many of them since joining the Trump
campaign in mid-August and becoming the campaign’s reliably combative voice and, with her
spasmodic smiles and strange combination of woundedness and imperturbability, peculiarly telegenic
face. Beyond all of the other horrible blunders of the campaign, the real problem, she said, was the
devil they couldn’t control: the Republican National Committee, which was run by Priebus, his
sidekick, thirty-two-year-old Katie Walsh, and their flack, Sean Spicer. Instead of being all in, the
RNC, ultimately the tool of the Republican establishment, had been hedging its bets ever since Trump
won the nomination in early summer. When Trump needed the push, the push just wasn’t there.
That was the first part of Conway’s spin. The other part was that despite everything, the campaign
had really clawed its way back from the abyss. A severely underresourced team with, practically
speaking, the worst candidate in modern political history—Conway offered either an eye-rolling
pantomime whenever Trump’s name was mentioned, or a dead stare—had actually done
extraordinarily well. Conway, who had never been involved in a national campaign, and who, before
Trump, ran a small-time, down-ballot polling firm, understood full well that, post-campaign, she
would now be one of the leading conservative voices on cable news.
In fact, one of the Trump campaign pollsters, John McLaughlin, had begun to suggest within the
past week or so that some key state numbers, heretofore dismal, might actually be changing to
Trump’s advantage. But neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law Jared Kushner—the
effective head of the campaign, or the designated family monitor of it—wavered in their certainty:
their unexpected adventure would soon be over.
Only Steve Bannon, in his odd-man view, insisted the numbers would break in their favor. But this
being Bannon’s view—crazy Steve—it was quite the opposite of being a reassuring one.
Almost everybody in the campaign, still an extremely small outfit, thought of themselves as a
clear-eyed team, as realistic about their prospects as perhaps any in politics. The unspoken agreement
among them: not only would Donald Trump not be president, he should probably not be.
Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.
As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. He had survived the release of the
Billy Bush tape when, in the uproar that followed, the RNC had had the gall to pressure him to quit
the race. FBI director James Comey, having bizarrely hung Hillary out to dry by saying he was
reopening the investigation into her emails eleven days before the election, had helped avert a total
Clinton landslide.
“I can be the most famous man in the world,” Trump told his on-again, off-again aide Sam
Nunberg at the outset of the campaign.
“But do you want to be president?” Nunberg asked (a qualitatively different question than the
usual existential candidate test: “Why do you want to be president?”). Nunberg did not get an answer.
The point was, there didn’t need to be an answer because he wasn’t going to be president.
Trump’s longtime friend Roger Ailes liked to say that if you wanted a career in television, first run
for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was
a great future.
He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful brand and
untold opportunities. “This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes in a conversation a week
before the election. “I don’t think about losing because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.” What’s
more, he was already laying down his public response to losing the election: It was stolen!
Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and fury. They
were not ready to win.
* * *
In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you probably
can’t win unless you believe that you will win—except in the Trump campaign.
The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how everybody
involved in it was a loser. He was equally convinced that the Clinton people were brilliant winners
—“They’ve got the best and we’ve got the worst,” he frequently said. Time spent with Trump on the
campaign plane was often an epic dissing experience: everybody around him was an idiot.
Corey Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s first more or less official campaign manager, was
often berated by the candidate. For months Trump called him “the worst,” and in June 2016 he was
finally fired. Ever after, Trump proclaimed his campaign doomed without Lewandowski. “We’re all
losers,” he would say. “All our guys are terrible, nobody knows what they’re doing. . . . Wish Corey
was back.” Trump quickly soured on his second campaign manager, Paul Manafort, as well.
By August, trailing Clinton by 12 to 17 points and facing a daily firestorm of eviscerating press,
Trump couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. At this dire
moment, Trump in some essential sense sold his losing campaign. The right-wing billionaire Bob
Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer, had shifted his support to Trump with a $5 million infusion. Believing the
campaign was cratering, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah took a helicopter from their Long Island
estate out to a scheduled fundraiser—with other potential donors bailing by the second—at New York
Jets owner and Johnson & Johnson heir Woody Johnson’s summer house in the Hamptons.
Trump had no real relationship with either father or daughter. He’d had only a few conversations
with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables; Rebekah Mercer’s entire history with Trump
consisted of a selfie taken with him at Trump Tower. But when the Mercers presented their plan to
take over the campaign and install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Trump
didn’t resist. He only expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This
thing,” he told the Mercers, “is so fucked up.”
By every meaningful indicator, something greater than even a sense of doom shadowed what Steve
Bannon called “the broke-dick campaign”—a sense of structural impossibility.
The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire—ten times over—refused even to invest his
own money in it. Bannon told Jared Kushner—who, when Bannon signed on to the campaign, had
been off with his wife on a holiday in Croatia with Trump enemy David Geffen—that, after the first
debate in September, they would need an additional $50 million to cover them until election day.
“No way we’ll get fifty million unless we can guarantee him victory,” said a clear-eyed Kushner.
“Twenty-five million?” prodded Bannon.
“If we can say victory is more than likely.”
In the end, the best Trump would do is loan the campaign $10 million, provided he got it back as
soon as they could raise other money. (Steve Mnuchin, then the campaign’s finance chairman, came to
collect the loan with the wire instructions ready to go, so Trump couldn’t conveniently forget to send
the money.)
There was in fact no real campaign because there was no real organization, or at best only a
uniquely dysfunctional one. Roger Stone, the early de facto campaign manager, quit or was fired by
Trump—with each man publicly claiming he had slapped down the other. Sam Nunberg, a Trump aide
who had worked for Stone, was noisily ousted by Lewandowski, and then Trump exponentially
increased the public dirty-clothes-washing by suing Nunberg. Lewandowski and Hope Hicks, the PR
aide put on the campaign by Ivanka Trump, had an affair that ended in a public fight on the street—an
incident cited by Nunberg in his response to Trump’s suit. The campaign, on its face, was not
designed to win anything.
Even as Trump eliminated the sixteen other Republican candidates, however far-fetched that might
have seemed, it did not make the ultimate goal of winning the presidency any less preposterous.
And if, during the fall, winning seemed slightly more plausible, that evaporated with the Billy
Bush affair. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them,” Trump told the NBC
host Billy Bush on an open mic, amid the ongoing national debate about sexual harassment. “It’s like a
magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. . .
. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
It was an operatic unraveling. So mortifying was this development that when Reince Priebus, the
RNC head, was called to New York from Washington for an emergency meeting at Trump Tower, he
couldn’t bring himself to leave Penn Station. It took two hours for the Trump team to coax him across
town.
“Bro,” said a desperate Bannon, cajoling Priebus on the phone, “I may never see you again after
today, but you gotta come to this building and you gotta walk through the front door.”
* * *
The silver lining of the ignominy Melania Trump had to endure after the Billy Bush tape was that now
there was no way her husband could become president.
Donald Trump’s marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him—or it was, anyway,
for those without private jets and many homes. He and Melania spent relatively little time together.
They could go days at a time without contact, even when they were both in Trump Tower. Often she
did not know where he was, or take much notice of that fact. Her husband moved between residences
as he would move between rooms. Along with knowing little about his whereabouts, she knew little
about his business, and took at best modest interest in it. An absentee father for his first four children,
Trump was even more absent for his fifth, Barron, his son with Melania. Now on his third marriage,
he told friends he thought he had finally perfected the art: live and let live—“Do your own thing.”
He was a notorious womanizer, and during the campaign became possibly the world’s most
famous masher. While nobody would ever say Trump was sensitive when it came to women, he had
many views about how to get along with them, including a theory he discussed with friends about how
the more years between an older man and a younger woman, the less the younger woman took an
older man’s cheating personally.
Still, the notion that this was a marriage in name only was far from true. He spoke of Melania
frequently when she wasn’t there. He admired her looks—often, awkwardly for her, in the presence
of others. She was, he told people proudly and without irony, a “trophy wife.” And while he may not
have quite shared his life with her, he gladly shared the spoils of it. “A happy wife is a happy life,” he
said, echoing a popular rich-man truism.
He also sought Melania’s approval. (He sought the approval of all the women around him, who
were wise to give it.) In 2014, when he first seriously began to consider running for president,
Melania was one of the few who thought it was possible he could win. It was a punch line for his
daughter, Ivanka, who had carefully distanced herself from the campaign. With a never-too-hidden
distaste for her stepmother, Ivanka would say to friends: All you have to know about Melania is that
she thinks if he runs he’ll certainly win.
But the prospect of her husband’s actually becoming president was, for Melania, a horrifying one.
She believed it would destroy her carefully sheltered life—one sheltered, not inconsiderably, from
the extended Trump family—which was almost entirely focused on her young son.
Don’t put the cart before the horse, her amused husband said, even as he spent every day on the
campaign trail, dominating the news. But her terror and torment mounted.
There was a whisper campaign about her, cruel and comical in its insinuations, going on in
Manhattan, which friends told her about. Her modeling career was under close scrutiny. In Slovenia,
where she grew up, a celebrity magazine, Suzy, put the rumors about her into print after Trump got the
nomination. Then, with a sickening taste of what might be ahead, the Daily Mail blew the story across
the world.
The New York Post got its hands on outtakes from a nude photo shoot that Melania had done early
in her modeling career—a leak that everybody other than Melania assumed could be traced back to
Trump himself.
Inconsolable, she confronted her husband. Is this the future? She told him she wouldn’t be able to
take it.
Trump responded in his fashion—We’ll sue!—and set her up with lawyers who successfully did
just that. But he was unaccustomedly contrite, too. Just a little longer, he told her. It would all be over
in November. He offered his wife a solemn guarantee: there was simply no way he would win. And
even for a chronically—he would say helplessly—unfaithful husband, this was one promise to his
wife that he seemed sure to keep.
* * *
The Trump campaign had, perhaps less than inadvertently, replicated the scheme from Mel Brooks’s
The Producers. In that classic, Brooks’s larcenous and dopey heroes, Max Bialystock and Leo
Bloom, set out to sell more than 100 percent of the ownership stakes in the Broadway show they are
producing. Since they will be found out only if the show is a hit, everything about the show is
premised on its being a flop. Accordingly, they create a show so outlandish that it actually succeeds,
thus dooming our heroes.
Winning presidential candidates—driven by hubris or narcissism or a preternatural sense of
destiny—have, more than likely, spent a substantial part of their careers, if not their lives from
adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of elected offices. They perfect a public
face. They manically network, since success in politics is largely about who your allies are. They
cram. (Even in the case of an uninterested George W. Bush, he relied on his father’s cronies to cram
for him.) And they clean up after themselves—or, at least, take great care to cover up. They prepare
themselves to win and to govern.
The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The candidate and his top lieutenants
believed they could get all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change their
behavior or their fundamental worldview one whit: we don’t have to be anything but who and what
we are, because of course we won’t win.
Many candidates for president have made a virtue of being Washington outsiders; in practice, this
strategy merely favors governors over senators. Every serious candidate, no matter how much he or
she disses Washington, relies on Beltway insiders for counsel and support. But with Trump, hardly a
person in his innermost circle had ever worked in politics at the national level—his closest advisers
had not worked in politics at all. Throughout his life, Trump had few close friends of any kind, but
when he began his campaign for president he had almost no friends in politics. The only two actual
politicians with whom Trump was close were Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie, and both men were
in their own way peculiar and isolated. And to say that he knew nothing—nothing at all—about the
basic intellectual foundations of the job was a comic understatement. Early in the campaign, in a
Producers-worthy scene, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate: “I got as
far as the Fourth Amendment before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back
in his head.”
Almost everybody on the Trump team came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a
president or his staff. Mike Flynn, Trump’s future National Security Advisor, who became Trump’s
opening act at campaign rallies and whom Trump loved to hear complain about the CIA and the
haplessness of American spies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take
$45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” he assured
them, knowing that it would therefore not be a problem.
Paul Manafort, the international lobbyist and political operative who Trump retained to run his
campaign after Lewandowski was fired—and who agreed not to take a fee, amping up questions of
quid pro quo—had spent thirty years representing dictators and corrupt despots, amassing millions of
dollars in a money trail that had long caught the eye of U.S. investigators. What’s more, when he
joined the campaign, he was being pursued, his every financial step documented, by the billionaire
Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who claimed he stole $17 million from him in a crooked real estate
scam.
For quite obvious reasons, no president before Trump and few politicians ever have come out of
the real estate business: a lightly regulated market, based on substantial debt with exposure to
frequent market fluctuations, it often depends on government favor, and is a preferred exchange
currency for problem cash—money laundering. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, Jared’s father
Charlie, Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric, and his daughter Ivanka, as well as Trump himself, all
supported their business enterprises to a greater or lesser extent working in the dubious limbo of
international free cash flow and gray money. Charlie Kushner, to whose real estate business interests
Trump’s son-in-law and most important aide was wholly tied, had already spent time in a federal
prison for tax evasion, witness tampering, and making illegal campaign donations.
Modern politicians and their staffs perform their most consequential piece of opposition research
on themselves. If the Trump team had vetted their candidate, they would have reasonably concluded
that heightened ethical scrutiny could easily put them in jeopardy. But Trump pointedly performed no
such effort. Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political adviser, explained to Steve Bannon that Trump’s
psychic makeup made it impossible for him to take such a close look at himself. Nor could he tolerate
knowing that somebody else would then know a lot about him—and therefore have something over
him. And anyway, why take such a close and potentially threatening look, because what were the
chances of winning?
Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his business deals and real estate holdings,
he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he if he wasn’t going to win?
What’s more, Trump refused to spend any time considering, however hypothetically, transition
matters, saying it was “bad luck”—but really meaning it was a waste of time. Nor would he even
remotely contemplate the issue of his holdings and conflicts.
He wasn’t going to win! Or losing was winning.
Trump would be the most famous man in the world—a martyr to crooked Hillary Clinton.
His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would have transformed themselves from relatively
obscure rich kids into international celebrities and brand ambassadors.
Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the Tea Party movement.
Kellyanne Conway would be a cable news star.
Reince Priebus and Katie Walsh would get their Republican Party back.
Melania Trump could return to inconspicuously lunching.
That was the trouble-free outcome they awaited on November 8, 2016. Losing would work out for
everybody.
Shortly after eight o’clock that evening, when the unexpected trend—Trump might actually win—
seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he called him, looked as if he had
seen a ghost. Melania, to whom Donald Trump had made his solemn guarantee, was in tears—and not
of joy.
There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a
befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a quite horrified Trump. But still
to come was the final transformation: suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he
deserved to be and was wholly capable of being the president of the United States.
O
2
TRUMP TOWER
n the Saturday after the election, Donald Trump received a small group of well-wishers in his
triplex apartment in Trump Tower. Even his close friends were still shocked and bewildered,
and there was a dazed quality to the gathering. But Trump himself was mostly looking at the clock.
Rupert Murdoch, heretofore doubtlessly certain Trump was a charlatan and a fool, said he and his
new wife, Jerry Hall, would pay a call on the president-elect. But Murdoch was late—quite late.
Trump kept assuring his guests that Rupert was on his way, coming soon. When some of the guests
made a move to leave, Trump cajoled them to stay a little longer. You’ll want to stay to see Rupert.
(Or, one of the guests interpreted, you’ll want to stay to see Trump with Rupert.)
Murdoch, who, with his then wife, Wendi, had often socialized with Jared and Ivanka, in the past
made little effort to hide his lack of interest in Trump. Murdoch’s fondness for Kushner created a
curious piece of the power dynamic between Trump and his son-in-law, one that Kushner, with
reasonable subtly, played to his advantage, often dropping Murdoch’s name into conversations with
his father-in-law. When, in 2015, Ivanka Trump told Murdoch that her father really, truly was going to
run for president, Murdoch dismissed the possibility out of hand.
But now, the new president-elect—after the most astonishing upset in American history—was on
tenterhooks waiting for Murdoch. “He’s one of the greats,” he told his guests, becoming more agitated
as he waited. “Really, he’s one of the greats, the last of the greats. You have to stay to see him.”
It was a matched set of odd reversals—an ironic symmetry. Trump, perhaps not yet appreciating
the difference between becoming president and elevating his social standing, was trying mightily to
curry favor with the previously disdainful media mogul. And Murdoch, finally arriving at the party he
was in more than one way sorely late to, was as subdued and thrown as everyone else, and struggling
to adjust his view of a man who, for more than a generation, had been at best a clown prince among
the rich and famous.
* * *
Murdoch was hardly the only billionaire who had been dismissive of Trump. In the years before the
election, Carl Icahn, whose friendship Trump often cited, and who Trump had suggested he’d appoint
to high office, openly ridiculed his fellow billionaire (whom he said was not remotely a billionaire).
Few people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was almost his appeal: he was what
he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul.
But now he was the president-elect. And that, in a reality jujitsu, changed everything. So say
whatever you want about him, he had done this. Pulled the sword from the stone. That meant
something. Everything.
The billionaires had to rethink. So did everyone in the Trump orbit. The campaign staff, now
suddenly in a position to snag West Wing jobs—career- and history-making jobs—had to see this
odd, difficult, even ridiculous, and, on the face of it, ill-equipped person in a new light. He had been
elected president. So he was, as Kellyanne Conway liked to point out, by definition, presidential.
Still, nobody had yet seen him be presidential—that is, make a public bow to political ritual and
propriety. Or even to exercise some modest self-control.
Others were now recruited and, despite their obvious impressions of the man, agreed to sign on.
Jim Mattis, a retired four-star general, one of the most respected commanders in the U.S. armed
forces; Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil; Scott Pruitt and Betsy DeVos, Jeb Bush loyalists—all of
them were now focused on the singular fact that while he might be a peculiar figure, even an absurdseeming
one, he had been elected president.
We can make this work, is what everybody in the Trump orbit was suddenly saying. Or, at the very
least, this could possibly work.
In fact, up close, Trump was not the bombastic and pugilistic man who had stirred rabid crowds
on the campaign trail. He was neither angry nor combative. He may have been the most threatening
and frightening and menacing presidential candidate in modern history, but in person he could seem
almost soothing. His extreme self-satisfaction rubbed off. Life was sunny. Trump was an optimist—at
least about himself. He was charming and full of flattery; he focused on you. He was funny—selfdeprecating
even. And incredibly energetic—Let’s do it whatever it is, let’s do it. He wasn’t a tough
guy. He was “a big warm-hearted monkey,” said Bannon, with rather faint praise.
PayPal cofounder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel—really the only significant Silicon
Valley voice to support Trump—was warned by another billionaire and longtime Trump friend that
Trump would, in an explosion of flattery, offer Thiel his undying friendship. Everybody says you’re
great, you and I are going to have an amazing working relationship, anything you want, call me
and we’ll get it done! Thiel was advised not to take Trump’s offer too seriously. But Thiel, who gave
a speech supporting Trump at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, reported back that, even
having been forewarned, he absolutely was certain of Trump’s sincerity when he said they’d be
friends for life—only never to basically hear from him again or have his calls returned. Still, power
provides its own excuses for social lapses. Other aspects of the Trump character were more
problematic.
Almost all the professionals who were now set to join him were coming face to face with the fact
that it appeared he knew nothing. There was simply no subject, other than perhaps building
construction, that he had substantially mastered. Everything with him was off the cuff. Whatever he
knew he seemed to have learned an hour before—and that was mostly half-baked. But each member
of the new Trump team was convincing him- or herself otherwise—because what did they know, the
man had been elected president. He offered something, obviously. Indeed, while everybody in his
rich-guy social circle knew about his wide-ranging ignorance—Trump, the businessman, could not
even read a balance sheet, and Trump, who had campaigned on his deal-making skills, was, with his
inattention to details, a terrible negotiator—they yet found him somehow instinctive. That was the
word. He was a force of personality. He could make you believe.
“Is Trump a good person, an intelligent person, a capable person?” asked Sam Nunberg, Trump’s
longtime political aide. “I don’t even know. But I know he’s a star.”
Trying to explain Trump’s virtues and his attraction, Piers Morgan—the British newspaper man
and ill-fated CNN anchor who had appeared on Celebrity Apprentice and stayed a loyal Trump friend
—said it was all in Trump’s book The Art of the Deal. Everything that made him Trump and that
defined his savvy, energy, and charisma was there. If you wanted to know Trump, just read the book.
But Trump had not written The Art of the Deal. His co-writer, Tony Schwartz, insisted that he had
hardly contributed to it and might not even have read all of it. And that was perhaps the point. Trump
was not a writer, he was a character—a protagonist and hero.
A pro wrestling fan who became a World Wrestling Entertainment supporter and personality
(inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame), Trump lived, like Hulk Hogan, as a real-life fictional
character. To the amusement of his friends, and unease of many of the people now preparing to work
for him at the highest levels of the federal government, Trump often spoke of himself in the third
person. Trump did this. The Trumpster did that. So powerful was this persona, or role, that he seemed
reluctant, or unable, to give it up in favor of being president—or presidential.
However difficult he was, many of those now around him tried to justify his behavior—tried to
find an explanation for his success in it, to understand it as an advantage, not a limitation. For Steve
Bannon, Trump’s unique political virtue was as an alpha male, maybe the last of the alpha males. A
1950s man, a Rat Pack type, a character out of Mad Men.
Trump’s understanding of his own essential nature was even more precise. Once, coming back on
his plane with a billionaire friend who had brought along a foreign model, Trump, trying to move in
on his friend’s date, urged a stop in Atlantic City. He would provide a tour of his casino. His friend
assured the model that there was nothing to recommend Atlantic City. It was a place overrun by white
trash.
“What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model.
“They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.”
He looked for a license not to conform, not to be respectable. It was something of an outlaw
prescription for winning—and winning, however you won, was what it was all about.
Or, as his friends would observe, mindful themselves not to be taken in, he simply had no
scruples. He was a rebel, a disruptor, and, living outside the rules, contemptuous of them. A close
Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar—except that Clinton
had a respectable front and Trump did not.
One manifestation of this outlaw personality, for both Trump and Clinton, was their brand of
womanizing—and indeed, harassing. Even among world-class womanizers and harassers, they
seemed exceptionally free of doubt or hesitation.
Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends’
wives into bed. In pursuing a friend’s wife, he would try to persuade the wife that her husband was
perhaps not what she thought. Then he’d have his secretary ask the friend into his office; once the
friend arrived, Trump would engage in what was, for him, more or less constant sexual banter. Do
you still like having sex with your wife? How often? You must have had a better fuck than your
wife? Tell me about it. I have girls coming in from Los Angeles at three o’clock. We can go upstairs
and have a great time. I promise . . . And all the while, Trump would have his friend’s wife on the
speakerphone, listening in.
Previous presidents, and not just Clinton, have of course lacked scruples. What was, to many of
the people who knew Trump well, much more confounding was that he had managed to win this
election, and arrive at this ultimate accomplishment, wholly lacking what in some obvious sense must
be the main requirement of the job, what neuroscientists would call executive function. He had
somehow won the race for president, but his brain seemed incapable of performing what would be
essential tasks in his new job. He had no ability to plan and organize and pay attention and switch
focus; he had never been able to tailor his behavior to what the goals at hand reasonably required. On
the most basic level, he simply could not link cause and effect.
The charge that Trump colluded with the Russians to win the election, which he scoffed at, was, in
the estimation of some of his friends, a perfect example of his inability to connect the dots. Even if he
hadn’t personally conspired with the Russians to fix the election, his efforts to curry favor with, of all
people, Vladimir Putin had no doubt left a trail of alarming words and deeds likely to have enormous
political costs.
Shortly after the election, his friend Ailes told him, with some urgency, “You’ve got to get right on
Russia.” Even exiled from Fox News, Ailes still maintained a fabled intelligence network. He
warned Trump of potentially damaging material coming his way. “You need to take this seriously,
Donald.”
“Jared has this,” said a happy Trump. “It’s all worked out.”
* * *
Trump Tower, next door to Tiffany and now headquarters of a populist revolution, suddenly seemed
like an alien spaceship—the Death Star—on Fifth Avenue. As the great and good and ambitious, as
well as angry protesters and the curious hoi polloi, began beating a path to the next president’s door,
mazelike barricades were hurriedly thrown up to shield him.
The Pre-Election Presidential Transition Act of 2010 established funding for presidential
nominees to start the process of vetting thousands of candidates for jobs in a new administration,
codifying policies that would determine the early actions of a new White House, and preparing for the
handoff of bureaucratic responsibilities on January 20. During the campaign, New Jersey governor
Chris Christie, the nominal head of the Trump transition office, had to forcefully tell the candidate that
he couldn’t redirect these funds, that the law required him to spend the money and plan for a transition
—even one he did not expect to need. A frustrated Trump said he didn’t want to hear any more about
it.
The day after the election, Trump’s close advisers—suddenly eager to be part of a process that
almost everybody had ignored—immediately began blaming Christie for a lack of transition
preparations. Hurriedly, the bare-bones transition team moved from downtown Washington to Trump
Tower.
This was certainly some of the most expensive real estate ever occupied by a transition team (and,
for that matter, a presidential campaign). And that was part of the point. It sent a Trump-style
message: we’re not only outsiders, but we’re more powerful than you insiders. Richer. More famous.
With better real estate.
And, of course, it was personalized: his name, fabulously, was on the door. Upstairs was his
triplex apartment, vastly larger than the White House living quarters. Here was his private office,
which he’d occupied since the 1980s. And here were the campaign and now transition floors—firmly
in his orbit and not that of Washington and the “swamp.”
Trump’s instinct in the face of his unlikely, if not preposterous, success was the opposite of
humility. It was, in some sense, to rub everybody’s face in it. Washington insiders, or would-be
insiders, would have to come to him. Trump Tower immediately upstaged the White House.
Everybody who came to see the president-elect was acknowledging, or accepting, an outsider
government. Trump forced them to endure what was gleefully called by insiders the “perp walk” in
front of press and assorted gawkers. An act of obeisance, if not humiliation.
The otherworldly sense of Trump Tower helped obscure the fact that few in the thin ranks of
Trump’s inner circle, with their overnight responsibility for assembling a government, had almost any
relevant experience. Nobody had a political background. Nobody had a policy background. Nobody
had a legislative background.
Politics is a network business, a who-you-know business. But unlike other presidents-elect—all
of whom invariably suffered from their own management defects—Trump did not have a career’s
worth of political and government contacts to call on. He hardly even had his own political
organization. For most of the last eighteen months on the road, it had been, at its core, a three-person
enterprise: his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski (until he was forced out a month before the
Republican National Convention); his spokesperson-bodyperson-intern, the campaign’s first hire,
twenty-six-year-old Hope Hicks; and Trump himself. Lean and mean and gut instincts—the more
people you had to deal with, Trump found, the harder it was to turn the plane around and get home to
bed at night.
The professional team—although in truth there was hardly a political professional among them—
that had joined the campaign in August was a last-ditch bid to avoid hopeless humiliation. But these
were people he’d worked with for just a few months.
Reince Priebus, getting ready to shift over from the RNC to the White House, noted, with alarm,
how often Trump offered people jobs on the spot, many of whom he had never met before, for
positions whose importance Trump did not particularly understand.
Ailes, a veteran of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 White Houses, was growing worried by the
president-elect’s lack of immediate focus on a White House structure that could serve and protect
him. He tried to impress on Trump the ferocity of the opposition that would greet him.
“You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff. And you need a son of a bitch who knows
Washington,” Ailes told Trump not long after the election. “You’ll want to be your own son of a bitch,
but you don’t know Washington.” Ailes had a suggestion: “Speaker Boehner.” (John Boehner had
been the Speaker of the House until he was forced out in a Tea Party putsch in 2011.)
“Who’s that?” asked Trump.
Everybody in Trump’s billionaire circle, concerned about his contempt for other people’s
expertise, tried to impress upon him the importance of the people, the many people, he would need
with him in the White House, people who understood Washington. Your people are more important
than your policies. Your people are your policies.
“Frank Sinatra was wrong,” said David Bossie, one of Trump’s longtime political advisers. “If
you can make it in New York, you can’t necessarily make it in Washington.”
* * *
The nature of the role of the modern chief of staff is a focus of much White House scholarship. As
much as the president himself, the chief of staff determines how the White House and executive
branch—which employs 4 million people, including 1.3 million people in the armed services—will
run.
The job has been construed as deputy president, or chief operating officer, or even prime minister.
Larger-than-life chiefs have included Richard Nixon’s H. R. Haldeman and Alexander Haig; Gerald
Ford’s Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney; Jimmy Carter’s Hamilton Jordan; Ronald Reagan’s James
Baker; George H. W. Bush’s return of James Baker; Bill Clinton’s Leon Panetta, Erskine Bowles, and
John Podesta; George W. Bush’s Andrew Card; and Barack Obama’s Rahm Emanuel and Bill Daley.
Anyone studying the position would conclude that a stronger chief of staff is better than a weaker one,
and a chief of staff with a history in Washington and the federal government is better than an outsider.
Donald Trump had little, if any, awareness of the history of or the thinking about this role. Instead,
he substituted his own management style and experience. For decades, he had relied on longtime
retainers, cronies, and family. Even though Trump liked to portray his business as an empire, it was
actually a discrete holding company and boutique enterprise, catering more to his peculiarities as
proprietor and brand representative than to any bottom line or other performance measures.
His sons, Don Jr. and Eric—jokingly behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and
Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein—wondered if there couldn’t somehow be two parallel
White House structures, one dedicated to their father’s big-picture views, personal appearances, and
salesmanship and the other concerned with day-to-day management issues. In this construct, they saw
themselves tending to the day-to-day operations.
One of Trump’s early ideas was to recruit his friend Tom Barrack—part of his kitchen cabinet of
real estate tycoons including Steven Roth and Richard Lefrak—and make him chief of staff.
Barrack, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, is a starstruck real estate investor of legendary
acumen who owns Michael Jackson’s former oddball paradise, Neverland Ranch. With Jeffrey
Epstein—the New York financier who would become a tabloid regular after a guilty plea to one count
of soliciting prostitution that sent him to jail in 2008 in Palm Beach for thirteen months—Trump and
Barrack were a 1980s and ’90s set of nightlife Musketeers.
The founder and CEO of the private equity firm Colony Capital, Barrack became a billionaire
making investments in distress debt investments in real estate around the world, including helping to
bail out his friend Donald Trump. More recently, he had helped bail out his friend’s son-in-law, Jared
Kushner.
He watched with amusement Trump’s eccentric presidential campaign and brokered the deal to
have Paul Manafort replace Corey Lewandowski after Lewandowski fell out of favor with Kushner.
Then, as confounded as everyone else by the campaign’s continuing successes, Barrack introduced the
future president in warm and personal terms at the Republican National Convention in July (at odds
with its otherwise dark and belligerent tone).
It was Trump’s perfect fantasy that his friend Tom—an organizational whiz fully aware of his
friend’s lack of interest in day-to-day management—would sign on to run the White House. This was
Trump’s instant and convenient solution to the unforeseen circumstance of suddenly being president:
to do it with his business mentor, confidant, investor, and friend, someone whom acquaintances of the
two men describe as “being one of the best Donald handlers.” In the Trump circle this was called the
“two amigos” plan. (Epstein, who remained close to Barrack, had been whitewashed out of the
Trump biography.)
Barrack, among the few people whose abilities Trump, a reflexive naysayer, didn’t question,
could, in Trump’s hopeful view, really get things running smoothly and let Trump be Trump. It was, on
Trump’s part, an uncharacteristic piece of self-awareness: Donald Trump might not know what he
didn’t know, but he knew Tom Barrack knew. He would run the business and Trump would sell the
product—making American great again. #MAGA.
For Barrack, as for everybody around Trump, the election result was a kind of beyond-belief
lottery-winning circumstance—your implausible friend becoming president. But Barrack, even after
countless pleading and cajoling phone calls from Trump, finally had to disappoint his friend, telling
him “I’m just too rich.” He would never be able to untangle his holdings and interests—including big
investments in the Middle East—in a way that would satisfy ethics watchdogs. Trump was
unconcerned or in denial about his own business conflicts, but Barrack saw nothing but hassle and
cost for himself. Also, Barrack, on his fourth marriage, had no appetite for having his colorful
personal life—often, over the years, conducted with Trump—become a public focus.
* * *
Trump’s fallback was his son-in-law. On the campaign, after months of turmoil and outlandishness (if
not to Trump, to most others, including his family), Kushner had stepped in and become his effective
body man, hovering nearby, speaking only when spoken to, but then always offering a calming and
flattering view. Corey Lewandowski called Jared the butler. Trump had come to believe that his sonin-
law, in part because he seemed to understand how to stay out of his way, was uniquely sagacious.
In defiance of law and tone, and everybody’s disbelieving looks, the president seemed intent on
surrounding himself in the White House with his family. The Trumps, all of them—except for his
wife, who, mystifyingly, was staying in New York—were moving in, all of them set to assume
responsibilities similar to their status in the Trump Organization, without anyone apparently
counseling against it.
Finally, it was the right-wing diva and Trump supporter Ann Coulter who took the president-elect
aside and said, “Nobody is apparently telling you this. But you can’t. You just can’t hire your
children.”
Trump continued to insist that he had every right to his family’s help, while at the same time asking
for understanding. This is family, he said—“It’s a leettle, leettle tricky.” His staffers understood not
only the inherent conflicts and difficult legal issues in having Trump’s son-in-law run the White
House, but that it would become, even more than it already was, family first for Trump. After a great
deal of pressure, he at least agreed not to make his son-in-law the chief of staff—not officially,
anyway.
* * *
If not Barrack or Kushner, then, Trump thought the job should probably go to New Jersey governor
Chris Christie, who, with Rudy Giuliani, comprised the sum total of his circle of friends with actual
political experience.
Christie, like most Trump allies, fell in and out of favor. In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump
contemptuously measured Christie’s increasing distance from his losing enterprise, and then, with
victory, his eagerness to get back in.
Trump and Christie went back to Trump’s days trying—and failing—to become an Atlantic City
gaming mogul. The Atlantic City gaming mogul. (Trump had long been competitive with and in awe of
the Las Vegas gaming mogul Steve Wynn, whom Trump would name finance chairman of the RNC.)
Trump had backed Christie as he rose through New Jersey politics. He admired Christie’s straighttalk
style, and for a while, as Christie anticipated his own presidential run in 2012 and 2013—and as
Trump was looking for a next chapter for himself with the fading of The Apprentice, his reality TV
franchise—Trump even wondered whether he might be a vice presidential possibility for Christie.
Early in the campaign, Trump said he wouldn’t have run against Christie but for the Bridgegate
scandal (which erupted when Christie’s associates closed traffic lanes on the George Washington
Bridge to undermine the mayor of a nearby town who was a Christie opponent, and which Trump
privately justified as “just New Jersey hardball”). When Christie dropped out of the race in February
2016 and signed on with the Trump campaign, he endured a torrent of ridicule for supporting his
friend, whom he believed had promised him a clear track to the VP slot.
It had personally pained Trump not to be able to give it to him. But if the Republican establishment
had not wanted Trump, they had not wanted Christie almost as much. So Christie got the job of
leading the transition and the implicit promise of a central job—attorney general or chief of staff.
But when he was the federal prosecutor in New Jersey, Christie had sent Jared’s father, Charles
Kushner, to jail in 2005. Charlie Kushner, pursued by the feds for an income tax cheat, set up a
scheme with a prostitute to blackmail his brother-in-law, who was planning to testify against him.
Various accounts, mostly offered by Christie himself, make Jared the vengeful hatchet man in
Christie’s aborted Trump administration career. It was a kind of perfect sweet-revenge story: the son
of the wronged man (or, in this case—there’s little dispute—the guilty-as-charged man) uses his
power over the man who wronged his family. But other accounts offer a subtler and in a way darker
picture. Jared Kushner, like sons-in-law everywhere, tiptoes around his father-in-law, carefully
displacing as little air as possible: the massive and domineering older man, the reedy and pliant
younger one. In the revised death-of-Chris-Christie story, it is not the deferential Jared who strikes
back, but—in some sense even more satisfying for the revenge fantasy—Charlie Kushner himself who
harshly demands his due. It was his daughter-in-law who held the real influence in the Trump circle,
who delivered the blow. Ivanka told her father that Christie’s appointment as chief of staff or to any
other high position would be extremely difficult for her and her family, and it would be best that
Christie be removed from the Trump orbit altogether.
* * *
Bannon was the heavy of the organization. Trump, who seemed awestruck by Bannon’s conversation
—a mix of insults, historical riffs, media insights, right-wing bons mots, and motivational truisms—
now began suggesting Bannon to his circle of billionaires as chief of staff, only to have this notion
soundly ridiculed and denounced. But Trump pronounced many people in favor of it anyway.
In the weeks leading up to the election, Trump had labeled Bannon a flatterer for his certainty that
Trump would win. But now he had come to credit Bannon with something like mystical powers. And
in fact Bannon, with no prior political experience, was the only Trump insider able to offer a coherent
vision of Trump’s populism—aka Trumpism.
The anti-Bannon forces—which included almost every non-Tea Party Republican—were quick to
react. Murdoch, a growing Bannon nemesis, told Trump that Bannon would be a dangerous choice.
Joe Scarborough, the former congressman and cohost of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, a favorite Trump
show, privately told Trump “Washington will go up in flames” if Bannon became chief of staff, and,
beginning a running theme, publicly denigrated Bannon on the show.
In fact, Bannon presented even bigger problems than his politics: he was profoundly disorganized,
seemingly on the spectrum given what captured his single-minded focus to the disregard of everything
else. Might he be the worst manager who ever lived? He might. He seemed incapable of returning a
phone call. He answered emails in one word—partly a paranoia about email, but even more a
controlling crypticness. He kept assistants and minders at constant bay. You couldn’t really make an
appointment with Bannon, you just had to show up. And somehow, his own key lieutenant, Alexandra
Preate, a conservative fundraiser and PR woman, was as disorganized as he was. After three
marriages, Bannon lived his bachelor’s life on Capitol Hill in a row house known as the Breitbart
Embassy that doubled as the Breitbart office—the life of a messy party. No sane person would hire
Steven Bannon for a job that included making the trains run on time.
* * *
Hence, Reince Priebus.
For the Hill, he was the only reasonable chief among the contenders, and he quickly became the
subject of intense lobbying by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell. If they were going to have to deal with an alien like Donald Trump, then best they do it
with the help of a member of their own kind.
Priebus, forty-five, was neither politician nor policy wonk nor strategist. He was political
machine worker, one of the oldest professions. A fundraiser.
A working-class kid originally from New Jersey and then Wisconsin, at thirty-two he made his
first and last run for elective office: a failed bid for Wisconsin state senate. He became the chairman
of the state party and then the general counsel of the Republican National Committee. In 2011 he
stepped up to chairmanship of the RNC. Priebus’s political cred came from appeasing the Tea Party
in Wisconsin, and his association with Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, a rising Republican star
(and, briefly—very briefly—the 2016 front-runner).
With significant parts of the Republican Party inalterably opposed to Trump, and with an almost
universal belief within the party that Trump would go down to ignominious defeat, taking the party
with him, Priebus was under great pressure after Trump captured the nomination to shift resources
down the ticket and even to abandon the Trump campaign entirely.
Convinced himself that Trump was hopeless, Priebus nevertheless hedged his bets. The fact that he
did not abandon Trump entirely became a possible margin of victory and made Priebus something of a
hero (equally, in the Kellyanne Conway version, if they had lost, he would have been a reasonable
target). He became the default choice for chief.
And yet his entry into the Trump inner circle caused Priebus his share of uncertainty and
bewilderment. He came out of his first long meeting with Trump thinking it had been a disconcertingly
weird experience. Trump talked nonstop and constantly repeated himself.
“Here’s the deal,” a close Trump associate told Priebus. “In an hour meeting with him you’re
going to hear fifty-four minutes of stories and they’re going to be the same stories over and over
again. So you have to have one point to make and you have to pepper it in whenever you can.”
The Priebus appointment as chief of staff, announced in mid-November, also put Bannon on a
coequal level. Trump was falling back on his own natural inclinations to let nobody have real power.
Priebus, even with the top job, would be a weaker sort of figure, in the traditional mold of most
Trump lieutenants over the years. The choice also worked well for the other would-be chiefs. Tom
Barrack could easily circumvent Priebus and continue to speak directly to Trump. Jared Kushner’s
position as son-in-law and soon top aide would not be impeded. And Steve Bannon, reporting
directly to Trump, remained the undisputed voice of Trumpism in the White House.
There would be, in other words, one chief of staff in name—the unimportant one—and various
others, more important, in practice, ensuring both chaos and Trump’s own undisputed independence.
Jim Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and almost everybody’s
model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not to take the job.
* * *
The transmogrification of Trump from joke candidate, to whisperer for a disaffected demographic, to
risible nominee, to rent-in-the-fabric-of-time president-elect, did not inspire in him any larger sense
of sober reflection. After the shock of it, he immediately seemed to rewrite himself as the inevitable
president.
One instance of his revisionism, and of the new stature he now seemed to assume as president,
involved the lowest point of the campaign—the Billy Bush tape.
His explanation, in an off-the-record conversation with a friendly cable anchor, was that it “really
wasn’t me.”
The anchor acknowledged how unfair it was to be characterized by a single event.
“No,” said Trump, “it wasn’t me. I’ve been told by people who understand this stuff about how
easy it is to alter these things and put in voices and completely different people.”
He was the winner and now expected to be the object of awe, fascination, and favor. He expected
this to be binary: a hostile media would turn into a fannish one.
And yet here he was, the winner who was treated with horror and depredations by a media that in
the past, as a matter of course and protocol, could be depended on to shower lavish deference on an
incoming president no matter who he was. (Trump’s shortfall of three million votes continued to
rankle and was a subject best avoided.) It was nearly incomprehensible to him that the same people—
that is, the media—who had violently criticized him for saying he might dispute the election result
were now calling him illegitimate.
Trump was not a politician who could parse factions of support and opprobrium; he was a
salesman who needed to make a sale. “I won. I am the winner. I am not the loser,” he repeated,
incredulously, like a mantra.
Bannon described Trump as a simple machine. The On switch was full of flattery, the Off switch
full of calumny. The flattery was dripping, slavish, cast in ultimate superlatives, and entirely
disconnected from reality: so-and-so was the best, the most incredible, the ne plus ultra, the eternal.
The calumny was angry, bitter, resentful, ever a casting out and closing of the iron door.
This was the nature of Trump’s particular salesmanship. His strategic belief was that there was no
reason not to heap excessive puffery on a prospect. But if the prospect was ruled out as a buyer, there
was no reason not to heap scorn and lawsuits on him or her. After all, if they don’t respond to sucking
up, they might respond to piling on. Bannon felt—perhaps with overconfidence—that Trump could be
easily switched on and off.
Against the background of a mortal war of wills—with the media, the Democrats, and the swamp
—that Bannon was encouraging him to wage, Trump could also be courted. In some sense, he wanted
nothing so much as to be courted.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, which had become one of the many
Trump media bêtes noires in the media world, nevertheless took pains to reach out not only to the
presidentelect but to his daughter Ivanka. During the campaign, Trump said Amazon was getting
“away with murder taxwise” and that if he won, “Oh, do they have problems.” Now Trump was
suddenly praising Bezos as “a top-level genius.” Elon Musk, in Trump Tower, pitched Trump on the
new administration’s joining him in his race to Mars, which Trump jumped at. Stephen Schwarzman,
the head of the Blackstone Group—and a Kushner friend—offered to organize a business council for
Trump, which Trump embraced. Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor and fashion industry queen, had
hoped to be named America’s ambassador to the UK under Obama and, when that didn’t happen,
closely aligned herself with Hillary Clinton. Now Wintour arrived at Trump Tower (but refused to do
the perp walk) and suggested that she become Trump’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. And
Trump was inclined to entertain the idea. (“Fortunately,” said Bannon, “there was no chemistry.”)
On December 14, a high-level delegation from Silicon Valley came to Trump Tower to meet the
president-elect, though Trump had repeatedly criticized the tech industry throughout the campaign.
Later that afternoon, Trump called Rupert Murdoch, who asked him how the meeting had gone.
“Oh, great, just great,” said Trump. “Really, really good. These guys really need my help. Obama
was not very favorable to them, too much regulation. This is really an opportunity for me to help
them.”
“Donald,” said Murdoch, “for eight years these guys had Obama in their pocket. They practically
ran the administration. They don’t need your help.”
“Take this H-1B visa issue. They really need these H-1B visas.”
Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas might be hard to square with his
immigration promises. But Trump seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, “We’ll figure it out.”
“What a fucking idiot,” said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.
* * *
Ten days before Donald Trump’s inauguration as the forty-fifth president, a group of young Trump
staffers—the men in regulation Trump suits and ties, the women in the Trump-favored look of high
boots, short skirts, and shoulder-length hair—were watching President Barack Obama give his
farewell speech as it streamed on a laptop in the transition offices.
“Mr. Trump said he’s never once listened to a whole Obama speech,” said one of the young
people authoritatively.
“They’re so boring,” said another.
While Obama bade his farewell, preparations for Trump’s first press conference since the
election, to be held the next day, were under way down the hall. The plan was to make a substantial
effort to show that the president-elect’s business conflicts would be addressed in a formal and
considered way.
Up until now, Trump’s view was that he’d been elected because of those conflicts—his business
savvy, connections, experience, and brand—not in spite of them, and that it was ludicrous for anyone
to think he could untangle himself even if he wanted to. Indeed, to reporters and anyone else who
would listen, Kellyanne Conway offered on Trump’s behalf a self-pitying defense about how great his
sacrifice had already been.
After fanning the flames of his intention to disregard rules regarding conflicts of interest, now, in a
bit of theater, he would take a generous new tack. Standing in the lobby of Trump Towner next to a
table stacked high with document folders and legal papers, he would describe the vast efforts that had
been made to do the impossible and how, henceforth, he would be exclusively focused on the nation’s
business.
But suddenly this turned out to be quite beside the point.
Fusion GPS, an opposition research company (founded by former journalists, it provided
information to private clients), had been retained by Democratic Party interests. Fusion had hired
Christopher Steele, a former British spy, in June 2016, to help investigate Trump’s repeated brags
about his relationship with Vladimir Putin and the nature of Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin.
With reports from Russian sources, many connected to Russian intelligence, Steele assembled a
damaging report—now dubbed the “dossier”—suggesting that Donald Trump was being blackmailed
by the Putin government. In September, Steele briefed reporters from the New York Times, the
Washington Post, Yahoo! News, the New Yorker, and CNN. All declined to use this unverified
information, with its unclear provenance, especially given that it was about an unlikely election
winner.
But the day before the scheduled press conference, CNN broke details of the Steele dossier.
Almost immediately thereafter, Buzzfeed published the entire report—an itemized bacchanal of
beyond-the-pale behavior.
On the verge of Trump’s ascendancy to the presidency, the media, with its singular voice on Trump
matters, was propounding a conspiracy of vast proportions. The theory, suddenly presented as just
this side of a likelihood, was that the Russians had suborned Donald Trump during a trip to Moscow
with a crude blackmail scheme involving prostitutes and videotaped sexual acts pushing new
boundaries of deviance (including “golden showers”) with prostitutes and videotaped sex acts. The
implicit conclusion: a compromised Trump had conspired with the Russians to steal the election and
to install him in the White House as Putin’s dupe.
If this was true, then the nation stood at one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of
democracy, international relations, and journalism.
If it was not true—and it was hard to fathom a middle ground—then it would seem to support the
Trump view (and the Bannon view) that the media, in also quite a dramatic development in the history
of democracy, was so blinded by an abhorrence and revulsion, both ideological and personal, for the
democratically elected leader that it would pursue any avenue to take him down. Mark Hemingway, in
the conservative, but anti-Trump, Weekly Standard, argued the novel paradox of two unreliable
narrators dominating American public life: the president-elect spoke with little information and
frequently no factual basis, while “the frame the media has chosen to embrace is that everything the
man does is, by default, unconstitutional or an abuse of power.”
On the afternoon of January 11, these two opposing perceptions faced off in the lobby of Trump
Tower: the political antichrist, a figure of dark but buffoonish scandal, in the pocket of America’s
epochal adversary, versus the would-be revolutionary-mob media, drunk on virtue, certainty, and
conspiracy theories. Each represented, for the other side, a wholly discredited “fake” version of
reality.
If these character notes seemed comic-book in style, that was exactly how the press conference
unfolded.
First Trump’s encomiums to himself:
“I will be the greatest jobs producer that God ever created. . . .”
A smattering of the issues before him:
“Veterans with a little cancer can’t see a doctor until they are terminal. . . .”
Then the incredulity:
“I was in Russia years ago with the Ms. Universe contest—did very very well—I tell everyone be
careful, because you don’t want to see yourself on television—cameras all over the place. And again,
not just Russia, all over. So would anyone really believe that story? I’m also very much of a
germaphobe, by the way. Believe me.”
Then the denial:
“I have no deals in Russia, I have no deal that could happen in Russia because we’ve stayed away,
and I have no loans with Russia. I have to say one thing . . . Over the weekend I was offered two
billion dollars to do a deal in Dubai and I turned it down. I didn’t have to turn it down, because as
you know I have a no-conflict situation as president. I didn’t know about that until three months ago
but it’s a nice thing to have. But I didn’t want to take advantage of something. I have a no-conflict-ofinterest
provision as president. I could actually run my business, run my business and run government
at the same time. I don’t like the way that looks but I would be able to do that if I wanted to. I could
run the Trump organization, a great, great company, and I could run the country, but I don’t want to do
that.”
Then the direct attack on CNN, his nemesis:
“Your organization is terrible. Your organization is terrible. . . . Quiet . . . quiet . . . don’t be rude .
. . Don’t be. . . . No, I’m not going to give you a question . . . I’m not going to give you a question. . . .
You are fake news. . . .”
And in summation:
“That report first of all should never have been printed because it’s not worth the paper it’s
printed on. I will tell you that should never ever happen. Twenty-two million accounts were hacked
by China. That’s because we have no defense, because we’re run by people who don’t know what
they’re doing. Russia will have far greater respect for our country when I’m leading it. And not just
Russia, China, which has taken total advantage of us. Russia, China, Japan, Mexico, all countries will
respect us far more, far more than they do under past administrations. . . .”
Not only did the president-elect wear his deep and bitter grievances on his sleeve, but it was now
clear that the fact of having been elected president would not change his unfiltered, apparently
uncontrollable, utterly shoot-from-the-hip display of wounds, resentments, and ire.
“I think he did a fantastic job,” said Kellyanne Conway after the news conference. “But the media
won’t say that. They never will.”