Fire and Fury

by Michael Wolff

  * * *

  As James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee approached—it would take place on June 8, twelve days after the presidential traveling party returned home from the long trip to the Middle East and Europe—there began among senior staffers an almost open inquiry into Trump’s motives and state of mind.

  This seemed spurred by an obvious question: Why hadn’t he fired Comey during his first days of office, when it would likely have been seen as a natural changing of the guard with no clear connection to the Russian investigation? There were many equivocal answers: general disorganization, the fast pace of events, and a genuine sense of innocence and naïveté about the Russian charges. But now there seemed to be a new understanding: Donald Trump believed he had vastly more power, authority, and control than in fact he had, and he believed his talent for manipulating people and bending and dominating them was vastly greater than it was. Pushing this line of reasoning just a little further: senior staff believed the president had a problem with reality, and reality was now overwhelming him.

  If true, this notion directly contravened the basic premise of the support for Trump among his staff. In some sense, not too closely questioned, they believed he had almost magical powers. Since his success was not explainable, he must have talents beyond what they could fathom. His instincts. Or his salesman’s gifts. Or his energy. Or just the fact that he was the opposite of what he was supposed to be. This was out-of-the-ordinary politics—shock-to-the-system politics—but it could work.

  But what if it didn’t? What if they were all profoundly wrong?

  Comey’s firing and the Mueller investigation prompted a delayed reckoning that ended months of willing suspension of disbelief. These sudden doubts and considerations—at the highest level of government—did not quite yet go to the president’s ability to adequately function in his job. But they did, arguably for the first time in open discussions, go to the view that he was hopelessly prone to self-sabotaging his ability to function in the job. This insight, scary as it was, at least left open the possibility that if all the elements of self-sabotage were carefully controlled—his information, his contacts, his public remarks, and the sense of danger and threat to him—he might yet be able to pull it together and successfully perform.

  Quite suddenly, this became the prevailing view of the Trump presidency and the opportunity that still beckoned: you can be saved by those around you or brought down by them.

  Bannon believed the Trump presidency would fail in some more or less apocalyptic fashion if Kushner and his wife remained Trump’s most influential advisers. Their lack of political or real-world experience had already hobbled the presidency, but since the Comey disaster it was getting worse: as Bannon saw it, they were now acting out of personal panic.

  The Kushner side believed that Bannon or Bannonism had pushed the president into a harshness that undermined his natural salesman’s abilities to charm and reach out. Bannon and his ilk had made him the monster he more and more seemed to be.

  Meanwhile, virtually everybody believed that a large measure of the fault lay in Reince Priebus, who had failed to create a White House that could protect the president from himself—or from Bannon or from his own children. At the same time, believing that the fundamental problem lay in Priebus was easy scapegoating, not to mention little short of risible: with so little power, the chief of staff simply wasn’t capable of directing either Trump or those around him. Priebus himself could, not too helpfully, argue only that no one had any idea how much worse all this would have been without his long-suffering mediation among the president’s relatives, his Svengali, and Trump’s own terrible instincts. There might be two or three debacles a day, but without Priebus’s stoic resolve, and the Trump blows that he absorbed, there might have been a dozen more.

  * * *

  On June 8, from a little after ten in the morning to nearly one in the afternoon, James Comey testified in public before the Senate Intelligence Committee. The former FBI director’s testimony, quite a tour de force of directness, moral standing, personal honor, and damning details, left the country with a simple message: the president was likely a fool and certainly a liar. In the age of modern media politesse, few presidents had been so directly challenged and impugned before Congress.

  Here it was, stark in Comey’s telling: the president regarded the FBI director as working directly for him, of owing his job to him, and now he wanted something back. “My common sense,” said Comey, “again, I could be wrong, but my common sense told me what’s going on here is he’s looking to get something in exchange for granting my request to stay in the job.”

  In Comey’s telling, the president wanted the FBI to lay off Michael Flynn. And he wanted to stop the FBI from pursuing its Russia-related investigation. The point could hardly have been clearer: if the president was pressuring the director because he feared that an investigation of Michael Flynn would damage him, then this was an obstruction of justice.

  The contrast between the two men, Comey and Trump, was in essence the contrast between good government and Trump himself. Comey came across as precise, compartmentalized, scrupulous in his presentation of the details of what transpired and the nature of his responsibility—he was as by-the-book as it gets. Trump, in the portrait offered by Comey, was shady, shoot-from-the-hip, heedless or even unaware of the rules, deceptive, and in it for himself.

  After the hearing ended, the president told everybody he had not watched it, but everybody knew he had. To the extent that this was, as Trump saw it, a contest between the two men, it was as direct a juxtaposition as might be imagined. The entire point of the Comey testimony was to recast and contradict what the president had said in his angry and defensive tweets and statements, and to cast suspicion on his actions and motives—and to suggest that the president’s intention was to suborn the director of the FBI.

  Even among Trump loyalists who believed, as Trump did, that Comey was a phony and this was all a put-up job, the nearly universal feeling was that in this mortal game, Trump was quite defenseless.

  * * *

  Five days later, on June 13, it was Jeff Sessions’s turn to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee. His task was to try to explain the contacts he had had with the Russian ambassador, contacts that had later caused him to recuse himself—and made him the president’s punching bag. Unlike Comey, who had been invited to the Senate to show off his virtue—and had seized the opportunity—Sessions had been invited to defend his equivocation, deception, or stupidity.

  In an often testy exchange, the attorney general provided a squirrelly view of executive privilege. Though the president had not in fact evoked executive privilege, Sessions deemed it appropriate to try to protect it anyway.

  Bannon, watching the testimony from the West Wing, quickly became frustrated. “Come on, Beauregard,” he said.

  Unshaven, Bannon sat at the head of the long wooden conference table in the chief of staff’s office and focused intently on the flat-screen monitor across the room.

  “They thought the cosmopolitans would like it if we fired Comey,” he said, with “they” being Jared and Ivanka. “The cosmopolitans would be cheering for us for taking down the man who took Hillary down.” Where the president saw Sessions as the cause of the Comey fiasco, Bannon saw Sessions as a victim of it.

  A sylphlike Kushner, wearing a skinny gray suit and skinny black tie, slipped into the room. (Recently making the rounds was a joke about Kushner being the best-dressed man in Washington, which is quite the opposite of a compliment.) On occasion the power struggle between Bannon and Kushner seemed to take physical form. Bannon’s demeanor rarely changed, but Kushner could be petulant, condescending, and dismissive—or, as he was now, hesitating, abashed, and respectful.

  Bannon ignored Kushner until the younger man cleared his throat. “How’s it going?”

  Bannon indicated the television set: as in, Watch for yourself.

  Finally Bannon spoke. “They don�
��t realize this is about institutions, not people.”

  “They” would appear to be the Jarvanka side—or an even broader construct referring to all those who mindlessly stood with Trump.

  “This town is about institutions,” Bannon continued. “We fire the FBI director and we fire the whole FBI. Trump is a man against institutions, and the institutions know it. How do you think that goes down?”

  This was shorthand for a favorite Bannon riff: In the course of the campaign, Donald Trump had threatened virtually every institution in American political life. He was a clown-prince version of Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Trump believed, offering catnip to deep American ire and resentment, that one man could be bigger than the system. This analysis presupposed that the institutions of political life were as responsive as those in the commercial life that Trump was from—and that they yearned to meet the market and find the Zeitgeist. But what if these institutions—the media, the judiciary, the intelligence community, the greater executive branch itself, and the “swamp” with its law firms, consultants, influence peddlers, and leakers—were in no way eager to adapt? If, by their nature, they were determined to endure, then this accidental president was up against it.

  Kushner seemed unpersuaded. “I wouldn’t put it like that,” he said.

  “I think that’s the lesson of the first hundred days that some people around here have learned,” said Bannon, ignoring Kushner. “It’s not going to get better. This is what it’s like.”

  “I don’t know,” said Kushner.

  “Know it,” said Bannon.

  “I think Sessions is doing okay,” said Kushner. “Don’t you?”

  19

  MIKA WHO?

  The media had unlocked the value of Donald Trump, but few in the media had unlocked it more directly and personally than Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. Their MSNBC breakfast show was an ongoing soap-opera-ish or possibly Oprahesque drama about their relationship with Trump—how he had disappointed them, how far they had come from their original regard for him, and how much and how pathetically he regularly embarrassed himself. The bond he once had with them, forged through mutual celebrity and a shared proprietary sense of politics (Scarborough, the former congressman, seemed to feel that he ought reasonably to be president as much as Donald Trump felt he should be), had distinguished the show during the campaign; now its public fraying became part of the daily news cycle. Scarborough and Brzezinski lectured him, channeled the concerns of his friends and family, upbraided him, and openly worried about him—that he was getting the wrong advice (Bannon) and, too, that his mental powers were slipping. They also staked a claim at representing the reasonable center-right alternative to the president, and indeed were quite a good barometer of both the center-right’s efforts to deal with him and its day-to-day difficulties of living with him.

  Trump, believing he had been used and abused by Scarborough and Brzezinski, claimed he’d stopped watching the show. But Hope Hicks, every morning, quaking, had to recount it for him.

  Morning Joe was a ground-zero study in the way the media had overinvested in Trump. He was the whale against which media emotions, self-regard, ego, joie de guerre, career advancement, and desire to be at the center of the story, too, all churned in nearly ecstatic obsession. In reverse regard, the media was the same whale, serving the same function, for Trump.

  To this Trump added another tic, a lifelong sense that people were constantly taking unfair advantage of him. This perhaps came from his father’s cheapness and lack of generosity, or from his own overawareness of being a rich kid (and, no doubt, his insecurities about this), or from a negotiator’s profound understanding that it is never win-win, that where there is profit there is loss. Trump simply could not abide the knowledge that somebody was getting a leg up at his expense. His was a zero-sum ecosystem. In the world of Trump, anything that he deemed of value either accrued to him or had been robbed from him.

  Scarborough and Brzezinski had taken their relationship with Trump and amply monetized it, while putting no percentage in his pocket—and in this instance, he judged his commission should be slavishly favorable treatment. To say this drove him mad would be an understatement. He dwelled and fixated on the perceived injustice. Don’t mention Joe or Mika to him was a standing proscription.

  His wounded feelings and incomprehension at the failure of people whose embrace he sought to, in return, embrace him was “deep, crazy deep,” said his former aide Sam Nunberg, who had run afoul of his need for 100 percent approbation and his bitter suspicion of being profited from.

  * * *

  Out of this accumulated rage came his June 29 tweet about Mika Brzezinski.

  It was classic Trump: there was no mediation between off-the-record language and the public statement. Referring to “low I.Q. Crazy Mika” in one tweet, he wrote in another that she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when she and Scarborough visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago on the previous New Year’s Eve. Many of his tweets were not, as they might seem, spontaneous utterances, but constant ones. Trump’s rifts often began as insult comedy and solidified as bitter accusations and then, in an uncontainable moment, became an official proclamation.

  The next step, in his tweet paradigm, was universal liberal opprobrium. Almost a week of social media fury, cable breast-beating, and front-page condemnation followed his tweet about Brzezinski. That was accompanied by the other part of the Trump tweet dynamic: by unifying liberal opinion against him, he unified its opposite for him.

  In truth, he was often neither fully aware of the nature of what he had said nor fully cognizant of why there should be such a passionate reaction to it. As often as not, he surprised himself. “What did I say?” he would ask after getting severe blowback.

  He wasn’t serving up these insults for effect—well, not entirely. And his behavior wasn’t carefully calculated; it was tit for tat, and he likely would have said what he’d said even if no one was left standing with him. (This very lack of calculation, this inability to be political, was part of his political charm.) It was just his good luck that the Trumpian 35 percent—that standing percentage of people who, according to most polls, seemed to support him no matter what (who would, in his estimation, let him get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue)—was largely unfazed and maybe even buoyed by every new expression of Trumpness.

  Now, having expressed himself and gotten in the last word, Trump was cheery again.

  “Mika and Joe totally love this. It’s big ratings for them,” said the president, with certain satisfaction and obvious truth.

  * * *

  Ten days later, a large table of Bannonites was having dinner at the Bombay Club, a high-end Indian restaurant two blocks from the White House. One of the group—Arthur Schwartz, a PR consultant—asked a question about the Mika and Joe affair.

  Perhaps it was the noise, but it was also a fitting measure of the speed of events in the Trump era: Bannon lieutenant Alexandra Preate replied, with genuine fogginess, “Who?”

  The operetta of the Mika tweets—the uncouthness and verbal abuse demonstrated by the president, his serious lack of control and judgment, and the worldwide censure heaped upon him for it—had already far receded, wholly overshadowed by more Trump eruptions and controversy.

  But before moving on to the next episode of ohmygodness, it is worth considering the possibility that this constant, daily, often more than once-a-day, pileup of events—each one canceling out the one before—is the true aberration and novelty at the heart of the Trump presidency.

  Perhaps never before in history—not through world wars, the overthrow of empires, periods of extraordinary social transformation, or episodes of government-shaking scandal—have real-life events unfolded with such emotional and plot-thickening impact. In the fashion of binge-watching a television show, one’s real life became quite secondary to the public drama. It was not unreasonable to say Whoa, wait just a minute: public life doesn’t happen like this. Public life in fac
t lacks coherence and drama. (History, by contrast, attains coherence and drama only in hindsight.)

  The process of accomplishing the smallest set of tasks within the sprawling and resistant executive branch is a turtle process. The burden of the White House is the boredom of bureaucracy. All White Houses struggle to rise above that, and they succeed only on occasion. In the age of hypermedia, this has not gotten easier for the White House, it’s gotten harder.

  It’s a distracted nation, fragmented and preoccupied. It was, arguably, the peculiar tragedy of Barack Obama that even as a transformational figure—and inspirational communicator—he couldn’t really command much interest. As well, it might be a central tragedy of the news media that its old-fashioned and even benighted civic-minded belief that politics is the highest form of news has helped transform it from a mass business to a narrow-cast one. Alas, politics itself has more and more become a discrete business. Its appeal is B-to-B—business-to-business. The real swamp is the swamp of insular, inbred, incestuous interests. This isn’t corruption so much as overspecialization. It’s a wonk’s life. Politics has gone one way, the culture another. The left-right junkies might pretend otherwise, but the great middle doesn’t put political concerns at the top of their minds.

  And yet, contravening all cultural and media logic, Donald Trump produced on a daily basis an astonishing, can’t-stop-following-it narrative. And this was not even because he was changing or upsetting the fundamentals of American life. In six months as president, failing to master almost any aspect of the bureaucratic process, he had, beyond placing his nominee on the Supreme Court, accomplished, practically speaking, nothing. And yet, OMG!!! There almost was no other story in America—and in much of the world. That was the radical and transformational nature of the Trump presidency: it held everybody’s attention.

  Inside the White House, the daily brouhaha and world’s fascination was no cause for joy. It was, in the White House staff’s bitter view, the media that turned every day into a climactic, dastardly moment. And, in a sense, this was correct: every development cannot be climactic. The fact that yesterday’s climax would soon, compared to the next climax, be piddling, rather bore out the disproportion. The media was failing to judge the relative importance of Trump events: most Trump events came to naught (arguably all of them did), and yet all were greeted with equal shock and horror. The White House staff believed that the media’s Trump coverage lacked “context”—by this, they meant that people ought to realize that Trump was mostly just huffing and puffing.