The Book Now on Sale
Long and totally astonishing article (NY Magazine) – This is great “insider” firsthand
reporting at the Trump 2016 campaign (those closest to him) with an emphasis on
election day/night and the reactions offered by many, and recalled in the book through
the eyes of Steve Bannon in a new book just published and on the market. The
book: Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House Amazon here.
Truly astonishing stuff, extensive and detailed.
I
have highlighted five key points that I consider critical in this fine article:
Point #1: On the afternoon of November 8,
2016, Kellyanne Conway settled into her glass office at Trump Tower.
Right up until the last weeks of the race, the campaign headquarters had
remained a listless place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate
back office were a few posters with right-wing slogans. Conway, the
campaign’s manager, was in a remarkably buoyant mood, considering she was about
to experience a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat. Donald Trump would lose
the election — of this she was sure — but he would quite possibly hold the
defeat to under six points. That was a substantial victory. As for the looming
defeat itself, she shrugged it off: It was Reince Priebus’s fault, not
hers.
Point #2: Even though the numbers in a few key
states had appeared to be changing to Trump’s advantage, neither Conway nor
Trump himself nor his son-in-law, Jared Kushner — the effective head
of the campaign — wavered in their certainty: Their unexpected adventure would
soon be over. Not only would Trump not be president, almost everyone
in the campaign agreed, he should probably not be. Conveniently, the former
conviction meant nobody had to deal with the latter issue.
As the
campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate goal, after
all, had never been to win. “I can be the most famous man in the world,” he had
told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race. His longtime
friend Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you
want a career in television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by
Ailes, was floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He
would come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes a week before the election, with a far more powerful
brand and untold opportunities this: “This is
bigger than I ever dreamed of. I
don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.”
Point #3:
From the start, the leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was
how crappy it was, and how everybody involved in it was a loser. In August,
when he was trailing Hillary Clinton by more than 12 points, he
couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario for achieving an electoral
victory. He was baffled when the right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, a Ted
Cruz backer whom Trump barely knew, offered him an infusion of $5 million. When
Mercer and his daughter Rebekah presented their plan to take over the campaign
and install their lieutenants, Steve Bannon and Conway, Trump didn’t
resist. Trump expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone would want to do
that telling the Mercers: “This thing is so f**ked up.”
Point #4:
The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was different. The
candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get all the benefits
of almost becoming president without having to change their behavior
or their worldview one whit. Almost everybody on the Trump team, in fact, came
with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite a president once he was in
office. Michael Flynn, the retired general who served as Trump’s opening
act at campaign rallies, 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,” Flynn assured them.
Not only did
Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and
real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns.
Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a martyr
to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner would be international
celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de facto head of the tea-party
movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had
been assured by her husband that he wouldn’t become president, could return to
inconspicuously lunching. Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was
winning.
Point #5 (and the most-startling): Ailes, the veteran of the Nixon,
Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations, tried to impress on Trump the need to
create a White House structure that could serve and protect him, telling Trump:
“You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff. And you need a son of a
bitch who knows Washington. You’ll want to be your own son of a bitch, but you
don’t know Washington.” Ailes then made a suggestion: John Boehner, who
had stepped down as Speaker of the House only a year earlier.
“Boehner – who’s
that?” asked Trump.
As much as
the president himself, the chief of staff determines how the Executive branch —
which employs 4 million people — will run. The job has been construed as deputy
president, or even prime minister.
But Trump had no interest in appointing a
strong chief of staff with a deep knowledge of Washington. Among his early
choices for the job was Kushner — a man with no political experience beyond his
role as a calm and flattering body man to Trump during the campaign.
It was Ann Coulter who finally took the
president-elect aside and said to him: “Nobody is apparently telling you this. But
you can’t. You just can’t hire your children.”
Bowing to
pressure, Trump floated the idea of giving the job to Steve Bannon, only to
have the notion soundly ridiculed. Murdoch told Trump that Bannon would be a
dangerous choice. Joe Scarborough, the former congressman and co-host of
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” told the president-elect: “Washington will go
up in flames if Bannon became chief of staff."
So Trump
turned to Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman, who had become the subject of
intense lobbying by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell. If congressional leaders were going to have to deal with an alien
like Donald Trump, then best they do it with the help of one of their own kind.
Finally,
I note:
It has all gone downhill
since January 20, 2017 – the Donald J. Trump was sworn into office.
This from my other post here that
is related to this fast-moving story.
These sites have related articles, too:
1. ABC News
3. NBC News
4. The Guardian
We are watching history unfold in real time and as
they say, “It ain’t pretty.”
Thanks for stopping by.
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