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Trump wakes up at 5 a.m. and sleeps only four hours a night. Before entering the White House, he slept even less. A cleanliness freak, the president likes to take a long shower of fifteen minutes. Then he sprays his famous hair.
“What’s the difference between a wet raccoon and Donald J. Trump’s hair?” Trump asked during his Comedy Central roast in 2011. “A wet raccoon doesn’t have seven billion f—ing dollars in the bank.”
“I do not wear a toupee,” he told supporters at a campaign rally, pulling a woman from the audience to prove it by having her touch his very real, not-a-toupee hair. At another rally, he complained that hair spray is not what it used to be because of concerns that it affects the ozone layer.
Over breakfast, Trump will start reading the papers. At 6 a.m., he begins watching the news. He watches Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. Then he switches to ABC, NBC, and CBS.
Trump reads the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal cover to cover. Trump also reads op-eds in the Washington Times and looks at the New York Post and the Financial Times.
“He reads magazines as they come in, particularly if it’s about him,” Bannon says. “He’s a voracious consumer of the cable news channels. He just watches those nonstop. He watches all the morning shows.”
Trump does not use a computer or go online, but staffers will print him out articles that appear on Breitbart News and the Daily Caller. Melania also gives him articles, sometimes with handwritten notes with her comments or pointing out particular sections that he should read. Trump will walk around with a box of press clippings he plans to peruse.
Aides who wanted to discredit Bannon internally would give Trump articles from Breitbart to make the president mad at him, suggesting he is not the president’s friend. Bannon would deny he had anything to do with the articles critical of the president or of White House aides and say he did not control Breitbart.
By 10 a.m., Trump is in the Oval Office. Trump himself selected new Oval Office wallpaper from York Wallcoverings in Pennsylvania, where executives first thought the order was a prank. The print was a baroque floral damask pattern with tones of white, light taupe, and gold, Trump’s favorite color. It had been supplied to previous administrations but was discontinued in 2014. Yet the White House insisted on having it delivered the same day it was ordered. It was to be part of a White House renovation plan that included a new heating and air-conditioning system, repainting, and replacement of all the carpeting.
The company halted other work and assigned twenty employees to the job. They had to mix all the inks by hand. But ninety-six rolls of the wallpaper arrived at the White House on time.
In case an intruder is able to penetrate the White House, the Secret Service provides secret alarms in the Oval Office and the White House residence. The Secret Service’s Technical Security Division (TSD) also installs devices at White House entrances to detect radiation and explosives. Populated with real-life Qs, James Bond’s fictional gadget master, TSD sweeps the White House and hotel rooms for electronic bugs. While electronic bugs have never been found in the White House, they are occasionally found in hotel rooms where they had been planted to pick up conversations of previous guests.
TSD samples the air and water in the White House for contaminants, radioactivity, and deadly bacteria. It keeps the air in the White House at high pressure to expel possible contaminants. It provides agents with special hoods called expedient hoods to be placed over the president’s head in the event of a chemical attack. Each year, TSD screens nearly a million pieces of mail sent to the White House for pathogens and other biological threats. In conjunction with Los Alamos National Laboratory or Sandia National Laboratories, it runs top-secret risk assessments to find any holes in physical or cyber security measures.
In case an assassin manages to penetrate all the security while trying to see the president, TSD has installed panic buttons and alarms in the Oval Office and the residence part of the White House. They can be used if there is a medical emergency or physical threat. Many of the alarm triggers are small presidential seals that sit on tables or desks and are activated if knocked over.
The panic alarms bring Secret Service agents running, guns drawn. Besides agents and uniformed officers stationed around the Oval Office, agents deploy from W-16, a staging room used by the Secret Service under the Oval Office.
The White House has emergency escape routes, including a tunnel ten feet wide and seven feet high. It extends from a subbasement of the White House under the east wing to the basement of the Treasury Department adjacent to the White House grounds.
After 9/11, the Defense Department began drawing up plans for a secret bunker under the North Lawn. At least five stories deep, the bunker, which was completed near the end of President Obama’s tenure, can house the staff of the entire West Wing indefinitely in the event of a weapons of mass destruction attack. After Trump became president, top staffers toured the bunker, whose existence is classified. While it was being built, the General Services Administration, which provides federal office space, issued bogus claims that the construction on the North Lawn was to relocate utility lines.
In protecting the White House, the Secret Service’s Uniformed Division employs what it calls canine units. In all, the agency has seventy-five of the dogs. Mainly Belgian Malinois, most of the dogs are cross-trained to sniff out explosives and attack an intruder. While they resemble German shepherds, the breed is believed to be higher energy and more agile. The dogs are prey-driven, and ball play is their reward after they locate their “prey.”
While waiting to check cleared vehicles that arrive at the White House’s southwest gate, the dogs stand on a white concrete pad that is refrigerated in summer so their paws don’t get hot. Each dog eagerly checks out about a hundred cars a day.
When Trump arrives at the Oval Office each morning, he usually starts off by discussing with his staff the latest news reports and how to convey the White House message. Occasionally, he tries to guess the source of critical items or leaks, but most of the time he assumes the material is made up with no actual sources.
“When he comes in in the morning, he knows every article, good, bad, and indifferent,” Priebus says.
By 10:30 a.m., Trump is receiving an intelligence report from the CIA. He reads his copy of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB), the top-secret digest of the latest intelligence. He interrupts the briefers with questions and demands brevity. He likes to pore over visuals—maps, charts, pictures, and videos, as well as “killer graphics,” as CIA director Mike Pompeo has phrased it. Besides Pompeo, McMaster, John F. Kelly, and Pence usually attend. Depending on the topic of the day, other administration principals join, including Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis. The briefings last thirty to forty-five minutes.
“He always asks hard questions, which I think is the sign of a good intelligence consumer,” Pompeo says. “He’ll challenge analytic lines that we’ll present, which is again completely appropriate. It is frequently the case that we’ll find that we need to go back and do more work to develop something, to round something out.”
“There was never a lack of detailed questioning from the president,” Priebus says. “In fact, he loves getting the intelligence leads. That was something that people out there would be proud of, the way he deliberates on serious military conflicts. People have this assumption that he shoots from the hip with Twitter and all that. When it comes to using the military, it would give everyone a lot of comfort if they saw how he acts privately when it comes to the use of the military. He is actually slower and more deliberate than the generals around him. Everyone thinks that the generals are the big moderating force for the president. The truth is the president is methodical and slow to the trigger.”
When it came to unleashing missiles on Syria, for example, “The president was very deliberative, very thoughtful, had no problem slowing things down and saying we’re going to talk again tomorrow,” Priebus says. “In situations like that, I think both Republicans and Democrats would be proud to know the kind of leadership he displays.”
Nor, when it came to increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan, was Trump in a hurry, Priebus says. “He didn’t care if they wanted to drag him down in the Situation Room ten times. He cares a lot about using the military wisely, and he just doesn’t like the idea of just throwing troops around the Middle East.”
Whether under Priebus or Kelly, Trump functions as his own chief of staff. He does not like to feel overmanaged. His reaction to being restricted is to open the floodgates and allow more people access, not less.
Trump usually leaves the office by 6:30 p.m. and almost always has dinner plans. John McEntee, his personal aide or body man, tries to keep him on schedule, and he is rarely late. McEntee, twenty-six years old, was a signal caller on the University of Connecticut’s football team, then went to work for Fox News as a production assistant. He volunteered for the Trump campaign and became trip director.
In contrast to Trump, Secret Service agents on Bill Clinton’s detail referred to “Clinton Standard Time,” meaning Clinton was always one to two hours late.
“Bill Clinton was never on time,” former agent Jeff Crane says. “He didn’t care how late he was or whether it strained our resources.”
If Clinton was inconsiderate, Hillary is a shrew. Hillary pretends to be a compassionate woman who cares about the “little people” and is a champion of the middle class. The reality is that behind the scenes, she is abusive to those same people.
As detailed in my book The First Family Detail, Hillary is so nasty to Secret Service agents who would lay down their lives for her that being assigned to her detail is considered a form of punishment and the worst assignment in the Secret Service.
“We were basically told, the Clintons don’t want to see you, they don’t want to hear you, get out of the way,” says a former Secret Service agent of the Clintons’ White House years. “If Hillary was walking down a hall, you were supposed to hide behind drapes used as partitions. Supervisors would tell us, ‘Listen, stand behind this curtain. They’re coming,’ or ‘Just stand out of the way, don’t be seen.’ ”
Agents say Hillary’s nastiness and contempt for them, and disdain for law enforcement and the military in general, has continued, both when she was secretary of state and now that she is protected as a former first lady, earning her the distinction of being considered the Secret Service’s most detested protectee.
“Hillary would cuss at Secret Service drivers for going over bumps,” former agent Crane says.
FBI agents assigned by Independent Counsel Ken Starr to investigate the death of Vince Foster found that Hillary Clinton triggered her friend’s suicide, humiliating the already depressed deputy White House counsel in front of his colleagues at a White House meeting. She called him a small town hick lawyer who would never make it in the big time and who had failed the Clintons. Based on interviews with aides present at the meeting and with Foster’s family members and friends, the FBI found that his mood plummeted after Hillary’s attack, leading to his suicide a week later.
In contrast to the image he wanted to project, Biden was so thoughtless that he would swim naked in the swimming pools at the vice president’s residence and at his home in Wilmington, offending female Secret Service agents. They signed up to take a bullet for the president or vice president—not to see Joe Biden naked.
Trump never swims at Mar-a-Lago, but he is vigorous and gets some exercise by playing golf. He has always gone for six strips of bacon at breakfast or sausages with three eggs. He likes hamburgers without the bun and steak well done, often eaten with ketchup. He rarely eats vegetables. And he has rich desserts with two scoops of ice cream. When campaigning, he went for Kentucky Fried Chicken, Domino’s Pizza, or burgers from Wendy’s or McDonald’s.
Now that he is president, the Secret Service has put a stop to Trump’s impromptu visits to fast-food outlets. When the president is eating out, Secret Service agents run background checks on employees and supervise the food preparation. Whether in Washington, Palm Beach, or New York, Trump almost never dines at an establishment he does not own. Why promote other businesses?
At Mar-a-Lago, Trump orders either the dry aged prime strip steak that club manager Bernd Lembcke orders from Bush Brothers Provision Co. in West Palm Beach or the meatloaf that, per Trump’s order, is always on the menu and is said to be made from his mother’s recipe.
With his preference for steak well done, Trump emulates Ronald Reagan. Besides steak, Reagan liked hamburger soup—made with ground beef, tomatoes, and carrots—roast beef hash, beef and kidney pie, and osso buco. Nancy Reagan liked paella à la Valenciana, salmon mousse, and chicken pot pie. For dessert, the Reagans both liked apple brown betty, prune whip, fruit with Cointreau, and plum pudding.
Trump does not drink alcohol. Melania sometimes drinks a glass of red wine at dinner, but Trump drinks a Diet Coke or occasionally a virgin piña colada mixed for him at the bar overlooking the main pool at Mar-a-Lago. In the Oval Office, when Trump presses a red button on a box on his desk, a butler arrives with a Diet Coke. He then may order other items as well, such as Lay’s potato chips, classic style, which he eats during the day as a snack.
Trump has attributed his decision to abstain from drinking to seeing his brother Fred Jr. struggle with alcoholism. His brother, who died in 1981 at the age of forty-three, was the second oldest of Trump’s siblings. Maryanne Trump Barry is the oldest. After Freddy came Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert. Fred Jr. worked briefly for his father in the family real estate business but left to become a pilot. He married and had two children.
Drinking became a problem for Freddy when he was in his twenties. He gave up flying because he knew his drinking could lead to disaster. He divorced and tried his hand at commercial fishing in Florida, but he failed at that. By the late 1970s, he was living with his parents and working as a maintenance worker for his father.
Donald was in college when he met Freddy for dinner in a Queens apartment complex built by their father. Also at the dinner were Freddy’s best friend and the friend’s girlfriend, Annamaria Schifano. Freddy had a gift for imitating W. C. Fields, according to a New York Times report. As he joked around, his younger brother grew impatient. “Grow up, get serious, and make something of yourself in the family business, Donald scolded,” according to the New York Times’ story.
“Donald put Freddy down quite a bit,” Schifano told the paper. “There was a lot of combustion.” However, Trump later asked Freddy to be best man at his first marriage in 1977 to Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model who became an accomplished business woman restoring and managing Trump’s landmark Plaza Hotel.
According to the Times, “Trump said he had learned by watching his brother how bad choices could drag down even those who seemed destined to rise. Seeing his brother’s agony fighting his alcoholism led him to avoid ever trying alcohol or cigarettes, he said.”
As president, Trump personalized his antidrug message at the White House when he declared the opioid crisis a public health emergency and announced an education program and other measures to combat the crisis. To fight the epidemic that had led to sixty-four thousand overdose deaths a year, the president said the government would produce “really tough, really big, really great advertising” aimed at persuading Americans not to start using opioids in the first place. Campaigns aimed at smoking are a model. In 1955, 45 percent of American adults said they smoked cigarettes. Today, the rate is 15 percent.
Speaking about the opioid crisis at the White House, Trump remembered his brother as a “great guy, best looking guy,” with a personality “much better than mine.” But “he had a problem, he had a problem with alcohol. I learned because of Fred.”
When his brother urged him not to smoke or drink, Trump said he listened to him. “And to this day, I’ve never had a drink, and I have no longing for it. I have no interest in it. To this day, I’ve never had a cigarette.” Trump said, “If we can teach young people and people generally not to start, it’s really, really easy not to take [drugs].”
As they were growing up, Trump constantly drilled the same message into his kids.
“No tattoos, no piercings outside of the ears, there were a lot of rules,” Ivanka Trump said of her life growing up. “But I think more than everything he really tried to lead us by example. He was a disciplinarian, but I could get around it often,” she laughed in a Fox & Friends interview. “Once in a while I’d find my way through.”
While his daughter Tiffany lived in California with her mother, Marla Maples, Trump made it a point to fly to California regularly to visit her.
No matter how important the meeting he was conducting, Trump always made it a practice to take his children’s phone calls. At the age of ten, Ivanka would call her father collect from a pay phone at school every day during recess. He picked up the phone every time. Unusual with men, he kisses his sons on the cheek when he sees them. And he made sure all the children understood the value of a dollar.
“I think at the end of each of our lives, if we can be judged by nothing else, if you choose one way to be judged, I’m sure we would all prefer that to be how we impacted the next generation, our progeny,” Kellyanne Conway notes. And no matter how people line up politically, almost everyone recognizes that Trump has raised five outstanding children. “They are moral, generous, kind, and loving people,” Conway says. “On that, Donald Trump is five for five.”