作者：Michael Wolff
出版社：Macmillan USA
发行时间：2018-1-9
来源：下载的 epub 版本
赶时髦追了这本书，但是怎么说呢，乏善可陈吧~ 核心内容 Twitter 上都剧透的差不多了，余下的部分多是未经确认的传闻和作者自己的猜测，Mark Berman 在 Twitter 上直接否认 A Four Seasons breakfast: I have never had breakfast at the Four Seasons, never actually been there. 很有可能是写错人了，但是确实太多的东西非常不严谨
有趣的是：
One of the most surprising parts of "Fire and Fury" is how Donald Trump accidentally started a national book club.
摘录：
Bannon veered from “Mad Dog” Mattis—the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominated as secretary of defense—to a long riff on torture, the surprising liberalism of generals, and the stupidity of the civilian-military bureaucracy. Then it was on to the looming appointment of Michael Flynn—a favorite Trump general who’d been the opening act at many Trump rallies—as the National Security Advisor.
“He’s fine. He’s not Jim Mattis and he’s not John Kelly . . . but he’s fine. He just needs the right staff around him.” Still, Bannon averred: “When you take out all the never-Trump guys who signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these wars . . . it’s not a deep bench.”
Bannon said he’d tried to push John Bolton, the famously hawkish diplomat, for the job as National Security Advisor. Bolton was an Ailes favorite, too.
“He’s a bomb thrower,” said Ailes. “And a strange little fucker. But you need him. Who else is good on Israel? Flynn is a little nutty on Iran. Tillerson”—the secretary of state designate—“just knows oil.”
“Bolton’s mustache is a problem,” snorted Bannon. “Trump doesn’t think he looks the part. You know Bolton is an acquired taste.”
“Well, rumors were that he got in trouble because he got in a fight in a hotel one night and chased some woman.”
“If I told Trump that, he might have the job.”
“Does he get it?” asked Ailes suddenly, pausing and looking intently at Bannon.
He meant did Trump get it. This seemed to be a question about the right-wing agenda: Did the playboy billionaire really get the workingman populist cause? But it was possibly a point-blank question about the nature of power itself. Did Trump get where history had put him?
Bannon took a sip of water. “He gets it,” said Bannon, after hesitating for perhaps a beat too long. “Or he gets what he gets.”
With a sideways look, Ailes continued to stare him down, as though waiting for Bannon to show more of his cards.
“Really,” Bannon said. “He’s on the program. It’s his program.” Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Netanyahu’s all in. Sheldon”—Sheldon Adelson, the casino billionaire, far-right Israel defender, and Trump supporter—“is all in. We know where we’re heading on this.”
“Does Donald know?” asked a skeptical Ailes.
Bannon smiled—as though almost with a wink—and continued:
“Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal with it. Or sink trying. The Saudis are on the brink, Egyptians are on the brink, all scared to death of Persia . . . Yemen, Sinai, Libya . . . this thing is bad. . . . That’s why Russia is so key. . . . Is Russia that bad? They’re bad guys. But the world is full of bad guys.”
Bannon offered all this with something like ebullience—a man remaking the world.
“But it’s good to know the bad guys are the bad guys,” said Ailes, pushing Bannon. “Donald may not know.”
The real enemy, said an on-point Bannon, careful not to defend Trump too much or to dis him at all, was China. China was the first front in a new cold war. And it had all been misunderstood in the Obama years—what we thought we understood we didn’t understand at all. That was the failure of American intelligence. “I think Comey is a third-rate guy. I think Brennan is a second-rate guy,” Bannon said, dismissing the FBI director and the CIA director.
“China’s everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we don’t get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You’re going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.”
By August, trailing Clinton by 12 to 17 points and facing a daily firestorm of eviscerating press, Trump couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory. At this dire moment, Trump in some essential sense sold his losing campaign. The right-wing billionaire Bob Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer, had shifted his support to Trump with a $5 million infusion. Believing the campaign was cratering, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah took a helicopter from their Long Island estate out to a scheduled fundraiser—with other potential donors bailing by the second—at New York Jets owner and Johnson & Johnson heir Woody Johnson’s summer house in the Hamptons.
Trump had no real relationship with either father or daughter. He’d had only a few conversations with Bob Mercer, who mostly talked in monosyllables; Rebekah Mercer’s entire history with Trump consisted of a selfie taken with him at Trump Tower. But when the Mercers presented their plan to take over the campaign and install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, Trump didn’t resist. He only expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do that. “This thing,” he told the Mercers, “is so fucked up.”
By every meaningful indicator, something greater than even a sense of doom shadowed what Steve Bannon called “the broke-dick campaign”—a sense of structural impossibility.
The candidate who billed himself as a billionaire—ten times over—refused even to invest his own money in it. Bannon told Jared Kushner—who, when Bannon signed on to the campaign, had been off with his wife on a holiday in Croatia with Trump enemy David Geffen—that, after the first debate in September, they would need an additional $50 million to cover them until election day.
“No way we’ll get fifty million unless we can guarantee him victory,” said a clear-eyed Kushner.
“If we can say victory is more than likely.”
In the end, the best Trump would do is loan the campaign $10 million, provided he got it back as soon as they could raise other money. (Steve Mnuchin, then the campaign’s finance chairman, came to collect the loan with the wire instructions ready to go, so Trump couldn’t conveniently forget to send the money.)
during the fall, winning seemed slightly more plausible, that evaporated with the Billy Bush affair. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them,” Trump told the NBC host Billy Bush on an open mic, amid the ongoing national debate about sexual harassment. “It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. . . . Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
It was an operatic unraveling. So mortifying was this development that when Reince Priebus, the RNC head, was called to New York from Washington for an emergency meeting at Trump Tower, he couldn’t bring himself to leave Penn Station. It took two hours for the Trump team to coax him across town.
“Bro,” said a desperate Bannon, cajoling Priebus on the phone, “I may never see you again after today, but you gotta come to this building and you gotta walk through the front door.”
Donald Trump’s marriage was perplexing to almost everybody around him—or it was, anyway, for those without private jets and many homes. He and Melania spent relatively little time together. They could go days at a time without contact, even when they were both in Trump Tower. Often she did not know where he was, or take much notice of that fact. Her husband moved between residences as he would move between rooms. Along with knowing little about his whereabouts, she knew little about his business, and took at best modest interest in it. An absentee father for his first four children, Trump was even more absent for his fifth, Barron, his son with Melania. Now on his third marriage, he told friends he thought he had finally perfected the art: live and let live—“Do your own thing.”
Almost everybody on the Trump team came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president or his staff. Mike Flynn, Trump’s future National Security Advisor, who became Trump’s opening act at campaign rallies and whom Trump loved to hear complain about the CIA and the haplessness of American spies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a problem if we won,” he assured them, knowing that it would therefore not be a problem.
Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his business deals and real estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns. Why should he if he wasn’t going to win?
What’s more, Trump refused to spend any time considering, however hypothetically, transition matters, saying it was “bad luck”—but really meaning it was a waste of time. Nor would he even remotely contemplate the issue of his holdings and conflicts.
He wasn’t going to win! Or losing was winning.
Trump would be the most famous man in the world—a martyr to crooked Hillary Clinton.
His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared would have transformed themselves from relatively obscure rich kids into international celebrities and brand ambassadors.
Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the Tea Party movement.
Kellyanne Conway would be a cable news star.
Reince Priebus and Katie Walsh would get their Republican Party back.
Melania Trump could return to inconspicuously lunching.
That was the trouble-free outcome they awaited on November 8, 2016. Losing would work out for everybody.
Shortly after eight o’clock that evening, when the unexpected trend—Trump might actually win—seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father, or DJT, as he called him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania, to whom Donald Trump had made his solemn guarantee, was in tears—and not of joy.
There was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving Trump and then into a quite horrified Trump. But still to come was the final transformation: suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he deserved to be and was wholly capable of being the president of the United States.
PayPal cofounder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel—really the only significant Silicon Valley voice to support Trump—was warned by another billionaire and longtime Trump friend that Trump would, in an explosion of flattery, offer Thiel his undying friendship. Everybody says you’re great, you and I are going to have an amazing working relationship, anything you want, call me and we’ll get it done! Thiel was advised not to take Trump’s offer too seriously. But Thiel, who gave a speech supporting Trump at the Republican Convention in Cleveland, reported back that, even having been forewarned, he absolutely was certain of Trump’s sincerity when he said they’d be friends for life—only never to basically hear from him again or have his calls returned. Still, power provides its own excuses for social lapses. Other aspects of the Trump character were more problematic.
A pro wrestling fan who became a World Wrestling Entertainment supporter and personality (inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame), Trump lived, like Hulk Hogan, as a real-life fictional character. To the amusement of his friends, and unease of many of the people now preparing to work for him at the highest levels of the federal government, Trump often spoke of himself in the third person. Trump did this. The Trumpster did that. So powerful was this persona, or role, that he seemed reluctant, or unable, to give it up in favor of being president—or presidential.
Donald Trump had little, if any, awareness of the history of or the thinking about this role. Instead, he substituted his own management style and experience. For decades, he had relied on longtime retainers, cronies, and family. Even though Trump liked to portray his business as an empire, it was actually a discrete holding company and boutique enterprise, catering more to his peculiarities as proprietor and brand representative than to any bottom line or other performance measures.
His sons, Don Jr. and Eric—jokingly behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein—wondered if there couldn’t somehow be two parallel White House structures, one dedicated to their father’s big-picture views, personal appearances, and salesmanship and the other concerned with day-to-day management issues. In this construct, they saw themselves tending to the day-to-day operations.
One of Trump’s early ideas was to recruit his friend Tom Barrack—part of his kitchen cabinet of real estate tycoons including Steven Roth and Richard Lefrak—and make him chief of staff.
Barrack, the grandson of Lebanese immigrants, is a starstruck real estate investor of legendary acumen who owns Michael Jackson’s former oddball paradise, Neverland Ranch. With Jeffrey Epstein—the New York financier who would become a tabloid regular after a guilty plea to one count of soliciting prostitution that sent him to jail in 2008 in Palm Beach for thirteen months—Trump and Barrack were a 1980s and ’90s set of nightlife Musketeers.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post , which had become one of the many Trump media bêtes noires in the media world, nevertheless took pains to reach out not only to the presidentelect but to his daughter Ivanka. During the campaign, Trump said Amazon was getting “away with murder taxwise” and that if he won, “Oh, do they have problems.” Now Trump was suddenly praising Bezos as “a top-level genius.” Elon Musk, in Trump Tower, pitched Trump on the new administration’s joining him in his race to Mars, which Trump jumped at. Stephen Schwarzman, the head of the Blackstone Group—and a Kushner friend—offered to organize a business council for Trump, which Trump embraced. Anna Wintour, the Vogue editor and fashion industry queen, had hoped to be named America’s ambassador to the UK under Obama and, when that didn’t happen, closely aligned herself with Hillary Clinton. Now Wintour arrived at Trump Tower (but refused to do the perp walk) and suggested that she become Trump’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. And Trump was inclined to entertain the idea. (“Fortunately,” said Bannon, “there was no chemistry.”)
For Jared and Ivanka, as really for everybody else in the new administration, quite including the president, this was a random and crazy turn of history such that how could you not seize it? It was a joint decision by the couple, and, in some sense, a joint job. Jared and Ivanka had made an earnest deal between themselves: if sometime in the future the time came, she’d be the one to run for president (or the first one of them to take the shot). The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be Hillary Clinton, it would be Ivanka Trump.
In some sense—putting aside both her father’s presence in the White House and his tirades against draining the swamp, which mightotherwise include most everyone here, this was the type of room Ivanka had worked hard to be in. Following the route of her father, she was crafting her name and herself into a multifaceted, multiproduct brand; she was also transitioning from her father’s aspirational male golf and business types to aspirational female mom and business types. She had, well before her father’s presidency could have remotely been predicted, sold a book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, for $1 million.
In many ways, it had been an unexpected journey, requiring more discipline than you might expect from a contented, distracted, run-of-the-mill socialite. As a twenty-one-year-old, she appeared in a film made by her then boyfriend, Jamie Johnson, a Johnson & Johnson heir. It’s a curious, even somewhat unsettling film, in which Johnson corrals his set of rich-kid friends into openly sharing their dissatisfactions, general lack of ambition, and contempt for their families. (One of his friends would engage in long litigation with him over the portrayal.) Ivanka, speaking with something like a Valley Girl accent—which would transform in the years ahead into something like a Disney princess voice—seems no more ambitious or even employed than anyone else, but she is notably less angry with her parents.
She treated her father with some lightness, even irony, and in at least one television interview she made fun of his comb-over. She often described the mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate—a contained island after scalp reduction surgery—surrounded by a furry circle of hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a product called Just for Men—the longer it was left on, the darker it got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.
Father and daughter got along almost peculiarly well. She was the real mini-Trump (a title that many people now seemed to aspire to). She accepted him. She was a helper not just in his business dealings, but in his marital realignments. She facilitated entrances and exits. If you have a douchebag dad, and if everyone is open about it, then maybe it becomes fun and life a romantic comedy—sort of.
Hence, on inaugural morning, the employees of Uber, the ride sharing company, whose then CEO Travis Kalanick had signed on to the Schwarzman council, woke up to find people chained to the doors of their San Francisco headquarters. The charge was that Uber and Kalanick were “collaborating”—with its whiff of Vichy—a much different status than a business looking to sober forums with the president as a way to influence the government. Indeed, the protesters who believed they were seeing the company’s relationship with Trump in political terms were actually seeing this in conventional brand terms and zooming in on the disconnect. Uber’s customer base is strongly young, urban, and progressive, and therefore out of sync with the Trump base. Brand-conscious millennials saw this as beyond policy dickering and as part of an epic identity clash. The Trump White House stood less for government and the push-pull of competing interests and developing policies, and more, in a brand-savvy world, as a fixed and unpopular cultural symbol.
Uber’s Kalanick resigned from the council. Disney CEO Bob Iger simply found that he was otherwise occupied on the occasion of the forum’s first meeting.
But most of the people on the council—other than Elon Musk, the investor, inventor, and founder of Tesla (who would later resign)—were not from media or tech companies, with their liberal bent, but from old-line, when-America-was-great enterprises. They included Mary Barra, the CEO of General Motors; Ginni Rometty of IBM; Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE; Jim McNerney, the former CEO of Boeing; and Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo. If the new right had elected Trump, it was the older Fortune 100 executives who most pleased him.
Trump attended the meeting with his full retinue—the circle that seemed always to move with him in lockstep, including Bannon, Priebus, Kushner, Stephen Miller, and National Economic Council chief Gary Cohn—but conducted it entirely himself. Each of the people at the table, taking a point of interest, spoke for five minutes, with Trump then asking follow-up questions. Though Trump appeared not to have particularly, or at all, prepared for any of the subjects being discussed, he asked engaged and interested questions, pursuing things he wanted to know more about, making the meeting quite an easy back-and-forth. One of the CEOs observed that this seemed like the way Trump preferred to get information—talking about what he was interested in and getting other people to talk about his interests.
The meeting went on for two hours. In the White House view, this was Trump at his best. He was most at home around people he respected—and these were “the most respected people in the country,” according to Trump—who seemed to respect him, too.
Flynn had really only one supporter in the Trump administration, and that was the president himself. They were best friends during the campaign—buddy movie stuff. Post-inauguration, this translated into a total-access relationship. On Flynn’s part, it led to a set of misapprehensions that was common inside Trump’s circle: that the president’s personal endorsement indicated your status in the White House and that Trump’s level of flattery was a convincing indication that you had an unbreakable bond with him and that you were, in his eyes, and in his White House, something close to omnipotent. Trump, with his love of generals, had even for a moment wanted to make Michael Flynn his vice president.
Intoxicated by Trump’s flattery during the campaign, Flynn—a lower-tier general and quite a flaky one at that—had become something of a Trump dancing monkey. When former generals make alliances with political candidates, they customarily position themselves as providers of expertise and figures of a special maturity. But Flynn had become quite a maniacal partisan, part of the Trump traveling road show, one of the ranters and ravers opening Trump rallies. This all-in enthusiasm and loyalty had helped win him access to Trump’s ear, into which he poured his anti-intelligence-community theories.
The Chinese, who Trump had oft maligned during the campaign, came to Mar-a-Lago for a summit advanced by Kushner and Kissinger. (This required some tutoring for Trump, who referred to the Chinese leader as “Mr. X-i”; the president was told to think of him as a woman and call him “she.”) They were in an agreeable mood, evidently willing to humor Trump. And they quickly figured out that if you flatter him, he flatters you.
Even before word of the June 2016 meeting leaked out, Kushner’s legal team—largely assembled in a rush since the appointment of Mueller, the special counsel—had been piecing together a forensic picture of both the campaign’s Russian contacts and Kushner Companies’ finances and money trail. In January, ignoring almost everybody’s caution against it, Jared Kushner had entered the White House as a senior figure in the administration; now, six months later, he faced acute legal jeopardy. He had tried to keep a low profile, seeing himself as a behind-the-scenes counselor, but now his public position was not only endangering himself but the future of his family’s business. As long as he remained exposed, his family was effectively blocked from most financial sources. Without access to this market, their holdings risked becoming distress debt situations.
Jared and Ivanka’s self-created fantasylike life—two ambitious, well-mannered, well-liked young people living at the top of New York’s social and financial world after having, in their version of humble fashion, accepted global power—had now, even with neither husband nor wife in office long enough to have taken any real action at all, come to the precipice of disgrace.
Jail was possible. So was bankruptcy. Trump may have been talking defiantly about offering pardons, or bragging about his power to give them, but that did not solve Kushner’s business problems, nor did it provide a way to mollify Charlie Kushner, Jared’s choleric and often irrational father. What’s more, successfully navigating through the eye of the legal needle would require a careful touch and nuanced strategic approach on the part of the president—quite an unlikely development.
Meanwhile, the couple blamed everyone else in the White House. They blamed Priebus for the disarray that had produced a warlike atmosphere that propelled constant and damaging leaks, they blamed Bannon for leaking, and they blamed Spicer for poorly defending their virtue and interests.
They needed to defend themselves. One strategy was to get out of town (Bannon had a list of all the tense moments when the couple had taken a convenient holiday), and it happened that Trump would be attending the G20 summit Hamburg, Germany, on July 7 and 8. Jared and Ivanka accompanied the president on the trip, and while at the summit they learned that word of Don Jr.’s meeting with the Russians—and the couple kept pointedly presenting it as Don Jr.’s meeting—had leaked. Worse, they learned that the story was about to break in the New York Times.
Originally, Trump’s staff was expecting details of the Don Jr. meeting to break on the website Circa. The lawyers, and spokesperson Mark Corallo, had been working to manage this news. But while in Hamburg, the president’s staff learned that the Times was developing a story that had far more details about the meeting—quite possibly supplied by the Kushner side—which it would publish on Saturday, July 8. Advance knowledge of this article was kept from the president’s legal team for the ostensible reason that it didn’t involve the president.
In Hamburg, Ivanka, knowing the news would shortly get out, was presenting her signature effort: a World Bank fund to aid women entrepreneurs in developing countries. This was another instance of what White House staffers saw as the couple’s extraordinarily off-message direction. Nowhere in the Trump campaign, nowhere on Bannon’s white boards, nowhere in the heart of this president was there an interest in women entrepreneurs in developing countries. The daughter’s agenda was singularly at odds with the father’s—or at least the agenda that had elected him. Ivanka, in the view of almost every White House staffer, profoundly misunderstood the nature of her job and had converted traditional First Lady noblesse oblige efforts into White House staff work.
Shortly before boarding Air Force One for the return trip home, Ivanka—with what by now was starting to seem like an almost anarchic tone deafness—sat in for her father between Chinese president Xi Jinping and British prime minister Theresa May at the main G20 conference table. But this was mere distraction: as the president and his team huddled on the plane, the central subject was not the conference, it was how to respond to the Times story about Don Jr.’s and Jared’s Trump Tower meeting, now only hours away from breaking.
En route to Washington, Sean Spicer and everybody else from the communications office was relegated to the back of the plane and excluded from the panicky discussions. Hope Hicks became the senior communications strategist, with the president, as always, her singular client. In the days following, that highest political state of being “in the room” was turned on its head. Not being in the room—in this case, the forward cabin on Air Force One—became an exalted status and get-out-of-jail-free card. “It used to hurt my feelings when I saw them running around doing things that were my job,” said Spicer. “Now I’m glad to be out of the loop.”
Included in the discussion on the plane were the president, Hicks, Jared and Ivanka, and their spokesperson, Josh Raffel. Ivanka, according to the later recollection of her team, would shortly leave the meeting, take a pill, and go to sleep. Jared, in the telling of his team, might have been there, but he was “not taking a pencil to anything.” Nearby, in a small conference room watching the movie Fargo, were Dina Powell, Gary Cohn, Stephen Miller, and H. R. McMaster, all of whom would later insist that they were, however physically close to the unfolding crisis, removed from it. And, indeed, anyone “in the room” was caught in a moment that would shortly receive the special counsel’s close scrutiny, with the relevant question being whether one or more federal employees had induced other federal employees to lie.
An aggrieved, unyielding, and threatening president dominated the discussion, pushing into line his daughter and her husband, Hicks, and Raffel. Kasowitz—the lawyer whose specific job was to keep Trump at arm’s length from Russian-related matters—was kept on hold on the phone for an hour and then not put through. The president insisted that the meeting in Trump Tower was purely and simply about Russian adoption policy. That’s what was discussed, period. Period. Even though it was likely, if not certain, that the Times had the incriminating email chain—in fact, it was quite possible that Jared and Ivanka and the lawyers knew the Times had this email chain—the president ordered that no one should let on to the more problematic discussion about Hillary Clinton.
It was a real-time example of denial and cover-up. The president believed, belligerently, what he believed. Reality was what he was convinced it was—or should be. Hence the official story: there was a brief courtesy meeting in Trump Tower about adoption policy, to no result, attended by senior aides and unaffiliated Russian nationals. The crafting of this manufactured tale was a rogue operation by rookies—always the two most combustible elements of a cover-up.
In Washington, Kasowitz and the legal team’s spokesperson, Mark Corallo, weren’t informed of either the Times article or the plan for how to respond to it until Don Jr.’s initial statement went out just before the story broke that Saturday.
Over the course of next seventy-two hours or so, the senior staff found itself wholly separate from—and, once again, looking on in astonishment at—the actions of the president’s innermost circle of aides. In this, the relationship of the president and Hope Hicks, long tolerated as a quaint bond between the older man and a trustworthy young woman, began to be seen as anomalous and alarming. Completely devoted to accommodating him, she, his media facilitator, was the ultimate facilitator of unmediated behavior. His impulses and thoughts—unedited, unreviewed, unchallenged—not only passed through him, but, via Hicks, traveled out into the world without any other White House arbitration.
“The problem isn’t Twitter, it’s Hope,” observed one communication staffer.
On July 9, a day after publishing its first story, the Times noted that the Trump Tower meeting was specifically called to discuss the Russian offer of damaging material about Clinton. The next day, as the Times prepared to publish the full email chain, Don Jr. hurriedly dumped it himself. There followed an almost daily count of new figures—all, in their own way, peculiar and unsettling—who emerged as participants in the meeting.
But the revelation of the Trump Tower meeting had another, perhaps even larger dimension. It marked the collapse of the president’s legal strategy: the demise of Steve Bannon’s Clinton-emulating firewall around the president.
The lawyers, in disgust and alarm, saw, in effect, each principal becoming a witness to another principal’s potential misdeeds—all conspiring with one another to get their stories straight. The client and his family were panicking and running their own defense. Short-term headlines were overwhelming any sort of long-term strategy. “The worst thing you can do is lie to a prosecutor,” said one member of the legal team. The persistent Trump idea that it is not a crime to lie to the media was regarded by the legal team as at best reckless and, in itself, potentially actionable: an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears.
Mark Corallo was instructed not to speak to the press, indeed not to even answer his phone. Later that week, Corallo, seeing no good outcome—and privately confiding that he believed the meeting on Air Force One represented a likely obstruction of justice—quit. (The Jarvanka side would put it out that Corallo was fired.)
“These guys are not going to be second-guessed by the kids,” said a frustrated Bannon about the firewall team.
Likewise, the Trump family, no matter its legal exposure, was not going to be run by its lawyers. Jared and Ivanka helped to coordinate a set of lurid leaks—alleging drinking, bad behavior, personal life in disarray—about Marc Kasowitz, who had advised the president to send the couple home. Shortly after the presidential party returned to Washington, Kasowitz was out.
Words Review List:
| words | sentence |
|---|---|
| inauguration | With the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, 2017 |
| contemporaneous | I set out to tell this story in as contemporaneous a fashion as possible |
| polishing off | the then candidate polishing off a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla as he happily and idly opined about a range of topics |
| a pint of | the then candidate polishing off a pint of Häagen-Dazs vanilla as he happily and idly opined about a range of topics |
| voluble | They moved on to Trump Tower with a voluble Steve Bannon |
| semipermanent | I took up something like a semipermanent seat on a couch in the West Wing |
| fiefdoms | given the many fiefdoms in the Trump White House that came into open conflict |
| interloper | Hence I became more a constant interloper than an invited guest |
| settled on | In other instances I have, through a consistency in accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true |
| disembodied | for a disembodied description of events provided by an unnamed witness |
| forthrightly | Finally, some sources spoke forthrightly on the record |
| conundrums | At the same time, it is worth noting some of the journalistic conundrums that I faced when dealing with the Trump administration |
| risible | a source’s views being so well known and widely shared that it would be risible not to credit them |
| samizdat | and the almost samizdat sharing, or gobsmacked retelling |
| gobsmacked | and the almost samizdat sharing, or gobsmacked retelling |
| shed light | went to great effort to help shed light on the unique nature of life inside the Trump White House |
| hip | The seventy-six-year-old Ailes, with a long history of leg and hip problems |
| extracting | Bannon’s aide, Alexandra Preate, kept texting steady updates on Bannon’s progress extracting himself from Trump Tower |
| energetically | he energetically described some of the possibilities for coming up with the billion or so dollars he thought he would need for a new cable network |
| cable network | he energetically described some of the possibilities for coming up with the billion or so dollars he thought he would need for a new cable network |
| louche | three months later, accused of vastly more louche and abusive behavior, was elected president |
| backbone | But Ailes was convinced that Trump had no political beliefs or backbone |
| confection | he had witnessed just about every type and style and oddity and confection and cravenness and mania |
| cravenness | he had witnessed just about every type and style and oddity and confection and cravenness and mania |
| mania | he had witnessed just about every type and style and oddity and confection and cravenness and mania |
| Mar-a-Lago | he knew Trump planned to make regular trips to Mar-a-Lago |
| proffered | Pushing a proffered glass of wine away—“I don’t drink” |
| veered | Bannon veered from “Mad Dog” Mattis |
| neocons | all the neocons who got us in all these wars |
| hawkish | the famously hawkish diplomat |
| on-again off-again | He had first met Trump, the on-again off-again presidential candidate |
| revanchism | Bernie Sanders and his liberal revanchism |
| backlash | everywhere was backlash |
| populist | Did the playboy billionaire really get the workingman populist cause? |
| Jerusalem | Day one we’re moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem |
| far-right | the casino billionaire, far-right Israel defender |
| wink | Bannon smiled—as though almost with a wink—and continued |
| Jordan | Let Jordan take the West Bank |
| Gaza | let Egypt take Gaza |
| on the brink | The Saudis are on the brink |
| Persia | all scared to death of Persia |
| Sinai | Yemen, Sinai, Libya |
| Capitol Hill | Nobody on Capitol Hill knows him, no business guys know him |
| grandiosity | with both remarkable grandiosity and wry self-deprecation |
| wry | with both remarkable grandiosity and wry self-deprecation |
| Murdoch | Bannon then spent several minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch |
| incredulity | “Yeah, he’s Trump,” said Ailes, with something like incredulity |
| buoyant | Conway now was in a remarkably buoyant mood |
| cataclysmic | considering she was about to experience a resounding if not cataclysmic defeat |
| spasmodic | with her spasmodic smiles and strange combination of woundedness and imperturbability |
| woundedness | with her spasmodic smiles and strange combination of woundedness and imperturbability |
| imperturbability | with her spasmodic smiles and strange combination of woundedness and imperturbability |
| clawed | the campaign had really clawed its way back from the abyss |
| abyss | the campaign had really clawed its way back from the abyss |
| underresourced | A severely underresourced team with, practically speaking, the worst candidate in modern political history |
| eye-rolling | Conway offered either an eye-rolling pantomime whenever Trump’s name was mentioned |
| pantomime | Conway offered either an eye-rolling pantomime whenever Trump’s name was mentioned |
| down-ballot | ran a small-time, down-ballot polling firm |
| berated | was often berated by the candidate |
| conjure | Trump couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral victory |
| monosyllables | who mostly talked in monosyllables |
| de facto | the early de facto campaign manager |
| silver lining | The silver lining of the ignominy |
| trophy wife | She was, he told people proudly and without irony, a “trophy wife.” |
| truism | echoing a popular rich-man truism |
| cart | Don’t put the cart before the horse, her amused husband said |
| larcenous | In that classic, Brooks’s larcenous and dopey heroes |
| dopey | In that classic, Brooks’s larcenous and dopey heroes |
| Broadway | sell more than 100 percent of the ownership stakes in the Broadway show they are producing |
| flop | everything about the show is premised on its being a flop |
| Beltway insiders | relies on Beltway insiders for counsel and support |
| quid pro quo | who agreed not to take a fee, amping up questions of quid pro quo |
| dictators | had spent thirty years representing dictators and corrupt despots |
| despots | had spent thirty years representing dictators and corrupt despots |
| amassing | amassing millions of dollars in a money trail that had long caught the eye of U.S. investigators |
| scrutiny | heightened ethical scrutiny could easily put them in jeopardy |
| jeopardy | heightened ethical scrutiny could easily put them in jeopardy |
| martyr | Trump would be the most famous man in the world—a martyr to crooked Hillary Clinton |
| tenterhooks | was on tenterhooks waiting for Murdoch |
| jujitsu | And that, in a reality jujitsu |
| loyalists | Scott Pruitt and Betsy DeVos, Jeb Bush loyalists |
| bombastic | in fact, up close, Trump was not the bombastic and pugilistic man |
| pugilistic | in fact, up close, Trump was not the bombastic and pugilistic man |
| protagonist | a protagonist and hero |
| pro wrestling | A pro wrestling fan who became a World Wrestling Entertainment supporter and personality |
| preposterous | Trump’s instinct in the face of his unlikely, if not preposterous, success was the opposite of humility |
| retainers | For decades, he had relied on longtime retainers, cronies, and family |
| Uday | His sons, Don Jr. and Eric—jokingly behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay |
| Qusay | His sons, Don Jr. and Eric—jokingly behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay |
| handlers | being one of the best Donald handlers |
| naysayer | a reflexive naysayer |
| transmogrification | The transmogrification of Trump from joke candidate |
| opprobrium | Trump was not a politician who could parse factions of support and opprobrium |
| bêtes noires | which had become one of the many Trump media bêtes noires in the media world |
| blackmail | a crude blackmail |
| dupe | with the Russians to steal the election and to install him in the White House as Putin’s dupe |
| mollify | He had to reach out. He had to mollify |
| conservative | Trump mixed messages at odds with conservative orthodoxy |
| orthodoxy | Trump mixed messages at odds with conservative orthodoxy |
| bogeyman | making a bogeyman of American |
| agitator | a soothing voice as well as a professional agitator |
| upbeat | The media gets a new and upbeat story |
| curry | it’s a chance to curry favor and seek new advantage |
| coronation | For the country, it’s a coronation |
| joie de guerre | Much of the sixteen-minute speech was part of Bannon’s daily joie de guerre patter |
| carnage | carnage-everywhere vision for the country |
| aloofness | For Bannon, Obama was the north star of aloofness |
| censure | What’s more, Trump was receiving the censure of his friends |
| bewildered | and who now found himself as bewildered as everyone else |
| feud | it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community |
| carpet | The carpet had been shampooed |
| distress | distress is an opportunistic business play |
| contrarian | a contrarian’s game |
| purveyor | In the early 2000s, Bannon became a purveyor of conservative books products and media |
| retailed | retailed the gossip he offered them |
| monologue | plunged into a long monologue about how well things had gone |
| antipathy | because of his antipathy to Trump |
| cogent | Kushner’s most cogent reason for entering the White House was “leverage,” |
| Delphic oracle | Trump himself you could see as a sort of Delphic oracle |
| C-suite | while there was a warming C-suite feeling for Trump |
| back-and-forth | making the meeting quite an easy back-and-forth |