by Howard Kurtz
Reporters found Miller easy to deal with, but he was soon at the center of a soap opera.
Miller, whose wife was about to have a baby, had a secret. As the press release announcing his appointment was being prepared, another Trump staffer, a blonde lawyer named A. J. Delgado, fired off an email to top White House aides.
She told them what some colleagues already knew: she was embroiled in an affair with Jason Miller, and said he was not treating her well. It was a blatant attempt to block Miller’s appointment.
The next day, the transition team announced the appointments of Miller and Spicer. As if on cue, A. J. went public with a fiery series of tweets, including, “Congratulations to the baby-daddy on being named WH Comms Director!”
The political world was stunned. Delgado didn’t stop there, calling Miller “the 2016 version of John Edwards,” the onetime presidential candidate who had fathered a child with an aide. And: “When people need to resign graciously and refuse to, it’s a bit…spooky.”
Trump was furious that this had become gossipy embarrassment for the press. Reince Priebus and the White House counsel’s office were alarmed, looked into the matter, and decided to rescind the appointment.
Forty-eight hours after the press release naming him communications director, Miller put out a statement that his family was his top priority and he wouldn’t be taking the White House job after all. It was no coincidence that Kellyanne Conway, asked in an interview how she could balance four children and a top White House post, said that “I don’t play golf, I don’t have a mistress.”
CHAPTER 5
A LEAKY SHIP OF STATE
In what would become a hallmark of the new White House, it was clear soon after the election that just about everything leaked to the press.
Every feud. Every spat. Every disagreement. Every power play. Even the delicate process of who was jockeying for which job.
The media had a voracious appetite for White House infighting. These were juicy stories, far easier to do than analyzing policy initiatives. And many in the top echelon of Trump World were all too happy to dish.
It often seemed that these unnamed aides were out for themselves rather than worrying about what was best for the president-elect. This was not a tightly knit squad of loyalists who had worked together for years. It was an oddball collection of disparate personalities who frequently planted stories in the press.
What emerged was a portrait of a dysfunctional operation, which happened to jibe with the media’s predominant view that Trump knew next to nothing about running a government.
Corey Lewandowski was expected to be on the team. He was the ultimate Trump loyalist, and that was evident when he phoned Trump after the networks called the race on Election Night.
“Nobody believed in me,” Trump told him. “Literally, just you, Hope and one or two others,” he said, referring to Hope Hicks, the elegant former fashion model who had become his campaign press secretary and confidante. But Trump joked that Hope “had about as much experience as a coffee cup.”
A lean, tough-minded, fast-talking operative who had managed nothing more than a losing Senate campaign in his home state of New Hampshire, Lewandowski was an unknown when he took over Trump’s tiny campaign at the start of 2015. He told Trump he had a 5 percent chance of winning; Trump said it was 10 percent.
Lewandowski wound up guiding Trump to the brink of the nomination, but made his share of enemies along the way. He also unleashed a tidal wave of bad publicity when he grabbed the arm of a Breitbart reporter, Michelle Fields, while blocking her from asking Trump a question. Various videos showed there was a bit of contact, though Fields was not knocked off balance as she had claimed. Nevertheless, the incident—especially when a criminal charge was filed and then dropped—left him with a rough image.
Trump fired Lewandowski in April 2016, replacing him with veteran lobbyist Paul Manafort. Corey was shocked when Donald Trump Jr. delivered the message. “What am I being fired for? We won,” he said.
“You feed into his worst instincts on the plane,” Jared Kushner told him. He blamed Corey for allowing Trump to publicly criticize the Mexican-American judge presiding over the Trump University case. “I don’t let him do anything,” Lewandowski replied. “He’s 70 years old.”
But it turned out to be an amicable parting, and Lewandowski fiercely defended his ex-boss in his new role as a CNN commentator. Jeff Zucker took plenty of heat for giving Lewandowski a half-million-dollar contract, especially since Lewandowski was still drawing severance payments from the campaign.
After Lewandowski praised Trump’s acceptance speech at the GOP convention from the CNN set in Cleveland, Trump called him.
“Hey man, you’re the greatest. You did the greatest job,” Trump said. He paused. “Of course, it helps that you had the best candidate.”
Lewandowski quit CNN the day after the election, and when Trump called him again, the talk quickly turned to his next job.
“You get whatever you want,” Trump said. “You want to be in the White House, what’s the holdup? That’s where the action is gonna be.”
But Trump had set up a White House with competing power centers, with Reince Priebus on one side and Steve Bannon, the former chairman of Breitbart, the conservative website, on the other, and Jared Kushner wielding as much if not more influence. Lewandowski had clashed with Priebus and didn’t want a mid-level White House slot where other people were constantly leaking stuff on him.
That fear was well grounded. A week after the election, Politico ran a hit piece that Lewandowksi thought had Priebus’ fingerprints on it. The story said that some of Trump’s “key loyalists” were “quietly lining up in opposition” to Lewandowski getting a top job, given that he was a “loose cannon” with a “penchant for bitter infighting.” The piece explicitly claimed that Priebus and Jared Kushner were trying to block him.
During another call Lewandowski told the president-elect, “You know, sir, you’ve got a bunch of guys sitting up there who don’t even fucking like you. Three months ago they weren’t even for you.”
“I’m so sick of this shit,” said Trump, who wanted his people taken care of.
But the blow-by-blow action was still unfolding in leaked media accounts. When Politico carried a story on complaints from the loyalists who felt frozen out, Trump was furious. He hated getting bad press for what he viewed as someone else’s screw-up.
There was another path for Lewandowski. He had four children, and could make enough on the outside in one year to put them all through college. He could go to big corporations and say, you have no relationship with the new president; well, now you do. Everyone knew he could get Trump on the phone. He could make $5 million in a year. Who knew if he’d be this hot after a couple years in the White House?
Lewandowski told Trump that he would pass. Trump asked him to reconsider.
Steve Bannon tried one more time: “Wait, I’ll get you in,” he said.
“I’m going to put out my own announcement before you do,” Corey said. “I’m done.”
Lewandowski immediately leaked word that he was starting a Washington consulting firm. Within a week he had eighteen clients.
Kellyanne Conway’s stay-or-go melodrama also played out in the glare of the media.
She knocked down a reporter’s tweet quoting “sources” as saying she was “reluctant” to take an administration job because she wanted to stay at her polling company. “False,” Conway said, adding, “Could it be those ‘sources’ want the WH job I’ve been offered?”
True, she had talked to Fox and other networks and was trying to forge a double deal, one broadcast and one cable channel. But there were complications.
Conway had become such a ubiquitous television presence for Trump that he could not afford to lose the woman he called “my Kellyanne.” Priebus and Bannon insisted she could have a family-friendly schedule in the White House, but she knew that wasn’t realistic.
Still, after talking it over
with her husband George, a lawyer who wanted an administration job, they decided they were ready to move their family from New York to Washington. Conway accepted the coveted title of White House counselor.
A fascinating mixture of charm and ambition, of barbed humor and steely message discipline, Kellyanne had friendly relations with most reporters and anchors. There is no question she would have been celebrated as a magazine cover girl if she had been a Democratic strategist. But even though she had started the campaign as a Ted Cruz operative, her devotion to Trump made her a lightning rod for the press and a target for shows like Saturday Night Live.
With four children to care for—ages twelve, twelve, eight, and seven when she entered the White House—and under a constant media spotlight, Kellyanne would need every bit of toughness she could muster.
Not a single primary vote had been cast when National Review declared war on Donald Trump.
This did not take the form of a stinging editorial or opinion column. The magazine’s editor, Rich Lowry, published a special issue—“Against Trump”—with essays from twenty-two leading conservative thinkers, all denouncing the Republican front-runner. Even Bill Kristol, editor of the rival Weekly Standard, contributed a piece.
“Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself,” the lead editorial said.
Trump responded shortly after the issue was posted online: “The National Review’s a dying paper. Its circulation’s way down.…I guess they want to get a little publicity. But that’s a dying paper. I got to tell you, it’s pretty much a dead paper.” This was the opening salvo in what became a bitter slugfest between Trump and the conservative commentariat, which, for the most part, opposed the GOP’s leading presidential prospect.
Trump relished the fight. He was determined to portray his adversaries on the right as out-of-touch elitists, whose influence was confined to their conferences and cruises, and who had more in common with the liberal elite than with rank-and-file conservatives. They were what George Wallace, in a very different context, once described as pointy-headed intellectuals. As a onetime Democrat, Trump didn’t quake at being called a fake conservative; he was a Republican populist with a few moderate or liberal ideas, even overlapping with Bernie Sanders on trade issues.
National Review and its allies believed Trump was an opportunist, a onetime New York liberal who rejected the policies of free trade and interventionism abroad that many of them had long supported. But whatever their policy differences, the battle between the incoming president and the #NeverTrump conservatives turned excruciatingly personal.
Charles Krauthammer, the syndicated columnist and Fox News contributor, assailed Trump as a “schoolyard bully” who was “beyond narcissism.…His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied.”
David Brooks, the moderately conservative New York Times columnist, framed Trump in psychiatric terms: “He displays the classic symptoms of medium-grade mania in more disturbing forms: inflated self-esteem, sleeplessness, impulsivity, aggression and a compulsion to offer advice on subjects he knows nothing about.”
Peggy Noonan, the onetime Reagan speechwriter turned Wall Street Journal columnist, agreed that “when you act as if you’re insane, people are liable to think you’re insane…a total flake.”
George Will, the syndicated columnist, lashed out at Republican voters and Trump supporters “who persist in pretending that although Trump lies constantly and knows nothing, these blemishes do not disqualify him from being president.”
Trump hit back hard. When I asked him about the criticism, he said that “Krauthammer has just absolutely been a disgrace when it comes to me. Don’t forget he was a big war hawk, going to Iraq.”
He said Stephen Hayes, another Fox commentator and Weekly Standard writer, “treats me terribly. It wouldn’t matter what I do.”
A mention of Brooks prompted Trump to ruminate about how these pundits despised him. “This has nothing to do governing. This has to do with a personal hatred that is unbelievable.”
And in Trump’s mind, they were taking potshots from afar: “They don’t call me. I’ve never spoken to any of them to the best of my knowledge. So, you would think that if they’re going to write something about me, they’d call, they’d talk to me.” It wasn’t easy to just ring him up, but his mindset was still that of the Manhattan developer who constantly chatted with reporters.
Since several of these conservative critics were associated with Fox—Lowry, Hayes, Krauthammer, Will, Jonah Goldberg—Trump was souring on the network. “I think Fox treats me terribly,” he told me. “I will say CNN treats me much better than Fox does.” (He would come to dramatically reverse that view.)
Trump’s constant counterpunching soon divided the Fox audience. Some viewers who had long admired its conservative commentators turned on them, often adopting the Trump view that they were part of a failed establishment. Trump’s electoral victory proved, among other things, that he understood political combat and conservative voters better than many pundits on the right did.
Some assumed that after he won the election, Trump’s conservative critics would swallow hard and close ranks behind him. But, for the most part, that never happened. So deep was their distaste for the new president that conservative Never-Trumpers largely stood their ground—and in some cases paid a price.
“There are a lot of pundits on the right who think their job is to be a cheerleader for their team,” Jonah Goldberg told me. “That is not my job. My job is to tell the truth as I see it, and that has gotten a lot of people angry.”
Goldberg, who occasionally offered praise when he thought Trump was right, took a financial hit. He lost a sizable sum of money, having to pass up speeches where he was expected to be a Republican surrogate. His appearances as a Fox contributor dropped precipitously, he says, because he no longer fit the format of many left-right debate segments. “Every day, on social media, I am attacked, dismissed, or otherwise declared an illegitimate analyst or fake conservative because of my criticisms of President Trump,” he says. That became the new world for those on the right who don’t accept Trumpism.
Lowry also remained a sharp critic. “Our role is not to get on anyone’s bandwagon,” he told me. “It’s not to read the polls, it’s not to get with the program or fall in line, it’s to represent conservatism and these ideas and our principles that Bill Buckley created for us, founded us for that role.”
I asked Steve Hayes, who became editor of the Weekly Standard, about Newt Gingrich’s contention that we were getting “anti-Trump propaganda” from “the same idiots” who failed to understand that Trump would win.
“Being one of those idiots,” Hayes allowed, “I didn’t think Trump was going to win the nomination. I didn’t think he was going to win the election. I don’t think that that somehow invalidates the things that I say about his Cabinet. Whether I’m praising them, which I have in some cases, or criticizing and raising questions, we’ve never been sort of a mouthpiece for the Republican Party. We are an independent conservative voice.…Look, we’re not on the team. We’ve never thought of ourselves on the team.”
When I spoke with Charles Krauthammer, he said, “it’s very simple: I call them like I see them.…I don’t make any secret of the fact that I didn’t think he should have been president, but that doesn’t matter on the day he’s sworn in. He is president. At this point, whatever I thought about his ascendance is irrelevant.”
It is hard to fault the conservative critics for standing by their principles, even as they knew they were alienating part of their natural audience. And yet that added to the president’s sense of being under siege by a full panoply of media antagonists, rather than just the target of liberal bias.
But Krauthammer made one larger point echoed by the others in various forms. Despite his criticism of Trump, he s
aid, “I want him to succeed. I’m a patriotic American.”
CHAPTER 6
THE DOSSIER SURFACES
Donald Trump was freelancing again. And his closest advisers knew the drill.
The president-elect ignited a media firestorm by tweeting, with absolutely no evidence, that millions of people had voted illegally in the 2016 election. The press found this especially odd because, well, Trump had won the election.
Whenever Trump went off script, the coverage was almost universally negative. Most politicians would backtrack, admit error, or change the subject. Trump invariably dug in his heels. Reporters were convinced they had him cornered, but like Houdini, Trump would conjure an escape, somehow convincing his supporters that he was the victim, that biased journalists were distorting his meaning or missing the point.
Corey Lewandowski knew all too well that his former boss sometimes misfired on Twitter. Trump talked to plenty of people; they would say things, and he would repeat those things. A couple of folks might have said they saw people voting illegally in their state. But now Trump’s microphone was so big that every word was national and international news.
The problem with the media, Lewandowski believed, was that journalists took Trump’s words all too literally. Sometimes he would shoot off his mouth like a guy at the bar, not weighing every syllable, but people loved that he didn’t sound like a focus-grouped politician. The press still hadn’t figured him out.
Trump viewed journalists as nonstop nitpickers. If what he said was “off by one-hundredth of a percent,” Trump said, “I end up getting Pinocchios,” awarded by the Washington Post fact-checking column.
