Document Text Content
ALSO BY MICHAEL WOLFF
Television Is the New Television:
The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age
The Man Who Owns the News:
Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch
Autumn of the Moguls:
My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed
Up Big Media
Burn Rate:
How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet
Where We Stand
White Kids
LITTLE, BROWN
First published in the United States in 2018 by Henry Holt and Company
First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Little, Brown
Copyright © 2018 by Michael Wolff
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Designed by Meryl Sussman Levavi
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-4087-1138-5
Little, Brown
An imprint of
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
www.hachette.co.uk
www.littlebrown.co.uk
For Victoria and Louise, mother and daughter
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
PROLOGUE: AILES AND BANNON
1. ELECTION DAY
2. TRUMP TOWER
3. DAY ONE
4. BANNON
5. JARVANKA
6. AT HOME
7. RUSSIA
8. ORG CHART
9. CPAC
10. GOLDMAN
11. WIRETAP
12. REPEAL AND REPLACE
13. BANNON AGONISTES
14. SITUATION ROOM
15. MEDIA
16. COMEY
17. ABROAD AND AT HOME
18. BANNON REDUX
19. MIKA WHO?
20. MCMASTER AND SCARAMUCCI
21. BANNON AND SCARAMUCCI
22. GENERAL KELLY
EPILOGUE: BANNON AND TRUMP
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The reason to write this book could not be more obvious. With the inauguration of Donald
Trump on January 20, 2017, the United States entered the eye of the most extraordinary
political storm since at least Watergate. As the day approached, I set out to tell this story in
as contemporaneous a fashion as possible, and to try to see life in the Trump White House
through the eyes of the people closest to it.
This was originally conceived as an account of the Trump administration’s first
hundred days, that most traditional marker of a presidency. But events barreled on without
natural pause for more than two hundred days, the curtain coming down on the first act of
Trump’s presidency only with the appointment of retired general John Kelly as the chief of
staff in late July and the exit of chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon three weeks later.
The events I’ve described in these pages are based on conversations that took place
over a period of eighteen months with the president, with most members of his senior staff
—some of whom talked to me dozens of times—and with many people who they in turn
spoke to. The first interview occurred well before I could have imagined a Trump White
House, much less a book about it, in late May 2016 at Trump’s home in Beverly Hills—
the then candidate polishing off a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla as he happily and idly
opined about a range of topics while his aides, Hope Hicks, Corey Lewandowski, and
Jared Kushner, went in and out of the room. Conversations with members of the
campaign’s team continued through the Republican Convention in Cleveland, when it was
still hardly possible to conceive of Trump’s election. They moved on to Trump Tower with
a voluble Steve Bannon—before the election, when he still seemed like an entertaining
oddity, and later, after the election, when he seemed like a miracle worker.
Shortly after January 20, I took up something like a semipermanent seat on a couch in
the West Wing. Since then I have conducted more than two hundred interviews.
While the Trump administration has made hostility to the press a virtual policy, it has
also been more open to the media than any White House in recent memory. In the
beginning, I sought a level of formal access to this White House, something of a fly-onthe-wall
status. The president himself encouraged this idea. But, given the many fiefdoms
in the Trump White House that came into open conflict from the first days of the
administration, there seemed no one person able to make this happen. Equally, there was
no one to say “Go away.” Hence I became more a constant interloper than an invited guest
—something quite close to an actual fly on the wall—having accepted no rules nor having
made any promises about what I might or might not write.
Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict
with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. Those conflicts, and that
looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.
Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge
them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in accounts and through sources I
have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.
Some of my sources spoke to me on so-called deep background, a convention of
contemporary political books that allows for a disembodied description of events provided
by an unnamed witness to them. I have also relied on off-the-record interviews, allowing a
source to provide a direct quote with the understanding that it was not for attribution.
Other sources spoke to me with the understanding that the material in the interviews
would not become public until the book came out. Finally, some sources spoke
forthrightly on the record.
At the same time, it is worth noting some of the journalistic conundrums that I faced
when dealing with the Trump administration, many of them the result of the White
House’s absence of official procedures and the lack of experience of its principals. These
challenges have included dealing with off-the-record or deep-background material that
was later casually put on the record; sources who provided accounts in confidence and
subsequently shared them widely, as though liberated by their first utterances; a frequent
inattention to setting any parameters on the use of a conversation; a source’s views being
so well known and widely shared that it would be risible not to credit them; and the almost
samizdat sharing, or gobsmacked retelling, of otherwise private and deep-background
conversations. And everywhere in this story is the president’s own constant, tireless, and
uncontrolled voice, public and private, shared by others on a daily basis, sometimes
virtually as he utters it.
For whatever reason, almost everyone I contacted—senior members of the White
House staff as well as dedicated observers of it—shared large amounts of time with me
and went to great effort to help shed light on the unique nature of life inside the Trump
White House. In the end, what I witnessed, and what this book is about, is a group of
people who have struggled, each in their own way, to come to terms with the meaning of
working for Donald Trump.
I owe them an enormous debt.
PROLOGUE:
AILES AND BANNON
T
he evening began at six-thirty, but Steve Bannon, suddenly among the world’s most
powerful men and now less and less mindful of time constraints, was late.
Bannon had promised to come to this small dinner arranged by mutual friends in a
Greenwich Village town house to see Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News and the
most significant figure in right-wing media and Bannon’s sometime mentor. The next day,
January 4, 2017—little more than two weeks before the inauguration of his friend Donald
Trump as the forty-fifth president—Ailes would be heading to Palm Beach, into a forced,
but he hoped temporary, retirement.
Snow was threatening, and for a while the dinner appeared doubtful. The seventy-sixyear-old
Ailes, with a long history of leg and hip problems, was barely walking, and,
coming in to Manhattan with his wife Beth from their upstate home on the Hudson, was
wary of slippery streets. But Ailes was eager to see Bannon. Bannon’s aide, Alexandra
Preate, kept texting steady updates on Bannon’s progress extracting himself from Trump
Tower.
As the small group waited for Bannon, it was Ailes’s evening. Quite as dumbfounded
by his old friend Donald Trump’s victory as most everyone else, Ailes provided the
gathering with something of a mini-seminar on the randomness and absurdities of politics.
Before launching Fox News in 1996, Ailes had been, for thirty years, among the leading
political operatives in the Republican Party. As surprised as he was by this election, he
could yet make a case for a straight line from Nixon to Trump. He just wasn’t sure, he
said, that Trump himself, at various times a Republican, Independent, and Democrat,
could make the case. Still, he thought he knew Trump as well as anyone did and was eager
to offer his help. He was also eager to get back into the right-wing media game, and he
energetically described some of the possibilities for coming up with the billion or so
dollars he thought he would need for a new cable network.
Both men, Ailes and Bannon, fancied themselves particular students of history, both
autodidacts partial to universal field theories. They saw this in a charismatic sense—they
had a personal relationship with history, as well as with Donald Trump.
Now, however reluctantly, Ailes understood that, at least for the moment, he was
passing the right-wing torch to Bannon. It was a torch that burned bright with ironies.
Ailes’s Fox News, with its $1.5 billion in annual profits, had dominated Republican
politics for two decades. Now Bannon’s Breitbart News, with its mere $1.5 million in
annual profits, was claiming that role. For thirty years, Ailes—until recently the single
most powerful person in conservative politics—had humored and tolerated Donald Trump,
but in the end Bannon and Breitbart had elected him.
Six months before, when a Trump victory still seemed out of the realm of the possible,
Ailes, accused of sexual harassment, was cashiered from Fox News in a move engineered
by the liberal sons of conservative eighty-five-year-old Rupert Murdoch, the controlling
shareholder of Fox News and the most powerful media owner of the age. Ailes’s downfall
was cause for much liberal celebration: the greatest conservative bugbear in modern
politics had been felled by the new social norm. Then Trump, hardly three months later,
accused of vastly more louche and abusive behavior, was elected president.
* * *
Ailes enjoyed many things about Trump: his salesmanship, his showmanship, his gossip.
He admired Trump’s sixth sense for the public marketplace—or at least the relentlessness
and indefatigability of his ceaseless attempts to win it over. He liked Trump’s game. He
liked Trump’s impact and his shamelessness. “He just keeps going,” Ailes had marveled to
a friend after the first debate with Hillary Clinton. “You hit Donald along the head, and he
keeps going. He doesn’t even know he’s been hit.”
But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone. The fact that
Trump had become the ultimate avatar of Fox’s angry common man was another sign that
we were living in an upside-down world. The joke was on somebody—and Ailes thought
it might be on him.
Still, Ailes had been observing politicians for decades, and in his long career he had
witnessed just about every type and style and oddity and confection and cravenness and
mania. Operatives like himself—and now, like Bannon—worked with all kinds. It was the
ultimate symbiotic and codependent relationship. Politicians were front men in a complex
organizational effort. Operatives knew the game, and so did most candidates and
officeholders. But Ailes was pretty sure Trump did not. Trump was undisciplined—he had
no capacity for any game plan. He could not be a part of any organization, nor was he
likely to subscribe to any program or principle. In Ailes’s view, he was “a rebel without a
cause.” He was simply “Donald”—as though nothing more need be said.
In early August, less than a month after Ailes had been ousted from Fox News, Trump
asked his old friend to take over the management of his calamitous campaign. Ailes,
knowing Trump’s disinclination to take advice, or even listen to it, turned him down. This
was the job Bannon took a week later.
After Trump’s victory, Ailes seemed to balance regret that he had not seized the chance
to run his friend’s campaign with incredulity that Trump’s offer had turned out to be the
ultimate opportunity. Trump’s rise to power, Ailes understood, was the improbable
triumph of many things that Ailes and Fox News represented. After all, Ailes was perhaps
the person most responsible for unleashing the angry-man currents of Trump’s victory: he
had invented the right-wing media that delighted in the Trump character.
Ailes, who was a member of the close circle of friends and advisers Trump frequently
called, found himself hoping he would get more time with the new president once he and
Beth moved to Palm Beach; he knew Trump planned to make regular trips to Mar-a-Lago,
down the road from Ailes’s new home. Still, though Ailes was well aware that in politics,
winning changes everything—the winner is the winner—he couldn’t quite get his head
around the improbable and bizarre fact that his friend Donald Trump was now president of
the United States.
* * *
At nine-thirty, three hours late, a good part of the dinner already eaten, Bannon finally
arrived. Wearing a disheveled blazer, his signature pairing of two shirts, and military
fatigues, the unshaven, overweight sixty-three-year-old joined the other guests at the table
and immediately took control of the conversation. Pushing a proffered glass of wine away
—“I don’t drink”—he dived into a live commentary, an urgent download of information
about the world he was about to take over.
“We’re going to flood the zone so we have every cabinet member for the next seven
days through their confirmation hearings,” he said of the business-and-military 1950s-type
cabinet choices. “Tillerson is two days, Session is two days, Mattis is two days… .”
Bannon veered from “Mad Dog” Mattis—the retired four-star general whom Trump
had nominated as secretary of defense—to a long riff on torture, the surprising liberalism
of generals, and the stupidity of the civilian-military bureaucracy. Then it was on to the
looming appointment of Michael Flynn—a favorite Trump general who’d been the
opening act at many Trump rallies—as the National Security Advisor.
“He’s fine. He’s not Jim Mattis and he’s not John Kelly … but he’s fine. He just needs
the right staff around him.” Still, Bannon averred: “When you take out all the never-
Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars
… it’s not a deep bench.”
Bannon said he’d tried to push John Bolton, the famously hawkish diplomat, for the
job as National Security Advisor. Bolton was an Ailes favorite, too.
“He’s a bomb thrower,” said Ailes. “And a strange little fucker. But you need him.
Who else is good on Israel? Flynn is a little nutty on Iran. Tillerson”—the secretary of
state designate—“just knows oil.”
“Bolton’s mustache is a problem,” snorted Bannon. “Trump doesn’t think he looks the
part. You know Bolton is an acquired taste.”
“Well, rumors were that he got in trouble because he got in a fight in a hotel one night
and chased some woman.”
“If I told Trump that, he might have the job.”
* * *
Bannon was curiously able to embrace Trump while at the same time suggesting he did
not take him entirely seriously. He had first met Trump, the on-again off-again presidential
candidate, in 2010; at a meeting in Trump Tower, Bannon had proposed to Trump that he
spend half a million dollars backing Tea Party-style candidates as a way to further his
presidential ambitions. Bannon left the meeting figuring that Trump would never cough up
that kind of dough. He just wasn’t a serious player. Between that first encounter and mid-
August 2016, when he took over the Trump campaign, Bannon, beyond a few interviews
he had done with Trump for his Breitbart radio show, was pretty sure he hadn’t spent more
than ten minutes in one-on-one conversation with Trump.
But now Bannon’s Zeitgeist moment had arrived. Everywhere there was a sudden
sense of global self-doubt. Brexit in the UK, waves of immigrants arriving on Europe’s
angry shores, the disenfranchisement of the workingman, the specter of more financial
meltdown, Bernie Sanders and his liberal revanchism—everywhere was backlash. Even
the most dedicated exponents of globalism were hesitating. Bannon believed that great
numbers of people were suddenly receptive to a new message: the world needs borders—
or the world should return to a time when it had borders. When America was great. Trump
had become the platform for that message.
By that January evening, Bannon had been immersed in Donald Trump’s world for
almost five months. And though he had accumulated a sizable catalogue of Trump’s
peculiarities, and cause enough for possible alarm about the unpredictability of his boss
and his views, that did not detract from Trump’s extraordinary, charismatic appeal to the
right-wing, Tea Party, Internet meme base, and now, in victory, from the opportunity he
was giving Steve Bannon.
* * *
“Does he get it?” asked Ailes suddenly, pausing and looking intently at Bannon.
He meant did Trump get it. This seemed to be a question about the right-wing agenda:
Did the playboy billionaire really get the workingman populist cause? But it was possibly
a point-blank question about the nature of power itself. Did Trump get where history had
put him?
Bannon took a sip of water. “He gets it,” said Bannon, after hesitating for perhaps a
beat too long. “Or he gets what he gets.”
With a sideways look, Ailes continued to stare him down, as though waiting for
Bannon to show more of his cards.
“Really,” Bannon said. “He’s on the program. It’s his program.” Pivoting from Trump
himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S.
embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all in. Sheldon”—Sheldon Adelson, the casino
billionaire, far-right Israel defender, and Trump supporter—“is all in. We know where
we’re heading on this.”
“Does Donald know?” asked a skeptical Ailes.
Bannon smiled—as though almost with a wink—and continued:
“Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink
trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared to death of
Persia … Yemen, Sinai, Libya … this thing is bad… . That’s why Russia is so key… . Is
Russia that bad? They’re bad guys. But the world is full of bad guys.”
Bannon offered all this with something like ebullience—a man remaking the world.
“But it’s good to know the bad guys are the bad guys,” said Ailes, pushing Bannon.
“Donald may not know.”
The real enemy, said an on-point Bannon, careful not to defend Trump too much or to
dis him at all, was China. China was the first front in a new cold war. And it had all been
misunderstood in the Obama years—what we thought we understood we didn’t understand
at all. That was the failure of American intelligence. “I think Comey is a third-rate guy. I
think Brennan is a second-rate guy,” Bannon said, dismissing the FBI director and the CIA
director.
“The White House right now is like Johnson’s White House in 1968. Susan Rice”—
Obama’s National Security Advisor—“is running the campaign against ISIS as a National
Security Advisor. They’re picking the targets, she’s picking the drone strikes. I mean,
they’re running the war with just as much effectiveness as Johnson in sixty-eight. The
Pentagon is totally disengaged from the whole thing. Intel services are disengaged from
the whole thing. The media has let Obama off the hook. Take the ideology away from it,
this is complete amateur hour. I don’t know what Obama does. Nobody on Capitol Hill
knows him, no business guys know him—what has he accomplished, what does he do?”
“Where’s Donald on this?” asked Ailes, now with the clear implication that Bannon
was far out ahead of his benefactor.
“He’s totally on board.”
“Focused?”
“He buys it.”
“I wouldn’t give Donald too much to think about,” said an amused Ailes.
Bannon snorted. “Too much, too little—doesn’t necessarily change things.”
* * *
“What has he gotten himself into with the Russians?” pressed Ailes.
“Mostly,” said Bannon, “he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet Putin.
But Putin couldn’t give a shit about him. So he’s kept trying.”
“He’s Donald,” said Ailes.
“It’s a magnificent thing,” said Bannon, who had taken to regarding Trump as
something like a natural wonder, beyond explanation.
Again, as though setting the issue of Trump aside—merely a large and peculiar
presence to both be thankful for and to have to abide—Bannon, in the role he had
conceived for himself, the auteur of the Trump presidency, charged forward:
“China’s everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we don’t get
anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in
1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world,
until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You’re going to have
a hypernationalist state, and once that happens you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
“Donald might not be Nixon in China,” said Ailes, deadpan, suggesting that for Trump
to seize the mantle of global transformation might strain credulity.
Bannon smiled. “Bannon in China,” he said, with both remarkable grandiosity and wry
self-deprecation.
“How’s the kid?” asked Ailes, referring to Trump’s son-in-law and paramount political
adviser, thirty-six-year-old Jared Kushner.
“He’s my partner,” said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt otherwise, he was
nevertheless determined to stay on message.
“Really?” said a dubious Ailes.
“He’s on the team.”
“He’s had lot of lunches with Rupert.”
“In fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” Bannon then spent several
minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch. Ailes, since his ouster from Fox,
had become only more bitter towards Murdoch. Now Murdoch was frequently jawboning
the president-elect and encouraging him toward establishment moderation—all a strange
inversion in the ever-stranger currents of American conservatism. Bannon wanted Ailes to
suggest to Trump, a man whose many neuroses included a horror of forgetfulness or
senility, that Murdoch might be losing it.
“I’ll call him,” said Ailes. “But Trump would jump through hoops for Rupert. Like for
Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about who’s jerking whose chain.”
The older right-wing media wizard and the younger (though not by all that much)
continued on to the other guests’ satisfaction until twelve-thirty, the older trying to see
through to the new national enigma that was Trump—although Ailes would say that in
fact Trump’s behavior was ever predictable—and the younger seemingly determined not
to spoil his own moment of destiny.
“Donald Trump has got it. He’s Trump, but he’s got it. Trump is Trump,” affirmed
Bannon.
“Yeah, he’s Trump,” said Ailes, with something like incredulity.
1
ELECTION DAY
O
n the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway—Donald Trump’s
campaign manager and a central, indeed starring, personality of Trumpworld—
settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last weeks of the race, the
Trump campaign headquarters had remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish
it from a corporate back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans.
Conway now was in a remarkably buoyant mood considering she was about to
experience a resounding if not cataclysmic defeat. Donald Trump would lose the election
—of this she was sure—but he would quite possibly hold the defeat to under 6 points.
That was a substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it off: it was
Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.
She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and
blaming Priebus. Now she briefed some of the television producers and anchors with
whom she’d built strong relationships—and with whom, actively interviewing in the last
few weeks, she was hoping to land a permanent on-air job after the election. She’d
carefully courted many of them since joining the Trump campaign in mid-August and
becoming the campaign’s reliably combative voice and, with her spasmodic smiles and
strange combination of woundedness and imperturbability, peculiarly telegenic face.
Beyond all of the other horrible blunders of the campaign, the real problem, she said,
was the devil they couldn’t control: the Republican National Committee, which was run
by Priebus, his sidekick, thirty-two-year-old Katie Walsh, and their flack, Sean Spicer.
Instead of being all in, the RNC, ultimately the tool of the Republican establishment, had
been hedging its bets ever since Trump won the nomination in early summer. When
Trump needed the push, the push just wasn’t there.
That was the first part of Conway’s spin. The other part was that despite everything,
the campaign had really clawed its way back from the abyss. A severely underresourced
team with, practically speaking, the worst candidate in modern political history—Conway
offered either an eye-rolling pantomime whenever Trump’s name was mentioned, or a
dead stare—had actually done extraordinarily well. Conway, who had never been involved
in a national campaign, and who, before Trump, ran a small-time, down-ballot polling
firm, understood full well that, post-campaign, she would now be one of the leading
conservative voices on cable news.
In fact, one of the Trump campaign pollsters, John McLaughlin, had begun to suggest
within the past week or so that some key state numbers, heretofore dismal, might actually
be changing to Trump’s advantage. But neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-inlaw
Jared Kushner—the effective head of the campaign, or the designated family monitor
of it—wavered in their certainty: their unexpected adventure would soon be over.
Only Steve Bannon, in his odd-man view, insisted the numbers would break in their
favor. But this being Bannon’s view—crazy Steve—it was quite the opposite of being a
reassuring one.
Almost everybody in the campaign, still an extremely small outfit, thought of
themselves as a clear-eyed team, as realistic about their prospects as perhaps any in
politics. The unspoken agreement among them: not only would Donald Trump not be
president, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody
had to deal with the latter issue.
As the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. He had survived the
release of the Billy Bush tape when, in the uproar that followed, the RNC had had the gall
to pressure him to quit the race. FBI director James Comey, having bizarrely hung Hillary
out to dry by saying he was reopening the investigation into her emails eleven days before
the election, had helped avert a total Clinton landslide.
“I can be the most famous man in the world,” Trump told his on-again, off-again aide
Sam Nunberg at the outset of the campaign.
“But do you want to be president?” Nunberg asked (a qualitatively different question
than the usual existential candidate test: “Why do you want to be president?”). Nunberg
did not get an answer.
The point was, there didn’t need to be an answer because he wasn’t going to be
president.
Trump’s longtime friend Roger Ailes liked to say that if you wanted a career in
television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was floating rumors
about a Trump network. It was a great future.
He would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful
brand and untold opportunities. “This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes in a
conversation a week before the election. “I don’t think about losing because it isn’t losing.
We’ve totally won.” What’s more, he was already laying down his public response to
losing the election: It was stolen!
Donald Trump and his tiny band of campaign warriors were ready to lose with fire and
fury. They were not ready to win.
* * *
In politics somebody has to lose, but invariably everybody thinks they can win. And you
probably can’t win unless you believe that you will win—except in the Trump campaign.
The leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was and how
everybody involved in it was a loser. He was equally convinced that the Clinton people
were brilliant winners—“They’ve got the best and we’ve got the worst,” he frequently
said. Time spent with Trump on the campaign plane was often an epic dissing experience:
everybody around him was an idiot.
Corey Lewandowski, who served as Trump’s first more or less official campaign
manager, was often berated by the candidate. For months Trump called him “the worst,”
and in June 2016 he was finally fired. Ever after, Trump proclaimed his campaign doomed
without Lewandowski. “We’re all losers,” he would say. “All our guys are terrible, nobody
knows what they’re doing… . Wish Corey was back.” Trump quickly soured on his
second campaign manager, Paul Manafort, as well.
By August, trailing Clinton by 12 to 17 points and facing a daily firestorm of
eviscerating press, Trump couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an
electoral victory. At this dire moment, Trump in some essential sense sold his losing
campaign. The right-wing billionaire Bob Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer, had shifted his
support to Trump with a $5 million infusion. Believing the campaign was cratering,
Mercer and his daughter Rebekah took a helicopter from their Long Island estate out to a
scheduled fundraiser—with other potential donors bailing by the second—at New York
Jets owner and Johnson & Johnson heir Woody Johnson’s summer house in the Hamptons.
Trump had no real relationship with either father or daughter. He’d had only a few
conversations with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables; Rebekah Mercer’s
entire history with Trump consisted of a selfie taken with him at Trump Tower. But when
the Mercers presented their plan to take over the campaign and install their lieutenants,
Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Trump didn’t resist. He only expressed vast
incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told the
Mercers, “is so fucked up.”
By every meaningful indicator, something greater than even a sense of doom shadowed
what Steve Bannon called “the broke-dick campaign”—a sense of structural impossibility.
The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire—ten times over—refused even to
invest his own money in it. Bannon told Jared Kushner—who, when Bannon signed on to
the campaign, had been off with his wife on a holiday in Croatia with Trump enemy David
Geffen—that, after the first debate in September, they would need an additional $50
million to cover them until election day.
“No way we’ll get fifty million unless we can guarantee him victory,” said a clear-eyed
Kushner.
“Twenty-five million?” prodded Bannon.
“If we can say victory is more than likely.”
In the end, the best Trump would do is loan the campaign $10 million, provided he got
it back as soon as they could raise other money. (Steve Mnuchin, then the campaign’s
finance chairman, came to collect the loan with the wire instructions ready to go, so
Trump couldn’t conveniently forget to send the money.)
There was in fact no real campaign because there was no real organization, or at best
only a uniquely dysfunctional one. Roger Stone, the early de facto campaign manager, quit
or was fired by Trump—with each man publicly claiming he had slapped down the other.
Sam Nunberg, a Trump aide who had worked for Stone, was noisily ousted by
Lewandowski, and then Trump exponentially increased the public dirty-clothes-washing
by suing Nunberg. Lewandowski and Hope Hicks, the PR aide put on the campaign by
Ivanka Trump, had an affair that ended in a public fight on the street—an incident cited by
Nunberg in his response to Trump’s suit. The campaign, on its face, was not designed to
win anything.
Even as Trump eliminated the sixteen other Republican candidates, however farfetched
that might have seemed, it did not make the ultimate goal of winning the
presidency any less preposterous.
And if, during the fall, winning seemed slightly more plausible, that evaporated with
the Billy Bush affair. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them,”
Trump told the NBC host Billy Bush on an open mic, amid the ongoing national debate
about sexual harassment. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re
a star they let you do it. You can do anything… . Grab them by the pussy. You can do
anything.”
It was an operatic unraveling. So mortifying was this development that when Reince
Priebus, the RNC head, was called to New York from Washington for an emergency
meeting at Trump Tower, he couldn’t bring himself to leave Penn Station. It took two
hours for the Trump team to coax him across town.
“Bro,” said a desperate Bannon, cajoling Priebus on the phone, “I may never see you
again after today, but you gotta come to this building and you gotta walk through the front
door.”
* * *
The silver lining of the ignominy Melania Trump had to endure after the Billy Bush tape
was that now there was no way her husband could become president.
Donald Trump’s marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him—or it was,
anyway, for those without private jets and many homes. He and Melania spent relatively
little time together. They could go days at a time without contact, even when they were
both in Trump Tower. Often she did not know where he was, or take much notice of that
fact. Her husband moved between residences as he would move between rooms. Along
with knowing little about his whereabouts, she knew little about his business, and took at