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One focus of the Mueller investigation was on the concerted effort by the Trump campaign to purchase Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails. Shopping in a dark-web bazaar, the Trump campaign had connected to Russian state hackers.
For Bannon here was a full and ironic circle. In 2015, Breitbart had funded the research for Clinton Cash, a book by Peter Schweizer (and later a documentary) that tried to trace the sources of the considerable funds that had flowed to Hillary and Bill Clinton’s enterprises. It was the nearly nonstop Freedom of Information requests for Clinton’s emails when she was secretary of state by Schweizer and several right-wing groups that helped shine the light on Clinton’s email practices.
The ensuing scandal prompted an FBI investigation, which, especially when it was reopened weeks before the 2016 election, may have dealt the single greatest blow to Clinton’s campaign. But even after Clinton had turned over most of her private-server emails, 33,000 emails she deemed “personal” remained unaccounted for. Bannon, along with many other Republicans, suspected that in this cache of emails was a clear road map of how Bill and Hillary were funding the Clinton Foundation, trading, they suspected, on her position in the Obama administration for cash contributions. In July 2016, Trump made a clarion call for Russian hackers to find those emails.
By that point Bannon and Breitbart had been in the hunt for the missing emails for more than a year. Taking a deep dive down the rabbit hole of international hacking, they met “finders” and eager sellers galore. The only problem was that many different collections and many different versions of the emails seemed to be available. Said Bannon: “It was like buying bricks from the Texas School Book Depository”—the building from which Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK. “Don’t tell the guy with the kiln that the building is still standing.”
By the time Bannon came into the Trump campaign in August 2016, he knew that there was no holy grail of Clinton emails—or at least no reliable one. But various gofers and fetch dogs from the campaign, among them people in the candidate’s family, still sought to curry favor with Trump by trying to obtain the emails, which Trump believed would damage Clinton.
These efforts confirmed for Bannon both the haplessness of the Trump campaign and, later, the weakness of the Mueller collusion case. The best Mueller would be able to do was make a case for screwball stuff, Trumpers vainly trying to find something that did not exist. The investigation would only prove the campaign’s—and the candidate’s—stupidity.
The indictment obtained by the special counsel’s office against the twelve Russian intelligence agents, announced during the president’s visit with the Queen, came three days before Trump was due to head from his golfing holiday in Scotland to his summit in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president.
The indictment made clear that on July 27, 2016, Russian hackers tried to break into Clinton’s private email server—the same day that Trump had publicly called for the Russians to do exactly this. (Trump would later insist that this was a joke, with campaign staffers attesting that he was reading a prepared line and barely knew what he was saying.) These hackers then proceeded to infiltrate both the Clinton campaign—hacking into Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s pesonal email account—and the Democratic National Committee; subsequently, they leaked material they had stolen, deeply embarrassing the Clinton campaign and the Democrats.
The indictment outlined an operation of cyber spy versus cyber spy. Indeed, one implication here was that the U.S. intelligence community knew what the Russians were doing even as they were doing it but chose not to stop them—because, then, following conventional spy theory, the Russians would know that they had been found out.
The hackers, the indictment maintained, were in touch with a person with ties to senior members of the campaign. This was, by the clearest inference, Roger Stone. If there was anyone who best represented the irregular nature of the Trump campaign, it was Stone, a vivid if unstable combination of publicity seeker, performance artist, sexual adventurer, and conspiracist whom no one took seriously, probably not even Donald Trump.
“If all Mueller has is Stone, he doesn’t have much,” said Bannon, ever trying to parse what exactly Mueller had.
But the special counsel’s indictment, it turned out, also appeared to be a cliff-hanger, for he was about to go quiet. It was now midsummer; always inclined to go by the book, Mueller was unlikely to do much else that could have an impact on the November elections. What’s more, Mueller’s small team had to prepare for the two trials of Paul Manafort that would take place sequentially in August and September, their first significant public performance and accounting.
The fact that the season finale came hours before Trump was to meet with Putin—well, Bannon observed, that’s what coppers do. They turn up the heat on their subject and watch for the reaction.
It was just going to be Trump and Putin, with translators at their elbows. A straight-up discussion between two men. Two presidents sitting at a table in Helsinki, a favorite spot for Russian-American summits.
Trump was adamant about not having anybody else in the room. Mike Pompeo, one of the few people to whom the president was at least somewhat respectful, told him he couldn’t do this, that at the very least his secretary of state ought to be in the room with him. But Trump blew him off: “I’m afraid of leaks, leakers.” Which, by inference, seemed to mean Pompeo.
The entire foreign policy establishment—including Pompeo, NSC chief Bolton, and Kushner, with his vast foreign policy portfolio—was on the verge of a professional breakdown. The presidents of the United States and Russia meeting alone? It was unheard-of, but especially given the Russia investigation it was just this side of insane. Yet with a kind of bureaucratic heave, the foreign policy people readjusted. It was Trump—what could they do?
Trump had a plan, Mike Pompeo and John Bolton concluded: the plan was “happy talk.”
Trump often boasted of his persuasive powers. “There’s nobody who can butter up somebody like me,” he bragged. In the Trump circle, this was understood as the anchor-tenant strategy. Jared and Ivanka were big proponents of this explanation of Trump’s behavior. In the real estate business, you would do anything to get your big-brand anchor tenant for your retail space. Trump was famously single-minded in pursuit of his star tenant. If a hot retail prospect said he was sleeping with Trump’s wife, Trump would say, Hey, let me get you some champagne. Until he got a signature and a deposit, there was no level of self-abasement that Trump wouldn’t tolerate. Then, in the winter, he would withhold the heat.
Look at how well it had worked in Singapore with Kim Jong-un! Trump had buttered Kim up and, in return, Kim had buttered Trump up. And even if nothing else changed, the temper changed. Public hostility became public accommodation, even tenderness—albeit yet with nukes. That was a win, wasn’t it? And it was all thanks to happy talk.
If Trump emerged from his meeting with Putin walking hand in hand with the Russian bear, that would be a win, too. He, Trump, would have used charm and personal diplomacy to win over the beast—all by himself. To Trump, this seemed like a no-brainer. It would be the perfect example of another of his favorite business maxims: “Pick the low-hanging fruit.” If Trump and Putin flattered each other, they were much less likely to threaten each other or demand things of each other. For now, Trump just needed a handshake. Later he could withhold the heat.
On Friday, July 13, three days before the Helsinki summit, the president and his team arrived late in the day at Trump Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, after passing on their way from the airport cow pastures and cheering citizens—but no protesters.
Mike Pompeo and John Bolton were carrying copious briefing books. This was meant to be a weekend of preparation interspersed with golf. John Kelly, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Bill Shine, and several other aides had come along, too.
Saturday was sunny and in the mid-seventies, with nothing on the agenda except golf. But by now a few protesters had made their way to Turnberry. “No Trump, No KKK, No Racist USA,” shouted a small group of them during the president’s afternoon golf game.
Trump, energized by his NATO and UK meetings—“we roughed them up”—was in no mood to prepare for his Putin meeting. Even his typical, exceedingly casual level of preparation—prep masked as gossip—wasn’t happening. Pompeo and Bolton reduced the boxed briefing binders to a one-pager. The president wouldn’t focus on it.
He was fine. And why shouldn’t he be? He had walked into his meeting with Kim unable to pick out North Korea on a map, but it didn’t matter. He was in charge, a strong man making peace.
Don’t box me in, he told his advisers. I need to be open, he kept repeating, as though this was a therapeutic process. Pompeo and Bolton urgently pressed him about the basic talking points for the summit, now just hours away—but nothing doing.
The next morning he played golf, and then it started to rain.
The presidential party arrived in Helsinki at 9:00 p.m. that Sunday, still an hour and a half before the sun would set, and then headed to the Hilton Hotel. While they were in the air, France had beaten Croatia for the Russian-hosted World Cup at Luzhniki Stadium, Moscow, in a match attended by President Putin.
The morning of Monday, July 16, was occupied with ceremonial meetings and greetings with the Finnish president, but Trump found time to tweet about the Mueller indictments and the “rigged witch hunt” pursuing him.
Putin arrived in Helsinki later than expected—Putin was invariably late—keeping Trump waiting for almost an hour. After the hold, Trump and his party reached the Finnish Presidential Palace at about 2:00 p.m. Trump and Putin sat down together, posed for photos, and offered a few minutes of public remarks, with Trump congratulating the Russian president on a successful World Cup. Then the doors were closed, and their one-on-one private session commenced.
The meeting ran for a little more than two hours. For an additional hour or so, Russian and U.S. advisers and diplomats joined the two leaders. Finally Trump and Putin were led into the hall for a post-meeting press conference—where the world, and more specifically Trump’s own people, saw a wholly unfamiliar figure.
Bannon’s characterization of Trump quickly became the almost universal one in the Trump circle: “He looked like a beaten dog.” Even Jared, likely unclear that the description originated with Bannon, repeated it.
For everyone in Trumpworld there was but one question: What could have possibly happened in there?
Trump and Putin went in as equals and came out as victim and victor. How had Trump’s “happy talk” agenda been turned into such an obvious humiliation? Putin must have cornered the president with some dreadful unpleasantness—perhaps even some life-threatening unpleasantness! But exactly what was this order of pressure? What did Putin have? Almost everyone in the White House joined the debate.
“What could it be?” titillated staffers asked.
Bannon checked off the possibilities.
The pee tape? “I guarantee,” said Bannon, “that if such a thing exists, and if it surfaced, he would simply, baldly, absolutely say that the spitting image of Donald J. Trump was not him. Fake. Fake. It wouldn’t slow him down.”
Don Jr. trying to buy the emails? “He doesn’t care about Don Junior. Are you kidding?”
Proof that the oligarchs had bailed him out, that Russian billionaires had bought Trump properties at inflated prices? “Nobody gives a fuck. Trump knows that. Wouldn’t faze him.”
Possibly more devastating than a blackmail gambit, perhaps Putin had launched a concerted assault on Trump’s intelligence.
“Forget the tax return, what if they have his college transcript?” This was a familiar White House riff. Many of Trump’s friends believed that a root of his shame and intellectual insecurity was his steady semesters of Ds.
Or, what if Putin had turned the meeting from happy talk into geopolitical quizzing? How cruel, Bannon wondered, might Putin really be? Would he ask Trump to point out Crimea on a map? “Oh my God, not the relationship between Crimea and the Ukraine. Don’t ask him that, please!”
Bannon believed that here were two narcissistic, cult-leader-type presidents on the world stage. Both had populist talents, yet both were ultimately out for their own benefit. Of the two, Putin was the far cleverer one.
For years, Donald Trump had stroked Vladimir Putin from afar, constantly calling out to him, the equivalent of overeager text messages. Putin remained aloof, making it clear that there was a ranking system. When, in 2013, Trump showed up in Moscow with his beauty pageant—when the pee tape was supposedly made—Putin let him think they would meet, that he would make an appearance at Trump’s pageant. Instead, Putin snubbed him. Not rudely: he was smoother than that. Rather, the message was, Yes, someday we might meet, but not now. Bannon theorized that Trump may not have been interested in Russian help during the campaign; he may have merely wanted Russian attention, Russian interest—Putin’s recognition.
Now, in Helsinki, after two hours in a room together, Trump had in theory finally gotten what he wished for. He was Putin’s equal.
But then why did he look like a beaten dog?
The press conference surely ranked among the most devastating and damaging public performances by a president ever.
It wasn’t even that Trump had fumbled a showdown with the Russian leader by delivering a performance something like Kennedy’s famously botched first meeting with Khrushchev. Quite the opposite. Trump made no effort to stand tall. He was deferential, obsequious, servile. It really did seem like Manchurian Candidate stuff, with Trump under the thumb of his handler.
At the press conference, Putin audaciously offered to address the Mueller indictments of the twelve Russians. He would let them be questioned if, in turn, the United States would let Russia question American citizens it regarded as its enemies. This notion, Putin indicated, had been received positively by the U.S. president, who stood, deflated or uncomprehending, by his side.
Trying to rally, Trump blithely, with signature incoherence, exonerated Putin.
My people came to me, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be, but I really do want to see the server. But I have—I have confidence in both parties. I really believe that this will probably go on for a while, but I don’t think it can go on without finding out what happened to the server. What happened to the servers of the Pakistani gentleman that worked on the DNC? Where are those servers? They’re missing. Where are they? What happened to Hillary Clinton’s emails? Thirty-three thousand emails—gone, just gone. I think, in Russia, they wouldn’t be gone so easily. I think it’s a disgrace that we can’t get Hillary Clinton’s thirty-three thousand emails.
Putin, for his part, casually dismissed Trump. The pee tape? Surveillance? Why? Trump was a nobody when he had visited Russia in 2013. A construction company executive. Not a guy who ran a branded high-end resort and casino business and was a major television star, but a run-of-the-mill, nothing-special business guy, Putin said with Trump wilting next to him. What reason would he have for taking an interest in Donald Trump?
Why didn’t Shine stop it? How could the press conference have run so long? How had Trump been allowed to carry on, every comment worse than the previous one, digging himself deeper and deeper? And all the while, Putin stood next to him, watching, the coolest cat who ever swallowed a canary.
“We’ve had a reversal of fortune,” said Bannon. “That was Little Big Horn.”
But Bannon also recognized that Trump had been outplayed by a master. “God,” he said, “Putin is a badass.”
When Trump’s public humiliation was finally over, he seemed unaware of what had happened. With Melania, Shine, and John Kelly following, he headed directly from the press conference into a small room in the presidential palace that had been converted into a television studio.
Trump had agreed to do a post-meeting interview with Fox’s Tucker Carlson—Carlson, who had also come to Helsinki to cover the summit, had gotten the interview by calling Trump directly on his cell phone. But Sean Hannity, Carlson’s colleague, also following Trump across Europe, had had a tantrum. Urged on by Bannon—“You’re Sean Hannity! You get to interview Donald Trump!”—Hannity called Trump himself and begged. So Trump, always inclined to embrace anybody’s servility, not to mention every opportunity for friendly publicity, was suddenly giving two interviews in back-to-back time slots to the same network in the same makeshift studio, everybody crowded in together.
There was hardly any room to stand: along with Trump, Melania, Shine, and Kelly, there were Carlson, Hannity, a camera crew, and two executive producers. Trump seemed yet undisturbed by the disastrous press conference. Kelly, snarling, could barely contain his fury and incomprehension, physically pushing people out of the way, including Carlson. Melania—rarely approached and certainly never hugged by anyone on Trump’s staff or in his entourage—visibly recoiled from Hannity’s too-close embrace.
Hannity, like Trump, seemed to have missed the import of the press conference. Their interview proceeded in a flirty way—Trump playing hard to get and dismissive, Hannity excruciatingly unctuous.
Watching Hannity’s performance, Carlson’s executive producer said, “I’m gay and I’ve never hit on a man that hard.”
Trump began the interview with Hannity by needling him for incorrectly identifying the number of NATO nations in his first question (with everyone surprised that Trump in fact seemed to know the correct number). “Tucker wouldn’t screw that up,” Trump said to a stricken Hannity. “He knows how many NATO countries there are. You ever watch his show? I watch it every night. I’ll let you redo the question, go ahead.”
Then, in his interview with Carlson—still unaware that he had incurred the condemnation as well as stupefaction of the free world for his slavishness to Putin—Trump went after NATO again. All in all, he said, he would be quite ambivalent about coming to the defense of NATO allies, thus effectively abandoning both the entire point of NATO and the foundation of the postwar order.
Carlson looked bewildered. “Membership in NATO obligates any other member to defend any member who is attacked,” he pointed out.
Trump, noting that Montenegro is a NATO member, said he certainly would not want to fight for Montenegro.
On the plane ride home it only got worse.
At first, Trump looked eagerly for affirmation, but soon the disastrous coverage of his press conference began to sink in. His own perception of what had happened and the world’s stood at nearly a 180-degree difference. Trump—almost never voluntarily alone, and absolutely never alone and awake without the television on—retreated into his bedroom cabin in silence.
As Air Force One flew west, he resisted all efforts to persuade him to brief his advisers about his meeting with Putin. He had had two hours of private conversation with the Russian president, yet no one in the U.S. government knew what he or Putin had said. The Russian government presumably knew everything.
The presidential party arrived back in the United States just after 9:00 p.m. that Monday. The president was followed off the plane by Bill Shine and John Bolton. Trump still refused to speak to anyone.
The next day, the president sat down with members of Congress to talk about tax reform, waving away efforts to engage him in discussions about the Helsinki summit.
Pompeo, Bolton, Mattis, the entire U.S. foreign policy leadership—everyone remained in the dark about what had been discussed. Nobody was read in. Did the president not listen to what was said, did he not understand, did he not remember? The Russians, meanwhile, started to leak details of what appeared to be a range of agreements that were reached during the summit. These included—incredibly, bizarrely—support for a plebiscite in Eastern Ukraine and a promise that U.S. officials would testify in a Russian judicial inquiry.
Many in the White House expressed a shocked appreciation of Putin’s chutzpah: Had he really made such fantastical propositions, much less gotten the president to agree to them? In some surreal sense, this was a moment when effectively the entire U.S. government realized that its leader was not only tragically—or comically—out of his depth, but a pitiable mark. It was almost impossible to overstate the absolute bewilderment in the government or the rising panic in the Republican Party.
On Tuesday, July 17, Vice President Pence was delegated the responsibility to go into the Oval Office and tell the president that he had to walk back his Helsinki remarks. Pence stressed that it wasn’t just Democrats; Republicans on the Hill were coming unglued. And there were about to be mass resignations in the White House.
Lewandowski and Hannity actually thought that the House might be hours away from voting articles of impeachment.
Derek Harvey, on the majority staff of the House Intelligence Committee, frantically called the White House to say that six Republicans might vote to subpoena the interpreter who had worked for the American side during the Trump-Putin meeting.
Finally, after a further meeting with members of Congress that afternoon, Trump took questions from the press and performed his walk-back. John Kelly, Ivanka Trump, Bill Shine, John Bolton, Mike Pence, and Steve Mnuchin were all standing close by.
“I’ll begin by stating that I have full faith and support for America’s great intelligence agencies,” the president said stiffly. “I accept our intelligence community conclusion that Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election took place.” Oh, and also, he insisted, there was “no collusion.”
Earlier, Trump had been huddling with Ivanka—even he couldn’t find a way to talk himself out of this one. Ivanka called Anthony Scaramucci—“the Mooch”—the New York hedge fund executive who had, in July 2017, in a comic opera of drunkenness and ranting to the press, served for just eleven days as head of the White House communications team. Ivanka and Scaramucci proposed that Trump simply deny saying what he had said and blame it on misspeaking. Ivanka, pointing out that her father often misspoke and had “lazy speech patterns,” ventured that this was at least a somewhat plausible explanation.
Trump had seized on this plan, and now he added: “It should have been obvious, I thought it would be obvious, but I would like to clarify just in case it wasn’t. In a key sentence in my remarks I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t.’ The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’ so, just to repeat it, I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t.’” It was, he continued, “sort of a double negative.”
While Trump was in the middle of his walk-back remarks, carried live on national television, the lights went out. A puzzled Trump continued speaking, his face briefly darkened. Ivanka later accused John Kelly of purposely turning the lights off. It wasn’t an accident or a sign from God, she insisted; it was John Kelly saying shut up.
Bannon was, once again, gobsmacked. “When Ivanka and the Mooch can talk the commander in chief of the United States into thinking that people will believe that you had a double negative problem, you’ve left the Cartesian universe.”
A cabinet meeting was hastily arranged for the next day, Wednesday. To demonstrate that it was business as usual at the White House, the meeting was open to the press. Ivanka Trump gave the main presentation and offered an array of ideas for new job programs. “Wow,” noted the president afterward. “If that were Ivanka ‘Smith,’ the press would say that was totally brilliant!”
Answering a question as the meeting finished, Trump said, No, he didn’t believe the Russians were targeting U.S. elections any longer. A short time later, a clarification was issued: when the president said “No,” he was saying, No, he wouldn’t answer questions.
Jim Mattis, very publicly in town, openly incredulous and deeply alarmed—and, after Helsinki, more uncertain about whether he should remain in his position than at any time since he had joined the Trump administration—pointedly failed to show up for the cabinet meeting. Rumors everywhere, many seeming to come from people very close to the secretary of defense, had Mattis resigning in protest within hours.
And yet, as bad as it was, it got still worse when Trump suddenly announced that he was inviting Putin to come to the White House.
The furor raged on. Responding with hurt and explosive anger, he now looked for someone to blame. Mattis, with his apocalyptic hints of resignation, seemed an ideal target. Trump suddenly began screaming to aides about Mattis and his transgender tolerance. “He wants to give trannies operations. ‘Learn to fire a gun and I’ll give you an operation,’” Trump mimicked in his mincing voice.
The White House quickly tried to measure the likely reaction if Mattis—who, in the view of both parties, was the designated adult in the White House—was forced out. Firing the secretary of defense, they were told by members of the congressional leadership, might make the Saturday Night Massacre look like a peaceful evening.
“If he loses Mattis,” said Bannon, more concerned than he had ever been about Trump’s mental state, “he loses the presidency.” Mattis was the link to the bipartisan establishment, such as it was. Without Mattis, the center truly might not hold.
Persuaded to turn his attention away from Mattis, the president next focused his guns on Kelly, who had hinted at his own resignation after Helsinki. But then Dan Coats, the director of National Intelligence, stepped into the line of fire.
Coats was out of town attending a conference on global security issues in Aspen. While being interviewed onstage, he was informed that Trump had just invited Putin to the White House. Coats, his eyes seeming to pop out of his head, couldn’t stifle his amazement, nor did he try. “Say that again?” he asked. As the audience burst into laughter, he continued, “Okay … that’s going to be special.”
Within minutes, almost all the television news outlets were playing the tape of Coats’s unfiltered reaction. Trump was furious: “He was shitting all over me!”
Making Coats’s gaffe worse, news of the incident preempted the White House’s planned distraction: with Ivanka at his side, the president was set to sign a new executive order creating the Council for the American Worker as part of his daughter’s job-training program. The president, meanwhile, would sign a new executive order appointing Jared Kushner head of a new labor council. But there was no TV!
Trump vowed to fire Coats. Kelly immediately objected: if you fire Coats, Kelly said, ten other guys will resign. And if Congress doesn’t impeach you over firing Coats, they will certainly censure you.
Trump began to crazily flip through the cable dial, looking for his defenders and finding no one. Where was Kellyanne? he demanded to know. Where was Sarah? Where was anybody?
Afraid that Hannity would call for Trump to fire Coats and that this would seal Coats’s fate, the White House went into yet another panic. Before an interview with CBS in the Roosevelt Room, Kelly, Shine, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Mercedes Schlapp had a near throw-down fight about who would tell the president that he had to defend Coats. The job fell to Kelly.
On the air, the president seemed strangely eager to please. Sitting in a chair with his hands between his legs like a monster shrimp, he bent over the interviewer, Jeff Glor. Perhaps finally starting to appreciate his peril, he seemed, spirit broken, eager to give the right answers.
GLOR: You say you agree with U.S. intelligence that Russia meddled in the election in 2016.
TRUMP: Yeah and I’ve said that before, Jeff. I have said that numerous times before, and I would say that is true, yeah.
GLOR: But you haven’t condemned Putin, specifically. Do you hold him personally responsible?
TRUMP: Well I would, because he’s in charge of the country. Just like I consider myself to be responsible for things that happen in this country. So certainly as the leader of a country you would have to hold him responsible, yes.
GLOR: What did you say to him?
TRUMP: Very strong on the fact that we can’t have meddling, we can’t have any of that …
As the show wrapped, Kelly hit bottom. “This time he’s not going to get away with it,” he said, muttering to himself. “This shit is out of control. Nobody can carry this anymore.”
And yet no one resigned—not that day, or the next, or the next. If Trump did not quite “get away with it,” no one in his inner circle could come up with a good answer to the essential question: What are we going to do about this mess?
Bannon, in a public statement, declared: “You are either with Trump or against him.” The comment resolved nothing and yet somehow summed up everything.
On Friday, July 20, the president headed off to Bedminster. On Saturday, he played golf. On Sunday, he tweeted that Russian interference in the 2016 elections “was all a big hoax.”
Not long after the Putin summit, an ad hoc circle of Republicans started to talk. This group included representatives from the Senate majority leader’s office, the Speaker of the House’s office, and some of the party’s most significant donors, notably Paul Singer and Charles Koch. Although this was hardly yet an organized move against the president, it was the beginning of an exploratory committee. The group’s primary objectives were to assess the president’s strengths and weaknesses, and to look toward 2020 and the possibility of a primary challenge.