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They agreed that Kellyanne Conway—a feisty, outspoken Republican pollster who was already helping the campaign—would be designated campaign manager. “We’re going to put her on television every day as the female-friendly face on the thing,” Bannon proposed. “Because Kellyanne is a warrior. And she’ll just take incoming. But people like her. And that’s what we need is likability.”
The first step was for field staff to get an absentee or early voting ballot to those they deemed pro-Trump because they scored a 90 or above on a scale of 0 to 100 in the national database. In Ohio, out of perhaps 6 million voters, approximately 1 million would score 90 or above. Those 1 million would be targeted for early voting ballots, and the field staff and volunteers would hound each one until the ballot was sent in.
Interesting that early voting was part of Trump’s 2016 campaign
Giuliani appeared on all five, completing what is called a full Ginsburg—a term in honor of William H. Ginsburg, the attorney for Monica Lewinsky, who appeared on all five network Sunday programs on February 1, 1998.
“Sean,” Mattis finally said, “I’ve killed people for a living. If you call me again, I’m going to fucking send you to Afghanistan. Are we clear?”
“If you just shut the fuck up and listen,” Cohn said to both Trump and Navarro, dropping deference for the moment, “you might learn something.”
“I went to parts of Pennsylvania,” the president said, “that used to be big steel towns and now they’re desolate towns and no one had a job and no one has work there.” “That may be true, sir,” Cohn said. “But remember there were towns 100 years ago that made horse carriages and buggy whips. No one had a job either. They had to reinvent themselves. You go to states like Colorado, you’ve got 2.6 unemployment rate because they keep reinventing themselves.”
Cohn brought in Lawrence B. Lindsey, a Harvard economist who had held Cohn’s job under President George W. Bush. Lindsey bluntly asked, Why are you spending any time thinking about our trade deficit? You should be thinking about the economy as a whole. If we can buy cheap products abroad and we can excel in other areas—service and high-tech products—that should be the focus. The global marketplace provided immense benefits to Americans. “Why don’t we manufacture things at home?” Lindsey asked. “We’re a manufacturing country.” Of course the United States manufactured things, but reality did not
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“Mr. President, can I show this to you?” Cohn fanned out the pages of data in front of the president. “See, the biggest leavers of jobs—people leaving voluntarily—was from manufacturing.” “I don’t get it,” Trump said. Cohn tried to explain: “I can sit in a nice office with air conditioning and a desk, or stand on my feet eight hours a day. Which one would you do for the same pay?” Cohn added, “People don’t want to stand in front of a 2,000 degree blast furnace. People don’t want to go into coal mines and get black lung. For the same dollars or equal dollars, they’re going to choose something
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During a meeting in Priebus’s corner office Bannon and Ivanka got into an altercation. “You’re a goddamn staffer!” Bannon finally screamed at Ivanka. “You’re nothing but a fucking staffer!” She had to work through the chief of staff like everyone else, he said. There needed to be some order. “You walk around this place and act like you’re in charge, and you’re not. You’re on staff!” “I’m not a staffer!” she shouted. “I’ll never be a staffer. I’m the first daughter”—she really used the title—“and I’m never going to be a staffer!”
The Chinese knew exactly how to inflict economic and political pain. The United States was in kindergarten compared to China’s PhD. The Chinese knew which congressional districts produced what products, such as soybeans. They knew which swing districts were going to be important to maintain control of the House. They could target tariffs at products from those districts, or at a state level. The Chinese would target bourbon from McConnell’s Kentucky and dairy products from Paul Ryan’s Wisconsin.
“You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women,” he said. “If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead. That was a big mistake you made. You didn’t come out guns blazing and just challenge them. You showed weakness. You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny anything that’s said about you. Never admit.”
Cohn wrote a joke for Trump to use at the Gridiron Dinner: “We’ve made enormous progress on the wall. All the drawings are done. All the excavating’s done. All the engineering is done. The only thing we’ve been stumbling with is we haven’t been able to figure out how to stretch the word ‘Trump’ over 1,200 miles.” Trump wouldn’t use it.
Trump had a giant TV going much of the time, alone in his bedroom with the clicker, the TiVo and his Twitter account. Priebus called the presidential bedroom “the devil’s workshop” and the early mornings and dangerous Sunday nights “the witching hour.”
“Forget about Reince. He’s like a little rat. He just scurries around. You don’t even have to pay any attention to him.
“It’s a good thing,” Trump said, “but it’s a bit of a shame because I was the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.”
Bannon turned to what was perhaps the fondest memory of their political lives—when Trump had won the presidency on November 9. Victory was as sweet as it got. “Is there any doubt in your mind on the 9th, when it was called, that it was the hand?” Bannon asked, dipping into a shared religious belief system. “That divine providence that worked through Trump to win this?” “No,” Sessions said. “You mean that?” Sessions said he did. “It was the hand of God, right? You and I were there. We know there’s no other way it could’ve happened than the hand of God.” “Yes.”
“The South Koreans subsidize the hell out of us,” Cohn said, challenging the president directly. The trade deal was good for the United States economy, he said again. “We buy the most amazing TVs in the world for $245. Which means that people are spending less money on TVs and more money on other products in the United States.”
“I wouldn’t need a fucking thing,” the president said. “And I’d sleep like a baby.”
At one point Trump said he had decided to impose tariffs. “Great,” Cohn said. “The stock market will be down 1,000 or 2,000 points tomorrow, but you’ll be happy. Right, sir?” “No, no, meeting’s over! Let’s not do anything.”
On the way out of the Oval Office, General Kelly, who had heard it all, pulled Cohn into the Cabinet Room. According to notes that Cohn made afterward, Kelly said, “That was the greatest show of self-control I have ever seen. If that was me, I would have taken that resignation letter and shoved it up his ass six different times.”
“The president’s unhinged,” Kelly said.
That evening, Trump sent a taunting, mine-is-bigger-than-yours tweet that shook the White House and the diplomatic community: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times,” Trump wrote on Twitter at 7:49 p.m. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
