by Howard Kurtz
Priebus believed that some of his colleagues had come in with a fantasy of what West Wing life was like. He realized that he had the title of chief of staff but not the authority that went with it.
Politico ran a story titled “Knives Are Out for Reince,” with unnamed sources saying he was incompetent, that he couldn’t manage, that he was stacking the White House with RNC types, and that he was blocking the true-believers’ access to Trump.
The reality was that Trump ran the White House with ten direct reports and Priebus was one of them, with slightly more authority than the others. Priebus felt that he could not be a traditional chief of staff, because this was not a traditional president; he had less power because all of Trump’s deputies represented power centers of their own. Reince believed that he—by pumping millions of dollars into television ads and data collection for the Trump campaign when he ran the RNC—was responsible for Trump’s election, and he needed to be there, despite the frustrations and limitations of his job. But he knew it would be a short-term gig.
Kellyanne Conway was also getting bad-mouthed inside the White House, but she tried to stay focused on media strategy. She wanted to end the administration’s boycott of CNN. She told the president that whenever she went on Fox & Friends, Fox would run the best clips throughout the day. They needed to get similar facetime on CNN. “You’ve got to get people back on CNN,” she said. “They’re going to be on 24/7 with or without our people.”
When Trump learned that Mika Brzezinski had called him a “fake president,” he decided to watch Morning Joe for the first time in a month. Wow, he told Kellyanne, they are vicious. Conway herself avoided consuming most of what was said and written about her; why keep reading that she was stupid and ugly?
Trump, like Conway, had once been pals with Joe and Mika, and they had touted his chances of winning when almost no one else did. But late in the campaign, Trump tweeted that they were “two clowns” and, at a time when their romance was secret, Trump hit Scarborough “and his very insecure long-time girlfriend.” Jared Kushner tried to repair the relationship, with Trump even offering to officiate at a White House wedding, and Scarborough was encouraged enough to offer Trump advice on Cabinet picks during the transition. But their relationship was now in a deep freeze.
Kellyanne thought Trump wanted, and deserved, more respect from his media antagonists. She was struck by what Trump had said in a private session with the network anchors. They asked him what had most surprised him about becoming president. “The fact that you never changed your coverage,” he said. “The fact that it never got better.”
Madonna was live on cable news, dropping F-bombs as she spoke.
She was a featured speaker at a women’s protest rally the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated, and she was letting loose.
“Yes, I’m angry,” she railed. “Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House.”
No, she didn’t mean it literally. But what was eye-popping was how little attention the media gave Madonna’s outrageous comment; if it had been reversed, if a conservative entertainer had threatened to blow up Barack Obama’s White House, the media would have been in a full-blown frenzy.
Instead, the constant stream of inflammatory invective from celebrities against Trump was simply woven into the larger news culture. Their diatribes generated segments on cable news and endless online gossip items. Some of them appeared on political talk shows and Sunday shows, the better to goose the ratings. Their swipes and slams were covered so matter-of-factly, or with raised-eyebrow acquiescence, that it sent a signal that this was perfectly ordinary discourse.
Robert De Niro called Trump “totally nuts.” Susan Sarandon said he “made hatred and racism normal.” A petition from “Artists United Against Hate,” including Bryan Cranston and Mark Ruffalo, said “Trump wants to take our country back to a time when fear excused violence, when greed fueled discrimination, and when the state wrote prejudice against marginalized communities into law.”
Lena Dunham described sobbing in the shower on Election Night, and suffering such “soul-crushing pain and devastation and hopelessness” that her weight dropped.
They had every right to speak out, but they often seemed like actors reading variations of the same script.
Sarah Silverman went on Conan O’Brien’s show dressed as Hitler and compared the Nazi leader to Trump, down to the size of their manhoods. Chelsea Handler tweeted a near-naked, rear-view picture of herself, with “Trump is a butt hole” scrawled on her body.
Rob Reiner, the liberal director and actor, said that “This is not normal. We’ve had the greatest attack on this democracy since 1941.…Our democracy is being compromised.” Yes, he was comparing the president’s election to Pearl Harbor, and went on to call for “all-out war” against Trump’s “treason.”
The cast of Hamilton felt compelled to lecture Mike Pence when he took his family to the hit Broadway show. “We are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us,” a cast member announced.
At the Oscars, it was de rigueur to take shots at Trump. La La Land producer Marc Platt said that “repression,” meaning by Trump, of course, “is the enemy of civilization.” Barry Jenkins of Moonlight told viewers that “the ACLU has your back. For the next four years we will not leave you alone, we will not forget you.” And Jimmy Kimmel, who hosted the awards, said they were all hoping to give a speech “that the president of the United States will tweet about in all caps during his 5 a.m. bowel movement tomorrow.”
Kimmel and other late-night comics formed an almost united front against Trump. The lone exception was Jimmy Fallon, the apolitical Tonight Show host who took enormous abuse for tousling Trump’s hair during a playful interview. Fallon was “devastated” by criticism that he had been “humanizing a well-documented, xenophobic, racist and misogynistic serial liar,” as the Huffington Post put it. And he soon lost his top spot in the ratings.
The openly liberal Stephen Colbert, who made Trump-bashing a staple of his program, drew glowing reviews and a bigger audience. Comedians ranging from Samantha Bee to Seth Meyers to John Oliver to Trevor Noah followed suit. Hey, they could be funny; all presidents get bashed. But after eight years of gentle humor aimed at Obama, comedians brandished a much harder-edged, more intensely personal brand of satire against Trump, one that was increasingly mixed with serious politics.
And then there was Saturday Night Live.
The iconic program surged to its highest-rated season in decades, powered by Alec Baldwin’s over-the-top impersonation of the president as a doofus. Trump, of course, hit back, tweeting that it was “time to retire the boring and unfunny show” and that Baldwin’s “hit job” on him “stinks.” And Baldwin, an unabashed New York liberal who once hosted a talk show on MSNBC, attacked Trump at every opportunity.
“When we woke up the day after the election it was like 9/11,” Baldwin told Howard Stern, likening a free election to the worst terrorist attack in American history. He confessed that he no longer speaks to his brother Steve Baldwin: “If you support Trump, there is no common ground.”
That about summed up the celebrity culture’s attitude toward Donald Trump: no common ground. And that sense of ridicule constantly reverberated through the news echo chamber.
CHAPTER 12
“THE KNIVES ARE OUT”
Kellyanne Conway seemed off her game.
She could be flawless in a long interview—sharp, funny, and charming, with an encyclopedic command of statistics. And then, without warning, she could step in it.
On March 12, in a video interview with her hometown Jersey paper, the Bergen Record, she was asked: “Do you know whether Trump Tower was wiretapped?”
“What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other,” Conway said, referring to a new WikiLeaks disclosure about CIA spying techniques. “You can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets�
�any number of different ways, microwaves that turn into cameras.”
Conway was simply deflecting the question by changing the subject, but it seemed like she was insinuating something.
The next day, Conway made the rounds on the morning news shows. On CNN, she got hammered over the Bergen Record’s piece: “Kellyanne Conway Alludes to Even Wider Surveillance of Trump Campaign.” The hosts of course demanded to know what evidence she had of wider surveillance.
“I’m not in the job of having evidence. That’s what investigations are for,” she told New Day anchor Chris Cuomo. She insisted she was offering a more general point about surveillance capabilities, not making new allegations, and criticized the Record headline, saying: “I know I’m great clickbait.”
And then there was this: “I’m not Inspector Gadget. I don’t believe people are using the microwave to spy on the Trump campaign.”
It was the same drill on Today and Good Morning America. All day, her defensive answers replayed in an endless loop. She was the microwave lady. The Inspector Gadget line went viral. Mika Brzezinski attacked her again. Even on Fox, anchor Shepard Smith introduced the story by saying, “Kellyanne Conway, whom we really don’t quote much anymore because, well, history…”
Had a lower-profile official used the same dodge, it wouldn’t have been news. But this was Kellyanne, and the media were waiting to pounce on the merest misstep.
The most stinging part wasn’t the criticism, it was the mockery. Stephen Colbert did a bit peering out from inside a microwave oven. CNN’s Jim Acosta made Inspector Gadget jokes. Kellyanne was adept at producing colorful phrases, but as with “alternative facts,” these could also be thrown back in her face.
After her morning blitz, Trump tweeted: “It is amazing how rude much of the media is to my very hard working representatives. Be nice, you will do much better!”
The president was now having to defend the woman whose job was to defend him on television, and that left him feeling perturbed. He sent word that Kellyanne should take some time off from the airwaves. “She’s worn out, making mistakes,” Trump told a top aide.
Jared Kushner, widely viewed as one of Conway’s antagonists in the Trump White House, actually became one of her defenders. He felt she didn’t get credit for the 999 times out of a thousand that she did a good job, and got too much blame when there was a misstep. He knew that campaigning and governing required different skills and standards, that they all had to make the adjustment, and Kellyanne, he thought, was making the transition as well as anyone.
Still, the media firestorm over Trump’s accusation of wiretaps ordered by Obama raged on. Trump tried to muddy the waters by having Spicer say that his boss’s use of “wiretap,” in quotes, included any kind of surveillance. Journalists were openly skeptical, and felt vindicated when, on the morning of March 16, the Senate Intelligence Committee issued a statement saying there was no evidence that Obama had ordered Trump wiretapped.
The president gave Spicer his marching orders: “Let’s make sure we’re pushing back on this.”
What followed was Spicer’s most contentious press briefing. He angrily accused journalists of pushing a “false narrative.” He charged the press with a blatant double standard for focusing on the lack of evidence for Trump’s wiretap claim, while simultaneously ignoring the lack of evidence for any Trump campaign collusion with the Russians, which was now the subject of an FBI investigation. The press of course regarded the collusion allegations as newsworthy precisely because they were under investigation; and no major news organization had flatly accused Trump or his associates of conspiring with the Russians. The president, by contrast, had flatly insisted that Barack Obama had ordered surveillance for him and his campaign associates, and by offering no evidence, he had made the press criticism fair game.
Spicer had come prepared to make his case. He devoted seven minutes to citing news reports, from the New York Times and National Review to Fox News, about surveillance during the campaign. But the articles didn’t say what he said, having focused mainly on intercepts of Russians that apparently picked up contacts with certain Trump people.
In the president’s defense, Spicer approvingly cited Andrew Napolitano, Fox’s top legal analyst, who said that three unnamed sources had told him that the Obama administration had asked British intelligence to put Trump under surveillance. Fox anchors made a point of saying their news division found no evidence to support that claim.
Spicer’s move caused an international incident, especially after Trump, at a news conference, defended Spicer, saying that “all we did was quote a certain very talented legal mind.” The British government called the charge “utterly ridiculous,” and U.S. officials apologized.
The pundits hit back hard. Jake Tapper said after the briefing that Spicer can’t “defend the indefensible” and was arguing that “the earth is flat.”
Four days later, when James Comey testified that there was no evidence to support Trump’s wiretapping tweets, the president’s media detractors took a victory lap. They had tried for two years to prove that Trump did not tell the truth, had struggled to make the public care—and now they felt vindicated.
“The president has no facts,” Anderson Cooper said on CNN. Lawrence O’Donnell, a former Senate Democratic aide, said on MSNBC that Trump should be considered incapacitated and removed under the Twenty-Fifth Amendment—a ludicrous suggestion even by the most partisan standards.
But some outlets continued to push stories saturated with speculation. CNN reported the FBI had learned that Trump associates had “communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information” damaging to Clinton, “raising the suspicions of FBI counterintelligence investigators that the coordination may have taken place, though officials cautioned that the information was not conclusive and that the investigation is ongoing.” (Italics added.) The sheer number of qualifiers rendered the story meaningless.
Still, Spicer had to keep deflecting questions about whether Trump should admit he was wrong and apologize to Obama.
Things sank to the point that Spicer was again feuding with Glenn Thrush on Twitter. Thrush was a dogged New York Times reporter who previously worked for Politico and was now being portrayed as a character on Saturday Night Live. He had also, however, been caught on leaked emails admitting to Clinton campaign chief John Podesta that he was a “hack” and asking him not to tell anyone he was sharing an unpublished story in advance for Podesta’s vetting. And he had posted plenty of snarky tweets about Trump.
“Name a time in American history—even during Watergate—when the executive branch was this dysfunctional, feral and fragile. I can’t,” Thrush tweeted. Feral? He sounded disdainful of the White House.
Thrush felt he was simply engaging in the same truth-telling as the president. He viewed his tweets as factually accurate and didn’t understand why anyone would object to them. No one, in his view, had degraded the national discourse more than Donald Trump.
Spicer did not like how Thrush occasionally would call him after a briefing, tell him he had done a great job, and then bash him in print. The last straw came when Thrush co-authored a story saying that Spicer and other officials had “told allies that Mr. Trump’s Twitter habits are making their jobs harder.”
That was obviously true, but Spicer angrily tweeted in response, “Just when you thought @nytimes couldn’t go any lower, they make this up.”
That prompted Thrush to taunt him on Twitter: “Tell the folks out there why u didn’t reply to my email running it by you? Gave you hours and hours.…” This was, in fact, true as well. Spicer sometimes ignored requests for comment and then complained about the resulting story.
Thrush felt he was making the process transparent, using his Twitter following as leverage to get answers. This was his way of telling the press secretary that he had a responsibility to respond to the Fourth Estate.
Spicer sometimes engaged in such obvious fudging that no one could
figure out why he bothered. When news leaked that Paul Manafort was under investigation for his dealings with Russia, Spicer told reporters that Manafort “played a very limited role for a very limited amount of time.” On another day Spicer said he had been “hired to count delegates.”
Did he think they had forgotten that Manafort had been the campaign chairman for five months, through the Republican convention, and was Trump’s top spokesman on television? Why deny what everyone already knew?
It was those little evasions that kept providing fodder for Spicer’s detractors.
Some of Spicer’s friends were worried that he would have trouble getting a job in corporate America when he was done at the White House. Those fears were underscored when CNN ran a piece titled “How Sean Spicer Lost His Credibility.”
At 3:31 p.m. on Friday, March 24, Trump called Washington Post reporter Robert Costa.
“So, we just pulled it,” he told Costa, who immediately tweeted the news. The president was using a newspaper he often denounced to tell the world that he couldn’t get the votes he needed and was yanking his Obamacare replacement bill. He called Maggie Haberman of the “failing” New York Times moments later with the same news.
Revamping health care was Trump’s signature promise, along with building a border wall. The House Republicans had voted sixty times for repeal under Obama, when it was purely symbolic. Now the media had cast it as a test of whether the party could govern.
Trump had promised to repeal Obamacare right away, then, when Congress balked, said that it might take until 2018. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated,” he said, an observation that had Washington cynics chuckling. The president could muster only a weak spin about the Democrats. “The beauty,” he told Costa, “is that they own Obamacare” and would eventually be forced to “make one beautiful deal for the people.”
