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The day John Dowd was fired, Steve Bannon was sitting at his dining-room table trying to forestall another threat to the Trump presidency. This one wasn’t about a relentless prosecutor but rather a betrayed base. It was about the Wall that wasn’t.
The town houses on Capitol Hill, middle-class remnants of the nineteenth century, are cramped up-and-down affairs of modest parlor floors, nook-y sitting rooms, and small bedrooms. Many serve as headquarters for causes and organizations that can’t afford Washington’s vast amount of standard-issue office real estate. Some double as housing for their organization’s leaders. Many represent amateur efforts or eccentric pursuits, often a kind of shrine to hopes and dreams and revolutions yet to occur. The “Embassy” on A Street—a house built in 1890 and the former location of Bannon’s Breitbart News—was where Bannon had lived and worked since his exile from the White House in August 2017. It was part frat house, part man cave, and part pseudo-military redoubt; conspiracy literature was scattered about. Various grave and underemployed young men, would-be militia members, loitered on the steps.
The Embassy’s creepiness and dark heart were in quite stark contrast to Bannon’s expansive and merry countenance. He might be in exile from the Trump White House, but it was an ebullient banishment, coffee-fueled or otherwise.
In the last few weeks, he had helped install his allies—and first-draft choices during the presidential transition—in central posts in the Trump administration. Mike Pompeo had recently been named secretary of state, John Bolton would soon become the national security advisor, and Larry Kudlow had been appointed director of the National Economic Council. The president’s chief political aides were Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, both Bannon allies, if not acolytes; both operated outside the White House and were frequent visitors at the Embassy. Many of the daily stream of White House defenders on cable television—the surrogates—were Bannon people carrying Bannon’s message as well as the president’s. What’s more, his enemies in the White House were moving out, including Hope Hicks, H. R. McMaster, the former national security advisor, and the ever shrinking circle of allies supporting the president’s son-in-law and daughter.
Bannon was often on the road. He was in Europe meeting with the rising populist right-wing groups, and in the U.S. meeting with hedge funders desperate to understand the Trump variable. He was also looking for every opportunity to try to convince liberals that the populist way ought to be their way, too. Early in the year, Bannon went to Cambridge to see Larry Summers, who had been Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary, Barack Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, and, for a time, president of Harvard. Summers’s wife refused to allow Bannon into their home, so the meeting happened at Harvard instead. Summers was mis-shaven and wearing a shirt that was missing a button or two, while Bannon was sporting his double-shirt getup, cargo pants, and a hunting jacket. “Both of them looked like Asperger guys,” said one of the people at the meeting.
“Do you fucking realize what your fucking friend is doing?” yelled Summers about Trump and his administration. “You’re fucking the country!”
“You elite Democrats—you only care about the margins, people who are rich or people who are poor,” returned Bannon.
“Your trade mumbo jumbo will sink the world into a depression,” thundered Summers.
“And you’ve exported U.S. jobs to China!” declared a delighted Bannon, always enjoying the opportunity to joust with a member of the establishment.
Bannon was—or at least saw himself to be—a fixer, power broker, and kingmaker without portfolio. He was a cockeyed sort of Clark Clifford, that political eminence and influence peddler of the 1960s and ’70s. Or a wise man of the political fringe, if that was not an ultimate kind of contradiction. Or the head of an auxiliary government. Or, perhaps, something truly sui generis: no one quite like Bannon had ever played such a central role in America’s national political life, or been such a thorn in the side of it. As for Trump, with friends like Bannon, who needed enemies?
The two men might be essential to each other, but they reviled and ridiculed each other, too. Bannon’s constant public analysis of Trump’s confounding nature—both its comic and harrowing components, the behavior of a crazy uncle—not to mention his indiscreet diatribes on the inanities of Trump’s family, continued to further alienate him from the president. And yet, though the two men no longer spoke, they hung on each other’s words—each desperate to know what one was saying about the other.
Whatever current feeling Bannon might have for Trump—his mood ranged from exasperation to fury to disgust to incredulity—he continued to believe that nobody in American politics could match Trump’s midway-style showmanship. Yes, Donald Trump had restored showmanship to American politics—he had taken the wonk out of politics. In sum, he knew his audience. At the same time, he couldn’t walk a straight line. Every step forward was threatened by his next lurch. Like many great actors, his innate self-destructiveness was always in conflict with his keen survival instincts. Some around the president merely trusted that the latter would win over the former. Others, no matter the frustration of the effort, understood how much he needed to be led by unseen hands—unseen being the key attribute.
With no one to tell him otherwise, Bannon continued, unseen, to conduct the president’s business from his dining-room table on A Street.
That afternoon, a bipartisan Congress with surprising ease had passed the $1.3 trillion 2018 appropriations bill. “McConnell, Ryan, Schumer, and Pelosi,” said Bannon about the Republican and Democratic congressional leadership, “in their singular moment of bipartisan magnanimity, put one over on Trump.”
This legislative milestone was a result of Trump’s disengagement and everybody else’s attentive efforts. Most presidents are eager to get down into the weeds of the budget process. Trump took little or no interest. Hence the Republican and Democratic leadership—here supported by the budget and legislative teams in the White House—were able to pass an enormous spending bill that failed to fund Trump’s must-must item, the holy grail Wall, that prospective two-thousand-mile monument meant to run the entire length of the border between the United States and Mexico. Instead, the bill provided only $1.6 billion for border security. The current bill was in effect the same budget bill that had been pushed forward at the end of the previous September, when the Wall had once again not been funded. In the fall, Trump had agreed to have the Republican-controlled Congress vote to extend the September budget bill. The next time it came up, the Wall would be funded or, he threatened, the government would be shut down.
Even the hardest-core Trumpers in Congress seemed content not to have to die on the actual battlefield of funding the Wall, since that would mean embracing or at least enduring an always politically risky shutdown. Trump, too, in his way, seemed to understand that the Wall was more myth than reality, more slogan than actual plan. The Wall was ever for another day.
On the other hand, it was unclear what the president understood. “We’ve gotten the budget,” he privately told his son-in-law at the end of the March budget negotiations. “We’ve gotten the Wall, totally.”
On Wednesday, March 21, the day before the final vote, Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, had come to the White House to receive the president’s blessings on the budget bill.
“Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming,” the president shortly tweeted.
The White House had originally asked for $25 billion for the Wall, although high-end estimates of the Wall’s ultimate cost came in at $70 billion. Even then, the $1.6 billion in the appropriations bill was not so much for the Wall as for better security measures.
As the final vote neared, a gentlemen’s agreement appeared to have been reached, one that extended to every corner of the government—with, it even seemed, Trump’s own tacit support, or at least his convenient distraction. The understanding was straightforward: whatever their stripe, members of Congress would not blow up the appropriations process for the Wall.
There were, too, Republicans like Ryan—with the backing of Republican donors such as Paul Singer and Charles Koch—who were eager to walk back, by whatever increment possible, Trump’s hard-line immigration policies and rhetoric. Ryan and others had devised a simple method for accomplishing this kind of objective: you agreed with him and then ignored him. There was happy talk, which Trump bathed in, followed by practical steps, which bored him.
That Wednesday, Trump made a series of calls to praise everyone’s work on the bill. The next morning, Ryan, in a televised news conference to seal the deal, said, “The president supports this bill, there’s no two ways about it.”
Here were the twin realities. The Wall was the most concrete manifestation of Trumpian policy, attitude, belief, and personality. At the same time, the Wall forced every Republican politician to come to terms with his or her own common sense, fiscal prudence, and political flexibility.
It was not just the expense and impracticality of the Wall, it was having to engage in a battle for it. A government shutdown would mean a high-stakes face-off between the Trump world and the non-Trump world. Should this come to pass, it would potentially be as dramatic a moment as any that had occurred since the election of 2016.
If the Democrats wanted to harden the partisan division and were eager to find yet another example—perhaps the mother of all examples—of Trump at his most extreme, a shutdown over the Wall would hand them one. If the Republicans wanted to shift the focus from a full-barbarian Trump to, say, the tax bill the Congress had recently passed, shutting down the government would sweep that approach right off the table.
The White House, quite behind Trump’s back, was aggressively working to pass the appropriations bill and avoid a shutdown. The vice president gave Trump the same assurance he had been given previously when a budget had been passed without full funding for the Wall: Pence said the bill provided a “down payment” for the Wall, a phrase whose debt-finance implications seemed to amply satisfy the president and which he repeated with great enthusiasm. Marc Short, the White House director of legislative affairs, and Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, in a joint appearance in the White House briefing room that Thursday, shifted the debate from the Wall to the military. “This bill will provide the largest year-over-year increase in defense spending since World War II,” said Mulvaney. “It’ll be the largest increase for our men and women in uniform in salary in the last ten years.”
The attempt to distract the Trumpian base with these bromides utterly failed. The hard-core cadre insisted on forcing the issue, and Bannon was delighted to serve as their general.
Within minutes of the budget bill’s passage on March 22, Bannon, in the Embassy, began working the phones. Calling Trump’s most ardent supporters, his goal was to “light him up.” The effect was nearly immediate: an unsuspecting Trump started to hear from many of those on his noisy back bench, who were suddenly furious.
Bannon understood what moved Trump. Details did not. Facts did not. But a sense that something valuable might be taken from him immediately brought him up on his hind legs. If you confronted him with losing, he would turn on a dime. Indeed, turning on a dime was his only play. “It’s not that he needs to win the week, or day, or even the hour,” reflected Bannon. “He needs to win the second. After that, he drifts.”
For the hard-core Trumpers, it was back to a fundamental through line of Trumpism: you had to constantly remind Trump which side he was on. As Bannon organized a howling protest from the president’s base, he took stock of the Trump reality: “There simply is not going to be a Wall, ever, if he doesn’t have to pay a political price for there not being a Wall.”
If the Wall was not under way by the midterm elections in November, it would show Trump to be false and, worse, weak. The Wall needed to be real. The absence of the Wall in the spending bill was just what it seemed to be: Trump out to lunch. Trump’s most effective message, the forward front of the Trump narrative—maximal aggression toward illegal immigrants—had been muted. And this had happened without him knowing it.
The night of the twenty-second, the Fox News lineup—Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity—hammered the message: betrayal.
The battle was on. The Republican leadership on the Hill, along with the donor class, stood sober and pragmatic in the face of both political realities and the prospect of unlimited billions in government spending—with, certainly, no illusions that Mexico was going to pay for the Wall. Opposing them were the Fox pundits, righteous and unyielding in their appeal to the true emotion of Trumpism.
The personal transformation of Trump over the course of the evening was convulsive. All three Fox pundits delivered a set of electric shocks, each rising in current. Trump had sold out the movement. Or, worse, Trump had been outsmarted and outwitted. Trump, on the phone, roared in pain and fury. He was the victim. He had no one in his corner. He could trust no one. The congressional leadership: against him. The White House itself: against him. Betrayal? Almost everyone in the White House had betrayed him.
The next morning it got worse. Pete Hegseth, the most obsequious of the Fox Trump lovers, seemed, on Fox & Friends, nearly brought to tears by Trump’s treachery.
Then, almost simultaneously with Hegseth’s wailing, Trump abruptly—confoundingly—shifted position and tweeted that he was considering vetoing the appropriations bill. The same bill that, twenty-four hours before, he had embraced.
That Friday morning, he came down from the residence into the Oval Office in a full-on rage so violent that, for a moment, his hair came undone. To the shock of the people with him, there stood an almost entirely bald Donald Trump.
The president’s sudden change of heart sent the entire Republican Party into a panic. If Trump carried out his threat not to sign the bill, he would bring on what they most feared: a shutdown. And he might well blame the shutdown on his own party.
Mark Meadows, the head of the House Freedom Caucus and a staunch Trump ally in Congress, called the president from Europe to say that after the vote on Thursday afternoon most members had left town for the congressional recess. Congress wouldn’t be able to undo the previous day’s vote, and the shutdown was due to commence in mere hours.
Mitch McConnell rushed Defense Secretary Jim Mattis into action to tell the president that American soldiers would not be paid the next day if he didn’t sign the bill. This was a repeat performance: Mattis had issued a similar warning during a threatened shutdown in January.
“Never … never … never … again,” Trump shouted, pounding the desk after each “never.”
Once again he caved and agreed to sign the bill. But he vowed that next time there would be billions upon billions for the Wall or there really would be a shutdown. Really. Really.
Bannon had been here before, so many times.
“Dude, he’s Donald fucking Trump,” said Bannon, holding his head and sitting at his table in the Embassy the day after the president signed the bill.
Bannon was not confused: he had a clear understanding of how great a liability Trump could be to Bannon’s own vision and career. To the nervous titters of the people around him, Bannon believed he was the man of populist destiny and not Donald Trump.
The urgency here was real. Bannon believed he represented the workingman against the corporate-governmental-technocratic machine whose constituency was the college-educated. In Bannon’s romantic view, the workingman smelled of cigarettes, crushed your hand in his, and was hard as brick—and not from working out in a gym. This remembrance of things past, of (if it ever existed) a leveled world where a workingman was proud of his work and identity, was inspiring, Bannon believed, a global anger. It was a revolution—this worldwide unease and fear and day-by-day upending of liberal assumptions—and it was his. The global hegemon was in his sights. He was the man behind the curtain—and he might as well be in front of it, too—trying to snatch the world back from its postmodern anomie and restore something like the homogenized and neighborly embrace of 1962.
And China! And the coming Götterdämmerung! To Bannon, this was way-of-life stuff. China was the Russia of 1962—but smarter, more tenacious, and more threatening. American hedge funders, in their secret support of China against the interests of the American middle class, were the new fifth column.
How much of this did Trump understand? How much was Trump committed to the ideas that moved Bannon and, by some emotional osmosis, the base? Trump was more than a year in, and not a shovelful of dirt had yet been dug for the Wall, nor a penny allocated. The Wall and so much else that was part of Bannon’s populist revolution—the details of which he had once listed on whiteboards in his White House office, expecting to check each one off—were entirely captive to Trump’s inattention and wild mood swings. Trump, Bannon had long ago learned, “doesn’t give a fuck about the agenda—he doesn’t know what the agenda is.”
In late March, after the gloom of the budget bill disaster had lifted, there was a brief, optimistic moment for the faithful in Trump’s inner circle.
Chief of Staff John Kelly, fed up with Trump—just as Trump was fed up with him—seemed surely on the way out. Kelly had joined the White House, replacing Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff, in August 2017, charged with bringing management discipline to a chaotic West Wing. But by mid-fall, Trump was circumventing Kelly’s new procedures. Jared and Ivanka—with many of the new rules designed to curtail their open access to the president—were going over his head. By the end of the year, Trump was casually mocking his chief of staff and his penchant for efficiency and strict procedures. Indeed, both men were openly trashing each other, quite unmindful of the large audience for their slurs. For Trump, Kelly was a “twitcher” and “feeble” and ready to “stroke out.” For Kelly, Trump was “deranged” and “mad” and “stupid.”
The drama just got weirder.
In February, Kelly, a retired four-star general, grabbed Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski outside the Oval Office and pushed him up against a wall. “Don’t look him in the eye,” whispered Trump about Kelly after the incident, circling his finger next to his head in the crazy sign. The confrontation left everybody shaken, with Trump asking Lewandowski not to tell anyone, and Lewandowski, when talking to the people he did tell, saying that he had almost wet himself.
By March, Trump and Kelly were hardly speaking. Trump ignored him; Kelly sulked. Or Trump would drop pointed hints that Kelly should resign, and Kelly would ignore him. Everyone assumed the countdown had begun.
Various Republicans, from Ryan to McConnell to their right-wing adversary Mark Meadows, along with Bannon, had gotten behind a plan to push House majority leader Kevin McCarthy for chief of staff. Even Meadows, who hated McCarthy, was all for it. Here finally was a strategy: McCarthy, a top tactician, would refocus an unfocused White House on one mission—the midterms. Every tweet, every speech, every action would be directed toward salvaging the Republican majority.
Alas, Trump didn’t want a chief of staff who would focus him. Trump, it was clear, didn’t want a chief of staff who would tell him anything. Trump did not want a White House that ran by any method other than to satisfy his desires. Someone happened to mention that John F. Kennedy didn’t have a chief of staff, and now Trump regularly repeated this presidential factoid.
The Mueller team, as it pursued the Russia investigation, continued to bump up against Trump’s unholy financial history, exactly the rabbit hole Trump had warned them not to go down. Mueller, careful to protect his own flank, took pains to reassure the president’s lawyers that he wasn’t pursuing the president’s business interests; at the same time, he was passing the evidence his investigation had gathered about Trump’s business and personal affairs to other federal prosecutors.
On April 9, the FBI, on instructions from federal prosecutors in New York, raided the home and office of Michael Cohen, as well as a room he was using in the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. Cohen, who billed himself as Trump’s personal lawyer, sat handcuffed for hours in his kitchen while the FBI conducted its search, itemizing and hauling away every electronic device its agents could find.
Bannon, coincidentally, also stayed at the Regency on his frequent trips to New York, and he would sometimes bump into Cohen in the hotel’s lobby. Bannon had known Cohen during the campaign, and the lawyer’s mysterious involvement in campaign issues often worried him. Now, in Washington, seeing the Cohen news, Bannon knew that another crucial domino had fallen.
“While we don’t know where the end is,” said Bannon, “we can guess where it might begin: with Brother Cohen.”
On April 11, three weeks after the president signed the budget bill, Paul Ryan—one of the government’s most powerful figures given the Republican lock on Washington—announced his plan to leave the Speakership and depart Congress.
“Listen to what Paul Ryan is saying,” said Bannon, sitting at his table in the Embassy early that morning. “It’s over. Done. Done. And Paul Ryan wants the fuck off the Trump train today.”
Ryan had been telling almost anyone who would listen that as many as fifty or sixty House seats would be lost seven months hence in the midterm elections. A Ryan lieutenant, Steve Stivers, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, was estimating a loss of ninety to one hundred seats. At this gloomy hour, it seemed more than possible that the Democrats would eliminate their twenty-three-seat deficit and gain a majority greater than the one the Republicans held now. Except, unlike the Republicans, theirs would be a unified party—or at least one that was unified against Donald Trump.
Ryan and Stivers were hardly the only ones seeing such a result. Mitch McConnell was telling donors not to even bother contributing to House races. The money should go to the Senate campaign, where prospects for holding the Republican majority were significantly brighter.
This was, for Donald Trump, in Bannon’s view, the most desperate moment in his political career, arguably even worse than the revelation of the Access Hollywood grab-them-by-the-pussy tape. He was already on the ropes legally, with Mueller and the Southern District bearing down; now, looking at a likely wipeout in the midterm elections, he was in serious political jeopardy as well.
But Bannon’s usual ebullience quickly returned. As he talked his way out of his funk, he became nearly joyful. If the establishment—Democrats, Republicans, moderate thinkers of every sort—believed that Donald Trump needed to be run out of town, then Bannon relished the prospect of defending him. For Bannon, this was the mission, but it was also sport. Bannon thrived on the possibility of upset. His own leap to the world stage had come because the Trump campaign was so deep in hopelessness that he was allowed to take it over. Then, on November 9, 2016, against all odds and expectations, Trump, riding Bannon’s campaign—with Bannon’s primacy soon one of the bitterest pills for Trump to swallow—won the presidency. Now, even with almost every indicator for the November elections looking bleak, Bannon believed he could yet see how Republican losses could be held to under the twenty-three seats needed to save the House majority. Still, it was going to be a grinding fight.
“When Trump calls his New York friends after dinner and whines that he doesn’t have a friend in the world, he’s kind of right,” said a mordant Bannon.
Bannon viewed the case against Donald Trump as both inherently political—his enemies willing to do whatever it took to bring him down—and essentially true. He had little doubt that Trump was guilty of most of what he was accused of. “How did he get the dough for the primary and then for the general with his ‘liquidity’ issues?” asked Bannon with his hands out and his eyebrows up. “Let’s not dwell.”
But for Bannon there were two sides in American politics—not so much right and left, but right brain and left brain. The left brain was represented by the legal system, which was empirical, evidentiary, and methodical; given the chance, it would inevitably and correctly convict Donald Trump. The right side was represented by politics, and therefore by voters who were emotional, volatile, febrile, and always eager to throw the dice. “Get the deplorables fired up”—he slapped his hands in thunderclap effect—“and we’ll save our man.”
Almost a year and a half on, all of the issues of 2016 remained as powerful and raw as ever: immigration, white man’s resentment, and the liberal contempt for the working—or out-of-work—white man. The year 2018 was, for Bannon, the real 2016: the deplorable base had become the deplorable nation. “It’s civil war,” Bannon said, a happy judgment he often repeated.
The most resonant issue was Donald Trump himself: the people who elected him would be galvanized by the effort to take him from them. Bannon was horrified by mainstream Republican efforts to run the coming election on the strength of the recent Republican tax cut. “Are you kidding? Oh my fucking god, are you kidding?” This election was about the fate of Donald Trump.
“Let’s have a do-over election. That’s what the libs want. They can have it. Let’s do it. Up or down, Trump or no Trump.”
Impeachment was not to be feared, it was to be embraced. “That’s what you’re voting for: to impeach Donald Trump or to save him from impeachment.”
The legal threat, however, might be moving faster than the election. And to Bannon—who knew more about the president’s hankerings, mood swings, and impulse-control issues than almost anyone—you could not have produced a needier or more hapless defendant.
Since coming aboard in the summer of 2017, the president’s legal team—Dowd, Cobb, and Sekulow—had delivered the message their client insisted upon hearing, that he was not a target and would shortly be exonerated. But the lawyers went even further with their feel-good strategy.
Presidents, faced with hostile investigations by the other coequal branches of government, Congress and the judiciary, invariably cite executive privilege both as a legitimate principle and as a dilatory tactic. It’s a built-in bargaining chip. But Trump’s lawyers, hoisted by how often they had to assure the president that he had nothing to fear, supported their confident assessment, to Trump’s delight, by dispensing with any claim of executive privilege and willingly satisfying all the special counsel’s requests. Trump, in all his dodginess, had become an open book. What’s more, Trump himself, ever believing in the force and charm of his own personality, was, with his attorneys’ apparent assent, eager to testify.
And yet, Bannon knew, it was still much worse. The president’s lawyers had sent more than 1.1 million documents to the special counsel, aided by only a scant document production team. It was just Dowd, Cobb, and two inexperienced assistants. In major litigations, documents are meticulously logged and cross-referenced into elaborate and efficient database systems. Here, they shipped over much of the material merely as attachments, and kept minimal or no records of what exactly had been sent. Few in the White House knew what they had given up and thus what the special counsel had. And the haphazard approach didn’t stop there. Dowd and Cobb neither prepared many of the witnesses who had worked for the White House in advance of their testimony to Mueller’s team nor debriefed them after they testified.
Bannon was overcome by the hilarity and stupidity of this what-me-worry approach to federal prosecutors whose very reputations depended on nailing the president. Trump needed a plan—which, of course, Bannon had.
Bannon swore that he did not want to go back into the White House. He wouldn’t ever, he said. The humiliations of working in Trump’s administration had almost destroyed Bannon’s satisfaction at having risen so miraculously to the top of the world.
Some, however, were not convinced by his protestations. They believed that Bannon actively fantasized that he would be brought back into the West Wing to save Trump—and that, not incidentally, this would be his ultimate revenge on Trump, saving him yet again. Bannon certainly believed that he was the only one who could pull off this difficult rescue, a reflection of his conviction that he was the most gifted political strategist of his time, and of his view that Trump was surrounded by only greater and lesser lummoxes.
Trump, Bannon believed, needed a wartime consigliere. And if, he mused, Jared and Ivanka were finally sent packing … But no, he insisted, not even then.
Moreover, Trump would not be able to tolerate it. Bannon understood that only Trump could save the day, or at least that Trump believed only he could save the day. No other scenario was possible. He would rather lose, would rather even go to jail, than have to share victory with someone else. He was psychologically incapable of not being the focus of all attention.
In the end, it was easier and more productive to give Trump advice at a distance than up close. It was a safer play to do what needed to be done without Trump himself actually being involved with, or even aware of, what was being done.
The morning Ryan announced his retirement from the House, Bannon was particularly eager to send some advice Trump’s way. Setting up a deft bank shot, he invited Robert Costa, a reporter for the Washington Post, to visit him at the Embassy.
Bannon spent a good part of every day talking to reporters. On some days, perhaps most days, his blind-quote voice—hidden behind a familiar attribution such as “this account is drawn from interviews with current and former officials”—crowded out most other voices on the subject of whatever new crisis was engulfing the Trump administration. These quotes functioned as something like a stage whisper that Trump could pretend he didn’t hear. Trump, in fact, was always desperately seeking Bannon’s advice, though only if there was the slightest pretext for believing that it came from some place other than Bannon. Indeed, Trump was quite willing to hear Bannon say something in this or that interview and then claim he had thought of it himself.
Costa sat at Bannon’s dining-room table for two hours, taking down Bannon’s prescription for how to save Trump from himself.
Trump’s stupidity, said Bannon, could sometimes be made into a virtue. Here was Bannon’s idea: the president should make a retroactive claim of executive privilege. I didn’t know. Nobody told me. I was ill-advised.
It was hard not to see Bannon’s satisfaction in a prostrate Trump admitting to his own lack of guile and artfulness.
Bannon understood that this claim of retroactive executive privilege would have no chance of success—nor should it. But the sheer audacity of it could buy them four or five months of legal delay. Delay was their friend, possibly their only friend. They could work this claim of retroactive executive privilege, no matter how loopy, all the way to the Supreme Court.
For this plan to work, the president would have to get rid of his inept lawyers. Oh, and he would also have to fire Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who was overseeing the Mueller investigation. Bannon had been against the firing of Comey, and in the months after the appointment of the special counsel, he had fought the president’s almost daily impulse to fire Mueller and Rosenstein, seeing this as the surest invitation to impeachment. (“Just don’t pay attention to his crazy shit,” he had urged everyone around the president.) But now they had run out of options.
“Firing Rosenstein is our only way out of here,” Bannon told Costa. “I don’t come to this lightly. As soon as they went to Cohen—that’s what they do in Mob prosecutions to get a response from the true target. So you can sit there and get bled out—get indicted, go to grand juries—or you can fight it politically. Get it out of the law-and-order system where we are losing and are going to lose. A new DAG will review where we stand on this thing, which could take a couple of months. Delay, delay, delay—and shift it politically. Can we win? I have no fucking idea. But I know on that other path I’m going to lose. It’s not perfect … but we live in a world of imperfect.”
Costa’s story, which was posted online later that day, described Bannon as “pitching a plan to West Wing aides and congressional allies to cripple the federal probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, according to four people familiar with the discussions.” But however many people Costa had spoken to about the background machinations of Steve Bannon, what mattered was that he had spoken directly and at length to Bannon himself, who was using the Washington Post to pitch a plan to the president.
Bannon’s three-part plan for Trump instantly made its way to the Oval Office. And the next morning, the president offered Kushner his view that he should fire Rosenstein, reinstate a claim of executive privilege, and get a tough-guy lawyer.
Kushner, pressing his own strategies, urged his father-in-law to move cautiously when it came to Rosenstein.
“Jared is spooked,” said a scornful Trump later that day while on the phone to a confidant. “What a girl!”