Inside Trump's White House

by Doug Wead

  Madonna’s remarks about blowing up the White House signaled a new era of violent protest. On January 20, 2017, even before the swearing-in had taken place, protestors armed with hammers and crowbars broke Washington, DC, storefront windows and set a limousine on fire. The owner of the limousine, a Muslim, was a smallbusiness entrepreneur. At the time, almost all of his drivers were Pakistani-born immigrants, also Muslim. He was shaken and confused by the mob. Later, I spoke with many of his drivers. Never mind, they were told. It was the symbolism of the burning limousine that mattered. They would have to take the loss stoically.

  “I remember reading about the Muslim businessman,” Don Jr. said. “He apparently spent his life savings to start his business. It was really a great American success story. But the rioters burned his car.

  “There’s a great irony here. Again, the Left preaches tolerance, but it’s really only tolerance if they say it is. They can withdraw their credentials at any time if it serves their purpose.”

  The street protestors, described as “well-organized” by the Washington Post, had come prepared with medics and an attorney from Colorado to assist those who were planning to be violent or get arrested. The protestors—or perhaps more correctly, the organized rioters—came from twenty-six states and the District of Columbia.31 They gathered in parks downtown, where their experienced street fighters stood on benches and gave detailed instructions on what to say and do to get the most television coverage. I lingered on the fringes of some of these prep sessions. “Use your mask,” one leader exhorted. “It has a purpose.”

  As events would have it, aside from the fiery, burning limousine, which filled the television screens, the demonstrators actually gained little traction on Inauguration Day. Instead, several hundred thousand Trump supporters filled the grassy mall that stretched from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial to celebrate and witness the swearing-in of the new president.

  It was the next day, the day that Madonna took to the stage, that the same mall was filled with hundreds of thousands of women. The women would be wearing what they called pink pussy hats, symbolic of female genitalia. It was explained, in an article in the Detroit Free Press, that the hats would be abandoned by organizers at future women’s events on the grounds that they excluded “transgender women, as well as women of color whose genitals are more likely to be darker colors than pink.”32

  CNN would later say that Madonna’s “blowing up the White House” statement was taken out of context.33 But then, CNN would not provide its audience with the context. Madonna’s speech had been filled with profanity and F-bombs.. By anyone’s standards, there was no denying that “the long nightmare” that some members of the Trump family had thought was finally over was now only morphing into something even worse.

  A conversation between the Trump White House and the media would soon dissolve into a tooth-and-claw debate about just how many people had attended the inauguration. Many of Trump’s supporters felt that the new administration needlessly wasted equity on the discussion. Meanwhile, leaders of the Women’s March claimed that their event would be the largest demonstration since the days of the 1970s and the protests against the Vietnam War.

  HOW THE RESISTANCE GOT ITS NAME

  In retrospect, right after the 2016 election, there had been no immediate, massive, grassroots street reaction to the Trump victory. The Left had not expected Trump to win. The outrage had come from the national media and Hollywood personalities, some even weeping over the election results. Journalists who had remained professional and stoic on 9/11, as the World Trade Towers collapsed over their shoulders, now turned bitterly angry at their own television audiences, many of whom had voted for Donald Trump.

  Donald Trump Jr. remembers watching the election-night moment unfolding at Trump Tower. “They wouldn’t call it. I thought, ‘What’s going on? What are they trying to do? Can others see this?’

  “You could sort of see, you know, everyone’s trying to draw this out. They were hoping and praying that miraculously, something would happen.

  “Watching the media meltdown and Martha Raddatz crying on television, well, it was just a little bit too much. Remember, she had been the moderator of the second debate. Imagine?

  “Before we went upstairs, we were in the war room downstairs on a split screen. We were all simultaneously watching it all. I love the mix tapes that have been put together since then, but we saw bits and pieces of all of that stuff as it was happening.

  “Here are these journalists, who had been telling us with a straight face that they didn’t have a favorite, they just wanted to get to the real news. I just want you to know, the whole world could see, they were visibly shaken. In some cases, they were in tears. They didn’t cry over caskets coming back to Dover Air Force Base, they didn’t cry over 9/11, but when their big bosses lost control of power? They cried. This was happening before their very eyes. It was just sort of amusing to watch.

  “The irony of all of it is that Democrats had been warning the nation for months that elections have consequences and that you had to accept the will of the people and Donald Trump better not make a fuss when he loses, the country needs to have unity, it needs to come together. Hillary harped on this.

  “The truth of the matter is that our people wouldn’t have liked it if we had lost, but there would never have been a single rioter in the street. I would have gone back to work the next morning, getting back to doing what we do.

  “I’m not saying I would have been happy about it. I think leadership under Hillary Clinton would have been a total disaster. You would have perpetuated the same nonsense and made it, frankly, even worse. The swamp would have loved it. The lobbyists were already invested in the Clinton Foundation, in Congress, in each other. But I wouldn’t have spent the next two years moaning about it.

  “With the media it’s always, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ That’s the reality, save the environment but make my private jet rentals an exception. Don’t allow guns except for me and my bodyguards. Make sure you meekly accept the election when Hillary wins. That’s the right thing to do, except she didn’t win and the media immediately expected the street mobs to get with it.”

  RIOTS IN PORTLAND

  The only immediate reaction on the ground happened in Portland, Oregon, the day after the election. This was the antifa crowd, who some critics claimed were sponsored by the leftist billionaire George Soros. Antifa, a moniker for “antifascist,” included some experienced street agitators, previously trained in the Black Lives Matter organization. As paid protestors, they could be reliably turned out with a few phone calls.

  These beginner protests in Portland, Oregon, continued throughout the week, breaking out into violence that Friday evening. Groups of anarchists dressed in black, head to toe, carried baseball bats. Nineteen cars at a Toyota dealership were damaged, and windows were smashed at storefronts in Portland’s central Pearl District. Police said the demonstrations had turned into a full-scale riot.34

  In Chicago, a group of young African American men pulled a white man out of his car and viciously beat him for “voting for Donald Trump.”35 This story was too graphic for television networks to show, although Fox News aired it once. Television producers may have considered the footage politically counterproductive to feature. The man “had his arm put through a back window with the window rolled up, trapping his arm inside the car. The car was driven through traffic, dragging the man’s body with it.”36

  There were a few protests in numerous other places across the country, including in front of Trump Tower itself in New York City. Protestors used the hashtag #NotMyPresident across social media.

  In San Francisco, an online effort began urging consumers to boycott Ivanka Trump’s product lines, going under the hashtag #GrabYourWallet. The idea was to economically punish Ivanka, the president’s daughter, for not speaking out against her own father.

  In New York, residents of certain apartment buildings insisted that the Trump name be removed from th
e marquees of their buildings. Professional basketball teams tried to avoid staying at Trump-named hotel properties.37

  Keith Olbermann, the sportscaster turned leftist political pundit, had an online broadcast for GQ magazine throughout the 2016 election year. The show was called The Closer. On November 9, the day after the election, Olbermann sent out a tweet saying, “Let the resistance begin.” He gave his show a new name. From now on it would be The Resistance.38

  The national media apparently liked the idea and liked the name. Violence was good for ratings. “The Resistance” echoed the heroics of World War II and the French Resistance to the Nazis. For young people, it mirrored the name of the New Republic forces battling the evil and fascist-looking forces of the First Order in the fictional Star Wars universe. In both cases, it positioned “Resistance” members as opposing fascism and afforded them a touch of romance.

  One of the overt acts of resistance came from a source well-schooled with framing narratives and romance: Hollywood. In a video released under the auspices of a movement called “Unite for America,” an assortment of television actors appealed to members of the Electoral College to select anyone other than Donald Trump. The actor Martin Sheen, who portrayed the fictional US president Josiah Bartlet in the television drama The West Wing, kicked off the video and was followed by Debra Messing of Will and Grace fame. Sheen and Messing were joined by numerous stars of the small screen.

  Interestingly enough, the campaign made it especially clear, they were not asking electors to vote for Hillary Clinton. There was already a modest, heretical school of thought emerging that wondered if Trump’s victory was partially due to his flawed opponent. Rather, this new project was an attempt to force the presidential selection into the US House of Representatives. (This is the procedure described in Constitution when there is a deadlock in the Electoral College.) It was an “anyone but Trump” appeal.

  It failed.39

  THE STREET GANG BECOMES A MOVEMENT

  On the heels of the third Trump-Clinton televised debate in late October, a woman from Maine, Libby Chamberlin, started a Facebook page called Pantsuit Nation. The name came from Hillary Clinton’s penchant for pantsuits. The page initially urged women to wear pantsuits to the polls on November 8, as a sign of supporting Hillary Clinton. By November 8 the page had exploded, boasting nearly three million members.

  On November 9, a Pantsuit Nation member named Teresa Shook posted to the group that there should be a “Women’s March on Washington.” The idea took off rapidly and a website, womensmarch.com, was created. While the concept was initiated by upper-middle class white women, it was quickly appropriated by other groups as well.

  Marie Berry and Erica Chenoweth, research professors at the University of Denver, describe these groups as “tributaries.” Beyond the Pantsuit Nation women, one of the Women’s March tributaries was the Occupy movement. Occupy Wall Street was perhaps its best known demonstration, but the organization had many offshoots and causes. Its involvement with the women was significant. Occupy was focused on its enemy, the wealthiest “1 percent” in America. Occupy members never really warmed to Hillary Clinton; their members were much more likely to have supported Senator Bernie Sanders during the Democratic nominating process.

  The initial organizers of the Women’s March, who were more likely affiliated with the Pantsuit Nation, came under increasing criticism from other #NotMyPresident and #Resistance activists. They were criticized for not sufficiently considering “intersectionality.” This was a view that gender oppression needed to be elevated to the level of race and class oppression and include oppression of the LGBTQ community. It was a criticism of early feminists, who were predominantly white and heterosexual. The Pantsuit Nation community was also less experienced in the art of street activism and organizing rallies.

  Eventually, the leadership of the Women’s March was passed to activists with more experience on the streets, people who had learned how to provoke confrontations and how to set up events for sympathetic media. New leadership came from the ranks of the Black Lives Matter and immigrants’ rights tributaries, including Muslim activists. It was these leaders who were in charge by the time Madonna mused about blowing up the White House.40

  While some of these leaders urged a passive resistance modeled after Martin Luther King Jr., they were increasingly joined by people from groups such as antifa that led to some of the violence seen in Portland and the burning limousine on Inauguration Day.

  Borrowing tactics that had been used successfully by ISIS terrorists, antifa became well known for posting videos of its members, usually clad in all black, including face-covering balaclavas, punching alleged white supremacists in the face. Videos of such punches were put to music and posted on social media.41

  Things had moved from wearing pantsuits to punch a Nazi in the face as a form of activism. But further research found that some of their targets were not white supremacists at all.42 They were simply white people caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  In early January 2017, Rolling Stone magazine described a coalition of odd bedfellows forming as the “Resistance.” Not just street protestors and anarchists, but established Left organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Human Rights Campaign, joining with John Weaver, a Republican political consultant, who had advised the presidential campaigns of Senator John McCain and Governor John Kasich.

  Also identified as a Resistance leader was Evan McMullin, a former CIA agent who ran against Trump as an independent for president. McMullin placed third among Utah voters. He had previously worked on Capitol Hill as a Republican House staffer. The article quoted Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican strategist who had led Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 as well as Bob Dole’s presidential campaign in 1996.43 There was Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, the famous Swiss American psychiatrist, who first came up with the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.44

  A DEATH BLOW FOR MANY

  Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was like a death blow to many. For millions, it meant the death of the dream of the first female president in their lifetime. It killed the dream of a third or even fourth term of an Obama-like administration. For some, it meant the death of the dream of demography being destiny, the belief that an increasingly multicultural America would never again elect a Republican president, certainly not an America First president like Donald Trump.

  It was a devastating defeat to members of the Left, to the socialists. It was a blow to American academia, which was codependent with China, a nation that was sending masses of full-paying students to their universities. It would mean the postponement of “free education,” which would allow the federal government to pay for college tuition. It would postpone legislation to wipe out the student loan debt in the United States. It would be a setback for the idea of “reparations”—that is, government grants to descendants of American slaves—a cause endorsed by almost all of the future 2020 Democratic presidential candidates.

  Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the election of Donald Trump represented a setback and an unknown future for many corporate, globalist monopolies. It would force them to wait him out, or to tilt, God forbid, to more supply-and-demand and free markets until he could be thrown out of office. These monopolies depended on insider deals and sometimes quick, cheap money direct from the Federal Reserve and other devices to finance growth.

  In some cases, these companies were also the engines that ran the American media. Their advertising dollars kept the media functioning and paid the salaries of the TV anchors. Some companies had pieces of ownership, both directly and indirectly. Meanwhile, their grants to think tanks paid the salaries of the earnest guest pundits and experts who dominated the airwaves. Incredibly, even beyond television talking heads, this elite corporate community was willing to ally themselves, at least temporarily, with street thugs and members of the Left to mount a substantial opposi
tion to Trump and to block his planned reforms.

  To use the language of one of its own, there would be no honeymoon, no moving on to bargaining, depression, and acceptance. The “Resistance” insisted on staying in the stages of denial and anger. “Not My President!” they declared. And then there was Madonna’s famous line: “I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”45

  Many of the sixty-three million Americans who had elected Donald Trump as president looked on in stunned disbelief. Several million of them had voted twice for Barack Obama, feeling a great sense of pride in electing the first African American president. Now they were being attacked and berated for having voted to make America great again.

  In June 2018, Representative Maxine Waters called for open harassment of anyone even associated with Donald Trump. “I want to tell you,” she said, “these members of his Cabinet who remain and try to defend him, they won’t be able to go to a restaurant, they won’t be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store. The people are going to turn on them. They’re going to protest. They’re absolutely going to harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the president, ‘No. I can’t hang with you.’”46

  If you were not in the Resistance, it was best to keep quiet, keep your head down, and let the storm pass over.

  NOTES

  1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from Donald Trump Jr. in this chapter come from conversations, emails, and interviews conducted with the author in 2019.

  2. Madonna, Remarks at Women’s March, January 21, 2017. available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKhVp--feJk

  3. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/12/08/the-philadelphia-daily-news-front-page-goes-there-on-donald-trump/