Monday morning, November 27, 2017, most Americans were dispassionately making their way back to work, still stuffed full of turkey and dressing after a long Thanksgiving weekend of family and football. The President was in the White House residence soaking in, and occasionally stewing over, the latest news coverage.
It will likely come as no surprise to anyone that he was a voracious consumer of news—even the “fake news” he sometimes claimed he didn’t read. His routine generally involved reading The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post front-to-back, and then bouncing around to various TV morning shows, which he saved on his highly prized super TiVo. This put extraordinary pressure on his aides, particularly those of us in communications, to be aware of every story—because he definitely would be.
During the campaign, comms aides Kaelan Dorr and Steven Cheung would stay up deep into the night or rise before dawn to organize press clippings and collect newspaper stories that they could use to brief senior communications adviser Jason Miller. Jason also had to be up early so that he could read and consider them all prior to his morning phone call with the boss. Sometimes Kaelan would even throw out anticipated questions from Trump on some particular story or media narrative, so that Jason could practice his responses. But as much as you tried, you could never know for certain what would tick off the candidate or grab his interest.
And so every morning, Jason would sit anxiously by the phone, waiting for the call. He would start by giving Trump a rundown of the coverage, and then Trump would pepper him with questions. Did you see what Maggie wrote in the Times this morning? Did you see what Hannity said about Crooked Hillary? What’d you think about that first Morning Joe segment? Those were predictable, but what made the job harder was that he also might ask about an article by some guy no one had ever heard of, buried thirty pages into The Wall Street Journal.
On top of that, he might decide on the fly, without any sort of formalized strategy, what the campaign’s message of the day was going to be.
All of this was a test. If Jason was on top of the news stories and had a good plan for pushing back on the negative ones, he passed. If he almost instantly got people on TV to parrot Trump’s “news of the day,” Jason passed again. Usually Jason would scramble to call a reporter like NBC’s Hallie Jackson to give her the scoop on what Trump was thinking. She would then be able to go on the next segment of Morning Joe and say, “According to sources close to Mr. Trump, he plans to…” If Trump saw that, A+.
But if Jason failed this sometimes-impossible test, Trump would take matters into his own hands and, well, I don’t have to tell you what those days were like. You saw the tweets. What was amazing—and is just a fact of life now—was how easily Trump could say or tweet anything and change the news coverage almost instantaneously. This was a power that I don’t think any presidential candidate ever had—and Trump was not shy about using it, sometimes for a purpose and sometimes just for the fun of it.
Unfortunately, the scheduled morning calls stopped happening once we made it into the White House, mainly because Miller—whom Trump referred to affectionately as “my Jace”—was gone and his relationship with Sean Spicer, well, it wasn’t quite the same. Early in the administration, then, various aides—myself included on rare occasions—funneled articles or other information directly to Trump because there was no official process for putting things in front of him. Sometimes aides took advantage of the lax oversight to feed him articles that painted internal rivals in an unflattering light. Other times they did it to advance a policy argument or thwart someone else’s. I did it for one reason only: to tell him he had been right about something. If there was a topic he was frequently talking about and I came across an article that supported or verified his point, I’d print it out, write a little note on it that said, “You were right about this.—Cliff,” then give it to him at the end of the day. Once I asked Madeleine Westerhout, his executive assistant, to include an article and note in his nightly briefing book because I wasn’t going to see him. I saw it later sitting on Sean Spicer’s desk—Madeleine was an RNC alumnus, after all—so I didn’t do that again.
On this particular post-Thanksgiving morning, one story in the Lifestyle section of The Washington Post was garnering some buzz. “The hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe did the usual day-after Thanksgiving kibitzing on the air on Friday morning, telling viewers about their turkey dinners and mentioning the big football game the night before,” wrote Post media reporter Paul Farhi. “One problem: None of those things had actually happened at the time Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Co. started talking about them. The program that aired Friday morning was taped Wednesday, but made to look and sound as if it was airing live.” Farhi went on to write that the whole thing was “cooked up to appear as if it was happening in real time.”
Even though I wasn’t there when he read this, I have no trouble envisioning the mischievous grin that slowly formed across the President’s face. There was nothing—nothing—he loved more than members of the media getting caught up in some embarrassment, and then rubbing their noses in it. Unable to resist, Trump fired off a tweet about the Morning Joe gaffe: “The good news is that their ratings are terrible, nobody cares!” Trump loved to claim that any media outlet he felt was out to get him had terrible ratings, whether it was true or not. To the President, the former TV producer, there was no bigger insult than to tell someone nobody was watching you.
That tweet made his morning. Feeling inspired, he hatched an idea which of course he likely shared with no one before announcing it on Twitter. “We should have a contest as to which of the Networks, plus CNN and not including Fox, is the most dishonest, corrupt and/or distorted in its political coverage of your favorite President (me),” he tweeted. “They are all bad. Winner to receive the FAKE NEWS TROPHY!” In an instant, a sleepy post-Thanksgiving Twitter feed was brought to life—with eye rolls, outrage, and aggrieved commentary from members of the media. Mission accomplished.
That afternoon, the President hosted an event in the Oval Office with three of the thirteen surviving Navajo Code Talkers, who were integral to U.S. military communication during World War II. Those inspiring, heroic stories might have moved the President, I’m not sure. What I do know is that right after the event, he saw me helping the audio-video crew take the podium and other equipment out of the Oval Office, and waved me over.
His thoughts were, as it turned out, not consumed by the Navajo.
“What’d you think about the fake news trophy?” he asked, barely concealing his amusement over his tweet and the reaction.
Now, if you’re looking for a voice of reason when it came to the tweets, I was generally not your guy. Sure, I—and plenty of others—would occasionally debate with the President about whether to tweet certain things, or how various tweets should be worded. Sometimes I think he just wanted to voice his displeasure about something, then be talked down from actually tweeting about it. But most of the time I was just in favor of what was going to happen anyway. In other words, the tweets were going out regardless of what anyone thought or said, so why burn capital with the boss arguing over them?
So when the President asked me about his latest salvo against the media, I told him I thought it was hilarious. This had the benefit of being true. I mean, seriously, deconstruct that tweet. He had somehow invented a Twitter syntax all his own. I also viewed this type of tweet as the humorous, mostly harmless side of a coin that, when flipped over, featured the much darker, and more dangerous, phrase “Enemy of the People.”
Unlike most people working in the Trump White House, I had been a journalist and seen the world through their eyes. I had written tough stories, including some that helped take down a once-popular Republican governor in my home state. I didn’t always get things right—I could be guilty of the same things that frustrated me about White House reporters—but I had done my best to be accurate. I felt like most members of the White House press corps tried to do the same.
To be sure, there was a lot I disliked about the press corps. Many reporters I knew personally could be pretentious, self-absorbed, self-righteous, blinded by ideology, biased toward controversy, and far too slow to admit when they were wrong. Like many Republicans, who had felt with some justification that the media was biased against them for decades, I cheered as hard as anyone when Trump took on the media establishment, which had become just as much a part of the swamp culture as the politicians it was covering. It was clear that many reporters covering Trump had become advocates against him and his supporters, in ways that would have seemed totally inappropriate even a few years earlier. Their view was that Trump’s extreme behavior justified these departures from the norm. I didn’t think that was a good enough excuse. Regardless, calling journalists enemies of the people was a bridge too far for me; the connotation was too loaded.
During the French Revolution, Robespierre had called for “enemies of the people” to be put to death. Lenin had labeled opponents of the Soviet Communist Party “enemies of the people” and “outlaws,” and called for them to be “arrested immediately.” Mao ominously warned of “enemies of the people” seeking to “sabotage” his “socialist revolution.” I doubt Trump was aware of the history of the phrase. Then again, maybe he was fully aware and used it anyway, knowing it would spark outrage. Regardless, it made me squirm. But I never told Trump that, or tried to explain this, which was a failing on my part.
So if the choice was between calling reporters enemies of the United States or mocking their errors—and it was—I was all in for the Fake News Awards.
“I think we should do it,” he told me. “I’ll give you a hundred dollars. Go buy a trophy—a nice, little trophy.” He was moving his hands out in front of him, as if measuring the trophy in the air. He could see it now. I imagined it looking something like an Emmy (for which he’d been nominated twice for his work on The Apprentice).
“And get a little engraving on there,” he ordered. “CNN—Fake News Network of the Year.”
I didn’t comment that he’d already prejudged the winner of this “contest.” Instead, I laughed as I walked back toward the a/v crew. “I’ll see what we can put together,” I said with a smile. Then I didn’t give it much additional thought.
As everyone working for Donald Trump knew, there were generally two kinds of presidential requests—ones you acted on and ones you ignored unless he brought it up again. I figured this was the latter. A little over a month went by without him saying anything else about it, at least to me. But late on New Year’s Day of 2018, I got a text from a friend traveling back from Mar-a-Lago with the President on Air Force One. “POTUS is back to talking about the Fake News Awards. He wants to host an awards show and hand out trophies.” The text ended with the emoji character that’s laughing so hard it’s crying.
Shortly after I received that text, the President tweeted, “I will be announcing THE MOST DISHONEST & CORRUPT MEDIA AWARDS OF THE YEAR on Monday at 5:00 o’clock. Subjects will cover Dishonesty & Bad Reporting in various categories from the Fake News Media. Stay tuned!”
Immediately after seeing that, I texted Hope Hicks, “Well, we’ve got an awards show to put together.”
Hope responded right away: “I think we should have someone hand Sarah an envelope in the briefing, then say it was too tough to choose and give them all little participation trophies.”
We were both joking—sort of—but there was no avoiding this now. The show would go on.
The rest of the staff was divided on the entire concept, much less producing some type of awards show with multiple categories. The White House Counsel’s Office was adamantly opposed, as attorneys tend to be when there’s fun involved. President Obama’s former ethics czar even tweeted out a stern warning that if White House staff helped with the awards, we would “risk violating §§ 702, 704 & 705 forbidding use of gov time & $$$ to harm some media & aid others.”
In the end, Trump was begrudgingly talked into allowing the Republican National Committee to release an online list, titled “The Highly-Anticipated 2017 Fake News Awards,” that he could tweet out. This was anticlimactic, and the RNC web page didn’t even work at first. But I must admit, seeing some of the most egregious reporting errors of 2017 all in one place was actually pretty striking. For all the justifiable criticism of the Trump administration’s credibility issues—and there were plenty of them—the media gave the President numerous opportunities to throw that charge back at them.
The list included The New York Times predicting Trump’s election would destroy the economy, when in reality the stock market boomed and unemployment plummeted. It included an erroneous ABC News story claiming Trump’s former National Security Advisor was prepared to testify against him in the Russia probe. The story tanked the stock market for a day, but was later found to be false, earning the reporter a suspension and demotion. It included three CNN employees having to resign after publishing, then retracting, another false Russia-related story. Then there was the time Newsweek falsely reported that the Polish First Lady refused to shake Trump’s hand. And another time when CNN deceptively edited a video of Trump and the Japanese prime minister feeding fish—yes, feeding fish. The video made it look like Trump had just dumped out all of the food, unprompted, when in reality he was following the lead of the Japanese Prime Minister, his host.
Trump was unusually diligent in pointing out these mistakes, of course. And he was effective. According to a Gallup survey released in January 2018, less than half of Americans could name an “objective news source”—not a single one. The effect of this was that the more the “fake news” attacked Trump, the tighter his supporters clung to him.
But behind the scenes, the relationship between the press and the White House was more complicated—and sometimes more incestuous—than either side wanted to admit.
Trump sincerely held most members of the media in low regard—that wasn’t for show. But what he didn’t like to admit was that he also craved their approval. Decades in the New York City tabloids had convinced him that being the topic of conversation—whether positive or negative—was what really mattered. Nothing was more a focus of his attention in this regard than The New York Times. It was his hometown paper, after all. During a dinner with evangelical leaders in the Blue Room, Trump named the exact number of occasions he had been on the front page of the Times during his career as a businessman. It was only a handful. “Now I’m on there almost every day,” he observed, though usually not in the way he would have liked. He added, with a mix of pride and irritation, that Ivanka, who was also in the room, still got better coverage in the Times than he did.
But if Trump held the media in low esteem, members of the media clearly felt the same way. Yet, thanks to him, they were also having the time of their lives. There had never been this much news in Washington, D.C., and they had never gotten this much attention. Politics had seldom been the go-to conversation at office water coolers and around the family dinner table, but it was now. And journalists were becoming stars in their own right. Some of them were satirized on Saturday Night Live, right along with the Trumps, Kellyanne, Sean, Jared, and Steve. Almost all of them were now recognizable in public, pausing to take selfies with fans for the first time in their lives.
To the public, Trump versus the press was a bitter war. But behind the scenes, it was much more like professional wrestling. The reporters needed Trump and his team to leak to them and give them information or they couldn’t break news. By contrast, Trump and his team needed them to get information out, or misinformation, or serve as a powerful and effective political foil. They also served two almost completely separate audiences—the press often seemed to be writing stories to get clicks from the Trump haters while the White House used those same stories to rile up the media haters. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Never was this more evident than on August 2, 2017, when Senior Policy Advisor Stephen Miller was brought into the White House Press Briefing Room to discuss an immigration bill that the President had just endorsed. The WWE nature of the entire proceeding was clear right from the beginning. Everyone knew what was going to happen. Everyone had their unofficially assigned roles.
“I’d like to hand it over to Stephen Miller,” Sarah Sanders said with a smile. “I know you guys will have a lot of fun.”
Miller swaggered over to the podium in his perfectly tailored suit and skinny tie, like he had been pulled straight off the set of Mad Men. In his rather off-putting, dogmatic, weirdly self-confident style, he launched into an explanation of various controversial components of the bill as if he were discussing a bread recipe. Then after a lengthy round of questions, Miller said he would take one more, from the Trump White House’s favorite media villain—CNN’s Jim Acosta.
“The Statue of Liberty says, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,’” Acosta said with seeming conviction, his head cocked slightly to the right. “Aren’t you trying to change what it means to be an immigrant coming into this country…?” Acosta didn’t answer his own question—though clearly his answer would be yes—but he didn’t have to. He had perfected the seemingly earnest expression that many White House reporters tried to don. He was just an impartial fact gatherer like the rest of the press—even though his questions, tone, and temperament just happened to suggest that he believed Stephen Miller, his policies, his views, his colleagues, and his president were irredeemable racists. But that’s what Acosta’s audience wanted. And that’s, as it turned out, what we wanted, too.
Miller tried to suppress a grin, but the corners of his mouth subtly betrayed the excitement welling up inside of him. This was exactly what he had been hoping for. A TV moment.
As it happened, I was in Sarah’s office just before she and Miller went into the briefing. I told Miller that someone—probably Acosta—was going to bring up the “The New Colossus” poem, which was mounted on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal almost two decades after it was erected. I knew this because the subject had come up with a caller on my radio program the year before.
“I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is … a symbol of American liberty lighting the world,” Miller said. “The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.” He tried to complete his point, but Acosta cut him off.
“You’re saying that that does not represent what the country has always thought of as immigration coming into this country? That sounds like some National Park revisionism.”
Reporters chuckled. The game was on. The two bantered back and forth, neither allowing the other to finish a sentence, much less complete a full thought. Acosta seemed particularly irked at the idea of scaling back the total number of legal immigrants coming into the country each year, which Miller pointed out had fluctuated over time.
“Jim, let’s talk about this,” Miller said, still barely concealing his glee. He knew that there was nothing President Trump would like more than for Miller to go to battle with Acosta, a reporter Trump probably loathed more than any other human being in the entire capital. Except maybe Jim Comey. If the Acosta-Miller exchange had descended into a physical brawl, the President would have run into the room with a bowl of popcorn and a diet soda. “In 1970, when we let in three hundred thousand people a year, was that violating or not violating the Statue of Liberty law of the land? In the 1990s, when it was half a million a year, was it violating or not violating the Statue of Liberty law of the land?”
Acosta tried to jump back in, but Miller pressed on.
“Tell me what years meet Jim Acosta’s definition of the Statue of Liberty poem law of the land,” he demanded. “So you’re saying a million a year is the Statue of Liberty number? Nine hundred thousand violates it? Eight hundred thousand violates it?” I imagined Donald Trump—who loved to watch these briefings in real time—jumping up from the private dining room table and pumping his fist in jubilation.
For seven minutes Miller and Acosta sparred in front of the entire country. And as he wrapped it, his final words from the podium were: “I think that went exactly as planned. I think that’s what Sarah was hoping would happen. I think that’s exactly what we were hoping to have happen.”
He was laughing as he said it, but actually, it kind of was. Everything Miller said about the poem and the statue was historically accurate because he’d gamed it out in advance. He’d thought through how he would respond. Both sides knew what was coming, the staging and timing were preset, and everyone played their part. How is this any different from professional wrestling?
I met Miller in the hallway between the Briefing Room and the Press Secretary’s office right after he’d come offstage, and he literally high-fived me. We got what we wanted—a confrontation that allowed the White House to take a hard line on immigration. Acosta got what he wanted—a confrontation that CNN could air on a loop for the rest of the day, and sound bites their panelists could dissect with righteous indignation. The American people got—what, exactly? I have no idea. And that’s how I felt most days after the press briefings.
I’m not sure there has ever been a time when on-camera briefings were productive. The Clinton administration was the first to give them a shot, but a couple of weeks in they shut them down. “The briefing is more an opportunity to exchange ideas and to have a conversation about what’s happening,” explained Clinton Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers. “That wasn’t really happening as productively as we had hoped.”
I know exactly what she meant. The reason productive exchanges rarely take place during on-camera briefings is because they create perverse incentives for both sides. Grandstanding TV correspondents try to manufacture gotcha moments, confrontations that make their producers happy and look dramatic on screen. Whether they actually glean any useful information in the process is a much lesser concern. And under-siege spokespeople resort to condescension and witty one-liners that go viral on social media, get the base riled up, and please the boss, who’s almost always watching. Whether they provide relevant, accurate information on the news of the day is, again, a lesser priority.
Reporters publicly decried the White House for holding fewer and fewer briefings, but privately conceded that they were mostly useless theater. Print journalists loathed the TV grandstanders in the Briefing Room because the spectacle didn’t provide them with anything useful to fill column space. In fact, some of the most widely respected White House reporters, like Maggie Haberman from The New York Times and Jonathan Swan from Axios, rarely showed their faces in the Briefing Room. Why bother? They were busy talking to dozens of sources throughout the building, hustling for the real scoop while their competitors crowded into a room to ask the same questions and get the same nonanswers.
For the most part we all carried on like the good frenemies that we were—publicly bashing one another’s brains out while privately acknowledging that each side needed the other. The Jim Acostas of the world needed to attract the White House’s ire, making them heroes to “the resistance.” And the White House needed them to be foils, Fake News mascots for the conservative base.
Leaning over the phone in the Oval Office, arms crossed in front of him with his elbows sitting on the Resolute desk, Trump was trying to cut a deal. But it wasn’t with a congressman or senator haggling over details of legislation. It wasn’t a foreign head of state, debating a trade accord. Nor was it a major corporate CEO who Trump was trying to persuade to expand operations in the United States. It was a reporter.
“Who gave you this story?” Trump asked playfully. “I’d just be curious to know who told you this.”
The reporter laughed somewhat nervously, saying they obviously could not reveal their sources.
“Well, I guess that’s fine,” Trump replied. “But of course you know I could give you so much better stories—so much better.”
After a little more unsuccessful coaxing Trump relented, and the reporter hung up without a hot scoop from “a source close to the President.”
Privately Trump acknowledged that interacting, even brawling, with reporters was one of his favorite aspects of the job—it was like a sport to him. Early in the administration, after a tense back-and-forth with Acosta during a press conference in the East Room, Trump came back to the West Wing enthused and playing media critic. “I actually think Jim handled himself well there,” he said. “Sometimes he’s so defensive—just so defensive. Not today. Very calm. Very professional. I thought he was good. I got the better of him, of course—they’re fake news, as we know—but he was good, Jim was good.”
That’s not to say that Trump’s press criticisms were insincere. Far from it. As with pretty much everything else, what he said publicly closely mirrored what he said in private.
On January 31, 2018, I had organized a meeting with the President and seven workers whose employers had given them pay raises as a result of the Trump tax cuts. As was our routine, the press pool was brought in to cover some casual remarks by the President and his guests. As the event concluded, reporters shouted questions at the President before being ushered out of the room. This was normal and totally reasonable. Sometimes the President would answer them, sometimes he wouldn’t. In this particular instance, Trump chose not to engage, sending Acosta into a fit of anger. “Are you a racist?” he demanded to know. The two press wranglers, young ladies in their early twenties whose job it was to escort the press in and out of such meetings, immediately looked at me like deers in headlights. “Thank you, press! Thank you, press!” they said louder and louder, trying to drown out the belligerent Acosta and nudge the reporters to leave the room. Eventually they succeeded.
“Sorry about that,” the President said as the press were finally gone and the door was closed behind them. “Comes with the territory.” The room was filled with nervous laughter, then William Harmon, an African American man in his late twenties from Muscogee County, Georgia, spoke up.
“I just want you to know that we see through all of them,” he said. “They’re going to keep throwing stuff at you. Don’t let it bother you. There are millions of us all over the country who support you and want you to succeed. You make us all proud to be Americans.”
“Thank you, William, thank you very much,” the President said with sincere appreciation.
After the meeting broke up and the guests were escorted out, the President sat down behind the Resolute desk and I asked him if he was pleased with the event.
“I thought it was perfect,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin interjected. “Having you surrounded by those workers is great optics and great messaging.”
The President nodded in agreement. “Yeah,” he said, looking back at Mnuchin, “but we’ve gotta do something about this lunatic Jim Acosta screaming at everyone in the Oval Office. Can’t we suspend him, or something?”
“It’s a lack of decorum, is what it is,” Mnuchin added.
Sarah Sanders, who had walked up just in time to hear the President expressing this familiar frustration, said she didn’t think it was worth worrying about. “There’s not much we can do, sir. If we kick him out, they’ll just accuse us of being like China, like we’re suppressing the free press. It’ll end up being more trouble than it’s worth.”
“But who cares?” Trump retorted. “They lie about everything else. Our people don’t care what they say.”
Turning to me, he said, “What do you think?”
“I think it’s reasonable to expect everyone at the White House to have a certain level of decorum, especially in the Oval,” I told him. “If Acosta can’t hold himself together, I say we suspend him for the next time CNN is in the press pool, but let them send another reporter in his place.” That way CNN could still have a reporter there, but the event wouldn’t be pointlessly derailed by Acosta’s attention-seeking belligerence. The President seemed to like this idea, pursing his lips and nodding in approval.
“Well, somebody needs to do something, because he’s out of control,” Trump concluded. “So talk about it and do something. I don’t care what, but it needs to be something.”
This was an ongoing debate among senior press aides, and occasionally even the Chief of Staff’s office when the President got really spun up. But during my time in the West Wing, the decision was always made to let it go, rather than exacerbate our already contentious relationship with the press.
He consumed TV like the late Roger Ebert must have watched movies. I imagine that, after being a film critic for almost a half century, it was difficult for Ebert to enjoy a movie just for the fun of it. He must have always been analyzing the plotline, character development, and cinematography. Trump was the same way about network news programming. He commented on the sets, the graphics, the wardrobe choices, the lighting, and just about every other visual component of a broadcast. Sure, he liked to hear pundits saying nice things about him or White House officials defending him from attacks, but everything came back to how does it look? With that in mind, the most Trumpian tactic the comms team employed was arguing with TV networks about the “chyrons,” the words displayed at the bottom of the screen that act as headlines for whatever the commentators are discussing.
“People watch TV on mute,” the President told me, “so it’s those words, those sometimes beautiful, sometimes nasty little words that matter.” He had mastered television as a communications medium, and this was one of his smartest insights. Steven Cheung, the White House Director of Strategic Response, was effective at getting negative or unfair chyrons changed. He had developed that skill—and the TV network relationships to implement it—while working sixteen-hour days in Trump Tower during the campaign. He continued to work his magic in the White House, perhaps most notably during the confirmation hearings for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
When the President would deliver a speech somewhere outside of D.C., the research team would take screenshots of all the chyrons that aired while he was speaking. Then, adding those images to headlines and tweets from influential reporters and pundits, they would race to print out a packet before Trump made it back to the White House. The goal was for Sarah or Hope or me—or whoever hadn’t traveled with him—to meet him on the ground floor of the residence and hand him the packet to review mere moments after Marine One landed on the South Lawn.
And once he got upstairs to the residence, you could bet that he was going to watch the replays and commentary from his favorite prime-time lineup on Fox. After all, Trump undoubtedly loved the fight, but he loved being, well, loved even more. And there were few places he felt the love more than on Fox.
Sean Hannity, the network’s biggest star, was one of the few people outside the White House who spoke to the President as much as the media seemed to think he did. Most people inflated their access to Trump; Hannity didn’t have to. The President loved that he had “the most highly rated show of them all,” and the two discussed everything from personnel matters to communications strategy. Trump also loved to watch Tucker Carlson embarrass his hapless guests and would occasionally call to congratulate him on his performance. Laura Ingraham was the Fox host most ideologically aligned with Trump on his signature issue, immigration, but she did not share the close rapport with Trump that others did, in part because some of the people around Trump found her difficult to deal with. During one “radio row” event in the East Room, Ingraham went so far over her allotted time interviewing the President that Hope Hicks had to step in and apologetically but forcefully end the conversation because Trump was so late for his next interview. Trump didn’t mind, though. She had been one of his earliest supporters, so she could have a few extra minutes if it made her happy. But no one in the Fox lineup held a place closer to Trump’s heart than Lou Dobbs.
In July 2017, Kellyanne Conway appeared on Dobbs’s Fox Business Network show. Dobbs, a protectionist on trade and a “build the wall” hard-liner on immigration, loved Trump and supported him relentlessly. In contrast, he frequently derided Republican leaders in Congress, whom he viewed as feckless and incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, much less legislating.
It was the summer of Trump’s first year in office, and a debate was raging over the GOP’s longtime promise to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Dobbs was frustrated that Republicans—who had voted dozens of times to repeal Obamacare while in the minority—suddenly couldn’t pull it off with majorities in both chambers. Calling out both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan by name, Dobbs unloaded from his studio as Kellyanne stood and listened on the North Lawn of the White House.
“There’s no toughness, there’s no intelligence, and there is very little beyond pure flaccidity on the part of the Republican leadership,” he declared. “It’s time to make something happen, isn’t it?”
He assumed Kellyanne would echo his frustrations, but she didn’t. “I’m going to push back on this,” she replied. “There’s a very serious effort here to make good on repealing and replacing Obamacare.”
As she continued defending Republican congressional leaders, Dobbs grew increasingly irritated. “Kellyanne, I can’t believe you’re filibustering me!… You’ve got to be straight with this audience,” he finally said in exasperation. “What is the Republican leadership up to? Why in the world isn’t the White House responding with greater force and direction?”
The following day, I was in the Oval Office showing the President a draft of a video we’d recently recorded when he saw Kellyanne through the doorway.
“Kellyanne, come on in here,” he called out. Then he shouted at his secretary. “Madeleine, get me the great Lou Dobbs on the phone.” I’m pretty sure by this point Madeleine had this guy on speed dial.
Kellyanne gave me a kiss on the cheek as she walked in and stood behind one of the wooden chairs in front of the President’s desk.
Within a matter of moments, Dobbs was patched into the Oval Office. Trump immediately put him on speakerphone and leaned forward so he could be heard clearly.
“One hell of a show last night, Lou,” the President said, grinning.
“Well, thank you, Mr. President. I certainly appreciate it,” Dobbs said.
“Lou, I’ve been thinking a lot about it and I really think you might be the best.”
Dobbs tried to interject, but Trump wouldn’t have it.
“No, I’m serious. Honest to God, Lou, I think you’re the best who’s ever done it. You’ve got a certain way that you do things. Now you know Hannity—Sean is wonderful, so good. But I honestly think you may be better. And you know why? It’s not just information, Lou. It’s great information but it’s more than that; it’s entertainment. People forget about that. You can’t just inform them. They won’t listen to you for long if you put them to sleep! You’ve got to entertain them. You’re a hell of an entertainer, Lou. That’s why I just keep watching and watching.”
I’d heard Trump praise many of his media allies before, but with Dobbs there was no doubting his sincerity. Maybe it was in part because they were close to the same age, but Donald Trump was an unabashed Lou Dobbs fanboy. This, of course, meant that Lou Dobbs had the most secure job at Fox News for the duration.
“That’s very kind of you to say, Mr. President,” Dobbs said with a humility bordering on shyness. “I do my best, and I hope it’s helpful in getting some other Republicans to do what they’re supposed to do.”
Trump looked up at Kellyanne with a waggish glint in his eye. Clearly he had something in mind.
“Oh, you’re doing great, Lou. But I couldn’t believe it last night. Kellyanne was on there defending Paul Ryan! Who would have imagined? My Kellyanne taking Paul Ryan’s side over ours!”
Kellyanne rolled her eyes as Trump muted the phone and laughed. Dobbs, unaware that she was in the room, laughed sheepishly and sidestepped the previous night’s conflict. Part of the fun in this type of game for Trump was that you really didn’t know what the person on the other end of the line would say. What if Lou had lit Kellyanne up? I suspect Trump would have loved every moment. But of course it would have put Lou in an awkward spot.
Instead he just chuckled. “She’s great. Kellyanne does a great job.”
Trump unmuted the phone and filled him in on the joke. “She’s right here, Lou! She’s listening to every word. I’m kidding, but not really, she was really on there defending him. You had to set her straight.”
“Love you, Lou,” Kellyanne said. “Keep up the great work.”
“Lou, you’re the greatest,” Trump concluded, and hung up the phone with a giant smile on his face. I’m not sure if Trump had genuine affection for much of anyone outside of his family. But if he did, it was for the people who defended him day after day on television.
Bob Novak, a syndicated columnist in hundreds of newspapers before he passed away in 2009, was famous inside the Beltway for having some kind of scoop in every column. In his autobiography, he shed some light on his superhuman ability to pry information out of people by noting that aides understood that they were either “a source or a target.”
As a former journalist, I understand where he was coming from. If you were willing to play ball, I wouldn’t necessarily bury stories you didn’t like, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to ding you, either. On the other hand, if you tried to ignore me—as Alabama Governor Robert Bentley’s office did after I wrote a series of damaging (but accurate) articles—that meant it was open season to tee off. Rewarding sources can be a useful trade-off to gain access. But it’s foolish to think that just being nice to people is going to make you a go-to reporter for aides looking to off-load inside information. The best reporters spend a disproportionate amount of their time with sources building actual relationships that are deeper than just “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” The most press-savvy aides did the same.
In the Trump White House, the fear of being a target—of both hungry reporters and, perhaps of greater concern, your colleagues—was the most powerful motivator to talk to journalists. The thought process went something like this: If I can maintain close relationships with reporters, I can at least avoid gratuitous hit pieces planted by my rivals.
I experienced this myself for the first time in May 2017.
Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon, usually staunch adversaries, had grown so frustrated with Spicer’s bumbling communications operation that they joined forces in an attempt to overhaul it.
“Put a plan together,” Bannon snarled at a handful of us. “Weaponize everything. We’re going back to war.”
“We’re taking this back to campaign-style,” Jared added enthusiastically.
Piling into a secluded EEOB office to sketch out a plan to bolster the operation were four former campaign aides: Andy Surabian, Steven Cheung, Andy Hemming, and myself. For the next four hours, we brainstormed, analyzed the communications operation, and debated how to best address its problems. Unfortunately, Hemming was out of his office so long that his direct supervisor, Raj Shah, came looking for him. He needed an excuse, but Bannon and Kushner didn’t want other people in the building knowing what we were actually up to. So Hemming told Raj that we were working on a plan to better respond to the onslaught of Russia-related stories.
Within a matter of hours, Surabian and I were contacted by Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng from The Daily Beast, who said they had White House sources telling them that we were leading an effort to set up a “Russia War Room.”
Neither Surabian nor I had a relationship with the two reporters, and we made the mistake of ignoring them, thinking they were just out on a fishing expedition. We couldn’t have done anything about it anyway. We couldn’t tell them the truth on background, because Bannon and Kushner wanted it kept confidential.
Later that afternoon, The Daily Beast published a story, based on information provided by anonymous White House sources, saying that “ground-level operations” for a “Russia War Room” would be run by “senior White House communications hands.… Cliff Sims, the director of White House message strategy, and deputy policy strategist Andrew Surabian.”
We were livid. First of all, it wasn’t true. But more concerning was that being connected to anything Russia-related opened up the possibility of legal bills that could easily be more than a year’s salary in the White House. My frustrations culminated months later in a near brawl in the Trump Hotel lobby when I confronted Asawin Suebsaeng and we both had to be restrained by mutual friends. We would later laugh it all off.
This story illustrates a fundamental reality of life inside Trump’s White House—there was a deep, often justified, feeling of paranoia engulfing the entire building. Seeing a reporter’s name pop up on the screen could send your heart racing with adrenaline that this might be the assassin approaching, ready to carry out a hit put out by a colleague.
I didn’t have a full appreciation of this until May 2017, when I saw the American Sniper of West Wing marksmen practicing her craft firsthand. As I watched Kellyanne Conway in operation over our time in the White House, my view of her sharpened. It became hard to look long at her without getting the sense that she was a cartoon villain brought to life. Her agenda—which was her survival over all others, including the President—became more and more transparent. Once you figured that out, everything about her seemed so calculated; every statement, even a seemingly innocuous one, seemed poll tested by a focus group that existed inside her mind. She seemed to be perennially cloaked in an invisible fur coat, casting an all-knowing smile, as if she’d already collected ninety-eight Dalmatians with only three more to go.
The hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe were accusing Kellyanne of being two-faced when it came to Donald Trump. Mika Brzezinski claimed that when she came on their show during the campaign, she would lavish Trump with praise, and then “the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off, and she would say, ‘Blech, I need to take a shower,’ because she disliked her candidate so much.” The other cohost, Joe Scarborough, asserted that Kellyanne had only taken the Trump gig because it would pay off financially. And they both said they had decided to no longer book her on the show because she lacked credibility.
Kellyanne had developed pretty thick skin, and normally she would let this kind of stuff go. So I was a little surprised when she called me upstairs to her office to discuss issuing a response. I assumed this was because she feared Trump would believe the charges, which might threaten her plum White House position of doing whatever it was she wanted whenever she felt like it. Whatever her reasoning, she wanted to fire back and asked if I would help her draft a statement.
Kellyanne’s office was one of the largest in the West Wing. On the top floor, above Bannon’s and Kushner’s offices below, it was about twice as long as it was wide. On the south end of the room, where her desk sat, she had the most valuable commodity in the West Wing: two fairly large, square external windows. On the opposite end of the room she had a small conference table that could comfortably seat six. In between there was a sitting area with a couch and two chairs positioned on opposite sides of an oval coffee table. The office had been set up this same way when Valerie Jarrett occupied it during the Obama years. Just outside her door, in a tiny reception area, sat her executive assistant, who handled her calendar, and her body man, who shadowed her every move and catered to her needs.
I had not brought my work laptop upstairs with me when she called, so Kellyanne pointed over to her personal MacBook sitting on the conference table on the other side of the room.
“Just use that and type something up for me,” she said.
I sat down and started slowly pecking out a statement. While working in the White House I found that I’d grown so accustomed to writing in Trump’s voice that writing for other people had become somewhat harder than it normally would have been. I was already getting off to a slow start, but I was also getting distracted by the nonstop stream of iMessages popping up on the screen. At that point, personal phones had not yet been banned in the West Wing, so Kellyanne was sitting at her desk texting away. And since her iMessage account was tied to both her phone and her laptop, which she must not have even considered, I could inadvertently see every conversation she was having.
Over the course of twenty minutes or so, she was having simultaneous conversations with no fewer than a half-dozen reporters, most of them from outlets the White House frequently trashed for publishing “fake news.” Journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Politico, and Bloomberg were all popping up on the screen. And these weren’t policy conversations, or attempts to fend off attacks on the President. As I sat there trying to type, she bashed Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, and Sean Spicer, all by name. She also recounted private conversations she’d had with the President during which, at least in her telling, she’d convinced him to see things her way, which she said was a challenge when you’re dealing with someone so unpredictable and unrestrained. She wasn’t totally trashing the President, at least as the Morning Joe crew described it, but she definitely wasn’t painting him in the most favorable light. She was talking about him like a child she had to set straight. I was sitting there, watching this, totally bewildered. I was supposed to be writing a statement defending her against accusations that she had done almost exactly what I was watching her do that very moment.
Author Ronald Kessler would later write in his book The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game that Kellyanne was the “No. 1 leaker” in the administration. Kessler, whose book was generally favorable toward Trump, claimed Kellyanne “said the most mean, cutting and obviously untrue things about Reince” and “also lit into Jared and Ivanka.”
When Fox News host Abby Huntsman asked Kellyanne about Kessler’s claims, she sidestepped the question, only saying that “leakers get great press” and adding that “one day, Abby, I will have my say.”
From what I saw on her computer, she was having her say all day long. She was playing a double game—putting a foot in both worlds—telling Trump and his supporters on Fox one thing while bad-mouthing them to the “mainstream” media in private. It didn’t hurt matters with the latter group that her husband, George, was an increasingly frequent critic of the President on Twitter. If the Trump administration was the Titanic, as many outsiders routinely claimed, then Kellyanne seemed determined to play the role of the Unsinkable Molly Brown. She wasn’t going to go down with this ship.
But while Kellyanne stood in a class of her own in terms of her machinations—I had to admire her sheer gall—it would be unfair to pretend that Kellyanne was a complete anomaly. I myself had dozens of reporter relationships, going all the way back to the campaign. We worked in communications, after all. And calling her the “No. 1 leaker” wasn’t fair, either, because all leaks are not created equal. Sure, the staff-on-staff backstabbing was a distraction and contributed to the toxic work environment, but the real-world damage those leaks inflicted paled in comparison to the national security leaks. And Kellyanne didn’t have anything to do with those. On top of that, the President at times benefited greatly from our collective press relationships, which allowed us to shape stories to his advantage or push back on negative story lines. But the unspoken reality inside the Trump White House was that everyone had relationships with journalists, not just the press and comms teams.
One night at the Woodward Table restaurant on the ground floor of my apartment building, I saw the White House’s top ethics attorney having dinner with a CNN reporter. On another night, across the street at Joe’s Seafood, I saw Rob Porter—who had angrily accused Peter Navarro of leaking—having dinner with a different CNN reporter. At various times I saw countless White House officials outside the comms team buddying up to journalists. I saw the Chief Digital Officer meeting with a reporter at a coffee shop. Another reporter bragged that even the President’s personal aide Jordan Karem had asked to meet up clandestinely on the weekend to avoid being seen.
These meetings weren’t necessarily nefarious, although I can’t really think of a good reason for the President’s body man to buddy up with reporters. Karem’s predecessor, Johnny McEntee, certainly never would have violated the President’s trust like that. But the point is, everyone wanted to stop everyone else from talking to the press, while continuing to talk to the press themselves. And since that wasn’t realistic, aides and reporters both developed weblike information networks.
The Trump White House staff was famously factionalized—RNC vs. campaign loyalists, establishment vs. MAGA, globalists vs. nationalists, free traders vs. protectionists. But less well known is that the press was, too. Every West Wing faction had its favored reporters.
Early on, former RNC aides seemed to leak the most to Josh Dawsey (Politico and later The Washington Post), Zeke Miller (Time and later the Associated Press), and Paul Bedard (Washington Examiner). They also aired their personal grievances with the President through Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng of The Daily Beast. Aides who wanted to take shots at Spicer knew they’d be well received by the Politico duo of Tara Palmeri and Alex Isenstadt, both of whom had been targets of Spicer’s ire. NEC aides who wanted to undermine the President’s protectionist trade instincts liked to leak to Politico’s Andrew Restuccia. NSC aides opposed to National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster found willing enablers at Breitbart News. Reporters joked that senior aides seemed to save their “best” leaks for Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, because of her reputation and the Times’s massive platform—and also because the President read everything she wrote (even though he once called her a “third-rate flunky” who he never talked to). The Washington Post’s team of Phil Rucker and Ashley Parker also seemed to cross the various factions, and later they became go-to reporters for staffers taking shots at General Kelly. The Wall Street Journal seemed to have the most rigorous reporting standards, which made it much more difficult for aides to take anonymous shots at one another. On the opposite extreme, Politico was generally the outlet of choice for any staffer trying to stab a colleague because its entire content strategy revolved around stoking White House palace intrigue. But Politico’s coverage didn’t drive the conversation in the White House like it did on Capitol Hill, where they had some of the best reporters in town. The West Wing—and much of D.C.—woke up to Axios’s morning email blast, written by longtime Washington insider Mike Allen. Between Allen and his protégé Jonathan Swan, the behind-the-scenes details they unearthed made it feel like Axios had someone sitting in the corner of our meetings taking notes.
Reporters were relentless in their source-development methods. They knew they couldn’t come in through the front door—our official email addresses or phone numbers—so they tried the back door, our personal cell phones. Or, they found their way into the house through cracks, like direct messages on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or, for the millennial aides, Snapchat. And most of the time they were successful.
As a former journalist, I respected the hustle, but as time went by, I became more and more alarmed at the overall low quality of some of the coverage. At their best, journalists present facts within their proper context to provide readers and viewers with the information they need to develop informed opinions. In the age of Twitter journalism, where every minor development (scooplet!) was met with breathless outrage or analysis, context nearly disappeared. Reporters obsessed over the process, rather than the substance, and the palace-intrigue stories were justified by reporters analyzing what it all “meant.” In short, when everything matters, nothing matters. This actually worked to Trump’s advantage in some ways, because there was so much “news” happening that damaging stories either couldn’t break through or were in the spotlight so briefly that they didn’t inflict lasting damage. Most Americans couldn’t follow the play-by-play; they had actual lives to live.
On top of all that, many reporters were so personally offended by Trump’s broadsides that they essentially became what he was accusing them of being: the opposition party. I can understand how difficult it must have been to endure his withering criticisms of their profession. But over time I saw once-decent reporters subconsciously devolve into anti-Trump protesters, some because they took it all so personally, others because it was the quickest way to build their profile, while for still others it was some of both.
Reporters’ other main problem was their overreliance on anonymous sources and their willingness to regurgitate whatever they were told, as if they were absolved from any responsibility over whether or not it was actually true. The President was convinced the sources were made up, that they didn’t exist. Reporters responded to this assertion with righteous indignation. But even though I was confident these anonymous sources were indeed real, that did not make up for the fact that what they were saying was often untrue, or at least only part of the story.
In March 2018, I got a text from my comms team colleague Steven Cheung. “We need to pay attention to CNN, because I think something bad might be about to happen,” he said. I joked that such a statement could apply to almost any moment. But in this particular instance, Cheung explained that one of our former campaign colleagues was mad at Sarah Sanders—he wasn’t entirely clear why—and was sending Cheung cryptic texts that he “had something coming for her on CNN.”
Sure enough, an article popped up on CNN’s website shortly thereafter with the headline TRUMP UPSET WITH SANDERS.
“President Donald Trump is upset with White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders over her responses regarding his alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, a source close to the White House tells CNN,” Jim Acosta wrote.
“POTUS is very unhappy,” the source was quoted as saying. Acosta then went out on TV and dramatically described the deteriorating relationship between the President and his once-beloved Press Secretary.
All of this, of course, was based on a single anonymous source. But unlike the public, we knew this source went around town convincing people—journalists and clients alike—that he maintained a close relationship with the President. In reality, Trump couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup. He had completely made up the story about the President being mad at Sarah. Acosta had run the single-sourced story, apparently unconcerned about whether it was true or not. And that’s how your CNN news was programmed for the day.
Now, you might think to yourself, Okay, fine, Jim Acosta’s no Bob Woodward. That’s not exactly breaking news. But what if I told you that Bob Woodward is no Bob Woodward, either, at least the way his legend is portrayed?
In Woodward’s book on the Trump White House, Fear, the famed journalist describes a scene in Trump Tower after Steve Bannon had first joined the campaign as its CEO. Bannon takes the elevators up to the fourteenth floor and enters the war room, the nerve center of the campaign, and is stunned to find just one person sitting there: Andy Surabian. Bannon peppers Surabian with questions, taken aback by the lack of people working on a weekend. It’s all very cinematic. Bannon—the campaign’s savior—fully realizes the challenge that lies ahead of him. The empty war room illustrates the ragtag nature of the campaign and implies a contrast between the skeleton crew in Trump Tower and the Clinton machine headquartered a few miles away in Brooklyn. It’s all quite interesting. Except it never happened; the entire scene is a total fabrication, presented by the country’s most esteemed journalist as if he had been sitting there observing it all himself.
Now, in a sense, the scene is not misleading. The underlying points being illustrated were generally correct. But the actual interaction and dialogue literally never took place. There were only two people in the scene: Steve Bannon and Andy Surabian. And yet, according to Surabian, Woodward never called him to verify the story. Surabian laughed upon reading the excerpt with his name in it. He wasn’t mad—it wasn’t like the story was damaging to him, or to anyone else, for that matter. He just couldn’t believe that Bob Woodward of Watergate fame was printing fictionalized accounts made up out of thin air without even making a cursory attempt to confirm their veracity.
Large chunks of the book are recitations of one-on-one conversations between Trump’s senior aides and the President. When the book came out, Woodward was very public about the fact that he had not talked to Trump while writing the book. So obviously he was entirely reliant on single sources for many of these conversations. Unsurprisingly, the individuals in these scenes almost always come across as nearly heroic. And since I’d spent countless hours with many of the people portrayed in the book, I knew much of the dialogue sounded nothing like the way they actually spoke—to the President or to one another.
Throughout the book, Woodward quotes various people who “told an associate” this, that, or the other. Readers are left wondering who this mystery associate is, or what ax they may have to grind. Assessing the credibility of sources is a very real challenge for members of the press. Sources inflate their access and knowledge. They have agendas. Reporters have to attempt to assess what’s true and what’s not. As for readers, they have no idea how trustworthy these sources are.
I know firsthand the value of anonymous sources. A series of stories I broke in Alabama—all based on information provided to me by anonymous sources—ultimately helped take down a corrupt governor. These stories included audio recordings, bank records, and other evidence of wrongdoing. Woodward is a legend as the result of anonymous sources who helped him and his colleagues take down Nixon. But now we have reporters relying on anonymous sources to tell their readers about pretty much everything, including the President’s “mood” at a given moment. It’s a joke.