by Howard Kurtz
Kushner was blunt with people, and he realized that probably hurt him. He told Priebus flat out that Sean Spicer was doing a bad job. He didn’t say it publicly; he didn’t leak it; he realized that feelings might get hurt; but he knew others were more adept at political maneuvering.
Some colleagues thought he should build relationships with the media and go on TV. Even Trump told him, “You should do it.” But his default setting was to avoid the limelight. He didn’t have a following. He wasn’t there to build his brand. He wanted to have a real impact on policy, not a fake impact as measured by pretty stories. What Kushner didn’t understand was that in Washington positive news stories can increase your clout.
At the hardest moments Jared would think, what am I doing this for, why don’t I go back to New York? But he felt he was doing important work. Still, since he almost never spoke to journalists on the record, there were no gauzy features about him; he was viewed as important but elusive figure.
Kushner was amazed by the constant attacks on his father-in-law, and felt it had become the hip thing to do to trash Trump on television. He wasn’t blind to the president’s excesses; he knew their lives would be easier if Trump stopped tweeting; but on balance he felt that Twitter was a positive tool for communicating his agenda.
When people told him his father-in-law was unhinged, Kushner had a ready answer: No, he makes other people unhinged.
CHAPTER 16
THE COMEY FIRESTORM
Late on the afternoon of May 9, 2017, Sean Spicer was summoned to a meeting with the president.
Trump had decided to fire James Comey, the FBI director. Brushing aside the few objections from his advisers, he committed the ultimate act of defiance disorder. By canning the head of the agency that was investigating his associates and their ties to Russia, the president handed his media antagonists a devastating narrative. There were many legitimate stories questioning the decision, but many in the press simply went bonkers, casting Trump as criminal or crazy or a malevolent mastermind, especially as his explanation for the firing seemed to change.
The cover of New York’s Daily News, which detested Trump, called it a “coup,” and that word popped up in cable news segments as well. The headline on a McClatchy Newspapers story was “Trump Takes a Dictator’s Stand Against Inquiry.”
On CNN, Jeff Toobin called Trump’s decision “a grotesque abuse of power” and “the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies.” Morning anchor Dave Briggs kicked off CNN’s coverage by saying “breaking news, the bedrock of our democracy is under siege.” On MSNBC, Chris Matthews said the move carried a “whiff of fascism.” John Heilemann said Trump “blew the lid off his own coverup.” On Fox, Bob Beckel called Trump “a liar and a buffoon.”
John Harwood, CNBC’s editor at large, who had been condemned for asking Trump during a debate whether he was running a “comic book version” of a campaign, tweeted that it’s “not hard to imagine resulting chain of events that would make Pence president.”
So for dismissing the head of the FBI, who serves at the pleasure of the president, Trump was called a fascist dictator who threatened the foundation of democracy and who could be impeached. If he was not a fascist, Trump was at least Richard Nixon, with the press likening Comey’s ouster to Nixon’s firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Never mind that Cox was investigating real crimes while the Russia allegations remained murky.
Trump had not informed Spicer that he was firing Comey until the last minute, which left the press office stranded without a plan.
When there was a glitch in emailing the press release announcing the firing, Spicer read it—shouted it, actually—to a handful of reporters outside his office.
That night, Spicer huddled with his staff near a clump of bushes on the North Lawn. He had just done a brief interview with Lou Dobbs of Fox Business, and a pack of reporters was nearby, clamoring for more answers. An aide said Spicer would take a few questions, but only if the networks turned off their lights.
Spicer laid out the White House line: Trump was merely acting on the recommendation of Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who had been on the job for two weeks and was overseeing the Russia investigation because Jeff Sessions had recused himself.
“It was all him,” Spicer said, meaning Rosenstein. “No one from the White House. That was a DOJ decision.”
Spicer promised to get answers to the many questions he couldn’t answer, and when he retreated toward the mansion, a pack of reporters trailed his steps.
The surreal scene was described in a Washington Post sidebar that cast Spicer as using the bushes for cover. Spicer angrily called a top editor at the paper to complain that he wasn’t “hiding” behind the bushes, as the Post suggested, that he had taken questions near there for ten minutes. And Sean was upset that the paper, which complained about access, failed to note that he had directed cameras to the Roosevelt Room, where he did one-on-one interviews with every network.
The Post’s handling of the episode, Spicer believed, had been disgraceful. And he was perturbed that not one reporter who witnessed the scene stood up for him.
The paper ran an editor’s note to clarify what happened. But the “hiding in the bushes” meme took on a life of its own, with sketches of a cowering Spicer even appearing on magazine covers.
Kellyanne Conway was on a road trip when she heard the news and rushed back to the White House. “What do you think of this?” Trump asked.
“I think it’s very you,” Conway said. “You’ve been itching for a while about this guy,” meaning Comey. Trump had made his decision over the weekend, when he was at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. Jared and Ivanka had been there, but not Conway or Bannon or Priebus, who might have tried to dissuade him.
Trump was upset that he was being trashed by CNN’s panels, which he viewed as stacked six to one against him. “Where are my people?” he asked.
With Rosenstein refusing to appear on television, Trump’s team tried to reach Chris Christie or Rudy Giuliani. Trump asked Conway to go on CNN, which she viewed as the lion’s den.
Speaking from the White House lawn, Kellyanne made the case to Anderson Cooper. “He took the recommendation of his deputy attorney general,” she said; and “today’s actions had zero to do” with the FBI’s Russia probe.
When she offered an aside about how she had tried to tell them that Trump would win the election, Cooper rolled his eyes, which Conway regarded as sexist.
The president told Kellyanne that he loved the interview. At the very least, he said, it cut into the channel’s otherwise non-stop negative coverage.
Every official had the same talking points, including Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Spicer’s deputy, and Mike Pence, who spoke of “the president’s decision to accept the recommendation of the deputy attorney general and the attorney general.”
The two-page Rosenstein memo that Trump and his allies kept citing focused on Comey’s mishandling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. It criticized Comey’s public trashing of Hillary when he chose not to recommend that the Justice Department bring an indictment against her. And it criticized him for his eleventh-hour announcement of a renewed probe into her emails (which had prompted Trump to praise Comey for his “guts”).
But while Rosenstein’s memo recommended removing the FBI chief for botching the Clinton email investigation, the president invoked the Russia inquiry in his official letter dismissing Comey: “I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation.” A gusher of administration leaks followed, which quickly debunked the notion that the firing was all about Hillary and not about Russia.
A New York Times account detailed how the president had been fuming about Comey’s Senate testimony that he had been nauseated by the notion that he had interfered with the election.
Mike Pence, Jared Kushner, and White House counsel Don McGahn supported the idea of firing Comey. Reince Priebus did not favor the mo
ve, but the decision was largely made before he learned about it—underscoring his lack of influence at crunch time.
Steve Bannon, however, had weighed in and was adamantly opposed. He believed that the geniuses who wanted Comey ousted didn’t understand the Beltway culture. In real estate and entertainment, Bannon felt, personalities could carry the day. But charm didn’t work in Washington. It was all about institutions. And you couldn’t fire the FBI, he argued, which is how the dismissal would be perceived. Trump was already unpopular at the FBI, and with much of Congress. The president, Bannon believed, could have gotten away with firing Jim Comey right after the inauguration, or if he waited a few months until things died down. But right now, with Comey overseeing the Russia probe, Bannon was certain it would be the worst political decision of modern times. And beyond that, the probe had been running out of gas. It was a third-tier story going nowhere. It had no oomph.
The others, the New Yorkers, actually thought the Democrats would praise the move, since they detested Comey for undermining Hillary in the campaign’s final stretch. And the president, who employed the Socratic method—asking everyone he could find for their opinion—was swayed by the staffers who opposed Bannon. And now they were shocked by the blowback.
The press was obsessed with the issue of Trump’s motivation. The Washington Post said that Trump, who was tweeting that Comey’s Russia probe was a “total hoax,” had already “made up his mind” before ordering Rosenstein and Sessions to lay out the case against Comey.
In an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt two days after the firing, the president flatly contradicted all the top aides who had been peddling the spin that the decision rested on Rosenstein’s memo. Trump admitted he had made the decision beforehand, telling the anchor that “I was going to fire Comey regardless of recommendation.” With that one sentence, the president enabled the media to trumpet that they had been right all along.
Kellyanne didn’t care if she had been undercut. He was the president, he was her boss, and she had made her argument with the information that was given to her. Even though she had been left out of the loop on Comey, she didn’t agree that Trump had blindsided his communications team. She and Hope Hicks were with the president, off-camera, during the Lester Holt interview. Conway saw no contradiction between Trump acting on both his longstanding desire to fire Comey and on Rosenstein’s recommendation (though Rosenstein later admitted that, before he wrote his memo, he knew Trump intended to fire Comey).
Kellyanne thought the whole story was overblown. Ordinary people outside the Beltway didn’t care about Comey. They worried about their jobs, not his. As a New Jersey girl raised by a single mother, she felt she understood ordinary Americans in a way the elite media did not.
Conway was amazed that lawyers like Jeff Toobin could trash the president with loaded language and be back on CNN day after day. She thought it was terrible that the Washington Post could anonymously quote “one GOP figure close to the White House”—how close, she wondered, at the Cosi down the street?—as musing about whether Trump was “in the grip of some kind of paranoid delusion.” And where, she wondered, were the corrections? The Washington Post reported that Rosenstein threatened to resign if he was blamed for Comey’s ouster; he denied it. The New York Times reported that Comey had asked for more resources for the Russia probe; his deputy denied it.
Conway was once again a prime media target. Mika Brzezinski, her former friend, went into overdrive, denouncing CNN for putting her on the air. “It’s politics porn. You’re just getting your little ratings crack,” she said, because Kellyanne was “a repeated liar.”
Brzezinski went further, saying that after Conway’s Morning Joe appearances during the campaign, “the microphone would be taken off and she would say ‘Blecch, I need to take a shower’ because she disliked her candidate so much.”
Word of Brzezinski’s slam on Conway reached the president. “Did you see what Mika said about you?” Trump asked Kellyanne. “I don’t believe that for a second.”
Many outsiders didn’t understand that Trump has a strong sense of loyalty, and that when his people come under fire, he pulls them closer. Trump appreciated Conway’s defending him after the Access Hollywood debacle; he knew she had given up a gold mine to work for him, telling Mike Pence, “She could have made eight figures and came with us instead.”
It may have been a breach for the Morning Joe duo to reveal private, off-air conversations. Scarborough didn’t know whether Kellyanne viewed it as a betrayal. But he recalled Conway subtly dissing Trump; now she was lecturing the press about its mistreatment of the president.
Conway issued a statement calling Brzezinski and Scarborough “virulent critics of the president and those close to him.” She noted that she had walked away from “millions of dollars” that she could have made in the private sector, and said it was “absurd” to suggest that she served the president merely because she needed a paycheck and not because she believed in him.
Joe Scarborough stuck by Mika’s story and jumped on Sean Spicer as well, saying “he went into the White House and shattered his reputation.” He also called Donald Trump, the president of the United States and his former friend, a “thug” and implied that he was mentally ill: “Donald Trump is not well. He is detached from the reality that most of us live day in and day out.”
The president matched his critics with inflammatory language. In over-the-top comments during a three-hour interview with Time, he called Chris Cuomo a “chained lunatic,” “like a boiler ready to explode, the level of hatred” (which the network called “beneath the dignity of the office”). Trump dismissed CNN’s Don Lemon as “perhaps the dumbest person in broadcasting.” As for Scarborough, “I don’t watch the show anymore, it drives him crazy.” Trump also hit back at Stephen Colbert, calling him a “no-talent” purveyor of “filthy” jokes.
Trump continued his press war online. He tweeted that since he was a very active president, “it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy! Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future ‘press briefings’ and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???” Trump insisted on Fox that the “level of hostility” toward Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders was “incredible,” and maybe he’d just hold a biweekly press conference instead.
Things really spiraled out of control with a New York Times report that at a dinner one week after the inauguration, Trump had asked Comey whether he would “pledge his loyalty to him,” with the director offering only his honesty. Trump denied the account, and posted this ominous tweet: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
The media went nuts. Tapes? As in Watergate? After a firing they were all likening to Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre?
Trump refused further comment. Spicer’s orders were to duck the question: “I’ve talked to the president. The president has nothing further to add on that.”
Trump might have been trolling the press, but he fueled a whole new wave of negative stories.
Trump never admitted that the Comey firing had been a mistake. But he told Bannon that “it’s gotten really hot,” that the media reaction to dumping Comey had been “terrible.” It was his way of acknowledging that he and others at the White House had greatly underestimated the fallout.
After missing two days of briefings while fulfilling his Naval Reserve duty, Sean Spicer returned to find the media filled with stories saying he was practically toast . Politico reported that Trump was pleased with Sarah Huckabee Sanders filling in at the podium and “has talked about grooming her” for Spicer’s job. The Washington Post said Trump had “lashed out at the communications office” for its lousy performance. In the mother of all palace intrigue stories, Axios said the president was considering a “huge reboot” that, according to unnamed “White House sources,” could knock out not just Spicer but Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon.
Spicer’
s White House colleagues felt sorry for him. A Melissa McCarthy skit on SNL had him begging Trump for his job. Sean Spicer had become a human punchline.
During Donald Trump’s long-shot campaign, the glib shorthand was that he would be a reality show president.
That, as it turned out, was more prescient than anyone had realized.
Trump’s insistence on responding to the media in real time, his extraordinary appetite for consuming media, and his use of social media and television outlets to slam detractors and drive his message has been unprecedented.
Every president is a product of his time, whether it was FDR and his fireside radio chats, Jack Kennedy’s televised news conferences, or Bill Clinton going on Larry King and MTV. And every president has had his battles with the Fourth Estate.
JFK canceled his subscription to the New York Herald Tribune. LBJ called CBS chief Frank Stanton after a report on a Marine using a Zippo lighter to set a Vietnamese hut on fire to say he had “shit on the American flag.” And Johnson challenged the loyalties of the Canadian-born correspondent, Morley Safer, saying, “How could CBS employ a communist like Safer?”
Richard Nixon put reporters on an enemies list, had some of them wiretapped, and threatened to “screw around” with the Washington Post’s TV licenses during Watergate. Ronald Reagan said he’d had it “up to my keister” with leaks to the press. George H. W. Bush, whose unofficial campaign motto was “Annoy the Media—Reelect Bush,” once called CBS to complain about an Evening News story while Dan Rather was on the air.
Bill Clinton complained that he had “not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it.” George W. Bush called a New York Times reporter a “major-league asshole.” Barack Obama—who said that “if I watched Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me either”—ran an administration that secretly obtained phone and email records from Fox’s James Rosen, as well as the Associated Press.
