by Rick Wilson
It was classic Roger Stone ratfuckery, playing to Trump’s paranoia, his hatred of Joe Scarborough, and his monstrous vanity. Stone worked to protect his alt-right ally Bannon while also working to burn Kushner, whom he blames in part for his diminished access to and influence over the president.
The one moment I loved about Kushner was when he shanked Chris Christie for a role in the administration. Christie, who served as Trump’s errand boy and bottom bitch in the campaign, was desperate to serve as attorney general of the United States. Kushner slipped the daggers in over and over, slowly bleeding Governor Shinebox out.
By the end of the first year, Jared and Ivanka were, in the words of Vanity Fair, in a world of shit.10 Failures in their official capacity, both Jared and Ivanka continued to play their roles, but as the Mueller probe continued to rise in intensity, Jared was under monstrous financial pressure from his investment in 666 Fifth Avenue, which by then was teetering on insolvency.
Kushner had flailed for cash to keep the deal alive, and by 2018 the pressure was almost unimaginable. He may have believed the White House position would lead foreign investors to send money flooding his way, but 666 Fifth was a curse he couldn’t shake.11
When John Kelly came on board as White House chief of staff, he immediately recognized Jared as a type he’d seen in his military service: the rich kid from a powerful family in way over his head. Kelly was quick to limit the scope of Kushner’s portfolio, and Jared seemed to largely fade from view until he and Ivanka made a play to oust Kelly over the Rob Porter matter.12 This Night of the Long Sporks move flopped, and though Kelly is not the savior most hoped he might become, he had enough juice to survive their last big attack.
As the writing process of this book comes to a close, Jared and Ivanka have had their wings clipped firmly by John Kelly. While Kelly’s lost power, he tried to take them down with him during the bloody White House purges in which Trump went rogue and decided he didn’t need professional guidance, management, or counsel.
As with everyone who joins the Trump administration, Jared and Ivanka came with an agenda of their own, plans to execute it, and almost none of the skills needed to pull off the caper. In the end, nowhere was safe. Even Vogue turned on Ivanka, a cut that sent a signal that any hopes of returning to Manhattan social life or her former business of selling shoes and costume jewelry might not go smoothly.13
UDAY AND QUSAY
Don Jr. and Eric prove the fruit falls very close to the tree in the Trump family. Hair slicked back as if they were 1980s cosplayers, spread-collar shirts, and the entire gold-leaf-and-pinky-ring Trump affects scream that these scions of privilege most likely won’t ever display even a hint of noblesse oblige, taste, or dignity. Like copies of a copy of a copy, Eric and Don Jr. now run Trump’s business empire, though not very well. Oddly enough, outside of the narrow audience of Washington lobbyists using his hotel and his country clubs to gain access to the president, the Trump brand has turned to shit. Partners are pulling out of deals, removing the gold Trump logo from buildings, and adopting a “Donald who?” attitude.
If at the end of this Eric and Don Jr. aren’t holed up in a wrecked house, surrounded by U.S. troops, I’ll be shocked. The Uday and Qusay of the Trump clan combine their father’s skeezy pomposity with an air of je ne sais dumbass that won’t quit.
Donald Trump Jr.’s Comedy of Traitors
The most infamous moment in Don Jr.’s role in the campaign was a carefully guarded secret until brought to light by the Mueller probe.
It turned out that the campaign that had absolutely no business with, contact from, knowledge of, or even the vaguest connection to Russia had held meetings with representatives of the Russian government, and Don Jr.’s handling of the news dragged his father and the administration deep into the weeds of obstruction of justice. Team Trump doesn’t comprise the most gifted liars in the business, even if they are some of the most persistent.
The statement written by the president and Hope Hicks on Air Force One to provide the meeting with a cover story was laughable and reflected just how little the Trump team understands that bullshitting through a Manhattan real estate deal is vastly different from trying to bullshit Robert Mueller.
Even Steve Bannon knew this was a disaster for the president. He is recounted in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury as saying that Mueller would “crack Don Jr. like an egg.”14
Don Jr. also enjoys a special place in the game of alt-right footsie the Trumps seem to love. You can count on him to retweet the bottom-feeders of the MAGA pool. On Gab, the alt-right’s home after their inevitable Twitter bans hit, Don Jr. is a hero. He’s also a frequent retweeter of Trump-friendly edge-case sites like the Gateway Pundit.
A friend once observed, “Don Jr. is truly an asshole’s asshole. If there were an Asshole Aficionado magazine, he would be the cover boy.”
MELANIA
I have a scintilla of sympathy for Melania. It’s barely detectable even with the most sophisticated scientific instruments, but it’s there. Occasionally. She’s gorgeous, in that perfectly polished, price-is-no-object Manhattan way. Her Botox froideur is magnificent. Stylish in the way only a former almost-supermodel trophy wife married to an air-quotes billionaire accidental president can be, Melania is a mystery in the heart of Trump World.
In the story of Trump, Melania proves the ETTD theory in spades; you can see how dead her soul is with every appearance. Every moment looks like a hostage video, her tense, dark eyes looking for a break in the security cordon, damn the prenup.
Obviously miserable even before her role as a prisoner in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, stories in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury and elsewhere reported her shock and dismay at Trump’s victory. Her real role in Trump’s world, like owning a private jet or a personally branded golf course, is to signify Trump’s virility to the little people, “I have obtained the unobtainable Hot. Banged the unbangable.”
While trapped in Trump Tower, she at least still had a little freedom to slip outside the gravity well of The Donald. After all, he was busily banging a constellation of adult-film stars, Playboy models, and other victims of his pussy-grabbing charm.
Once in the White House, her caged-bird situation was obviously, visibly painful. She is equipped with a magnificent resting bitch face in good times and bad, and her smile collapsing into a poker face whenever he turns away from her at White House events is the political equivalent of a fake orgasm, a performance for an audience of one, hoping to rush things along so she can get back to her Peloton.
When news that Trump had engaged in an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels—Who are we kidding with the anodyne term “affair”? He fucked her, and she spanked him with a Forbes magazine—the trouble in Slovenian trophy bride paradise was evident. Melania mysteriously dropped out of a trip to Davos shortly after the news broke, and the Trumps’ anniversary photograph in 2017 looks like it should have been attached to a list of ISIS hostage demands.
For all my dislike of Trump, Melania seems like the kind of girl who needs a few tequila shots in a bar where no one knows her, the music is loud, and no one pronounces the letter “h” as the letter “y.” That prenup must be a monster.
The following transcript was provided by Wikileaks in the Fall of 2024.
* * *
– INTERCEPT 3 –
TOP SECRET//SI//ORCON//NOFORN
[BEGIN TRANSCRIPT]
[CALL BEGINS]
OPERATOR: Please hold for the president.
BANNON: Go for the B-Man.
TRUMP: Steve-O!
BANNON: Big T! Making America great?
TRUMP: Always, my man. I was calling to thank you for that book. It was really good.
(Analyst note: Human-source intel indicates the book Trump refers to is Authoritarian Nationalism—An Illustrated Pop-Up Guide to Destroying Democracy)
BANNON: Cool. I’m sending you my new Evola for Kids coloring book this week.
TRUMP: Thanks, Steve. Hey, have you talked to
Gorka lately?
BANNON: Yeah, saw him last week at Scores. Usual table in the Champagne Room. It was me, Gorka, Stephen Miller, and Pence. We missed you.
TRUMP: Wait . . . PENCE?
BANNON: (laughs) I’m fucking with you. There’s one weird thing about that night, though. You know that dancer I like? Destinee Raynebow? She was giving Miller a lap dance and they went back to a private booth. Now she’s gone missing. Weird.
TRUMP: You know how he gets . . . (wistful) I miss being able to tear it up.
BANNON: Pussy. You should come out. Who’s gonna stop you? That globalist cuck Kelly? I don’t think so.
TRUMP: Nah, you know. Her.
BANNON: Melania?
TRUMP: Worse.
BANNON: The Hucklebeast?
TRUMP: Worse. Kellyanne. Shit. That’s her now. Gotta go.
[CALL TERMINATED]
12
* * *
TEAM CRONY
FROM THE MOMENT HE WAS elected, Trump was surrounded by Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street alumni who behaved just as they always do: with weapons-grade venality, an abiding love of crony capitalism, and Master of the Dick Universe affects.
They were there for the tax bill. Only the tax bill. Nothing else ever mattered to any of them.
From the tone-deaf, determinedly out-of-touch treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin and his wife, sometime actress and LARPing supervillainess Louise Linton, to Wilbur Ross and Gary Cohn, Team Crony was in the White House to make the market happy, to ensure the Goldman Guys were at the helm no matter what kind of yahooism Bannon was cooking up in his laboratory in the White House basement. One by one, these men fell by the wayside as Trump’s trade-war fetishism, economic ignorance, and rampant corruption became the central features of the administration’s economic posture.
Trump’s administration also has been a hotbed of remarkably obvious pay-to-play and crony capitalist game-playing. How obvious? Think 1970s Times Square hooker on the corner obvious. Think, finding your wife in bed with her personal trainer obvious. You’d have to be spectacularly indifferent to reality to not observe the endemic corruption in this White House. From the petty rip-off artistry of Trump’s DC hotel to the big policy changes and executive orders, it was clear from the start that Trump had the “For Sale” sign out.
THE TAX BILL AND ITS DISCONTENTS
I’m a Republican with broad libertarian leanings. I think taxes are a necessary evil, and so as a general rule I like things that reduce the burden borne by American citizens to feed a largely ravenous and wasteful federal government. Yes, yes, I know. Starving orphans, fragile grannies poised on the edge of the cliff, etc.
The 2017 tax bill, though, was a whole different creature. Surprisingly slanted to—wait for it if you can’t guess ahead of time—Wall Street hedge funds, the banking industry, real estate developers, and the very peak of the economic pyramid, the tax bill was a whale of a payday for the sectors of the economy that already receive a pretty consistent dollop of federal largesse when they periodically crash the economy.
Republicans are supposed to love tax cuts, right? They’re universally good, central to a booming economy, and should finally, at long last, provide relief for struggling middle-class families in the forgotten heartla—
Oh. Sorry. I fell asleep there, recounting the same phony line we repeated for a generation on taxes. The reality of the Trump-Ryan tax cut is that it is a spectacular, budget-busting payday for Wall Street. Full stop. It provided rounding-error benefits for Middle America, and even those benefits sunset in a few years. The corporate tax rate was permanently dropped to 21%. Sounds great, right?
The tax bill knocked a $1.5 trillion-with-a-t hole in the federal budget. No amount of supply-side mojo is going to bring that into alignment with fiscal reality. The stock market had already priced the tax cut into its already spectacular rise. We can debate the political effort to market “Trump bonuses” as a third-order effect of the tax bill, but the rounding-error-level increases in paychecks are a drop in the fiscal bucket for most Americans, particularly in an era when inflationary pressures in health care, college tuition, energy, and other sectors are squeezing people even in a good economy.
For all of my party’s yammering about the evils of wealth redistribution, we’ve done a spectacular job of it with this tax bill; the corporate benefits are forever, but the Tax Policy Center predicts that just ten years from now Americans making under $100,000 a year will pay much more in taxes given the provisions of the Trump tax bill.
Wall Street, the unofficial home of American state capitalism, was protected not only from their own cupidity and errors by taxpayer-funded bailouts but now is rewarded with a suite of tax benefits that would be risible in other circumstances. You know, after a decade of quantitative easing (that’s “free money” to us rubes in the hinterlands) and record growth, Wall Street bankers, investment houses, and hedge fund bros were just suffering terribly. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune included having to decide between the G650 and the Falcon jet or what color Lambo to choose at bonus time.
The saddest, dumbest part of this tax bill isn’t that it stinks to high heaven of Trump-era fiscal indiscipline. It isn’t that it’s a budget-buster. It’s that the GOP convinced itself that, like Trump, they could play the “Fake it till you make it” game and genuinely believed two things that show how badly out of whack their political GPS is. First, they bought into the idea that voters would be robustly cheering the tax bill’s impacts come Election Day 2018. Second, in their panic to pass something—anything!—in 2017, they bought the donor-sector political pressure hook, line, and special-interest sinker.
The bill does nothing to reduce the complexity, expense, opacity, and general brain-frying shittiness of the tax code for ordinary Americans. So much for our “Do your taxes on a postcard!” rhetoric. The tax code, baroque and ludicrously convoluted before, is now even more baffling unless you can afford a fleet of corporate tax attorneys and consultants.
A prominent tax lobbyist I know wrote, “This is almost too easy. Even I feel dirty.” This person literally sat in the majority leader’s office crafting parts of the tax bill, laughing all the way to the bank. The members of the House and Senate who voted for this 479-page bill had only a few hours to consider it. I asked this lobbyist at the time what the job-creation effect would be from the corporate tax cut, and he replied, “How the fuck do I know? Something? Maybe?” This wasn’t just lobbyist shit-talking. His goal, for which he was richly compensated, was to ensure a set of his corporate clients could use the tax cut to buy back their stock.
If you think I sound like a Democrat, you’re mistaken. I sound like a fiscal conservative who believes in a tax system that is broad and simple and treats every American equally. That’s certainly not what we got in this mess.
WINNERS AND LOSERS, COAL EDITION
In Washington lore, payoffs are subtle, suitably laundered, discreetly referred to through a veil of elliptical terms and subtle glances. “I took care of that thing with the guy we spoke about. By the way, how’s that other thing in Appropriations going?” is the kind of formulation all too familiar to Washington denizens.
When it comes to Trump, subtle isn’t in the mix, and one of the most obvious, egregious examples of the new era of pay-to-play crony capitalism is related to the coal industry.
Coal mining’s employment heyday was in the 1920s, when 785,000 Americans worked in the industry. The number stands at just under 50,000 today. The coal industry, though, has continued to be a dirty, destructive, and profitable business. The heroic image of the coal miner is part of the Appalachian iconography of working-class West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. Those workers, though, have increasingly been swept aside by market forces—the declining price of natural gas, primarily—and by the declining cost of renewables. Those miners have also been replaced by machines and by the practice of mountaintop-removal mining. If you’re wondering if it’s an environmental nightmare, it
is.
With the election of Donald Trump, the coal industry had a friend in the White House. As much as Bannon and Trump loved the image of the gritty, salt-of-the-earth workin’ man that coal miners represent, it didn’t hurt the cause of coal that coal company CEOs were stroking checks faster than you can say “black lung.”
When Trump signed his executive order reversing the Obama era’s restrictions on coal, one of the coal executives flanking him was Joseph Craft of Alliance Resource Partners, one of the nation’s largest coal mining conglomerates.
Just after Trump’s election, Craft donated a cool $1 million to the Inaugural Committee, so his presence there was no accident.1 As a bonus, Trump nominated Craft’s wife, Kelly Knight Craft, to be our ambassador to Canada, or as Trump calls it, “Snow Mexico.”
Another winner in the Coal Crony Capitalism Olympics is Robert Murray. Murray plays the role of comic-opera coal baron to the hilt: rotund, blustery, and ready to bellow out marching orders to the Trump administration. His $1 million donations to the Trump America First PAC and $300,000 to the Trump Inaugural Committee opened doors as wide as he opened his wallet.
Murray wasn’t subtle in his ask; he presented the administration with a five-page memo that reads like an environmental villain’s wish list.2 Most of the changes Murray sought from the Trump White House were directly about protecting and expanding Murray Energy’s bottom line. For the bargain price of $1.3 million, Murray wanted a few minor tweaks: withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord, cut the Environmental Protection Agency by 50%, and shrink the Mine Safety Administration down to a size where its inspectors could fit around a six-person booth at Denny’s. Did I mention he also wanted to do away with a host of other pollution control and worker-safety regulations, and virtually anything else that made coal mining cleaner or safer?
