Siege: Trump Under Fire

by Michael Wolff

The scene in the movie Love Actually, where the prime minister—played by Hugh Grant—upbraids and humiliates a boorish U.S. president, instantly became a UK meme.

These efforts confirmed for Bannon both the haplessness of the Trump campaign and, later, the weakness of the Mueller collusion case.

Trump was adamant about not having anybody else in the room.

It was unheard-of, but especially given the Russia investigation it was just this side of insane.

Look at how well it had worked in Singapore with Kim Jong-un! Trump had buttered Kim up and, in return, Kim had buttered Trump up. And even if nothing else changed, the temper changed.

Trump, energized by his NATO and UK meetings—“we roughed them up”—was in no mood to prepare for his Putin meeting.

Pompeo and Bolton reduced the boxed briefing binders to a one-pager. The president wouldn’t focus on it.

The meeting ran for a little more than two hours. For an additional hour or so, Russian and U.S. advisers and diplomats joined the two leaders.

“He looked like a beaten dog.”

Putin remained aloof, making it clear that there was a ranking system.

Watching Hannity’s performance, Carlson’s executive producer said, “I’m gay and I’ve never hit on a man that hard.”

Carlson looked bewildered. “Membership in NATO obligates any other member to defend any member who is attacked,” he pointed out.

The Russian government presumably knew everything.

“He wants to give trannies operations. ‘Learn to fire a gun and I’ll give you an operation,’” Trump mimicked in his mincing voice.

Trump was worse, said Shine, than Bill O’Reilly, who, by almost all accounts, was the most difficult man in television (in the history of television, according to longtime Fox boss Roger Ailes).

The party was just going through the motions, waiting for Trump to pull off a miracle. Somehow.

ipso facto,

“I’m going to say you’re a bunch of fucking suckers. You put your heart and soul into the gig economy, and you’ve got nothing. A bunch of serfs—no ownership, no benefits, no equity, your savings account at zero.”

A big correction could shatter Trump’s confidence and cause him to behave even more erratically.

It’s a death spiral. McConnell and Ryan are already saying that by Tuesday or Wednesday they are going to cut Trump loose from the RNC and focus all the money on the House and Senate.

Mnuchin was there but they threw him out.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘I thought that meant Trump Tower.’ ‘No,’ he says, ‘I’m here in Bedminster.’ Well, I’d never heard of Bedminster in my life. So I say, ‘What’s that?’ ‘My golf course. A great golf course. The greatest. So be out here at noon.’ Then he starts to explain in great detail how to get there because, honestly, he has no earthly idea what a phone can do. He is literally like my dad, who is ninety-six. For ten minutes—‘You go over the bridge, exit, remember road splits, veer this way…’ I’m saying, ‘Just give me an address.’ ‘… Get off Rattlesnake Road, come down by the church, but don’t take that right … keep

going … hard right…’ On and on, he’s from the land that time’s forgotten. I swear he doesn’t know how to use a phone.

They’re putting hot dogs on the grill. It’s like a Jersey shore cookout. Hot dogs—and not good hot dogs. I later realize that’s what he eats. Nathan’s franks, burgers. I am so ripshit.

He’s Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island.

So I say, ‘Then where is everybody?’ and he says, ‘The Trump campaign doesn’t work weekends. They’ll all be getting in around ten tomorrow.’ I say, ‘But there’s like eighty-eight days to go!’

When Manafort’s daughter’s phone got hacked in 2017, we learned that Paul likes to see multiple guys fuck his wife—his daughter asks her sister in one of the emails, ‘Has Mom been tested for STDs?’ Well, that’s Mom lying on the sofa.

‘Paul, how long have you known about this?’ He says, ‘I don’t know, a couple of months.’ ‘A couple of months?’

For his part, Trump took the bait and branded Manigault Newman a “dog” and “a crazed, crying lowlife.”

“Fifteen to twenty percent more,” said Howard to a satisfied Trump, who, a few minutes later, reconfirmed: “So, I sell fifty percent more than any of the movie stars?” “Well, like I said, fifteen to twenty percent more.” “Let’s call it forty,” said the president.

Trump and Pecker eventually settled on each other in a certain mutuality of disrepute.

deal. Roger Ailes, the creator of Fox News, with whom Trump was actively discussing his media future in the fall of 2016, called Pecker “Trump’s water-boy idiot.” Added Ailes: “An idiot needs an even bigger idiot to get his water.”

Managing the women whom Trump had disappointed or mauled or humiliated was a recognized process.

Davidson was a real-life Ray Donovan, a celebrity fixer who became one of the leading representatives of sex tapes for sale, including two of the most famous, Paris Hilton’s and Hulk Hogan’s.

Trump frequently riffed about Cohen’s clumsiness and limited brain power.

Delving into Cohen’s taxi medallion business, prosecutors identified a massive tax fraud even beyond his participation in

the violations of campaign finance laws.

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.

“Nobody else,” he said, “could get away with this shit.”

He was obsessed with her weight gain. “Donut,” he called her. “When she hears my name she always looks like she’s going to cry. Like her father. Very, very tough family. Boo hoo, boo hoo.”

Gary Cohn, for instance, would take Trump’s calls while playing golf at the private Sebonack Golf Club in Southampton, holding out the phone so others could hear Trump’s diatribes and meanwhile making crazy-man gestures.)

But Bannon also believed that if you could get around Trump’s repellent character, intellectual deficiencies, and glaring mental health issues, you ought to be able to see that Trump was being savaged—with the powers that be trying to run him out of office—for doing much of what he had been elected to do. Trumpism, in fact, was working.

Trump yet rebelled. This was a plum job; why couldn’t he give it to a friend? He may not be a lawyer, but he knew more than most lawyers. After all, he had hired and fired lawyers for almost fifty years.

Trump, it seemed, could not get enough of this story. “He pushed her down on the bed and that’s it?” How long had he held her down? Trump wanted to know. “Did he just fall on her and go in for a kiss? Or was it humping?”

“This is embarrassing,” he said. “Catholic school boys.” Which provoked a recollection of his exploits when he was seventeen: he hadn’t just stolen kisses, that was for sure.

Through it all, there seemed to be an implicit recognition on the president’s part that what Blasey Ford had said was probably true. “If it wasn’t true,” he offered, “she would have claimed rape or something, not just a kiss.”

It was a badly kept secret in foreign policy circles that Mohammed bin Salman—MBS—had a cocaine problem and could disappear for days or longer on benders, or on long and frightening (at least for other passengers) trips on his yacht. He also spent hours every day planted in front of a screen playing video games.

Mattis had become increasingly convinced that Kushner’s continual forays were screwball, or criminal, or both.

That week, to one of his after-dinner callers, he put it somewhat differently: “Of course he killed him—he probably had good reason. Who gives a fuck?”

“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.”