The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

by Peter Baker

Even when the deadliest plague in a century struck, the nation’s forty-fifth president spoke of two countries—his America, Red America, and that of the blue states opposed to him. He soon turned a simple thing like a face mask worn to protect against a public health threat into a wedge issue between warring parties. Trump made divisiveness the calling card of his presidency.

warned. He sought out enemies and where they did not exist, he invented them. With Trump, there was always an us and always a them.

The painful fact is that those who stopped Trump from committing this or that outrage also helped him learn how better to get what he wanted the next time. A

“We didn’t win an election to bring the country together.” —Steve Bannon

Trump, America’s first reality television star turned president, had long fixated on lighting. Wherever he expected to be photographed, he evaluated the angles and shadows and brightness of the sun or artificial bulbs that would frame the shot. As he entered the White House, he did not know much about government or health care policy or foreign affairs. But he knew a lot about lighting.

Trump was also sensitive about his weight. He did not like being photographed from below, fearing that would make him look heavier than the 236 pounds he claimed to weigh. Hope Hicks, his communications adviser, had issued an edict during the campaign barring news cameras from the buffer zone in front of the stage beneath Trump; only after vociferous complaints did she finally allow photographers there for just a few minutes. For that matter, Trump did not like being shot from above either. The angle had to be on the same plane as he was, because he felt it looked better on television.

“Listen, I don’t think we ought to be too concerned about today’s meeting,” Dunford told the others in Priebus’s office. “Once we understand the Trump Doctrine and the new president’s approach to the world, we’ll be able to anticipate what he’s looking for—and we’ll be able to frame these problems in a way that helps him.” Jared Kushner, the ranking relative in a White House that Trump meant to run like his family business, looked at Dunford like he just did not get it. “Well, that’s never going to happen,” Kushner said. “That’s not the way it works.” And of course he was right. Trump was Trump—only now with the whole world watching. He would not learn. He would not change. There would be no doctrine, no process, no pivot. The general’s misreading of the new president showed how much official Washington had yet to absorb the new reality.

Trump’s mind was “unusual,” Sternlicht said. Something was “wrong” in his head. He could not pay attention, could not do details, was not bothered by inconsistency. “He hasn’t read a book in thirty years,” Sternlicht said. “He’s not encumbered by the truth.”

Trump always insisted that he won, whether he did or not. He did not even think of it as cheating.

He did not know that Puerto Rico was part of the United States, did not know whether Colombia was in North America or South America, thought Finland was part of Russia, and mixed up the Baltics with the Balkans. He got confused about how World War I started, did not understand the basics of America’s vast nuclear arsenal, did not grasp the concept of constitutional separation of powers, did not understand how courts worked. “How do I declare war?” he asked at one point, to the alarm of his staff, who realized he was unaware that the Constitution prescribes that role for Congress.[9] He seemed genuinely surprised to learn that Abraham Lincoln had been a member of the Republican Party. “He knew nothing about most things,” observed one top aide.

Nor did Trump show much inclination to learn on the job. He famously would not read briefing papers longer than a single page. He unashamedly boasted that he got most of his understanding of the world from television. Asked once where he turned to for military information, he said, “Well, I watch the shows.”[11] Where other presidents received an intelligence rundown every workday and often on weekends too, Trump met with his briefers on average two and a half times a week in his first five weeks in office.

“A narcissist does not hear the naysayers.”[14] Skimming the surface was a survival technique. “You’re a very shallow person,” Michael Bailkin, an attorney who negotiated a hotel project for Trump, once told him. “Of course,” Trump replied, “that’s one of my strengths.”[15]

Unlike Buchanan, Trump was an ideological chameleon, opportunistically embracing and discarding positions depending on the moment. He went from being “very pro-choice” to a hardline opponent of abortion.[19] He spoke out in favor of same-sex marriage before he became the scourge of transgender rights. He

He switched political parties at least five times, constantly looking for one that would welcome him as the savior that he believed himself to be.

“Isn’t Air Force One really something?” he gushed during a flight early in his tenure. “I mean, we all have our own private planes and have for years, but this is something else.”[23] Eventually, Trump would push the military to purchase a vastly upgraded new plane and backup for nearly $4 billion; it was necessary, he said, because the Saudis and other world leaders had much fancier, more recent Boeing 747-800s at their disposal. “The United States should be properly represented,” he would insist.

While LBJ famously kept a three-screen television setup in the Oval Office to monitor each of the national networks, Trump did him one better, installing a sixty-inch television in that private dining room along with a DirecTV Genie HD DVR, a whole-home system that he called his “Super TiVo” and that let him record multiple shows at once and replay them from the same point on any screen in the building. “This is one of the great inventions of all time—TiVo,” he told visitors.[27] It was in effect his own media bunker, from which he often called the hosts of his favorite Fox News programs after their shows to offer his critique or solicit their advice.

At times, he wielded the phone like a threat. During an argument with aides over a decision in the early days of his presidency, he reached into the drawer of his desk, pulled out his phone, and threw it on the desk. “Do you want me to settle this right now?” he asked.

The night he defeated Hillary Clinton against all odds, his first thought when told by an aide that he would become president was how to use the office to take revenge on his enemies. The one who initially came to mind was John Kasich, the governor of Ohio and the last Republican who had stood against him in the primaries. “When I get to Washington,” Trump said, according to the aide, “I’m gonna shove it up Kasich’s ass!”[38]

“What’s the worst thing that happens?” he asked as he contemplated the campaign. “We lose? So what? This can be the greatest infomercial in the history of politics.”[44]

He refused a more conventional organization for his administration and thrived on the internal feuds, which left him the lone authoritative decider. “Trump wasn’t trying to lead a unifying team,” said one White House official caught up in it. “He wasn’t trying to prevent the rivalries and the squabbles and the knife-fighting. It was almost Apprentice-esque. He liked competition and infighting among the people below him. It’s like a competition for his favor.” The result was an insecure president who fostered perpetual insecurity on his staff. As much as Trump talked about loyalty as a paramount value, what he meant was loyalty to him, never from him.

In assembling his White House, Trump essentially sought to replicate the Trump Organization, where he was the sole decision-maker, unaccountable to any board and surrounded by his own children as executives. He invited his daughter and son-in-law to join his official government staff, while maintaining control over his global business empire through his two eldest sons without divesting himself of it or setting up a blind trust, as his predecessors had.

Most pronounced was the rivalry between Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump, two sculpted former models who had long vied for Donald’s attention and favor, had little love for each other, and immediately began a quiet competition for the role of leading lady in the White House.

Melania was also convinced that Ivanka was maneuvering to make sure that she and Jared were positioned on the inaugural stage to be visible in the iconic photograph of the new president taking the oath. So the new first lady and Wolkoff, a former chief planner of New York’s Met Gala who was helping organize the celebrations, conspired to keep the first daughter out of camera range. Wolkoff called it “Operation Block Ivanka.”[13]

His admiration for her sometimes took on a creepy tone. More than once in the years before the White House, he had praised her body, most infamously during a 2006 joint appearance on The View when he said, “if Ivanka weren’t my daughter perhaps I’d be dating her.”[16] He thought so much of her that he proposed putting her on his ticket in 2016 as his vice presidential running mate. Campaign aides thought he was kidding at first, but he kept pressing. “She’s bright, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, and the people would love her!”

Kushner demonstrated scant humility given his lack of knowledge and, while he was a quick learner, at times he acted as if anybody who had served in government before he arrived was an idiot. During an early meeting with Senator John McCain, White House officials asked about his priorities as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. McCain started talking about reforming the Pentagon acquisition process. Kushner cut him off. “Senator, we’re going to change everything about how the government does business,” he said. “Well,” McCain replied, “good luck with that.”[23] The senator did not bother to say another word for the remainder of the meeting but dined out on that anecdote for the rest of his life, regularly offering a devastating impersonation of Kushner for the benefit of friends.

Trump respected three types of people—those with money, those with Ivy League credentials, and those with stars on their uniform.

Looks mattered as much as anything to Trump, who stocked his administration as if he were casting a new reality show. He had to be able to visualize the person in the role he was giving them. Mike Pence, he declared, was “out of central casting.”[29] David Shulkin, his new veterans affairs secretary, was “a good looking guy.”[30] After Judge Neil Gorsuch left a secret interview for a Supreme Court nomination at Trump Tower, Trump remarked, “This guy’s out of central casting.” When Trump first hosted Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, he told her that her ambassador, Kim Darroch, was “from central casting.”[31] On the first day of his presidency, just after he took the oath, he introduced Jim Mattis as, yes, “from central casting.”[32] One result of this hiring process was that nobody had ever staffed a modern White House with so few people who knew how government worked.

Was it better to stand on principle or was there a duty to try to steer an erratic commander in chief in a responsible direction? It was a decision that tore apart friendships and families. All over town there were spouses threatening to leave if their partners went to work for that man while longtime associates stopped speaking to each other when one went into the administration and another refused. Some, like Dan Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana tapped to serve as director of national intelligence, took on the new mission with the understanding that their job would be to protect their agency from the president who appointed them.

Priebus’s only experience in the capital was campaign politics, which gave him an impressive rolodex of wealthy donors and media consultants but little expertise in running a government. Rex Tillerson had traveled the world negotiating deals for ExxonMobil, but that did not necessarily make him an ideal secretary of state. Jim Mattis had served in the military for decades, giving him more exposure to a large public sector bureaucracy than any of his new colleagues. But he did not have extensive experience in Washington, a battlefield quite unlike Afghanistan and Iraq. Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump—none of them had ever served in government. Neither had Steven Mnuchin, the new treasury secretary, or Wilbur Ross, the new commerce secretary, or Ben Carson, the new secretary of housing and urban development, or Betsy DeVos, the new education secretary, or Peter Navarro, the trade adviser who had been recruited to the campaign after Kushner found his book on China while scrolling Amazon and read it. The twentysomething former model Hope Hicks, who had become close to Trump on the campaign as his spokesperson and now would serve in his White House as an all-purpose adviser, was so new to politics that her disgruntled ex-boyfriend Corey Lewandowski said she had confused the Koch brothers with Coke the soda. Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media director and aide de camp, was once his golf caddie. Brad Parscale, his campaign strategist, was originally his...

Prodded by Steve Bannon, who urged him to “hit, hit, hit” in the administration’s opening days, Trump wanted to demonstrate action with a flurry of executive orders that he had promised on the campaign trail.[38] He did not care if neither he nor any of his new advisers knew how to do it. The point was how it looked—how he looked—not whether the orders were done right, or even legally.

repeatedly on tabloid covers had left him firmly in the all-publicity-is-good-publicity school. He once said in front of his adviser Brad Parscale, “There’s no bad press unless you’re a pedophile.” And it was a mutual dependence. In the 2016 campaign, he had dominated the news in a way that no other untested, unelected candidate ever had, trailed by cameras everywhere he went from the minute he descended that golden escalator at Trump Tower to greet a bought-and-paid-for crowd of sign-wavers earning $50 each. His rallies were aired live from start to finish on cable networks that found the unpredictable rants to be ratings boosters. “It may not be good for America,” Les Moonves, the network’s chief executive, famously said, “but it’s damn good for CBS.”[9]

To Trump, talking with Murdoch was more important than just about anything. No one played a more central role in Trump’s media world than the Australian-born impresario of conservative journalism who owned Fox News, Fox Business, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and other properties. If the mainstream news outlets were the new president’s enemies, Murdoch’s empire was to be his prime ally, amplifying his messages, taking on his adversaries, shaping the debate, and influencing his thinking. Fox was a source of power and a source of inspiration, an endless feedback loop in which the president took his cues from the network’s shows while its anchors delivered his party line.

But Murdoch also thought Trump was “the perfect vessel” because “he’s not that smart.”

What Ailes saw in Trump that he did not see in any other Republican politician of recent years was someone who connected with the Fox audience even more than Fox did.

What lines there used to be between newsmakers and the news organization were increasingly blurred. A Fox producer sent daily emails to a Trump campaign list summarizing the latest news developments while offering suggestions about how, for instance, to reply to a Hillary Clinton speech. When Diana Falzone, a Fox reporter, uncovered allegations that Trump had had an extramarital tryst with a porn star who went by the professional name of Stormy Daniels and negotiated a cash settlement buying her silence, the story was quashed. “Good reporting, kiddo,” her boss told her, according to a report by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker. “But Rupert wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go.”[21]

It did not take long for White House aides, cabinet secretaries, and members of Congress to get wise to this unique symbiosis between president and network—and to begin lobbying Trump via Fox. During an early congressional debate on repealing Barack Obama’s health care program, Trump saw Representative Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio and one of the leading conservative flame-throwers in the House, and mentioned that he had watched the congressman on Fox that morning. Jordan later summoned aides and told them to start booking him on shows if he had a message for the president. “Every time we were on TV, we weren’t just talking to people in the television audience; we were talking to POTUS,” Jordan observed.[29]

AT&T executives interpreted the calls as an implicit quid pro quo—if AT&T agreed to hand over CNN, Trump would not obstruct the larger acquisition using the Justice Department’s antitrust division. The executives viewed it as crude, almost mob-style extortion.

Trump saw nothing wrong with using the power of the presidency to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, especially if it benefited himself or his friends.

Barack Obama had lobbied Merkel to run for a fourth term as chancellor so that she could serve as a counterweight to Trump and the rising forces of right-wing populism in Europe. Merkel reluctantly agreed, announcing her re-election bid two days after Obama left, as a response to “insecure times.”[3] Obama’s adviser Ben Rhodes had ruefully toasted her as the new “leader of the free world.”[4]

Unorthodox ideas like this seemed to come from nowhere all the time in the new administration. Outside advisers, old friends and business associates, canny lobbyists, random Mar-a-Lago members, and junior senators all had as much chance, if not more, than any member of the cabinet at getting Trump’s ear.

pulled into the private dining room off the Oval Office to share a cheeseburger with the president. It was quickly apparent to Corker and others that decision making was essentially random, as much about who got to talk to Trump, and when, as anything else. White House staffers were soon calling Corker with strategic advice on how to be the last voice in Trump’s ear: “I would get calls at 6:30 in the morning from a staffer asking me to weigh in on a decision that was going to be made at 10,” Corker would recall, “and they asked me to call him at 9:45.” Over the holidays, Corker had spoken with Trump and asked him to nominate a fellow Tennessean, Bill Hagerty, as ambassador to Japan. Within an hour, Trump had called Hagerty and offered him the job.

All of it fed theories that Trump and his campaign had been acting in collusion with the Russians. American intelligence agencies had firmly established that Putin not only authorized a covert operation to disrupt American elections but specifically wanted to tilt the outcome in favor of Trump. When a Trump foreign policy adviser named George Papadopoulos confided to an Australian diplomat over drinks in London in May 2016 that Russia had thousands of Democratic emails that would embarrass Hillary Clinton, Australian officials tipped American intelligence, leading the FBI to open an investigation. Unlike the email probe in which Clinton was eventually cleared, the inquiry into Trump’s campaign remained little publicized until after the election. The pre-inaugural phone calls with the Russian ambassador that got Mike Flynn fired only fueled suspicions. And when Trump took office, he prepared to lift some sanctions on Russia until Republican senators led by Mitch McConnell threatened to overrule him with legislation.

“By ingratiating himself with Putin and hinting at changes in American sanctions policy against the country under a Trump presidency, the boss was trying to nudge the Moscow Trump Tower project along,” Michael Cohen later wrote in a memoir blasting his former boss. “The campaign was far too chaotic and incompetent to actually conspire with the Russian government. The reality was that Trump saw politics as an opportunity to make money and he had no hesitation in bending American foreign policy to his personal financial benefit.”[22]

“His entire context for the military at this point was watching the movie Patton,” said a retired general who served with Mattis, Dunford, and John Kelly. “The guy had no idea what a general did. He respected their power and status and he wanted to have them around him because he felt that having generals around him—‘my generals’—would make him appear even more powerful. What he hadn’t bargained for was the fact that his generals were going to oppose him on moral grounds on many things. He just thought they were all about power, and the wielding of power and destruction.”

McMaster had not been in the job long before the Bannon wing orchestrated attacks to undermine him with Trump. The campaign, using the full ecosystem of the alt-right media led by Bannon’s old team at Breitbart News, portrayed McMaster and others on his staff, such as the Russia expert Fiona Hill, as shadowy “globalists” with a subversive anti-Trump agenda, often invoking the anti-Semitic trope that they were pawns of the wealthy Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros.

Kelly had quickly realized through the shocks of August that he would never transform Trump into a normal president nor stop him from tweeting. But he told himself that if he could control the information that got to Trump, if he could keep some of the nuttier figures in the president’s orbit off the phone and out of the Oval Office, if he could stop some of the wackier Breitbart clips from being slipped to him by the hardliners in the building, then there was a chance of keeping him focused on reality. If Kelly could make sure the input was better, then maybe the output would be too.

adhocracy that Porter came up with in 1980, a White House that “minimizes regularized and systematic patterns of providing advice and instead relies heavily on the President distributing assignments and selecting whom he listens to and when.”

But rather than opening a new era of cooperation, it was a short demonstration of what could have been. Trump more than any president in generations had come to the White House without strong party affiliation or philosophical moorings and in theory might have bridged the capital’s divides had he chosen to. Trump won the presidency in spite of his party’s establishment rather than because of it, having challenged traditional Republican orthodoxy on foundational issues like trade, war, and Russia.[12] He was openly scornful of the party’s last three presidential nominees, all of whom had refused to vote for him. And once in office, Trump seemed just as comfortable blasting fellow Republicans as he did Democrats. In the days following his deal with Pelosi and Schumer, Trump dismissed discontent within his party, posting a tweet that began, “Republicans, sorry,” as if he were not one of them, and criticizing their leaders for having a “death wish.”

In their Oval Office session, McConnell had come prepared with a plan to align his interests with the president’s. He pitched Trump on a bold idea: if they focused on it, McConnell said, they could transform the federal judiciary. He ran through all the progress that he and Don McGahn, Trump’s White House counsel, had been making already on this by pushing federal judicial nominations through with factory-like efficiency. If Trump made this a priority, he could make history, McConnell suggested, and lock down his conservative base as well. In the midst of McConnell’s explanation, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who had replaced Sean Spicer as White House press secretary, popped into the Oval Office and asked if they would like to do a news conference together. McConnell, surprised, soon found himself in the Rose Garden standing next to Trump declaring their mutual admiration in front of cameras. “We have been friends for a long time,” Trump said of the man he had been trashing on social media days earlier. “We are probably now, I think, at least as far as I’m concerned, closer than ever before.”[15] “We’ve been friends and acquaintances for some time,” McConnell offered. “Contrary to what some of you may have reported, we are together totally on this agenda to move America forward.”

Jared and Ivanka were polarizing figures in the West Wing. Some aides viewed them as calming influences and appealed to them to stop reckless decisions or nudge the president in a more responsible direction. They were seen as the more rational members of the family, not hotheaded screw-ups like Don Jr., and willing to listen in a way that the president did not. But others came to resent the pair, seeing them as entitled, pampered, arrogant, and self-aggrandizing. They always seemed to be trying to get into the photograph at major events. They were widely accused of leaking flattering stories about themselves and scathing stories about their rivals. And their preternatural confidence in their own judgment rankled many. Although in their late thirties, both Jared and Ivanka had spent most of their working lives at their own family businesses. Some in the White House began referring to them as “The Interns”; John Kelly called them “the Royal Couple” and eventually adopted Melania’s nickname for Ivanka, “Princess.”