Everything Trump Touches Dies

by Rick Wilson

  Like Trump, his enablers, and supporters, Cohen thought his position as an inner-circle member would protect him indefinitely. He believed, after so many years of getting away with every kind of shenanigan at Trump’s behest, that the facts would never matter, the music would never stop, and the party would never end. Again, he’s a perfect metaphor for this administration.

  A close friend of Trump’s—one you’ve seen mentioned as a part of his kitchen cabinet and who is a stalwart defender on cable news—once told me that Trump’s fixer had a special office in Trump Tower where he handled the legal infrastructure of Trump’s bimbo eruptions. A few days after Trump declared his candidacy for president, this friend said to me, “Cohen and that other guy [presumed by me to be attorney Marc Kasowitz] handle the NDAs, the abortions, the payments to all these girls.11 There’s so many of them I don’t know how people won’t find out about it.”

  People did find out. Our researchers in 2015 started working the rumor mill in New York, tracing down women who had been in Trump’s orbit. All of them were reticent because they feared both the terms of the NDAs they’d signed and Cohen personally.

  Cohen thinks of himself as Ray Donovan or Tom Hagen. He sold himself as a super-lobbyist with pay-for-play access to Trump, only to see it all collapse when the Southern District of New York and the FBI kicked down his office, home, and hotel room doors in a massive, simultaneous raid. Cohen suddenly seemed more terrified than terrifying. It was the beginning of a downward spiral for Cohen, who once saw himself as a titan, now reduced to nothing more than a suspect in a constellation of Mueller’s investigation, a target of Stormy Daniels’s bulldog attorney, Mark Avenatti, and the cause of so many of Trump’s emerging legal nightmares.

  ROGER STONE

  The ubiquitous Roger Stone had been exiled from the mainstream of national politics for a generation, kept on as a curiosity by a few suckers here and there. One of those suckers was Donald Trump. Stone’s long descent from Nixon campaign intern and bag-boy to Trump sycophant and beret-clad Infowars spinner of lunatic conspiracy theories is a cautionary tale for political consultants and explains much of Trump’s style, politics, and rise. Ask his Trump-era fans, and they’ll tell you Roger ran the Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and Trump campaigns, made every ad in political history, and is a singular genius in American politics. Not so much.

  In October 1999 I was working as a senior advisor to Mayor Rudy Giuliani. I visited my New York politics mentor Ray Harding, the great New York Liberal Party boss, at least once a month. He once said to me, “When they say the Liberal Party is neither liberal nor a party, they’re right. It is my personal fucking political machine.” He seemed to know everyone and everything in New York politics and skated very close (in the end, too close) to the ethical edge.

  Ray’s backstory is worthy of a book of its own; it involves escaping the Nazis as a child, being one of the only 1,000 Jews allowed into the U.S. by FDR during World War II, service in the U.S. Army, and a life in politics that was both colorful and corrupt. He was a mighty character.

  Our conversations were long, discursive, and educational as hell. One rainy afternoon, the subject of Roy Cohn came up, which led to Roger Stone. Stone is sui generis in American politics. He’s become a kind of Zeligesque political figure, appearing when he’s least desired and least expected. Like Trump, Roger is constantly burnishing his brand image, writing himself into history, where his role has been, at its very best, tangential.

  Ray looked across his desk from behind a cloud of unfiltered Camel smoke and said to me, “Roger parlayed one line of bullshit into a career. The only person who buys his bullshit is that moron Trump.”

  Ray had known of Roger from some Liberal Party briefcase-full-of-cash shenanigans in which Stone and his mentor Roy Cohn were involved and knew enough of Stone to call his bullshit. I knew of Roger, as everyone in my political generation did. He was always involved in something shady, but in the pre-Google era, it was hard to separate Stone’s personal PR from fact.

  Stone and Cohn shaped much of Trump’s political response behavior, training him never to apologize, always attack, and deploy a torrent of bullshit to cover for the mistakes, disasters, and calamities caused by his prior torrents of bullshit.

  Stone was exiled even by the Trump campaign, which must have rankled because the ax was dropped by Corey Lewandowski, a man without a scintilla of Stone’s political chops, real or imagined.12 After a few months of intemperate behavior, Lewandowski was himself fired, to be replaced by Stone’s old friend, former business partner, and longtime co-conspirator Paul Manafort as the chairman of the Donald Trump for President Campaign.13

  The installation of Manafort was one of the most consequential of the 2016 campaign. It demonstrates that Roger Stone isn’t a far-sighted strategist but a man driven mostly by tactical revenge. Manafort’s rise to power inside Trump World would open up ties to Russia, avenues of investigation, and provide a key witness in the Mueller probe to tear into Trump World like an industrial wood chipper.

  All so Roger Stone could get a rival fired.

  The architect of Trump’s victory, if only in his own spin, Stone’s infamy had a cost. In October 2017, Stone was banned from Twitter.14 By late 2016, he had been banned from every mainstream television network save Fox, and even there he appeared only in limited doses.

  On the outside of the campaign looking in, Stone raised around $600,000 for a SuperPAC, much of which seems to have gone back into Stone-affiliated firms, but his long-anticipated Powerball-level payday from 40 years of hustling for Trump never appeared. He lives now in a Trumpian demimonde of politics, his game tired, his points spent, and his influence with the White House minimal.

  Far from a triumph for Stone, the election of Trump has pushed Roger into a media ghetto from which even his formidable personal public relations skills will never extract him. His connections with the Russian GRU hacker Gruccifer and Julian Assange brought him under the eye of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. By the spring of 2018, Stone was running an online fundraising effort to pay his legal bills.

  Roger Stone touched Trump’s career almost from its beginnings and certainly shaped Trump’s political message, ideology (such as it is), and communications techniques. Stone was as close to Trump as anyone.

  It wouldn’t save him. Stone, a man who has chased the dragon of fame for fifty years in politics, was reduced to hawking conspiracy books, appearances at small local Republican Clubs, and seething about the Deep State with Alex Jones.

  STEPHEN MILLER

  The ideological zampolit of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller is brilliant, dangerous, and also needs to spend a week getting laid. My God, does it show. All that pent-up fury at Mexicans and Muslims is a bad look on anyone. One-time college besties with pudgy racist thought leader Richard Spencer, Miller is the thinking man’s racist on Team Trump.

  After Bannon’s unceremonious departure from the White House, Stephen Miller and his wing-harpy Julia Hahn (a former Bannon deputy) were two of the last of the white nationalists at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and Miller made the most of it. Like a French courtier, Miller was utterly obsequious toward Trump, utterly vicious with everyone else in sight. He was willing to go on national television—including one spectacularly raw outing in which Jake Tapper threw him off the set—and drill the Trump company line even in the face of reality. He made Kellyanne Conway look like a reasonable and truthful member of the Don Squad, which took some doing.

  We reached peak Miller during the shutdown frenzy over immigration in January 2018, as he singlehandedly destroyed a nascent compromise between Trump and Senate members. Miller, seeing a DACA deal in the offing that wasn’t sufficiently punitive, engineered the infamous “shithole” meeting, where Trump wrecked an agreement on immigration that led to the first, brief shutdown of 2018. Miller stacked the meeting, prepared the battlefield, and let Trump’s ego take it from there.

  In some ways Miller has always been more dangerous and more perni
cious than Bannon. Bannon’s constant autofellation, absurd desire to play the great man of history, and frustration with the boring realities of governance and policy, in the end, helped sink him as a White House power player. Stephen Miller has always been entirely conscious that the immigration fight is racial animus barely disguised as a policy question on who can and cannot come to America. Like Bannon before him, Miller also saw the utility of the immigration scare tactics—MS-13 is gunning for you! A brown wave of cantaloupe-calved drug smugglers is creeping up from Me-he-co!—as the glue holding together the alt-right, the social conservatives, and the blue-collar Rust Belt they-took-our-jobs Trump true believers.

  As the classic ideological scavenger inside the walls of government, Miller looks the part: the archetypal sneaky little crapweasel who plays the DC game to the hilt, pursuing his agendas instead of those that would be good for either his principal or the country. Watching Miller, I am haunted by how little humanity is behind those 32-year-old eyes.

  I can only imagine what Miller was like when he was at Duke with race-baiter and Nazi fanboy Richard Spencer. Can’t you see them in some dorm room bullshit session, smoking weed and working through their plans to depopulate the Rodina of anyone darker than a latte? That, and Spencer trying to find a girl to throw Miller some mercy sex so he could get the dead-eyed creeper out of his dorm room.

  KELLYANNE CONWAY

  In thirty years in politics, I’ve known Kellyanne Conway as “the girl pollster.” An alumna of Frank Luntz’s polling shop, she’d made it a practice area to help Republicans communicate with female voters. Not an unworthy pursuit, but she was never one of the go-to pollsters in the top tier of the business, which is why no one I knew in politics was surprised when she jumped on the Trump Train after working for Ted Cruz.

  Trump, being Trump, fell in love with how thoroughly she worked him and how she stroked his ego assiduously. She doesn’t have a job in the White House per se, but she’s always game for a TV hit requiring a combination of dishonesty, amorality, and cult-eyed tales of wonder at the healing power of Donald Trump’s abiding love.

  In the history of White House advisors, not one tops Kellyanne Conway in utter mendacity, though Stephen Miller often gives her a run for her money. A fairly indifferent pollster in her prior career, Conway’s complete lack of scruples was a perfect fit for the Trump campaign and his administration.

  Aggressively willing to lie, then to deny she lied, then to deny that she denied she lied about lying, Conway is routinely wheeled out to defend the usual panoply of indefensible acts, colossal errors, grand and petit corruptions, and the rest of Team Trump’s daily catalogue of disasters. She’s magnificent in turning a substantive interview into a Gordian knot of lies, evasions, misstatements, and distractions.

  She started early in the administration, uttering the now infamous defense of Trump’s inaugural numbers by saying that Sean Spicer had simply presented “alternative facts.” It should have been a warning to us all.

  Conway hit bottom in the fall of 2017 in her defense of kid-diddling Senate candidate Roy Moore. It took Kellyanne Conway—a woman whose soulless, serial lying has become the entirety of her personality—to grab the controls of the Trump plane and send it crashing to the ground faster than Roy Moore’s pants as he lurked under the bleachers at a high school cheerleading practice. In an appearance on Fox & Friends, which in the White House is must-see TV for President Trump, Conway argued for Dirty Roy, saying, “I’m telling you, we want the votes in the Senate to get this tax bill through.”

  Even the Fox News hosts had a moment of stunned silence, perhaps shocked that a senior counselor to the president of the United States was defending Alabama’s Uncle Creepy, perhaps hypnotized by the last tiny shred of Conway’s integrity being vaporized live on television in service to Steve Bannon’s hand-picked candidate.

  But there it was. Media outlets who continue to book Conway baffle me. The hosts, producers, and bookers know they’re going to stand under a torrential downpour of lies, evasions, prevarications, and eldritch spells seeking to open a dimensional portal and unleash Hell on our plane of reality each and every time she speaks, but they still have her on the air, over and over. It’s a peculiar form of masochism, but they keep booking her, and she keeps shredding their credibility for doing so.

  She is a woman without a real portfolio beyond a few token issues. Occasionally, when you hear a few words from Donald’s maw that don’t sound like his usual Trumpian vernacular, you can detect Conway’s words, trying desperately to tune Trump’s voice into something with dignity and stature. Conway’s all-in bet on Trump is the defining moment of her career, but she should know that no matter what she does, no one escapes the Trump curse.

  SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS

  Sean Spicer represented one of the Trump administration’s few ties to the traditional Washington media relations model. The role of being Trump’s press secretary was always going to be fraught with problems. Having a boss with a yawning, ravenous chasm of ego, a lifetime in television roleplaying, poor impulse control, and an itchy Twitter finger make it the Russian roulette of communications jobs. Having one of the world’s most notorious liars as a boss was just the icing on the cake.

  Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s improbable rise was a consequence of Spicer’s rapid death from ETTD, the first symptoms of which were evident almost before the first week of the administration ended. Hounded out of the White House for failing to sufficiently immolate himself in increasingly elaborate lies about the wonder, majesty, and accomplishments of Donald Trump, Spicer had burned his bridges with the DC press corps and lost the confidence of the president. He is an early cautionary tale of the professional costs of working for President Trump.

  His departure cleared the path for the daughter of noted blowhard and gravy aficionado Mike Huckabee to stand herself behind the podium in the James Brady Press Room in the White House and open the floodgates on a torrent of lies, bullshit, prevarications, and laughably bad excuses for the inexcusable man in the Oval Office. Somewhere, deep in her soul, I imagine she feels a twinge from time to time about the role she’s playing, but the powerful magic of the White House apparently gave her a pass on the whole truth thing.

  It’s not an easy ride.

  Sanders went through one humiliation after another. When Anthony Scaramucci’s brief tenure as White House communications director kicked off, one of the first things he did was humiliate her from the Press Room podium, saying, “Sarah, if you’re watching, I loved the hair and makeup person we had on Friday. . . . So I’d like to continue to use the hair and makeup person.”15

  Scaramucci’s desire to glam up Sanders played to Trump’s love of the reality-TV aspects of the job, and Sanders was apparently a little too down-market for his tastes. Katie Price, Scaramucci’s stylist pick to gussy up Sanders, was his only real White House hire during his all-too-brief tenure. Scaramucci’s obsession with Sanders’s looks missed the mark. She became one of the least respected White House press secretaries in modern memory because she’s a tendentious defender of a terrible president, and Scaramucci’s glam squad was never going to fix that problem.

  Press secretaries have always engaged in media pushback, ranging from humorous to tendentious, but Sanders took it deep into the fake news jungle in an unwavering defense of Trump that flew in the face of facts, logic, decency, and evidence.

  Her greatest hits left the press corps reeling, first with anger, then with derision. When Sanders said, “I don’t think it’s appropriate to lie from the podium or any other place; my job is to communicate the President’s agenda,” my Recursive Horseshit Meter pegged at 100%.16 Aside from the few procedural notes that are demonstrably true, “It is Christmas,” and “The president flies to Mar-a-Lago this afternoon,” Sanders has been one of the least credible and least persuasive White House mouthpieces in memory.

  She doesn’t even lie well.

  When it came to the Russia investigation, Sanders stepped in it tim
e and again. Her claim that Trump’s decision to fire FBI director Jim Comey after the White House heard from “countless” members of the FBI that they had lost confidence in Comey led even the normally stoic deputy director Andrew McCabe to respond during a Senate hearing, “We are a large organization, we are 36,500 people across this country, across this globe. We have a diversity of opinions about many things, but I can confidently tell you that the majority, the vast majority, of FBI employees enjoyed a deep and positive connection to Director Comey.”17

  When she claimed that Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto had called Trump to praise his immigration policies, it was as if she believed no one in Washington had access to a phone or the internet. No such call had taken place, as the Mexican president soon confirmed. Sanders’s response was true to her current form: “I wouldn’t say it was a lie. That’s a bold accusation.” No, Sarah. It was a lie.

  SEBASTIAN GORKA

  Imagine for a moment a ludicrous, Bond-knockoff, straight-to-cable movie villain, status anxiety screaming out of every pore. Imagine a cloud of Drakkar Noir surrounding him dense enough to cause nearby victims to believe they’re in the midst of a WMD attack. Imagine attending an Inaugural Ball wearing a black tunic getup that looks like something an old-school Star Trek villain might sport. Imagine driving a black Mustang with ART WAR vanity tags.

  I know, ladies, try to keep your clothes on, because we’re talking the pinnacle of Trump World machismo: Herr Doktor Sebastian Gorka, the Dragon of Budapest, scourge of the savage Mahometan horde, 4-cylinder Mustang driver. If we didn’t have a Sebastian Gorka, we’d have to invent him. His outrageous, blustering affect, his Anglo-Eurotrash acccccent, his endless, protests-too-much masculine posturing, and his edge-case policy views are a perfect example of how Trump attracted the misfit toys.