By Win McNamee/Getty Images.
On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump was already looking ahead to the publicity opportunities that would come in the weeks and months following his inevitable loss to Hillary Clinton. “This is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” Trump told his longtime friend Roger Ailes, according to an excerpt from Michael Wolff’s upcoming Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House. “I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve totally won.” Then, of course, they actually won, shocking not only the nation but their own campaign, and catapulting a man into the White House whom many of his own staffers saw as unfit.
Trump’s shock election also swept up an unlikely eyewitness. Just after the inauguration, Wolff said he was given “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing,” conducting hundreds of interviews with White House aides, including “most members of [Trump’s] senior staff.” The result is a book that depicts vivid scenes of Trump’s ineptitude, and the quagmire of infighting that has bogged down the White House since his ascent. And a handful of details, if true, are particularly telling.
Michael Flynn should’ve listened to his friends
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.
Trump’s political wherewithal barely rivals that of the average middle-schooler
Those close to the president knew going in that he was startlingly ignorant, but dismissed that fact as irrelevant—after all, he would never be president.
Everybody in his rich-guy social circle knew about his wide-ranging ignorance. Early in the campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” Nunberg recalled, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
Things did not improve when it came time for the president-elect to choose a chief of staff.
Ailes, a 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. “You need a son of a bitch as your chief of staff,” he told Trump. “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 had a suggestion: John Boehner, who had stepped down as Speaker of the House only a year earlier. “Who’s that?” asked Trump.
When Trump floated Jared Kushner for the job, it was conservative pundit Ann Coulter, of all people, who reportedly talked some sense into him. “Nobody is apparently telling you this,” she told him, according to Wolff. “But you can’t. You just can’t hire your children.”
Reince Priebus’s job came with a warning
“Here’s the deal,” a close Trump associate told Priebus. “In an hour meeting with him, you’re going to hear 54 minutes of stories, and they’re going to be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one point to make, and you pepper it in whenever you can.”
Ivanka regularly dishes on her dad’s hair-care regimen
For Ivanka, it was all business — building the Trump brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House. She treated her father with a degree of detachment, even irony, going so far as to make fun of his comb-over to others. 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.
Trump was initially very concerned for the tech industry
After a delegation from Silicon Valley came to visit the president, Trump pal Rupert Murdoch reportedly asked the president how the conversation had gone.
“Oh, great, just great,” said Trump. “These guys really need my help. Obama was not very favorable to them, too much regulation. This is really an opportunity for me to help them.”
“Donald,” said Murdoch, “for eight years these guys had Obama in their pocket. They practically ran the administration. They don’t need your help.”
“Take this H-1B visa issue. They really need these H-1B visas.”
Murdoch suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas, which open America’s doors to select immigrants, might be hard to square with his promises to build a wall and close the borders. But Trump seemed unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, “We’ll figure it out.”
The president really, really misses Trump Tower
Trump, in fact, found the White House to be vexing and even a little scary. He retreated to his own bedroom—the first time since the Kennedy White House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms. In the first days, he ordered two television screens in addition to the one already there, and a lock on the door, precipitating a brief standoff with the Secret Service, who insisted they have access to the room. He reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the floor: “If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the floor.” Then he imposed a set of new rules: Nobody touch anything, especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s — nobody knew he was coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would let housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his own bed.
In the first month of Trump’s presidency, not even White House staffers knew what was going on
To [Katie] Walsh, the proud political pro, the chaos, the rivalries, and the president’s own lack of focus were simply incomprehensible. In early March, not long before she left, she confronted Kushner with a simple request. “Just give me the three things the president wants to focus on,” she demanded. “What are the three priorities of this White House?”
It was the most basic question imaginable — one that any qualified presidential candidate would have answered long before he took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Six weeks into Trump’s presidency, Kushner was wholly without an answer.
“Yes,” he said to Walsh. “We should probably have that conversation.”
Though White House sources told Axios that they had been ”prepared for the Wolff book to be bad for them,” certain portions seem to have exceeded their expectations. After The Guardian published a portion of the book in which former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was quoted slamming the actions of Donald Trump Jr., the elder Trump shot back with a blistering statement of his own. Meanwhile, Trump allies on the right have already begun a campaign to discredit Wolff, calling him a “total hack” and casting doubt on his reports. As right-wing blogger Mike Cernovich lamented on Wednesday, “This terrible smear piece . . . harms everyone and helps no one.”
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