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December 29 - December 29, 2018
This was the job Bannon a week later.
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.”
“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.
Towner
Several of his father-in-law’s circle of confidants also confided in Kushner—often confiding their worries about their friend, the president-elect. “I give him good advice about what he needs to do and for three hours the next day he does it, and then goes hopelessly off script,” complained one of them to Trump’s son-in-law. Kushner, whose pose was to take things in and not give much back, said he understood the frustration. These powerful figures tried to convey a sense of real-world politics, which they all claimed to comprehend at some significantly higher threshold than the soon-to-be
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“Don’t let him piss off the press, don’t let him piss off the Republican Party, don’t threaten congressmen because they will fuck you if you do, and most of all don’t let him piss off the intel community,” said one national Republican figure to Kushner. “If you fuck with the intel community they will figure out a way to get back at you and you’ll have two or three years of a Russian investigation, and every day something else will leak out.”
Dissuaded by his staff from staying at the Trump International Hotel in Washington and regretting his decision, the president-elect woke up on inaugural morning complaining about the accommodations at Blair House, the official guest residence across the street from the White House. Too hot, bad water pressure, bad bed.
Throughout the morning, he was visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears and would return to New York the next day; almost every word he addressed to her was sharp and peremptory. Kellyanne Conway had taken up Melania Trump as a personal PR mission, promoting the new First Lady as a vital pillar of support for the president and a helpful voice in her own right, and was trying to convince Trump that she could have an important role in the White House. But, in general, the Trumps’ relationship was one of those things nobody asked too many questions about—another mysterious
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Trump believed the Obamas acted disdainfully—“very arrogant”—toward him and Melania.
That were
. “Who do you have in there?” said Joe Scarborough in a frantic call. “Who’s the person you trust? Jared? Who can talk you through this stuff before you decided to act on it?” “Well,” said the president, “you won’t like the answer, but the answer is me. Me. I talk to myself.”
“Who should keep the oil?” asked a bewildered CIA employee, leaning over to a colleague in the back of the room.
there were practically
is it stopped immediately.…” “No, it didn’t,” one of the staffers traveling with him said reflexively, then catching herself and, with a worried look, glancing around to see if she had been overheard.
In a continuing sign of Trump’s Rashomon effect—his speeches inspiring joy or horror—witnesses would describe his reception at the CIA as either a Beatles-like emotional outpouring or a response so confounded and appalled that, in the seconds after he finished, you could hear a pin drop.
“She’s nuts … nuts … full-fledged … like whoa, ideologically there is no conversation with her,” said one senior Trump White House staffer.
“He doesn’t know anything about American politics, and has no feel for the American people,” said Bannon to Trump, always eager to point out that Murdoch wasn’t an American. But Trump couldn’t get enough of him. With his love of “winners”—and he saw Murdoch as the ultimate winner—Trump was suddenly bad-mouthing his friend Ailes as a “loser.”
Part of Jared and Ivanka’s calculation about the relative power and influence of a formal job in the West Wing versus an outside advisory role was the knowledge that influencing Trump required you to be all in. From phone call to phone call—and his day, beyond organized meetings, was almost entirely phone calls—you could lose him. The subtleties here were immense, because while he was often most influenced by the last person he spoke to, he did not actually listen to anyone. So it was not so much the force of an individual argument or petition that moved him, but rather more just someone’s
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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.
“Some people who are very privileged are aware of it and put it away; Kushner not only seemed in every gesture and word to emphasize his privilege, but also not to be aware of it,” said one New York media executive who dealt with Kushner. Both men were never out of their circle of privilege. The main challenge they set for themselves was to enter further into the privileged circle. Social climbing was their work.
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“Things are so messed up and I don’t know how to fix it.…”
“Can you imagine how disruptive it would be if that’s what you did every day and then suddenly you’re in the White House?” marveled a longtime Trump friend, smiling broadly at this trick of fate, if not abrupt comeuppance.
If he was not having his six-thirty dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his three screens and making phone calls—the phone was his true contact point with the world—to a small group of friends, among them most frequently Tom Barrack, who charted his rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then compared notes with one another.
On the February 5,
But another likely leak source about his angst in the White House was Trump himself. In his calls throughout the day and at night from his bed, he frequently spoke to people who had no reason to keep his confidences. He was a river of grievances—including about what a dump the White House was on close inspection—examples of which many recipients of his calls promptly spread throughout the ever attentive
The initial subject of his ire was the New York Times and its reporter Maggie Haberman, whom he called “a nut job.” The Times’s Gail Collins, who had written a column unfavorably comparing Trump to Vice President Pence, was “a moron.” But then, continuing under the rubric of media he hated, he veered to CNN and the deep disloyalty of its chief, Jeff Zucker. Zucker, who as the head of NBC had commissioned The Apprentice, had been “made by Trump,” Trump said of himself in the third person. And Trump had “personally” gotten Zucker his job at CNN. “Yes, yes, I did,” said Trump.
Having dispensed with Zucker, the president of the United States went on to speculate on what was involved with a golden shower. And how this was all just part of a media campaign that would never succeed in driving him from the White House. Because they were sore losers and hated him for winning, they spread total lies, 100 percent made-up things, totally untrue, for instance, the cover that week of Time magazine—which, Trump reminded his listeners, he had been on more than anyone in history—that showed Steve Bannon, a good guy, saying he was the real president. “How much influence do you
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In short order, McGahn, Priebus, and Bannon, each with prior doubts about Flynn’s reliability and judgment—“a fuck-up,” according to Bannon—conferred about the Yates message. Flynn was asked again about his call with Kislyak; he was also told that a recording might exist. Again he scoffed at any suggestion that this was a meaningful conversation about anything.
“They take everything I’ve ever said and exaggerate it,” said the president in his first week in the White House during a late-night call. “It’s all exaggerated. My exaggerations are exaggerated.”
Why? What could possibly be in it for an American politician to publicly embrace—sycophantically embrace—Vladimir Putin and to encourage what the West saw as Russian adventurism? Theory 1: Trump was drawn to authoritarian strongmen.
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.
Theory 5: The Russians, holding damaging information about Trump, were blackmailing him. He was a Manchurian Candidate.
This was the peculiar and haunting consensus—not that Trump was guilty of all that he was accused of, but that he was guilty of so much else. It was all too possible that the hardly plausible would lead to the totally credible.
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“It certainly is an odd circumstance if you live your life without regard for being elected and then get elected—and quite an opportunity for your enemies.”
Flynn declared that he had had no such conversations, absolutely no conversation, he confirmed again, and the interview, attended by senior National Security Council official and spokesman Michael Anton, ended soon thereafter. But later that day, DeYoung called Anton and asked if she could use Flynn’s denial on the record. Anton said he saw no problem—after all, the White House wanted Flynn’s denial to be clear—and notified Flynn. A few hours later, Flynn called Anton back with some worries about the statement. Anton applied an obvious test: “If you knew that there might be a tape of this
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For the senior White House staff, the underlying concern was less about getting rid of Flynn than about the president’s relationship with Flynn. What had Flynn, in essence a spy in a soldier’s uniform, roped the president into? What might they have got up to together?
Finally, there was a new rationale that Flynn should be fired not because of his Russian contacts, but because he had lied about them to the vice president. This was a convenient invention of a chain of command: in fact, Flynn did not report to Vice President Pence, and he was arguably a good deal more powerful than Pence. The new rationale appealed to Trump, and he at last agreed that Flynn had to go. Still, the president did not waiver in his belief in Flynn. Rather, Flynn’s enemies were his enemies. And Russia was a gun to his head. He might, however ruefully, have had to fire Flynn, but
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the Oval immediately became the scene of a daily Trump clusterfuck. It’s likely that more people had easy access to this president than any president before. Nearly all meetings in the Oval with the president were invariably surrounded and interrupted by a long list of retainers—
“I love Reince,” said the president, with the faintest praise. “Who else would do this job?”
Walsh was a fine example of the many political professionals in whom competence and organizational skills transcend ideology. (To wit: “I would much rather be part of an organization that has a clear chain of command that I disagree with than a chaotic organization that might seem to better reflect my views.”)