BY THE GUN José Santos at a checkpoint near the entrance to Tancítaro. Fed up with both the cartels and the government, the people of Tancítaro pushed out both.CreditBrett Gundlock for The New York Times
TANCÍTARO, Mexico — The road to this agricultural town winds through the slums and cartel-controlled territory of Michoacán, ground zero for Mexico’s drug war, before arriving at a sight so strange it can seem like a mirage.
Fifteen-foot stone turrets are staffed by men whose green uniforms belong to no official force. Beyond them, a statue of an avocado bears the inscription “avocado capital of the world.” And beyond the statue is Tancítaro, an island of safety and stability amid the most violent periodin Mexico’s history.
Local orchard owners, who export over $1 million in avocados per day, mostly to the United States, underwrite what has effectively become an independent city-state. Self-policing and self-governing, it is a sanctuary from drug cartels as well as from the Mexican state.
But beneath the calm is a town under tightfisted control, enforced by militias accountable only to their paymasters. Drug addiction and suicide are soaring, locals say, as the social contract strains.
Tancítaro represents a quiet but telling trend in Mexico, where a handful of towns and cities are effectively seceding, partly or in whole. These are acts of desperation, revealing the degree to which Mexico’s police and politicians are seen as part of the threat.
Visit three such enclaves — Tancítaro; Monterrey, a rich commercial city; and Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, just outside the capital — and you will find a pattern. Each is a haven of relative safety amid violence, suggesting that their diagnosis of the problem was correct. But their gains are fragile and have come at significant cost.
They are exceptions that prove the rule: Mexico’s crisis manifests as violence, but it is rooted in the corruption and weakness of the state.
Photo
Guarding the town’s avocado orchards.CreditBrett Gundlock for The New York Times
Tancítaro: ‘A Million or Two on Weapons’
It began with an uprising. Townspeople formed militias to eject both the cartel, which effectively controlled much of Michoacán, and the local police, who were seen as complicit. Orchard owners, whose families and businesses faced growing extortion threats, bankrolled the revolt.
This left Tancítaro without police or a government, whose officials had fled. Power accumulated to the militias that controlled the streets and to their backers, an organization of wealthy avocado growers known as the Junta de Sanidad Vegetal, or Plant Health Council. Citizens sometimes call it the Junta.
Nearly four years in, long after other militia-run towns in Michoacán collapsed into violence, the streets remain safe and tidy. But in sweeping away the institutions that enabled crime to flourish, Tancítaro created a system that in many ways resembles cartel control.
Their rule began with a purge. Young men suspected of involvement in the cartel were expelled. Low-level runners or informants, mostly boys, were allowed to stay, though the cartel murdered most in retaliation, a militia commander said.
Though violence eventually cooled, the wartime power structure has remained. The militias now act as the police, as well as guards for the town perimeter and the avocado orchards.
Cinthia Garcia Nieves, a young community organizer, moved into town shortly after the fighting subsided. Idealistic but clear-minded, she wanted to help Tancítaro develop real institutions.
But lines of authority had “blurred,” she said in a cafe near the town center.
Ms. Nieves set up citizens’ councils as a way for local families to get involved. But militia rule has accustomed many to the idea that power belongs to whomever has the guns.
She has high hopes for community justice forums, designed to punish crimes and resolve disputes. But, in practice, justice is often determined — and punishments administered — by whichever militia commander chooses to involve himself.
“We took them out in the street and gave them a beating,” Jorge Zamora, a militia member, said of some men accused of dealing drugs. Their lives were spared because two of them were his relatives, he said. Instead, “we expelled them from the town.”
Photo
Emilio Aguirre Rios at his farm outside Tancítaro.CreditBrett Gundlock for The New York Times
Though his militia is tasked with guarding orchards, not policing, its proximity to the junta’s interests gives it special power. “For those people, it’s not a burden at all to spend a million or two on weapons,” Mr. Zamora said.
Officially, Tancítaro is run by a mayor so popular that he was nominated by the unanimous consent of every major political party and won in a landslide. Unofficially, the mayor reports to the farm owners, who predetermined his election by ensuring he was the only viable candidate, according to Falko Ernst and Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, security researchers who study Tancítaro.
The citizens’ councils, designed as visions of democratic utopianism, hold little power. Social services have faltered.
Though the new order is popular, it offers few avenues for appeal or dissent. Families whose sons or brothers are expelled — a practice that continues — have little recourse.
The central government has declined to reimpose control, the researchers believe, for fear of drawing attention to the town’s lesson that secession brings safety.
Ms. Nieves remains a believer in Tancítaro’s model, but worries about its future.
“We have to work together,” she said, or risk a future of “oppressive authority.”
BY THE CHECKBOOK Taking portraits for a quinceañera, or coming-of-age, celebration in Monterrey. The city’s business elite quietly took over public institutions.CreditBrett Gundlock for The New York Times
Monterrey: ‘They Destroyed the Whole Thing’
If Tancítaro seceded with a gun, then the city of Monterrey, home to many top Mexican corporations, did it with a Rolodex and a handshake.
Rather than ejecting institutions, Monterrey’s business elite quietly took them over — all with the blessing of their friends and golf partners in public office.
But their once-remarkable progress is now collapsing. Crime is returning.
“I’m telling you, I have a long career in these matters, and the project I am more proud of than anything is this one in Monterrey,” said Jorge Tello, a security consultant and former head of the national intelligence agency.
“It’s very easy to lose it,” he warned, adding that it may already be too late.
Monterrey’s experiment began over a lunch. Mr. Tello was dining with the governor, who received a call from José Antonio Fernández, the head of Femsa, one of Mexico’s largest companies.
Femsa’s private security guards, while ferrying employees’ children to school, had been attacked by cartel gunmen, he said. Two had died repelling what was most likely a kidnapping attempt.
The governor put the call on speaker. It was the first of many conversations, joined by other corporate heads who faced similar threats.
A club of corporate executives who call themselves the Group of 10 offered to help fund and reform the state’s kidnapping police. The governor agreed.
They hired a consultant, who advised top-to-bottom changes and replaced nearly half the officers. They hired lawyers to rewrite kidnapping laws and began to coordinate between the police and the families of victims.
When the governor later announced an ambitious plan for a new police force, intended to restore order, he again invited business leaders in. C.E.O.s would now oversee one of the most central functions of government. They hired more consultants to put into effect the best and latest thinking in policing, community outreach, anything that could stop the violence tearing through their city. They bankrolled special housing and high salaries for officers.
Their payroll and human resources departments serviced the force. Their marketing divisions ran a nationwide recruitment campaign. When government officials asked to approve the ads before they ran, corporate leaders said no. Perhaps most crucially, they circumvented the bureaucracy and corruption that had bogged down other police reform efforts.
Crime dropped citywide. Community leaders in poorer areas reported safer streets and renewed public trust in the police.
Monterrey’s experience offered still more evidence that in Mexico, violence is only a symptom; the real disease is in government. The corporate takeover worked as a sort of quarantine. But, with the disease untreated, the quarantine inevitably broke.
A new governor, who took office in late 2015, let reforms lapse and appointed friends to key positions. Now, crime and reports of police brutality are resurging, particularly in working-class suburbs. Business leaders, whose wealthy neighborhoods remain safe, have either failed or declined to push the new governor.
“Things got better, people felt comfortable, and then they destroyed the whole thing,” Mr. Tello said.
Mexico’s weak institutions, he added, make any local fix subject to the whims of political leaders. Countries like the United States, he said, “have this structure that we don’t have. That’s what’s so dangerous.”
Adrián de la Garza, who is mayor of Monterrey’s municipal core, said the city could do only so much to insulate itself. “This isn’t an island,” he said.
Any Mexican city, he said, is policed by multiple forces. Some report to the mayor, some to the governor and some to the federal government. And any one of those political actors can derail progress through corruption, cronyism or simple neglect.
Even Mexico’s most powerful business leaders could cut them out only briefly.
“It’s a big problem,” Mr. de la Garza said. Managing it, he said, is “just political life in Mexico.”
BY THE BALLOT Police officers in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl. The chief has been free to experiment because the government is not part of the entrenched party system.CreditBrett Gundlock for The New York Times
Neza: ‘How Long Can We Hold This?’
“You don’t expect to see a bright light in a place like Neza,” said John Bailey, a Georgetown University professor who studies Mexican policing.
Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a million-resident sprawl outside Mexico City, was once known for poverty, gang violence and police corruption so widespread that officers sometimes mugged citizens.
Today, though still rough, it is far safer. Its police officers are considered “a really promising model,” Mr. Bailey said, in a part of the country where most are seen as threats.
Unlike Tancítaro or Monterrey, Neza has no militia or business elite to seize or win power. Its government appears, on the surface, normal.
But the police chief who has overseen this change, a grandfatherly former academic named Jorge Amador, is not normal. For years he has treated Neza as his personal laboratory, trying a wild mix of hard-nosed reforms, harebrained schemes and fanciful experiments.
Many failed. Some drew arch amusement from the foreign press. (A literature program provided officers with a new book each month — mostly classics, all mandatory — and rewarded officers who wrote their own.) But some worked.
Mr. Amador was free to experiment — and his successes stuck — because Neza’s government is not normal, either. It has seceded from a part of the state that Joy Langston, a political scientist, called Mexico’s key point of failure: its party system.
Neza inverted Monterrey’s model: Rather than establishing an independent police force and co-opting the political system, Neza established an independent political system and co-opted the police.
Mexico’s establishment parties are more than parties. They are the state. Loyalists, not civil servants, run institutions. Officials have little freedom to stretch and little incentive to investigate corruption that might implicate fellow party members. Most are shuffled between offices every few years, cutting any successes short.
Neza, run by a third party, the left-wing P.R.D., exists outside of this system. Its leaders are free to gut local institutions and cut out the state authorities.
Mr. Amador is doing both. He fired one in eight police officers and changed every commanding officer. He shuffled assignments to disrupt patronage networks. Those who remain are under constant scrutiny. Every car is equipped with a GPS unit, tracked by dozens of internal affairs officers.
The state police are treated like foreign invaders. Neza’s leaders believe state officials are quietly undermining their efforts in a bid to retake power.
Photo
Police officers monitoring cameras that are trained on the streets of Neza.CreditBrett Gundlock for The New York Times
Neza’s bureaucratic secession allowed Mr. Amador to remake the force in his image. Corruption and crime would always pay more than he could, Mr. Amador knew. So he would offer something more valuable than money: a proud civic identity.
Essay contests, sports leagues and scholarships come with heavy messaging, cultivating a culture that can feel cultlike. Awards are handed out frequently — often publicly, always with a bit of cash — and for the smallest achievements.
“We have to convince the police officer that they can be a different kind of police officer, but also the citizen that they have a different kind of officer,” Mr. Amador said.
Yazmin Quroz, a longtime resident, said working with police officers, whom she now knows by name, had brought a sense of community. “We are united, which hadn’t happened before,” she said. “We’re finally all talking to each other.”
But Neza’s gains could evaporate, Mr. Amador said, if crime in neighboring areas continued to rise or if the mayor’s office changed party. His experiment has held drug gangs and the Mexican state at bay, but he could solve neither. He compared Neza to the Byzantine Empire, squeezed between larger empires for centuries before succumbing to history.
“The question is,” he said, “how long we can hold this?”
Election Night: It “looked as if he had seen a ghost.”
On the afternoon of November 8, 2016, Kellyanne Conway
settled into her glass office at Trump Tower. Right up until the last
weeks of the race, the campaign headquarters had remained a listless
place. All that seemed to distinguish it from a corporate back office
were a few posters with right-wing slogans.
Conway,
the campaign’s manager, was in a remarkably buoyant mood, considering
she was about to experience a resounding, if not cataclysmic, defeat.
Donald Trump would lose the election — of this she was sure — but he
would quite possibly hold the defeat to under six points. That was a
substantial victory. As for the looming defeat itself, she shrugged it
off: It was Reince Priebus’s fault, not hers.
She had spent a good part of the day calling friends and allies in the political world and blaming Priebus,
the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Now she briefed some
of the television producers and anchors whom she had been carefully
courting since joining the Trump campaign — and with whom she had been
actively interviewing in the last few weeks, hoping to land a permanent
on-air job after the election.
Even
though the numbers in a few key states had appeared to be changing to
Trump’s advantage, neither Conway nor Trump himself nor his son-in-law, Jared Kushner
— the effective head of the campaign — wavered in their certainty:
Their unexpected adventure would soon be over. Not only would Trump not
be president, almost everyone in the campaign agreed, he should probably
not be. Conveniently, the former conviction meant nobody had to deal
with the latter issue.
As
the campaign came to an end, Trump himself was sanguine. His ultimate
goal, after all, had never been to win. “I can be the most famous man in
the world,” he had told his aide Sam Nunberg at the outset of the race.
His longtime friend Roger Ailes,
the former head of Fox News, liked to say that if you want a career in
television, first run for president. Now Trump, encouraged by Ailes, was
floating rumors about a Trump network. It was a great future. He would
come out of this campaign, Trump assured Ailes, with a far more powerful
brand and untold opportunities.
“This
is bigger than I ever dreamed of,” he told Ailes a week before the
election. “I don’t think about losing, because it isn’t losing. We’ve
totally won.”
The Postelection Chaos at Trump Tower
From the start,
the leitmotif for Trump about his own campaign was how crappy it was,
and how everybody involved in it was a loser. In August, when he was
trailing Hillary Clinton
by more than 12 points, he couldn’t conjure even a far-fetched scenario
for achieving an electoral victory. He was baffled when the right-wing
billionaire Robert Mercer, a Ted Cruz backer whom Trump barely knew,
offered Trump’s campaign an infusion of $5 million. Trump didn’t turn
down the help—he just expressed vast incomprehension about why anyone
would want to do that. “This thing,” he told Mercer, “is so fucked up.”
Steve Bannon,
who became chief executive of Trump’s team in mid-August, called it
“the broke-dick campaign.” Almost immediately, he saw that it was
hampered by an even deeper structural flaw: The candidate who billed
himself as a billionaire — ten times over — refused to invest his own
money in it. Bannon told Kushner that, after the first debate in
September, they would need another $50 million to cover them until
Election Day.
“No way we’ll get 50 million unless we can guarantee him victory,” said a clear-eyed Kushner.
“Twenty-five million?” prodded Bannon.
“If we can say victory is more than likely.”
In the end, the best Trump would do is to loan the campaign $10
million, provided he got it back as soon as they could raise other
money. Steve Mnuchin, the campaign’s finance chairman, came to collect
the loan with the wire instructions ready to go so Trump couldn’t
conveniently forget to send the money.
Most
presidential candidates spend their entire careers, if not their lives
from adolescence, preparing for the role. They rise up the ladder of
elected offices, perfect a public face, and prepare themselves to win
and to govern. The Trump calculation, quite a conscious one, was
different. The candidate and his top lieutenants believed they could get
all the benefits of almost becoming president without having to change
their behavior or their worldview one whit. Almost everybody on the
Trump team, in fact, came with the kind of messy conflicts bound to bite
a president once he was in office. Michael Flynn,
the retired general who served as Trump’s opening act at campaign
rallies, had been told by his friends that it had not been a good idea
to take $45,000 from the Russians for a speech. “Well, it would only be a
problem if we won,” Flynn assured them.
Not only did Trump disregard the potential conflicts of his own business deals and real-estate holdings, he audaciously refused to release his tax returns.
Why should he? Once he lost, Trump would be both insanely famous and a
martyr to Crooked Hillary. His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared
would be international celebrities. Steve Bannon would become the de
facto head of the tea-party movement. Kellyanne Conway would be a
cable-news star. Melania Trump, who had been assured by her husband that
he wouldn’t become president, could return to inconspicuously lunching.
Losing would work out for everybody. Losing was winning.
Shortly
after 8 p.m. on Election Night, when the unexpected trend — Trump might
actually win — seemed confirmed, Don Jr. told a friend that his father,
or DJT, as he calls him, looked as if he had seen a ghost. Melania was
in tears—and not of joy.
There
was, in the space of little more than an hour, in Steve Bannon’s not
unamused observation, a befuddled Trump morphing into a disbelieving
Trump and then into a horrified Trump. But still to come was the final
transformation: Suddenly, Donald Trump became a man who believed that he
deserved to be, and was wholly capable of being, the president of the
United States.
From the moment
of victory, the Trump administration became a looking-glass presidency:
Every inverse assumption about how to assemble and run a White House
was enacted and compounded, many times over. The decisions that Trump
and his top advisers made in those first few months — from the slapdash
transition to the disarray in the West Wing — set the stage for the
chaos and dysfunction that have persisted throughout his first year in
office. This was a real-life version of Mel Brooks’s The Producers,
where the mistaken outcome trusted by everyone in Trump’s inner circle —
that they would lose the election — wound up exposing them for who they
really were.
On
the Saturday after the election, Trump received a small group of
well-wishers in his triplex apartment in Trump Tower. Even his close
friends were still shocked and bewildered, and there was a dazed quality
to the gathering. But Trump himself was mostly looking at the clock. Rupert Murdoch,
who had promised to pay a call on the president-elect, was running
late. When some of the guests made a move to leave, an increasingly
agitated Trump assured them that Rupert was on his way. “He’s one of the
greats, the last of the greats,” Trump said. “You have to stay to see
him.” Not grasping that he was now the most powerful man in the world,
Trump was still trying mightily to curry favor with a media mogul who
had long disdained him as a charlatan and fool.
Few
people who knew Trump had illusions about him. That was his appeal: He
was what he was. Twinkle in his eye, larceny in his soul. Everybody in
his rich-guy social circle knew about his wide-ranging ignorance. Early
in the campaign, Sam Nunberg was sent to explain the Constitution to the
candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” Nunberg recalled,
“before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling
back in his head.”
The
day after the election, the bare-bones transition team that had been
set up during the campaign hurriedly shifted from Washington to Trump
Tower. The building — now the headquarters of a populist revolution —
suddenly seemed like an alien spaceship on Fifth Avenue. But its
otherworldly air helped obscure the fact that few in Trump’s inner
circle, with their overnight responsibility for assembling a government,
had any relevant experience.
Ailes,
a veteran of the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush 41 administrations, tried to
impress on Trump the need to create a White House structure that could
serve and protect him. “You need a son of a bitch as your chief of
staff,” he told Trump. “And you need a son of a bitch who knows
Washington. You’ll want to be your own son of a bitch, but you don’t
know Washington.” Ailes had a suggestion: John Boehner, who had stepped down as Speaker of the House only a year earlier.
“Who’s that?” asked Trump.
As
much as the president himself, the chief of staff determines how the
Executive branch — which employs 4 million people — will run. The job
has been construed as deputy president, or even prime minister. But
Trump had no interest in appointing a strong chief of staff with a deep
knowledge of Washington. Among his early choices for the job was Kushner
— a man with no political experience beyond his role as a calm and
flattering body man to Trump during the campaign.
It was Ann Coulter
who finally took the president-elect aside. “Nobody is apparently
telling you this,” she told him. “But you can’t. You just can’t hire
your children.”
Bowing
to pressure, Trump floated the idea of giving the job to Steve Bannon,
only to have the notion soundly ridiculed. Murdoch told Trump that
Bannon would be a dangerous choice. Joe Scarborough,
the former congressman and co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, told the
president-elect that “Washington will go up in flames” if Bannon became
chief of staff.
So
Trump turned to Reince Priebus, the RNC chairman, who had became the
subject of intense lobbying by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. If congressional leaders were going to
have to deal with an alien like Donald Trump, then best they do it with
the help of one of their own kind.
Jim
Baker, chief of staff for both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and
almost everybody’s model for managing the West Wing, advised Priebus not
to take the job. Priebus had his own reservations: He had come out of
his first long meeting with Trump thinking it had been a disconcertingly
weird experience. Trump talked nonstop and constantly repeated himself.
“Here’s
the deal,” a close Trump associate told Priebus. “In an hour meeting
with him, you’re going to hear 54 minutes of stories, and they’re going
to be the same stories over and over again. So you have to have one
point to make, and you pepper it in whenever you can.”
But
the Priebus appointment, announced in mid-November, put Bannon on a
co-equal level to the new chief of staff. Even with the top job, Priebus
would be a weak figure, in the traditional mold of most Trump
lieutenants over the years. There would be one chief of staff in name —
the unimportant one — and others like Bannon and Kushner, more
important in practice, ensuring both chaos and Trump’s independence.
Priebus
demonstrated no ability to keep Trump from talking to anyone who wanted
his ear. The president-elect enjoyed being courted. On December 14, a
high-level delegation from Silicon Valley came to Trump Tower to meet
him. Later that afternoon, according to a source privy to details of the
conversation, Trump called Rupert Murdoch, who asked him how the
meeting had gone.
“Oh,
great, just great,” said Trump. “These guys really need my help. Obama
was not very favorable to them, too much regulation. This is really an
opportunity for me to help them.”
“Donald,”
said Murdoch, “for eight years these guys had Obama in their pocket.
They practically ran the administration. They don’t need your help.”
“Take this H-1B visa issue. They really need these H-1B visas.”
Murdoch
suggested that taking a liberal approach to H-1B visas, which open
America’s doors to select immigrants, might be hard to square with his
promises to build a wall and close the borders. But Trump seemed
unconcerned, assuring Murdoch, “We’ll figure it out.”
“What a fucking idiot,” said Murdoch, shrugging, as he got off the phone.
Steve Bannon,
suddenly among the world’s most powerful men, was running late. It was
the evening of January 3, 2017 — a little more than two weeks before
Trump’s inauguration — and Bannon had promised to come to a small dinner
arranged by mutual friends in a Greenwich Village townhouse to see
Roger Ailes.
Snow
was threatening, and for a while the dinner appeared doubtful. But the
76-year-old Ailes, who was as dumbfounded by his old friend Donald
Trump’s victory as everyone else, understood that he was passing the
right-wing torch to Bannon. Ailes’s Fox News, with its $1.5 billion in
annual profits, had dominated Republican politics for two decades. Now
Bannon’s Breitbart News, with its mere $1.5 million in annual profits,
was claiming that role. For 30 years, Ailes — until recently the single
most powerful person in conservative politics — had humored and
tolerated Trump, but in the end Bannon and Breitbart had elected him.
At
9:30, having extricated himself from Trump Tower, Bannon finally
arrived at the dinner, three hours late. Wearing a disheveled blazer,
his signature pairing of two shirts, and military fatigues, the
unshaven, overweight 63-year-old immediately dived into an urgent
download of information about the world he was about to take over.
“We’re
going to flood the zone so we have every Cabinet member for the next
seven days through their confirmation hearings,” he said of the
business-and-military, 1950s-type Cabinet choices. “Tillerson is two
days, Sessions is two days, Mattis is two days …”
Bannon veered from James “Mad Dog” Mattis
— the retired four-star general whom Trump had nominated as secretary
of Defense — to the looming appointment of Michael Flynn as
national-security adviser. “He’s fine. He’s not Jim Mattis and he’s not
John Kelly … but he’s fine. He just needs the right staff around him.”
Still, Bannon averred: “When you take out all the Never Trump guys who
signed all those letters and all the neocons who got us in all these
wars … it’s not a deep bench.” Bannon said he’d tried to push John
Bolton, the famously hawkish diplomat, for the job as national-security
adviser. Bolton was an Ailes favorite, too.
“He’s
a bomb thrower,” said Ailes. “And a strange little fucker. But you need
him. Who else is good on Israel? Flynn is a little nutty on Iran.
Tillerson just knows oil.”
“Bolton’s mustache is a problem,” snorted Bannon. “Trump doesn’t think he looks the part. You know Bolton is an acquired taste.”
“Well, he got in trouble because he got in a fight in a hotel one night and chased some woman.”
“If I told Trump that,” Bannon said slyly, “he might have the job.”
Bannon
was curiously able to embrace Trump while at the same time suggesting
he did not take him entirely seriously. Great numbers of people, he
believed, were suddenly receptive to a new message — the world needs
borders — and Trump had become the platform for that message.
“Does he get it?” asked Ailes suddenly, looking intently at Bannon. Did Trump get where history had put him?
Bannon took a sip of water. “He gets it,” he said, after hesitating for perhaps a beat too long. “Or he gets what he gets.”
Pivoting from Trump himself, Bannon plunged on with the Trump agenda. “Day one we’re moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem.
Netanyahu’s all-in. Sheldon” — Adelson, the casino billionaire and
far-right Israel defender — “is all-in. We know where we’re heading on
this … Let Jordan take the West Bank, let Egypt take Gaza. Let them deal
with it. Or sink trying.”
“Where’s Donald on this?” asked Ailes, the clear implication being that Bannon was far out ahead of his benefactor.
“He’s totally onboard.”
“I wouldn’t give Donald too much to think about,” said an amused Ailes.
Bannon snorted. “Too much, too little — doesn’t necessarily change things.”
“What has he gotten himself into with the Russians?” pressed Ailes.
“Mostly,”
said Bannon, “he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet
Putin. But Putin couldn’t give a shit about him. So he’s kept trying.”
Again,
as though setting the issue of Trump aside — merely a large and
peculiar presence to both be thankful for and to have to abide — Bannon,
in the role he had conceived for himself, the auteur of the Trump
presidency, charged forward. The real enemy, he said, was China. China
was the first front in a new Cold War.
“China’s
everything. Nothing else matters. We don’t get China right, we don’t
get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi
Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the
most rational people in the world, until they’re not. And they’re gonna
flip like Germany in the ’30s. You’re going to have a hypernationalist
state, and once that happens, you can’t put the genie back in the
bottle.”
“Donald might not be Nixon in China,” said Ailes, deadpan.
Bannon smiled. “Bannon in China,” he said, with both remarkable grandiosity and wry self-deprecation.
“How’s the kid?” asked Ailes, referring to Kushner.
“He’s
my partner,” said Bannon, his tone suggesting that if he felt
otherwise, he was nevertheless determined to stay on message.
“He’s had a lot of lunches with Rupert,” said a dubious Ailes.
“In
fact,” said Bannon, “I could use your help here.” He then spent several
minutes trying to recruit Ailes to help kneecap Murdoch. Since his
ouster from Fox over allegations of sexual harassment, Ailes had become
only more bitter toward Murdoch. Now Murdoch was frequently jawboning
the president-elect and encouraging him toward Establishment moderation.
Bannon wanted Ailes to suggest to Trump, a man whose many neuroses
included a horror of senility, that Murdoch might be losing it.
“I’ll
call him,” said Ailes. “But Trump would jump through hoops for Rupert.
Like for Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about who’s
jerking whose chain.”
Trump holed up in his White House bedroom in February 2017.
Illustration: Jeffrey Smith
Trump did not
enjoy his own inauguration. He was angry that A-level stars had snubbed
the event, disgruntled with the accommodations at Blair House, and
visibly fighting with his wife, who seemed on the verge of tears.
Throughout the day, he wore what some around him had taken to calling
his golf face: angry and pissed off, shoulders hunched, arms swinging,
brow furled, lips pursed.
The
first senior staffer to enter the White House that day was Bannon. On
the inauguration march, he had grabbed 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the
newly appointed deputy chief of staff, and together they had peeled off
to inspect the now-vacant West Wing. The carpet had been shampooed, but
little else had changed. It was a warren of tiny offices in need of
paint, the décor something like an admissions office at a public
university. Bannon claimed the nondescript office across from the much
grander chief of staff’s suite and immediately requisitioned the
whiteboards on which he intended to chart the first 100 days of the
Trump administration. He also began moving furniture out. The point was
to leave no room for anyone to sit. Limit discussion. Limit debate. This
was war.
Those
who had worked on the campaign noticed the sudden change. Within the
first week, Bannon seemed to have put away the camaraderie of Trump
Tower and become far more remote, if not unreachable. “What’s up with
Steve?” Kushner began to ask. “I don’t understand. We were so close.”
Now that Trump had been elected, Bannon was already focused on his next
goal: capturing the soul of the Trump White House.
He
began by going after his enemies. Few fueled his rancor toward the
standard-issue Republican world as much as Rupert Murdoch — not least
because Murdoch had Trump’s ear. It was one of the key elements of
Bannon’s understanding of Trump: The last person the president spoke to
ended up with enormous influence. Trump would brag that Murdoch was
always calling him; Murdoch, for his part, would complain that he
couldn’t get Trump off the phone.
“He
doesn’t know anything about American politics, and has no feel for the
American people,” Bannon told Trump, always eager to point out that
Murdoch wasn’t an American. Yet in one regard, Murdoch’s message was
useful to Bannon. Having known every president since Harry Truman — as
Murdoch took frequent opportunities to point out — the media mogul
warned Trump that a president has only six months, max, to set his
agenda and make an impact. After that, it was just putting out fires and
battling the opposition.
This
was the message whose urgency Bannon had been trying to impress on an
often distracted Trump, who was already trying to limit his hours in the
office and keep to his normal golf habits. Bannon’s strategic view of
government was shock and awe. In his head, he carried a set of decisive
actions that would not just mark the new administration’s opening days
but make it clear that nothing ever again would be the same. He had
quietly assembled a list of more than 200 executive orders to issue in
the first 100 days.
The very first EO, in his view, had to be a crackdown on immigration.
After all, it was one of Trump’s core campaign promises. Plus, Bannon
knew, it was an issue that made liberals batshit mad.
Bannon
could push through his agenda for a simple reason: because nobody in
the administration really had a job. Priebus, as chief of staff, had to
organize meetings, hire staff, and oversee the individual offices in the
Executive-branch departments. But Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump had
no specific responsibilities — they did what they wanted. And for
Bannon, the will to get big things done was how big things got done.
“Chaos was Steve’s strategy,” said Walsh.
On
Friday, January 27 — only his eighth day in office — Trump signed an
executive order issuing a sweeping exclusion of many Muslims from the
United States. In his mania to seize the day, with almost no one in the
federal government having seen it or even been aware of it, Bannon had
succeeded in pushing through an executive order that overhauled U.S.
immigration policy while bypassing the very agencies and personnel
responsible for enforcing it.
The
result was an emotional outpouring of horror and indignation from
liberal media, terror in immigrant communities, tumultuous protests at
major airports, confusion throughout the government, and, in the White
House, an inundation of opprobrium from friends and family. What have
you done? You have to undo this! You’re finished before you even start!
But Bannon was satisfied. He could not have hoped to draw a more vivid
line between Trump’s America and that of liberals. Almost the entire
White House staff demanded to know: Why did we do this on a Friday, when
it would hit the airports hardest and bring out the most protesters?
“Errr
… that’s why,” said Bannon. “So the snowflakes would show up at the
airports and riot.” That was the way to crush the liberals: Make them
crazy and drag them to the left.
On the Sunday
after the immigration order was issued, Joe Scarborough and his Morning
Joe co-host, Mika Brzezinski, arrived for lunch at the White House.
Trump proudly showed them into the Oval Office. “So how do you think the
first week has gone?” he asked the couple, in a buoyant mood, seeking
flattery. When Scarborough ventured his opinion that the immigration
order might have been handled better, Trump turned defensive and
derisive, plunging into a long monologue about how well things had gone.
“I could have invited Hannity!” he told Scarborough.
After
Jared and Ivanka joined them for lunch, Trump continued to cast for
positive impressions of his first week. Scarborough praised the
president for having invited leaders of the steel unions to the White
House. At which point Jared interjected that reaching out to unions, a
Democratic constituency, was Bannon’s doing, that this was “the Bannon
way.”
“Bannon?”
said the president, jumping on his son-in-law. “That wasn’t Bannon’s
idea. That was my idea. It’s the Trump way, not the Bannon way.”
Kushner, going concave, retreated from the discussion.
Trump,
changing the topic, said to Scarborough and Brzezinski, “So what about
you guys? What’s going on?” He was referencing their not-so-secret
secret relationship. The couple said it was still complicated, but good.
“You guys should just get married,” prodded Trump.
“I can marry you! I’m an internet Unitarian minister,” Kushner, otherwise an Orthodox Jew, said suddenly.
“What?”
said the president. “What are you talking about? Why would they want
you to marry them when I could marry them? When they could be married by
the president! At Mar-a-Lago!”
The
First Children couple were having to navigate Trump’s volatile nature
just like everyone else in the White House. And they were willing to do
it for the same reason as everyone else — in the hope that Trump’s
unexpected victory would catapult them into a heretofore unimagined big
time. Balancing risk against reward, both Jared and Ivanka decided to
accept roles in the West Wing over the advice of almost everyone they
knew. It was a joint decision by the couple, and, in some sense, a joint
job. Between themselves, the two had made an earnest deal: If sometime
in the future the opportunity arose, she’d be the one to run for
president. The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would not be
Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.
Bannon,
who had coined the term “Jarvanka” that was now in ever greater use in
the White House, was horrified when the couple’s deal was reported to
him. “They didn’t say that?” he said. “Stop. Oh, come on. They didn’t
actually say that? Please don’t tell me that. Oh my God.”
The
truth was, Ivanka and Jared were as much the chief of staff as Priebus
or Bannon, all of them reporting directly to the president. The couple
had opted for formal jobs in the West Wing, in part because they knew
that influencing Trump required you to be all-in. From phone call to
phone call — and his day, beyond organized meetings, was almost entirely
phone calls — you could lose him. He could not really converse, not in
the sense of sharing information, or of a balanced back-and-forth
conversation. He neither particularly listened to what was said to him
nor particularly considered what he said in response. He demanded you
pay him attention, then decided you were weak for groveling. In a sense,
he was like an instinctive, pampered, and hugely successful actor.
Everybody was either a lackey who did his bidding or a high-ranking film
functionary trying to coax out his performance — without making him
angry or petulant.
Ivanka
maintained a relationship with her father that was in no way
conventional. She was a helper not just in his business dealings, but in
his marital realignments. If it wasn’t pure opportunism, it was
certainly transactional. For Ivanka, it was all business — building the
Trump brand, the presidential campaign, and now the White House. She
treated her father with a degree of detachment, even irony, going so far
as to make fun of his comb-over to others. She often described the
mechanics behind it to friends: an absolutely clean pate — a contained
island after scalp-reduction surgery — surrounded by a furry circle of
hair around the sides and front, from which all ends are drawn up to
meet in the center and then swept back and secured by a stiffening
spray. The color, she would point out to comical effect, was from a
product called Just for Men — the longer it was left on, the darker it
got. Impatience resulted in Trump’s orange-blond hair color.
Kushner,
for his part, had little to no success at trying to restrain his
father-in-law. Ever since the transition, Jared had been negotiating to
arrange a meeting at the White House with Enrique Peña Nieto,
the Mexican president whom Trump had threatened and insulted throughout
the campaign. On the Wednesday after the inauguration, a high-level
Mexican delegation — the first visit by any foreign leaders to the Trump
White House — met with Kushner and Reince Priebus. That afternoon,
Kushner triumphantly told his father-in-law that Peña Nieto had signed
on to a White House meeting and planning for the visit could go forward.
The next day, on Twitter, Trump blasted Mexico for stealing American jobs.
“If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall,” the
president declared, “then it would be better to cancel the upcoming
meeting.” At which point Peña Nieto did just that, leaving Kushner’s negotiation and statecraft as so much scrap on the floor.
Nothing contributed
to the chaos and dysfunction of the White House as much as Trump’s own
behavior. The big deal of being president was just not apparent to him.
Most victorious candidates, arriving in the White House from ordinary
political life, could not help but be reminded of their transformed
circumstances by their sudden elevation to a mansion with palacelike
servants and security, a plane at constant readiness, and downstairs a
retinue of courtiers and advisers. But this wasn’t that different from
Trump’s former life in Trump Tower, which was actually more commodious
and to his taste than the White House.
Trump,
in fact, found the White House to be vexing and even a little scary. He
retreated to his own bedroom — the first time since the Kennedy White
House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms. In the
first days, he ordered two television screens in addition to the one
already there, and a lock on the door, precipitating a brief standoff
with the Secret Service, who insisted they have access to the room. He
reprimanded the housekeeping staff for picking up his shirt from the
floor: “If my shirt is on the floor, it’s because I want it on the
floor.” Then he imposed a set of new rules: Nobody touch anything,
especially not his toothbrush. (He had a longtime fear of being
poisoned, one reason why he liked to eat at McDonald’s — nobody knew he
was coming and the food was safely premade.) Also, he would let
housekeeping know when he wanted his sheets done, and he would strip his
own bed.
If
he was not having his 6:30 dinner with Steve Bannon, then, more to his
liking, he was in bed by that time with a cheeseburger, watching his
three screens and making phone calls — the phone was his true contact
point with the world — to a small group of friends, who charted his
rising and falling levels of agitation through the evening and then
compared notes with one another.
As
details of Trump’s personal life leaked out, he became obsessed with
identifying the leaker. The source of all the gossip, however, may well
have been Trump himself. In his calls throughout the day and at night
from his bed, he often spoke to people who had no reason to keep his
confidences. He was a river of grievances, which recipients of his calls
promptly spread to the ever-attentive media.
On
February 6, in one of his seething, self-pitying, and unsolicited phone
calls to a casual acquaintance, Trump detailed his bent-out-of-shape
feelings about the relentless contempt of the media and the disloyalty
of his staff. The initial subject of his ire was the New York Times
reporter Maggie Haberman, whom he called “a nut job.” Gail Collins, who
had written a Times column unfavorably comparing Trump to Vice-President
Mike Pence, was “a moron.” Then, continuing under the rubric of media he hated, he veered to CNN and the deep disloyalty of its chief, Jeff Zucker.
Zucker,
who as the head of entertainment at NBC had commissioned The
Apprentice, had been “made by Trump,” Trump said of himself in the third
person. He had “personally” gotten Zucker his job at CNN. “Yes, yes, I
did,” said the president, launching into a favorite story about how he
had once talked Zucker up at a dinner with a high-ranking executive from
CNN’s parent company. “I probably shouldn’t have, because Zucker is not
that smart,” Trump lamented, “but I like to show I can do that sort of
thing.” Then Zucker had returned the favor by airing the “unbelievably
disgusting” story about the Russian “dossier” and the “golden shower” — the practice CNN had accused him of being party to in a Moscow hotel suite with assorted prostitutes.
Having
dispensed with Zucker, the president of the United States went on to
speculate on what was involved with a golden shower. And how this was
all just part of a media campaign that would never succeed in driving
him from the White House. Because they were sore losers and hated him
for winning, they spread total lies, 100 percent made-up things, totally
untrue, for instance, the cover that week of Time magazine — which,
Trump reminded his listener, he had been on more than anyone in history
— that showed Steve Bannon, a good guy, saying he was the real
president. “How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me?”
Trump demanded. He repeated the question, then repeated the answer:
“Zero! Zero!” And that went for his son-in-law, too, who had a lot to
learn.
The
media was not only hurting him, he said — he was not looking for any
agreement or even any response — but hurting his negotiating
capabilities, which hurt the nation. And that went for Saturday Night
Live, which might think it was very funny but was actually hurting
everybody in the country. And while he understood that SNL was there to
be mean to him, they were being very, very mean. It was “fake comedy.”
He had reviewed the treatment of all other presidents in the media, and
there was nothing like this ever, even of Nixon, who was treated very
unfairly. “Kellyanne, who is very fair, has this all documented. You can
look at it.”
The
point is, he said, that that very day, he had saved $700 million a year
in jobs that were going to Mexico, but the media was talking about him
wandering around the White House in his bathrobe, which “I don’t have
because I’ve never worn a bathrobe. And would never wear one, because
I’m not that kind of guy.” And what the media was doing was undermining
this very dignified house, and “dignity is so important.” But Murdoch,
“who had never called me, never once,” was now calling all the time. So
that should tell people something.
The call went on for 26 minutes.
Without a strong
chief of staff at the White House, there was no real up-and-down
structure in the administration—merely a figure at the top and everyone
else scrambling for his attention. It wasn’t task-based so much as
response-oriented — whatever captured the boss’s attention focused
everybody’s attention. Priebus and Bannon and Kushner were all fighting
to be the power behind the Trump throne. And in these crosshairs was
Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff.
Walsh,
who came to the White House from the RNC, represented a certain
Republican ideal: clean, brisk, orderly, efficient. A righteous
bureaucrat with a permanently grim expression, she was a fine example of
the many political professionals in whom competence and organizational
skills transcend ideology. To Walsh, it became clear almost immediately
that “the three gentlemen running things,” as she came to characterize
them, had each found his own way to appeal to the president. Bannon
offered a rousing fuck-you show of force; Priebus offered flattery from
the congressional leadership; Kushner offered the approval of blue-chip
businessmen. Each appeal was exactly what Trump wanted from the
presidency, and he didn’t understand why he couldn’t have them all. He
wanted to break things, he wanted Congress to give him bills to sign,
and he wanted the love and respect of New York machers and socialites.
As
soon as the campaign team had stepped into the White House, Walsh saw,
it had gone from managing Trump to the expectation of being managed by
him. Yet the president, while proposing the most radical departure from
governing and policy norms in several generations, had few specific
ideas about how to turn his themes and vitriol into policy. And making
suggestions to him was deeply complicated. Here, arguably, was the
central issue of the Trump presidency, informing every aspect of
Trumpian policy and leadership: He didn’t process information in any
conventional sense. He didn’t read. He didn’t really even skim. Some
believed that for all practical purposes he was no more than
semi-literate. He trusted his own expertise — no matter how paltry or
irrelevant — more than anyone else’s. He was often confident, but he was
just as often paralyzed, less a savant than a figure of sputtering and
dangerous insecurities, whose instinctive response was to lash out and
behave as if his gut, however confused, was in fact in some clear and
forceful way telling him what to do. It was, said Walsh, “like trying to
figure out what a child wants.”
By
the end of the second week following the immigration EO, the three
advisers were in open conflict with one another. For Walsh, it was a
daily process of managing an impossible task: Almost as soon as she
received direction from one of the three men, it would be countermanded
by one or another of them.
“I
take a conversation at face value and move forward with it,” she said.
“I put what was decided on the schedule and bring in comms and build a
press plan around it … And then Jared says, ‘Why did you do that?’ And I
say, ‘Because we had a meeting three days ago with you and Reince and
Steve where you agreed to do this.’ And he says, ‘But that didn’t mean I
wanted it on the schedule …’ It almost doesn’t matter what anyone says:
Jared will agree, and then it will get sabotaged, and then Jared goes
to the president and says, see, that was Reince’s idea or Steve’s idea.”
If
Bannon, Priebus, and Kushner were now fighting a daily war with one
another, it was exacerbated by the running disinformation campaign about
them that was being prosecuted by the president himself. When he got on
the phone after dinner, he’d speculate on the flaws and weaknesses of
each member of his staff. Bannon was disloyal (not to mention he always
looks like shit). Priebus was weak (not to mention he was short — a
midget). Kushner was a suck-up. Sean Spicer was stupid (and looks
terrible too). Conway was a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka should never have
come to Washington.
During
that first month, Walsh’s disbelief and even fear about what was
happening in the White House moved her to think about quitting. Every
day after that became a countdown toward the moment she knew she
wouldn’t be able to take it anymore. To Walsh, the proud political pro,
the chaos, the rivalries, and the president’s own lack of focus were
simply incomprehensible. In early March, not long before she left, she
confronted Kushner with a simple request. “Just give me the three things
the president wants to focus on,” she demanded. “What are the three
priorities of this White House?”
It
was the most basic question imaginable — one that any qualified
presidential candidate would have answered long before he took up
residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Six weeks into Trump’s
presidency, Kushner was wholly without an answer.
“Yes,” he said to Walsh. “We should probably have that conversation.”
How He Got the Story
This story is adapted from Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,
to be published by Henry Holt & Co. on January 9. Wolff, who
chronicles the administration from Election Day to this past October,
conducted conversations and interviews over a period of 18 months with
the president, most members of his senior staff, and many people to whom
they in turn spoke. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Wolff says, he
was able to take up “something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in
the West Wing” — an idea encouraged by the president himself. Because no
one was in a position to either officially approve or formally deny
such access, Wolff became “more a constant interloper than an invited
guest.” There were no ground rules placed on his access, and he was
required to make no promises about how he would report on what he
witnessed.
Since
then, he conducted more than 200 interviews. In true Trumpian fashion,
the administration’s lack of experience and disdain for political norms
made for a hodgepodge of journalistic challenges. Information would be
provided off-the-record or on deep background, then casually put on the
record. Sources would fail to set any parameters on the use of a
conversation, or would provide accounts in confidence, only to
subsequently share their views widely. And the president’s own views,
private as well as public, were constantly shared by others. The
adaptation presented here offers a front-row view of Trump’s presidency,
from his improvised transition to his first months in the Oval Office.
*Excerpted from Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff (Henry Holt and Co., January 9, 2018). This article appears in the January 8, 2018, issue of New York Magazine.
