Siege: Trump Under Fire

by Michael Wolff

Dealing with sources in the Trump White House has continued to offer its own set of unique issues. A basic requirement of working there is, surely, the willingness to infinitely rationalize or delegitimize the truth, and, when necessary, to outright lie. In fact, I believe this has caused some of the same people who have undermined the public trust to become private truth-tellers. This is their devil’s bargain. But for the writer, interviewing such Janus-faced sources creates a dilemma, for it requires depending on people who lie to also tell the truth—and who might later disavow the truth they have told. Indeed, the extraordinary nature of much of what has happened in the Trump White House is often baldly denied by its spokespeople, as well as by the president himself. Yet in each successive account of this administration, the level of its preposterousness—even as that bar has been consistently raised—has almost invariably been confirmed.

In November 2004, for instance, Jeffrey Epstein, the financier later caught in a scandal involving underage prostitutes, agreed to purchase from bankruptcy a house in Palm Beach, Florida, for $36 million, a property that had been on the market for two years. Epstein and Trump had been close friends—playboys in arms, as it were—for more than a decade, with Trump often seeking Epstein’s help with his chaotic financial affairs. Soon after negotiating the deal for the house in Palm Beach, Epstein took Trump to see it, looking for advice on construction issues involved with moving the swimming pool. But as he prepared to finalize his purchase for the house, Epstein discovered that Trump, who was severely cash-constrained at the time, had bid $41 million for the property and bought it out from under Epstein through an entity called Trump Properties LLC, entirely financed by Deutsche Bank, which was already carrying a substantial number of troubled loans to the Trump Organization and to Trump personally.

Just as the enmity between the two friends increased over the house purchase, Epstein found himself under investigation by the Palm Beach police. And as Epstein’s legal problems escalated, the house, with only minor improvements, was acquired for $96 million by Dmitry Rybolovlev, an oligarch who was part of the close Putin circle of government-aligned industrialists in Russia, and who, in fact, never moved into the house. Trump had, miraculously, earned $55 million without putting up a dime. Or, more likely, Trump merely earned a fee for hiding the real owner—a shadow owner quite possibly being funneled cash by Rybolovlev for other reasons beyond the value of the house. Or, possibly, the real owner and real buyer were one and the same. Rybolovlev might have, in effect, paid himself for the house, thereby cleansing the additional $55 million for the second purchase of the house. This was Donald Trump’s world of real estate.

When the long day was finally over, the witness left the grand jury room shocked—not so much by what the prosecutors wanted to know but by what they already knew.

Among the book’s other revelations, there were perhaps two notes that should have been especially worrisome for Donald Trump: its underlying theme of Trump’s Mafia-like behavior, and the fact that Comey said nothing at all about the Trump Organization. If the former head of the FBI says you act like you’re a Mafia don, that’s a neon sign. And if he doesn’t mention the organization at the center of your business and family life, then that’s a tell: the organization is an FBI target.

This sense of Giuliani’s offness was curiously ironic, since it bore an almost eerie similarity to Trump’s own hysteria, grandiosity, and tendency to say almost anything that came into his head. For many of the senior aides who worked on the transition team, excluding the seventy-four-year-old Giuliani from a top administration job was viewed as one of their singular accomplishments. “That was at least one bullet that we missed,” said Trump’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

Barring a grievance that might strike him in the night, Trump arrived late to the office and then on most days enjoyed a lineup of staged meetings with a person or group in the Oval Office or Roosevelt Room, the purpose of which was to praise, congratulate, and distract him. And as his staff knew very well by now, a distracted Trump was a happy Trump.

annoyed him from the first weeks of his administration. (Pence was the governor of Indiana from 2013–17; for twelve years before that, he was a member of Congress.) Trump demanded subservience, but when he got it he was suspicious of the person providing it. The more Pence bowed, the more Trump tried to figure out his angle.

“Why does he look at me like that?” Trump asked about the way Pence seemed to stare at him near beatifically. “He’s a religious nut,” Trump concluded. “He was a sitting governor and was going to lose when we gave him the job. So I guess he’s got a good reason to love me. But they say he was the stupidest man in Congress.”

Jackson—physician to the president in the Obama administration and now in the Trump White House—was the go-to doctor for the president, cabinet members, and senior staff, supervising the White House’s on-site medical unit. Jackson was a popular get-along figure, not least because he was casual about prescribing medication. He kept the president stocked with Provigil, an upper, which Trump’s New York doctor had long prescribed for him. For others, Jackson was regarded as a particularly easy Ambien touch. He got along especially well with the men—an “old-fashioned sort of drinker,” in one description. He got along much less well with the women, accruing several complaints.

Trump might often come to the brink of firing Mueller, but he kept stepping back from it, too. This was not so much restraint as a cat-and-mouse game: threatening to fire him and then not firing him was Trump’s legal strategy. You were intimidated or you intimidated was Trump’s legal theory. Several rounds of imminent Mueller-to-be-fired stories came from Trump’s own direct leaks. “You’ve got to mess with them,” he explained.

In fact, the Conways’ public disagreement was, some acquaintances and colleagues believed, itself a lie, one in which the couple conspired to distance themselves from Trump’s lies. “They are of one mind about Trump,” said a friend of the couple’s. “They hate him.” The husband would take a moral stand, protecting his own reputation and law firm partnership, while the wife, who privately professed to be aghast at Trump, continued to defend her client. The Conways had an $8 million hotel-size house near the Kalorama neighborhood in Washington, not far from Jared and Ivanka’s house, a manse that the couple very much liked. The neighborhood, reliably anti-Trump, gave the cold shoulder to Jared and Ivanka. George Conway’s public objections to the president helped keep the neighbors happy.

As Whitestone knew, the unbound Trump, to which the insiders at The Apprentice were regularly exposed, was captured on thousands of hours of outtakes. Those fabled tapes still exist, but they are now controlled by Burnett and MGM. “Like the ark of the covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, [they are] somewhere on a pallet, wrapped in tape, in a desert outside of Los Angeles. Eighteen cameras shooting almost twenty-four hours a day are saved on DVDs … We didn’t have hard drives.” It is probably the richest historical record ever made of a man in his pre-presidential professional capacity—fourteen years of The Apprentice preserved. Whitestone remembered certain moments with particular clarity.

“Almost everything he does is about trying to avoid humiliation,” said Bannon. “And he’s close to it all of the time. He’s drawn to it. Caught red-handed, he’ll stare you down. He’s psychologically gifted. His father humiliated him. That humiliation broke Trump’s brother. But he learned to withstand it. But that’s the Russian roulette he’s playing, waiting for the humiliation that will break him.”

Shock and awe is what Mueller needed. Mueller had to give “the deplorables”—Bannon had adopted Hillary Clinton’s disparaging term as his affirmative and affectionate label—a compelling reason to reevaluate Trump. That is, he had to produce a smoking gun far worse than anything anyone thought Trump might have done, and that was a high hurdle. It was not going to get the special counsel anywhere merely to confirm what people already knew Trump to be. Tell me something I don’t know!

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.

But if calamity hit the House, if the House flipped to the Democrats, Mitch McConnell would then hold virtually all the cards. Trump, who, in his own set piece, regularly belittled and mocked McConnell, would be, without a Republican House, entirely beholden to the Senate majority leader. This, in McConnell’s view, was the path to taking the party back from Trump. A Democratic House would mean that only McConnell would stand between Trump and his expulsion from office. Trump would be McConnell’s prisoner. It was Bannon’s belief that McConnell had used this Machiavellian scenario to line up many of the party’s major donors. McConnell wanted the Republicans to lose the House. He was working to that end.

You couldn’t miss the sense of codependence here. Trump’s key supporters worked for him because nobody else would have them. For Bannon, bitter about many things, but now, at sixty-four, having the time of his life, electing Trump was the ultimate fuck you. Part of his mission was to elect Trump precisely to shock and outrage all of the people who so passionately didn’t want him elected. “What is the point of democracy if not of an upset?” he would ask. The fact that Trump was Trump was a separate issue; yes, he was an imperfect weapon, but he was the weapon at hand.

For Bannon, Trump’s campaign and his presidency were partly a dare. Stop me if you can—and if you can’t, then you deserve Trump. His contempt for Democrats was, in its way, not directed at Democrats per se, but at what he regarded as the mediocrities they produced, a set of placeholders who did not have the necessary political gifts. He would enumerate their names in one breath: Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand. “That’s who they’ve got? That’s who they’ve got? Stop! You’re killing me.”

The Chinese believed that Trump’s stated views should not be taken all that seriously. Indeed, the Schulze initiative represented a sophisticated understanding of the new Trump diplomatic reality. In Trump’s Washington it was possible to avoid the State Department, the foreign policy establishment, the intelligence community, and virtually every other normal diplomatic process or restraint. The chief work-around to institutional diplomacy was through Kushner, the self-appointed foreign policy expert. The White House joke, said with an amazed slap to the face, was that Kushner was a modern-day Metternich.

Not long after his father-in-law’s election, Kushner—encouraged by Rupert Murdoch, whom he had befriended when they were neighbors in a Trump-branded building on Park Avenue—reached out to Henry Kissinger for advice and counsel. Kushner had decided that he would take an official position in the Trump White House and that, given his family ties, he would be able to forge a role for himself as a direct conduit to the president. In this, he imagined that a new kind of clarity and efficiency could be brought to bear on the world’s most pressing issues—the personal touch. It seemed of no significance that he knew very little about these issues beyond what he read in the New York Times.

For Kissinger—still globe-trotting, still at work at Kissinger Associates most days, still social climbing—the startling opportunity at his advanced age was to become the key adviser to one of the most significant foreign policy players, perhaps the most significant foreign policy player, in the U.S. government. And the essential point, as Kissinger explained to friends, was that Kushner, with zero experience in international relations, was a blank slate.

Privately, or not so privately, Bannon believed that Trump, if he made it through his first term, would have had quite enough of the presidency by 2020. “Dude, look at him,” said Bannon, who didn’t look all that good himself. In the event that Trump did not run in 2020, Bannon—ever revivified by the daily lurches, catastrophes, and lost opportunities of the Trump presidency—saw himself as the presidential candidate for the populist-nationalist movement and its radical immigration platform. He saw Sean Hannity as his running mate. A contemptuous Hannity, with grandiose ambitions of his own, insisted that this scenario was ludicrous. He would top the ticket, with Bannon, “if he’s lucky,” taking the second spot.

Each of the Fox prime-time anchors privately acknowledged that were Trump to go down, they would likely go down, too. Each acknowledged that if Fox changed course, as they assumed it would, they would be out the door. They were tied to Donald Trump, not Fox. Together the three—along with Fox’s Judge Jeanine and Lou Dobbs—formed the sort of brain trust of presidential advisers and cheerleaders that heretofore had remained mostly out of view. This was new: the Fox team served as a public channel between the Trump base (the Fox audience) and the Trump White House. Likewise, many of the messages from the Bannon side of the Trump party were delivered through and supported by the Fox prime-time schedule—most consistently and succinctly, the message on immigration. And all this was constantly fed and reinforced by Hannity’s incessant phone calls with Trump. Two of Bannon’s acolytes in the White House, Stephen Miller and Julie Hahn, the Trump anti-immigration brain trust, often lobbied Trump through Hannity. Indeed, Hahn’s job was now divided between policy and comms, where she was the direct contact with Hannity—not only giving Hannity the White House position, but giving him the Bannon-Miller-Hahn position, which Hannity would recycle back to Trump.

Hannity and the president spoke as often as six or seven times a day. The calls sometimes lasted more than thirty minutes. John Kelly, astounded that there were days when the president spent as many as three hours talking to Hannity, had tried to limit these calls. But Hannity was a calming influence on Trump: he was both a distraction and a willing audience for Trump’s endless complaints about almost everybody. Furthermore, Hannity supplied Trump with an ongoing report on TV ratings, one of the few things that could reliably hold Trump’s interest. As always, Trump was keenly responsive to whatever words and actions might get him better ratings.

Hannity could press the president to do and say things that would, retold on the news, boost Hannity’s ratings—and, as usually happened, almost everyone else’s. A return in Trump’s tweets to the Wall would often be Hannity’s doing. This was old-fashioned politics, of course, a politician behaving in a way that would please his constituents. But this other angle—a television host directing the president to do whatever might most compel a television audience—took the game a big step further.

Bannon, arguably—or arguably in his view—was the secret sauce behind Brexit. Early in 2016, Bannon, looking for ways to help his friend Nigel Farage and Farage’s UKIP party, had launched a British Breitbart. UKIP and Brexit needed a platform, and “Farage will tell you,” declared Bannon, “that Breitbart was the difference.”

For Bannon, losing the House could in fact be quite the perfect plan. A good part of his bitter fight with Trump—beyond the fact that everyone fought bitterly with Trump—had to do with Trump’s willingness to let the Republican leadership substitute its agenda for his. Trump and Bannon’s populist revolution had, too often, defaulted to standard Republican politics. So here, in defeat, Bannon might get his all-out war with the Republican Party. It was the RINOs—the Republicans in Name Only—who had not adequately defended Trump; hence, if the House was lost, it was the RINOs who would be responsible for his impeachment. If the House flipped and Trump was threatened with impeachment, the deplorable wing of the party would be energized and ascendant (although even for Bannon the nature of that energy had its fearsome prospects). What would rouse this beast more than anything was its leader’s destruction. Depending on Bannon’s mood, he was ready to bring it on, and he could see how the martyrdom of Donald Trump might be a net positive for himself and the populist movement. Trump would be turned into a powerful symbol, victim and martyr, and in the end that might play better than Trump as the movement’s infuriating and unpredictable standard-bearer.

Bannon knew precisely what he would say to Trump if the meeting came through: “If you get your fucking relatives and Parscale out of there, I will run the fucking campaign. No promises after that.” Hearing Bannon’s conditional assent to the notion of a visit, Trump seemed on the verge of inviting him. “I’m going to call him,” he told a friend in New York. But then, to the same friend, he immediately said: “Jared’s hearing bad stuff about him.” Later, he debated the issue with Hannity. Should I call him? he asked. In the end, the call never came. Bannon understood that Trump was incapable of publicly admitting he was in so much trouble that he needed help. “I know this guy,” Bannon said. “Psychologically he can’t handle dependence. In fact, I wouldn’t be able to save him, because if it started to look like I was saving him, or if I got credit for saving him, he’d crack in front of everybody.”