Siege: Trump Under Fire

by Michael Wolff

In a grand jury inquiry, you fall into one of three categories. You are a “witness of fact,” meaning the prosecutor believes you have information about an investigation at hand. Or you are a “subject,” meaning you are regarded as having personal involvement with the crime under investigation. Or, most worrisome, you are a “target,” meaning the prosecutor is seeking to have the grand jury indict you. Witnesses often became subjects, and subjects often became targets.

The White House, it rapidly dawned on almost everyone who worked there—even as it became one more reason not to work there—was the scene of an ongoing criminal investigation, one that could potentially ensnare anyone who was anywhere near it.

(“You usually have enough competent people for White House positions to weed out the wife beaters, but you couldn’t be so choosy in the Trump White House,” said one Republican acquaintance of Porter’s.)

“It’s playing the game,” he explained in one of his frequent monologues about his own superiority and everyone else’s stupidity. “I’m good at the game. Maybe I’m the best. Really, I could be the best. I think I am the best. I’m very good. Very cool. Most people are afraid that the worst might happen. But it doesn’t, unless you’re stupid. And I’m not stupid.”

The difficulty in proving a conspiracy is proving intent. Many of the president’s inner circle believed that Trump, and the Trump Organization, and by extension the Trump campaign, operated in such a diffuse, haphazard, gang-that-couldn’t-shoot-straight manner that intent would be very difficult to establish. What’s more, the Trump hangers-on were so demonstrably subpar players that stupidity could well be a reasonable defense against intent.

That Friday morning, he came down from the residence into the Oval Office in a full-on rage so violent that, for a moment, his hair came undone. To the shock of the people with him, there stood an almost entirely bald Donald Trump. The president’s sudden change of heart sent the entire

For a generation or more, the arm’s-length relationship between the White House and the Department of Justice often seemed more like a never-ending conflict between armed camps.

His entire working life was spent at the head of what was in essence a small family operation, one designed to do what he wanted and to bow to his style of doing business.

As reliably, he would respond, “I don’t want to hear this bullshit!”

“He reports to me!”

“I could have made my brother the attorney general,” Trump insisted, although in fact he did not even speak to his brother (Robert, a seventy-one-year-old retired businessman). “Like Kennedy.”

“Sean’s in crank land,” observed Bannon, “but these are good bedtime stories for the president.”

Over dinner, Dershowitz asked for a retainer of a million dollars.

“Dementia,” declared Bannon. “Plus he drinks too much,” said Trump, who more than once during the campaign had told Giuliani to his face that he was “losing it.”

And the price was right: of course he would work for free, Giuliani told Trump.

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.

“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.”

Many of the leaks about Jackson’s drinking, free hand with pills, and the harassment claims against him—which Trump began to blame on Democrats and other enemies, and which, by mid-April, were part of the daily Trump news cycle—came from Mother and Ayers.

The story of the past fifteen months had not been about a president strengthening his White House team, but about the attrition of the relatively weak team that Trump had been rushed into accepting.

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.

Although this was far from a legal prohibition or a court ruling against the indictment of a president, it had become the default position, not least because no one had ever tried to indict a president.

Indeed, Mitch McConnell, willing to do nearly anything to protect his Senate majority, sent dark warnings to the White House that the Senate could not be counted on to stand with the president if he acted recklessly toward Mueller.

Overnight, the entire operation might be dismantled and its work shredded.

Bannon shook his head in wonder. “Drinking aside, guys’ll tell you that Rudy can’t engage in a real conversation. You see that by the facial tics, the big eyes, and the asides—like he’s speaking to himself while he’s telling you some bombshell information. Come on: Rudy’s wife, future First Lady or at least, she imagined, Queen of Foggy Bottom, ain’t walking away from this unless she knows there’s no more squeeze in the lemon. It’s mind-boggling.”

Trump also commented on his weight, which was climbing toward three hundred pounds, and his unsteady gait. “He looks like a mental patient,” said Trump.

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.

Very little about him was real, and yet he managed to be at least halfway believed by enough people so that he could continue the con.

Trump certainly ran his business as though it were a criminal enterprise.

Mobsters had more fun.

Not long after the show’s production got under way, Whitestone, now on permanent Trump-mic duty, took a day off and someone else, an African American sound technician, was given the assignment. Trump flipped out.

An hour later, Whitestone came rushing in to find Trump screaming from behind the bathroom door. “Erik, what the fuck, they tried to fuck me up … They put dirty fingerprints on my collars, they tried to fuck up my tie.”

Whitestone became what everyone around Trump had to become—long-suffering—because Trump was always ready to explode with anger. “It’s not your fault,” said Whitestone. “It’s just your turn, was how we put it.”

Once, coming back from Chicago, a young woman, an attractive interior designer who was pitching Trump on a project, hitched a ride on Trump’s plane. “He led her into the bedroom with a mirrored ceiling … She comes out, half an hour later, dress ripped off, staggering out, she sits in the seat … and then he comes out with his tie off, shirt untucked, and says, ‘Fellas … just got laid.’”

He and she sitting next to each other as he tries to grope her, with her blocking him like she’s done it a hundred times before.”

“He’s got a plan. I’m going to do his campaign commercials: ‘I want you to use our boardroom set and get a bunch of Arabs and all their Arab gear and we’ll put a sign on the table that says “OPEC” and we’ll have them going, “Hoooluuuuluuuhooo, hoooluuulyyhoood,” and we’ll have this subtitle, “Death to the Americans,” or “We’ll Screw the Americans,” and then I’ll walk in and I’ll say a bunch of presidential bullshit … and then we’ll make it go viral. Call Corey Lewandowski—here’s his number—and set it up.’”

“Someone said ‘cunt’ and someone else said, ‘You can’t say “cunt” on TV,’ and Donald said, ‘Why can’t you say “cunt”?’ and said ‘Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt. There, I’ve said it on TV. Now you can say

“A twelve-year-old in a man’s body, all he does is takedowns of people based on their physical appearance—short, fat, bald, whatever it is.

[He was] always eating Oscar Mayer baloney … [Once he] pulled a slice of baloney out and shoved it in my mouth…”

Sam Nunberg, testifying before the Mueller grand jury, said that when he worked at Trump Tower in the years before the campaign, he saw Cohen with bags of cash. Cohen was, for Trump, literally a bag man, dealing with women and other off-the-books issues.

Michael Cohen styled himself as speaking for Trump around the globe; he tried to negotiate lucrative deals and seize “branding opportunities.” These efforts soon earned Cohen the hostility of Ivanka and her brothers, since this was exactly what they were supposed to be doing.

Trump became inordinately interested in following Samantha Cohen,

The teenager seemed to particularly enjoy posing in an almost unending array of bikinis and resort wear.

He turned on Cohen’s daughter, too, and her Instagram travelogue. “She just waves her tits around,” he told a friend. “No respect for the situation.”

A week later, Melania entered Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Trump’s response was dismissive: he wasn’t any different from Kennedy. The counsel that at this point in time JFK would hardly offer cover for a disorderly personal life was met by a particularly sour Trump face: Don’t be a pussy.

“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.”

other. “We don’t belong here,” she widely repeated to friends.

It was, once again, the paradox of the Trump presidency: he was so unsuited, if not unfit, for the office, such an assault on the established order, that all the defenders of this established order were of course compelled to protect it from him.

His argument was a simple inversion: the establishment—the deep state—regards me as illegitimate and violated democratic principles to deny me the White House. But I won; hence, they, not I, are illegitimate.

Still, Bannon felt obliged to warn Carter about the story that would shortly become the backbone of the Lewandowski and Bossie book Trump’s Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency. “You do realize,” said Bannon, “that none of this is true.”