Early the morning of Friday, July 28, Trump’s promise to repeal and replace Obamacare had failed in Congress. Trump blamed Priebus. He was supposed to know the Hill and have close relationships with the Republican leaders. No matter how Priebus tried to explain, Trump would not buy it. “You didn’t get it done.”
That day, Trump flew to Long Island to give a speech. Priebus accompanied him. They had a talk in the private cabin at the front of Air Force One.
Priebus had submitted his resignation the night before. He was fed up and knew he had lost his usefulness to Trump.
Trump wondered who would be a good replacement and said he had talked to John Kelly, the secretary of homeland security and retired Marine four-star general. What do you think of Kelly? Trump asked.
General Kelly would be great, Priebus said.
Trump agreed and said he thought Kelly would be just right, but he said he had not offered Kelly the job.
Priebus was concerned about the optics of his departure. We can do it this weekend, he said, or we can do a press release. Or do it Monday. Whatever you want to do. “I’m ready to do it how you want to do it.”
“Maybe we’ll do it this weekend,” Trump said. What are you going to do?
Priebus hoped to rejoin his old law firm.
Trump gave him a big hug. “We’ll figure it out,” he said. “You’re the man.”
Air Force One landed. Priebus walked off down the ramp. Rain dotted his black SUV, where Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino were waiting for him. He felt as good about the situation as possible.
He got an alert for a presidential tweet. He looked down at the latest from @realdonaldtrump: “I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff. He is a Great American . . .”
“Unbelievable!” thought Priebus. “Is this serious?”
He had just talked to Trump about waiting.
No one had expected Trump’s tweet. When Miller and Scavino saw it, they hopped out of Priebus’s SUV to get into another car, leaving the former chief of staff alone.
As he shut the car door, Priebus wondered if maybe Trump had drafted a tweet and sent it accidentally. No, that had not happened. The conversation in the cabin was just one more lie.
That night General Kelly came to see Priebus. They had been in the foxhole together, but Kelly had privately criticized the disorder and chaos of the White House to Trump. Kelly had told the president he believed he could straighten the place out.
“Reince,” Kelly said, “I’d never do this to you. I’d never been offered this job until the tweet came out. I would have told you.”
It made no sense, Priebus realized, unless you understood the way Trump made decisions. “The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.”
Caught by surprise, Kelly had gone dark for several hours. He’d had to call his wife and explain that he had no choice but to accept after being offered one of the most important jobs in the world via tweet.
Kelly said in a statement that day, “I have been fortunate to have served my country for more than 45 years—first as a Marine and then as the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. I am honored to be asked to serve as the Chief of Staff to the president of the United States.”
* * *
In some respects Priebus never got over the way his departure was handled. If you have no empathy or pity for anything or anybody, then that episode doesn’t seem that abnormal, Priebus concluded. Which is why Trump could call him two days later: Reince, my man, what’s going on? How you doing? Trump didn’t think they had a problem, so he didn’t view it as awkward.
As a general rule, in relations with Trump, the closer you were, the further away you got. You started with 100 points. You couldn’t get more. Kelly had started with 100 points in his jar, and they’d gone down. Being close to Trump, especially in the chief of staff role, meant going down in points. It meant you paid.
The most important part of Trump’s world was the ring right outside of the bull’s-eye: the people that Trump thought perhaps he should have hired, or who had worked for him and he’d gotten rid of and now thought, Maybe I shouldn’t have. It was the people who were either there or should have been there, or associates or acquaintances that owed nothing to him and were around him but didn’t come in for anything. It was that outside circle that had the most power, not the people on the inside. It wasn’t Kelly or Priebus or Bannon.
* * *
Months after his departure from the White House, Priebus made a final assessment: He believed he had been surrounded in the West Wing by high-ranking natural killers with no requirement to produce regular work products—a plan, a speech, the outline of a strategy, a budget, a daily and weekly schedule. They were roving interlopers, a band of chaos creators.
There was Ivanka, a charming huntress dipping in and out of meetings or the latest presidential business. Jared had the same rights. Theirs was a portfolio without experience.
Kellyanne Conway had, or took, license to weigh in on television or interviews almost at will, often without coordinating with the communications and press secretary offices that Priebus was supposed to control.
Then there was Bannon, who had snagged a key West Wing office near the Oval and lined his walls with whiteboards listing Trump’s campaign promises. He was a strategist in an operation that had none. He came forward to enter discussions with his fire when the nationalist-populist agenda might be at risk, or seemingly at random or when he needed something to do.
Trump had failed the President Lincoln test. He had not put a team of political rivals or competitors at the table, Priebus concluded. “He puts natural predators at the table,” Priebus said later. “Not just rivals—predators.”
These were people who had no experience in government, an astonishingly common distinguishing characteristic. They had spent their lives dabbling in political opinions and in policy debates or were too young.
In some ways, these four—Ivanka, Jared, Conway and Bannon—had the same modus operandi. “They walk into the West Wing. You’re not putting your weapon down,” Priebus said. “I’m not either.” Their discussions were not designed to persuade but, like their president, to win—to slay, crush and demean.
“If you have natural predators at the table,” Priebus said, “things don’t move.” So the White House was not leading on key issues like health care and tax reform. Foreign policy was not coherent and often contradictory.
“Why?” asked Priebus. “Because when you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody. That’s what happens.”
CHAPTER
29
On a weekend in mid-August, in the seventh month of Donald Trump’s presidency, hundreds of white supremacists came into violent conflict with protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, vividly underscoring, once again, the racial divide in America.
Moving across the campus of the University of Virginia in a haunting nighttime torch walk on a steamy August 11 evening, echoing Germany of the 1930s, around 250 white nationalists chanted “Jews will not replace us” and the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.”
The next day, following brawls between white nationalists protesting the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee and counterprotesters, one of the white nationalists drove his car into a crowd of protesters, killing a woman and injuring 19 others. Images of snarling, tiki-torch-bearing white men in polos and khakis and video of the vehicle brutally scattering pedestrians became a major television and news spectacle.