A half-dozen White House staffers—most of them from the National Security Council—and a handful of think-tank academics crowded around a table in the Ward Room in the basement of the West Wing. This private dining room was right next door to the larger White House Mess and had become a favorite meeting place for senior aides who wanted a secure spot to chat, but didn’t want to reserve the larger Roosevelt Room upstairs or the more formal Situation Room across the hall. There were glasses of water sitting on top of an off-white tablecloth. Gold-framed pictures of large ships on the walls were an ever-present reminder that the Navy handled all of the food service in the West Wing.
The names of these aides would not be familiar to the public, but they were the deputy assistants and special assistants to the President who did a lot of the heavy lifting for their more well-known bosses. The one exception was Steve Bannon, who had positioned himself at the head of the table.
Interactions with Bannon often had an almost cinematic quality to them, as if he were playing out a part for a camera in the corner capturing his every utterance and movement. The Ward Room’s tight quarters and dark-stained wood paneling accentuated that feeling. This was the proverbial smoke-filled back room where the world’s problems are hashed out, and the type of place that often left me feeling self-conscious, out of place, maybe even in over my head.
Bannon had asked me to attend the meeting of this group, which he had put together to discuss countering the rise of China, which Bannon viewed as the nation’s most pressing geopolitical threat, perhaps even an existential one. When I asked him what I would bring to such a discussion, he sold it to me as only he could, “Somebody’s gotta figure out how we’re going to talk about this s—. Sit there, shut the f— up, soak it in, and then come up with a way to sell it.”
Fair enough.
I didn’t have the guts at the time to ask the logical follow-up questions, which were things like, “Is the National Security Advisor aware of this meeting?” General H. R. McMaster most certainly was not. Nor, I could only assume, were the folks at State, or CIA or DoD, or a half-dozen other acronymed agencies that had staffers devoting their entire lives to the issue. Bannon was running his own op here, and who was I to question the White House Chief Strategist? General Kelly’s arrival clearly wasn’t going to change his MO.
Like most Bannon meetings, it was a freewheeling affair, filled with bold assertions, multiple tangents, and a generous sprinkling of expletives. Most of it was a blur.
“You’ve got to respect these SOBs,” he said of the Chinese at one point. “They’re out for themselves and they don’t give a f— what anyone thinks. They’re playing hardball. They’re lying, cheating, and stealing.” He loathed them, despised them for daring to challenge the United States for global supremacy. But there was also something in him that had a deep appreciation for how they went about their business.
“They’ve got spies in our universities,” he continued. “They own our think tanks, present company excluded, I hope. They’re spending more on infrastructure in a year than we will in a decade. It’s a beautiful thing to behold, man. Xi’s a motherf—ing nationalist and he’s still going to be President after half this room is dead. They’re gonna kill us, man. They’re just gonna kill us.”
I sat there blinking, shoveling spoonfuls of vanilla ice cream from the Mess into my mouth, as he envisioned our inevitable doom.
The public perception, often cultivated by Bannon himself, was that he was an evil mastermind of the Trump White House—a maniacal courtier from the Renaissance period, lifted off the pages of Machiavelli’s The Prince and dropped into the modern world’s most powerful court. As with most legends, this one took a thread of truth and wove it into a larger tapestry that seamlessly mixed fact and fiction.
Looking back, this random meeting on China—off the books, somewhat cloak-and-dagger, with no clear purpose and no apparent plan to execute on anything discussed—was a microcosm of Bannon’s tenure in the White House. It was fueled by visions of grandeur; he alone was leading a tiny band of misfits to take on a rising communist power that had bested the elite minds of multiple past administrations. And somehow he would win.
In the Great Man Theory of history, the course of human events is largely determined by the impact of highly influential individuals who, by sheer force of will, personality, or talent, reshape the world in their image. There’s an argument to be made that Trump is such a man, whether people like it or not. But Bannon seemed to view himself as the true Great Man of the partnership, on whose fulcrum the course of history pivoted.
Bannon’s office on the main floor of the West Wing was ground zero for a revolution that other parts of the building probably weren’t even aware was going on. Even the revolutionaries he enlisted, myself included on occasion, didn’t quite understand.
As reporters started using various terms to describe what Bannon believed, such as nationalist, populist, and alt-right, he had his deputy Andy Surabian—my old campaign war room colleague—put together a packet that included definitions and background research on how accurate those terms were.
“I’m an economic nationalist,” he said after reviewing the documents. “Love it.”
He advocated forcefully for policies that advanced his views, especially on immigration, trade, and infrastructure, and he wasn’t afraid to lose internal debates. Many operatives spent most of their time holding their finger up in the air trying to figure out which way the political winds were blowing. They just want to be on the “winning” side in the end. Not Bannon. He’d go down fighting for what he believed, which I’d say is a respectable quality in any man. And his office was prepared for war—with charts and maps and screens everywhere, as the great general surveyed battlefield conditions all over the world.
The centerpiece of the office was the “promises made, promises kept” list, tracking every Trump campaign promise, which ones he’d already delivered on, and which ones were works in progress. On one of his walls hung two giant flat-screen TVs, each displaying four panels tuned to eight different news channels: Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, CNN International, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, and C-SPAN. He stood in front of the TVs almost all day, absorbing all of it and none of it, pacing back and forth, pecking out a nonstop stream of texts and emails as ideas popped into his head. Opposite the TVs was a standing desk—really more of a podium—where he would scribble notes, or read books on grand strategy or history, along with the news of the day. There were a handful of wooden chairs positioned around the perimeter of the room. This was where I and other aides would sit as Bannon berated us for not pushing back forcefully enough on negative stories, or when he strategized out loud on how to take back a congressional seat or dissected the ulterior motives of foreign leaders. Or sometimes all three.
To be sure, he had his successes. Perhaps most memorably, Bannon won a fight between the “nationalists” and the “globalists” over whether Trump should withdraw the United States from the so-called Paris Accord, a multination agreement to address climate change.
With Trump set to pull out, a small group of senior aides, led by Ivanka, launched a gambit to convince him to change his mind. Knowing the President’s views could occasionally be influenced by titans of industry, just about the only people whose opinions he actually respected, they urged business leaders to call Trump directly and make the case for staying in the deal. At one point it looked like the President might actually change his mind.
Bannon, sensing the tide turning against him, called Surabian and told him he had an important task that needed his immediate attention. “Surabian, drop everything you’re doing right now,” he demanded. It was the Saturday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend, but that didn’t matter. “I need you to find every time that Trump ever promised to pull out of the Paris deal. Put it all in a document and send it to me ASAP. Okay? Go.” He hung up without waiting for a response.
Surabian grabbed his laptop and spent the next four hours scouring the internet for everything Trump had ever said about the Paris Accord. We would later laugh that those few hours of work may have changed the course of history. The following week, Bannon walked into the Oval Office and plopped a stack of papers down on the Resolute desk. The President pulled it toward him and flipped through page after page of his public comments eviscerating the Paris deal and promising to pull out.
Checkmate.
Three days later he delivered on his promise in a Rose Garden speech in which he declared, “I was elected by voters of Pittsburgh, not Paris.” When Bannon was focused and under control, this was his true value to the Trump presidency: being an ever-present reminder of the promises and agenda that propelled Donald Trump into the Oval Office to begin with. Unfortunately, neither focus nor control was Steve’s strong suit.
A disproportionate amount of General Bannon’s war-fighting capability was focused not against Trump’s political opposition, or the media, or China, or any of his other external enemies. It was instead used to prosecute his fruitless war with Jared and Ivanka—or Javanka, as he called them. The core principle of Trump World, as even outside observers could glean after five minutes, was never pit yourself against the family. Anyone with “Strategist” in their job title should have seen how foolish this was. Even Bannon’s perceived allies, like Stephen Miller, recognized it was counterproductive. Bannon seemed to think of Miller as a sort of right-wing protégé. But if surviving—much less thriving—was the goal, Miller proved himself to be a more skilled strategist than his mentor. He was an ideological clone of Bannon—a hard-liner on immigration and trade who believed we should always maintain a confrontational posture with the press. But contrary to public perception—and I’m pretty sure contrary to Bannon’s own perception—Miller was not Bannon’s ally against the so-called globalists inside the White House, Kushner in particular.
In our early days in the White House, Miller had made his way over to the ground floor of the residence to witness one of our first-ever recording sessions for the President’s weekly address to the nation. On the walk back to the West Wing, Miller and the President walked ahead of me. Miller glanced back over his shoulder, as if to see who might be listening, but I’m not sure if he noticed I was behind him, rather than a Secret Service agent. Of course, the person who should have been most worried about his back was Steve Bannon, as Miller plunged in the knife and, to borrow from Richard Nixon, twisted it with relish.
“Your polling numbers are actually very strong considering Steve won’t stop leaking to the press and trying to undermine Jared,” Miller told the President as we walked up the West Colonnade.
“So you think that’s really hurting me, huh?” the President asked.
“It’s getting nonstop coverage. If Steve wasn’t doing that, I bet you’d be ten points higher,” Miller replied.
I knew Miller and Kushner had a good relationship, which they had forged on the campaign. I just wouldn’t have guessed he’d be an active combatant against Steve, with whom he’d enjoyed a close alliance for years. But maybe he just knew that any fight against the family wouldn’t end well, and he wanted to be on the winning team. There’s a reason Miller outlasted so many others in the West Wing.
By April 2017, only four months into the administration, a shockingly short amount of time, the Chief Strategist of the White House had no clear strategy for his own survival. The President had grown frustrated with the incessant infighting and the media’s Bannon-fueled portrayal of Steve as some kind of Svengali, constantly bending the President to his will.
Responding to reports that Steve had been using the media—Breitbart News in particular—to go after Kushner and the rest of his West Wing enemies, the President said, “Steve is a good guy, but I told them to straighten it out or I will.”
From that point forward it felt like his days were numbered. To me. To the President. To every single person in the West Wing. To everyone, it seemed, but Steve Bannon. Once Trump replaced Priebus with Kelly and gave him the authority to put the entire staff under his thumb, I figured Bannon was finished. Kelly was bent on installing a more defined staff hierarchy, with himself at the top, and it was hard to imagine Bannon subordinating himself to another staffer, even a four-star Marine general. After all, he was still organizing off-the-books meetings on China and who knows what else. It was only a matter of time before it came to a head.
“How much do you think that bird’s worth?”
The forty-person White House communications team was huddled together in the Roosevelt Room late in the afternoon, and I was listening to a small group of junior aides debate how much the golden eagle statue in the corner might cost. The sculptures—there were actually two of them, one on each side of a large cabinet that hid a giant flat-screen TV behind its antique doors—stood about two feet tall. They had been added to the decor as part of the latest round of renovations. The eagles were perched atop a rock with their wings extended high above their heads, like they were forever stuck on the first letter of the “YMCA” dance.
“Gotta be, like, twenty thousand dollars, or something like that,” one of the young aides estimated.
“I’m pretty sure it’s bronze, not gold,” argued another. “Probably knock it down some. I’d guess ten thousand.”
“What’s up with certain parts looking darker than others, though?” a third chimed in.
“It’s called patina, dude,” the second one shot back incredulously.
I chuckled to myself as they walked across the room together to get a closer look. I already knew what they were about to find out: the eagles were actually made of wood. The statues were intricately carved and beautifully painted. But they weren’t quite what my colleagues thought they were going to be.
That isn’t a perfect metaphor for the experience of working in the White House, but it’s a serviceable one nonetheless. I could vividly recall what it felt like to stand on Pennsylvania Avenue and wonder what must be happening behind those white walls and curtained windows. It had now been six months since I learned the answer to that question. And much like the experience of getting a close-up look at the bird statues in the Roosevelt Room, it was somehow nothing like I thought it’d be—more wooden than gold—but still beautiful and interesting, nonetheless.
When friends or acquaintances would ask what it was like, I had a standard, three-phrase response: Always interesting. Sometimes amazing. Usually exasperating. The past few weeks had fallen firmly into the exasperating category. And now here I was, back in the Roosevelt Room, where just days before the Mooch had reigned supreme. The entire comms and press staff had been called in for an all-hands staff meeting, but we hadn’t yet been told why.
With that familiar click, whoosh, the answer immediately became clear.
Everyone’s eyes darted toward the door just as General Kelly marched in. He had a certain presence about him. He was physically imposing, probably about six foot two and weighing around 230 pounds. His New England accent hit my Southern ears like a pick breaking through a block of ice, but his tone wasn’t abrasive. He didn’t have to yell. The four stars he used to wear on his shoulder weren’t there, but the respect they demanded still remained.
The entire room stood up, like privates first class reporting for duty. This already marked a dramatic departure from Priebus’s time in the White House. He would occasionally float in and out of our meetings without most staffers lifting their heads out of their phones, much less their entire bodies out of their seats.
Kelly, whom aides had already taken to calling “The Chief,” another respectful nod that Priebus never received, motioned subtly for everyone to sit down. He didn’t make small talk. “How many of you here have prior government experience?” he asked straightaway. Out of the forty people in the room, only one or two hands shot up.
For reasons that were unclear, he cut his eyes at one of his personal aides, who had come into the room with him. “Let me give you some advice, okay? You’re going to be dealing with the press. Tell the truth. That’s important. I know what you all do. You know, other generals would get mad at me sometimes because I got such good press. But that’s because I knew how to talk to the press. I knew how to work with them, and they didn’t.” The words flew out of his mouth like perfectly fired salvos from a cannon. As he continued to speak, I thought to myself, This is a man who’s used to commanding people.
“I want you to know I understand how valuable what you do is,” he said, wrapping up his brief remarks. “And so does the President.”
After he’d left, several press aides joked that the new Chief had already exposed himself as a leaker by talking about what great press he used to get. The only people who attract positive stories in this town, they noted, are the ones who reporters can’t take shots at because they’re scared to lose them as a source. I’m not sure if that’s true, exactly, but it was certainly the way most senior aides operated in the Trump White House. To me, it was more interesting that he had zeroed in on whether we had prior government experience. This was a relevant question, of course. There was certainly something to be said for institutional knowledge. But as someone who had come out of the private sector, it worried me that he might be drawn to the couple of aides with prior experience in government, whom I coincidentally—or perhaps not—viewed as some of the least capable staffers on the team. At this point there was no way to know. In any event, those comments proved to be far less concerning than what I heard him say next.
Shortly after that, Kelly assembled all of the staff working in the EEOB to deliver his introductory remarks. He stood at a podium at the intersection of two large hallways, black-and-white-checkered floors stretching the length of a city block. Several hundred staffers crowded around him. Some of us from the West Wing walked across the driveway as well, curious to hear what he would say.
“Nice to meet you, I’m from Boston,” he said right off the bat. I smirked and nodded my head. We were from dramatically different places, but I was proud of where I came from, too. I felt like it said something about who I was. Kelly clearly felt the same way about his blue-collar roots. I liked that about him right away.
But then things got a little weird.
The primary theme of his speech was that he planned to approach his new job by serving the country, then the President, in that order, and that we should do the same. At first blush, this didn’t seem like a particularly profound statement, much less a controversial one. But the more he spoke, the more he seemed to really be hammering on this construct: country, then President, country, then President. And the more I let it soak in, the more I thought that what Kelly was saying—country first, POTUS second—was, at best, a bit curious, and at worst, potentially hostile.
We believed that the way we served our country was by serving the President. Kelly, on the other hand, seemed to be intimating that those two goals might be at odds, perhaps even mutually exclusive at times. And you know what? Maybe they would be. But if they ever were, the honorable response would be to resign. Maybe we were being paranoid after being in the Trump bunker for so long, but Kelly seemed to be saying that, in such a scenario, it might be necessary to subvert the President’s wishes in service of some amorphous higher calling.
Most of us had met his arrival with optimism after enduring six months of staff upheaval. Now I was watching some of the President’s most ardent supporters shuffling back to their offices, hanging their heads in concern.
“What a letdown,” one of them said. “He comes across like he doesn’t even like the President, much less want to work for him.”
I am still not certain what motivated Kelly to use his first interaction with the majority of the White House staff to say what he did. We might have completely misread him. Indeed, he would go on to make other bizarre comments in the press—and behind the scenes—that suggested he might just be a poor communicator at times. But right off the bat his remarks hurt his standing among loyal aides who were hoping he could unify the fractious staff behind a singular mission: advancing the President’s agenda.
That was about to be more important than ever. After the failure on health care, a push to overhaul the tax code—a major component of Trump’s economic agenda—was now looming. But before Kelly could even begin to approach that challenge, the battle-hardened Marine was going to get a taste of a different type of warfare.
During Kelly’s first week on the job, the senior members of the President’s trade and economic teams clustered together in the Outer Oval, waiting to go in for their first presidential-level policy meeting of Kelly’s tenure. At the time trade issues were in my comms portfolio, so I was waiting as well. This was my first glimpse at Kelly in action, and Kelly’s first glimpse at a White House paralyzed by inaction—at least when it came to a coherent position on trade.
Trade was one of the White House’s most contentious issues. The ideological diversity among the President’s senior economic aides swung wildly, from avid free traders to hard-core protectionists. This made for some of the most interesting debates, but also some pretty hard feelings.
On the protectionist—or economic nationalist—side of the debate were Bannon, Stephen Miller, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and Director of the National Trade Council Peter Navarro. Lighthizer, pushing seventy years old, had been Deputy U.S. Trade Representative—the first to ever hold that title—under President Ronald Reagan. He was a fierce advocate for bilateral trade deals, in which two countries would hash out an agreement directly, rather than multilateral deals that involved numerous countries. Trump often denounced multilateral agreements, saying they were “bad deals” that eroded U.S. sovereignty and often put American workers and companies at a disadvantage. That was music to Lighthizer’s ears.
Navarro, in his late sixties, was a former college professor who had joined the campaign as an economic adviser after Jared Kushner stumbled across one of his books, Death by China, online. Needless to say, he was a China hawk, but really I’m not sure there was a single country on earth on which Navarro didn’t want to slap tariffs. He was a prickly character, probably the least diplomatic senior aide in the White House. But he was a true believer in both his economic beliefs and in the President. And much to the chagrin of his internal enemies—of whom there were many—Trump viewed him as a loyalist who should be empowered.
Together, the nationalists were a formidable group, mainly because they had one really big thing going for them: Trump agreed with them. Trade was one of the few issues on which the President walked in the door with a fully formed opinion, and he’d been consistent on it for decades.
The free traders were led by Gary Cohn, Director of the National Economic Council. Cohn was a Wall Street tycoon worth about a half-billion dollars, giving him the credentials needed to be one of the few people in the building Trump actually respected as a peer. He had struggled his way through school as a middle-class kid with dyslexia, at a time when educators were still figuring out how to best serve such students. He went on, through sheer tenacity, to graduate from American University, and got a job selling aluminum siding for U.S. Steel. Then, after a chance meeting with a Wall Street executive in a taxicab, he landed a job as a runner on the trading floor. He caught the attention of Goldman Sachs in 1990 and jumped at the opportunity to work for the investment juggernaut. Twenty-six years later he was named the firm’s president, making him one of the most powerful executives in the finance world. In his mid-fifties, Gary was bald-headed and physically imposing, standing about six foot three and weighing around 220 pounds. He had a well-earned reputation for being “one tough cookie,” as the President put it. The best-known Cohn anecdote from his time at Goldman Sachs was that “he would sometimes hike up one leg, plant his foot on a trader’s desk, his thigh close to the employee’s face, and ask how markets were doing.”
In a White House full of both real and imagined enemies, Bannon had Cohn right at the top of his list. He dubbed Cohn “Globalist Gary” and derided him as the leader of the “Wall Street Wing” of the administration. Together with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and a handful of other advisers with business backgrounds, they were often able to slow down the nationalists’ (i.e., the President’s) agenda, even if they couldn’t stop it altogether. Their go-to argument against tariffs or withdrawing from multilateral deals was that doing so might blunt the stock market boom. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had hit numerous record highs since Trump took office, a fact the President loved to tout.
Often siding with the free traders in these debates—albeit somewhat more quietly—was Rob Porter, the Staff Secretary. At forty years old, Porter’s pedigree was that of a pre-Trump-era White House aide. Harvard undergrad. Rhodes Scholar. Oxford master’s degree. Harvard Law. He had served as Senator Orrin Hatch’s Chief of Staff prior to joining the administration. The Staff Secretary title may give the impression that he served in some type of clerical role, but every single piece of paper going to the President had to first flow through the Staff Secretary’s office. That’s a powerful job in any administration, but his constant interaction with Trump made him even more influential than usual. On top of that, General Kelly had made it clear from his first day on the job that Porter was being given additional power that he never had under Priebus. He would totally control the paper flow to POTUS—no more sticking Breitbart articles in his evening briefing book to get him riled up—and he would also coordinate internal policy debates.
By August 2017, Bannon’s star was clearly fading. Even he could see that, though he tried to mask it, like an aging movie star hoping for one more chance to find a hit. Kelly was establishing himself as the alpha dog, and both Cohn and Porter were ascendant. But as we all waited patiently in the Outer Oval, it quickly became clear that Kelly’s arrival had not softened the tension between the warring factions.
Porter walked over behind the desk of Madeleine Westerhout, the President’s executive assistant, and picked up a large foam-core board showcasing a complicated chart. I don’t know much about making charts, but I do know that the point of them is to present complicated data in a simple way. And yet there was so much information packed onto this poster-sized chart that it should have been accompanied by a copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.
“What is this?” Porter asked in disgust.
“Don’t worry about it, Rob,” snapped Navarro. “It’s for the President. He’ll want to see it.”
Porter rolled his eyes.
“Okay, but all of the paper that goes to the President—including charts like this—has to go through the Staff Secretary’s office for vetting,” he said. “That’s the process, Peter, and you know it. That’s what the Chief wants. No one’s even seen this or had a chance to fact-check it, and you’re just going to take it in to the President.”
Navarro snatched the chart out of Porter’s hands and walked off a few yards, over by the closed Oval Office door. Propping up the chart against the wall, he folded his arms and kept his back turned to the rest of the group. “You guys just don’t want him to see the whole story,” he said under his breath. “You want him to hear your facts, not the facts.” Judging by the look in Navarro’s eyes, this chart must be a killer. When the moment came, it would shut up everyone else in the room.
A TV mounted on the wall was tuned to Fox News, and I pretended to be interested in what was on the screen to avoid making eye contact with the two aides who clearly hated each other’s guts. Cohn shook his head and chuckled quietly. Bannon’s head was buried in his phone, as usual. Was he listening? No one was ever quite sure.
Moments later the door swung open and the Chief invited the group to come in.
“We’re on the clock, gentlemen,” Kelly snapped. “We’ve got twenty minutes blocked off for this.”
Now that’s new, I thought to myself. Up until that point the schedule had been kind of a suggestion, more of a loose outline than something to which everyone paid close attention. Maybe this is how it’s supposed to work.
Lighthizer, Navarro, Miller, and Cohn sat down in the wooden chairs in front of the Resolute desk, with Bannon standing right behind them. Porter stood off to the left, and I sat down on one of the couches. Kelly, who wouldn’t move from his position standing at Trump’s left hand the entire meeting, was clearly in control. The President seemed to enjoy this—his handpicked general running the show, shaping things up. I wondered how long that would last.
The topic of discussion was potential actions the administration could take to crack down on Chinese theft of American intellectual property and the forced transfer of our companies’ technology. Both issues were posing serious problems for American enterprises, and in some cases jeopardizing U.S. national security. Kelly expected everyone to stick to the topic.
Trump set the tone right away. “It’s the geniuses again,” he said mockingly, leaning back in his chair and looking up at Kelly. “These same geniuses come in here every week, with the same problems, and I tell them the same thing: ‘Let’s do some tariffs, bring me some tariffs.’ But here we are again and I bet nothing has happened.”
Kelly’s deadpan expression never changed.
“So go ahead,” the President said, looking back at the group. “Let’s hear it.”
Lighthizer laid out various options for how to deal with the China problem, but Trump was clearly right, tariffs were not currently on the table. He looked up at General Kelly as if to say, I told you so.
With a brief lull in the conversation, Navarro picked up his precious giant chart and presented it to the President with great pride. Trumpets may have sounded in Navarro’s head. Trump held it out in front of himself, cocking his head to the side as he tried to understand what he was looking at. He was a visual learner, so usually charts and graphs were a smart way to present information to him. Except this one. A few seconds later, Trump dropped it back on top of the desk and looked back to Navarro in confusion.
“I have no idea what I’m even looking at here,” he said. “No one on earth could make sense of this thing. What is this, Peter? C’mon, Peter, what is this? Makes no sense.”
Navarro looked frustrated and started to explain, but it was pointless; the President had already moved on. Porter was now standing with his arms crossed, rubbing his forehead with his left hand, and also staring at Kelly with his own I told you so look.
Sensing an opening from this blunder, Cohn took the opportunity to make his own case for a path that did not include tariffs, which he believed could start a “trade war” that would slow growth at a time when the economy was revving up. Trump raised his eyebrows and took a sip of Diet Coke. He seemed receptive to Cohn’s arguments, which prompted Bannon to jump in.
“The Trump program is about working people,” he snapped. “Some people here want to derail the Trump program. They’ve got their reasons, I suppose.” This of course was classic Bannon. With a whiff of conspiracy, he yet again framed himself as the defender of the Trump agenda and others as nefariously trying to stop its implementation. It drove his adversaries nuts, mainly because it was effective.
Kelly, who I assumed didn’t know much about trade policy, was still standing there quietly grasping a folder in his hands. But I could see the frustration growing on his face. Is this how this always plays out? he seemed to be wondering.
I almost wanted to catch his attention and silently nod my head. Yes, General, this is about par for the course.
“I don’t understand why this is so difficult,” the President continued. “I want tariffs—tariffs! Can anyone in this room of geniuses bring me some tariffs?”
Glancing from person to person, the President finally locked eyes with Cohn, sending him into a mini tirade. “Oh, now of course I know there are some globalists in the room!” Trump said, elongating the “o” in “glooobalists.” “They don’t want to do it, but they didn’t get elected. This is what I ran on. This is what we’re going to do.”
Bannon, who was pacing behind the rest of the debating aides, gleefully turned away, almost as if not to gloat too openly. This moment was another reminder to me of the ideological bond Trump and Bannon shared. On the other hand, the fact that Cohn & Co. had largely held off Trump’s nationalist instincts for the first seven months of his presidency was impressive in its own right. For the next few minutes, the aides waged a rhetorical war in the Oval Office, with Bannon, Navarro, and Lighthizer advocating for tariffs and Cohn—and to a lesser extent Porter—predicting economic doom if the administration pursued such “protectionist” policies.
Bannon and Navarro were relentless, urging the President to economically crush America’s enemies under the weight of punitive tariffs. Bannon stood up and sat down, paced, then paused to punctuate a point, lowered then raised his voice to draw in his audience before hammering home an argument. Navarro angrily growled that “some other people in the room” were refusing to execute the President’s orders, although it was still unclear to me what specific actions were being proposed.
Cohn, who had survived his fair share of boardroom squabbles as president of Goldman Sachs, was equally relentless in laying out the impact that retaliatory tariffs would have on American workers and consumers, particularly in the Middle American states that had put him in office. He tended to stay seated in his chair in front of the Resolute desk to Trump’s left, presenting himself as a measured check on Bannon and Navarro’s nationalist fervor.
General Kelly tried to referee the discussion, with limited success, and at some point it became clear that this wasn’t a policy debate that could end with the President making a decision. Instead it was—once again—a free-for-all argument between people who couldn’t stand one another. It was basically a Twitter fight in real life—in the Oval Office, in front of the President of the United States. The President interjected one last time.
“John, this is your first time here for this,” he said to Kelly, “so I want you to understand my position. I want tariffs. Someone better bring me some d— tariffs.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. President,” the Chief said. “We’re going to break up this meeting for now and come back when we have some clearer options for you.” Kelly motioned for the group to head for the exit, another new technique after six months of everyone hanging around and chatting with the President at the end of meetings for seemingly as long as they wanted.
Porter, trying to assert himself in front of the new boss, had an idea.
“Guys, let’s convene in the Roosevelt Room for a few minutes for a debrief,” he said. Bannon didn’t seem interested in participating, and didn’t. Lighthizer stayed behind to talk to Kelly. The rest of the group silently walked across the hall into the conference room.
With everyone inside, Cohn shut the door and unleashed all of the frustrations he had coolly masked while in front of the President.
“You’re a liar, Peter!” he roared.
Oh, boy, I thought, Peter’s gonna have to take this all by himself in Bannon’s absence.
“You can’t keep going in there and telling the President lies. Nothing you said in there was true,” Cohn raged. “This isn’t college anymore,” he continued, a nod to Navarro’s lengthy tenure as a college professor. “This isn’t theoretical. You’re going to tank the global economy and it’s all going to be based on lies.”
Cohn was right, of course. Navarro should not have plopped a Rube Goldberg–esque chart in front of the President without anyone having a chance to see it. And some of the facts he threw out did seem a bit dicey.
Navarro, a much more diminutive physical presence than Cohn, nonetheless did not back down.
“I’m a liar?” he shot back. “You guys are the ones who walk out of the Oval all the time and refuse to do what the President asks. I know exactly what you all do: You go back to your offices and you come up with a way to slow everything down. You hatch all these reasons to slow-walk everything. That’s why he’s so mad in there, because you all refuse to do what the President asks you to do—he’s the President of the United States!”
Navarro was right on this point. When it came to trade actions, everyone knew that was exactly what they did.
The back-and-forth continued along those same lines for several minutes, leaving Porter standing there in silence, totally vexed. So much for this great idea.
In the end, the entire group dispersed to their various corners of the White House complex—Cohn upstairs to the NEC Director’s wood-paneled office, Porter downstairs to the Staff Secretary’s low-ceilinged suite, and Navarro across the street to his palatial digs in the EEOB.
I walked across the hall to my desk, at the time in the corner office that had recently been vacated by Scaramucci, looked out the window onto the White House North Lawn, and took a deep breath. Well, that was something. This was the Wild West Wing John Kelly was brought in to tame. I silently wished him luck. But it wasn’t going to be easy. Even Wyatt Earp had to first survive the gunfight at the O.K. Corral before he could bring Tombstone to heel.
A couple of weeks after the trade meeting blow-up, a tiny desk clock ticked the seconds away in a sprawling office on the main floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. In contrast to the cramped confines of the West Wing, the EEOB, across the road, offered spacious accommodations. The furniture was aging and mismatched, and didn’t look like it had ever been particularly nice. But the high ceilings and large windows made even the smaller offices feel open and airy. The overhead lights were turned off, as I sat patiently on an uncomfortable couch, listening to the barely audible clock marking each second. But I could see dust particles moving slowly through the air, thanks to two giant windows allowing shards of light to stab through the thin shroud of darkness.
I was doing what nearly anyone trying to talk to Steve Bannon had to do: wait for him to finish sending a text message.
Bannon was working out of the EEOB while the West Wing had its decades-old air-conditioning unit replaced. The President, the Chief, and a handful of the President’s closest aides had decamped to Trump’s retreat in Bedminster, New Jersey. I was going to join them in the next few days. Bannon, tellingly, was not. He was fully on the outside looking in for the first time since he signed on to be CEO of Trump’s campaign. Since he had raged to the point of panic at me over what he saw as my efforts to undermine Priebus, I’d asked to come by to hear how he was feeling about the new regime. He was seated behind a desk—something I wasn’t used to seeing—and he was in good spirits, at least in his own way.
“Okay, done,” he barked, standing up from his desk after firing off his text. He walked over toward me. “Listen, me and the General are great,” he said, getting right to the point.
Steve seemed genuinely enthusiastic. “This is the best thing that could have happened. We’re on the same page. He knows the border is f—ed. He dealt with it [as Secretary of Homeland Security]. It’s going to be good.”
I told him I was glad to hear that, but that things were going to be dramatically different from how they were under Reince—probably in both good ways and bad.
“Look, dude,” he said. “I’m a Navy guy, he’s a Marine. It’s going to work out fine.”
Steve was putting on a brave face, but surely, I thought, he must feel the walls closing in around him. He had all but run out of friends in senior roles by this point. He couldn’t possibly be that out of it. Sure enough, I found out later that he had slipped out of town for a day to meet with the Mercer family, major financial backers of Breitbart and longtime Bannon benefactors. He was exploring what it was going to look like for him to return to the private sector. Just in case.
As Steve and I continued discussing the new Chief, I heard the door handle jiggling, but knew whoever it was wouldn’t be able to get in. Some of the EEOB offices had electronic locks. To enter, you either needed to punch in a pass code or someone on the inside needed to press a button to unlock it. This was one of those offices. A few moments later, I could hear a female voice apologizing and nervous fingers frantically punching in the pass code. This was followed by the loud snap of a lock disengaging and the slow creaking of a heavy wooden door easing open to reveal the man who Steve, unbeknownst to me, had been waiting for—the Attorney General of the United States.
I hopped up to greet Sessions, whose expression made me feel like he was pleasantly surprised to see a fellow Alabamian. We hadn’t seen each other much since we both joined the administration, outside of an occasional dinner with our wives or a quick catch-up by phone. We were both weathering storms, although mine were more like scattered showers compared to the hurricane he often found himself enduring.
I’m not sure who had requested to meet with whom, but Bannon and Sessions were longtime allies, and now they were both Trump administration outsiders. Sessions joined Steve and me in the sitting area of his temporary office, and the conversation quickly turned to a familiar topic: leaks. But these leaks—the ones that were concerning Sessions—weren’t the kind that so often consumed the West Wing. The leaks that had made it onto Sessions’s radar were the ones that jeopardized U.S. national security.
A few days earlier, transcripts of classified conversations between Trump and the leaders of Mexico and Australia had been published in The Washington Post. During the calls, Trump had urged the President of Mexico to pay for the construction of a border wall and sought to walk back an agreement President Obama had struck with the Prime Minister of Australia to accept two thousand refugees currently detained in his country. The leaks were universally condemned, even by the fiercest Trump critics. Foreign leaders and diplomats around the world were shaken to think that conversations at the highest level of the U.S. government were no longer secure.
The day after the calls leaked, Sessions announced that the Trump administration had tripled the number of criminal investigations into illegal disclosures of classified information. He decried the “staggering number of leaks” that were undermining “the ability of our government to protect this country.” The FBI, Sessions explained, had created an entirely new unit devoted to handling leak cases, which totaled more in the first six months of the Trump administration than in the previous three years combined.
“I have this warning for would-be leakers,” he concluded. “Don’t do it.”
As Sessions sat down to talk to Steve and me, his frustration had only increased. “We’ve got to do something about it,” he intoned.
“It’s despicable,” Bannon agreed. I noticed throughout the conversation that Bannon didn’t seem to curse in his conversations with Sessions, a rare—and welcome—display of deference to someone he saw as an elder statesman and consummate Southern gentleman.
The term “deep state” had risen in popularity online among conservatives who believed that bureaucrats within the national security establishment were purposefully undermining Trump’s presidency. Critics scoffed at these “conspiracy theorists.” Sessions didn’t use those words, but it quickly became apparent that he did believe there were an unusually high number of leakers—at least some of them holdovers from the Obama administration—who were releasing classified information. And they weren’t doing it to “blow the whistle” on corruption. In fact, most of the leaks only revealed that Trump said the same things in private that he did in public. But the leakers still did their best to time their releases to inflict political damage on the President.
At his wit’s end, Sessions had an idea. Transcripts of the foreign-leader calls were only accessible to a relatively small number of aides, most of them on the National Security Council staff. This small universe offered a potential opportunity to root out the leakers, or at least scare them into hiding for the foreseeable future.
“Some people have suggested a single-issue polygraph,” Sessions said, pausing for a moment, perhaps to gauge Bannon’s reaction.
Bannon leaned forward in his chair, wanting to hear more. The way it would work, Sessions briefly explained, was that each person who had access to those transcripts would be brought in and only asked about that one issue. The results might not be conclusive, much less actionable. Even if they showed deception, the DOJ historically didn’t seem to favor using polygraphs in court proceedings. But when word got around that national security aides were sitting for lie detector tests, leakers would presumably crawl back into their holes, hopefully never to be heard from again.
“We’re dealing with a bunch of spooks who know how to cover their tracks,” Bannon said cynically. “They need a shot across the bow. One way or another they’ve gotta know we’re serious.” I didn’t get the impression that Sessions was actually close to implementing the polygraph idea, but the fact that it was even within the realm of discussion indicated just how dire the situation had become.
“All right, Hammer—out,” Bannon said finally. “The Attorney General and I gotta talk.”
I stood up and shook Sessions’s hand. “It was great to see you,” he said, smiling. The lines around his eyes seemed to have deepened ever so slightly since his dream job had turned into something more closely resembling a nightmare. But he was hanging in there. “Tell Mrs. Mary I said hello,” I replied, then found my way to the door.
It could have all gone so differently. After one of the presidential debates, I had sat next to Sessions on the campaign plane and listened to him and Bannon debate everything from Middle East strategy to budget policy. Together, along with Stephen Miller, they had built the intellectual framework that turned Trump’s raw, gut instincts into actual policy positions. But Sessions’s recusal on Russia—a principled decision that nonetheless destroyed his relationship with the President—and Bannon’s self-destructive streak would likely prevent their vision from ever being fully implemented the way it could have been.
That meeting was the last time I ever saw Steve on the White House’s seventeen-acre complex.
Days later, Bannon inexplicably called up a left-wing, vehemently anti-Trump writer at an obscure publication called The American Prospect and gave him a random, albeit extraordinary, on-the-record interview.
He talked about “fight[ing] every day” with Gary Cohn and various other adversaries who were “wetting themselves” over his ideas to confront China on trade. He named a senior State Department official he was in the process of pushing out so that he could “get hawks in.” And most outrageous of all, he declared that there was “no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it.… They got us.”
It was strangely reminiscent of the meltdown that did Scaramucci in, except this time there were national security implications, and there was no way General Kelly was going to abide that.
Three days later, and about three weeks after the President tweeted Kelly’s arrival, Trump tweeted Bannon’s departure.
“I want to thank Steve Bannon for his service,” he typed. “He came to the campaign during my run against Crooked Hillary Clinton—it was great! Thanks S.” It felt like the end of an era. He and Trump had ridden a tornado together, and now it was dissipating back into the clouds.
I was weirdly saddened by how it all ended. There was a part of Steve Bannon that I loved, but in a disturbed kind of way. There are people, myself included at times, who can be painfully self-aware, always wrestling with whether we’re good enough and obsessing over our shortcomings. And then there are people like him, people who genuinely believe they are giants of history. Bannon thought he was an action figure who had been stuck in a hermetically sealed package for decades until Trump finally freed him and brought him to life. I couldn’t help but appreciate anyone who had the stones to be that grandiose.
Steve’s perception of his departure was, predictably, Bannonesque. He viewed it less as a blow to him personally than as a pivotal moment in history. “The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” he declared in an interview with The Weekly Standard.
But not to worry, he was still going to find a way to complete his mission to save the country, maybe even the world. No longer burdened by the restraints of being a government employee, he had grand visions of leading a nationalist movement that would sweep across the globe.
“I can do whatever I need to do,” he told me over the phone. “It’s going to be epic, brother.”
Kushner was the last man standing in the original Priebus-Bannon-Kushner triumvirate—which was wholly predictable from the start. But from my vantage point it looked increasingly like the Kelly and Cohn show.
Every once in a while over the previous year I would see a bald, bespectacled man in his sixties sitting in the West Wing lobby. He didn’t seem to have any reason to be there. One day, after seeing him several times, I asked the receptionist who he was. “I think he’s a journalist, or a writer, or something like that,” she replied.
I thought that was strange; journalists weren’t usually allowed outside of clearly defined press areas to just mill about. But I didn’t think much of it.
I, along with the rest of the world, would later learn his name—Michael Wolff—and in January 2018, excerpts from his book Fire and Fury set the internet ablaze. Bannon was all over the book, on the record. Wolff quoted Bannon as saying that Donald Trump Jr.’s decision to meet with a Kremlin-connected lawyer during the campaign amounted to “treason.” He went on to say that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s prosecution team would “crack Don Jr. like an egg on national TV.”
There were other parts of the book that didn’t ring true to me. Some of them were second- or thirdhand rumors. For example, he claimed Trump was displaying signs of deteriorating mental health; that none of the Trumps actually wanted to win the presidency, and when he did Melania broke down into tears of horror; and that Trump treated female staffers with “casual misogyny and constant sexual subtext.” The inaccuracies in Wolff’s book were too numerous to debunk them all. But his supposed insider’s account confirmed what some people wanted to believe it must be like. However, it also included sporadic nuggets of truth, like the Bannon quotes, which he never denied making.
The President was understandably furious at Bannon—and confused by this epic self-immolation. Bannon, after all, had been trying very hard to stay in Trump’s good graces; it was the key to his livelihood and continued relevance. Why, we all wondered, would Bannon act so recklessly by giving quotes to his guy, apparently while he still worked in the White House? I could only guess that he was seduced by the idea that this book would show his great contribution to history, and that overcame his judgment.
The President was as livid as anyone had ever seen him over this betrayal. Trump allies and surrogates were calling and texting senior members of the White House communications staff, asking how they should respond to the salacious quotes. Standing just outside the Oval Office, I asked Hope Hicks what she wanted me to do. Sitting behind the Resolute desk, Trump overheard my question.
“Cliff!” he yelled from his desk. “Tell them this: they’re either with me or they’re with Steve. That’s it.”
I looked back at Hope and raised my eyebrows. “It’s time for choosing,” she said. “And no one can have it both ways.”