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A raging and vengeful Trump might seem to be a constant presence in the White House, but in truth this Trump was often eclipsed by a lazy, disengaged, and even self-satisfied Trump—a seventy-one-year-old man fondly reviewing his own extraordinary performance and accomplishments.
“It might seem bad, really bad, but he can be as happy as a clam,” said Ivanka Trump, describing her father’s White House disposition to a friend.
This was the Trump bubble. Trump was incapable of admitting vulnerability—any at all. He could not acknowledge that his White House might be troubled or that he himself might be in peril. No one in a wide circle of acquaintances and colleagues had ever heard him express a regret, doubt, or wish to have acted any differently than the way he had acted. When Trump’s bubble opened and anything less than adulation entered, someone needed to be blamed—and quite possibly fired.
But mostly the bubble stayed closed. One effect of Trump’s mounting legal difficulties was that more and more people, fearful about their own exposure to these issues, avoided talking to him about his problems. Many of his late-night real estate buddies—Richard LeFrak, Steven Roth, and Tom Barrack, all of whom had served as voices of some measure of reality and practicality—were afraid of being called by Mueller. Trump’s bubble was smaller and increasingly less penetrable: he was left, at night, in bed, eating his favorite candy bars—Three Musketeers—and talking to a slavish and reassuring Sean Hannity.
Trump could only be part of an organization that attended to him with unalloyed devotion; he could not really imagine another type. He insisted that the White House operate more like the Trump Organization, an enterprise dedicated to his satisfaction and committed to following and covering for his peripatetic and impulsive interests. Trump’s management practices were entirely self-centered, not task-oriented or organizationally based. An outward focus, or focus of any sort, was not his concern or his method.
Barring a grievance that might strike him in the night, Trump arrived late to the office and then on most days enjoyed a lineup of staged meetings with a person or group in the Oval Office or Roosevelt Room, the purpose of which was to praise, congratulate, and distract him. And as his staff knew very well by now, a distracted Trump was a happy Trump.
When Trump was disengaged, the White House and greater executive branch were also happy. In this favorable environment, the political and bureaucratic professionals were able to move ahead with the work that Trump took no interest in—and Trump took no interest in a large majority of their work.
If Trump tended to be at his most cheerful when distracted, he was also liable to be in a good mood when in the midst of the personal crushes he regularly developed. Though they invariably passed, they were powerful in the moment. Michael Flynn had been a crush. Bannon had been one. Rob Porter and even Paul Ryan had had their day in the sun.
And then there was Rear Admiral Ronny Jackson, the White House doctor. Jackson would be nothing short of delirious when heaping flattery on the president. In his review of the president’s health in January 2018, he professionally opined, “Some people have just great genes. I told the president that if he had a healthier diet over the last twenty years, he might live to be two hundred years old.”
In late March, Trump had fired David Shulkin, the head of Veterans Affairs, and then nominated Jackson as his replacement. It was an odd choice—Jackson had no administrative experience, nor any professional engagement with veteran-related matters—but it was wholly in keeping with Trump’s desire to reward friends and supporters. In the weeks that followed, Trump was only dimly aware that a cadre inside the White House had commenced a sophisticated campaign to undermine his nominee, a campaign that originated in the office of the vice president.
Trump had never warmed to his vice president—indeed, Mike Pence had annoyed him from the first weeks of his administration. (Pence was the governor of Indiana from 2013–17; for twelve years before that, he was a member of Congress.) Trump demanded subservience, but when he got it he was suspicious of the person providing it. The more Pence bowed, the more Trump tried to figure out his angle.
“Why does he look at me like that?” Trump asked about the way Pence seemed to stare at him near beatifically. “He’s a religious nut,” Trump concluded. “He was a sitting governor and was going to lose when we gave him the job. So I guess he’s got a good reason to love me. But they say he was the stupidest man in Congress.”
In June 2017, Bannon had helped install Nick Ayers—a young, disciplined, making-a-name-for-himself Republican political operative—as Pence’s chief of staff. Pence, “our fallback guy,” in Bannon’s parlance, “who doesn’t know where he is half the time,” clearly needed help. The result was that Pence’s office, led by Ayers, had become the most efficient operation in the West Wing.
This was not saying very much. By spring 2018, many of the individual fiefdoms around Trump were in a state of relative collapse. The chief of staff’s office, given Trump’s persistent animosity toward Kelly, was surely among the weakest in history. Kushner’s various initiatives and power centers in the White House—notably the White House Office of American Innovation—had all flamed out. National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, who had finally resigned in March, had for the better part of six months been nearly persona non grata in the West Wing, with Trump often performing McMaster imitations (a droning voice and heavy breathing). Marc Short and the congressional liaison office had been shunned by the president ever since the appropriations bill contretemps.
And the communications department was in ludicrous disarray. The three key figures—Mercedes Schlapp, the White House director of strategic communications; Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the press secretary (for Trump, the “Huckabee girl”); and Kellyanne Conway, with communications responsibilities largely unknown to everyone else—each tried to undermine the other on an hour-to-hour basis, with Hope Hicks, an “on background” voice to the media, reliably zinging her former colleagues from outside the White House. “A catfight,” Trump pronounced with some apparent satisfaction, as he handled a good part of the press outreach from his own cell phone.
The era of Reince Priebus, the chief of staff during the administration’s first seven months, under whose reign the Trump White House seemed to have become a comedy of mismanagement, now rather looked like IBM in the 1950s compared to the current dysfunction. Amidst the breakdown, Pence’s office could be depended on to execute White House business because of two people: Nick Ayers and Pence’s wife, Karen.
Early in the administration, an article in Rolling Stone had quoted Pence referring to his wife as “Mother.” The moniker stuck. Since then, Mrs. Pence has been known throughout the West Wing as Mother, and not with affection. She was seen as the power behind the vice presidential throne—the canny, indefatigable, iron-willed strategist who propped up her hapless husband.
“She really gives me the creeps,” said Trump, who avoided Mrs. Pence.
Along with George Conway, Kellyanne Conway’s husband, a top Wall Street litigator who tweeted derisively about the president, and John Kelly’s wife, Karen Hernest, who had taken to buttonholing near strangers to express how much her husband hated the president, and Steve Mnuchin’s wife, the former actress Louise Linton, who regularly offered the gag gesture, Mother was one more spouse who regarded the president with disbelief.
While Pence performed daily acts of obeisance to Trump and demonstrated an abject and almost excruciating loyalty, Ayers and Mother were anticipating the worst for the Trump presidency and positioning Pence as the soft landing if impeachment and expulsion or resignation came, an eventuality that Mother variously rated to friends as 60/40 either way. By April 2018, both Ayers and Mother believed the House would be swamped in November and that even the Senate majority was imperiled, giving rise to a new and vaunting ambition in the Pence orbit.
Trump, however, appeared to remain unaware of the Pence—or Pence family—perfidiousness. He had no inkling that the nomination of Admiral Jackson was about to become a test of the Mother–Ayers (and thus Pence) strength, and of the president’s weakness.
Jackson—physician to the president in the Obama administration and now in the Trump White House—was the go-to doctor for the president, cabinet members, and senior staff, supervising the White House’s on-site medical unit. Jackson was a popular get-along figure, not least because he was casual about prescribing medication. He kept the president stocked with Provigil, an upper, which Trump’s New York doctor had long prescribed for him. For others, Jackson was regarded as a particularly easy Ambien touch. He got along especially well with the men—an “old-fashioned sort of drinker,” in one description. He got along much less well with the women, accruing several complaints.
One woman he crossed was Mother.
During the first year of the Trump presidency, she had consulted Jackson about a gynecological problem. Jackson, participating in the general ridicule of the vice president’s wife, was indiscreet about her issue. Mother soon learned about this breach, and her mortification and anger quickly turned into a determination for revenge.
Many of the leaks about Jackson’s drinking, free hand with pills, and the harassment claims against him—which Trump began to blame on Democrats and other enemies, and which, by mid-April, were part of the daily Trump news cycle—came from Mother and Ayers. Before long, the nomination was strangled. Jackson withdrew his name from consideration on April 26.
“This was one of the most impressive things I’ve seen the West Wing do, lay the hit on the admiral,” said Bannon. “They whacked that son of a bitch.”
The Jackson affair could be read as an instance not so much of opposing Trump, or of being disloyal to him, but of getting on with the business at hand in spite of him. It often seemed as though Trump, remote from the technical operations of governing, glued to the television and obsessed by its moment-by-moment challenges and insults, did not really intersect with his own White House. Mother and Ayers took political revenge because they could. And while Ronny Jackson may have been Trump’s pick, it was an idle pick. Jackson was certainly not part of any grand Trump plan, and, to boot, he had offended Mother, so why not whack him?
Still, despite Trump’s inattention, the Jackson debacle inflamed his conviction that he should be able to appoint whomever he pleased. Appointments were a reliable hot button; opposition to his personnel choices seemed like a direct challenge. Confused to find that the power of the presidency had limitations, he came to see the limitations as his own—a sign of his own weakness. Veterans Affairs was a no-account little job, so why couldn’t he appoint whomever he wanted? It was the White House standing in his way. It was Washington standing in his way. It was the whole gargantuan bureaucracy failing to support him.
Despite such feelings, many around Trump were surprised to record an unexpected character note: he wasn’t paranoid. He was self-pitying and melodramatic, but not on guard. Negativity and betrayal always startled him. Narcissism, really, is the opposite of paranoia: Trump thought people were and should be protecting him. He was surprised, and all the more deeply wounded, to realize that he had to look after himself.
Here again, as with the spending bill, was a moment that delivered bitter instruction. Even Mike Pence, suck-up, did not have his back. When Ivanka explained the precise issue to him—Jackson’s disrespect of Mrs. Pence—Trump chose to avoid that uncomfortable matter. Instead, he continued to dwell on the issue of his limited power. He was the president of the United States. Why couldn’t he get what he wanted?
The problem was the White House itself. Its many personalities and power centers demanded a savvy and politesse and diplomacy and adroitness—indeed, a willingness to work with others—that, counter to everything in Trump’s life, he was not now going to summon. The many empty billets at the White House were in part unfilled because of a lack of candidates; equally, however, Trump was unmoved to hire anybody.
The story of the past fifteen months had not been about a president strengthening his White House team, but about the attrition of the relatively weak team that Trump had been rushed into accepting. Almost the entire top tier of White House management had been washed out in little more than a year. Flynn, Priebus, Bannon, Cohn, Hicks, McMaster—all of these and so many others, gone. In some sense he had no chief of staff, no communications department, no National Security Council, no political operation, no congressional liaison office, and only a sputtering office of the White House counsel.
Those who remained or joined up seemed to better understand the rules: they worked for Donald Trump, not for the president of the United States. If you wanted to survive, you could not see this as an institutional relationship; instead, you needed to accept that you were serving at the pleasure of a wholly idiosyncratic boss who personalized everything. Mike Pompeo was so far succeeding because he seemed to have put down a big wager that his future lay in being subservient to Trump. Indeed, it was his guess that stoicism and holding his tongue might someday make him president. Meanwhile, Larry Kudlow, replacing Gary Cohn on the National Economic Council, and John Bolton, replacing H. R. McMaster, were perfect substitutes because they both desperately needed the job—Kudlow had lost his show on CNBC and Bolton had long been consigned to the foreign policy wilderness with little hope of escape.
These replacements aside, more than a year into the Trump administration, many White House jobs remained unfilled. The risks of legal costs were too high, the pain of working for Donald Trump too great, and the stain on one’s career too evident.
Sometimes the West Wing could seem almost empty. Trump was as alone as he had ever been.
But really, did it matter? The only show that had ever worked for Donald Trump was a one-man show.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner, an annual celebrity event during which presidents traditionally roast a wide range of politicians and media people, and in turn find themselves roasted by a popular comedian, was set for April 28. The dinner was for Trump perhaps the singular example of not just the media’s unending effort to gang up on him but, as he saw it, the media’s insistent demand that he be deferential to them.
“I’m not a suck-up. Trump doesn’t suck up. I wouldn’t be Trump if I sucked up,” he told a friend who argued that he would benefit from attending the dinner and telling some jokes about himself. He refused to go, saying, “Nobody even shows up anymore. It’s dead.”
As the event approached, he looked for ways to try to upstage it with a Trump rally, or at least try to compete with it, as he had done in 2017. He settled on a plan to travel to Washington, Michigan. Once the event was scheduled, the president’s aides quickly realized that the rally would become a major political event: it would serve as the unofficial kickoff of the 2018 midterm campaign. So far largely inattentive to the looming midterms, Trump now cast himself as the central figure in the race.
On the evening of April 28, the comedienne Michelle Wolf heaped scorn, bile, and ad hominem cruelties on the president in front of a large and mostly appreciative crowd at the Washington Hilton Hotel. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Trump spoke for over an hour to a raucous rally at the Total Sports Park arena in Washington Township. His specific intent was to support Bill Schuette, Michigan’s attorney general, a candidate running against Lieutenant Governor Brian Calley, who had committed the unpardonable sin of withdrawing his endorsement of Trump just before the 2016 election. The president offered a bare mention of Schuette near the beginning of his speech, then digressed into a long account, as vivid as it was demented, of all that he alone was up against.
After riffing for a while on several of his favorite topics—the American flag, the Wall, China, the stock market, North Korea—Trump took aim at Jon Tester, the senator from Montana who he believed was to blame for sabotaging Ronny Jackson’s nomination for head of Veterans Affairs.
“I’ll tell you, what Jon Tester did to this man is a disgrace. Admiral Jackson started studying, and he was working so hard. I suggested it to him. You know, he’s a war hero, a leader, a great, you know, he’s a, admiral, a great, great guy, fifty years old, and he started studying, and then he started getting hit with vicious rumors, vicious, and the Secret Service told me, ‘Just coming in, sir. We checked out all of those things, sir, they’re not true.’ They’re not true, so they try and destroy a man.
“Well, they’re doing it with us, they’re trying their damnedest, but that, but a little—I want to thank, by the way, the House Intelligence Committee, okay? They do it with us, too. Russian collusion. You know, I guarantee you, I’m tougher on Russia, nobody ever thought. In fact, do you, have you heard about the lawyer for a year, a woman lawyer, she was like, ‘Oh, I know nothing.’ Now, all of a sudden, she supposedly is involved with government. You know why? If she did that, because Putin and the group said, ‘You know, this Trump is killing us. Why don’t you say that you’re involved with government so that we can go and make their life in the United States even more chaotic?’ Look at what’s happened! Look at how these politicians have fallen for this junk. Russian collusion—give me a break!
“I’ll tell you, the only collusion is the Democrats colluded with the Russians, and the Democrats colluded with lots of other people. Take a look at the intelligence agencies, and what about, hey, and what about Comey? You watch him on the interviews? ‘Ah, ah, ah…’ What about Comey? What about Comey? How about that? So Comey, how about this guy Comey? He said the other night—the fake, dirty dossier—he said the other night on Fox, he said, very strongly, ‘No, I didn’t know that it was paid for by the Democrats and Hillary Clinton.’ He didn’t know, he didn’t know—how about that? They start something based on a document that was paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton. Honestly, folks, let me tell you, let me tell you, it’s a disgrace. We got to get back down to business. It’s a disgrace what’s going on in our country, and they did that, they did that to Admiral Jackson. They are doing it to a lot of people.
“Innuendo. You know, in the old days, when the newspapers used to write, they put names down. Today they say, ‘Sources have said that President Trump…’ Sources! They never say who the sources are, they don’t have sources. The sources don’t exist, in many cases. They don’t have sources and the sources in many cases don’t exist. These are very dishonest people, many of them. They are very, very dishonest people. Fake news, very dishonest. But you watch Comey, and you watch the way he lies, and then he’s got the memos. I wonder when he wrote the memos, right? Then he’s got the memos and he puts them up. Watch the way he lies, it’s the most incredible thing …
“By the way, by the way, by the way, is this better than that phony Washington White House Correspondents’ Dinner? Is this more fun? I could be up there tonight smiling, like I love where they are hitting you, shot after shot. These people, they hate your guts, shot, and then I’m supposed to … [he smiles]. And you know, you have got to smile. And if you don’t smile, they’ll say, ‘He was terrible, he couldn’t take it.’ And if you do smile, they’ll say, ‘What was he smiling about?’ You know, there’s no win…”
Trump, unbound and in his element, went on in this way for eighty minutes.