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“It appears likely,” the special counsel’s research on the topic concluded, “that the president can pardon his family members or close associates even for the purpose of impeding an investigation.” When tested, courts have held that the president’s pardon power “is plenary and absolute, with few exceptions.” And it appeared that, in fact, the president could probably pardon himself.
For one thing, the pardon power applies only to federal law, meaning that any state charges were excepted. For another, the power excludes anything to do with impeachment.
Second, the special counsel’s research fastened on a 1974 Supreme Court case. Schick v. Reed, while supporting the broad pardoning power, added a qualification: exercise of the power is legitimate if it “does not otherwise offend the Constitution.”
But the fact that it was given serious consideration suggested that challenging a president for a self-serving pardon wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.
Consequently, the development of a coherent and considered piece of thinking about anything other than the boss’s need to be reassured—however much of a no-win game that might be—was never going to happen.
It was an easy bond: many of Trump’s big-money supporters admired most of Trump’s policies, but almost all disliked Trump himself.
Bannon was convinced that Trump had to be on the ballot in each race. Politicians and operatives are often accused of always running the last race they had won, and for Bannon it was 2016 all over again.
As it was for Bannon, it was for them: Trump was the unaccountable, confounding, vastly annoying, but all-important centerpiece of their lives. Trump was their obsession. He ate at them.
Lewandowski was known for a volatile temper, an attention-deficit problem, and his desperation for a job.
Nunberg was frequently the connective tissue between Trump rumors and Trump news.
“I think of Maggie Haberman”—the New York Times reporter covering Trump—“the way I think of my grandmother,” said Nunberg. “I always go running to her.”
Mightily hurt—once again mightily hurt—he took solace in a weekend of cocaine and
prostitutes. On Monday morning, sleepless and high, he decided to refuse to show up for his grand jury appointment.
In 1998, Monica Lewinsky’s lawyer William H. Ginsburg appeared on all five of the Sunday morning talk shows on the same day. This became known as the “full Ginsburg.”
“Everybody said, ‘You can’t hire this guy, he got all coked up and went on eleven shows,’” said Bannon. “But how could I not hire him? He spent the weekend doing blow off a bunch of girls’ asses and then got up and did eleven
shows. It’s all in the quality of the fuck you, and this was pretty high-quality fuck you.”
He couldn’t execute, to say the least. Trump was merely a symbol, though, as it happened, an extraordinarily powerful one. Hence, the necessity of Steve Bannon.
But the Chinese saw opportunity: during the meeting in April 2017 at Mar-a-Lago between Trump and President Xi—a meeting shepherded by Kissinger and Kushner—they had been amazed at Trump’s openness, capriciousness, and lack of basic information.
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.
Kushner’s personal wealth depended on a shaky business whose precarious financial foundation rested on less-than-creditworthy loans. These were the kinds of loans secured through personal relationships and, not unusually, the trading of favors and influence. Often, they were obtained from countries with lax regulatory rules.
JASTA, the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, which was expressly written to make it possible for 9/11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia. If Aramco were listed on a foreign exchange, it would be particularly vulnerable to anyone taking advantage of the opening provided by JASTA; in fact, Aramco’s liability would be virtually unlimited. Hence, who would invest?
Now, in the White House, Kushner was told that there was good reason to believe Deng was a spy for the Chinese. She was, Kushner was informed, regularly supplying information gleaned from her social and political contacts to Chinese officials and business figures.
financial era’s most successful global tycoons, Wu had built Anbang from a company with an annual turnover of a few million dollars to one with $300 billion in assets in just ten years.
In June, the Chinese government removed Wu from the company and later sentenced him to prison on financial corruption charges.
The Kushner family’s desperate need for cash was turning U.S. foreign policy into an investment banking scheme dedicated to the refinancing of the Kushner family debt.
In addition to reviewing the Anbang deal, prosecutors were taking a close look at a $285 million 2016 Deutsche Bank loan to Kushner and his father, and at a direct pitch for a bailout made to the Qatar minister of finance in 2017.
For Kushner, the long game was the 2020 campaign. He was convinced the Republicans would lose the House in November 2018; so be it. But no matter who became the Democratic nominee in 2020, it would likely be a very close electoral race. That prospect could prove to be an advantage during the campaign: tight numbers would keep the party in line. As long as the Republican Party held, they could block the Democratic venom. And with a majority in the Senate, impeachment was a toothless threat.
He was childlike—a hyperactive child at that. There was no clear reason for why something caught his interest, nor was there any way to predict his reaction or modulate his response to it.
The key to managing his father-in-law—as everyone in Trump’s family, in the Trump Organization, on The Apprentice, and now in the White House understood—was distraction.
Bannon concluded that the Chinese client state would provide Trump with a great public relations opportunity, but this would also give China more leverage. After negotiating a flimsy handshake deal with Kim, Trump would be beholden to the Chinese, whom he would need to make the North Koreans deliver on their promises, such as they were.
Trump was promising “denuclearization,” while the White House and foreign policy people trailed behind him and tried to clarify a nonexistent process for achieving this end, as well as the terms for this sometime-in-the-future denuclearization status.
Captain Queeg.
sine qua non,
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.
“He may own every shitty piece of real estate in America,” said Ailes, fondly. Bannon, never one to miss the obvious joke, wondered, “How many illegals live in Hannity’s rentals?”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. But, hey, wait a minute. Do you like our life? Well, we owe that all to Mr. Ailes. So I’m staying until his funeral is done.”
NATO, Trump kept repeating to various people accompanying him, “bores the shit out of me.”
He was almost invariably enthusiastic about one-on-one world leader meetings—no matter the subject, no matter the leader—and agitated about collective gatherings.
So he reverted to his basic approach: if maximum flattery doesn’t work, if you can’t get to a deal that way, then “shit on them.”
His stated goal at the summit was to persuade NATO member states to raise their financial contribution.
“Elementary school eloquence. It’s not complicated: he’s been watching Lou Dobbs for thirty years. It’s the only show he watches from beginning to end.”
With respect to policy, he could not get beyond his single point, the one element that overrode all others and stuck in his head: Europeans should pay more.
to Trump, Bannon was confident that Trump was listening to absolutely everything he had to say. In this way, Bannon could reasonably represent, or deftly imply, to his clients that, truly, he had Trump’s ear.
Still, if Bannon was rating Italy as his great success and seeing the grim figure of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, whose ear he had, as a rising power, this was only a start.
Putin. For several years now, the Russians had been underwriting the Le Pens and their party.
His goal now was to pay the Russians back for their $13 million loan to the Front National (rebranded in mid-2018 as the National Rally) and replace the party’s debt holdings with a more acceptable supporter.
Trump’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Johnson was the Johnson & Johnson heir and owner of the New York Jets and much-mocked socialite and party boy in New York. (“Don’t get me started,” said Bannon. “In a long list of the unqualified, here you have the least qualified.”)
On British defense spending: it ought to be doubled. Immigration to Europe was “a shame—it changed the fabric of Europe.” And “it was never going to be what it was—and I don’t mean that in a positive way … I think you’re losing your culture.” On the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, the highest Muslim officeholder in the UK: “He’s done a terrible job.
It had been a difficult struggle for May and Downing Street to fill the room with top-level British politicians and businessmen, most, as it happened, skeptical about the advantages of close proximity to Trump.
Power, via expertise, had passed to a select group—the Davos gang. In Bannon’s view, this group self-dealt at a historic level of wealth appropriation. It controlled the intellectual, economic, and diplomatic establishment.
