In the shell-shocked aftermath of the election, President Obama, looking shaken, appeared in the White House Rose Garden to deliver public remarks intended to project a sense of calm—a sense, really, that the basic stability of the country remained intact. “The sun is up,” Obama said. “I know everybody had a long night. I did as well. I had a chance to talk to President-elect Trump last night—about 3:30 in the morning, I think it was—to congratulate him on winning the election.” The next day, when the two men appeared together in the Oval Office, it felt as if the world had slipped through the looking glass. Trump quickly named Bannon his chief White House strategist. Republicans controlled every branch of government. With Trump’s ability to defy every political norm, anything seemed possible. Who could argue otherwise after what had just transpired?
And yet within days of his inauguration, Trump’s White House was plunged into chaos and scandal from which it has not recovered—and may never. Bannon, the imaginative reconceiver of U.S. politics, hung streams of paper listing Trump’s “promises” from the walls of his West Wing office. His strategy, as always, was to launch furious attacks, this time to “shock the system” and rapidly reorient the federal government in a more nationalist direction. He called this, with what I took to be intentional irony, a “shock and awe approach” to asserting Trump’s power. But Trump’s flurry of activity quickly ran into problems. There was his executive order, sprung a week after his inauguration, banning immigrants from seven majority-Muslim countries, which set off nationwide protests and was blocked by the courts; his firing two weeks later of national security director Michael Flynn for contacts with the Russians; the collapse of his first major legislative initiative, a bill to repeal Obamacare; his firing of FBI director James Comey; and the swift descent of the West Wing into a viper’s nest of backstabbing and leaks.
This quick turn toward a crackup was hardly unforeseeable or even altogether surprising. But it contrasted sharply with the success of a candidate who had dominated his opponents, shaped news coverage, and shown himself to be all but impervious to forces that overwhelm other politicians.
Bannon, whose wild gambits in the campaign had invariably paid off, seemed to run out of magic tricks once Hillary Clinton was no longer a target. The government wasn’t as malleable to Trump and Bannon’s aggressions as the Republican Party and the cable news channels had been, and they found themselves consistently thwarted and undermined—by the courts, by right-wing hardliners in Congress, by their own inexperience and Trump’s errant tweets, and by the bureaucracy they were now overseeing. The crises these failures precipitated in the White House cost Bannon much of his influence and soon threatened Trump’s presidency.
While it’s still early in his term, the possibilities that Trump’s most ardent supporters once imagined for his presidency already seem to be mostly foreclosed. I think there are three main reasons why Trump’s administration has so quickly fallen into disorder and confusion.
—
Trump thought being president was about asserting dominance. Just after he’d locked up the GOP nomination, Trump said something to me that crystallized his view of politics and explains, to my mind, much of his subsequent difficulties. “I deal with people that are very extraordinarily talented people,” he told me. “I deal with Steve Wynn. I deal with Carl Icahn. I deal with killers that blow these [politicians] away. It’s not even the same category. This”—he meant politics—“is a category that’s like nineteen levels lower. You understand what I’m saying? Brilliant killers.”
Trump was equating politics with business and the presidency with the job of being a big-shot CEO, a “killer.” He filled the upper ranks of his administration with people of a similar mindset: Gary Cohn, Wilbur Ross, Steve Bannon—aggressive, domineering men accustomed to getting their way by dint of their position. None had government experience (nor did many others in the West Wing), so none anticipated the problems this approach to governing would cause. Trump’s self-conception as the all-powerful Apprentice boss blinded him to a fundamental truth of the modern presidency: that the president needs Congress more than Congress needs the president. Trump’s domineering instinct served him poorly, since most members of Congress are secure in their jobs and accountable mainly to their own constituents. And it backfired disastrously when Trump fired Comey after he refused to submit to a pledge of loyalty to the big boss.
—
Trump ran against the Republican Party, Wall Street, and Paul Ryan, but then took up their agenda. Populists often struggle to govern. But Trump scarcely attempted to lead the populist revolution he promised. In May, he’d told me he would transform the GOP into a “workers’ party.” But while he kept voicing populist shibboleths, the legislative agenda he took up was the standard conservative fare pushed by Paul Ryan. During the GOP primary, Trump had shrewdly sensed its weak point: Ryan’s desire to finance tax cuts for the rich by cutting programs such as Social Security and Medicaid harmed the party’s white, blue-collar base. Trump told me he’d made this point to Ryan directly: “I said, ‘There’s no way a Republican is going to beat a Democrat when the Republican is saying, “We’re going to cut your Social Security” and the Democrat is saying, “We’re going to keep it and give you more.”’”
Yet Trump’s first legislative push was for Ryan’s bill repealing the Affordable Care Act, which would eliminate health insurance coverage for twenty-four million people, cutting Medicaid, which benefits Trump’s working-class voters, to pay for high-end tax cuts. Not only was the bill deeply unpopular—a Quinnipiac poll in March found that only 17 percent of Americans supported it—but it galvanized grassroots Democratic opposition to Trump. Bannon went along because he thought Ryan had become a convert to nationalism, in the belief that it could give the GOP an electoral hammerlock on the upper Midwest. Bannon also thought Ryan’s tax plan, funded by a tax on imports, was “the most nationalist feasible plan” and that his former enemy could deliver on it.
The great fear among Democratic leaders was that Trump would be true to his word and lead a populist rebellion that would cripple their party. “I know what you’re doing, and I’m not going to let it happen,” Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic leader, told Bannon in the early days of the administration. Schumer feared that Trump would begin by pursuing a $1 trillion infrastructure bill—a massive project of roads and bridges that would neatly align with Trump’s “builder” image, produce tangible benefits, win over union voters Democrats rely on, and stand as a testament to what “America first nationalism” could mean. As it turned out, Schumer needn’t have worried.
—
Trump doesn’t believe in nationalism or any other political philosophy—he’s fundamentally a creature of his own ego. Over the years, Trump repeated certain populist themes: the United States is being ripped off in trade deals by foreign competitors; elites and politicians are stupid crooks. These were expressions of an attitude—a marketing campaign—rather than commitments to a set of policies. When Trump sensed nationalism was no longer generating a positive response for him, he abandoned it, announcing in April, “I’m a nationalist and a globalist,” as if the two weren’t opposed. At heart, Trump is an opportunist driven by a desire for public acclaim, rather than a politician with any fixed principles.
An early indicator was his decision to fill his administration with veterans of Goldman Sachs. Trump was gratified that they wanted to work for him, and he was willing to heed their counsel despite vilifying Goldman as a candidate. This opened up a rift that didn’t exist in his campaign between “nationalists” like Bannon and “globalists” like Cohn, a top Goldman executive who became head of the National Economic Council.
Bannon’s fall from his exalted status as Trump’s top adviser wasn’t the result of a policy dispute, but the product of Trump’s annoyance that Bannon’s profile had come to rival his own. Trump grew incensed at the popular notion that Bannon was the one really running the show—that he was, as an infamous Time cover put it, “The Great Manipulator.” Soon afterward, Bannon was unceremoniously demoted, though he kept his job and clawed back to a position of influence. “I like Steve, but you have to remember, he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump told the New York Post. “I’m my own strategist.”
For a certain segment of people around the world, the Trump brand holds powerful appeal. It was powerful enough to drive the greatest upset in American political history. Before that, it induced a succession of business partners in places as far flung as Miami and Moscow, Dubai and Azerbaijan, to team up with Donald Trump. The lure is always the same: that forming a partnership will be a mutually profitable arrangement. No one can sell that idea like Trump. More often than not, however, those partners seem to end up disappointed.
As Trump’s presidency drifts and the scandals around him mount, the idea that he will follow through on the robust nationalist agenda he campaigned on seems less and less likely, and would be difficult to pull off even if he was inclined to try. Still, every president changes the contours of American politics, and Trump will, too. It may not be nearly as aggressively as Bannon envisioned when the two joined forces, or even necessarily in the direction he wanted, but it is also true that after Trump Republicans will have a harder time pursuing free trade and open immigration. Perhaps even more significant, the effects of Jeff Sessions’s elevation to attorney general will reverberate for years in a way that populist-nationalists will approve of.
But in the end, it’s hard to imagine that Bannon and the legions he spoke for will wind up as anything other than the latest partners disappointed when their deal with Trump turns sour.
—June 5, 2017