by Howard Kurtz
There was no getting around the reality of what Donald Trump Jr. had acknowledged. This wasn’t a case of runaway media bias. Had Trump’s people disclosed all these Russian contacts months earlier and taken their lumps, they would not have fueled the media narrative of a conspiratorial cover-up.
And the disclosures continued, despite Don Jr.’s insistence to Hannity that he had revealed “everything” about the episode. NBC reported that there was another person in the meeting, a former Soviet military counterintelligence officer named Rinat Akhmetshin, who had been accused in a civil lawsuit of hacking into a company’s computer system. Akhmetshin was a naturalized American citizen and now worked as a lobbyist. He gave a strikingly different account of the meeting, saying that Veselnitskaya had actually handed over documents purporting to show improper contributions to the DNC. The picture remained murky.
On an Air Force One flight to Paris for a Bastille Day visit, Trump wandered back to the press cabin and spent ninety minutes chatting with reporters. The session was off the record, so Trump held forth on how he had pressed Putin on Russian hacking but had moved onto other subjects to avoid “a fistfight.” He called Don Jr. a “good boy,” said “nothing happened” in the meeting and that “honestly, in a world of politics, most people are going to take that meeting.”
Trump, as always, actually enjoyed chatting with journalists, assumed he could win them over, and wanted their approval. The president was disappointed that his remarks weren’t reported, and asked Sarah Huckabee Sanders to tell the press corps that key parts had been put on the record. Trump even wanted to hold more press conferences, but Steve Bannon talked him out of it, saying the sessions would be dominated by questions about Russia. Trump came round to Bannon’s point of view: “I’m beginning to believe more and more what you said. I understand what you meant,” he said, about the media being “the opposition party.”
Newt Gingrich was so concerned about the stalled Trump agenda that he decided to send the president a confidential memo.
It was titled “Breaking Out of the Gridlock,” and noted that Ronald Reagan had survived the Iran-contra scandal and Bill Clinton had survived the impeachment drive led by the former speaker himself.
The key section was headlined “Communications Strategy in the Middle of Distraction.”
“We are being sucked into stupid fights about stupid attacks and being distracted from arousing and organizing the American people on big topics that will change history,” Gingrich wrote. He detailed a four-month campaign focused on jobs, higher wages, and economic growth, designed to get around the obstacle that “congressional Republicans can’t do anything quickly.” This PR campaign, said Newt, would “shrink the media attacks into irrelevancy.”
Anthony Scaramucci was equally frustrated, telling Jared Kushner that Trump had the worst White House communications team since the advent of television. Sean Spicer had been put in a nowhere zone, he told Kushner, and should either get his briefings back on TV or be fired.
Trump called Corey Lewandowski, Dave Bossie, and Scaramucci to thank them for defending him. “You’re great on the shows,” he said. But he was angry that his best spokesmen had to book themselves and weren’t being pushed by his own press office. “I’ve got to fix the comms department,” Trump said.
Steve Bannon wanted to create a war room to coordinate legal and political strategy, and tracked down Lanny Davis, the Clinton White House lawyer who handled scandal questions, defended his boss on television, and insulated Clinton’s press secretary Mike McCurry from the bad stuff.
Davis gave Bannon a prescient warning: “You’ve got to remember you need one thing—the discipline to execute the plan.” If it were up to Bannon, they would start by abolishing White House press briefings altogether.
President Trump’s detractors on the left were now in a rage, casting any assessment of him as a character test.
“Is Donald Trump Simply the Worst Human Being We Can Imagine?” Salon asked. The answer: “Not only did Trump quickly become the worst president ever, he may just be the most hated person alive.”
In a remarkable burst of candor, liberal essayist Thomas Frank admitted in the Guardian that “the people of the respectable East Coast press loathe the president with an amazing unanimity.” They had “overwhelming contempt for Dumb Donald,” and were determined to “outwit the simple-minded billionaire,” simply because “so many of them are part of the same class—an exalted and privileged class.”
Anti-Trump conservatives, many of them neo-conservatives or Bush loyalists, were part of that class too, members of the political elite, and some declared it their duty to break with the Republican president. Joe Scarborough announced, on Colbert’s show, that he was quitting the GOP, then wrote a Washington Post column titled “Trump Is Killing the Republican Party.” He ripped party leaders for remaining silent when, in his view, Trump “echoed Stalin and Mao by calling the free press ‘the enemy of the people.’”
Michael Gerson, the former Bush White House staffer, titled his Washington Post column “An Administration Without a Conscience.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page scolded that Trump “somehow seems to believe that his outsize personality and social-media following make him larger than the presidency” and that a failure to come clean on the Russia probe meant the Washington establishment would “destroy Mr. Trump, his family and their business reputation.”
Fox’s Charles Krauthammer said that “it’s rather pathetic to hear Trump apologists protesting” that Don Jr.’s meeting with the Russians was “no big deal.…Have the Trumpites not been telling us for six months that no collusion ever happened? And now they say: Sure it happened. So what? Everyone does it. What’s left of your credibility when you make such a casual about-face?”
A red line had been crossed. The Russian meeting was not just a mistake, an embarrassment, or a breach of faith. It was, in this view, the final proof that Donald Trump and his family could never be trusted.
But whether the media could be trusted, after overdramatizing so many previous incidents, remained an open question.
The collapse of the health care effort on the night of July 17 was rightly portrayed by the media as a major failure. The president himself had warned Republican lawmakers at a private dinner that they would look like “dopes” and “weak” if they failed to pass a bill. But there was little doubt that the tone of the mainstream media bordered on celebratory.
Had the press been sympathetic to the bill, or sympathetic to Trump’s desire for a moderate compromise, there would have been lots of hand-wringing about gridlock choking off progress. Instead, the stories conveyed relief that millions would be able to keep their insurance, melded to a sense of vindication over Trump’s failure to master Washington’s ways.
The Twitter traffic was revealing. CNBC’s John Harwood tweeted that the “demise of GOP health bill is about substance, not Trump’s weak standing. No evidence that he’s a played a big role, knows or cares what’s in it.” What’s more, he said, Trump’s “BS has collided with reality.”
Glenn Thrush of the New York Times said that “no one’s scared of Trump,” and he reposted the president’s February tweet that he would immediately repeal and replace Obamacare and “nobody can do that like me.” He added this schoolyard taunt: “If nobody can do it like you how come you haven’t done it already?”
New York Times columnist David Leonhardt, a former Washington bureau chief, wrote that Trump won the presidency “despite a constant stream of falsehoods” and his loss on health care “demonstrated that facts still matter and that truth has some inherent advantages over falsehood.”
And Trump critic Rich Lowry said in National Review that the debacle was “a lesson in the wages of political bad faith.”
The president tried a new fallback position, that Republicans should just repeal Obamacare immediately—as they had voted to do many times when Obama was president—and work out a replacement program later. But everyone knew McConnel
l could not get enough votes for that approach. Trump told reporters that, if necessary, “we’ll just let Obamacare fail,” and “I’m not going to own it”—as if the media wouldn’t blame him for any disaster in the health insurance market.
If the failure to repeal Obamacare wasn’t enough, the press found another reason to attack Trump—Russia, again.
The Washington Post reported that Trump had held a second, undisclosed meeting with Putin at the G20 conference in Europe. MSNBC treated this as a nefarious secret rather than routine private diplomacy. There were shouts of “Oh my God!” in Rachel Maddow’s office as the news hit. Trump called the story “sick”—Spicer said there had just been small talk—and the encounter seemed less diabolical considering that it took place at a formal dinner in full view of eighteen other world leaders and their spouses.
The press tried switching from Russia to Iran.
The New York Times reported that while the president had recertified that Iran was complying with its nuclear agreement, it was “only after hours of arguing with his top national security advisers.” Trump had repeatedly vowed during the campaign to tear up Barack Obama’s deal. But the clear implication was that the ignorant candidate had been tutored in geopolitical realities by his advisers.
If the press wanted to push an image of Trump as an ill-informed loudmouth, he only added to his woes by proclaiming, “We’ve signed more bills—and I’m talking about through the legislature—than any president, ever.” This led to a front-page Times takedown on how he trailed many modern presidents, and that about half his bills were minor and inconsequential. Trump’s only caveat was that “I better say ‘think’” or the fact-checkers “will give you a Pinocchio.”
Lost amid the noise was the administration’s latest theme week, touting products “Made in America.” The Washington Post had already preempted the launch with a lengthy investigative piece on “Ivanka Inc.,” saying many of her branded products were made overseas.
For the press, no Trumpian subject was too personal. Politico even asked, “Is the President Fit?” But it turned out not to be about his capacity to do the job. Instead, said Politico, “No occupant of the Oval Office has evinced less interest in his own health.” Virtually nothing about this president, including his diet and exercise habits, was immune from media criticism.
Trump sat down with Maggie Haberman and two of her New York Times colleagues and was about to go off script yet again. With Hope Hicks as his only staffer in the room, he unloaded on Jeff Sessions.
“Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself, which frankly I think is very unfair to the president,” he told the reporters. “How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I’m not going to take you.’” Trump spoke off the record, but when the interview was over, he agreed, as he often did, that most of it could be published.
Now, there it was, in his own words: he wished he hadn’t hired his attorney general. Trump had also said it would be a “violation” for Robert Mueller to look at his personal finances on anything that was unrelated to Russia.
Steve Bannon thought that with that comment, Trump had put a big red flashing light on his business dealings. Why would Trump do that with a New York Times group that included Michael Schmidt, an investigative reporter who often got leaks from law-enforcement?
Bannon never underestimated Trump, and thought the move might be intentional. Perhaps Trump was laying the groundwork to fire Mueller if the investigator overstepped his bounds. The media, of course, went ballistic, accusing Trump of not grasping that it was not the attorney general’s job to shield him from an investigation. The Post alleged that Trump was exploring whether he could pardon his aides, his family members, even himself. Trump lashed out at the “Amazon Washington Post”—owned by Jeff Bezos—for “illegal leaks.” Trump’s top aides faced a dilemma: the only way to keep the president from making headlines with his provocative comments was to keep him off Twitter and away from the media. And that, they realized, was beyond their power.
CHAPTER 23
THE MOOCH’S MOMENT
Sean Spicer had heard the rumors, but it was not until the morning of July 21 that they became a reality.
Trump called Spicer into his office. The president had decided to tap Anthony Scaramucci as communications director, and Spicer would report to Scaramucci. Sean angrily told the president that this was a bad mistake.
Trump asked Spicer to stay on, but he refused. After six months of intense pressure, he had had enough. Trump at least could have consulted him about changing his role, rather than keeping his courtship of the Mooch a secret from him and from Reince Priebus. Working for a businessman with no PR background would be a final humiliation.
Spicer agreed to stay for a transition period before Sarah Huckabee Sanders replaced him at the podium. He felt a palpable sense of relief at the prospect of leaving the building.
Sean Spicer had become a household name. His daily briefings drew high ratings, and late night comedians mocked him, and sometimes the press did as well. As the cable channels went into breaking-news mode over the announcement, the New York Times editorial page adopted a juvenile, na-na-na-na-hey-hey-goodbye tone, bidding farewell to “our four-Pinocchio press secretary.”
Though Bannon and Priebus had gotten Scaramucci a sinecure at the Export-Import Bank—administration lawyers had earlier blocked a White House job because of his business entanglements—they told Trump it would be a mistake to put him in charge of communications. “He’s coming in to support Jared,” Bannon told the president. He argued that they needed someone with communications experience. “No, I think he can do it,” Trump said.
Bannon also thought Jared and the president were dreaming if they thought Spicer would stay on under these circumstances.
Earlier it had been Trump who had repeatedly resisted hiring Scaramucci. “He was never with me,” Trump said, recalling how Scaramucci had criticized him early in the campaign and had supported Scott Walker, and Jeb Bush. “He’s a self-promoter.”
But Trump changed his mind on Scaramucci after watching him do battle with CNN.
Bannon told Scaramucci: “Dude, this is a pressure cooker. You have no skills.” And while shaking his hand after the appointment, Bannon made a prediction: “Mooch, this is going to be a disaster.”
The Mooch made his debut in the briefing room, repeatedly proclaiming his love for Trump and praising his “karma.” He was naturally effusive in front of the cameras, using humor to deflect Jonathan Karl’s question about how he had called Trump a “hack politician” back when he was working for Scott Walker’s campaign. “He brings it up every 15 seconds, okay?” Scaramucci cracked. Since his past tweets had praised Hillary Clinton and embraced everything from gun control to gay marriage, the White House put him on a radio show at Breitbart to let him rehabilitate himself.
The larger problem was Russia. Bannon himself was staying out of 80 percent of White House meetings to avoid being sucked into that maw. He was bemused by Politico writing about “Steve Bannon’s Disappearing Act,” saying he was in “self-imposed exile,” which Bannon took as a sign that his strategy was working. He didn’t understand why Kellyanne Conway was answering Russia questions in TV interviews rather than referring everything to the lawyers.
When Scaramucci told him that the communications team wasn’t doing enough to protect Kushner, Steve stiffened. It was not the job of the press shop to defend the president’s son-in-law. “If you bring that shit in here, we’re enemies,” Bannon told him. “You can’t be Jared’s spokesman.” The Russia questions, he felt, could not be allowed to pollute the daily briefing.
Bannon was right to be concerned. Scaramucci told Jake Tapper that an unnamed person had assured him that if the Russians were responsible for the campaign hacking, they were so deceptive that no one would ever find out. The CNN anchor said that was hard to accept from an anonymous s
ource.
Scaramucci admitted that, well, it was Trump, calling him from Air Force One to say, “Maybe they did it—maybe they didn’t do it.” It was a very awkward moment.
Jared Kushner shed his camera shyness when it mattered most.
Faced with the inevitability of leaks after his closed-door Senate testimony about Russia, Kushner put out his eleven-page testimony before sunrise. By six a.m. the major news outlets were quoting him as saying “I did not collude,” a preemptive strike that set the day’s media narrative. He provided key details: after being pulled into the Don Jr. meeting with the Russians, he emailed his assistant to call his cell so he’d have an excuse to bail out.
Kushner, knowing he had to feed the media beast, went to the White House driveway after his testimony and read a short version of the statement, which television played in an endless loop.
Kushner felt the press had been killing him for three months, accusing him of treason. His preference had been to avoid the media, and he was stunned when the networks canceled scheduled interviews with his surrogate spokesmen. At last, Ivanka felt, he was excited to be able to tell his side of the story. She knew that her husband never felt the need to defend himself from allegations and anonymous sources, but in politics, sometimes you had no choice.
It was Jared’s father-in-law, however, who dominated the news. The president went on a Twitter rant against his own attorney general—calling Jeff Sessions “beleaguered” and “VERY weak” on Hillary Clinton’s “crimes.”
Trump confided to friends that he was so angry at Sessions that he couldn’t even look at him. Rupert Murdoch, among others, urged Trump to stop the Twitter assault, because he was just hurting himself. Trump said he would tone it down, but he had already created a media spectacle by attacking Sessions and urging a criminal investigation of Hillary. The press speculated that Trump wanted to dump Sessions as a first step toward firing Bob Mueller. Sarah Sanders, who had invited cameras back into all the press briefings, stayed on message and called the Russia probe “a complete hoax.”
