Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House

by Michael Wolff

This was originally conceived as an account of the Trump administration’s first hundred days, that most traditional marker of a presidency. But events barreled on without natural pause for more than two hundred days, the curtain coming down on the first act of Trump’s presidency only with the appointment of retired general John Kelly as the chief of staff in late July and the exit of chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon three weeks later.

Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. Those conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.

But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone.

Operatives knew the game, and so did most candidates and officeholders. But Ailes was pretty sure Trump did not. Trump was undisciplined—he had no capacity for any game plan.

In early August, less than a month after Ailes had been ousted from Fox News, Trump asked his old friend to take over the management of his calamitous campaign. Ailes, knowing Trump’s disinclination to take advice, or even listen to it, turned him down. This was the job Bannon a week later.

Trump’s rise to power, Ailes understood, was the improbable triumph of many things that Ailes and Fox News represented. After all, Ailes was perhaps the person most responsible for unleashing the angry-man currents of Trump’s victory: he had invented the right-wing media that delighted in the Trump character.

“Bolton’s mustache is a problem,” snorted Bannon. “Trump doesn’t think he looks the part. You know Bolton is an acquired taste.” “Well, he got in trouble because he got in a fight in a hotel one night and chased some woman.” “If I told Trump that, he might have the job.”

He had first met Trump, the on-again off-again presidential candidate, in 2010; at a meeting in Trump Tower, Bannon had proposed to Trump that he spend half a million dollars backing Tea Party–style candidates as a way to further his presidential ambitions. Bannon left the meeting figuring that Trump would never cough up that kind of dough. He just wasn’t a serious player.

But now Bannon’s Zeitgeist moment had arrived. Everywhere there was a sudden sense of global self-doubt. Brexit in the UK, waves of immigrants arriving on Europe’s angry shores, the disenfranchisement of the workingman, the specter of more financial meltdown, Bernie Sanders and his liberal revanchism—everywhere was backlash. Even the most dedicated exponents of globalism were hesitating. Bannon believed that great numbers of people were suddenly receptive to a new message: the world needs borders—or the world should return to a time when it had borders. When America was great. Trump had become the platform for that message.

“Really,” Bannon said. “He’s on the program. It’s his program.” Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all in. Sheldon”—Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, far-right Israel defender, and Trump supporter—“is all in. We know where we’re heading on this.”

“Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared to death of Persia … Yemen, Sinai, Libya … this thing is bad.… That’s why Russia is so key.… Is Russia that bad? They’re bad guys. But the world is full of bad guys.”

Bannon offered all this with something like ebullience—a man remaking the world. “But it’s good to know the bad guys are the bad guys,” said Ailes, pushing Bannon. “Donald may not know.”

“What has he gotten himself into with the Russians?” pressed Ailes. “Mostly,” said Bannon, “he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet Putin. But Putin couldn’t give a shit about him. So he’s kept trying.”

“China’s everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we don’t get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You’re going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”

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.

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.

Time spent with Trump on the campaign plane was often an epic dissing experience: everybody around him was an idiot.

“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.”

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

“What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model. “They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.”

Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends’ wives into bed.

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.

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.

One of Kushner’s now-frequent wise-men callers was Henry Kissinger.

Throughout the campaign and even more forcefully after the election, Trump had targeted the American intelligence community—the CIA, FBI, NSC, and, altogether, seventeen separate intelligence agencies—as incompetent and mendacious. (His message was “on auto pilot,” said one aide.)

George W. Bush, on the dais, supplied what seemed likely to become the historic footnote to the Trump address: “That’s some weird shit.”

Among Trump’s first moves as president was to have a series of inspirational photographs in the West Wing replaced with images of big crowd scenes at his inaugural ceremony.

Bannon didn’t much question Donald Trump’s bona fides, or behavior, or electability, because, in part, Trump was just his latest rich man. The rich man is a fixed fact, which you have to accept and deal with in an entrepreneurial world—at least a lower-level entrepreneurial world. And, of course, if Trump had had firmer bona fides, better behavior, and clear electability, Bannon would not have had his chance.

The real goal was to expose the hypocrisy of the liberal view. Somehow, despite laws, rules, and customs, liberal globalists had pushed a myth of more or less open immigration. It was a double liberal hypocrisy, because, sotto voce, the Obama administration had been quite aggressive in deporting illegal aliens—except don’t tell the liberals that.

But Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and the president’s daughter actually had no specific responsibilities—they could make it up as they went along. They did what they wanted. They would seize the day if they could—even if they really didn’t know how to do what they wanted to do.

Jared Kushner in quite a short period of time—rather less than a year—had crossed over from the standard Democratic view in which he was raised, to an acolyte of Trumpism, bewildering many friends and, as well, his own brother, whose insurance company, Oscar, funded with Kushner-family money, was destined to be shattered by a repeal of Obamacare.

The Ivanka-Jared relationship was shepherded by Wendi Murdoch, herself a curious social example (to nobody so much as to her then husband, Rupert).

But what did Ivanka and Jared really think of their father and father-in-law? “There’s great, great, great affection—you see it, you really do,” replied Kellyanne Conway, somewhat avoiding the question. “They’re not fools,” said Rupert Murdoch when asked the question. “They understand him, I think truly,” reflected Joe Scarborough. “And they appreciate his energy. But there’s detachment.” That is, Scarborough went on, they have tolerance but few illusions.

(He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s—nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.)

Theory 1: Trump was drawn to authoritarian strongmen. Foer recounted Trump’s longtime fascination with Russia, including being duped by a Gorbachev look-alike who visited Trump Tower in the 1980s, and his many

fulsome and unnecessary “odes to Putin.” This suggested a lie-down-with-dogs-wake-up-with-fleas vulnerability: consorting with or looking favorably upon politicians whose power lies partly in their tolerance of corruption brings you closer to corruption. Likewise, Putin was drawn to populist strongmen in his own image: hence, Foer asked, “Why wouldn’t the Russians offer him the same furtive assistance they’ve lavished on Le Pen, Berlusconi, and the rest?”

Theory 2: Trump was part of a less-than-blue-chip (much less) international business set, feeding off the rivers of dubious wealth that had been unleashed by all the efforts to move cash, much of it from Russia and China, out of political harm’s way. Such money, or rumors of such money, became an explanation—still only a circumstantial one—i...

two contradictory theories here: he had hidden these dealings because he didn’t want to admit their paucity, or he had hidden them to mask their disreputableness.) Because Trump is less than creditworthy, Foer was among many who concluded that Trump needed to turn to other sources—more or less dirty money, or money with other sorts of strings attached. (One way the process can work is, roughly speaking, as follows: an oligarch makes an investment in a more or less legitimate third-party investment fund, which, quid pro quo, makes an investment in Trump.) And ...

As a subset of this theory, Trump—never very scrupulous about vetting his people—surrounded himself with a variety of hustlers working their own dea...

Theory 3: The Holy Grail proposition was that Trump and the Russians—perhaps even Putin himself—had gotten together to hack the Democratic National Committee.

Theory 4: But then there was the those-that-know-him-best theory, some version of which most Trumpers would come to embrace. He was just star-fucking. He took his beauty pageant to Russia because he thought Putin was going to be his friend. But Putin couldn’t have cared less, and in the end

Trump found himself at the promised gala dinner seated on one side next to a guy who looked like he had never used a utensil and on the other side Jabba the Hutt in a golf shirt. In other words, Trump—however foolish his sucking-up might have been, and howeve...

Theory 5: The Russians, holding damaging information about Trump, were blackmailing him. He ...

But not only didn’t he read, he didn’t listen. He preferred to be the person talking. And he trusted his own expertise—no matter how paltry or irrelevant—more than anyone else’s. What’s more, he had an extremely short attention span, even when he thought you were worthy of attention.