The White House was his, and it was empty. It was January 20, 2017, and Donald Trump had taken the oath of office some two hours before. After traveling down Pennsylvania Avenue in the inaugural parade, the presidential limousine pulled through the northwest gate and toward the North Portico of the White House. For the next four years, this was going to be home. Hell, maybe for the next eight.
It did not feel like that right away, would not for months to come. There were ushers waiting on the upper floors, there was staff moving through the basement, but in the gray light of that January day, the White House seemed a deserted mansion. There was no instruction manual, no one waiting to give them a leisurely tour. But there were millions waiting for the president and first lady to emerge, as well as an evening ahead of them studded with celebratory galas.
An advance man helped the Trumps find a bathroom where they could fix their hair. Then it was back into the world, where a wintry mix of jubilation and anger awaited.
Steve Bannon couldn’t care less if the Trumps felt cozy at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That was not why he’d fought through the darkest days of the campaign, when the smirking visage of Billy Bush (“How about a little hug for the Donald? He just got off the bus.”) seemed to fill every television and smartphone screen in the land, when pundits debated just how badly Trump would be embarrassed.
The first two weeks of the Trump administration would be the closest that his presidency would ever come to the assault Bannon had envisioned. He wanted to “flood the zone,” as he put it, to utterly overwhelm Trump’s critics and opponents before they could throw up any legal or legislative barricades in their way.
Trump was happy to sign executive orders, which gave the appearance of work diligently accomplished. But he also remained furious about debates over the size of his inaugural crowd, which were compared unfavorably to President Obama’s.
Even as he pushed ahead on Bannon’s agenda of restricted immigration and decreased regulation, Trump sent ominous signs about what he expected from the people who were coming to work for him, about what excellence in service of the public was going to look like under President Trump.
After the release of the Access Hollywood tape, a San Francisco woman named Shannon Coulter started a boycott campaign called Grab Your Wallet, a name that referenced the crudest of Trump’s remarks on that recording. The goal wasn’t just to boycott Trump’s own products—the wine, the throw blankets, the ties—which would have been distasteful in the first place to urbane liberals like Coulter. Rather, the boycott was aimed at retailers that enabled the Trumps by carrying their products.
After his victory, Grab Your Wallet became the best, if still very much inadequate, means of making Trump feel some of the pain of the anti-Trump resistance. Among the largest retailers to respond to the pressure was Nordstrom, which operated close to four hundred department stores across North America. On February 2, Nordstrom announced that it would no longer carry the clothing line of Ivanka Trump. Nordstrom did not say that the boycott movement had anything to do with that decision, issuing a statement about the need to “refresh our assortment.”
If the point was to enrage Trump, the objective was achieved, and in very public fashion. The president tweeted about the Nordstrom affair on Wednesday, February 8, around the time he would have been reviewing his presidential daily briefing a summary of the most significant threats to the nation’s security. “My daughter Ivanka has been treated so unfairly by @Nordstrom,” the president complained. “She is a great person—always pushing me to do the right thing! Terrible!”
This came from Trump’s own Twitter account, but since he was intent on using that handle instead of the one specifically allotted to the president, the message had the force of a presidential announcement. The use of public office for private gain was strictly illegal, but the president was not a midlevel bureaucrat at the Department of Labor. He held the most scrutinized office on earth, but that office also put him on complex legal terrain, if not exactly outside the law, then somewhere on its fraying boundary. Much of a president’s behavior depended on decorum, his understanding of what it meant to sit where Lincoln and Kennedy once sat. When a president defiled that office (and Trump certainly wasn’t the first), it was unclear what price he had to pay.
Even some in the pro-Trump brigade were discomfited by the tweet—and they had been discomfited by so little else during his journey to Pennsylvania Avenue. On Fox News, one young conservative offered that the “White House is not QVC.” For this to come from the president’s favored source of insight and information was nothing short of cruel.
A remedy was at hand. The morning after Trump’s tweet criticizing Nordstrom, one of Trump’s top advisers, Kellyanne Conway, appeared on his most beloved Fox News program, Fox & Friends, the network’s flagship morning show. It was 7:48 a.m. in Washington, and Conway was standing in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, which was usually empty at that hour. Speaking about Ivanka, Conway sounded like a cross between an aggrieved-yet-proud aunt and a junior publicist who had been handed talking points by her client only moments before.
“You can certainly buy her goods online,” Conway informed viewers. She mused that Trump’s adversaries were “using her, who’s been a champion for women empowerment, women in the workplace, to get to him.” She then offered, with a carefree wave of the hand, a way to counter Nordstrom, Grab Your Wallet, and all the other forces aligned against the Trump family: “Go buy Ivanka’s stuff is what I would tell you. I hate shopping, but I’m gonna go get some myself today.”
In the Manhattan studio of Fox & Friends, host Steve Doocy smiled at the suggestion, noting that a campaign in favor of Ivanka Trump’s merchandise had been launched on Twitter. But next to the perennially upbeat Doocy, cohosts Brian Kilmeade and Ainsley Earhardt looked like they were witnessing an execution. They must have been aware that Conway’s endorsement had crossed a line that no presidential administration had crossed before (though the Clintons’ treatment of the Lincoln Bedroom as an Airbnb for political donors came close). Kilmeade fiddled with a pen, glancing uneasily off-camera for help that was not coming.
Conway evidently saw no problem with the endorsement, because she repeated it a few moments later, after a gratuitous but unsurprising barb at Hillary Clinton’s “failed” appeal to the American voter. “It’s a wonderful line; I own some of it,” Conway said. “I’m just gonna give a free commercial here, go buy it today, you can buy it online.”
The commercial would not be free. Trump was now the president, and Conway was a top White House staffer whose $179,700 salary was paid by the American taxpayer. And while Trump had promised in his dark inaugural address that “buy American” would be one of his governing principles, nobody expected that principle to be so quickly reduced to “buy Trump.”
Maybe they should have expected just that. On January 11, nine days before the presidential inauguration, Trump held a press conference at Trump Tower in Manhattan to address ethics issues surrounding his administration. “I could actually run my business and run the government at the same time,” he boasted. His tax lawyer, Sheri A. Dillon, described a vague arrangement in which Trump would not manage his businesses, but also not fully disassociate from them. On a table next to Trump were stacks of papers, presumably relating to his finances. A reporter’s photograph showed that the papers were blank.
The press conference sent two signals. The first was that Trump did not think public service was worth sacrificing whatever gain he stood to make in private enterprise. The second was to the men and women he was then in the midst of recruiting for this administration. They could do the same, without fear of consequences, without worrying about how glaringly their desires to hold on to stock options or offshore accounts clashed with Trump’s promises. Trump was telling them it was okay.
Remarkably, Trump held to this when he spoke in early 2019. “It sometimes makes it very difficult,” he said, “because people can’t go to work here because the rules and regulations are very strict, afterwards.” This raised an obvious question: Why would he want to employ people whose main concern would be their post-White House source of income?
“The tone was set by the president when he decided not to divest,” said Walter M. Shaub Jr., who’d been appointed by Obama as the head of the Office of Government Ethics, which served as the referee of the executive branch. Shaub would remain in that post during the transition and for the first five and a half months of Trump’s tenure, growing increasingly dismayed by what he saw, finding few reasons for optimism. After leaving the White House, he described how the administration “came in unprepared for the rigors” of working within the federal government, “unaware of the fact that there are many requirements and a culture of accountability to the public.”
Shaub blamed a lot of the ethical lapses on White House Counsel Don McGahn, whom he charged with fostering an anything-goes atmosphere by interpreting rules and laws in ways that allowed Trump to skirt them. That may have been an overestimation of the power McGahn wielded in the West Wing, of the energy with which he approached his responsibilities. Quickly falling out of favor with Trump, he sequestered himself in his office, almost never coming into the Oval Office to offer Trump the counsel he so desperately needed.
If Washington was a swamp, McGahn was a creature from its deepest depths. He was a close ally of Mitch McConnell, while his wife Shannon was a Republican operative on Capitol Hill. An expert in the financing of political campaigns, he was appointed to the Federal Election Commission by George W. Bush near the end of his second term in the White House. He served on the FEC for the next five years, doing what he could to make it easier for wealthy donors and corporations to contribute to political campaigns. This would be the very culture Trump would run against, promising a campaign where dark money and corporate cash would have no say. But not especially concerned with incongruences, even flagrant ones, he hired McGahn—who by 2015 had moved to Jones Day—to be his chief campaign lawyer. Two years later, he followed Trump to the White House.
McGahn “had no business being a White House counsel,” said a lawyer who worked with McGahn in the West Wing. He was a “judge guy,” happy to push through judicial nominees preselected by the Federalist Society or McConnell. But he utterly abdicated the role of offering sound legal advice to the president and his staff.
Trump grew to despise McGahn, who had a law degree from fourth-tier Widener University, in marked contrast to peers who had been trained at Harvard or Yale Law. Trump blamed McGahn for the immensely sloppy executive order restricting travel from Muslim-majority countries, which the president thought should have received better legal vetting. He also blamed McGahn for Jeff Sessions recusing himself from the Russia investigation. In response, McGahn grew ever more distant.
Reince Priebus was another enabler. A week before the inauguration, he warned on national television that Shaub “ought to be careful” about criticizing Trump’s conflicts of interests. Priebus complained to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that Shaub was “becoming extremely political” and thus squandering his credibility.
“I’m not sure what this person at government ethics, what sort of standing he has anymore in giving these opinions,” Priebus said.
Trump liked having his way, but he also respected people like Bannon who would stand up to him, tell him to his face that he was full of shit. The diminutive Priebus lacked charisma or a blazing wit, not to mention courage. He was “the little guy from Kenosha,” as Bannon put it. Priebus’s attack on Shaub was revealing of a desperation to be liked by the chief executive, even at the expense of the presidential credibility he was charged with protecting. Lacking conviction, searching for approval, Priebus hastened his own irrelevance.
Kellyanne Conway’s “free commercial” from the Brady Briefing Room became an early test of how seriously the administration took the promises Trump made to the American people. It was also an opportunity to see if the immune cells of the body politic worked as they were supposed to, whether they recognized that something was amiss and reacted as they were supposed to.
Four days after Conway’s appearance on Fox & Friends, Shaub sent a letter to Deputy White House Counsel Stefan C. Passantino, in hopes that the capable young ethics lawyer would see things his way. Passantino was decent and bright, eager about toiling in the federal government’s employ. Upon his appointment to the Trump administration, he had earned unlikely praise from Howard Dean, the former head of the Democratic National Committee.
In his letter to Passantino, Shaub wrote that “there is strong reason to believe that Ms. Conway has violated the Standards of Conduct and that disciplinary action is warranted.” Shaub noted that the regulations, which were put in place by George W. Bush, contained a hypothetical example of such a violation: a White House official “appearing in a television commercial to promote a product.” The letter drily observed that “Ms. Conway’s actions track that example almost exactly.”
Passantino bristled at being lectured by Shaub. He wrote back that Conway “made the statement in question in a light, off-hand manner while attempting to stand up for a person she believed had been unfairly treated and did so without nefarious motive or intent to benefit personally.” In a footnote, Passantino interpreted federal rules to conclude that Shaub lacked oversight power over the executive office of the president, meaning that he could not sanction Conway over the endorsement even if a sanction were warranted.
Shaub was stunned. “The assertion is incorrect, and the letter cites no legal basis for it,” he wrote back to Passantino. To him, Passantino’s pushback was evidence that the Trump administration sought not only to disregard ethics rules, but to actively dismantle them. “They just wanted maximum latitude to do anything they wanted,” Shaub complained.
Shaub announced that he was leaving OGE on July 6, 2017 (the following summer, Passantino would follow him out the gates). Upon his departure, he deemed the administration he was leaving behind “pretty close to a laughingstock.” He watched in dismay as, two months later, Trump used his response to Hurricane Harvey’s devastation of Texas to promote a line of campaign hats.
Although he would hesitate to admit it, Trump modeled his political approach after that of Michael R. Bloomberg, the financial services entrepreneur who became mayor of New York in 2002, despite having never held elected office before. Bloomberg was one of the wealthiest people in the United States, which made him impervious to the sleazy machine politics that had governed the city since the days of Tammany Hall. Trump promised to do for the White House what Bloomberg had done for City Hall: stock it with serious, incorruptible people whom only he could attract to the public sector.
Trump did make one crucial move in the direction of good government. That was the signing of Executive Order 13770 on Saturday, January 28.
EO 13770 was titled “Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Appointees.” Political appointees to executive branch positions came from outside the civil service and were nominated to their posts by the president. Under the new order, all such appointees had to pledge that they would not lobby the agency to which they were appointed for five years after leaving it; they would abide by restrictions regarding contact with agency officials; would not lobby foreign governments after working for the administration; would not accept gifts from lobbyists; and would follow other regulations.
Raj S. Shah, the deputy White House press secretary, grandiosely called it “the most sweeping Executive Order in U.S. history to end the revolving door” between 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the lobbying firms of K Street, singling out the injunction against foreign lobbying in particular. In some ways, the order was not dissimilar from what the Obama administration had in place: in fact, some parts of the executive order appeared to have been taken wholesale from the Obama version, thus making for an ironic and telling ethical transgression of its own.
The news of EO 13770, and any debate over its relative merits, was utterly lost in the furor over Executive Order 13769, which had been signed that Friday night, banning travelers originating in seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. Hastily written and announced to the public like a minor-league pitching change, EO 13769 sent protesters to airports and into the streets. That made EO 13770 something between an afterthought and a joke.
The difference between making a rule and enforcing it was the difference between consulting a map and actually traveling the route. With his farcical transition press conference on January 11, Trump had indicated that Bannon’s populist revolution was not on his agenda. That project, however dubious, would have required selfless men, not men like Steve Mnuchin and Wilbur Ross.
According to Norman L. Eisen, who served as President Obama’s chief ethics lawyer, the executive order on ethics was sabotaged by the very people in the executive branch charged with implementing it. Eisen claimed that the widespread granting of ethics waivers by the administration—in effect, permits to violate the new rules—completely undermined the executive order. “They’ve made a mockery of the executive order and of ethics in general,” he said, claiming that the Trump administration had “virtually no standard” on how such waivers are granted.
Eisen found Trump officials’ contention that their executive order was virtually equivalent to the one that guided the Obama administration preposterous: “It’s an ethics calamity of a kind we have never seen in modern presidential history.” Only six months into the presidency, there were seventy-four lobbyists already working in the administration, forty-nine of them in agencies they once lobbied on behalf of clients.
There were plenty of men and women in the Trump administration who had no interest in doing free commercials for Ivanka Trump. Many of them had served under George W. Bush, and they understood the contours of federal employment: what they could do, what they could never get away with, what bad optics would do to their careers, which could involve working in Washington, with Washington, long after their terms in the Trump administration were through.
Trump’s cabinet members, for the most part, lacked this same awareness. Some were new to government. Some were new to Washington. Conway’s free commercial, Priebus telling Shaub to not meddle in presidential affairs, were signs that they could do as they pleased. The boss would not mind, and the public would never know.