After the holidays, the House came under Democratic control and the shutdown dragged on. Jared and Ivanka believed that, out of the shutdown, and as part of some new balance in government, there could emerge a grand bargain on the Wall and immigration, including on DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—and the road to amnesty. They seemed to see this imagined resolution as the very basis of a new political equanimity.
Bannon was incredulous. Even more important to the base than the Wall was not bending on DACA or amnesty. Fighting amnesty was the lifeblood of the movement. Besides, the new Congress would not give Trump the Wall even if the White House could bend on amnesty—which it absolutely could not, unless it wanted to commit ritual suicide.
To Bannon, therefore, there was only one way out, other than capitulation. The tariffs on China tested little-known and seldom-used unilateral powers of the president. Now, by aggressively using further unilateral powers, the president could emerge from the humiliating corner he had put himself in: he could announce that the government would reopen and, by declaring a national emergency, he could direct the army to build the Wall. Or anyway, facing inevitable challenges, he could fight this battle in the courts rather than caving on the issue in Congress.
“It’s not pretty,” said Bannon. But it was a solution.
The national emergency rump group—plotting the politics of the move and applying pressure to Trump—consisted of Bannon, Lewandowski, Bossie, and Meadows, who began meeting at the Embassy during the first week of January. The group’s pitch was simple: there was no alternative. True, the declaration of a national emergency would be challenged in court—and, yes, the Wall would likely never be built—but here would be a show of strength rather than weakness. This strategy was not so much about finding a way to build the Wall, the four men understood. It was about finding a way out of the shutdown mess—a mess, they acknowledged, that was purely of the president’s own making.
The counterargument, coming exclusively from Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, was that the Democrats would negotiate. This notion was risible on the face of it, and, as had happened so often over the past two years, none of the men took the couple’s plan seriously.
When the president, beleaguered and confused, was presented with the rump group’s strategy, he seemed to regain his confidence. The idea of declaring a national emergency had immediate appeal. He began describing the declaration as “this power that I have,” as though it were magical.
Trump liked the idea so much that he decided to announce the national emergency in an address to the nation from the Oval Office on January 8. Bannon was skeptical. He warned against both the format and the venue, and said Trump would be judged—and not favorably—against his presidential peers, each memorialized by the Oval Office proscenium. But that, of course, was why Trump was so insistent about announcing it this way: he wanted to show everybody that he was one of them. The border crisis, he declared, was like the Cuban Missile Crisis, when John F. Kennedy faced down the Russians and addressed the nation from the Oval Office.
Well, Bannon thought, at least the president was trying to seize the day. Even if Trump sniffed oddly, as he tended to do when he read from a teleprompter, and even if, in a formal setting, he could never quite match his expression to his words, and even if the stage lights magnified the orange of his hair, the declaration of a national emergency would, Bannon hoped, help him appear to be presidential.
The president’s nine-minute speech astonished Bannon as much as anyone. In the hours, and possibly minutes, before Trump delivered the address, it had been entirely recast by Jared and Ivanka. The national emergency disappeared; in its place was a “humanitarian crisis,” quite changing the constitutional implications and the political argument of a national emergency. Whatever political advantages Trump offered as counterpuncher, as a strongman, as the buck-and-shock-the-system guy, they weren’t here. The speech was, to Bannon, a bad remake of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Ivanka, improbably playing Nurse Ratched, had subdued her patient.
From this solemn and august pulpit, all the more meaningful in that this was his first Oval Office address, Trump delivered, in one of Bannon’s signature expressions, “a nothing burger.” He was hunched over, constrained, small—and as the camera moved in, his eyes appeared to become ever tinier. He was a great actor in a belittling role.
No national emergency, no solution, no offer, no progress. Trump was, for the entire nation to see, trapped.
Mitch McConnell, Bannon observed, had completely distanced himself from the president’s standoff with Congress. With no end to the shutdown in sight, McConnell was spending his time and influence trying to convince Mike Pompeo to run for what would be an open Senate seat in Kansas in 2020.
Ever the chess player, McConnell wanted to remain at a remove from the shutdown until there was a deal to be made—and, a not inconsiderable benefit, he wanted to let Trump hang himself. But Bannon believed he also had a second agenda: McConnell, in concert with other Republican leaders and donors—the Defending Democracy Together group already polling for 2020—was trying to get Pompeo out of the way to clear the path for Nikki Haley to be the Republican presidential nominee. Bannon knew that among powerful Republicans it was fast becoming a a best-case scenario that Trump would not be a candidate in the next cycle. But the fear was that by the winter of 2020 Trump would be a mortally wounded figure, with no one of sufficient stature positioned to either challenge him or take over the ticket. Nobody seemed to regard Mike Pence as a reasonable option, even were he to become, in the next year, the default president. The only practical candidate for a party that, under Trump, had almost entirely forsaken the suburbs and college-educated women nationwide was Nikki Haley.
Bannon, meanwhile, was preoccupied with his own chess game. So far, he had appeared five times before the special counsel. (Some Bannon enemies whispered that he had actually had eight sessions.) He had not been called before the grand jury, which might mean that he was a subject or even a target of the Mueller investigation. Emails from the fall of 2016 could be construed to connect him to Roger Stone and Stone’s apparent involvement in what seemed like a push by the Trump campaign to ensure the release of hacked material from the Democratic National Committee. Bannon had shooed Stone away, but Stone was another of the Trump denizens who tainted everybody else.
Bannon still could not believe there could be a Russian conspiracy case if it hinged on Stone, an unstable fabulist, one of the many around Trump. Stone began his career as a Nixon hanger-on and then turned, briefly, into a successful 1980s-style international lobbyist and fixer in partnership with Paul Manafort, before a sex scandal in the ’90s drove him into caricature and self-parody. He now personified the combination of fanatical lunacy and personal self-interest—he was always selling some book or product—that seemed to more and more exist at the edges of modern politics. Indeed, he was Trumpian, but even more so, often leading Trump to brand him as a nuisance and a nutter. It certainly would be an odd kind of justice, Bannon thought, if the case against the president came down to Stone, Julian Assange, and Jerome Corsi—crazies, conspiracists, bullshit artists, and fringe players all.
Corsi, a right-wing gadfly who had recently become a figure in the investigation, connecting Stone to WikiLeaks and Assange, had once spearheaded the rumors that Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart, who died in 2012 from a heart attack, had been assassinated—and that Bannon, in cahoots with the CIA, was involved. (A raging Bannon had confronted Corsi: “I will shit down your neck if you don’t stop this. Andrew has a widow and four children. Do not keep saying he was murdered. He wasn’t.”) Bannon now found it laughable that Corsi might have played a significant role in any sort of actual plot. Likewise, Bannon could hardly believe that Paul Manafort had suddenly become, once more, a linchpin, with the smoking-gun suggestion that he had passed Trump campaign polling data to the Russians. (“The only polling the Trump campaign did was bullshit polling,” observed Bannon.)
And yet the small-time-crooks nature of the cast did not change the fact Trump that “was forever giving crazy guys crazy orders,” said Bannon, “which he would forget as quickly as he had given them.” This might be chicken shit rather than collusion, but in a sense it was just as damning to find the president so hopelessly mired in chicken shit.
In the New York investigations, the key to pick the lock could well be the investigation of the Trump charity, which could implicate the entire family. If it came to that, Trump, as human as anyone, would want to protect his children; even Trump might have to fall on his sword. And beyond the family charity, there was the RICO investigation in New York, which could easily bring about Trump’s personal financial destruction—all those loan applications, all that potential banking fraud.
“This is where it isn’t a witch hunt—even for the hard core, this is where he turns into just a crooked business guy, and one worth fifty million dollars instead of ten billion dollars,” said Bannon, ever on the edge of disgust. “Not the billionaire he said he was, just another scumbag.”
For Bannon, then, whether Mueller or the Southern District of New York or the Democrats or Trump’s own “psycho” actions provided the engine of destruction, the odds of the president going down remained as great as ever—“and not,” said Bannon, “in a blaze of glory.”
Bannon’s most urgent internal debate, however, was not about whether the president would go down. It was about when and how he would break with Trump—and save the movement for which Trump, in Bannon’s eyes, had never been more than vehicle and agent. He had, he insisted, always seen this moment coming: “Of course, it was obvious from the beginning that the real challenge would be to get this movement past Trump.”
And yet, even as Bannon considered his break with Trump, he considered the opposite, too. Trump’s misfortune had always been Bannon’s opportunity. When, in August 2016, Trump’s campaign was flat on its back, Trump had turned it over to Bannon, no questions asked. “He was totally malleable. I did everything I wanted—everything.”
Now a similar moment had arrived. Trump was at the bottom without options. Bannon started to poll people. “If they ask me to go back in, should I? Would that be insane? Do you think I could save him, given absolute freedom?”
He was already gaming out the rescue. Not long after Trump delivered his Oval Office address, Bannon sat at his table in the Embassy and described his plan. “Here’s the way out of here. It’s as plain as day. In the State of the Union, you lay out the case for the national security emergency. You announce, I am notifying the Joint Chiefs tonight that we are militarizing the border tomorrow morning. And then you welcome the impeachment process. Bring it on, because Stormy Daniels, obstruction, and Russia are now small potatoes. Now they can impeach him for what they really hate him for—trying to change the system. I mean, would you rather be impeached for trying to overthrow the establishment or for paying Stormy Daniels for a blow job?”
But Bannon’s plan was upended almost as soon as it was hatched. On January 16, Nancy Pelosi disinvited Trump from delivering the State of the Union in the House chamber later that month, saying that the address should be postponed until the government reopened. With the greatest élan, she took away the president’s platform before Congress and the nation.
Bannon was full of awe. “Even the guys on the right respect her now. How could they not? She’s crushed this motherfucker.”
Over the next few days, Jared and Ivanka convinced the president that a group of Democratic senators would join the Republican majority and vote out a compromise bill that would contain, in language that always seemed to soothe Trump, a “substantial down payment for the wall.” Cory Booker was in. So was Bob Menendez. Even Chuck Schumer. But this was delusion: there was no break in the Democratic ranks, far from it.
The shutdown—now the longest in American history—continued, with most polls blaming, by dramatic margins, the president and his party for the disaster. Finally, on January 25, thirty-five days in, Trump capitulated on all issues and signed legislation that temporarily reopened the government, claiming that the bill “was in no way a concession.” For the next twenty-one days, the government would be funded while congressional negotiators tried to work out a deal on border security, though the Democrats immediately drew a red line, declaring they would reject any deal that contained funds for the building of a physical wall.
The corner in which Trump had trapped himself required something that nobody believed he could summon: a political master stroke. He was once again in a familiar fix. He wanted what he wanted but lacked any clear understanding of how to get it. The Wall—to which he had sworn absolute commitment, unmindful of its logistical and political complications, and then, over the past two years, quite neglected—was now hung hopelessly around his neck.
Flailing, Trump declared that if the budget negotiations continued to go nowhere, he would close the government again, an option no one believed the rest of his party would ever accept. He was left with only the same threat he had been issuing, and then beating a hasty retreat from, for more than a month: he would use emergency powers to build the Wall. But his turnarounds had already undermined the nature of the emergency—he had sacrificed both logic and high ground. The Republican leadership warned that any declaration of a national emergency might well be overturned by a congressional majority—in which case he would have to veto a bill supported by some in his own party. Whatever the outcome, he certainly would not be endearing himself to fellow Republicans.
Bad went to worse; one rebuke followed another. On January 29, the director of the CIA, Gina Haspel, the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, and the director of National Intelligence, Dan Coats—each of them Trump appointments—went to Capitol Hill and said, in effect, that the president had no idea what he was talking about in his assessments of threats against the United States. Never before had intelligence chiefs so publicly contradicted a president. Trump was living, they seemed to say, in another reality.
In early February, Senate Republicans, en masse, broke with Trump and opposed his plan to remove troops from Syria. Since retaking the House, the Democrats had been proclaiming Congress as a coequal branch of government with the White House. Now the Republicans were making the same point.
The Southern District of New York, its RICO case unfolding, leaked word that it was interviewing Trump Organization executives. And federal prosecutors in New York suddenly issued a new, wide-ranging subpoena relating to the funds that Trump’s inaugural committee had raised and spent, meaning the feds were now following Bannon’s certain road to perdition.
The president, listening to Kushner, continued to somehow believe that the Democrats would yet offer him a face-saving deal. Chuck Schumer, he kept saying, was someone he could talk to.
Lou Dobbs, a mainstay of Trump support and philosophy, told Bannon he could not believe how delusional Trump had become.
Three days after the shutdown ended, Nancy Pelosi invited the president to deliver the State of the Union on February 5. In the days before the address, Jared and Ivanka’s allies began to leak reports that Trump would deliver a “unity” speech. This was part of the continuing Kushner plan to cultivate a new atmosphere and a new “cordiality,” he told confidants, with Democrats. Kushner was even suggesting that Trump might pivot from the Republicans and make several key deals with Democrats—on infrastructure, on drug pricing, and on Kushner’s fond notion of a far-reaching immigration reform bill.
Just as he had been from the beginning of his presidency, a fundamentally self-obsessed and otherwise uninterested Trump was willing to accede to his daughter and son-in-law’s desire for establishment status. At the same time, he was—and he usually, if not always, understood this—utterly dependent on his hard-core supporters’ belief that he stood for what they stood for. He would reliably tilt back and forth between these divergent poles, but by what degree depended on the hour of the day.
A few days before the State of the Union, Bannon was in New York having breakfast with one of Trump’s old friends. The discussion was, with a sense of growing urgency, about the fate of Donald Trump.
“I think he’ll revert back to us,” said Bannon, predicting the tenor and thrust of the State of the Union speech. “He’s a vaudeville actor. He can’t lose his audience. He can read a room.” But Bannon also understood that Trump was now operating in a world of quickly diminishing returns. “The whole apparatus is cutting him loose,” he observed.
Trump’s old friend, enumerating all the ongoing investigations and anticipating an eventual endgame, wondered, “Who does he negotiate with? How does he step down?”
“Well, he won’t go out classy,” answered Bannon. “Nixon was classy even though he was Nixon—and he was smart. We don’t have smart and we don’t have classy. If you think about it, American history doesn’t have that many unseemly moments. Even bad guys, looking at the end, take their medicine. This is not going to be like that. This is going to be very … unseemly.”
“Romney? Maybe it’s Romney who goes to him,” said the friend about the former presidential candidate who had recently been elected to the Senate. “Or McConnell?”
“Romney—hated,” said Bannon. “Mitch? Hated, too, but Mitch is a deal guy. You can’t go to Trump and walk him through a process. You’ve got to go to him with a deal; the only way Trump leaves is with a release. DOJ, State AG, Labor Department, all the RICO stuff, no prison time—and he keeps all his money. It’s got to be clean.”
“Not going to happen,” said the friend. “There’s no clean deal. Nobody to give him one. So, okay, it’s got to be Ivanka and Jared who go to him. Like Julie and David Eisenhower, who went to Nixon.”
“David Eisenhower was Eisenhower’s grandson,” said Bannon. “Jared and Ivanka are coming from very different stock. They are grifters”—a word that Bannon had been using since the early days of the administration, introducing it into the modern political lexicon. “They understand that if he’s out, the grift is over. The grift only keeps going as long as he’s around. That’s the scam. That’s how they get their phone calls returned from Apple, that’s how she gets her trademarks from the Chinese. Come on, they are nothing burgers. If he’s gone, nobody’s gonna rally around them. What, Jared and Ivanka will keep Camelot alive?”
After two years in the White House, Trump still had no speechwriters. When preparing for the State of the Union, the president’s staff farmed out much of the writing to Newt Gingrich and his people. Other parts of the job were managed by Jared and Ivanka, although neither actually wrote; instead, they threw out strategic thoughts. Stephen Miller played a role, too, but he wrote only in PowerPoint and was, to say the least, a limited wordsmith. Also involved were Lewandowski and Bossie, who had, between them, written two books—even though, practically speaking, neither of them had done any of the writing.
This was the team. The early drafts of the speech were so flowery that Trump could barely make his way through them. He couldn’t follow the abstract messaging and stumbled over the wordy, warm-tummy unity stuff.
On the night of the speech, the president was, strangely, unaccompanied in the limousine from the White House to the Capitol. The staging that evening was telling as well. White House staffers traditionally wait backstage as the president speaks, but Jared and Ivanka—now reverting to family status—joined Don Jr., Eric, Tiffany, and Melania (absent Barron) in pride-of-place guest seating.
Bannon, getting ready to watch the speech in New York—“I usually hate watching this stuff, so cringe-worthy”—was cautiously optimistic. He had been slipped pieces of the final text and said, with considerable satisfaction, “Unity is off the table.”
The address went on for a long hour and twenty minutes, often sounding rather like the result of a high school assignment to write a State of the Union speech. The president divided his time almost evenly between bland words about the importance of accommodating different points of view and an implacable throw down. Warming to his favorite topics, he offered a surly censure to the threat of oncoming investigations. He renewed his expostulations about the Wall and his promise that he would build it. And the immigrant hordes, he said, were once again heading in our direction.
“There it is,” said Bannon. “That’s the headline. Come on. Where else do you go? If you put yourself in a corner, you’ve got to be ready to come charging out of it. How many times can you announce that you’ll take nothing less than a big, beautiful Wall—and then take less?”
Politics favors the nimble. If the worst goes down, you need to have another card to play. But here was Trump, his hands empty.
“If you put Trump in the Republican Senate caucus and turned out the lights and counted to ten, he’d be dead,” said one Trump ally. The Republican Party, feeling both sorry for itself and ashamed, was also out of cards.
The twenty-one-day negotiating period was almost over, and the new shutdown clock ticked toward February 15. The Senate and House conferees were hard at work; they evinced little doubt that they would accomplish their task and showed limited concern for the White House’s reaction. The president would agree or the Congress would vote without his support and overrule him if he attempted a veto. Jared Kushner was happily telling people that everything was under control. No worries: the government would not close down and the Wall would not be funded. All good, everybody on board.
Except: the man who had spent his life making his personal brand about winning was now losing. Calling more attention to his loss, Trump showed up for a rally at the U.S.-Mexico border and insisted that the Wall would be built, that in fact it was being built. Look, over there, do you see it?
Back in Washington, Kushner continued to provide assurances that his father-in-law would take the negotiated deal, which was now less advantageous to the president than what had been on the table before the shutdown. They would revert to the old language; the new bill would make a “down payment” on some kind of barrier at the border. “He’ll go for that,” said Kushner.
But hostile armies surrounded him. On one side, Trump faced a majority of the electorate that believed he had abused his high office and soiled the country, its views ever hardening. On another, he faced, only days or weeks away, an array of investigations that were now set to enumerate his crimes and overwhelm his presidency. On the third, he faced a brewing rebellion by his own party, if not its open contempt. And on the fourth, he faced a Democratic House majority that was effectively pledged to his destruction. Could he escape yet again?
On February 14, William P. Barr was sworn in as attorney general. Among other duties, it was now his job to oversee the federal prosecutors and grand juries investigating the president. Barr replaced Matthew Whitaker, Trump’s hand-picked acting attorney general. In the days after Whitaker’s appointment, Mitch McConnell had let the president know that his plan to bypass Senate approval wouldn’t work. Trump needed to nominate someone acceptable to the Republican majority—and he had to do it within weeks, not months.
The GOP leadership was anticipating that the attorney general would need to be a broker between the DOJ investigations, including Mueller’s, and the president. Looking further down the road, the attorney general was a likely point person in the complex and very delicate negotiations that might need to be conducted with the president to avoid a constitutional crisis.
Bill Barr was McConnell’s suggestion. He was a safe choice: Barr had served once before as attorney general, from 1991 to 1993 under President George H.W. Bush. He was embraced by Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and even by the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, suggesting something of a consensus about the way things might need to go if, in fact, push came to shove.
Barr was sold to the president as a respected attorney who had a record of believing in a strong executive. He had publicly expressed misgivings about the Mueller investigation, especially its emphasis on obstruction of justice. In June 2018, Barr had stated his opinion in an unsolicited memo to the Justice Department; the memo struck many legal observers as little better than an effort by a first-year law student, its purpose solely to curry favor with the president.
But in a larger sense, Trump had missed the point. What Barr represented was the establishment view. He was not only a Republican fixture and a Bush-family loyalist, he had worked for the CIA and had long-standing ties to the intelligence community. All these details were gently obscured when describing his bona fides to the president.
Barr, meanwhile, was telling friends that he was looking for a payday. If he somehow succeeded in navigating this combustible situation—an unpredictable and possibly unstable president, an uncompromising Democratic House majority, and an unhappy Republican leadership—and at the same time managed to satisfy some ineffable GOP establishment ideal, there were many, many future millions in it for him.
Barr’s mandate was to avoid both a constitutional conflagration and the destruction of the Republican Party. In Barr’s view, a successful navigation past a naked showdown with Donald Trump ought to yield a big payday—one he would deserve.
Trump spent the night of February 14 making calls. Trying to talk his way out of his corner, he rehashed the serial disasters of the past few weeks.
Nobody was defending him, he bitterly complained. Nobody was out there on his behalf. The Feds were making Weisselberg talk, he declared with great agitation. Michael Cohen was the puppet of the Clintons; Jared had prevented him from making his stand on the Wall. And by the way, he said, it was a done deal—Jared would be indicted. That’s what he was hearing.
So here was an idea: What if he pardoned everybody? Everybody! For the good of the country! He returned once again to the magic of his pardon powers. “I could pardon El Chapo,” he said.
All of the Democrats were weak, he said with sudden determination. Weak! He could destroy them all. But Mitch was fucking him. What a fucking snake McConnell was.
He had another bold idea, too: a new vice president. Boom! Pence goes out the door. Fresh blood. Big. Surprise. “Probably have to pick Nikki Haley,” he added, a bit more glumly.
He knew he was going to get killed on the national emergency. But what else could he do? He had to do it. Should he do it? He had to. The Wall, the Wall, the Wall. The fucking Wall.
“He’s like a deer that’s been shot,” said a surfeited Bannon.
The next morning, panicked, irrational, stuck in the loop of his own stream of consciousness—more, it seemed, just to get it over with, since the fun was now gone—he declared his national emergency.