by Jim Acosta
Senior officials inside the West Wing were telling reporters that they were appalled by Trump’s behavior. One aide questioned why Trump was allowed to go back out in front of reporters at Trump Tower, a setting where he wouldn’t be able to resist the urge to engage with reporters. The aide told me I must have known I would have a confrontation with Trump the minute he arrived in the lobby. Honestly, I didn’t. But this official had assumed, as soon as he saw me, that a battle would ensue.
Two days after the Trump Tower debacle, the president found a way both to change the news cycle and to tamp down some of the blistering criticism of his handling of Charlottesville. He fired his chief strategist, a hero of the white nationalist movement in the United States, Steve Bannon. This was no small ball move on Trump’s part. Firing Bannon was a huge deal. While he had come on board the Trump team toward the end of the 2016 cycle, Bannon was seen at the time as one of the key voices of the growing nationalist movement in America, having been at the helm of the ultraconservative Breitbart website. Bannon encouraged Trump to continue to rail against immigration, free trade, and journalists—indeed, Bannon had once called the press “the opposition party” and helped Trump come up with the “enemy of the people.” (Note to the reader: Bannon privately loved the press and chatted with reporters on background all the time, conversations he used to knife his adversaries in the West Wing.)
Bannon’s firing came at a curious, almost too-convenient moment for Trump. After Bannon was let go, one White House official told me that the plan inside the West Wing had been to oust the conservative firebrand two weeks prior to his forced departure. That would have coincided with the hiring of John Kelly, who was already imposing discipline on Trump’s chaotic operation and cleaning house, having dispatched with Anthony Scaramucci. Whereas Priebus had an open-door policy, allowing Trump’s buddies to visit him whenever they wanted, Kelly was restricting access to the usual suspects. This was not good for Bannon, who had plenty of enemies inside the White House. Trump hated the perception that Bannon was the real brains behind the scenes inside the White House. Republican strategists suspected that Bannon’s firing was a kind of emergency vaccination for the poisonous atmosphere Trump had created.
“White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best,” Sarah Sanders said in a statement.
Bannon let it be known that he felt betrayed, going as far as to tell The Weekly Standard that Trump’s presidency was “over.”
There was almost one other high-profile departure in the days after Trump’s remarks on Charlottesville. The president’s top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, who is Jewish and was at Trump Tower for that disastrous news conference, told the Financial Times on August 25, about two weeks after the neo-Nazi violence that led to the murder of Heather Heyer, that he was under “enormous pressure” to leave the administration.
“I have come under enormous pressure both to resign and to remain in my current position. As a patriotic American, I am reluctant to leave my post as director of the National Economic Council because I feel a duty to fulfill my commitment to work on behalf of the American people. But I also feel compelled to voice my distress over the events of the last two weeks. Citizens standing up for equality and freedom can never be equated with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and the KKK. I believe this administration can and must do better in consistently and unequivocally condemning these groups and do everything we can to heal the deep divisions that exist in our communities. As a Jewish American, I will not allow neo-Nazis ranting, ‘Jews will not replace us’ to cause this Jew to leave his job. I feel deep empathy for all who have been targeted by these hate groups. We must all unite together against them,” Cohn told the Financial Times.
It was an extraordinarily candid takedown of Trump’s response to Charlottesville. It was rare to hear a current White House official criticize any sitting president in this fashion. Sure, officials leave and say all sorts of things. But typically, White House staffers bite their lip when it comes to criticizing the boss. Cohn’s candor was striking. He told the Financial Times that his decision to stay was not influenced by Bannon’s firing, and in another stark admission, he suggested that others in the administration, namely, Deputy National Security Advisor Dina Powell, were struggling with how to react to Trump’s inadequate response to the frightening rise of white supremacy in America.
“This is a personal issue for each of us—we are all grappling with it—this takes time to grapple with,” he said.
My colleagues Sara Murray with CNN and Maggie Haberman with the New York Times were both reporting that Cohn strongly considered resigning in the aftermath of Charlottesville. But one source told Murray that Cohn did not really come close to stepping down. Once again, in the hall of mirrors of the Trump White House, the truth seemed elusive. A senior White House official later scoffed at the notion that Cohn was serious about resigning. “Some people were trying to make themselves look good at the country club,” the official deadpanned. Was Cohn just trying to save his reputation by speaking out against Trump? The following March, he would leave the administration after losing a major battle with Trump over his plans to impose tariffs on key U.S. trading partners. So, he felt it necessary to leave over a trade dispute but not over Charlottesville? That’s puzzling.
As it turned out, Bannon’s firing was the only significant departure to come in the fallout after Charlottesville. Stop for a moment and think about that. It is stunning. Almost two years after the events of Charlottesville, a key question remains: what would have happened to Trump’s presidency had other officials searched their consciences and resigned in protest over the president’s remarks? Wouldn’t that have been a powerful message to send to the country and the world? We will never know, because it didn’t happen.
Likewise, most Republicans outside the administration, nearly united in their cowardice, stood firm in their refusal to confront the president. This sad chapter only reinforced the recognition that the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, had become Trump’s latest real estate acquisition. As so many GOP strategists have privately conceded to me, in latching on to Trump, their fellow Republicans were compromising their own principles. While this had been true for months, Charlottesville etched it in stone. The rhetoric and behavior exhibited by the president and too many of his supporters, and quietly accepted by too many Republicans during the campaign, during the transition, and during the Trump administration, had finally been realized in horrific Technicolor.
An inescapable lesson from the rise of Trump is that hatred left unchecked and unchallenged, even in the twenty-first century, can have terrible consequences. Over the first eight months of Trump’s administration, Republicans had shown time and time again that they were willing to abdicate their role as a check on the president, and once again, that left the media in this vacuum. For all our mistakes, it was moments like Charlottesville that reminded me of the role we in the press had to play.
The stakes were indeed high, and growing higher by the day, particularly because Trump spent the next weeks and months trying to rewrite the history we had all just lived, as he began to gaslight the public about Charlottesville. In a fiery speech at a rally of supporters in Phoenix on August 23, around the time Cohn told the Financial Times he had come under pressure to resign, Trump lied about his initial Charlottesville remarks. And not surprisingly, he blamed the media for misreporting what he had said. Trump’s ladder out of the hell he had created for himself, once again, was his continuing war against the press.
“So the—and I mean truly dishonest people in the media and the fake media, they make up stories. They have no sources in many cases. They say ‘a source says’—there is no such thing,” Trump told the crowd in Phoenix. “But they don’t report the facts. Just like they don’t want to report that I spoke out forcefully against hatred, bigotry and violence and strongly condemned the neo-Nazis, the White S
upremacists, and the KKK.”
Trump, as he is prone to do, was projecting, accusing the media of misreporting what had happened when, in fact, it was he who was misleading the public. He then attempted to rewrite history as he recalled his version of events from August 12.
“So here’s what I said, really fast, here’s what I said on Saturday: ‘We’re closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charlottesville, Virginia’—this is me speaking. ‘We condemn in the strongest, possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence.’ That’s me speaking on Saturday.”
Notice anything missing? Trump completely left out the fact that he said “many sides” were to blame for what had happened in Charlottesville. He also said that on that Saturday. Had his response been flawless, why did he leave that out?
Later on, in September, on a flight aboard Air Force One, after viewing hurricane damage in Florida, Trump again defended his handling of the violence in Charlottesville. Even after a few weeks of reflection, he had not changed his mind on what had happened. He stayed true only to the creed of Trumpworld: admit no mistakes. When pressed on the errors of his ways, Trump predictably doubled down again. He insisted that the anti-fascist protesters in Charlottesville were also to blame for the violence.
“You look at really what’s happened since Charlottesville, a lot of people are saying and people have actually written, ‘Gee, Trump might have a point.’ I said, ‘You’ve got some very bad people on the other side also,’ which is true,” he told reporters.
In October, Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, made some news on CNN by accusing members of the White House of having sympathies for the alt-right. Brown was echoing a broadside from Democratic congresswoman Frederica Wilson, who, after a fight with John Kelly over Trump’s treatment of a widow of a fallen soldier, had slammed the White House as being full of white supremacists.
“I agree that Steve Bannon is a white supremacist and Stephen Miller seems to be. And I know that studies have shown that they have their allies sprinkled around the White House,” Brown told CNN’s Dana Bash.
The Brown interview got under the skin of top officials inside the White House. One top official, principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah, actually vented about the interview to me. He had called me back to his office, as Spicer had done before, to complain about Brown’s interview on CNN. A bit more good-natured than Spicer, Shah tried to laugh off the accusation from Brown that white supremacists worked in the West Wing.
Shah, who is Indian American, shouted out to one of his aides, “Are you a white supremacist? Any white supremacists around here?”
He was joking, but it was an odd response, to say the least. I remember walking away from that meeting thinking, What the hell? I don’t think Shah was trying to blow off the horrors of white supremacy. Nor do I think he was trying to excuse Trump’s behavior. It was more an attempt to accuse the other party of going overboard in its criticism of Trump. Still, I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. I kept thinking, How do you joke about white supremacists while working inside the White House?
None of this was normal.
A senior White House official defended Trump’s response to Charlottesville, insisting pretty passionately that the president had been unfairly maligned over his response.
The official asserted Trump’s “very fine people” moment overshadowed other instances when he stated that he condemned Nazis.
“I wouldn’t be here in the first place if I thought Donald Trump was a racist. There would be no reason to be here,” the official said.
I then asked the official whether that could be stated on the record.
“I don’t want to say that on the record,” the official replied.
The stain on Trump’s presidency left by his response to Charlottesville never did come out in the wash; nor should it have. Moments that reveal character on that scale tend to leave an indelible mark on us all—for better or, in this case, for worse. As disgusting, sleazy, and appalling as the remarks captured in the Access Hollywood tape had been, Trump’s handling of Charlottesville felt worse. It felt unpatriotic and un-American. Until Charlottesville, some of Trump’s language had been coded through the alt-right’s dog whistles about immigration—birtherism, the wall, the Muslim ban, the list goes on. But now, because it had been framed by his equivocation over hate groups such as the KKK and neo-Nazis, a new reality was upon us, one that his critics said exposed the president’s racism.
In the aftermath of that moment, I felt a profound shift in how this White House had to be covered. Because of how journalists have been taught their craft for decades, we have long been obsessed with the idea of balance; that both sides deserve equal skepticism. While it’s one thing to say this about health care reform or tax policy, Charlottesville revealed that it’s entirely different when you’re talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacy. When it comes to the KKK, there is no balance, the other side does not get equal treatment. The risk is too great to pretend that such groups are anything but what they are—racists.
Purists in the field of journalism and academics opining from the safety of the classroom can lament the downfall of neutrality. But neutrality for the sake of neutrality doesn’t really serve us in the age of Trump. And indeed, we can always look back to previous administrations when it became absolutely necessary for reporters to step out of their roles as objective arbiters of the truth. Walter Cronkite of CBS told the American people the truth about Vietnam (that it could not be won), enraging Lyndon Johnson. The Washington Post and the New York Times exposed Nixon’s secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia with the release of the Pentagon Papers, in defiance of Richard Nixon, who also tangled at times with Dan Rather, over Watergate. Reagan had Sam Donaldson shouting across the South Lawn of the White House when “the Gipper” didn’t want to take questions. The press called out Clinton’s lies about Monica Lewinsky, and so on. Conversely, I think it can be fairly argued that the press failed the American people in the run-up to the Iraq War, when we allowed the George W. Bush administration to mislead the public into a costly conflict based on weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist.
Yes, the perils have indeed been high for the press countless times, and yet there’s no denying that even with that historical perspective, there was a sense that with Trump’s latest remarks, we were at a profoundly dangerous moment—for everyone. After Charlottesville, I think more members of the press began a more dogged pursuit of what was right, and that meant telling the truth, as painful as it was. That doesn’t mean that everyone started getting it correct all the time, but reporters grew more comfortable adopting honest assessments of Trump’s words and behavior, less fixated on catering to the media referees scoring whether we gave both sides equal time. We don’t exist just to tell the truth. We have to tell the truth, even when it hurts.
8
“We Reap What We Sow . . .”
One inescapable lesson from the first two years of the Trump administration is that Republicans have shown time and time again that they are willing to abdicate their role as a check on the president in order to advance their policy agenda. This would become all the more apparent in the wake of Charlottesville, when rather than challenge a president who had just equivocated over the rise of neo-Nazis in an American city, much of the GOP stayed loyal to Trump. After Charlottesville, there were other off-ramps available to Republicans. But in most cases, the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Reagan, and the Bush family, by and large, was all too willing to look the other way.
Sure, some high-profile Republicans publicly criticized Trump. In the fall of 2017, Bob Corker referred to the White House as an “adult day care center” after Trump criticized the Tennessee senator’s handling of the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal. Corker even went as far as to tell a group of reporters that three key administration officials were essentially the ones preventing the country from going off the rails.
“I think Secretary [of State] Tillerson, Secret
ary [of Defense] Mattis, and [White House Chief of Staff] Kelly are those people that help separate our country from chaos,” he said.
Still, Corker and other prominent GOP Trump critics, such as Arizona senator Jeff Flake, preferred to wage a war of words with the president than do much of anything to derail his presidency. In their defense, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, was not about to let them subvert Trump’s agenda in any meaningful way.
House Speaker Paul Ryan also had his concerns with Trump’s rhetoric and behavior. But Ryan, who, I’m told, spoke with Trump more often than the public ever really knew, registered his complaints privately. Ryan, a source close to him told me, did not want to create other distractions for the GOP by getting into public spats with the president. What was the point of that? Ryan thought.
But the party faced one of its more critical tests in the fall of 2017, with Trump’s disastrous endorsement of Alabama Republican candidate Roy Moore for the U.S. Senate. Had the accusations of sexual misconduct against Moore never come to light, it’s almost certain he would be sitting in the Senate today. As we all now know, Moore almost won the seat, thanks to Alabama’s bright-red conservatism but also to Trump, who will go down in history with the dubious distinction of throwing the full weight of the presidency behind a candidate facing allegations of child molestation. While Charlottesville was a jarring experience for so many Americans, who simply could not fathom a president waffling over white supremacists rioting in a U.S. city, the Moore campaign proved that Trump could deliver one unimaginable blow after another to the nation’s consciousness. As was often the case during Trump’s first two years in office, some in the GOP disagreed with him over his endorsement of Moore, yet there was no accountability for Trump. At Corker’s so-called White House day care center, you might say, there were seemingly no adults in the room willing to take on the president.