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Trump took John McCain’s brain tumor, diagnosed in the summer of 2017, as something like personal validation. “You see?” he would say, raising his eyebrows. “You see what can happen?” Then he would mime an exploding head.
As McCain’s illness progressed, Trump began to express annoyance that McCain “hung on.” Or that he was not a “good enough sport” to resign his seat and let the Republican governor of Arizona appoint a more Trump-friendly senator. He often transferred his disdain for McCain to McCain’s daughter Meghan, a regular panelist on ABC’s The View and a stern anti-Trumper. He was obsessed with her weight gain. “Donut,” he called her. “When she hears my name she always looks like she’s going to cry. Like her father. Very, very tough family. Boo hoo, boo hoo.”
McCain, in turn, took the opportunity of his mortal illness to draw a line in the sand between his American and Republican values and Trump’s. In an epic political dis, McCain did not invite Trump to the funeral he was planning for himself. Two days after McCain’s death, on August 25, the McCain family released his good-bye letter, a powerful statement of establishment principles and a direct rebuke to Trump.
Trump’s relationship with his chief of staff the former marine general John Kelly—now an open cold war in which each stayed out of the other’s way and each pronounced the other crazy—took a further bitter turn. Kelly, with a soldier’s affinity for McCain, the former fighter pilot and prisoner of war, took Trump’s comments to be both antimilitary and unpatriotic.
“John McCain,” he said as the president made his exploding head gesture one day, “is an American hero.” Then he turned his back and walked out of the Oval Office.
McCain’s was a full dress funeral, second only to what might be given a president. Held on September 1 in Washington’s National Cathedral, it was attended by Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, each personally invited by McCain, each magnifying Trump’s exclusion. “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again, because America was always great,” said Meghan McCain in her eulogy, generating an unlikely applause line at a funeral.
The funeral attracted the establishment great and good on both sides of the aisle, and almost everyone there—save perhaps the representatives of the Trump family—bore a pointed witness against Trump. The many Republicans at the service wanted to be counted: the globalist Republicans, the military-minded cold war Republicans, and the national-security, maintain-the-world-order Republicans. Even if they did not know how to fight back against Trump, or were not yet ready to, they could raise a finger here at John McCain’s funeral.
Trump, for his part, tried to out-tweet the funeral and then went to play golf.
By Labor Day weekend, establishment Washington and the mainstream media—largely one and the same, many Trump supporters argued—were eagerly awaiting the publication of Bob Woodward’s new book Fear, about Trump’s first year in office. Its publisher had embargoed the book before its September 11 publication, but the leaked teasers had built enormous anticipation and, equally, great consternation in the White House. As much as the book would deliver Woodward’s own weighty statement about Trump, many in the GOP establishment believed Woodward could be counted on to reflect their views—and even to provide cover for their views.
Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein had created the modern model of a political journalist with their Watergate reporting. Their subsequent books on Watergate and the movie about their pursuit of Richard Nixon had made them world famous. Woodward, ever attached to the Washington Post, had gone on to write more bestsellers and make more money than any other Washington reporter in history. At seventy-five, Woodward was one of the city’s monuments, or at least one of its institutional fixtures.
Since Watergate, much of his career had been spent in careful parsing of the political bureaucracy, a.k.a. the swamp. At times, he seemed almost to become its voice. In a way, that was the ultimate lesson of Watergate. In periods of acute political stress, the bureaucracy looked out for itself and protected itself, so all a smart reporter needed to do was listen to it. The more acute the stress, the more active the leakers, the bigger the story. Now, more than ever, with an outsider and rank amateur in the White House, the swamp—so pilloried by Trump—was fighting back.
The particular part of the swamp bureaucracy that over the years had provided Woodward with so many scoops was the deepest and most entrenched part of it, the vast national security system. Upon publication of Woodward’s new book, it was immediately evident that one of his key sources was H. R. McMaster, the three-star general who had joined the Trump administration in February 2017 as national security advisor, replacing Michael Flynn. Losing Flynn, the first casualty of the Russia investigation, had been an early dispiriting moment for Trump, and he had acceded to his staff’s choice for Flynn’s replacement without giving it much thought. In the initial interview, McMaster, detail- and plan-oriented, a PowerPoint general, had bored the president. Wanting just to be done with it and avoid a follow-up interview, Trump agreed to hire him.
Their relationship never got much better. McMaster became a target for Trump’s mockery and derision. The general hit all of the Trump sweet spots: his looks, his earnestness, his pomposity, and his short stature.
“What are you writing there, Mr. Note-Taker?” Trump heckled McMaster, who was invariably scribbling in a little black notebook during meetings. “Are you the secretary?”
Late in the process of researching his book, Woodward had contacted Bannon. For Bannon, there was hardly anyone who represented the Washington establishment more perfectly than Woodward—here, for him, was the enemy. But after just a few minutes of conversation, he began to understand what Woodward had. It was access to McMaster’s little black notebook, a detailed, sometimes nearly minute-by-minute chronicle of every meeting that McMaster had attended in his ten months in the White House. Bannon decided he needed to go into damage control.
Woodward’s book, Bannon understood, was set up to be the revenge of Team America. This was the self-styled band of grown-ups, or professionals, or (as they would sometimes acknowledge) resisters, working in the Trump White House, who had come to see themselves as patriots protecting the country from the president they worked for. At different moments, the group included, along with McMaster, Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson, Nikki Haley, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, NSC’s Matt Pottinger, NSC spokesperson Michael Anton, and, at certain points, John Kelly. The group excluded most people who were actively part of the Trump presidential campaign or others, like Mick Mulvaney, the Office of Management and Budget director, who had close Tea Party ties. Cohn was a Democrat, Mattis at least nearly one, and Pottinger’s father was a well-known liberal lawyer in New York. The rest, all Republicans, were far closer to the GOP of John McCain and George Bush than to the party that was now Donald Trump’s. In particular, each represented the antithesis of Trump’s anti-free-trade, America First, nationalist view. These were the Democrats and globalists who—in the chaos of an unprepared staff having to create, overnight, a presidential team of advisers—had slipped into this nationalist White House.
If they had tried to hide or blur their beliefs during their time in the White House, now, more than ever, they wanted to be known for them. They also, without exception, bore Trump a high level of personal as well as professional animosity. He had tainted them. Now out of the administration, their message to Woodward was that they had defended the nation against Trump and tried to shift the direction of Trump’s policies, or at least tried to create diversionary tactics as he veered off in some extreme or loopy direction.
Trump may not have been crueler to the globalists around him than he was to the nationalists, but that was not saying much. His derision of McMaster was a daily pastime; Rex Tillerson was “Rex, the family dog”; he accused Gary Cohn of being gay; he spread rumors about Dina Powell’s personal life. While die-hard Trumpers had no choice but to rationalize his cruelties, sometimes even prizing them when they were directed at someone else, the less-than-faithful adopted a steady, low-level, I-don’t-have-to-take-this, I-only-do-it-for-my-country umbrage. (At the same time, as Trump derided them, they derided Trump. Gary Cohn, for instance, would take Trump’s calls while playing golf at the private Sebonack Golf Club in Southampton, holding out the phone so others could hear Trump’s diatribes and meanwhile making crazy-man gestures.)
For Bannon the establishment’s passive response to Trump—its willingness to yet tolerate a man they so openly detested—was somehow further proof of the establishment’s weakness, and its cravenness. The behavior of the globalists and so-called professionals provided yet more evidence that they could not be trusted. They could not even stand up to someone they obviously hated and who hated them.
Even as members of this group cycled out of the White House, there seemed to be no will, or ability, or courage to openly oppose Trump. Gary Cohn could not get a new job, largely because of his association with Trump, but though he continued to privately dine out on Trump’s outlandishness, he seemed to continue to be too concerned about his reputation to publicly express his alarm and disgust. Dina Powell, furious about the rumors Trump was spreading about her, but hoping to land the UN ambassador’s job someday, said nothing. Nikki Haley, eyeing the exit, continued to cultivate her relationship with Jared and Ivanka while privately considering a primary run against Trump (and, indeed, hoping that Trump might be gone and that a primary challenge would not in the end be necessary to get her to the White House).
But Woodward and his book now provided cover for delivering a powerful message: Team America represented the collective resistance to Trump’s extreme, manic, and uninformed behavior.
Communication of this message required a coordinated effort. Each person’s willingness to talk to Woodward was cross-checked against the willingness of several others to talk to him. This was part of Woodward’s standard method of establishing a critical mass of inside sources: he created a kind of in-group, and this also suggested that if you failed to participate, you would not only lose your opportunity to be part of the in-group but lose your place in history—indeed, you would become one of its dupes. But Woodward’s sources now offered something greater than gossip or a self-serving telling of events. Here were members of the White House trying to distance themselves from the very White House they had helped create. They wanted to cast it off, and in fact many of the Trump administration’s key participants were declaring it a failed administration, although through no fault of their own.
Appearing fifty-seven days before the midterm elections, Woodward’s book became a political event, one that many clearly hoped would do what, forty-four years before, Woodward’s first book had done: help bring down the president.
Inside the White House, Trump not only got this message, he suddenly couldn’t stop talking about Richard Nixon and how much he had been wronged. Nixon, Trump announced, was the greatest president. The fact that the establishment players had gotten together and thrown Nixon out was proof that he was the greatest. His mistake was the tapes—he should have burned them. “Trump,” said Trump, as he had often said before, “would burn them.”
As the autumn campaign cycle began, with Trump planning to be on the road four or five days a week, the mood among the senior staff in the White House—never buoyant, seldom even hopeful—reached something of a new low.
It wasn’t just that they were being attacked by former colleagues but that they had been left behind. Being a Trump staffer had become an existential predicament: even if you wanted to get out, and almost all of them did, there was nowhere to go. The internal view of Woodward’s book—that those who had served as his sources, no matter how much virtue they now claimed, would be forever discredited by the fact that they had worked in the Trump White House—was hardly confidence-building. What it came back to, and this was relevant in a personal way to everyone who worked in the White House and who might want to work somewhere else, was Trump’s fragile legitimacy. They all tried, some sheepishly, some pluckily, to insist on it: He was elected, wasn’t he? But as it turned out, having been elected president did not, in fact, make you a legitimate president—at least not in the eyes of the establishment, which still seemed to be the final arbiter in such judgments.
“Woodward is part of the overthrow effort,” said Bannon one early September morning while sitting at the Embassy’s dining table. But he was not without some admiration for how well his former colleagues had played Woodward, and how well Woodward played them.
As much as anyone, Bannon understood why people who worked for Trump might naturally, or inevitably, turn against him. He understood all the empirical reasons why people might think Trump was unfit. He recognized, too, that part of the art of being president—which Trump might well be remembered most of all for sorely lacking—was keeping yourself from getting thrown out of office.
But Bannon also believed that if you could get around Trump’s repellent character, intellectual deficiencies, and glaring mental health issues, you ought to be able to see that Trump was being savaged—with the powers that be trying to run him out of office—for doing much of what he had been elected to do. Trumpism, in fact, was working.
The European Union was about to cave to most of the U.S. demands. Mexico was buying the Trump shift on NAFTA, and Canada would surely follow. And China? It was in full panic. Trump’s threats of $500 billion in tariffs were doing what Reagan’s military buildup had done to the Soviet Union. This could be, if Trump held the line, the end of Chinese inevitability.
Here, Bannon believed, was the real nature of the effort to bring the president down: the establishment did not want Trump gone because he was a failed president, but because he was a successful one. Trump was a cold war president and China was his enemy—about this he could not have been clearer. If Trump was ill-informed and untrustworthy about everything else, he did have one bedrock belief, one idea he truly understood: China bad. This was the basis of powerful new policies that would put the United States toe to toe with China. If successful, these policies might topple China and, as a consequence, derail an economic future—the very future that Gary Cohn, Goldman Sachs, and much of Team America had staked their futures on—that was penalizing and even crippling the American working class.
Bannon, chopping the air with his hands, was exercised now. Cohn and McMaster and Tillerson and the National Security Council bureaucracy were selling out the country. What they were defending—along with everyone else who had spoken, none too sotto voce, to Woodward—was the status quo. Add to that crowd Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and their hedge-fund allies as they weighed the president’s weaknesses and considered whether and when and with whom to move against him.
Forget that Trump was an idiot and had clearly invited everything that was coming his way. There was a coup in progress.
On September 5, the Wednesday after Labor Day, apparently timed to complement the imminent publication of the Woodward book—and, propitiously, in the days just after John McCain’s funeral—the New York Times published an anonymous essay by “a senior official” in the Trump administration.
President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.
It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.
The dilemma—which he does not fully grasp—is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
The essay portrayed Trump as the man nearly everyone knew him to be: erratic, unfocused, impetuous, likely not of sound mind. But the article seemed also to single out a higher concern: “Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.”
The essay went on to argue, as Woodward’s book would echo, that significant parts of the executive branch were actively trying to undermine Trump’s will and policies. This was offered as a silver lining, or what the writer called “cold comfort,” but it might also have been offered as proof of the administration’s incompetence: Trump’s presidency was, the article suggested, subverting itself. Pointedly, the essay ended with a reference to John McCain and his farewell letter.
For twenty-four hours, it quite seemed that something was happening in American government that had seldom happened before. One part of the government was in open civil rebellion against the other, with the aid of the nation’s most influential media outlet.
The provenance of a newspaper article has seldom been so carefully dissected. “A senior official” meant what, exactly? An assistant to the president, a cabinet secretary or undersecretary, the head of a major agency? But the Times, in a cryptic response to a question about the essay’s author, suggested that it might not even know who the writer was. (“The writer,” said the editor responding to a query, “was introduced to us by an intermediary whom we know and trust.”) Trump railed against “the Sulzbergers” and how they were out to get him, a trope sometimes employed by the right to remind people of the Jewish background of the family that controlled the Times.
Within the White House, speculation about the author became a feverish parlor game, with most guesses centering on the National Security Council and a joint effort by two or three present and former NSC officials. But it might also be anyone of high standing in the administration who had a close relationship with a lawyer who could serve as the go-between with the Times and, for reasons of attorney-client privilege, could protect the writer’s identity if a formal investigation were to ensue. Furthermore, this lawyer would need to be someone whom the Times could trust. This last point was critically important if the Times, as seemed possible, did not know the exact identity of the author.
One top guess was Matthew Pottinger, who was on the China desk at the National Security Council, and who, although he might not be considered a “senior official,” could have collaborated with H. R. McMaster and Michael Anton, McMaster’s spokesperson, who had written widely read pseudonymous essays during the 2016 campaign. (His essays were pro-Trump, but Anton had since sided with McMaster in his war with the president.) Pottinger’s father was the New York lawyer Stan Pottinger, well known in liberal circles and to the Times, not least for being a longtime consort of the feminist icon Gloria Steinem.
But, in fact, it was remarkable how many people in the administration might plausibly have written the article or contributed to it. Few could be excluded. “Treason”—a word seldom used in American politics, and never in the White House, but which had variously been applied to both the president and the president’s son in reference to their dealings with the Russians—was now, particularly by the president and his family, used against the author or authors of the essay, with the president vowing swift retribution.
There was a dire sense in the White House that the letter could have earthshaking consequences. “This is Monica at the Ritz Hotel,” said one person close to the vice president, referring to the moment when Monica Lewinsky was whisked off the street by the FBI and held at the Ritz in Washington until she admitted to her affair with President Clinton, which in turn led directly to his impeachment.
It could hardly be overlooked that establishment Republicans seemed less than shocked by what might be reasonably construed as an overt rebellion within the White House. Mitch McConnell, as he took pains not to criticize “Anonymous” or even express concern about the essay’s appearance, seemed almost to chuckle. In fact, the same day the op-ed was published, McConnell used the controversy about the article to make another, but perhaps quite related, point. Addressing Trump’s renewed attacks on his attorney general, McConnell said, “I’m a big supporter of Jeff Sessions. I think he’s done a good job and I hope he stays right where he is.”
The other point White House insiders would make in the coming days was equally telling. The disarray and discord that arguably led to the essay’s publication now contributed to a complete inability to discover who had written it.