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

by Peter Baker

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...