22

SHUTDOWN

On the morning of Wednesday, November 7, Trump made several phone calls to friends. One recipient described his conversation with the president as “eerie stuff—from another world.” Trump seemed unaware that the midterms had gone against him and that he was facing an alarming political setback. He seemed to believe—and seemed to take from his other conversations that morning—that politically he had advanced, with the Senate “such a big win.”

The friend did not argue otherwise, and he inferred that no one else the president had spoken to did, either. “Big victory, big victory, big victory,” said Trump. “This is what we’ve been waiting for.”

The president went on to tell his friend that the “victory plan” was all set. Sessions—“the shithead”—was out. Mueller would be boxed in.

“How far are you going to go?” the friend asked—that is, would the president now try to shut down the special counsel’s office?

“All the way,” the president answered.

The president also talked confidently about Nancy Pelosi, the likely new Speaker of the House. He told his friend he hoped she would make it and not “get voted out by the rebels.” She was going on seventy-nine, he repeated several times. She looked good, he noted, commenting that maintaining her appearance must take a lot of time. Meanwhile, he said, they got along. Got along fine. They had always understood each other. It would be great if she got to be Speaker again. That’s what she wanted. Everybody, he said, was getting what they wanted. And he knew how to handle Nancy. Not a problem. He knew what she wanted. She wanted to look good. “I know how to set it up,” said the president.

Now, with the midterms over, he would finally be able to do everything he had wanted to do. “That son-of-a-bitch Kelly’s last day is today,” Trump said. “His ass is fired.” (Kelly, in fact, would remain in place for another month.)

“Everything is going to be different,” Trump insisted. “New organization. Totally new.”

As the conversation went on, the friend thought it was possible that Trump felt chastened. Maybe, on the day after the disastrous election, he was mentally preparing himself for what was ahead. But the friend understood it was just as possible that the president—still on something of a high after nearly eight straight weeks of often daily stadium rallies—had no clear understanding of what had happened, and no sense at all of what lay ahead.

On the morning after the midterms, Bannon reminded several members of the original Trump team—those who had entered the White House nearly two years ago, on January 20, 2017—about a meeting that had taken place three days after the inauguration, the first business day of the new Trump administration. This was a traditional postinaugural occasion: the congressional leadership had been invited to meet the president and his staff.

Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon were sitting to the right of the new president. Nancy Pelosi was sitting across from them. Looking at the House minority leader, Bannon felt a shiver go down his spine. He leaned close to Priebus and whispered, “She so sees through us.”

Pelosi, the professional, was taking stock of the most ill-informed, ill-equipped, ill-prepared team ever to come into the White House. Bannon perceived that she had to exercise maximum restraint not to break down in open incredulity and hilarity. What she seemed to feel was less scorn, Bannon sensed, than pity. She saw the future.

The establishment might have been rocked to its core by the election of Donald Trump. All the powers that be might be contemplating how to resist and ultimately undo the administration of Donald Trump. But Pelosi, Bannon felt, saw the greater truth: the Trump administration would undo itself. No one in the White House, least of all Donald Trump himself, was capable of succeeding at the complicated dance of holding on to power, a much greater challenge than seizing power.

“She was at peace,” Bannon recalled. “Because she knew that in two years she would own us. This was not tragedy to her—it was comedy.” Hardly a day had gone by since then that he had not thought about how Pelosi had looked at them from across the table.

The president’s main piece of business on November 7 was to finally fire his attorney general, perhaps the man he most reviled in his government, and who most reviled him. He wasted no time: by noon he had accepted Sessions’s resignation and posted a perfunctory thank-you tweet.

He also announced the second part of his “victory plan,” the appointment of Matthew Whitaker—a loyalist lawyer who had been shunted around the administration and had few supporters other than Trump—as acting AG. Whitaker, with a host of conflicts and an unimpressive legal record, wasn’t a popular choice, even in the Republican Senate. Transparently, he was Trump’s latest attempt to undermine the Department of Justice and protect himself from the special counsel’s investigation. It was the president’s all-too-obvious hope that Mueller would deliver his findings to Whitaker, who would sequester the report while giving Trump the opportunity to launch an attack against it.

Whitaker’s new role atop the Justice Department was blessed by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel—the same office that had issued the opinion that a president cannot be indicted. The OLC had helpfully declared that the president could install, on an interim basis, without the advice and consent of the Senate, an appointee who could serve for 210 days, or longer if the confirmation for a permanent AG was in progress. Here was Trump’s ultimate work-around: finally, he had his personal attorney general.

Soon after Whitaker was appointed, Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George, the Wachtell Lipton lawyer, and Neal Katyal, who had served under Obama for a year as acting solicitor general, published an essay in the New York Times in which they argued that the Whitaker appointment was unconstitutional. The article was meant to give a considerable boost to any fight that brought the appointment to the courts. It would also give the new Congress ammunition to resist a Mueller challenge.

That day Trump also heard from Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire who was effectively his principal benefactor. For the $113 million Adelson had spent on the midterm elections, he had demanded only one guarantee: the election of Danny Tarkanian, his handpicked candidate in Nevada’s Third Congressional District. But no dice: Tarkanian had gone down in the Democratic wave. In Adelson’s view, he had received zero return on his investment.

“Sheldon seems pretty pissed,” a not unconcerned Trump told a caller.

On Friday, November 9, Trump flew to France to participate in ceremonies commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. (His favorite book, he repeated to several people before leaving, was the World War I novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which he had read in high school.) During the flight, British prime minister Theresa May called to congratulate him—she had been told in advance that he regarded the midterm elections as a victory. But as though he had begun to understand that “congratulations” was a way to humor him, and might be, in fact, a kind of mockery, he turned on May in a temper tantrum about Brexit, Iran, and her political abilities.

Trump spent much of that flight on the phone, venting his anger about a number of topics. By the time he reached Paris, a secondary wave of calls had begun to spread from several of the people he had been venting to. They rang the alarm bell: his mood was as bad as any they could remember. Everyone, he was saying, had failed him. He couldn’t get rid of Mueller. He felt surrounded. There was no way out.

“It’s very, very dark—the darkest,” said one caller.

In Paris the next morning, Trump was up early, tweeting and trying to defend Whitaker. He was holed up in his bedroom, stuck in his danger-zone mood. There was no one to talk him through this. In his ever-reduced White House, his travel group consisted of people he regarded as assistants or lackeys or fools—sometimes all three. Among them were his body man Jordan Karem, who was already planning to resign; former Trump golf club manager and now White House social media director Dan Scavino; White House personnel director Johnny DeStefano, who, after so many others had left, had transitioned from marginal figure to senior staffer, and was himself on the way out; and senior adviser and immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller, whom Trump described as “autistic” and “sweaty.” As for the two senior-most members of his team, Trump was preparing to fire Chief of Staff John Kelly, and he was mostly not speaking to his communications director Bill Shine.

Lacking someone in his entourage who was tactful enough, or bold enough, or trusted enough to advise him otherwise, Trump decided to blow off the symbolic centerpiece of the trip, a ceremony at an American cemetery outside the French capital honoring the U.S. soldiers killed in World War I. The international backlash to his absence—which his staff blamed on bad weather—began almost immediately, sending him into an even deeper spiral of recrimination and despair.

The Trump baby blimp, which had dogged him on his trip to London over the summer, now followed him to Paris, yet another irritation. And on Sunday, Trump attended a ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe, during which French president Macron delivered what Trump took to be a personal dressing down. “Nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism,” said Macron in his speech. “By saying, ‘Our interests first, who cares about the others,’ we erase what a nation holds dearest, what gives it life, what makes it great and what is essential: its moral values.”

In an administration characterized principally by Trump’s up-and-down mood swings, his forty-three hours in Paris were, in the estimation of friends charting his emotional course, among the most distraught and angry of his presidency. But after two years of nearly constant instability, this was only the beginning of a new, far more unpredictable mental state. And the Democratically controlled House had not even been seated yet.

The president’s extreme mood swings were alarming for almost everyone. His rages were now greater and his coherence more in question; Sean Hannity told Steve Bannon that Trump seemed “totally fucking crazy.”

But this new phase was good for Jared and Ivanka. With Trump spending an increasing number of hours away from the West Wing and cut off from his staff—labeled “executive time” on his schedule—his son-in-law and daughter were the only staffers in reliably constant contact with him.

In some sense, here was the triumph of their own relentless political battle. They had sidelined the native Trump forces—Bannon, Bossie, Lewandowski, Meadows—and recently quashed a rump move to have either Meadows or Bossie replace John Kelly as chief of staff. Indeed, on the verge of Kelly’s ouster, and thus the dismantling of the organizational structure he had tried to impose on the West Wing and on the Trump family, Jared and Ivanka looked forward to installing their handpicked choice, Nick Ayers, currently the vice president’s chief of staff.

The president’s daughter and son-in-law seemed somehow—to the amazement of the entire Trump administration, as well as establishment Washington itself—to have prevailed over the political professionals. They truly were, as they had so wished themselves to be, the power behind the throne. Their own feelings about this ascension were suffused with suffering and nobility. They had recently decided to leave their Washington house in Kalorama because their neighbors had made them feel so unwelcome; now they would shop for a new one in, they hoped, a more tolerant neighborhood. This was a particularly bitter pill. After all, hadn’t they, repeatedly and single-handedly, soothed and restrained the president?

As well, the administration’s major piece of legislation in 2018, one of the few bills wholly created and shepherded through Congress by the West Wing, was their brainchild. The First Step Act, a criminal justice reform bill, passed both the House and the Senate in the weeks following the midterms. The fact that this measure seemed to be at almost incomprehensible odds with everything else the Trump administration sought to achieve was just more proof, they believed, that they were unsung heroes.

Jared and Ivanka were also, as they liked to remind friends, the only people who seemed to be able to talk to the president about his political and legal peril. Trump raged at or dismissed everybody else who raised the subject—or he simply walked out of the room. Kushner, in a view the president liked, told Trump that the best defense was to remain in power.

Kushner, speaking of the president as though he were a high-strung child needing special cossetting and handling, described the rapidly darkening legal and political clouds to a friend as too much for Trump to fully grasp. “He needs discrete issues,” said Kushner as, on an almost daily basis, the threats to Trump and his family increased.

Days after the midterms, the New York State Supreme Court had allowed the New York attorney general’s lawsuit to proceed against the Trump Foundation, directly targeting the Trump family. The state’s newly elected attorney general, Letitia James, had all but run on a platform devoted to attacking Trump and using her office to help bring him down. Here, if not by other avenues, Kushner told the president, was a highway to that holy grail of the Trump tax returns, since a taxpayer’s New York State filing was just a mirror of his federal return. Although the IRS imposed high barriers to accessing a return, the barriers were far lower in New York.

The Southern District of New York, meantime, while privately saying it was not coordinating its efforts with the Mueller investigation, was also privately saying that its investigation of the Trump Organization was largely on a “time track” with Mueller’s probe—and that it would let the Mueller report come first. Kushner and his lawyer Abbe Lowell had been following this investigation for almost a year. Both Michael Cohen and Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s CFO, were said to be cooperating—Weisselberg, famous for being cheap, had hired his own lawyer. Robert Khuzami, the federal prosecutor handling the case, was telling people that he planned to leave the Southern District by late spring but hoped to wrap up the Trump case first.

Kushner’s catalog of the political crisis facing the president in the wake of the loss of his House majority was no less fraught.

Four soon-to-be-seated Democratic chairs of congressional committees now had the president in their sights. New York’s Jerry Nadler—who Trump, during a fight over real estate development in New York in the 1990s, had called a “fat little Jew”—would lead the Judiciary Committee, which would deal with any impeachment matters. Elijah Cummings’s Committee on Oversight and Reform would focus on what the Democrats saw as the Trump administration’s abuse of various government agencies. Maxine Waters, whom the president had repeatedly and publicly insulted, chaired the banking committee; she would be looking into the president’s financial issues, already singling out his tangled relationship with Deutsche Bank. Adam Schiff, who would chair the House Intelligence Committee and was perhaps the biggest publicity hound in the House, would be directing an investigation of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election.

Four committees trying to take a slice of the same pie was a recipe for infighting and disarray, but Nancy Pelosi had drafted no less than Barack Obama to help her maintain discipline among her troops. They would not lose this battle by acting precipitously. In an ideal world, she was telling people, it would be the Republicans pushing for a fast resolution of all these matters and the Democrats slow walking the various investigations.

Through it all, Jared and Ivanka yet maintained a kind of otherworldly confidence. It surely helped that their ally Nick Ayers—who, in everybody’s estimation, was the best political operative in the White House—was about to become chief of staff. In the couple’s view, Ayers would be as much their chief of staff as the president’s, thus finally bringing the White House under their direct control.

With John Kelly’s departure at last imminent—the announcement of his resignation was scheduled for Sunday, December 8, and his last official day would be January 2—Ayers stepped into the job on Wednesday, December 5. But Ayers’s takeover quickly unraveled: on Sunday, having spent four days working for, as he told a friend, “Mr. Fucking-out-of-his-mind-totally-crazy,” Ayers informed the president that he would not be taking the job after all. In yet another head-spinning episode of the West Wing’s soap opera, Ayers was quitting before he had officially started. Hence, by Monday there was no Ayers, no Kelly, and no chief of staff.

On Wednesday, December 11—without a chief of staff, and largely absent a communications director, with Trump continuing to shun Bill Shine—the president invited the Democratic leadership to a televised sit-down in the Oval Office. During the meeting, he threatened, even invited, a government shutdown over funding for the Wall. In a matter of minutes, Nancy Pelosi, the incoming Speaker of the House, was, as Trump tried to hector and bait her, transformed before a national audience into his coequal, and into the leader of a resurrected Democratic Party.

Three days later, at his daughter’s insistence, the president took two steps in an effort to undo the damage of the previous few days. He accepted budget director Mick Mulvaney’s unusual terms for becoming chief of staff: Mulvaney would not become the permanent chief, just the “acting” one, meaning that he would be ready, it was widely interpreted, to bolt at a moment’s notice. The following day, Trump walked back his demand for the Wall and his threats of a shutdown.

On December 19, the Wednesday before Christmas, the president made two fateful decisions. Early that morning—without preparation or consultation, and bypassing the standard military and interagency review process—Trump sent out a tweet proclaiming that “[w]e have defeated ISIS in Syria,” and then announced that he was withdrawing all U.S. troops from that country. The military, diplomatic, and intelligence communities had long ago concluded that Trump’s views about foreign policy gyrated peculiarly, and dangerously, on the basis of impulses and mood swings. But this was the topper: declaring that defeating ISIS was “my only reason for being [in Syria] during the Trump presidency,” the president tweeted out his announcement and thus kept his promise to his isolationist base.

This, finally, was too much for Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. The next day, Mattis announced his resignation in a letter that delivered a succinct and devastating critique of Trump’s damage to the international community. “We must do everything we can to advance an international order that is most conducive to our security, prosperity and values and we are strengthened in this effort by solidarity of our alliances,” Mattis wrote. He also refused to employ the usual anodyne language about his decision to resign, writing: “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.” Bannon’s mordant prediction after Helsinki—if Trump lost Mattis, he would lose the presidency—was about to be tested.

On that same Wednesday, the president sent Mike Pence to a lunch on Capitol Hill where the vice president gave assurances that Trump would, as he had done every other time a budget had come to his desk, sign a continuing resolution, known on the Hill as a CR. The CR would continue appropriations at the same levels from the prior fiscal year for an additional set period of time—with no Wall funding provided.

Kellyanne Conway began to publicly recast the wall as “border security,” and to say the president would find “other ways,” beyond the budget, to build the Wall.

To the base, this sounded like “no Wall ever.” To Steve Bannon, it sounded like a five-alarm fire, and he immediately went to work. He called Hannity, he called Lewandowski, and, most especially, he called Ann Coulter.

Trump had long admired Ann Coulter’s “mouth,” as well as—he always made sure to mention—her “hair and legs.” The conservative commentator and performer, with her politically incorrect zingers and signature straight blond hair, had, for more than twenty years, been a right-wing cable voice and bestselling author. (In Kellyanne Conway, a right-wing television personality who also had straight blond hair, Trump had gotten, he often said, the poor man’s Ann Coulter.) In fact, Coulter’s influence had dramatically waned in recent years. She was far too right wing for CNN and MSNBC, and way too unpredictable for Fox. An early Trump supporter, she had, not long into his term, decided that he was selling out the far-right, anti-immigration, nativist, America First cause. Invited to Trump Tower during the transition, she had lectured the president-elect mercilessly, using frequent f-bombs; she was particularly scathing about his “fucking moron idea” to hire his family. And yet because of her sharp tongue, Trump admired her. “She cuts people down—they don’t get up,” he said about Coulter with awe. “Great, great television.” He also credited her with having some kind of mythic connection to his base.

But now that base was buzzing with anger, and Coulter was about to stir up the hive. On the same Wednesday that Pence made his pilgrimage to the Hill, Coulter, at Bannon’s instigation, published a column in Breitbart; its headline was GUTLESS PRESIDENT IN WALL-LESS COUNTRY. Later that day, she recorded a podcast with the Daily Caller, and near the top of the podcast she said Trump’s presidency was “a joke.” And the next day she sent out a blistering tweet:

The chant wasn’t “SIGN A BILL WITH B.S. PROMISES ABOUT ‘BORDER SECURITY’ AT SOME POINT IN THE FUTURE, GUARANTEED TO FAIL!” It was “BUILD A WALL!”

A friend who spoke to Trump that evening was startled by the intensity of the president’s reaction. “Honestly, his voice was breaking,” said the friend. “Ann really fucked him up. The base, the base. He was completely panicked.”

On Friday, December 21, responding directly to Coulter’s taunts, Trump abruptly reversed course and refused to accept any compromise on the budget bill because it contained no funding for the Wall. At midnight, the government shut down.

During the two years Trump had been president, almost any other moment would have been a more propitious time to force a shutdown. In August 2017, as Bannon was leaving the White House, he had argued that the end of the following month presented the ideal opportunity: with a budget vote coinciding with a vote on the debt ceiling, Trump would have maximum leverage. A shutdown would cause the Treasury to run dry—the perfect time, in Bannon’s view, for brinkmanship. Instead, the president blinked, and then kicked the can down the road with another CR, expiring in January 2018. This had happened again in February 2018, then again in September 2018, with that CR now running out in December.

Here, with Coulter baiting him, Trump was finally insisting that the Wall be funded. Just at the moment when the Democrats were about to assume power—and, in their singular enmity toward him, just when they were as united as they had ever been—he had drawn a line in the sand. What’s more, he had given Nancy Pelosi, now the de facto leader of the Democratic Party and his most direct antagonist, a dramatic platform. In the past, Trump had demonstrated an extraordinary ability to undermine his opponents, to ridicule and reduce them; in this instance, he was doing exactly the opposite. Over the course of ten days, Trump had turned Pelosi into a political giant.

Trump’s decision to shut down the government was virtually incomprehensible to both Democrats, who could hardly believe that they had been handed such a favorable opportunity, and Republicans, who could see nothing but a political disaster for the party and a negative outcome for the president. And no one with any parliamentary experience or political acumen could see how Trump would get out of this.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate leader, famous for his iron-fisted control of everything that happened in the Senate, now merely pronounced that he was just a bystander, an observer awaiting developments. He left town for his home in Kentucky.

In the White House, the president, to general surprise, announced that he would not accompany his family to Mar-a-Lago over the holidays—a confounding, even alarming, turn for anyone who knew how much he valued a golf-and-warm-weather opportunity over any presidential business. Melania certainly had no intention of staying behind. Among other issues, friends suggested that she was still furious about his fireside Christmas Eve chat with a seven-year-old boy, during which Trump had asked the boy if he still believed in Santa. “Melania didn’t think that was funny,” said one aide. Trump was “clearly a guy who had never dealt with a seven-year-old.”

For his part, the stay-behind president became obsessed with the Secret Service detail patrolling the White House grounds, finding them perched in trees in “blackface,” he reported to callers, with their machine guns pointed at him. He tried to catch their attention, waving from the windows, but they blanked him. “Spooky,” he said. “Like I’m a prisoner.”

In an empty White House, a young assistant brought his papers and call sheets from the West Wing up to the residence, finding him, she told friends, in his underwear. And herein, suddenly, was another subplot.

Trump, who had first taken notice of the woman during the transition, kept repeating, “She’s got a way about her,” his signature, and creepy, stamp of approval for young women. Now the president was telling friends that he wasn’t staying at the White House because of the shutdown—he was staying because he was “banging” the young West Wing aide.

Shutdown bravado? Locker-room talk? Or all part of a new alternative reality that only he seemed to be living in?