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Kellyanne Conway first met Donald Trump at a meeting of the condo board for the Trump International Hotel, which was directly across the street from the
UN and was where, in the early 2000s, she lived with her husband and children.
In a real sense, however, her advantage was not meeting Trump but being taken up by the Mercers.
Her title was campaign manager, but that was a misnomer. Bannon was the real manager, and she
was the senior pollster.
Conway is an antifeminist (or, actually, in a complicated ideological somersault, she sees feminists as being antifeminists), ascribing her methods and temperament to her being a wife and mother.
Hope Hicks, then age twenty-six, was the campaign’s first hire.
Over the eighteen months of the campaign, the traveling group usually consisted of the candidate, Hicks, and the campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.
Lewandowski, with whom Hicks had an on-and-off romantic relationship,
Hicks continued playing the role of his personal PR woman.
the job was offered to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, who turned it down.
Priebus pushed for one of his deputies at the Republican National Committee, Sean Spicer,
(Later, it was Bannon who had to take the president aside and tell him that John Dean had been the White House counsel in the Nixon administration, so maybe it would be a good idea to lighten up on McGahn.)
In presidential annals, the firing of FBI director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.
On May 17, twelve days after FBI director Comey was fired, without consulting the White House or the attorney general, Rosenstein appointed former FBI director Robert Mueller to oversee the investigation of Trump’s, his campaign’s, and his staff’s ties to Russia.
Peter Thiel, an early and lonely Trump supporter in Silicon Valley who had become increasingly astonished by Trump’s unpredictability.
But two days before the meeting, Ailes fell in his bathroom and hit his head.
A week later, Ailes, that singular figure in the march from Nixon’s silent majority to Reagan’s Democrats to Trump’s passionate base, was dead.
Enter the crown prince of the House of Saud, Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, age thirty-one. Aka MBS. The fortuitous circumstance was that the king of Saudi Arabia, MBS’s father, was losing it. The consensus in the Saudi royal family about a need to modernize was growing stronger (somewhat). MBS—an inveterate player of video games—was a new sort of personality in the Saudi leadership.
had seized the economic portfolio and was pursuing a vision—quite a Trumpian vision—to out-Dubai Dubai and diversify the economy.
If Trump had one fixed point of reference in the Middle East, it was—mostly courtesy of Michael Flynn’s tutoring—that Iran was the bad guy. Hence everybody opposed to Iran was a pretty good guy.
the new Trump thinking about the Middle East became the following. There are basically four players (or at least we can forget everybody else)—Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. The first three can be united against the fourth. And Egypt and Saudi Arabia, given what they want with respect to Iran—and anything else that does not interfere with the United States’ interests—will pressure the Palestinians to make a deal. Voilà.
The foreign policy establishment had a long and well-honed relationship with MBS’s rival, the crown prince, Mohammed bin Nayef (MBN).
fast-advancing relationship with MBS would send a dangerous message to MBN.
On MBS’s assurance that he would deliver some seriously good news, he was invited to visit the White House in March.
the Saudis threw a $75 million party in Trump’s honor,
The president, ignoring if not defying foreign policy advice, gave a nod to the Saudis’ plan to bully Qatar.
Within weeks of the trip, MBS, detaining MBN quite in the dead of night, would force him to relinquish the crown prince title, which MBS would then assume for himself.
when Trump’s fortunes sank, Bannon’s rose.
nine top firms turned them down.
The professional White House was united against the amateur family White House.
On June 1, after a long and bitter internal debate, the president announced that he had decided to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.
The point could hardly have been clearer: if the president was pressuring the director because he feared that an investigation of Michael Flynn would damage him, then this was an obstruction of justice.
It was, arguably, the peculiar tragedy of Barack Obama that even as a transformational figure—and inspirational communicator—he couldn’t really command much interest.
That was the radical and transformational nature of the Trump presidency: it held everybody’s attention.
one of the most preposterous meetings in modern politics. On June 9, 2016, Don Jr., Jared, and Paul Manafort met with a movieworthy cast of dubious characters in Trump Tower after having been promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton.
The ten days of Anthony Scaramucci saw, on the first day, July 21, the resignation of Sean Spicer.
Scaramucci blamed Priebus directly, implicitly accusing him of a felony.
Scaramucci called a reporter at the New Yorker magazine and unloaded.
The resulting article was surreal
In fact, Kelly—who would soon abjectly apologize to Priebus for the basic lack of courtesy in the way his dismissal was handled—had not been consulted about his appointment. The president’s tweet was the first he knew of it.
just hours after he was sworn in, Kelly fired Scaramucci.
the president himself was unsure about where he himself stood; he kept asking people if Kelly liked him.
willing tough immigration enforcer at Homeland Security,
“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with the fire and the fury like the world has never seen. He has been very threatening beyond a normal state, and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power, the likes of which this world has never seen before. Thank you.”
“Unite the Right,” the theme of the rally called for Saturday, August 12, was explicitly designed to link Trump’s politics with white nationalism.
At a signal, the marchers began chanting official movement slogans: “Blood and soil!” “You will not replace us!” “Jews will not replace us!” Soon, at the center of campus, near a statue of UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, Spencer’s group was met by a counterprotest. With virtually no police presence, the first of the weekend’s melees and injuries ensued.
Trump took a moment to condemn the “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides” in Charlottesville.
As Richard Spencer had correctly understood, the president’s sympathies were muddled.
“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, alt-right? Do they have any semblance of guilt? What about the fact they came charging with clubs in their hands? As far as I’m concerned that was a horrible, horrible day.… I think there’s blame on both sides.
