by Howard Kurtz
During the campaign, Lewandowski and his successors had endured a remarkably consistent pattern. Trump would hone a successful message, stick to the script, and wind up chafing at the rhetorical shackles.
Lewandowski could always tell when Trump wasn’t having fun. And that meant he would rebel. He would create a new narrative: a phrase, a tweet, an extended riff in front of a rapturous crowd. And if in doing so Trump marred his own story line, he blamed the media for twisting his words, and doubled or tripled down (while sometimes tweaking) his remarks.
His staff had a name for when Trump utterly ignored their collective advice: defiance disorder.
That’s what happened when Trump started criticizing Khizr Khan and his wife. Their son, an Army captain, had been killed in Iraq, making them Gold Star parents. But after the Muslim couple appeared at the Democratic convention and Khan gave a fiery speech against Trump, he lashed out at them. “You’re getting killed on this,” Lewandowski told Trump after he had dropped 7 points in the polls. As his staff frantically tried to change the subject, Trump would not let go—and was convinced he had done nothing wrong.
“The media was not treating the statements fairly,” Trump told me at the time. “I mean, they would chop them up and then shorten the statement, and it didn’t sound as proper or didn’t sound as good when they did that. It was very unfair.”
There were growing calls for Trump’s team to boot him off Twitter. But Kellyanne Conway knew Trump would, in the end, say and do what he wanted. When Trump said things she couldn’t defend, she simply deflected reporters’ questions.
The ultimate example came when Trump’s team was prepping him for the third and final debate in Las Vegas, drilling him on one answer dozens of times. With Trump having spent weeks declaring that the election was “rigged,” the inner circle urged him to say that while the media were unfair, of course he would accept the outcome on Election Day. He was explicitly warned that any other response would guarantee forty-eight hours of bad press, wiping out the rest of the debate.
But when Fox’s Chris Wallace asked that very question, Trump went with his gut. He said he didn’t know what he would do and would keep the country in suspense. Conway and Bannon watched in amazement. A modified statement was issued the following day, but the damage was done. Those who knew him best grasped the truth: he would not be managed.
As Donald Trump stepped up his war on the media, filling the Twittersphere with attacks on CNN and NBC, some of his aides felt that he needed to tone it down, that the campaign was over and a new president should pick his targets more carefully. But one member of his inner circle believed Trump wasn’t going far enough.
“I fucking hate the press,” Steve Bannon would tell anyone who crossed his path.
In his view, Trump was always trying to mend fences with the media, trying to get them to like him. Bannon viewed journalists like scorpions. If you engaged, you would simply get stung. He liked some journalists personally but they were “killers,” he would say, adamantly opposed to his worldview.
Bannon believed that Trump’s sit-down interview with the New York Times had been a mistake, a misguided attempt at appeasement. Trump had the power of Twitter behind him; he didn’t need the mainstream press. During the campaign, Bannon read the Twitter feeds of the network embeds, the young producers who were always on the trail; they did not hide their contempt for Trump; neither did even seasoned journalists who continued to both underestimate Trump and snipe at him.
Bannon understood that Trump’s detractors in the press were on both the left and the right, and he was proud of the way the campaign had neutralized the old-line conservative media, whose thunder Bannon tried to steal when he ran Breitbart. Bannon loved the way his candidate took on the Never-Trump conservatives; for Bannon, Trump’s campaign was not only about defeating Hillary Clinton and the Democrats; it was about shattering the Republican Party and forging a new conservative movement.
Bannon had also learned how to handle the boss. Trump had yelled at him throughout the campaign, demanding that he fire this or that staffer. Bannon let him vent and ignored the orders.
As much as Kellyanne gravitated toward the spotlight, Bannon did his work in the shadows. Despite his pedigree as a Harvard Business School guy, Goldman Sachs executive, and Hollywood entrepreneur, Bannon walked around shaggy-haired and unshaven in well-worn combat jackets and multiple shirts. He had barely known Trump before, but from the moment he became campaign chairman, he was the most reviled man in politics.
Press reports depicted Bannon as a white supremacist and anti-Semite, attributing to him every creepy Breitbart headline, such as “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew” (an article written by David Horowitz, who is Jewish). Bannon was seen as the malevolent force behind the throne.
Whatever his dark view of the world, Bannon barely lifted a finger to defend himself. He was proud of the fact that he went through the entire campaign without granting an interview.
Bannon viewed himself as an economic nationalist, not a white nationalist. He believed that Breitbart’s web traffic soared because he channeled a populist fervor that took on Paul Ryan’s Republican establishment, and that the same impulse had enabled Trump to connect with frustrated working-class voters. Bannon had a grandiose vision of overthrowing a corroded Republican apparatus whose embrace of global trade and large-scale immigration served the interests of the elites, but left millions of Americans worse off.
Bannon’s view was that politics was war by other means and that the press—as much as the Democrats and the establishment Republicans—was the enemy. He believed you couldn’t co-opt the media. You had to steamroll them.
Bannon’s political strategy for President Trump was to “flood the zone,” football lingo for sending more receivers into an area of the field than the defense can cover. That’s why he wanted Trump to sign a flurry of executive orders in his first week.
In mid-January, on the eve of Trump’s first press conference in six months, aides debated whether to limit the session to its stated purpose, which was addressing possible conflicts of interest involving the president and his global real estate empire. Bannon argued that every topic should be fair game.
Suddenly they had to call an audible. At six a.m., CNN’s Jake Tapper texted Spicer that he needed to talk to him about something important. Spicer said he would be available. At two p.m., Tapper got in touch to say that his network was about to air a story that U.S. intelligence officials had briefed Trump about an unverified dossier, assembled by a former British spy, that claimed the Russians had compromising information about him.
“These are classified documents,” Spicer said. “It’s complicated stuff that I have to go through. I can’t just respond off the top of my head.” He asked for more time.
Tapper said they would update the story when Spicer came back with a response.
Spicer quickly called Jeff Zucker and pressed for more time to respond. The CNN president’s answer was the same: “We’ll update the story with your comments.”
Soon afterward, BuzzFeed posted the entire thirty-five-page document, which made outlandish allegations, such as that Trump had consorted with prostitutes at a Moscow hotel and had watched them engage in golden showers, a porn term involving urination, even as the site said it had no idea whether such allegations were true.
Kellyanne Conway tried to knock down the dossier story on Good Morning America. “You’re wrong—I’m not spinning,” she told investigative reporter Brian Ross off camera.
Trump huddled with his team. Would these sexual falsehoods now dominate the news conference?
Spicer argued that the BuzzFeed scoop—which was drawing criticism from major news organizations that had refused to report the unsubstantiated rumors—was already the biggest story in the country. It was the elephant in the room, he said, and they had to tackle it head on.
“How do you want to start?” Trump asked.
“I’d like to write something,�
�� Spicer said. He later showed his opening statement to Trump. Spicer suggested he call it “frankly outrageous and highly irresponsible” for a “left-wing blog” to dump “highly salacious and flat-out false information” just days before the inauguration.
“Perfect,” said Trump.
The president-elect added his own choice words at the Trump Tower event, calling BuzzFeed a “failing pile of garbage,” and broadened his attack to include CNN, which hadn’t printed the actual dossier.
When CNN correspondent Jim Acosta repeatedly interrupted Trump, loudly demanding a question, Trump finally snapped: “You are fake news.” Spicer confronted Acosta afterward, telling him that if he pulled such a stunt again, he’d be kicked out of the press conference. And when Acosta later reported that he’d been threatened with expulsion if he asked a hard question, Spicer called him a liar.
The die was cast. Donald Trump had denounced “fake news” and weaponized Twitter to battle what he viewed as the dishonest media. Steve Bannon disdained the media as a malevolent force. And Sean Spicer was on the front lines against confrontational reporters.
But away from the cameras, Spicer had his reservations. People were posting online that he was evil, and his wife, a former television producer, was freaking out. She stopped putting pictures of their two young children on social media. They had never been through anything like this. And Spicer knew that it was only going to get worse.
Eleven days before taking office, Donald Trump was at his desk on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower, being briefed on the latest media coverage.
Nothing had changed, and yet everything had changed.
Nothing: With his longtime assistant Rhona Graff sitting next door, Trump still barked out the names of the people he wanted called, still greeted visitors with a smile and a backslap, still roamed the halls filled with framed magazine covers bearing his visage.
Everything: With Secret Service agents filling the suites, with Jared Kushner popping in and out as he prepared to accept a White House post, Trump was holding meetings this day on who to name to the Supreme Court, not where to build his latest golf course. And that’s when I walked in.
With the weight of the presidency just days from descending on his shoulders, Trump wore the mantle lightly, pausing to gossip about the news business, taking a shot at Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sagging ratings on his old show, The Apprentice—then casually remarking that one of the tougher problems on his desk was North Korea.
It was still hard to fathom how he won the election in the face of so much media hostility, Trump said, relishing the moment. “Can you believe it?”
He noted that NBC’s Kristen Welker had just reported that he broke his promise that Mexico would pay for the wall. Not at all, said Trump, he had always planned to start it first with American funds and get the Mexicans to reimburse the cost through border fees.
Hope Hicks, who was almost always by his side and had just been named an assistant to the president, pulled out her phone to play footage of Kellyanne Conway on the CNN and Fox morning shows. She was deflecting Meryl Streep’s slam against Trump at the Golden Globes, where Streep attacked him for, among other things, having allegedly mocked a disabled New York Times reporter during the campaign. Kellyanne said that that charge had been repeatedly refuted and added that if the actress was so concerned about the rights of the disabled, she should have spoken out about a disabled boy who had been badly beaten by young thugs shouting anti-Trump epithets in a video that had been posted on Facebook and generated national outrage. Trump loved Kellyanne’s answer, and that got him revved up about his media coverage.
Trump asked why Fox had given airtime to Kurt Eichenwald, a Newsweek writer who claimed without a scintilla of evidence that Trump had once been in a mental institution—even if the point was to debunk the claim.
And “CNN is terrible,” he told me. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” He was convinced that he had gotten Jeff Zucker, who ran NBC when Trump was doing The Apprentice, his job as CNN president by recommending him. It was personal. Trump felt betrayed.
Zucker and Trump used to speak regularly, and Zucker had been a guest at Ivanka’s wedding to Jared. But as a candidate, Trump occasionally cursed out the CNN chief over segments that angered him.
During the campaign, Jared Kushner called Zucker after CNN’s fact-checkers had declared much of a Trump speech false, from the candidate saying he “started off with a small loan” (it was $1 million from his father) to claiming foreign governments hacked Hillary Clinton’s email server (“no conclusive evidence”).
“Jeff, this is just unfair,” Kushner said. “You’re looking for things to pick apart.” He told Zucker that Trump “told me to say he doesn’t want to do CNN anymore.”
“Look, you can’t win without CNN,” Zucker said, citing an audience study by David Axelrod, the Obama aide he now employed as a commentator.
Jared begged to differ: “You have 1 million viewers, and 70 percent of them aren’t in swing states.”
The conversation was not going well. Zucker, for his part, felt Trump was trying to delegitimize the press.
“You’re so arrogant, you think you know everything,” he told Jared.
Trump was more pleased with Rupert Murdoch, whose global media empire included Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. The two men stayed in touch. Trump told me that the mogul was more supportive after Roger Ailes was ousted from Fox over sexual harassment allegations and Murdoch took day-to-day control. Murdoch thought Trump had great potential but paid too much attention to the media.
Trump had invited French business magnate Bernard Arnault to join him at the press pool that day. Arnault was considering expanding his U.S. factories and Trump thought that was news. “The press didn’t care,” he lamented. “It was all, ‘What about Jared?’ ‘What about Russia?’”
On a happier note, he was pleased that the Wall Street Journal had declared his presidential Twitter feed to be a major media force. As an example of its power he told me that he had tweeted criticism of General Motors’ exporting jobs to Mexico and now “General Motors doesn’t know what to do about its new Mexican plant.” “I move markets,” he proclaimed.
Trump had a message for me as well. With everything swirling around him, he was somehow keeping an eye on my coverage. “Your problem,” he said in a friendly tone, looking me in the eye, “is that you’re too down the middle.” I said that was my job. In my world, of course, that was a compliment.
Hicks retreated to a nearby desk, where she spoke to New York Times reporter Patrick Healy. He had called Trump’s personal cell phone during the Golden Globes, and then quoted him as saying he wasn’t surprised by criticisms from “liberal movie people.”
Hicks took him to task. “I’m not a confrontational person, but calling the president-elect of the United States at midnight over an entertainment program is crossing the line.” If he wanted a comment from the president-elect, he should have called her; the fact that he didn’t “makes me look bad. I’m usually very responsive.” She ended on a conciliatory note: “It’s not the end of the world, we’ll move on.”
Trump knew he had greater problems than Meryl Streep. He broke with Republican leaders who wanted to replace Obamacare with health savings accounts, telling the Washington Post there would be “insurance for everyone.” Days later, in another interview he said, “We have to make sure that people are taken care of,” which, to the press, again put him at odds with his own party.
What most journalists missed was that Trump was trying to find a compromise plan that would appeal to more moderate voters. It was a collision course in the making, against both parties.
Carl Bernstein, the onetime Watergate sleuth now working for CNN, was ripping Kellyanne Conway as a “propaganda minister.”
Conway dismissed the slap, for while Bernstein was defending his story on the unsubstantiated dossier about Trump and Russia, she knew that his former partner Bob Woodward was now cri
ticizing the ex-spy’s dossier as “garbage.”
Moments before Bernstein’s remarks, Conway had really gotten into it with Anderson Cooper. “CNN and BuzzFeed have a lot in common,” she told him. “You both were absolutely convinced and told your viewers Hillary Clinton would win this election.”
When Cooper accused her of pivoting away from the question, Conway punched back: “Anderson, you can use words like ‘pivot,’ ‘distract,’ ‘red herring’ all you want. The fact is that the media have a 16 percent approval rating for a reason. It’s been earned. And it’s crap like this that really undergirds why Donald Trump won.”
And then, recalling the gushing coverage of Barack Obama, her sense of resentment emerged: “We get no forbearance. We get nothing! We get no respect. We get no deference!”
The more that Kellyanne fought back, the more she made herself a target. Late-night comic Samantha Bee called her a “spokes-cobra” and “soulless Machiavellian.” Bee played an old clip of Conway saying that femininity is replacing feminism for many women. Bee observed: “I know Kellyanne doesn’t believe those homophobic, sexist things in her heart, because Kellyanne doesn’t believe anything in her heart.”
Conway had a seemingly impervious hide. She didn’t spend much time thinking about such attacks. People were going to take their shots, that was politics. It wasn’t really about her. Conway felt she was being ridiculed for the sin of working for Donald Trump.
What was strange about the growing chorus of attacks was that they didn’t accuse her of being an incompetent hack; she was derided for being too good at her job. “Kellyanne Conway Gave a Master Class in Not Answering Questions in Her Fox News Interview,” said the Washington Post. Slate declared her “the Slipperiest Political Flack in History,” one who was impossible for anchors to pin down.
In Conway’s view, being a woman brought her special grief, especially from other women who made comments like “she’s aged 10 years since working for Trump.” Conway’s standard reply was, “I’m 50 years old, honey, not a beauty queen.”
