The populist movement had shown that it didn’t have the force to break through the permanent political class. Trump had been the armor-piercing shell that could pierce the Clinton part, but not the rest.
The Republican establishment had brought Trump to heel, he believed. The tax cut was a 100 percent corporate interest tax cut. The budget, adding $1.5 trillion to the deficit, was the worst part of the permanent political-class, boomtown mentality where every lobbyist got their deal for their clients. There was no wall. The swamp had won.
The Deep State was not the problem. It was the up-in-your-face state.
Most compromising for Trump, in Bannon’s view, was the January 26, 2018, speech that Trump gave at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The New York Times headline had been, “Trump Arrived in Davos as a Party Wrecker. He Leaves Praised as a Pragmatist.”
It had been a Chamber of Commerce speech, Bannon believed. Trump had looked at the establishment and essentially embraced it.
Trump’s critique of Attorney General Jeff Sessions was particularly galling to Bannon. He was sure Trump would never get a better guy confirmed by the Senate.
Grievance was a big part of Trump’s core, very much like a 14-year-old boy who felt he was being picked on unfairly. You couldn’t talk to him in adult logic. Teenage logic was necessary.
During Trump’s first six months in the White House, few understood how much media he consumed. It was scary. Trump didn’t show up for work until 11:00 in the morning. Many times he watched six to eight hours of television in a day. Think what your brain would be like if you did that? Bannon asked.
Bannon claimed he used to say to Trump, “Cut the fucking thing off.”
At Mar-a-Lago, Trump would come back from playing golf. It’d be a Saturday afternoon in February or March. Absolutely stunningly beautiful. One of the most beautiful things in the world. Melania would be in the room right next door. He would watch CNN’s D-team of panelists, whom Bannon considered super-haters, and get worked up. Bannon would say, “What are you doing? Why do you do this? Cut this off. It’s not meaningful. Just enjoy yourself.”
Trump’s response would often go like this: “You see that? That’s a fucking lie. Who the fuck’s . . .”
Bannon would say, “Go play some slap and tickle with Melania.” Trump also did not spend much time with his son Barron, then age 11.
Bannon felt he was not friends with Trump. Trump didn’t have genuine friends. He was a throwback to a different time—1950s America. He was a man’s man and a guy’s guy.
The #TimesUp and #MeToo movements of women and feminists would create an alternative to end the male-dominated patriarchy, Bannon believed.
“Trump is the perfect foil,” he summarized. “He’s the bad father, the terrible first husband, the boyfriend that fucked you over and wasted all those years, and [you] gave up your youth for, and then dumped you. And the terrible boss that grabbed you by the pussy all the time and demeaned you.”
* * *
President Trump’s tweets may have come close to starting a war with North Korea in early 2018. The public never learned the full story of the risks that Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un took as they engaged in a public battle of words.
It began on New Year’s Day in an address by Kim, reminding the world, and the American president, of his nuclear weapons.
“It’s not a mere threat but a reality that I have a nuclear button on the desk in my office,” Kim declared. “All of the mainland United States is within the range of our nuclear strike.” It was an ugly and provocative threat.
Lingering after receiving his President’s Daily Brief on January 2, President Trump said, “In this job I’m playing five hands of poker simultaneously, and right now we’re winning most of the hands. Iran is busting up and the regime is under intense pressure. Pakistan is terrified of losing all of our security aid and reimbursements. And South Korea is going to capitulate to us on trade and talks with North Korea.” He seemed on top of the world but he didn’t mention the fifth poker hand.
Real power is fear.
The answer on North Korea was to scare Kim Jung Un. “He’s a bully,” Trump told Porter. “He’s a tough guy. The way to deal with those people is by being tough. And I’m going to intimidate him and I’m going to outfox him.”
That evening, Trump sent a taunting, mine-is-bigger-than-yours tweet that shook the White House and the diplomatic community: “North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times,” Trump wrote on Twitter at 7:49 p.m. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
It played on Kim’s insecurities. In the last six years, 18 of Kim’s 86 missile tests had failed, according to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies.
The president of the United States was practicing a scene out of Dr. Strangelove. The Internet lost its collective mind.
The Washington Post’s Twitter account rushed to clarify: “There is no button.”
Colin Kahl, Obama’s former deputy assistant secretary of defense, tweeted, “Folks aren’t freaking out about a literal button. They are freaking out about the mental instability of a man who can kill millions without permission from anybody.”
Many on Twitter wondered if Trump had violated the platform’s terms of service by threatening nuclear war. Others recalled Hillary Clinton’s line from her July 2016 convention speech: “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.”
Trump’s tweet was not without supporters. A writer for the conservative Washington Examiner concluded: “One of former President Barack Obama’s central challenges was the foreign perception—by friends and foes alike—that he was reluctant to employ the full range of U.S. power. . . . I believe Trump is right to roll the dice and take the opposite approach.”
Trump was not done. Nor was he satisfied that it sufficed for the United States, the top nuclear power in the world, to issue an unprecedented threat.
Within the White House but not publicly, Trump proposed sending a tweet declaring that he was ordering all U.S. military dependents—thousands of the family members of 28,500 troops—out of South Korea.
The act of removing the dependents would almost certainly be read in North Korea as a signal that the United States was seriously preparing for war.
On December 4, McMaster had received a warning at the White House. Ri Su-yong, the vice chairman of the Politburo, had told intermediaries “that the North would take the evacuation of U.S. civilians as a sign of imminent attack.”
Withdrawing dependents was one of the last cards to play. The possible tweets scared the daylights out of the Pentagon leadership—Mattis and Dunford. A declaration of intent to do so from the U.S. commander in chief on Twitter was almost unthinkable.
A tweet about ordering all military dependents out of South Korea could provoke Kim. The leader of a country like North Korea that only recently had acquired nuclear weapons and had many fewer nukes than a potential adversary could be trigger-happy. A use-it-or-lose-it mind-set could take hold.
The tweet did not go out. But Trump wouldn’t drop the matter, and raised the issue of withdrawing U.S. military dependents with Senator Graham.
On December 3, before Trump and Kim’s war of words, and after a North Korean ICBM test, Graham had advocated removing military families from South Korea. “It’s crazy to send spouses and children to South Korea,” he said on CBS’s Face the Nation. He suggested making South Korea an unaccompanied tour for service members and said, “I think it’s now time to start moving American dependents out of South Korea.”
Now, a month later, when Trump called, Graham seemed to have had a change of heart.