Bannon often recounted, with continuing astonishment, the many times the president “looked me in the eye and lied,” and how he invariably did this with maximal sangfroid and aplomb.
The pee-tape episode was a formative lesson.
The U.S. intelligence chiefs, on January 6, 2017, two weeks before the inaugural, had come to Trump Tower to brief the president-elect on some of the nation’s key secrets. James Comey, the director of the FBI, then stayed behind and informed Trump about the existence of the Steele dossier, a report prepared by Christopher Steele, a British intelligence operative, and largely funded by the Democrats. The report—a raw file of rumors and speculation that was already circulating among various U.S. press outlets, one or more of which would likely publish it soon—said the Russians had information that could compromise Trump. This purportedly included video and audio recordings of scenes that took place in the room where Trump was staying at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton hotel in 2013 during the Miss Universe Pageant—most especially images of prostitutes urinating on the king-size bed, the same bed that Barack and Michelle Obama had slept in when they had visited Moscow.
Not long after the briefing, an angry and resolute Trump sat Bannon down. With powerful, forthright assurance and dead-on eye contact, Trump declared that this was preposterous—and in fact impossible. The reason was simple: he hadn’t stayed overnight in the hotel. After his plane had landed that day, he—along with Keith Schiller, his security aide—had gone from the airport to the Ritz Carlton to change his clothes, then to the pageant and dinner, and then back to the plane.
“That story was told to me a dozen times, maybe more, verbatim, and the details never changed,” Bannon recalled. “It was only later that I found out that story is correct except for one small difference: they came over a day earlier. They arrived on Friday morning, not Saturday morning, they were there for an entire day—and that’s when the girls got sent over and Keith, now in the revised telling, sent them away.”
Also on Bannon’s list of whoppers was Trump’s assertion that he had never spent a night with the porn star Stormy Daniels. “Never happened,” he told Bannon. He also lied about the payoff to Daniels: he had no idea. Both denials would, in short order, implode.
His lies, Bannon came to understand, were compulsive, persistent, and without even a minimal grounding in reality. Once, imperturbably denying the undeniable, Trump told the Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson that it was in fact not him on the grab-them-by-the-pussy tape—just trickery to make him look bad.
Understanding that the president was a barefaced liar left his aides with a nearly continuous sense of alarm and foreboding. But the trait also helped define Trump’s strength: lying was a powerful tool in his arsenal. Politicians and businesspeople dissemble and misrepresent and spin and prevaricate and mask the truth, but they prefer to avoid out-and-out lying. They have some shame, or at least a fear of getting caught. But lying willfully, adamantly, without distress or regret, and with absolute disregard of consequences can be a bulwark if not a fail-safe defense. It turns out that somebody always believes you. Fooling some of the people all of the time defined Trump’s hard-core base.
Trump’s constant lies forced the people around him to become complicit in those lies, or, at the very least, sheepish bystanders to them. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, had developed a particular pained and immovable expression when called on to repeat and defend the president’s lies.
Kellyanne Conway, for her part, took a literal, almost moralistic position. If the president said something, the mere fact that he had said it meant that the statement deserved to be defended. In this, like a lawyer (and she was a lawyer), she could defend the statement because her client had not told her it was untrue.
Conway, in fact, had perfected the art of satisfying Trump while running from him. She had come into the White House professing her desire “to be in the room,” but she survived by never being in the room, understanding that the room is where Stalin kills you.
Kellyanne Conway’s defense of the president’s lies had additionally seemed to bring her into a public confrontation with her husband, George Conway, a partner at the Wall Street firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, one of the wealthiest and most prestigious in the country. Conway found himself under enormous pressure from his firm to distance himself from Trump and his lies; he accomplished this, apparently at his wife’s expense, through Twitter, offering a running commentary on the president’s falsehoods and misrepresentations regarding his legal position. Conway’s stream of tweets became something of a new political genre, the spouse commentary.
In fact, the Conways’ public disagreement was, some acquaintances and colleagues believed, itself a lie, one in which the couple conspired to distance themselves from Trump’s lies. “They are of one mind about Trump,” said a friend of the couple’s. “They hate him.” The husband would take a moral stand, protecting his own reputation and law firm partnership, while the wife, who privately professed to be aghast at Trump, continued to defend her client. The Conways had an $8 million hotel-size house near the Kalorama neighborhood in Washington, not far from Jared and Ivanka’s house, a manse that the couple very much liked. The neighborhood, reliably anti-Trump, gave the cold shoulder to Jared and Ivanka. George Conway’s public objections to the president helped keep the neighbors happy.
Still, while Trump’s adamant falsehoods unnerved his aides, they also reassured. Neither evidence nor logic would force the president into an admission. He would hold like the toughest barnacle to his lies.
On the part of many in the White House, there was a constant fear, if not assumption, that some piece of irrefutable evidence would eventually surface and cause severe, perhaps fatal, damage. What if, for instance, someone actually produced a copy of the pee tape? Not to worry, said those who knew him best: even in such a predicament, Trump would not only deny it but convince a good part of the electorate to embrace his denial. It would be his word against a fake video.
The truth would not be shaken loose from him. You could count on him: no matter what the circumstances, Trump would never be beaten into submission. It was his word against, sometimes, everybody else’s, but it was his word and he would never waver from it.
One could argue that Trump’s métier—indeed, his primary business strategy—was lying. Trump Tower, Trump Shuttle, Trump Soho, Trump University, the Trump Casinos, Mar-a-Lago—all these enterprises were followed by a trail of claims and litigation that told a consistent story of borderline and often outright fraud. Broke in the 1990s, he somehow returned a few years later to billionaire status—hell, a billionaire ten times over!—at least in his telling. He was a con man, but that was not the surprising part. The surprising part was that Trump, in the face of the obvious, could so steadfastly deny the drumbeat of particulars regarding his dubious dealings and malfeasance. Very little about him was real, and yet he managed to be at least halfway believed by enough people so that he could continue the con.
This was where he really shone: he always stayed in character. When a person who is the target of multiple investigations remains outwardly untroubled, the effect is quite extraordinary. Such apparent coolness under fire fully exploits, to an almost unimaginable degree, the concept of innocent until proven guilty. Trump believed he would never be proven guilty; therefore, he was innocent. And he carried the total confidence and even serenity of the innocent—or at least of someone who knows how difficult it is to establish the guilt of a person capable of admitting nothing, of never wavering. The fact that he had stayed out of jail showed, impressively for many, how easily the system could be played. Seen from this point of view, he really might be a genius.
Through it all, Trump remained indomitable. He might complain that the accusations against him were outrageous, but he never seemed less than sanguine about the eventual outcome.
“I always win,” he frequently declared. “I know how to handle it.” Or, another favorite: “I never blink.”
Trump certainly ran his business as though it were a criminal enterprise. In the Trump Organization the truth needed to be contained in a tight circle—that was the secret sauce. Trump measured loyalty, that significant currency of his business and walk-on-the-wild-side lifestyle, by who was so dependent on him, and as clearly exposed as he was, that they would of course lie for him.
The model here was mobster life. Trump not only knew mobsters, and did business with them, he romanticized them. Mobsters had more fun. He would not conform to behavior that respectability demanded; he would go out of his way not to be respectable. Trump was the Dapper Don; it was a joke he embraced. His New York, his era of nightlife and prizefights—with Roy Cohn, the gold standard of Mob lawyers, by his side—was a Mob heyday.
Hence the special nature of his inner circle at the Trump Organization. They were all truly his: his executive assistant (holding the title of senior vice president), Rhona Graff; his accountant, Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg; his lawyers, Michael Cohen and Marc Kasowitz; his security man, Keith Schiller; his bodyguard, Matt Calamari, eventually elevated to Trump Organization COO; his children. Later, in the White House, Hope Hicks would join this trusted circle, as would Corey Lewandowski.
This was extreme codependence. You became an extension of DJT, a part of the strange organism that, daily, demonstrated an uncanny ability to survive every threat.
One person who became a part of this organism a dozen years before Trump became president was Erik Whitestone, a young sound engineer in New York City. Whitestone worked for Mark Burnett, the TV producer who in 2004 launched The Apprentice, the reality show that presented the virtually bankrupt Trump as a supremely successful businessman—and made him world famous. In the first week of production, Whitestone was assigned the job of putting the microphone up Trump’s shirt. Given the physical proximity this task required—you had to reach under the jacket and shirt—everyone else on the production team had resisted it. Trump, with his size, height, and glowering demeanor, was not only off-putting; for no clear reason, he would unzip his pants and pull them down partway, exposing tighty-whities. “It was like sticking your head in the lion’s mouth,” said Whitestone, who found himself stuck with the job.
Not long after the show’s production got under way, Whitestone, now on permanent Trump-mic duty, took a day off and someone else, an African American sound technician, was given the assignment. Trump flipped out.
A frantic Burnett found Whitestone at home. Trump had barricaded himself in the bathroom. “Donald won’t go on until you get here,” said Burnett. “So get here immediately!”
An hour later, Whitestone came rushing in to find Trump screaming from behind the bathroom door. “Erik, what the fuck, they tried to fuck me up … They put dirty fingerprints on my collars, they tried to fuck up my tie.”
Once the day’s filming was over, Burnett took Whitestone aside. “Dude, from now on, all you do is deal with Donald,” said Burnett, turning Whitestone into The Apprentice’s official Trump whisperer.
After that, every single morning of the shooting season, for the next fourteen years, Whitestone would show up at Trump’s apartment and meet Keith Schiller, becoming a constant shadow presence in Trump’s life—“countless hours sitting in his apartment,” as he put it.
Reflecting on the experience, Whitestone said, “I was with him so intimately for such a long period of time he’d get kind of sentimental: ‘Erik, you’re like a son to me and I have a son named Eric, isn’t that weird?’”
It was a no-intimacy intimacy. Trump would offer Whitestone gifts of things that he had gotten for free, such as products from the Art of Shaving, a kitschy men’s line. Trump turned everyone into a family member, at the same time offering a running commentary on his family’s flaws. “He kept saying how much he wished he’d never given Don Jr. his name and wished he could take it back,” recalled Whitestone.
Once, riding in his limo, Trump had a sudden inspiration. “‘Erik, I’m going to write your father a letter about what a wonderful guy you are.’ And a week later, Rhona called and asked for my parents’ address. And two weeks later my dad calls and says, ‘I got a great letter from Mr. Trump about what a wonderful guy you are. I think I’ll write him back.’ The show wrapped and I didn’t see Trump for about four months. And then I walk into his office and he’s like, ‘Erik, I got a letter from your dad.’ And he recited verbatim from a letter he got four months ago. ‘Your father agreed with me that you’re a great guy.’”
Trump did favors for Whitestone—or, anyway, got other people to do them. Michael Cohen, for instance, got Whitestone’s child into private school in New York.
Whitestone became what everyone around Trump had to become—long-suffering—because Trump was always ready to explode with anger. “It’s not your fault,” said Whitestone. “It’s just your turn, was how we put it.”
“How’s the weather?” was the code for the boss’s mood.
But Trump was a simple machine. Whitestone understood his singular interests—sports and girls—and learned they could be used as reliable distractions.
“If he was in a bad mood and we were going from office to boardroom—we had to go through the Trump Tower lobby—with these eastern European tourists looking at the waterfall—‘God’s urinal,’ he called it—I would scan for an attractive woman. ‘Hey,’ I’d say, ‘at six o’clock.’”
Girls were the constant. “‘Erik, go get her, and bring her up.’ And so, me: ‘Mr. Trump wants to know if you want to come up and see the boardroom.’ He’d hug them and grope them and send them on their way.”
Riding in the limo, “He’d just roll down the window and say ‘What’s up?’ to the ladies. ‘Hello, ladies…’ to two hot girls. ‘That was fun,’ he’d say, ‘remind me to do that again.’”
Once, coming back from Chicago, a young woman, an attractive interior designer who was pitching Trump on a project, hitched a ride on Trump’s plane. “He led her into the bedroom with a mirrored ceiling … She comes out, half an hour later, dress ripped off, staggering out, she sits in the seat … and then he comes out with his tie off, shirt untucked, and says, ‘Fellas … just got laid.’”
There was always one or another of Trump’s assistants in the car with him. “All his executive assistants were superhot. ‘Come with us,’ he’d order one of them on the way out to the limo. He and she sitting next to each other as he tries to grope her, with her blocking him like she’s done it a hundred times before.”
In some sense, everybody around Trump, everybody in the intimate Trump circle, became a Trump body man. “We’re flying to Chicago, and the Trump plane wasn’t working so we had to use another little plane and I had to sit facing him—knees almost touching—and he’s all pissed off because his plane’s broken down. I pull out a book to avoid eye contact. It was the book DisneyWar. But he can’t be ignored. He needs to talk. ‘What book is that … What’s it about … Am I in it? Read it to me.’ I tell him it’s got Mark Burnett pitching The Apprentice. ‘How does it make me look?’”
You had to adapt yourself to an idiosyncratic and quite alarming creature, Whitestone observed. “He can’t walk down steps … can’t walk down hills. [He’s got] mental blocks … [He] can’t handle numbers … they have no meaning to him.”
His transparency was as appalling as it was mesmerizing. “Once, we were with a bunch of people and Don Jr. suggested that Trump had been to two Yankees games in a row where they had lost, so maybe his father was bad luck. And he went ape-shit. ‘Why the fuck would you say that in front of these people? These fucking people are going to go out into the world and tell everyone, “Trump is bad luck.”’ Don Jr. was practically crying. ‘Dad, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Dad.’
“And at the hospital, when his grandchild was born, Don Jr.’s kid, [Trump said], ‘Why the fuck do I have to go see this kid? Don Jr. has too many fucking kids.’”
Everybody around Trump got drafted into his schemes. In the early days of the presidential campaign, Whitestone, not least because he was inexpensive, became part of the media team. “He’s got a plan. I’m going to do his campaign commercials: ‘I want you to use our boardroom set and get a bunch of Arabs and all their Arab gear and we’ll put a sign on the table that says “OPEC” and we’ll have them going, “Hoooluuuuluuuhooo, hoooluuulyyhoood,” and we’ll have this subtitle, “Death to the Americans,” or “We’ll Screw the Americans,” and then I’ll walk in and I’ll say a bunch of presidential bullshit … and then we’ll make it go viral. Call Corey Lewandowski—here’s his number—and set it up.’”
As Whitestone knew, the unbound Trump, to which the insiders at The Apprentice were regularly exposed, was captured on thousands of hours of outtakes. Those fabled tapes still exist, but they are now controlled by Burnett and MGM. “Like the ark of the covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, [they are] somewhere on a pallet, wrapped in tape, in a desert outside of Los Angeles. Eighteen cameras shooting almost twenty-four hours a day are saved on DVDs … We didn’t have hard drives.”
It is probably the richest historical record ever made of a man in his pre-presidential professional capacity—fourteen years of The Apprentice preserved. Whitestone remembered certain moments with particular clarity.
“Someone said ‘cunt’ and someone else said, ‘You can’t say “cunt” on TV,’ and Donald said, ‘Why can’t you say “cunt”?’ and said ‘Cunt, cunt, cunt, cunt. There, I’ve said it on TV. Now you can say it.’”
And: “‘You’re very pretty, stand up, walk over here, turn around.’ [There was] constant dialogue about who has better tits and then bitter fights with producers about not using this. ‘Why can’t we?’ he’d say. ‘This is great. This is great television.’”
Speaking about Trump more generally, Whitestone said: “A twelve-year-old in a man’s body, all he does is takedowns of people based on their physical appearance—short, fat, bald, whatever it is. There weren’t producers who could say, Don’t say that … We would just send him through the doors and hit Record … It’s like being in the backseat of a car being driven by a really drunk driver … holy shit. He was as incoherent then … no more, no less … as he is now, repeating thoughts and weird phrases … His weird sniffing thing (‘I have hay fever’) … [He was] always eating Oscar Mayer baloney … [Once he] pulled a slice of baloney out and shoved it in my mouth…”
Michael Cohen stepped into the Trump circle in 2006. Cohen was an upper-middle-class, son-of-a-surgeon Long Island Jewish kid. Impressed by an uncle who owned a Mob-connected Brooklyn restaurant, a popular Mob hangout, Cohen recast himself as a would-be tough. He married a girl from Ukraine whose family had immigrated to Brooklyn, then got a degree from Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School (the nation’s lowest-ranked law school, according to the legal website Above the Law), became a lawyer, and amassed a fleet of taxis. His wife’s father helped introduce Cohen to Trump, and for Cohen, Trump stood out: he was a dazzling model of fast-and-loose business practices and lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous glamour.
A successful career at the Trump Organization depended on getting Trump’s attention and favor. Cohen, like Trump, played at being a mobster to the point of becoming one. The coarser, grosser, and blunter you could be, the better; such behavior affirmed your standing with the boss. Trump’s oft-used injunction—“Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”—was taken as both license and direction to do whatever it took to advance the Trump cause.
Sam Nunberg, testifying before the Mueller grand jury, said that when he worked at Trump Tower in the years before the campaign, he saw Cohen with bags of cash. Cohen was, for Trump, literally a bag man, dealing with women and other off-the-books issues.
In the world of the Trump Organization, Trump lieutenants received a lot of their compensation in side deals. Michael Cohen styled himself as speaking for Trump around the globe; he tried to negotiate lucrative deals and seize “branding opportunities.” These efforts soon earned Cohen the hostility of Ivanka and her brothers, since this was exactly what they were supposed to be doing. In their eyes, the lawyer was one more competitor for Trump’s attention.
During the 2016 campaign, Cohen continually tried to impose himself on the operation, ever shuttling from the Trump Organization offices in Trump Tower to the floor housing the campaign. Finally, in August 2016, Bannon banned him from the political offices. At one point, Cohen tried to “fix” the election by himself, conducting his own negotiation with one of the myriad people who claimed to have Hillary Clinton’s thirty-three thousand missing emails. He was shocked when he did not get the call to replace Corey Lewandowski as campaign manager; Cohen thought he had set up this move with Don Jr., but Paul Manafort got the job instead. And he was shocked again when he wasn’t tapped to replace Manafort—the job Bannon got.
For the media, Cohen was a reliable leaker about Trump and the campaign. Among senior campaign aides, he was later regarded as a central voice in NBC correspondent Katy Tur’s book about the campaign, despite Trump’s antipathy toward her.
After Trump’s unexpected victory, Cohen still aimed high: he expected to be chief of staff. Keeping Cohen out of the White House involved a dedicated effort by the Trump presidential circle. His exclusion came as a bitter disappointment.
Cohen effectively had no supporters other than Trump himself, whose support for him, as with almost everyone, was shallow and fleeting. “He’s supposed to be a fixer,” said Trump about Cohen, “but he breaks a lot of stuff.”
All of Trump’s people saw Cohen as a flashing danger signal. In Bannon’s head-shaking view, you had to carefully circumscribe your suspicions about “what kind of crazy shit he’s done with Trump over the years. You have no earthly idea what kind of stuff—none.”
After the raid on Cohen’s office, Trump was yet unconcerned about Cohen’s loyalty. Many in the Trump circle had a different view: they knew that Cohen felt not just slighted by Trump but frequently cheated by him. Cohen secretly taped some of his meetings with Trump, at least in part to have a record of their loosey-goosey financial arrangements. But, at the same time, Cohen was as likely to be cheating Trump as trying to please him. Either way, they were both in it together.
The Stormy Daniels payoff was a characteristic Cohen operation, designed as much to please Trump as to solve a particular problem. Marc Kasowitz, Trump’s outside lawyer, had spurned the idea of making any sort of payment. After all, Daniels’s story was already out: the Wall Street Journal, citing reports of another affair in 2006 and 2007 with Karen McDougal, had mentioned this one as well. Bannon, too, shrugged it off, saying that, following the grab-them-by-the-pussy tape, an article about another Trump affair would change no votes. But Trump, as he often did, ignored the counsel of his advisers and encouraged his most loyal fixer to fix it.
Trump was personally offended by the FBI’s behavior during the raid of Cohen’s home and office, citing the “Gestapo tactics” used on his lawyer, in which he saw the heavy hand of the Justice Department. But he was also oddly sanguine. “I have deniability,” he repeated, reassuring nobody.
The truth was, nobody knew what Michael Cohen knew. The Trump Organization was a freelance affair, with everyone acting on the whim of Donald Trump or in the name of Donald Trump or trying to satisfy the anticipated urges of Donald Trump.
And anyway, Trump believed, whatever Cohen knew, he wouldn’t talk about it, because Trump could always pardon him—that, for both Trump and Cohen, was money in the bank. Indeed, Trump felt uniquely protected by his pardon power, and uniquely powerful because of it. But, in a progression of Trump thinking, he went from seeing his pardon power as a tool for his own protection to seeing it as a gift he could bestow. Or, as powerfully, he could threaten not to use it.
To Trump’s mounting displeasure, not long after the FBI raid, Cohen began to regularly appear at the outdoor café around the corner from the Regency, on Sixty-First and Park Avenue in Manhattan. Here again, he seemed eager to style himself as a mafioso, using the Upper East Side café as his version of a Brooklyn social club. He smoked cigars for the paparazzi and appeared not to have a care in the world.
Cohen’s visibility was his way of sending his pointed and threatening message to the president—I’m out here, for everyone to see. And as important as the pardon he expected to come was the expectation that Trump would foot his legal bills. Because if he didn’t …
But the message received by Trump was not so much a threat, something he might have understood. Instead, he saw a man stealing the limelight. The factotum, the toady, was trying to claim attention for himself. And, what’s more, he wanted Trump’s money!
Ivanka, too, was focused on and personally offended by Cohen’s showboating, prompting her to bring Cohen’s daughter’s Instagram feed to her father’s notice. Trump became inordinately interested in following Samantha Cohen, whose posts provided a travelogue of the nineteen-year-old’s expensive trips, unabated since her father’s travails had begun. The teenager seemed to particularly enjoy posing in an almost unending array of bikinis and resort wear.
As April wore on, Trump became obsessed with what Cohen was likely to get out of all this attention. He was trying to be a star, said Trump. “He has a media strategy,” declared Trump with evident surprise. He began to compare Cohen unfavorably to Manafort, who was “keeping his head down.”
It was a weird and potentially dangerous break in the Mob ethic. While a more conventional approach might sensibly have focused on the care and feeding of Michael Cohen, understanding the intersection of the Trump and Cohen interests, Trump, as in so many situations, seemed not to be able to align cause and effect. Instead, he appeared to go out of his way to antagonize his former lawyer, publicly belittling and insulting him.
He turned on Cohen’s daughter, too, and her Instagram travelogue. “She just waves her tits around,” he told a friend. “No respect for the situation.”
Trump, by insisting on Cohen’s utter lack of importance, created exactly the opposite situation: after years of toadying and bag carrying for the Trump Organization, after the ceaseless tending to and caring for Donald Trump, after worshipping a man who returned no consideration at all, Michael Cohen had arrived. Suddenly, he and Trump were united with equal weight and equal power, their names appearing nearly every day in news accounts in the same paragraph. Their fates were joined—just as Michael Cohen had always dreamed.