Siege: Trump Under Fire

by Michael Wolff

Real estate was the world’s favorite money-laundering currency, and Trump’s B-level real estate business—relentlessly marketed by Trump as triple A—was quite explicitly designed to appeal to money launderers.

Not long after Sessions had recused himself on Russia-related matters, the president directed Cliff Sims, a young West Wing staffer who had ingratiated himself with the president (“a weasel, who had weaseled his way in,” in Bannon’s description), and who, like Sessions, was from Alabama, to go to the attorney general’s house on a Saturday morning and demand that he unrecuse himself. Bannon, in this instance, countermanded the president’s directive to Sims.

By March 2018, Mueller’s team was contemplating an audacious move. In an initiative led by Weissmann, the special counsel’s office laid out an indictment of the president. The proposed indictment provided a virtual road map of the first year of Trump’s presidency. There were three counts in “UNITED STATES OF AMERICA - against - DONALD J. TRUMP, Defendant.” The first count, under Title 18, United States code, Section 1505, charged the president with corruptly—or by threats of force or threatening communication—influencing, obstructing, or impeding a pending proceeding before a department or agency of the United States. The second count, under section 1512, charged the president with tampering with a witness, victim or informant. The third count, under section 1513, charged the president with retaliating against a witness, victim or informant.

Fooling some of the people all of the time defined Trump’s hard-core base.

McConnell’s contempt for Trump was boundless. He was not just the stupidest president McConnell had ever dealt with, he was the stupidest person McConnell had ever met in politics—and that was saying something. He and his wife, Elaine Chao, the secretary of transportation, regularly mocked and mimicked Trump, a set piece they would perform for friends.

The issue was not that he might act precipitously and recklessly because he didn’t understand the consequences of doing so. The issue was that he could not comprehend the actual choices that needed to be made in order to act; indeed, he could not even stay in the room long enough to decide on a course of action. For Trump, the fog of war would waylay him before the first command could be given.

In the weeks before the grand trip to Singapore, worries about the difficulty of briefing the president became both a critical concern and a topic of high comedy. There was almost no particular—not geographic, not economic, not military, not historical—that he seemed to grasp. Could he even identify the Korean peninsula on a map?

Mattis had begun to think that in Trump he had met his Captain Queeg.

It was either a bizarre but random coincidence that there was a direct line that ran from Donald Trump to Paul Manafort to Oleg Deripaska to Vladimir Putin—or not a coincidence at all. Either Manafort and Deripaska were the middlemen connecting Trump and Putin, or Manafort and Deripaska, in some cosmic joke of proximity, just happened to find themselves in their own crazy shit inside some other, larger crazy shit.

The addition of Pecker and the National Enquirer into this tale confirmed the larger concern of some aides and many Republicans on the Hill: not just that the Trump circle lacked experience and talent, but that it was the greatest concentration of ignominious lowlifes, scammers, and con artists ever seen in national politics, which was saying a lot.

Trump was vulnerable because he was an amateur who had run for high office in a complicated world governed by byzantine election rules. Trump was vulnerable because he couldn’t control the many inept and undisciplined people around him. Trump was vulnerable because he couldn’t keep his mouth—or his Twitter feed—shut. And Trump was vulnerable because for forty years he had run what increasingly seemed to resemble a semi-criminal enterprise.

a disgusted Kissinger ripped Trump and Kushner in the most fundamental and visceral way. “The entire foreign policy is based on a single unstable individual’s reaction to perceptions of slights or flattery. If someone says something nice about him, they are our friend; if they say something unkind, if they don’t kiss the ring, they are our enemy.”

puffer vest,

down vest

On the morning after the midterms, Bannon reminded several members of the original Trump team—those who had entered the White House nearly two years ago, on January 20, 2017—about a meeting that had taken place three days after the inauguration, the first business day of the new Trump administration. This was a traditional postinaugural occasion: the congressional leadership had been invited to meet the president and his staff. Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon were sitting to the right of the new president. Nancy Pelosi was sitting across from them. Looking at the House minority leader, Bannon felt a shiver go down his spine. He leaned close to Priebus and whispered, “She so sees through us.” Pelosi, the professional, was taking stock of the most ill-informed, ill-equipped, ill-prepared team ever to come into the White House. Bannon perceived that she had to exercise maximum restraint not to break down in open incredulity and hilarity. What she seemed to feel was less scorn, Bannon sensed, than pity. She saw the future. The establishment might have been rocked to its core by the election of Donald Trump. All the powers that be might be contemplating how to resist and ultimately undo the administration of Donald Trump. But Pelosi, Bannon felt, saw the greater truth: the Trump administration would undo itself. No one in the White House, least of all Donald Trump himself, was capable of succeeding at the complicated dance of holding on to power, a much greater challenge than s...

senior adviser and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller, whom Trump described as “autistic” and “sweaty.”

And yet the small-time-crooks nature of the cast did not change the fact Trump that “was forever giving crazy guys crazy orders,” said Bannon, “which he would forget as quickly as he had given them.” This might be chicken shit rather than collusion, but in a sense it was just as damning to find the president so hopelessly mired in chicken shit.

And beyond the family charity, there was the RICO investigation in New York, which could easily bring about Trump’s personal financial destruction—all those loan applications, all that potential banking fraud. “This is where it isn’t a witch hunt—even for the hard core, this is where he turns into just a crooked business guy, and one worth fifty million dollars instead of ten billion dollars,” said Bannon, ever on the edge of disgust. “Not the billionaire he said he was, just another scumbag.”