VIKING

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Copyright © 2020 by Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Markay, Lachlan, author. | Suebsaeng, Asawin, author.

Title: Sinking in the swamp : how Trump’s minions and misfits poisoned

Washington / Lachlan Markay, and Asawin Suebsaeng.

Other titles: How Trump’s minions and misfits poisoned Washington

Description: New York : Viking, [2020]

Identifiers: LCCN 2019038462 (print) | LCCN 2019038463 (ebook) | ISBN 9781984878564 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781984878571 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Trump, Donald, 1946– —Influence. | Trump, Donald, 1946– —Friends and associates. | Presidents—United States—Staff. | Presidents—Press coverage—United States—History—21st century. | United States—Politics and government—2017– | Washington (D.C.)—Social life and customs—21st century.

Classification: LCC E912 .M38 2020 (print) | LCC E912 (ebook) | DDC 973.933092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038462

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019038463

Cover design: Colin Webber

Cover images: (Washington Monument) Detroit Photographic Co. Retrieved from the Library of Congress; (Capitol Hill) Brandon Bourdages / Shutterstock; (hand) Andrey Kuzmin / Shutterstock

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For Richard Henszey, the most brilliant man I’ve ever known.

Lachlan

For my father’s mom—Khun Ya Sanit. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you as much as you were for me. I love you, now and always.

Asawin

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Another Shitstorm in Fucktown

Tic Tacs and Uncle Toms

Joe, Mika, and “That Bitch with the Tranny Dad”

Talking the Talk

“Okay, Lad, That’s Enough”

“Get Him the Fuck Away from Me”

Raining on the POTUS Parade

“Did You See This Crap?”

“Why Would I Talk to You?”

“Get Me a Plan!”

“I Wish Him the Very Best”

“Definitely Somebody Knifing Him”

“She’s Been Getting Fatter?”

“Lovely Jennifer”

“I Don’t Know the Truth”

“Fake News Specialists”

“He Can’t Handle Jail”

“Oh, We’ll Find It”

“You’re a Piece of Trash”

Make America Rain Again

“I Have No Clients Whatsoever”

“That Chapter Isn’t Closed”

“An Average Nobody”

Acknowledgments

About the Author

ANOTHER SHITSTORM IN FUCKTOWN

Asawin’s chest puffed up. Lachlan rested his head in his hand and sighed. A hairsplitting dispute over a months-old news story looked as if it was about to turn into an all-out brawl in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel between a senior White House official and a reporter covering the West Wing.

It was both an absurd spectacle and a perfect encapsulation of our escapades as journalists in the Trump era in Washington, D.C. We were surrounded by the gilded splendor that is the Trump hotel lobby, flanked by a crew of mobbed-up-in-Trumpworld luminaries with whom we’d been having farcically overpriced cocktails and very amiable conversation just a few minutes earlier. And suddenly the whole thing was degenerating into a screaming match, with each party looking increasingly likely to throw a punch to the teeth.

The evening had kicked off after work at the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue, an ostentatious, now-defunct monument to the journalism profession that, when it wasn’t singing the praises of reporters for “comforting the afflicted,” rented out its glitzy rooftop lounge and patio to host receptions for the city’s political elite. It was April 24, 2018, and the former FBI director James Comey, whom President Donald Trump had famously canned the year prior, was hosting one of those receptions: an open-bar party and book signing for his autobiography, A Higher Loyalty. We were two of the political reporters who came for the free alcohol and food and maybe to ask the fired FBI chief a dumb question. It was clear from the outset that nobody was going to be getting any news or provocative responses from a buttoned-up, on-script Comey that evening.

Asawin—already a couple drinks in and buoyant—waited in line to ask him to sign a copy of his book for “Donald J. Trump.” Comey let out a polite chuckle and demurred. Instead, he signed the book for Asawin’s parents. The Thai American Daily Beast reporter felt like being cute, so he asked Comey if he wanted to join the two of us at the Trump International Hotel, situated roughly equidistant from the Newseum and the White House, to “do some Fireball shots.” Again, Comey delivered a robotic giggle or two and politely declined. Lachlan, the more conservative and less willing to make an ass out of himself of the duo, stood a few feet away from Comey and Asawin, literally face-palming. He had to remind Asawin that the Trump hotel “does not serve Fireball. I keep telling you this.”

When we reached the lobby of “Trump D.C.,” Comey was of course nowhere to be found, but all was not lost. Our cocktail companions ended up including an assortment of Trumpworld regulars such as Richard Grenell, a veteran Republican operative who would soon be confirmed as Donald Trump’s ambassador to Germany. Everything had been friendly until Cliff Sims showed up.

Sims is best known these days as the author of Team of Vipers, a tell-all book about his time in the White House. But back then, he was still working in the West Wing as the director of message strategy. He was friends with the crew we were hanging out with, but we’re not sure whether they mentioned, in inviting him over, that we were there as well.

A few months earlier, we had written a story about which Sims was clearly still seething. The piece (which we’ll get into in more detail later) reported that two Trump aides, Andrew Surabian and Sims, would likely be tapped as two of the White House’s new point men on crisis communications related to all things Russia. To this day they deny that it was accurate (it was). We’d taken our share of the shouts of “fake news!” that had become routine in covering the Trump White House, and while they continued to criticize the piece months later, Surabian at least had come to laugh about it, and we’d rib each other over the piece virtually every time we ran into each other.

Sims, though, was a different story. Our relationship was still on the outs when he sauntered up to our table, a knee-height glass one surrounded by couches adjacent to the Trump hotel lobby bar. Multiple people sitting at the table knew things hadn’t been smoothed over with Sims, and they decided to stir shit up. Two people quickly made a point of bringing up our disputed story about Surabian and Sims, prompting us to insist that, actually, the story was completely factual.

We thought it was all fun and games at this point. Sims didn’t like that and made his feelings clear. The next thing anyone knew, he and Asawin (or Swin as his friends call him) were standing inches apart, noses nearly touching, and screaming their cases as others in attendance attempted to break things up. Sims decided he didn’t want to deal with this anymore and extended his right hand to shake Swin’s goodbye. (Swin and Sims would speak in the weeks after this incident. Each would say, over a laugh, that he essentially wanted to rip out the other’s throat at that particular moment at the hotel. Relations have thawed between the reporter and the former Trump adviser; in fact, Swin would honest to God prefer it if more Trump officials and associates would get in his face instead of ratfucking behind his back.)

Sims is a lifelong teetotaler, and was as sober at the time as Donald J. Trump always claims to be. Swin, on the other hand, was a few rum and Cokes deep and thoroughly pissed off. He rejected Sims’s overture, loudly stating at least three times, “I’m not shaking his fucking hand!” Sims threw up his hands and headed for the door. At one point between the couches and the lobby exit, Sims turned around and made eye contact with Swin in one final taunt. The Daily Beast reporter took the bait and pursued him across the lobby, yelling the whole time. One of Sims’s friends, in an effort to defuse the situation, tried to lure Swin back to the table. He placed a hand on his shoulder. Swin whirled, pushed him, and nearly knocked him over a piece of furniture.

By that time, Sims had made it to the exit, and no real blows had been thrown. Still, the shouting and drunken emotions didn’t stop, and hotel security soon appeared, ready to eject Swin. Grenell, grinning widely, motioned to security that things were under control, and they backed off. Swin walked over to the bar to order more booze. Lachlan was thoroughly embarrassed and talked to Grenell for the rest of the evening, dodging whenever possible his idiot, truculent colleague.

Eventually, we both needed to get home to our respective girlfriends. In our shared cab ride home, Lachlan flatly stated, “I think my new favorite memory of us covering Trump together is you almost getting into a fistfight with a White House official at Trump hotel.”

It was a casually ridiculous episode typical in our three years covering Donald Trump and his era in Washington. And it helped underscore just how thoroughly the old rules had gone out the window.

By that time, the Trump hotel itself had already become a symbol of the bare-naked corruption and gaudy opulence that defines the forty-fifth president’s tenure. We were there mingling with people with whom we’d become friendly, even though they think we’re part of a borderline-treasonous disinformation apparatus and we think they’re part of an incompetent graft machine. This irreconcilable conflict had nearly resulted in a physical altercation at the center of political power in Trump’s Washington.

And in true Trumpian fashion, though tempers flared, threats were made, and heated words were exchanged, in the end not much was accomplished.

—

THERE used to be a different geographic center of the American political universe. A block from the White House, just across the street from the Treasury Department, sits the storied Willard InterContinental Hotel. It’s a historic place, dating back to 1850; the building itself was actually constructed thirty years earlier. Abraham Lincoln lived in the Willard for ten days before his stint in the White House. Martin Luther King Jr. prepared his “I Have a Dream” speech in the hotel. And if you believe the Willard staff, it’s where the term “lobbying” was coined, by President Ulysses S. Grant, to refer to the special interests congregated in the hotel lobby, hoping to bend the ear of government officials who frequented the place.

The story is apocryphal—the term dates back over a century earlier, and to the British House of Commons—but in the Washington of Grant’s day the Willard lobby was indeed a place where political business was done, mostly informally through D.C. social networks and handshake deals over high-end cocktails. Eventually, the term “lobbying” took on a meaning of its own, divorced from the physical structure from which it ostensibly originated, at least in American political parlance. A century and a half later, few would associate lobbying with an actual building lobby.

Until, that is, the era of President Donald Trump.

In Trump’s Washington, the physical locus of political power isn’t the Willard. And it isn’t even the White House. It’s that damned lobby in the Trump International Hotel down the street, at 1100 Pennsylvania Avenue. Administration officials, members of Congress, cable news personalities, political influence peddlers, corporate executives, the president’s legal teams, chaos agents, and foreign diplomats all regularly flock to its sprawling, gilded atrium to mingle, suck up, be seen, bask in the omnipresent political glow that pervades the place. Omnipresent, at least, until a certain someone is out of office.

Sharply dressed hosts and waitstaff shepherd visitors into plush, low-seated couches and love seats throughout the sprawling lobby. Cocktail prices run into the three figures. Bar food includes strips of thick-cut, candied bacon served hanging from a plated clothesline. A giant American flag adorns the wall behind the crystal-covered bar, right above an array of large flat-panel televisions, two of which are perpetually tuned to CNN and Fox News. The sound is only ever turned up on the latter, at least whenever we’ve been around.

The hotel occupies one of Washington’s oldest and most historic structures, the Old Post Office, and its clock tower offers one of the most stunning panoramic views of the capital’s skyline. But prior to the Trump Organization’s renovation, it had descended into a depressing state of disrepair. The only publicly accessible portion was a dingy food court. Even his most vehement detractors must concede that Trump did, in fact, make that place great again.

The hotel’s quintessentially Trumpian hallmarks were evident early. Abutting the southern end of D.C.’s bustling downtown business district, the hotel sits right on the commuting route of many professional Washingtonians. Just as Trump’s presidential campaign kicked into gear, and scared the shit out of much of D.C.’s professional class, those commuters began seeing a new, very large sign on Pennsylvania Avenue. It read “TRUMP: Coming 2016.” The sign referred to the hotel, but no one in a city built on and obsessed with politics could miss the electoral double entendre. (It even drew a complaint to the Federal Election Commission alleging it was effectively a campaign sign. The FEC disagreed and let the sign stay.)

We visit the hotel often, simply because there is no better place in Trump’s Washington to meet and talk with the most plugged-in people in the president’s orbit. Corey Lewandowski virtually lives there. Ryan Zinke was frequently seen holding court when he led the Department of the Interior. Eric Bolling, one of the president’s favorite pundits, routinely makes the rounds, beaming and shaking hands with a litany of fans and acquaintances. Rudy Giuliani, Wilbur Ross, Stephen Miller, David Bossie, Sean Spicer, Donald Trump Jr., Steven Mnuchin, William Barr, Brad Parscale, Lindsey Graham—walk in on any given weeknight, and chances are better than decent you’ll see several of them dining and partying. The night Anthony Scaramucci was fired from his brief stint as White House communications director, we headed to the Trump hotel, figuring there was no place in D.C.—including the White House—that we’d be more likely to spot him. And sure enough, shortly after we arrived, he wandered out of the hotel’s steak house over to the elevators, pale as a ghost, declining to comment on the way.

Reporters know that the hotel is the place to mingle with the people running the country and those who have their collective ear. So too do the legions of people—from lobbyists to foreign dignitaries—seeking to influence the president and those around him. The whole place is a mecca of (legal!) corruption, where the powerful can hobnob with one another and be feted by those seeking to break off a piece of their influence with the president.

And the best part about it, if you’re President Donald Trump, is the whole thing is making you richer. The president can still draw profits from the trust he created upon taking office and into which he deposited his extensive assets. And when he leaves office, even that thin veneer of recusal won’t be an issue any longer. So every dollar spent on Trump hotel cocktails while schmoozing a White House aide in the hopes of getting in the president’s good graces is a dollar added to the president’s balance sheets. He’s created the incentive for that influence-seeking, and the venue for it, and he’s collecting on the back end. No one ever said he wasn’t shrewd, at least when it comes to a simple grift.

All of this is to say that we are fully aware of our complicity in Trump’s monetization of the presidency. Just as the capital’s influence-industry professionals mingle at the Trump hotel to win favor with the administration, we mingle to meet sources and in the hopes of building relationships and getting good, useful information. That inevitably requires the purchase of significant volumes of libations and an occasional meal. In the summer of 2017, we perched up on the patio of the hotel during a political fund-raiser, which drew throngs of protesters outside. One protester angrily demanded to know why we were financially supporting the president. We explained that it’s part of the job. Swin told the protester he understood and sympathized with what she was saying but that he was tired and if he didn’t have a drink while being forced by his bosses to go to the Trump hotel on a weeknight, he might blow his brains out before he turned thirty.

Our patronizing of the hotel is a microcosm of the degree to which Trump has subsumed Washington. Doing business in D.C. these days largely means doing business Trump’s way—whether your business is government, lobbying, or journalism. That’s true to a degree with every administration, which naturally alters the town’s workings in dramatic ways. But Trump is such a uniquely narcissistic figure who demands unparalleled loyalty to himself personally that he, more than perhaps any prior president, individually defines and shapes the political environment in which he serves.

That has made for some very, very stupid times in the nation’s capital. Fortunately for us, it has also meant no shortage of stories about the absurd ways in which the government and those Washingtonians who depend on and benefit from it have turned American politics into a circus of crookedness, incompetence, and rank dishonesty. (Well, more so than usual.)

To understand Washington in the Trump era, it is of course necessary to understand Trump himself. But after nearly five years of 24/7 media coverage, most Americans probably know more about our president than they care to. And we’re far from the only journalists writing books attempting to dissect, explain, and reveal new details about this ridiculous moment in American political history.

To our minds, though, understanding this moment requires looking not just at the man at the top but at the people below him, the legions of minions and misfits who rode Trump’s coattails to some of the most powerful political positions in the world. Many of them share his defining characteristics—narcissistic, corrupt, shallow, dishonest, shameless—and though Trump himself is the face of everything that happens in his administration, the D-listers, as we’ve come to call them, are in most cases those who actually put his will into effect.

It was a quirk of our approach to the Trump administration, as two reporters who had never covered any previous White House, that we ended up focusing as much on those surrounding the president as on the president himself. We suddenly found ourselves competing with some of the best reporters in the world for some of the craziest stories in modern American politics. And we’re the first two to admit that we were regularly chasing some of our esteemed colleagues on some major scoops.

We were left to figure out what value we could bring to the increasingly insane daily political conversation. And we naturally settled into a role as storytellers for the people behind the headlines. The Daily Beast is a small newsroom that routinely punches above its weight. But when The New York Times or The Washington Post shifted the tectonic plates of Washington with a groundbreaking exclusive, we’d approach it with a different goal in mind: What are the thousands of midlevel functionaries toiling away in relative obscurity thinking and doing about the increasingly shambolic state of the administration that employed them? Before long, we’d carved out a niche as two White House reporters bringing an unvarnished view of the state of Trumpworld from the perspective of aides and advisers who often weren’t making the headlines but were forced to deal with their fallout.

A deeper understanding of the Trump presidency requires examining the unique, often comical, frequently disturbing goings-on in the corridors of power outside the Oval Office. We’re aiming to take you inside the Trump sausage factory, where grifters, ideologues, hangers-on, and unquestioning foot soldiers put the Trump vision for America into effect and frequently attempt to leverage it for their own personal, petty ends.

Our story begins before Trump’s political ascent and revisits his time as a New York real estate developer and reality-television star. We will take you through the campaign with the amateurish and ethically questionable crew that ushered him into office. We’ll revisit the early days of the Trump White House, its utter dysfunction, leaking, backbiting, and internal witch hunts, and the inevitable recriminations that enveloped the West Wing. And we’ll delve into the pro-Trump media apparatus, the lobbyists and influence peddlers seeking to cash in on his presidency, and the federal agencies trying to make policy under the weight of constant infighting and scandal. We’ll check in with the crew of lawyers who, so far, have managed to keep the president in office and out of the clink. And we’ll dig deep into the sketchy crew of foreign businessmen who have, as of this writing, landed the president on the verge of impeachment.

This story involves many people of whom you’re no doubt aware—folks like Steve Bannon, Corey Lewandowski, Scott Pruitt, Hope Hicks, and Rudy Giuliani. Others may be characters you’ve never heard of—Trump’s favorite teleprompter operator, the Fox producer who paved the way for the cable news presidency, the obscure environmental policy aide caught up in soap opera–style drama that effectively brought down a White House chief of staff. And where we recount stories that have already made it into the news, we will do so in ways that, hopefully, illuminate previously unknown details of the sagas that set the stage for and defined Trump’s first term in office.

And we’ll also try to make you laugh—in abject terror, at least.

—

WE also want to be very clear about something else.

Originally, we had asked our agents and our publisher if this book that you’re currently flipping through could be titled “Another Shitstorm in Fucktown: The Donald J. Trump Odyssey.” If we had our druthers, that would be the title. Alas, everybody in a position of power in making this decision told us we couldn’t do that. For one, it would make it harder to sell a book with such a name at Walmart or Costco or any other kid-friendly retailer.

After nearly three years of covering and investigating what Swin once publicly described as an “autocratic game-show host personality cult,” we thought it felt like the only title that fully captured the essence of what the Trump era was really like.

Too many reporters and books on the Trump years (including the bestseller Fear, which was ostensibly written by Bob Woodward but had the distinct feel of Rob Porter’s strong influence) cover this era without the necessary combination of horror, tar-black humor, and gleeful disregard for “respecting the office” for which we believe the occasion has called.

We’re Washington-based reporters for The Daily Beast, a New York–headquartered digital news outfit that we affectionately refer to as a highbrow tabloid. The institutional mantra is “nonpartisan but not neutral,” and that’s the attitude we’ve brought to our White House coverage and that we’ve tried to bring to this book. We’re not going to insult your intelligence by pretending to play it down the middle. And we hope you’re looking for a take on this ridiculous time in our country that doesn’t try to pretend that everything is fine and normal. It isn’t.

The initial inspiration for the premise of Sinking in the Swamp wasn’t any work of political nonfiction; it was a book about gangsters, the one on which the Martin Scorsese classic Goodfellas is based. That 1985 book, titled Wiseguy and written by the veteran crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi (who later co-wrote the screenplay with Scorsese), told the story of the American Mafia through the eyes of Henry Hill, a gangster turned FBI snitch. Hill wasn’t a marquee figure in gangland or a recognizable big name like a Gambino or a Siegel or a Luciano. He was, at least at one point, a total obscurity with no pop culture name ID.

“There’d been several books about mob bosses,” Pileggi once said, describing how and why he wrote his book. “But [with Wiseguy], it was like getting ahold of a soldier in Napoleon’s army. That’s who I want. I want to know how it worked inside. Detail, detail, detail. Everything is detail.”

This premise—telling the story of the famous boss and organization through the viewpoint of some foot soldier—seemed perfect not just for the mob but for the decadent political universe of Donald Trump. When we initially discussed coauthoring a book on Trumpworld, one thing neither of us wanted to do was write the story through the eyes of a Trump, a Kushner, or a Bannon. It’d been done many times, too often, and sometimes to very boring and useless effect.

We wanted to tell the story of Trump, but through the eyes and misadventures of his lieutenants, his cable news collaborators, his hangers-on, his diehards, the lobbyists, the “shadow lobbyists,” the grunts, the fixers, the ratfuckers, the operatives, and the unknowns-but-influentials. To tell this story from the ground up—from the worm’s-eye view—we needed to find dozens upon dozens of Trumpworld’s Henry Hills.

The idea of taking this storytelling template from gangland to the Trump orbit would probably make perfect sense to, of all people, Donald Trump himself.

“You have to treat ’em like shit,” Trump told his buddy the architect Philip Johnson, according to a 1992 New York magazine piece. The “’em” in that sentence was referring to women.

“You’d make a good mafioso,” Johnson told Trump, to which the future U.S. president replied, “One of the greatest.”

Decades later, numerous critics, including Trump’s fired FBI director, James Comey, would compare Trump to a mob boss, though less flatteringly so. This comparison also came up during a private meeting at the White House that we had with Sarah Huckabee Sanders, at the time still working in the West Wing as Trump’s most senior spokesperson and as a treasured confidante.

We were meeting her at her office in early 2019 in part to discuss the prospect of arranging an interview with her boss for Sinking in the Swamp. We explained the above premise and the Goodfellas analogy to Sanders, who seemed at least superficially interested, given her stated fandom for the acclaimed film. At one point, Swin conceded that there are, in fact, differences between La Cosa Nostra and the Trump administration, to which Sanders mockingly thanked him for generously admitting there were distinctions between Trump and a gore-soaked mobster.

“It’s true. You guys have stronger NDAs,” Swin replied.

“Yeah, but in the mob they’ll just kill you!” Sanders shot back. She scribbled down our interview request on a sheet of paper and at least said she would bring it up with the president.

As you can likely guess, despite our entreaties to Donald Trump’s senior spokespeople, including the back-to-back White House press secretaries Sanders and Stephanie Grisham as well as his former media gatekeeper Hope Hicks, we did not, ultimately, get to interview the president for this book, or anything else. We’ve asked numerous times and regret not having the opportunity to ask him about all the things we’re writing about that would invariably have made him mad to our faces. In the course of our investigations, interviews, and digging for the book that you’re holding, we communicated with at least 174 knowledgeable sources—administration officials, lawyers, Trump friends, operatives, party apparatchiks, media figures, lobbyists, strategists, villains, victims, professional bullshitters, backstabbers and backbiters, campaign brass, the works—to bring you this story.

A number of people, perhaps some very powerful and very wealthy people, will want to tell you that this book is “fiction” or “fake.” Our official position directed at anyone who tries to tell you that is “All our news is real, and every orgasm you ever thought you gave someone was fake.”

Reading this book, you might walk away with the sense that we have been two little piglets in the Trump years, gleefully inhaling the muck and empty calories at the trough of President Trump’s lunacy. Indeed, we tried to reflect as much of the dark humor of this presidency as possible and have painted a portrait of what we believe are some of the defining characteristics and depravities of the Trump universe. By no means should this be mistaken for a numbness to the human costs of the era, on which numerous reporters and advocates have done incredible work. For us, the use of humor is a form of professional and personal novocaine.

In the end, the American people get the elected government they deserve. And that is punishingly true, very much so, of the election and administration of the forty-fifth president.

TIC TACS AND UNCLE TOMS

Throughout Donald Trump’s long-running history of legal threats and maneuvers, there has been rampant bluffing, oftentimes taking the shape of verbally violent bluster. In his earlier real estate days, he was known to privately threaten businessmen, lawyers, and other adversaries with “my friends in Jersey” if he felt someone had crossed him. It is unclear if his threats of Mafia violence were backed up by anything remotely actionable or within his power to authorize, or if he was just making a big-boy noise. Most people who heard this simply rolled their eyes and went about their day.

President Trump was never able to shed his affinity for mob-don lingo, or at least his pop culture approximation of it. He’d repeatedly blast his former fixer and attorney, Michael Cohen, for being a snitch and a rat for cooperating with the feds and making him look bad, for instance. And Trump sues, or more often emptily threatens to sue or inflict pain via the justice system, as if failing to do so will cause him erectile dysfunction.

But long before he tore from Hillary Rodham Clinton the title of “leader of the free world,” and a decade before he shot to right-wing political stardom as a garrulous vessel for racist birtherism, Donald John Trump was himself the target of some pettier, less high-profile legal action. This was due to the fact that during the late 1980s and early 1990s Trump was—allegedly!—busy ripping off some poor schmuck’s board-game idea.

In 1990, around the time the tabloid press was having a field day with Trump’s brutal split from his first wife, Ivana, a real estate and insurance agent in Michigan named Walter Brockington III (then in his late twenties) briefly became a blip in The Donald’s long life. In a lawsuit that year, Brockington alleged that Trump had stolen his idea for a Monopoly-esque board game that the real estate mogul created with Milton Bradley and simply called Trump: The Game. For his alleged trouble and dispossession, Brockington sought $50,000 in damages.

It was one of a litany of lawsuits and legal actions, frivolous or otherwise, that have consumed seemingly the entirety of Trump’s seven decades on the planet, including his characteristically litigious presidency.

According to the suit filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit, Brockington claimed he had written Trump a letter in 1988 requesting financial support to move his game, Mogul, from drawing board to reality. Brockington claims that he received a letter back from the Trump Organization stating it was not interested. But the following year, Trump unveiled a new product with Milton Bradley, with Trump: The Game being sold for twenty-five bucks a pop.

Brockington’s lawsuit ended up going nowhere, and Trump’s board game proved to be a poorly selling dud. But to this day, Brockington believes the similarities between Trump: The Game and his letter to Trump—“the instructions, and the mechanics of Trump’s game,” he said—defied coincidence, thus proving he must’ve been “ripped off” by a supposed titan of industry he once so admired.

“He is a character,” Brockington said during the 2016 GOP presidential primary. “I don’t think he has what it takes to be president. When you look at what he said about immigrants, when you look at what he said about President Obama, he’s a bad example.

“I don’t think he’s gonna make it as president, or the nominee for the Republican Party,” Brockington added, chillingly but without much prescience.

—

IN the years that paved the way for Donald Trump’s ascendance to the presidency, he accumulated cultural power the old-fashioned way: through a potent combination of coastal tabloid intrigue, Hollywood star-fucking, weaponized baby-boomer racism, red-meat conservative media, and trashy, anesthetizing television.

In early 2004, the reality-TV kingpin Mark Burnett and the National Broadcasting Company gave Trump an extraordinary platform to bombard millions of American voters with pure, uncut pro-Trump propaganda: the big, fat lie that he was somehow a master of the universe. But if you blame NBC’s The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice for fueling President Trump’s rise and the cult of personality that propelled him into the Oval Office, then logically you must first blame the butterfly effect of the cast of Friends deciding to throw in the towel after a mere ten seasons on the air.

In the closing months of 2002, the actors playing Monica, Phoebe, Rachel, Joey, Ross, and Chandler on the beloved NBC sitcom all decided, and publicly announced, that season ten, to wrap in 2004, would be their curtain call. At the time, Jeff Zucker—who would soon become a nemesis of President Trump’s as president of CNN—was the head of NBC Entertainment; he and other top execs scrambled to lock down adequate filler to help close the void that was about to be exposed by the evaporation of “Must See TV” on Thursday nights.

The network, in what at the time seemed like a bold gambit, slotted a new reality show—Burnett’s Apprentice—in for Thursday-evening family viewing. And the move paid off. The first season, in which unknown businesspeople competed in menial contests for the honor of Donald Trump’s televised approval, was a hit and featured some of the more memorable characters such as Omarosa Manigault, who would become an ally on Trump’s 2016 campaign, a senior official in the Trump administration, and finally a high-profile backstabber and antagonist.

“Who knew that the replacement for ‘Friends’ would be Donald Trump?” Zucker told The New York Times all those years ago. Or that the replacement for Barack Obama would be Donald Trump?

—

BEFORE The Apprentice took off on NBC, Trump, with his string of colossal real estate catastrophes and bullshit-artistry, was at risk of cementing his status as a perennial D-lister and pop culture also-ran. With the success of the reality-TV series, he rose to the more respectable B-list and got a mere taste of the full-throttle political adulation that in time would be his for the taking.

He ruled over the set and series as his own personal fiefdom, barking orders as a morally vacant patrician acting out without fear of consequence, on or off camera.

One disgusting habit to which he’d routinely submit staff and the cleaning crew involved Tic Tacs. The hard-mint product became part of the Trump canon when The Washington Post published the infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” tape in the final weeks of the presidential campaign. On the tape, Trump explains to Jeb Bush’s cousin Billy that he popped some Tic Tacs before meeting the women he assaulted. It would lead to Tic Tac’s jumping on the bandwagon to denounce Trump, with a tweet reading “Tic Tac respects all women. We find the recent statements and behavior completely inappropriate and unacceptable.” But there’s another gross Tic Tac story hiding further back in Trump’s past.

On the set of The Apprentice, as Trump would sit behind the boardroom table, getting more and more bored as he waited to shoot his scenes, he would busy himself by sucking on Tic Tacs. He would spit them out behind the table, leaving them on the floor for staff to discover and, to their horror, to clean up.

“Trump used to take Tic Tacs, and suck out the outer layer, and stick them on the floor of the set—it was fucking awful,” one person who worked on Trump’s NBC show told Swin during the election. (All Apprentice staffers and alumni had to speak anonymously so as to not run afoul of strict, intimidating nondisclosure agreements, a Trump hallmark even then.)

One Apprentice colleague “started this tradition of keeping Trump-used Tic Tacs, and it was one day our goal to take them to a genetic lab” with the aim of cloning him, or at least getting the half-dissolved candies analyzed by a professional, this person added.

In a particularly stomach-turning moment of reporting, Swin was actually shown a photo of a container of Trump’s used Tic Tacs. It was as upsetting as it sounds.

—

DURING the tail end of the 2016 election, Swin, working closely with one of his Beast colleagues, Gideon Resnick, did a lot of reporting on Trump’s reign of terror at The Apprentice and attempted to show what his starring role and involvement with the production said about how he’d tackle being chief executive of the United States. The pair spent weeks cold-calling and contacting numerous former and then-current Apprentice staff, leading to many of them anonymously breaking their million-dollar-plus NDAs, all in the service of dishing revealing tidbits on the kind of man DJT really was.

Some of the stories Swin and Gideon broke included Trump repeatedly mocking one of his supposed friends and “celebrity apprentices,” Marlee Matlin, an Oscar-winning actress who happens to be deaf, as “retarded.” (President Trump would later use the term to habitually trash his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, as a “retarded,” “weak,” incompetent apparatchik.) During tapings of the series, Trump often scribbled notes as he sat at the long table and judged contestants in “the boardroom,” the climactic Trump Tower setting for his game show. One person familiar with these notes and who cleaned up the boardroom after tapings found one of the slips of paper, which read in Trump’s handwriting, “Marlee, is she retarded??”

A different Apprentice staffer recounted, “In the boardroom, he would talk to her like she was ‘special.’ He took her deafness as some kind of [mental] handicap.” This staff member recalled being in the control room for taping of an episode on which Matlin was a contestant and listening as Trump made an “insensitive” remark on the actress’s deafness while she was seated opposite Trump. “She responded; she stood up for herself,” this source recalled. However, this interaction was relegated to the cutting room floor of the episode. The Apprentice tapes of these cut scenes, potentially a treasure trove of clips and faux pas that would be humiliating to Trump, have been squirreled away from the public, with Trump’s buddy Mark Burnett, the Apprentice honcho, sticking to his vow of silence.

“People would just laugh this [stuff] off; it was just the culture,” the Apprentice staffer noted. “But now it’s a little more serious because it’s not a joke anymore!” Another witness said Trump “would kind of do these mock voices,” approximating a deaf voice. “Marlee was a popular person on the show . . . He would take the low road and mock her disability.”

The day after that report published in October 2016, Matlin responded with a written statement on Twitter, reading “Recent media reports have circulated that Donald Trump allegedly referred [to me] as ‘retarded.’ The term is abhorrent and should never be used. The fact that we are talking about this during a very important moment in American history has upset me deeply.”

She continued, “As a person who is Deaf, as a woman, as a mom, as a wife, as an actor, I have a voice. And I’m using that voice to make myself heard . . . and vote.”

Another Apprentice story Swin broke later that same month, when, citing multiple anonymous sources, The Daily Beast ran the headline “Donald Trump Kept Calling Lil Jon an ‘Uncle Tom’ on Celebrity Apprentice.” While making the thirteenth season of his NBC show, Trump caught a glimpse of the rapper/contestant wearing an Uncle Sam getup to help advertise hair-care products. After spotting this, Trump began exclaiming that Lil Jon, a black man, was a real “Uncle Tom!”—seemingly unaware that “Uncle Tom” is a racial slur typically directed at black men accused of being hyper-subservient to white people. When staff tried to tell Trump that what he really meant was “Uncle Sam,” not “Tom,” and that the latter would be taken as rather offensive to the recording artist, Trump refused to back down.

“No, that’s a saying, it’s Uncle Tom,” Trump said with a straight face. There are even several unaired takes in Apprentice footage of Trump trying to figure out the difference between “Uncle Sam” (bueno) and “Uncle Tom” (no bueno), with the TV host somehow not able to grasp what was and wasn’t problematic. His stubbornness on the issue set off a mini-crisis among producers and others on the set, with multiple producers having tried, to no avail, to persuade him not to use the term. One of the executive producers even called Trump to plead with him to drop the “Tom.”

None of this worked.

Their fears were realized when Trump, well, ended up calling Lil Jon an Uncle Tom to his face in the boardroom.

Shortly before publication of this story on a Friday night, Swin emailed Hope Hicks, one of Trump’s top aides and his media gatekeeper, with a standard comment request. Hicks had, for the most part, ignored Swin’s requests for comment during the many months of the campaign. Within twelve minutes of receiving Swin’s inquiry, however, Hicks messaged back a terse statement: “This is simply untrue.” (As a mildly amusing aside, when Hicks sent this, she thought she was emailing a female reporter. The following year, Swin and Lachlan would meet Hicks face-to-face for the first time, for a meeting in what had become Donald Trump’s West Wing. During the initial minutes of our conversation, Hicks kept looking at Swin in a gently bizarre, inquisitive way that became abundantly clear as to why, when at one point she interrupted him midsentence to say, “I’m sorry, I thought you were a girl.” Lachlan promptly began chortling his ass off in the chair beside Swin. Since 2015, Swin and Hope had communicated only in the form of written electronic comms. She had assumed “Asawin Suebsaeng” was a lady’s name. Who—who isn’t Thai—could possibly blame her?)

The Daily Beast published the article regardless. Before the clock struck midnight that Friday evening, Lil Jon himself helped knock down the Trump campaign’s explicit denial, tweeting a statement confirming the report. “When this ‘Uncle Tom’ incident happened on Celebrity Apprentice in the boardroom several of my castmates and I addressed Mr. Trump immediately when we heard the comment,” the rapper said. “I can’t say if he knew what he was actually saying or not, but he did stop using that term once we explained [its] offensiveness. I also want to be clear that I don’t agree with many of the statements Mr. Trump has said during his current run for President.” (As president, Trump would later claim at a press conference, when asked by a reporter about his track record of racist behavior, that he had no idea who Lil Jon was, despite having hosted him on his Apprentice set and having tweeted about the rapper in the past.)

Several other Apprentice-related scoops came out that month, but one in particular has stuck with Swin for all these years. It was the one story in the batch that, more so than the rest, truly underscored what kind of commander in chief Donald Trump would be. The story, which ran after the torrent of sexual assault and harassment allegations against the 2016 Republican presidential nominee had already started, had Donald Trump engaging in an alleged cover-up of a sexual attack, all to protect one of his famous friends.

During the filming of the 2011 Celebrity Apprentice season, Trump welcomed the Oscar nominee Gary Busey into the fold. Busey, of course, came with his fair share of personal baggage. In 1999, the actor had been investigated for domestic violence after his wife alleged that he “grabbed her shoulders and wrestled her to the ground,” according to the authorities. Busey was freed after posting bail. Two years prior to that, a United Airlines flight attendant accused Busey of hitting her. No subsequent criminal charges were filed.

But Trump has frequently felt compelled to stick up for his notorious acquaintances, even those accused or convicted of serious crimes, whether they be Mike Tyson, Don King, Paul Manafort, or Gary Busey. It didn’t hurt that Busey, in 2012, had endorsed Trump for the presidency back when the real estate mogul had previously flirted with running to unseat Barack Obama. (Trump would instead align himself with the eventual GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, whose campaign had actively sought the birther businessman’s imprimatur. Years after that, Romney was elected senator in the Trump era, during which he mainly made national headlines for gently criticizing something Trump said or did that made him feel personally uncomfortable.)

But during the shooting of the 2011 season, Busey allegedly did something on the set that Trump himself would consider “naughty.” Others would consider the alleged act sexual violence. The alleged incident occurred when the celebrity contestants were tasked by Trump to sell some art at a New York gallery. At one point, the cast and crew were taking a break outside, where one female employee, who spoke to Swin under the condition of anonymity, was allegedly grabbed by Busey. “They had booze for the [gallery party]; I think Lil Jon ordered it,” she said. “And so, a few of the celebrities wanted to do a shot together after we finished [setting up] for the show. We all took a shot together and then went to stand together for B-roll time. We were smoking cigarettes outside, and Busey was standing next to me. And then at one point, he grabbed me firmly between my legs and ran his hand up my stomach and grabbed my breasts. I didn’t know what to do. So I made this joke, ‘Oh, I’ve never been sexually harassed by a celebrity before!’ Then he grabbed my hand and put it [over] his penis and said, like, ‘I’m just getting started, baby.’”

At that point, her friend, visibly alarmed, said she intervened and jumped in between her and Busey to put a stop to it. Word traveled fast, and the alleged victim’s colleagues and friends were absolutely livid. Some reportedly demanded that Busey be kicked off the show, and internal discontent grew so loud that it rippled up the chain of command, from management and executive producers all the way to Donald Trump himself.

The real estate TV star not only turned a blind eye but laughed it off while doing so. Busey was permitted to remain on the show for the duration of the season, until he was “fired” by Trump and finished in sixth place. His alleged victim told Swin that she didn’t pursue the matter further for fear she would be blackballed or suffer professional consequences. (Two years after the alleged assault, Busey would return to Trump’s Apprentice fiefdom, if you’re wondering what kind of blowback he suffered.)

According to multiple sources, when Trump welcomed Busey into the boardroom, he did little more than giggle about the incident. “Keep your hands to yourself,” Trump instructed Busey. “Gary, did you do a bad thing? . . . Got your hands where they’re not supposed to be? . . . Bad boy, a very bad boy.”

Multiple people witnessed the two of them yukking it up as Trump was supposed to be punishing him. Through a representative, Busey emphatically denied the allegations at the time The Daily Beast first published them.

During the final weeks of the 2016 election, Swin spent a lot of time investigating Trump’s era of reality-TV stardom. Some of the stories he came across were frivolous; others were darkly humorous. But this one showed you basically everything you need to know about Trump as leader of the free world. Here he was presented with serious, credible allegations of a sexual assault, on his watch, and he gladly opted to protect the alleged perpetrator, even having already deemed him guilty of the act. He brushed it aside. In doing so, he personally covered up the scandal.

What would a president Trump do, then? Swin asked himself. What would he cover up as commander in chief? What if there was a massive sexual assault scandal in, say, the military during his presidency? How willing would he be to look the other way?

Three years of the Trump administration did little to assuage Swin’s concerns on this. When Roy Moore was accused of child molestation, Trump didn’t care. He privately slammed Moore’s multiple accusers of spewing made-up bullshit, and he and the Republican Party ended up doubling down on Moore’s Senate candidacy, hoping that Moore would defeat his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones, and that they could then start hurling the accusations down the memory hole. Moore, however, lost the Alabama race. Even with all the horrifying allegations against Moore, President Trump would still tweet in 2019, “I have NOTHING against Roy Moore.”

Furthermore, the official position of the Trump White House is that literally all of the women who came forward since 2016 to accuse the president of sexual misconduct or sexual violence are simply lying.

When his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was hit with an on-record allegation of attempted rape, President Trump didn’t just support him through the confirmation fight. He made Kavanaugh’s victory over the accusation a cornerstone of Republican messaging during the 2018 midterm elections. To this very day, the alleged attempted rapist’s lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land remains one of Trump’s most treasured accomplishments in his life.

Simply put, there is no shortage of allegedly violent, brutal men whom President Trump—or Apprentice Trump—is utterly and giddily willing to shelter and reward.

—

IF you lived through American popular culture since the late twentieth century, it was exceedingly difficult not to stumble across example after example after example after wretched example of overpaid filmmakers and well-rated TV shows depicting The Donald as a charming fancy-lad and ultimate elbow-rubber. If you thought you could watch the Sandra Bullock–Hugh Grant rom-com Two Weeks Notice without getting an eyeful of Donald Trump, think again, because he shows up for a cute, thirty-second cameo to needle Grant’s character and intimate that he’d steal away his one true love. Any consumer of television and Tinseltown flicks in the 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century couldn’t get away from Donald Trump if his or her life depended on it.

In the most basic, stereotypical (or archetypal) sense, Trump is a flouncing glob of “Hollywood”: the sleaze, the boorish self-aggrandizement, the backstabbing, and the constant bullshitting—it was all there, in the least likable, cattiest meaning of the loaded term. Though far too many famous friends, and famous former friends, put up with The Donald’s incessant star-fuckery and gala ass-kissing for decades, his craving for the approval of Hollywood’s ruling class naturally earned him some celebrity enemies long before he entered the West Wing.

This included women who refused to sleep with him. In late October 2016, the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign organized a conference call with reporters, the primary motive being to allow the pro-Clinton Mexican American actress Salma Hayek to tell journalists why she hated Trump so much.

“He calls us criminals, but who is the one who has a lawsuit for Trump University?” the Desperado star said on the call. “He calls us rapists, but who has a lawsuit [against him] for raping a young girl?” (The Hollywood actress was likely referring to an accuser, who used a pseudonym to file a suit in Manhattan federal court, who alleged that Trump had raped her when she was just thirteen years old, at a 1994 sex party at the estate of the pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.)

On the same conference call, Hayek also claimed that Trump had once tried to date her and, when she turned him down, retaliated by—anonymously, no fingerprints—planting a false and unflattering story about her in the National Enquirer, a Trump-aligned supermarket tabloid that would find itself in the crosshairs of federal investigators after Trump became president.

“Not my type!” Hayek exclaimed to reporters.

Hayek spoke for many in the business.

By March 2011, when Trump had only begun to transform into a national hero of the Far Right, the comedian Lewis Black did a riff on his semi-regular “Back in Black” segment on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, knocking Trump for his “dictator”-like qualities. This segment was titled “Trump 2012.”

“There’s one candidate who’s got me really excited: Donald Trump!” the comedian said with Stewart at his side. “Now, you might say he’d make a terrible president. I mean, the guy bankrupted his own casino. A casino! Where the house always wins! Unless it’s Donald Trump’s house.”

Black went further. “What this country needs is a crazy Third World dictator, and Donald Trump has what it takes to be that,” he continued. “He’s already got a plane with his name on it, solid-gold buildings, a harem! . . . He’s even got the look of a dictator! Now, is [Trump’s] hair any less crazy than [Kim Jong Il’s] hair? And he’s got what every good dictator needs: a ridiculously oversized ego . . . This is what I’ve been waiting for my whole life! A president who’s not afraid to tell the truth—about being a lying asshole.”

Black had been making jokes about Trump from time to time for decades. But when he did it on Comedy Central, a notoriously thin-skinned Trump perked up.

“I did a piece about him in 2011 on how what America needs is a banana republic dictator,” Black told Swin less than two months before Election Day 2016. “His assistant called my assistant, said he wanted to talk to me. At first, it was like, ‘What? Why would he call me? No one ever called me about anything I ever did on The Daily Show. So I said I was too busy and couldn’t talk to him. I thought, ‘Wow, I’m a comic; he’s an entrepreneur—a businessman. How is it that I’m more busy than he is? That’s unbelievable.’”

But, Trump being Trump, he simply would not. Let. It. Go.

“A call came the next day, and I just said no,” Black recounted. “I didn’t want to talk to him to legitimize him. That’s how I felt . . . If I accept his call, that legitimizes him. And I didn’t want to give him any little sense of legitimacy that I could have given him by answering the phone.”

For a frame of reference, this is what an angry call from Trump can sound like after he catches something on the TV that annoys him: In a piece published by Politico in January 2016, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson wrote about one especially memorable voice message he had once received from the real estate nepotism baby. “About 15 years ago, I said something nasty on CNN about Donald Trump’s hair,” Carlson recounted. “I can’t now remember the context, assuming there was one. In any case, Trump saw it and left a message the next day. ‘It’s true you have better hair than I do,’ Trump said matter-of-factly. ‘But I get more pussy than you do.’”

“Click,” Carlson wrote.

Trump never got his chance to leave Lewis Black any voice mail attacking the comedian’s sex life. Black noted that he had only one other personal experience involving Trump. Unsurprisingly, it occurred in the middle of the George W. Bush administration and involved a star-studded gala dinner in Manhattan and Donald Trump whining loudly at the help. “I have been within ten feet of him at an event I was working, for some book event, at the museum—the big one, with the fucking whale thing,” Black recalled. “He was upset because he didn’t get the right table. He was yelling about it.”

In the 2016 election, Black, a self-identifying socialist, was reliably an avowed Bernie Sanders supporter. (He quipped he’d rather vote for the Pillsbury Doughboy than Hillary Clinton, for instance.) By 2020, John Cusack, another loud and proud Bernie diehard occupying an upper echelon of Hollywood fame, was still pulling hard for Bernie 2020, confident that the democratic-socialist senator from Vermont was the only candidate in the entire, sprawling Democratic field who could actually vanquish Trump. Cusack, similar to Black, had long viewed Donald Trump as a grotesque manifestation of avarice, capitalism, racist barbarity, and American empire.

In the movie War, Inc., a 2008 satire on war profiteering, the actor Ben Kingsley voices a disembodied stand-in for U.S. imperial designs, barking orders at Cusack’s assassin character through a loudspeaker connected to a large TV. As Kingsley speaks, the screen projects different photos and images representing the American id. There’s Ronald Reagan, of course. And then there’s John Wayne. There’s also Donald Trump. The use of his face earned The Donald a sarcastic special “thanks” in the closing credits of the film.

The year Trump was elected, Cusack would tweet at Swin that Trump made a “cameo” in his movie “as a joke and as we used him as an absurdist Americana authoritarian strong man in the film.” American political life, Cusack believed, was “always darker” than “the most perverse satire.”

Nearly three years later, Cusack found himself again in Washington, D.C., in part to attend a special screening and Q&A of his 2000 film, High Fidelity, in part to meet with Representative Jerry Nadler, the House Judiciary Committee chairman investigating Trumpworld. Swin met Cusack for the first time face-to-face in the lobby area of the noir-influenced Kimpton Hotel Monaco near Chinatown and asked him about his past run-ins with Donald Trump. Some of the most revealing anecdotes about Trump’s personality, and regarding what makes him tick, can be found simply by asking famous people and Hollywood stars to dish on past experiences with the guy. The actor Tim Robbins (star of The Shawshank Redemption, and yet another Bernie Sanders booster) told The New York Times in early 2018 about the time he threw a private party for his friends at a Greenwich Village club one evening in the mid-1990s. Trump, uninvited and unwanted, crashed it, simply so he could get someone to snap a picture of him photobombing the ascendant Hollywood actor. “It was weird,” Robbins said. “He wanted a photo with me because I was famous. He used to do that a lot, by the way. He wanted to be photographed with famous people all the time.”

Cusack, for his part, had two lasting impressions of the then future president, based on two separate incidents over the past three decades. Neither painted a flattering portrait, and both convinced Cusack years ago that The Donald was a sociopathic sleazeball.

One incident, he told Swin, occurred at a heavyweight championship fight two decades prior. Cusack showed up and was escorted to the VIP section near the ring. He shuffled past well-established businessmen and various luminaries and supposed titans of industry on his way to his seat to watch the two professional fighters beat the hell out of each other. Sitting down, Cusack peered to his left, to discover to his dismay and great annoyance that right behind him, in the second row, was Donald Trump and the future First Lady Melania. Cusack did his best not to make eye contact with either of them, fearing that the businessman would initiate an awkward conversation about doing deals, or Candice Bergen, or a potentially fictitious yacht orgy Trump attended, or some other shit.

Soon enough, Cusack noticed Melania peeking at him and grinning widely. Then Cusack noticed that she . . . wouldn’t stop smiling and staring at him. At that point, Donald took notice, leaned forward, looked at John, looked at Melania, looked at John, looked at Melania. Then Donald Trump cracked an obsequious grin, tipping his hat to John’s fame, apparently.

“Hey, my girlfriend REALLY likes you,” Donald told John.

Cusack shuddered, smiled, and waved politely—“Well, nice to meet you,” he said—before turning away in quiet horror, having come face-to-face with a flirty, maybe-horny Donald Trump.

The other Cusack incident occurred several years earlier, when the actor was researching his role for the political drama City Hall, in which he shared top billing with Al Pacino and Bridget Fonda. Cusack was at the actual city hall in Manhattan, shadowing Democratic aides and politicians, when he found in his character research a thoroughly Trumpian anecdote about Donald Trump. (Lachlan and Swin have since heard this same story from two sources in New York politics and business.) Many years ago, Trump was at city hall talking to some senior aides, asking them if they would rename a prominent Manhattan street Trump Avenue to stoke his towering ego. The aides appeared perplexed and proceeded to gently explain to Trump that the city couldn’t do that. New York City, they told Trump, had a tradition of not naming streets after people who are still alive. The city could name streets after famous and beloved individuals, but after they had passed on.

Trump didn’t miss a beat or flinch in his reply.

“Oh, Fred’s in his late eighties,” the future president shot back.

Frederick Christ Trump would die in 1999, three years after City Hall came out. But here Donald was, standing in the middle of the real-life city hall, using the upcoming corpse of his rich daddy in a vain effort to get a street named after Donald J. Trump.

To this day, President Trump—having become the most powerful person on the face of the planet and perhaps the single most famous human being alive in this young century—still carries around a chip on his shoulder about all the famous actors, musicians, models, athletes, agents, and directors who now see him as little more than a fascist creep. During his first term in office, his stage mom–style lust for fame and recognition among the “elite” usually manifested itself in the form of ill-tempered online activity.

“Washed up psycho @BetteMidler was forced to apologize for a statement she attributed to me that turned out to be totally fabricated by her in order to make ‘your great president’ look really bad,” the forty-fifth president tweeted in early June 2019. “She got caught, just like the Fake News Media gets caught. A sick scammer!”

At the time, Trump was in London, meaning the tweet was posted around 1:00 a.m. his time. The president was for a moment preoccupied with Bette Midler while overseas on a state visit to the United Kingdom. Maybe it was easier than facing up to what was actually happening on that side of the pond, where he was being disrespected by an entirely different set of famous people. The young royals—William, Harry, Kate—refused President Trump a photo op with them.

The celebrity snub likely stung hard, even if the president tried not to let it show. But since entering the White House, Trump has complained privately about media reports that portray the British royal family as despising, and not wanting to hang out with, him, but loving Barack Obama. In 2018, the U.K. publication The Times reported that “Prince Charles and Prince William were unwilling to meet Donald Trump on his visit to Britain, leaving the Queen to greet the US president alone.” A Whitehall official told the paper that the queen’s meeting that year with President Trump was “kept to the bare minimum. The Queen will do her duty, but among the wider family, they were not as enthusiastic as they were when [President Barack] Obama came over.”

JOE, MIKA, AND “THAT BITCH WITH THE TRANNY DAD”

It was the middle of the day on the fourteenth floor of Trump Tower, where, as the candidate’s campaign to destroy Hillary Clinton’s hopes and dreams of West Wing occupancy kicked into high gear in late 2016, a ragtag group of Trump loyalists monitored and synthesized the unending stream of news coverage about their candidate. Oftentimes, when most of the campaign’s staffers had already gone home, Team Trump’s skeleton crew of media watchers was left working the midnight shift in the campaign’s so-called war room. War rooms are the rapid-response nerve centers of political campaigns, where staffers huddle around television sets, keeping tabs on any developments in the race or mentions of their candidates, ready to blast out a statement or a media pitch if a moment in the news cycle presents itself.

The news cycles of 2016 were consumed by Trump to a degree unusual even for a major-party presidential candidate. That made his campaign’s war room a central component of the campaign apparatus. And it also meant long hours for those tasked with sifting through the streams of cable news coverage and drip drip of reporting on their candidate’s various flaws, foibles, and outrageous campaign trail pronouncements and actions.

Trump himself rarely ever set foot in his own campaign offices. Staffers recalled fewer than half a dozen times throughout the campaign—including election night—when he was spotted roaming the fourteenth floor. So on this quiet, average day in Trump Tower, the war room’s denizens were stunned when they turned their heads to see that DJT, as campaign staffers knew him, had quietly sauntered up next to them. Some of them had never actually met the candidate, and here he was, calmly surveying his political operation.

No one knew what to say to the candidate. But he soon piped up. As he stood in front of his staffers, Trump motioned toward the war room televisions, each tuned to a different cable news channel.

“Which do you think is worse,” the future president asked, to no one in particular, “CNN or MSNBC?”

They were taken aback. Did he really want to know their opinions on the relative merits of various TV news channels? But one of the staffers chimed in.

“Well, sir,” he said sheepishly, “I think CNN is worse. MSNBC at least admits that they’re liberal. But CNN claims they play it down the middle, when they’re actually just as bad.”

Trump lit up. “Totally agree! Totally agree!” he exclaimed, hands raised in characteristic palms-forward gesticulation. He launched into a soliloquy about the misdeeds of what he would soon call the “fake news media,” and CNN in particular. But he quickly turned his ire back to MSNBC, and specifically Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the co-hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe program. Longtime Trump friends and acquaintances, Joe and Mika provided him with one of the few non-Fox platforms on cable news during the campaign that occasionally defended him, or at least took his candidacy seriously.

If that had earned them any goodwill with Trump at the time, he wasn’t showing it. He was more interested in gossiping about the two mainstays of the New York media scene. And, ooh boy, did he have some juicy gossip to share with these midlevel campaign staffers whose names he didn’t even know.

“You know,” he said, clearly amused with himself, “nobody else knows about it, but I know about Joe and Mika’s little apartment in the Upper East Side.” At the time, the longtime Morning Joe co-hosts were rumored to be engaged in a long-running affair. They would get married a couple years later, in late 2018. But during the campaign, their relationship was very much not officially public.

“One day, I’ll tell you all about it,” Trump promised his war room.

Here was the future president of the United States in his campaign headquarters, quizzing top staffers not on the latest polling data or the campaign’s ad strategies but on the love lives of two pundits about whom he simply loved to dish gossip.

Days later, Trump took another rare swing through his campaign’s offices. But this time he had a couple guests in tow.

He was giving a personal tour of his beloved war room to none other than . . . his dear pals Joe and Mika.

Multiple people recounted this story to us over the first two years of the Trump White House. For those present, and their campaign colleagues who inevitably heard about it through the unending stream of high-school-cheerleader-esque gossiping that ceaselessly consumes Trumpworld, it was a simultaneous illustration of a number of idiosyncrasies that, the whole country would soon learn in depressing fashion, define Donald Trump the man and have come to define his presidency.

Trump’s relationship with Joe and Mika, and his larger relationship with the pundit press, is akin to a really bad marriage. Each party despises the other, constantly hurls insults, threatens, demeans, berates, and promises that, goddamn it, this is the last time, I swear I’m going to leave you. But neither of them leaves, because when it comes down to it, they’re in love, and they need each other. Trump needs the media to hang on his every word, and if that means they put on an air of outrage and derision, well, that’s better than being ignored. And the punditocracy needs Trump and his endless stream of slights and outrages. They provide unending fodder for mindless and banal panel discussions, inevitably stacked with Republican strategists and Democratic strategists, titles seemingly devised purely for cable news chyrons with which to banner these reliably unenlightening television shout-fests.

Ground zero for the Trump-media marriage during much of the campaign was Morning Joe, where Brzezinski and Scarborough would profess their disgust with Trump’s more outlandish, sexist, and xenophobic comments while adding to-be-sure paeans to Trump’s—and by extension their own—down-home, middle-American appeal. Trump supporters, “formerly called common-sense conservatives, are considered drug-addled losers who are too stupid to determine what is in their best interest,” Scarborough wrote in an April 2016 column in The Washington Post. “The left-wing’s ‘What’s the Matter With Kansas?’ is now the GOP establishment’s ‘What the Hell’s Up With Upstate New York?’”

The New York pundit burnishing his real-American credentials soon became a Trump coverage genre of its own. Sure, he wants to throw brown people in camps, but golly someone’s finally listening to the blue-collar Appalachian coal miner. Yes, he’s threatening to use the Justice Department to prosecute political opponents. A bit extreme, but you know what? Americans are sick and tired of business as usual in Washington.

Trump professed his appreciation for the efforts—“You guys have been supporters, and I really appreciate it,” he told Joe and Mika on one occasion—but behind the scenes he was gossiping about their long-running affair. Beyond his immediate family, Trump has no relationship that he does not define, wittingly or unwittingly, in terms of his own impulsive satisfaction. He loves being praised, he loves to gossip, and above all he loves being talked about. And he’ll share his thoughts with anyone who will listen—be it one of his tens of millions of Twitter followers or a lowly war room staffer in his campaign headquarters.

—

THE Joe and Mika episode illustrated another essential Trump characteristic—a feature, not a bug—that dominated his campaign and would go on to do so in his presidential administration. The candidate frequently concerned himself with issues at best tangentially related to matters at hand (in this case, getting himself elected president). He was prone to distraction and consumed by gossip and petty feuds. And he took any criticism as a personal slight against him and went scorched earth in response.

It fell to the crew of staff assembled on the fourteenth floor to try to manage those instincts. Those who worked for the campaign continue to believe that Trump was far smarter and more adept than anyone gave him credit for. His understanding of the type of campaign that would propel him to the White House was second nature. And ideas for running that campaign that seemed outlandish to political professionals were, these staffers felt, strokes of genius during a campaign that defied all conventional wisdom on the conduct of a presidential candidate.

But these same staffers are the first to admit—and, indeed, have done so in countless private conversations with us—that Trump’s erratic behavior made it virtually impossible to stay on message and present a coherent, compelling political platform. Offhand remarks about Mexican rape fiends, deeply personal criticism of a Gold Star family, flippant pledges to dismantle crucial U.S. military alliances—these were all products of the same seat-of-the-pants political approach that ended up being so successful. (Once in the Oval Office, Trump seemed to take this approach toward everything, foreign and domestic, whether it came to Baltimore or Beijing.) But they also put Trump’s campaign staffers in the position of trying to keep this freewheeling political apparatus from going off the rails.

That would’ve been a challenge for the most seasoned and respected political operatives in the business. Initially, Trump’s team was . . . not that. When he got into the race for real, he faced a crowded Republican presidential field stacked with some of the party’s most prominent names and most promising political contenders. And those competitors had sucked up virtually all of the top-notch Republican political talent in the country. Most of those who weren’t committed to a candidate believed, as much of the political establishment did, that Trump didn’t stand a chance in the general election. None of them were eager to sign on with a dead-end campaign that would saddle them with all the baggage of Trump’s boisterous and caustic and potentially toxic brand.

That left Trump to draw from a limited pool of political operatives who ranged from the inexperienced to the fanatical to the downright corrupt. And few arms of the campaign illustrated the ad hoc nature of the effort’s ranks of operatives better than those tasked with being the public voices of the campaign.

By late 2016, one of the more garrulous faces of the operation was the senior communications aide Boris Epshteyn, a loud, brash, hulking Republican staffer. The Russian-born Epshteyn had ridden Sarah Palin’s brief ascendance to moderate prominence in GOP circles. He’d taken an ill-fated run through some New York financial services firms before returning to politics. During his stint on John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, where he was a Palin handler, staffers recalled him as a hanger-on with few official responsibilities and an outsize opinion of himself. One former colleague recalled that Epshteyn would frequently brag about how much he could bench-press, until his colleagues one day found a workout bench in the basement of their offices and challenged him to put his muscle where his mouth was. Epshteyn proceeded to put up something on the order of a colossal 350 pounds, the former colleague recalled.

We asked him about that story years later. “It was 425,” Epshteyn insisted with a grin.

After the McCain campaign, on which Epshteyn had helped run the Palin team’s rapid-response operation, he signed on as the vice president of legal affairs for a financial services firm called West America Securities. A few years later, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority expelled the firm altogether. Epshteyn, though ostensibly overseeing compliance matters for the firm, wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing.

He went on to found a boutique investment firm, TGP Securities, that soon found itself embroiled in litigation. A client accused TGP in federal court of accepting $100,000 in fees but failing to deliver financial backing for a theme park in Texas. The case was settled and dismissed in 2017. But the lawsuit shed some light on Epshteyn’s view of himself as a connected, high-level political consultant. The plaintiff in the case recalled Epshteyn bragging about his extensive relationships with high-level Republican officials and claiming that he “carried a lot of clout within the party.” He “suggested that the Plaintiff should Google him and watch his videos on YouTube” and “claimed that he was a regular guest on MSNBC, CNN, CNBC, Fox News, and radio programs nationwide and provided analysis on topics including political strategy, financial markets, international affairs, future elections, and party relations.”

That rosy description of Epshteyn’s influence would’ve come as a surprise at the time to virtually anyone working in Republican politics, where he was known, if at all, as a bumbling and marginally competent comms operative. But Trump’s ascent brought his largely marginal crew up with him, and Epshteyn had quickly become one of the most prominent public faces of the Republican front-runner and eventual nominee. He was a constant presence on cable television, where he did what any good Trump surrogate was expected to do: go to the mat to defend Trump against any and all criticism, no matter its merits. Trump was caught on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women? Boris was there to rejoin with a total non sequitur: “You think the mothers of the Benghazi victims think about this banter from eleven years ago?” Trump viciously attacked the father of a slain U.S. serviceman? Criticism is just an effort “to obscure the fact that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have failed at keeping this country safe.”

Boris is more of a blunt instrument than a subtle operative, and for a high-level political professional turned commentator—in 2017, Epshteyn would land one of the nation’s highest-profile posts in opinion journalism at the local-media conglomerate Sinclair—he appeared woefully ignorant of some basic aspects of how the American government functions. That was plain during a Twitter exchange with Lachlan in 2018, when Epshteyn sought to defend the president’s constitutional authority to impose tariffs on national security grounds against congressional efforts to roll back that authority. Lachlan pointed out that tariffs are squarely in Congress’s constitutional domain and that the president has only statutory authority—that is, granted by Congress, which can rescind it—to unilaterally impose such measures. No, no, Boris insisted, “national security” is the prerogative of the president, and therefore affixing that label to a tariff or any other measure automatically confers authority over it on the president. It was a totally nonsensical, constitutionally illiterate argument but fairly representative of Epshteyn’s tenuous grasp on the basic functions of the American political system.

But what Epshteyn lacked in basic knowledge of American civics, he more than made up for in the one characteristic that has always propelled people to success in the employ of Donald J. Trump: unquestioning, vehement loyalty to his boss. There was no outlandish statement that could not be justified, no criticism of Trump that wasn’t rooted in malicious double standards and personal animus, no Trump policy proposal that wouldn’t be an unqualified boon for the Republic.

No campaign surrogate can be expected to criticize his principal, of course, but most at least benefit from an understanding of the office to which their boss is aspiring. Epshteyn seemed to lack that, yet here he was, a very large cog in the veritable nerve center of the Trump campaign, the war room.

Epshteyn would also collect a stable of enemies during the campaign, those who found him to be an inconsequential oaf worthy of leaks, scorn, and subterfuge. At times, the feuding would resemble less a seasoned political operation and more a high school cafeteria. Epshteyn and Bryan Lanza, Trump 2016’s deputy comms director, hated each other so much that Boris would run informal polls throughout the office, trying to determine who was better liked among Trump staffers and who had more friends.

Even placed in such a prominent post, Epshteyn couldn’t help but let some of his more juvenile instincts flare from time to time. On one occasion, when some Trump family members were visiting the fourteenth floor, Melania and Tiffany both took seats among the war room desks, beside some of the staffers in the office. These comms officials were at this point surrounded by some of the candidate’s immediate family and were trying their hardest to simply stare straight ahead at the TVs and remain professional in the esteemed presence of Trump royalty.

Boris got a good laugh out of that later. “You’re sitting next to two of the most beautiful women in the world and you can’t even look at them!” he ribbed his colleagues.

Andrew Surabian joined the campaign relatively late in the race, in August 2016, but quickly impressed some of its higher-ups. He had previously been running the U.S. Senate campaign of Louisiana’s Rob Maness, a Tea Party–style Republican. And that’s where Surabian’s roots were. A more libertarian-minded Republican from a suburb of blue-collar Worcester, Massachusetts, he was previously the political director for the Tea Party Express, where he experienced most of his early political education.

Neighboring Surabian in the war room was Steven Cheung, a bicoastal, Asian American operator with eclectic career tastes and, relative to much of the Team Trump hodgepodge, a certain amount of experience in presidential politics at the time. Prior to the Trump campaign, he was a Las Vegas–based promoter and public relations executive for the mixed martial arts league Ultimate Fighting Championship. In the summer of 2016, he cold-called the campaign looking for a gig on Trump’s staff. He landed one and quickly earned a reputation as one of the hardest-working staffers on the fourteenth floor, a reputation that endeared him to the Trump family and earned him a White House post the following year. In the halls of the White House, President Trump, who could never seem to remember Cheung’s name, would still take to stilted small talk whenever the two would bump into each other.

The sleep-deprived, media-addled compatriots of the Trump war room were paid another rare visit from DJT himself in early September 2016, this time on the night of Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s respective “commander in chief” forums hosted by NBC’s Matt Lauer aboard the decommissioned USS Intrepid. Following the forum, Cheung, Surabian, senior comms adviser Jason Miller, and assorted members of Trump’s campaign staff were still huddled and at work in the Trump Tower war room, blasting out emails and press releases and keeping watchful eyes on cable news coverage just a couple hours shy of midnight. Their eyes bloodshot, their veins not nearly pumped enough with caffeine.

Suddenly, around 10:00 p.m., entered the Republican nominee, the future First Lady Melania, and other members of the Trump clan. Right after arriving on the near-empty floor in the dead of night, Trump quizzed his aides on his performance and what the press was saying about his portion of the forum. “How was I? How did we do?” he’d inquire. “How’s the coverage?” The campaign hands across the board, of course, told him he was world class as always and that the news coverage wasn’t that bad, considering how much the press seemed to hate, hate, hate Donald Trump. It was well understood that if you gave the boss the wrong piece of bad news or pinned the blame on him, you’d risk getting shipped to a prison camp in Siberia.

Looking pleased with himself, the candidate nodded and proceeded to sit down at an empty table on an old black office chair situated directly behind his staffers. Melania dutifully sat near him, keeping almost totally silent, looking bored out of her mind. The Donald, meanwhile, was taking in all the coverage on the nearly dozen mounted TVs, all switched to CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the occasional local channel.

It was while watching his war room’s wall of television sets that evening that Trump began doing something conspicuously, well, weird.

At one point, Trump started swinging around while seated in the desk chair, swiveling, doing multiple 180s, while staring down at the carpet and shuffling his feet like a child and tapping them against the floor. Campaign staffers noticed the swiveling and initially didn’t know what to make of it. The GOP presidential nominee then said out of nowhere, as he kept tapping his foot, “This is some really good carpeting. Where did this come from?”

Tap, tap, tap.

“Great carpet, where did this come from?”

Swivel, tap, tap-tap.

“Really fantastic. Fantastic stuff,” Trump continued.

Staffers present didn’t know what to say, because there was literally nothing remarkable about the carpeting across that floor at Trump Tower.

It was ordinary blue corporate-office floor covering.

But for some reason, the future president’s addled mind was absolutely fascinated by it. He had just come off an evening of weighing in on some topics of international and national importance, such as talking about how Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “made a terrible mistake on Libya” and how she and the rest of Team Obama “complicated the mistake by having no management once they bombed you-know-what out of Qaddafi.”

Back at campaign HQ just a couple hours later, Trump was back focusing on something more his speed: cable news and his precious blue carpet.

He sat in the war room, swiveling, sighing, and watching TV for about fifteen minutes before telling Melania it was time to go to bed. On the way to the elevator, he thanked the handful of aides left working late in the war room.

The following year, after Donald and Melania officially made the move to Washington, he had thousands of meters of new carpeting installed in the White House, including in the West Wing lobby and the Roosevelt Room, the latter of which had its Obama-era beige carpet torn out and thrown away. This was part of the Trumps’ redesign and redecoration of the White House, a process costing millions of dollars and earning condemnation from The Guardian’s design critic, who censured the new president, saying, “A boring carpet, greige wallpaper and two giant eagles won’t make the White House great again.”

About two years after that, President Trump again found himself in the U.K., doing his very best to impress the royal family and conservative leadership. At Westminster Abbey, according to a press pool report at the time, the president “paused at the white marble slab commemorating Lord Byron, the poet politician, and asked what stone the flooring was made from.”

—

DURING the constant melees of the Republican presidential primaries, Donald Trump defined himself by his enemies: the Mexicans, the Muslims, the Low-Energy Jebs, the Little Marcos, the Lyin’ Teds, the insufficiently subservient members of the media class.

One of these enemies who was especially adept at getting on Trump’s nerves was the NBC News correspondent Katy Tur, who would go on to write a memoir of her time covering the campaign and land an MSNBC anchor gig during a prime daytime slot. In early July 2015, three weeks following the candidate’s Mexican-rapist launch at Trump Tower, he sat down with Tur for a one-on-one interview at his eponymous tower, a thirty-minute taped conversation that quickly devolved into the Republican presidential candidate getting snippy about Tur’s questions and her personality.

“Oh, give me a break, Katy, go ahead, next question,” Trump said after Tur asked him about civilian casualties in Iraq that his “bomb the hell out of ISIS” foreign policy could cause.

“International diplomacy is a delicate thing. You have to watch what you say, and how can anybody expect that you’re going to be able to get into the White House and watch your mouth, when you were so widely panned for these . . . Mexico comments? How are you going to be able to hold your tongue and not piss off other countries?” Tur asked, presciently.

“Do you want to change the word, are you allowed to use that word on television?” he responded.

When Trump resumed demagoguing his fake immigrant crime statistics and Tur pushed back, Trump told her she was being a “very naive person.” When she seemed to lose her train of thought for a moment, a visibly annoyed Trump yapped, “Come on, try getting it out, try getting it out. I mean, I don’t know if you’re going to put this on television, but you don’t even know what you’re talking about. Try getting it out, go ahead.”

This animosity continued well into the following year, and Trump clearly wasn’t inclined to let it go. The following December, Trump called “Little Katy” a “third-rate journalist” in the middle of a campaign rally, prompting Trump supporters to look her way and lustily boo her. During the same event, Trump lumped her in the category of media “scum.”

At a press conference in July 2016, Tur asked Trump if he had “any qualms about asking a foreign government” to “hack into the system of anybody’s in this country,” referring to Trump’s famous public wish that Russian intelligence would find and distribute Hillary Clinton’s “30,000 emails that are missing.”

When she attempted to ask a follow-up question, the candidate shot back, “Be quiet, I know you want to, you know, save her . . . Now, if Russia, or China, or any other country has those emails, I mean to be honest with you, I’d love to see them.”

In her book, Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History, Tur wrote candidly about how Trump routinely made her a prominent object of hatred and about how candidate Trump once planted an abrupt, unwanted kiss upon her cheek, shortly before his appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe in November 2015. “Before I know what’s happening, his hands are on my shoulders and his lips are on my cheek,” she wrote. “My eyes widen. My body freezes. My heart stops.”

In the years since, the hard feelings and animus on Trump’s end have yet to abate. Starting during the campaign, Trump would privately assign her a six-word nickname that was . . . somewhat unique to the rest of the 2016 traveling press corps. To friends and advisers, he’d bitterly refer to the NBC News reporter simply as “that bitch with the tranny dad.”

Her biological father is named Zoey Tur (born Robert Albert Tur), a pilot and journalist who garnered plaudits for work covering events such as the 1992 Los Angeles riots and the O. J. Simpson car chase. During the 2016 election, Zoey Tur called Trump a “fascist” and “mentally ill” in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter and referred to Trump campaign stops as “his Nuremberg rallies.”

None of this went unnoticed by said “fascist,” who held all of it against the Tur family.

Two years before Trump launched his presidential bid, Bob Tur started hormone treatment to become Zoey. And ever since the days of the 2016 race, she will forever be known in President Trump’s mind as that “tranny” with the “bitch” kid who annoyed the billionaire demagogue so frequently during his big, loud run for office.

TALKING THE TALK

One of the most important people in Donald Trump’s life whom you probably never heard of is “Gabe.”

To most people who have heard Trump shout his name, that’s all they know him by: just “Gabe.” The reason a lot of people—particularly meddlesome political reporters seeking to do profiles on Trump’s inner sanctum—do not know who he is, what he looks like, or what his “deal” is, is that there is an unofficial protection racket, operating within and without Trump’s West Wing, set up to keep Gabe’s name out of the papers and glossy magazines. Multiple well-known Trumpworld personalities chided us throughout the course of our reporting on Gabe, even for some of our more mundane questions, such as “What’s his last name?”

Some of these people lied to us and insisted that they knew nothing about Gabe, or didn’t know his last name, or weren’t sure what he’s up to these days. Others responded indignantly, telling us to mind our own business and that Gabe doesn’t want anything to do with us, that he’s a private citizen and doesn’t deserve to be dragged into the limelight.

Call him private if you like, but Gabe is perhaps the most powerful Trumpworld figure you’ve never heard of. That’s due to his inordinate control over the words that come out of the president’s mouth.

Gabe’s last name is Perez, for what it’s worth. One of the reasons we know this is through an offhand mention by one of Trumpworld’s most reviled denizens, Corey Lewandowski, who briefly refers to Gabe in Let Trump Be Trump, a 2017 book credited to Lewandowski and his friend and fellow ex-Trump aide David Bossie, the latter of whom is markedly less of an asshole than the former.

So why is Gabriel so vital to the forty-fifth leader of the free world? In a certain respect, Gabe has mastered the art of controlling Trump’s public statements—for major speeches, during political events with party bigwigs, and at the booming, rowdy campaign rallies that helped win Trump the presidency in the first place.

All throughout the Obama era, numerous conservative media figures and right-wing blowhards (including future president Donald J. Trump) ceaselessly critiqued President Obama’s use of a teleprompter—one of the absolute dumbest conservative gripes of the Obama years, given that the display device’s ubiquity in American politics is so self-evident that complaining about its use is on par with demagoguing Obama’s use of a toothbrush or a waist belt.

So, the 2016 Trump campaign rolls around, and The Donald starts making good use of the teleprompter. As luck would have it, virtually every insufferable git on the right miraculously and suddenly found it in themselves to forget all about their collective, years-long jihad on the teleprompter.

But while Trump mimics his predecessors in his frequent use of the scrolling speech-text device, running Trump’s machinery is far more difficult than running Obama’s. Trump’s tendency to go off script is obviously well known. He’s renowned for his ability to read a crowd, and he loves getting applause. So if Trump senses during a campaign rally that he’s losing the room, he has some go-to tactics for getting everyone fired up. During the campaign, that generally meant calling for one of two things: the imprisonment of Hillary Clinton and the construction of the southern border wall.

After a while they became predictable asides. But not so predictable that a normal teleprompter operator would be able to keep up. And that was where Gabe shined. Those who would speak with us about him said Gabe had an uncanny ability to edit the scrolling text in a way that fit seamlessly with Trump’s unpredictable speaking style. He knew when to pause. He knew when to rewind to get Trump back on track. He could follow Trump’s stream of consciousness effectively enough that the boss could get right back on track with his prepared remarks even after a not-uncommon ten-minute deviation from the written version of a speech. For a presidential candidate who relied on authenticity and crowd energy during his stump speeches, that skill was an invaluable asset.

Gabe’s inclusion on Team Trump was almost a fluke. According to Bossie and Lewandowski’s book, the campaign “found Gabe by Googling ‘teleprompters.’” But once he was on the Trump Train, it didn’t take long for the Republican presidential front-runner to grow increasingly infatuated with Gabe’s mastery of the form.

To get himself in the zone to work the Trump-eprompter, Gabe was known to play Candy Crush on his smartphone to warm up his nimble fingers. In teleprompter-driven speeches, when Trump would improvise or do different sections of the prepared remarks before he’d actually reached that part of the address, Gabe would spring into action. He’d quickly scroll through the script, stealth-edit it in real time, and delete the section to accommodate Trump’s meandering oratory, to ensure Trump wouldn’t start reading words he’d already prematurely blabbed onstage.

Trump took notice and lauded Gabe for making him actually like using a teleprompter. From then on, Gabe was Trump’s guy. It got to the point where Trump would actively complain if he saw anyone else touching his precious machine. (Gabe would ultimately continue his work for Trump once the latter ascended to the White House.)

“Where’s Gabe? Get Gabe!!! GET GABE DOWN HERE NOW!” Trump would exclaim to whichever campaign lackeys were closest to him, when Gabe wasn’t around to rehearse or perform his orchestral duties.

It became something of an in-joke among a number of Trump’s campaign aides, who often didn’t even know whom he was talking about. “Who the fuck is Gabe???” they would ask among themselves. Was Trump summoning a real person? Did he screw up someone’s name (again)?

He might as well have. To the vast majority of Trumpworld beyond its own elite, Gabe is a ghost. Albeit one of President Trump’s favorite ghosts.

—

THE intense hypocrisy of Trump’s routine reliance on Gabe’s teleprompter was obvious. He’d spent years suggesting that his predecessor was incapable of delivering a speech without reading from prepared remarks. And if Trump could do so, even during a campaign defined by his freewheeling rants and nonsensical asides, it was probably better for everyone if he himself didn’t come up with his own public remarks.

One howler of an example of impromptu inanity (or insanity) came in September 2016, when Donald Trump and his team had announced that he was—ostensibly—prepared to put all that ugly, birther racism in the rearview mirror. Election Day was fast approaching, and it was time to at least do the pantomime of “presidential.”

Trump had built his political career and conservative street cred, circa 2011, on his reckless questioning of Barack Obama’s place of birth. It was an early lesson for Trump in the potency of press attention, even when the coverage itself was relentlessly negative. It’s entirely possible—Lachlan, at least, suspects this is the case—that Trump never actually thought Obama was ineligible for the presidency by virtue of his place of birth. But harping on the issue would provide Trump with two very potent political benefits: He would fire up the contingent of the political Right, which was apparently far larger than many at the time believed, that harbored racist sentiments toward Obama and thought Trump was right on the merits, or at least assumed that the black president just had to be an Other of some kind. At the same time, Trump would ensure that he would make headlines. The press, he likely knew, wouldn’t be able to resist criticizing him. To criticize him, they would have to talk about him. And the more they talked about him, the more powerful and prominent he’d become, and not just as a businessman and reality-TV star but as a voice in American politics. So what if the voice was a racist one. His original sin in the arena of national politics would also be his golden ticket.

By 2016, he apparently considered it a liability. But to jettison this from his arsenal would be to ignore what made Trump, well . . . Trump. Still, the decision was made by the future president and his senior staff that it was worth letting this one slide. In the days leading up to Trump’s first presidential debate with the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, held at Hofstra University on September 26, 2016, Team Trump tried to organize an event at the site of the Trump International Hotel in the nation’s capital. There, he would—however tepidly—relinquish birtherism at long last.

But first, the campaign wanted Trump to release an official, written statement renouncing birther conspiracy theories and declaring once and for all that baby Barack was born in the United States. His aides asked him for a short and sweet statement—just a few sentences—so they could put this to bed quickly and hopefully without causing a big fuss.

Trump convened some of his top campaign brass, including Hope Hicks and Jason Miller, on a conference call that month as he was patched in from his executive perch at Trump Tower in Manhattan. He told them he wanted to dictate a statement.

At first, his aides weren’t sure what he was going to say, and feared he would want to double down on his birther-ring leadership. After all, he had resorted to dodgy lines during the 2016 campaign when asked about the topic. “Well, I don’t know,” he’d say when pressed on whether Obama was or wasn’t foreign born. “If you believe that, that’s fine,” when reminded of the birth certificate Obama’s people released.

“Okay, are you ready?” Trump asked everyone on the call. “Okay, here it is . . .”

This kicked off what two people on the call independently described as a seven-minute, meandering spat of word-vomit during which Trump kept finding new ways to say that his birther crusade was, in fact, necessary, good, and proper. He repeatedly echoed his past comments on the matter, claiming credit for forcing President Obama to settle the issue by publicly releasing his original long-form birth certificate. He insisted this never would have happened without his incessant questioning of Obama’s birthplace. He achieved what John McCain, Bill Clinton, and so many others could only dream of doing, he thought. He blamed Hillary Clinton for being the godmother of the racist birtherism craze and for starting it in the first place. (She didn’t.) So really, Trump reasoned, what he did was a smashing success that warranted no apology, and he was happy he helped settle one of the great questions of our time.

Had this soliloquy been made public, it would have spanned two pages, single spaced.

“You get all that?” Trump asked.

At first, the Republican presidential nominee was met with dead, eerie silence, with those on the line confused as to what the optimal response could possibly be. Multiple advisers wanted to tell him that his dictated statement was far, far, far too long and would cause many more headaches for the campaign than it would resolve. If released, this would defeat the purpose of everything the campaign staff was trying to accomplish on this front. And yet, no one wanted to upset Trump, whose legendary hair-trigger temper could easily be set off by the slightest sign of perceived insolence.

Hope Hicks—a top confidante and a press and comms hotshot whom Trump had for years treated as a surrogate daughter and whom he affectionately called Hopey and Hopester—was the brave one. Hopey/Hopester went first.

“Uh, we can’t do this,” she said, explaining that it would predictably deliver Trump a self-inflicted blow. She recommended they go the route of a less obstreperous, and much shorter, statement to the media.

“Okay,” Trump said, before polling the other members of the conference call on whether they agreed with Hicks, or if they preferred using the diatribe the boss had just dictated. No campaign official who chimed in sided with Trump, with each of them giving some pussyfooting version of This is insane, why would we do this? Each added a “sir” or two to be safe.

After each aide said his or her piece, the call was interrupted by yet another uncomfortable, pregnant silence. It lasted an interminable three seconds. Then the inevitable eruption came.

“I WANT THAT STATEMENT!!!! GET ME THAT FUCKING STATEMENT!!!!!!” Trump roared into his phone—multiple recipients of his wrath recount—as his thundering voice crackled on the receiving ends. “I WANT THAT GODDAMN FUCKING STATEMENT RIGHT NOW!!!!! WHERE THE FUCK IS IT, WHY IS . . . JASON! JASON! GET THE HELL UP HERE NOW!”

Click.

By the time all the other participants of the birtherism call had hung up, Miller, Trump’s trusted senior communications adviser, was already hustling up to DJT’s twenty-sixth-floor office in the Tower. Behind closed doors, Miller—with a thick skin for verbal lashing and a calming voice—miraculously managed to walk Trump back off that ledge and strike a compromise: Miller would release a brief, innocuous statement in his own name, not Donald J. Trump’s, and the Republican presidential nominee would get to have his own say at the Trump hotel event in Washington, D.C. The secret, internally infamous, gargantuan Trump statement would be canned, never to see the embarrassing light of day. When Miller emerged from Trump’s office, he assured fellow campaign officials that he’d put out that fire, at least for the time being.

In the moment, Trump was bitter and vexed, still itching to one day unleash his lengthy and unalloyed comment on his birther past and present. As in so many other political conundrums before and after that conference call, Trump was like a small child who’d just been informed by the minimum-wage theme park worker that he wasn’t yet tall enough to ride Space Mountain.

Yet barely twenty-four hours after showing so much fury and dejection, he had already started forgetting about it and soon moved on. He wasn’t pestering his staff about it, and he was back to his “Crooked Hillary” and Lock-Her-Up shtick.

His violent mood swing on this topic reflects a large truth and reality well known at the upper echelons of Trumpworld—a juvenile attitude that persists even when the domestic and international stakes are outstandingly high. In the veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s Trump book, Fear, the president is described at one point as recklessly and wrathfully ordering his then secretary of defense, James Mattis, to have the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, snuffed out.

“Let’s fucking kill him! Let’s go in. Let’s kill the fucking lot of them,” Trump reportedly told Mattis over the phone, not long after news had broken that the mass-murdering dictator launched a chemical-weapons attack on civilians in Khan Sheikhoun. The chemical attack occurred in early April 2017, just months after Trump was inaugurated. According to Woodward’s account, Mattis assured Trump that he’d get “right on it.” Comically, the defense secretary put down his phone and immediately told a subordinate, “We’re not going to do any of that.” Instead, the Trump administration soon opted for a limited missile attack that did little, if anything at all, to change the course of the war or Assad’s butchering of Syrians. And in late 2019, President Trump would once again rejigger his Syria war policy, including greenlighting a Turkish massacre and the ethnic cleansing of Kurds.

During that phone call, when President Trump reportedly ordered what would have been a history-altering, potentially region-shaping assassination of a foreign leader, Mattis knew exactly what those on the birtherism call knew: just stall, and The Donald will quickly—hopefully—forget about whatever it was that had just hours ago been the most important, passion-inflaming thing in the world for him.

In each case, crisis was averted only because it slipped Trump’s elderly mind. And that was that: no batshit written statement, no batshit assassination attempt.

Still, there will be times when the reprieve is tragically short-lived.

On September 16, 2016, Trump ultimately came around to rejecting birtherism in public—in the most cynical, unconvincing, and utterly meaningless way possible. On that day, he gathered the campaign press at his then-new Trump-branded hotel just blocks from the White House he’d soon win. He teased it as a “major announcement,” which of course served as a barely veiled effort to trick the press into traveling with him to his garishly mediocre hotel lobby to get it some free advertising. It worked. “Nice hotel,” he said into the mic, kicking off the event, which mostly consisted of him bragging about his property, as well as the supporters and military men he had assembled behind him onstage.

Trump gave at least half an inch of lip service to non-racism and non-lunacy. “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period,” he said quickly and as if he had his index and middle fingers crossed behind his back. “Now we all want to get back to making America strong and great again.” Trump’s senior campaign aides did not know he’d actually say that Obama was born in America until the moment he said it. Some genuinely feared he’d use the event to triple down on birtherism, just because he might feel like doing it. When he decided not to during the staged event that Friday morning, the sighs of relief, from his advisers looking on, were clearly audible.

But to anyone operating with a shred of good faith, the man who had just introduced Trump at the event had all but negated any authenticity the future president was hoping to convey. The man was the retired Air Force lieutenant general Thomas McInerney, himself a fellow birther. That the Trump campaign was so childishly incompetent that it couldn’t even mount a supposedly anti-birther ceremony without giving no fewer than two birthers speaking roles yet again reinforced Trumpworld’s reputation for turning the laziest possible satire into stark reality.

In more ways than one, McInerney and Trump, the man he endorsed for the presidency in 2016, are the perfect match made in a gaudy, right-wing-talk-radio-fueled hell. McInerney had written a 2010 affidavit challenging President Obama’s authority, citing “widespread and legitimate concerns” regarding his place of birth. (McInerney used to be the number three commander of the air force.) Three months before Senator John McCain died, McInerney went on Fox Business Network and smeared a dying McCain with the inaccurate claim that torture “worked on” him during the Vietnam War: “That’s why they call him ‘Songbird John.’” This comment was so deranged and insulting that Fox News had to publicly denounce the Trump-loving military vet by assuring news outlets that he would never be invited back as a guest on Fox Business or Fox News.

Now, several years into the age of Trump, it’s pretty clear that neither the president nor his endorser is all that repentant of his distaste for McCain or his hatred of Trump’s predecessor. Well into his presidency, Trump continued bringing up his suspicions about President Obama’s birth certificate and clung to the conspiracy theory during private conversations with friends. He continued associating with leading birthers such as the WorldNetDaily writer Jerome Corsi, who would eventually be included in a joint defense agreement with the president when the Mueller shit hit the fan. And Trump would even take direct policy advice from the Fox Business host Lou Dobbs, who previously dubbed the birther conspiracy theory a “perfectly common sense question.”

During the final months of his presidential campaign, it would have saved everyone some time if Trump had just undercut his own staff and released his preferred statement, their warnings be damned. It goes without saying that this president and candidate was always as likely to be honest with voters about this (or anything else) as he was likely to willingly put on a condom full of silverfish.

“OKAY, LAD, THAT’S ENOUGH”

The speed with which Donald Trump had fallen out with American pop culture icons must have been jarring for the man who so craved the adulation of every American with a microphone and TV camera. In the twenty-five years before his presidential run, he was mentioned by name in more than seventy-five songs by prominent musical acts (“Get money like Donald Trump,” rapped Lil Wayne in 2011, at the height of Trump’s birther phase). He enjoyed famous cameos in movies and television series such as Home Alone 2, The Little Rascals, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The success of The Apprentice overshadowed his retrograde political views with much of the American public.

Still, his rising star on the xenophobic right quickly made him an outcast among those out of “Central Casting,” as Trump loves to say.

Trump’s run for president cemented his pariah status in the entertainment and media business. And that was something that he simply could not abide. But Trump’s solution wasn’t to change anything about his presidential run, his policy platform, or his unhinged public rhetoric. It was far easier to simply lie about the people supporting him.

During the long, brutal 2016 campaign, Trump would boast about his “celebrity” support, as though he’d landed the public affections of Tom Hanks, Taylor Swift, and Nelson Mandela’s ghost combined. In his heart, however, he knew he’d always be relegated to scoring endorsements from the likes of Duck Dynasty stars, Chachi from Happy Days, and a former Calvin Klein underwear model and soap-opera actor who now believes that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama should be jailed at Gitmo. Generally speaking, it was not exactly the A-list of anywhere—which is particularly funny, given how much Trump has long cared about star-fucking and the seal of elite approval.

Perhaps the most impressive of Trump’s primary election lot was Jon Voight, the Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy. Beginning in June 2016, Swin became The Daily Beast’s Chief Jon Voight Correspondent. It was the perfect side project for the Beast reporter. In the summer of 2014, John Avlon and Noah Shachtman at The Daily Beast had hired Swin from Mother Jones magazine’s Washington, D.C., office, where Swin had reported on the nexus of politics and popular culture (particularly Hollywood, movies, and TV series). The Beast hired Swin to do, essentially, the same thing. For about a year, that’s what he did, and then a reality-TV and celebrity-fixated gasbag named Donald John Trump announced his run for the presidency, creating a campaign emblematic of the logical conclusion, if not extreme, of the intersection of pop culture and politics. Swin had never intended on being a White House reporter of any kind. For years, he’d self-deprecatingly referred to his beat as mostly defined by “frivolous bullshit,” and it was nothing if not surreal to see that frivolous bullshit lead him directly to the door of the West Wing. The only reason he became a White House reporter in 2017 was that Hillary Clinton and her team were incompetent enough to shit the bed and—against all odds—find a way to lose to Donald Trump.

Anyway, Swin started pitching in with Trump coverage not long after he declared his run beneath the escalator at his Manhattan Trump Tower, with a focus on how Trump’s campaign and history intersected with the conservative enclaves of liberal Hollywood. So, with Jon Voight’s entry into the 2016 maelstrom as an unofficial Trump surrogate, Swin set out to corner the market on Voightworld. Soon enough, he managed to secure Voight’s personal cell-phone number and decided to keep bothering Angelina Jolie’s dad for the rest of the election and beyond.

“How’d you get my number, you son of a bitch?” Voight asked Swin the first time they spoke in June 2016. For whatever reason, the Oscar-winning Trump enthusiast stayed on the line. He talked about how “I’ll be as helpful as I can be” and said that “we’ll see come convention time if [the Trump campaign] wants me at the convention.” He talked about how “I’m in touch with the campaign, and I fully support Donald. I think he’s the man for the job.” He said he discussed with senior officials on Team Trump “what I might be available to do for them in California,” an obvious Democratic stronghold. During this chat, and all subsequent ones, Voight repeatedly called Swin “lad.” The conversation resulted in the Daily Beast article titled “Jon Voight in Talks with Trump Campaign: ‘Everything Is on the Table.’”

For the remaining months of the 2016 race, Swin continued calling and texting Jon Voight, and for whatever reason Jon Voight would answer, over and over again, to extol the virtues of Trump. For a stretch of months, Swin would text him no fewer than a dozen times a week and call an average of twice a week.

In their first phone conversation, Voight declined to tell Swin any names of the senior people on the Trump campaign with whom he’d conversed. A few months later, Swin accidentally found out the name of one of them. While crashing on deadline one evening, alone, overworked, and tired, in the Beast D.C. office, Swin got bored and decided to call Jon Voight again. Maybe he’ll have an interesting comment for this article, Swin thought to himself, but really it was just another excuse to pester the aging actor, whom Swin had watched and admired so much in his teenage and college years. After a couple minutes, Voight was done tolerating Swin’s generally aimless questions. “Okay, lad, that’s enough, goodbye,” the Hollywood titan said right before ending the call. Chuckling, Swin resumed work, trying to meet a deadline set by demanding editors.

An hour or two passed with Swin typing away at his office desk, when his phone buzzed and the caller ID read “Jon Voight.”

Why the hell is he calling me? Swin wondered. He usually can barely contain his displeasure when we talk. Swin answered and stammered out a couple of confused attempts at “Hi?”

“Hello, it’s Jon, Jon Voight, do you have a few minutes?” he replied.

“Yeah, sure, what’s going on, Jon?”

“Sorry we didn’t have time to talk much earlier.”

“That’s . . . That’s fine, you’re a busy guy. What can I do for you?”

“Are you sure you have time now? I can call back if . . .”

“Jon, I have time, what’s up?”

Swin had no earthly idea what to make of this. Why was the snarling villain from Anaconda being so vigorously accommodating?

“I had a couple of ideas I wanted to go over with you. I was thi . . . Wait . . .”

“Yes, Jon?”

“Wait, is this . . . Steve? Steve Mnuchin???”

(Steven Mnuchin, a Trump friend and successful banker who also dabbled in executive producing major Tinseltown fare such as American Sniper, The Lego Movie, How to Be Single, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, was the 2016 Trump campaign’s national finance chairman. He would later land a spot in President Trump’s cabinet.)

The moment Voight asked Swin who he was, Swin was bound by journalistic ethics to tell Voight the truth. To this day, Swin wishes Voight hadn’t figured out something was amiss before he had the chance to tell The Daily Beast what he and Mnuchin were discussing.

“No, Jon, this isn’t Steve Mnuchin. This is Swin. Asawin. Suebsaeng. The Daily Beast reporter. We literally spoke about an hour ago on the phone.”

“Oh, sorry, bye, lad.”

Click.

By early September 2016, Swin and Voight would finally have their first in-person encounter—of all places, at the annual social-conservative, Christian-right Values Voter Summit thrown at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Northwest D.C. Voight was there to introduce the GOP presidential candidate and to talk God, culture wars, and Trump, Trump, Trump. (“If you’re not for Trump, then you’re not for me,” Voight had once succinctly phrased his outlook to Swin.)

A couple of hours before Voight was scheduled to hit the stage, Swin ducked into a hallway to ring him to see if he had a moment to meet for a coffee or a drink. This time, Voight was far less accommodating. He didn’t stay on the line for a long time. He didn’t agree to another interview. He didn’t even mistake Swin’s voice for Steven Mnuchin’s. The jig was up: Voight had finally figured out that Swin leaned left.

“Oh, shit,” Voight said. “Look, I have a lot of sympathy for you, lad, but I will not be doing an interview with you. I have no interest in [cooperating] with someone who’s trying to make me look bad. The Daily Beast is not friendly to the conservatives.”

Swin told Voight that he’d interviewed him before without making him “look bad” and that The Daily Beast treated Voight fairly. “Let me get off the phone,” Voight pleaded. “You seem like a decent guy, and I wish you the best. If I see you, I’ll shoot you a big smile.”

Swin checked the time, his messages, his emails. He realized he had a good amount of time to kill, no pressing deadline, and zero editors asking for his status. This meant it was the ideal time for him to run around the Omni Shoreham, in an effort to encounter the aforementioned big smile. By the time Swin stumbled into the restaurant area of the sprawling hotel lobby, there was Voight—greeting conference attendees, snapping pics with fans, and bumping into the Breitbart editor Matt Boyle, with whom he agreed to do a radio interview on the spot. Swin jumped in before Jon could make a break for it.

“Hi, Mr. Voight, could I please get a photo,” Swin asked. Voight agreed and shook hands as a friend of Swin’s took a photo. As the camera flashed, Swin whispered into Voight’s ear, “By the way, my name’s Swin, you might know me from The Daily Beast; we spoke earlier today on the phone.”

Voight’s eyes promptly dilated as he grabbed both of Swin’s shoulders and began comically shaking the reporter in the middle of the Omni Shoreham entrance hall. “You’re Swinnnnnn????” Voight said, and he continued gently rocking Swin from side to side, having finally come face-to-face with the young D.C. reporter who had cold-called him all those months ago.

The actor and Trump acolyte patted Swin on the back as if to signal that there were no hard feelings. Then he walked off toward the main ballroom, ignoring Swin’s shouted questions and requests for a sit-down. When Voight did hit the stage to lavish Trump with praise, he held up the prolifically womanizing, rapaciously party-hopping, biblically illiterate accused serial sexual assaulter and bigot and scam artist as nothing short of God’s man on a mission. “We are all witness to Hillary Clinton’s lies and corruption,” Voight said during his brief prepared remarks. “My heart aches watching Donald Trump . . . How can anyone doubt his sincerity?

“He will lift the dark cloud hanging over us right now,” Voight said, telling the audience that, Lord willing, The Donald would be the next leader of the free world. “Such a great actor [and] person,” Trump told the crowd, following Voight’s introduction. “I love his movies.”

Voight and the rest of the Moral Majority contingent of American conservatism hit a mildly inconvenient, Trump-size bump in the road the following month—in the form of the now infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” tape. Voight, for his part, made like the vast majority of the Republican Party and conservative movement: he unapologetically sacrificed himself at the altar of Trumpism. In Voight’s case, that meant attacking Robert De Niro, his old Heat co-star, who had just recorded a video declaring, “I’d like to punch [Trump] in the face.”

“I am so ashamed of my fellow actor Bobby DeNiro’s rant against Donald Trump. What foul words he used against a presidential nominee,” Voight wrote on Twitter while running interference for Trump during the “pussy” tape news cycle. “I don’t know of too many men who haven’t expressed some sort of similar sexual terms toward women, especially in their younger years . . . Donald Trump’s words were not as damaging as Robert DeNiro’s ugly rant. Trump’s words did not hurt anyone. Can you imagine if any Republican said words like Robert DeNiro used—against Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama? All hell would break loose.”

A little over two years after Trump’s inauguration, the president—known for keeping tabs on who did and did not stay loyal to him during his “pussy” tape crisis, and acting accordingly—rewarded his part-time campaign surrogate. In late March 2019, the White House announced that President Trump would be appointing Voight to the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees. “Congrats,” Swin dryly texted the arch Hollywood conservative the day the news broke. Voight never responded. Not even with a canned “thanks, lad.”

“GET HIM THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME”

Rule 1 of the Trump campaign: Absolutely do not fuck with the boss’s tweets—not if you want to survive.

David Bossie wasn’t the first person to learn this lesson the hard way, and he certainly wasn’t the last. But in the closing months of the 2016 election, it was one of the miscalculations that cost him a cushy job in the administration.

In September 2016, Trump finally brought Bossie aboard his campaign staff to serve in the official capacity of deputy campaign manager. He’d been a longtime buddy of Trump’s, as well as a key player in the conservative movement as the president of the advocacy group Citizens United, which in the early Obama era forever altered how American political campaigns are financed. Years prior to that, he was a well-known investigator of President Bill Clinton. Though his title had “deputy” in it, his now former Trumpland colleagues often speak of Bossie as someone who orchestrated the nuts and bolts of campaign operations during those final critical weeks. In other words, many viewed him as more of a campaign manager, per se, than they ever viewed Kellyanne Conway, who had the official manager title but whom many cohorts derided behind her back as chiefly a TV spokeswoman.

This was in large part because Bossie was so instrumental in the scorched-earth strategy near the finale of the general election to, in an attempt to draw focus away from the numerous sexual assault and harassment allegations leveled at Trump, throw a spotlight on Bill Clinton’s alleged sexual violence. Bossie also had a heavy hand in moving resources to Michigan and Wisconsin in the critical weeks before Election Day and quickly shifting the Republican nominee’s travel schedule as the Electoral College math called for in that period. For Team Trump’s ultimately successful Hail Mary, it largely fell to Bossie to work in a frenzy with the finance department, digital team, communications staffers, and God knows who else to make a Trump upset possible—by chipping away at the Democratic “Blue Wall” as if he were breaking out of Shawshank.

By the time the presidential turnover hit, Bossie was given a seat at the table on the transition team as a senior official. Everything seemed to be coming up Bossie. He just helped make the Apprentice star a White House resident. There was chatter about a possible administration assignment or maybe a Republican National Committee chairmanship, in succession to soon-to-be White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

And then . . . nothing. No administration post. No corner office in the White House. No leading the RNC. Poof. Nothing. Instead, he had a Fox News contract and the consolation prize of “outside adviser.”

One key reason for this is that Dave—with his brash, sometimes chafing style—had simply pissed off too many people who didn’t want to play with him or even put in a good word for him. One of those guys was Reince Priebus.

Another one of them, at least for a while, was Donald Trump.

During the closing weeks of the long and frantic campaign season, as Trump made his closing pitch to voters all across the country, Bossie identified possible impediments, or at least inconveniences, to his boss’s path to the White House. This included the @realDonaldTrump tweets, which Bossie believed to be “unpresidential” in their crude nature. He thought Trump’s wild-man tweeting resembled flailing anger far more than it did assured victory. “Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?” Trump tweeted in the early morning of September 30, 2016, for instance.

That Friday morning, Trump was slut-shaming Alicia Machado, a former Miss Universe whom Trump had repeatedly assailed (for her weight, among other reasons) and whom Clinton had embraced as a talking point and as a supporter of her campaign. Machado, for her part, had previously called Trump a “Nazi rat.” And not that it mattered to Trump or his team, but the alleged “sex tape” that he wanted his Twitter followers to “check out” didn’t actually exist.

Still, it was tweets such as these that worried Bossie so much. And he wasn’t alone; numerous other top Trump advisers had wished their candidate would cut it out with the chronic rage-tweeting, or at least dial it back to a six instead of an eleven. But Bossie was the only one puckish enough to repeatedly lecture Trump on why he needed to stop tweeting so much. He simply wouldn’t let it go.

This climaxed in the final weeks of the race, aboard Trump Force One, when Bossie once again brought up how the tweets were a problem.

“Oh, this again?” Trump said, sighing and shifting his lips in displeasure.

As Bossie pushed harder and harder, not having yet realized that negotiating with a Twitter terrorist is a bad idea, Trump’s anger began to simmer and then boil. He asked Bossie to stop talking. Bossie persisted on the topic. He asked Bossie to shut up. Bossie persisted. Then, suddenly, Trump had had enough. He got up, walked away, and started screaming for his other aides to get Bossie out of his sight, if not off the plane entirely.

“GET HIM THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!!! GET HIM THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME,” the future president demanded, furiously gesticulating toward Bossie and the door behind him—all because Bossie had asked him to tweet less violently.

It was an episode that epitomized the decaying rapport between the candidate and his underling. Bossie would, soon enough, repair relations with Trump, only to risk destroying them all together. In the opening months of the Trump presidency, Bossie became one of the president’s top informal advisers and phone buddies, with Trump’s having allowed the bygones of the high-stress campaign to be bygones. And when it came time for Trump to pick his third chief of staff, this one to succeed John Kelly in late 2018, Bossie found himself on the short list—a dark horse who didn’t end up making the cut, but on the list, no doubt.

By mid-2019, Bossie was once again on the cusp of pissing it all away. On May 5 of that year, Axios reported on how the former deputy campaign manager had spearheaded what appeared to be financial self-dealing under the guise of reelecting Trump. Bossie’s political group, the Presidential Coalition, had raised roughly $18.5 million since Trump’s first year in office but had spent a paltry $425,000 on actual political activity. Many donors believed that their money was going toward reelecting the president, and yet the organization had spent more buying Bossie’s own books—a common tactic for political groups with the nice side benefit of enriching their principals—than it had on political activity.

Few things so quickly enrage Trump as someone, particularly a professed loyalist, using the Trump family name to make a buck—especially if Trump is deceptively not cut in on the action. It didn’t take long for word of the Axios report to find its way to President Trump, who immediately grew livid. As he stewed in his own billowing resentment, he picked up the phone and ordered his 2020 campaign manager, Brad Parscale (who worked with Bossie on the 2016 run), to release a statement retaliating against Bossie’s shenanigans.

“President Trump’s campaign condemns any organization that deceptively uses the President’s name, likeness, trademarks, or branding and confuses voters,” the campaign’s statement read, before going further and encouraging the authorities to investigate. “There is no excuse for any group, including ones run by people who claim to be part of our ‘coalition,’ to suggest they directly support President Trump’s re-election or any other candidates, when in fact their actions show they are interested in filling their own pockets with money from innocent Americans’ paychecks, and sadly, retirements. We encourage the appropriate authorities to investigate all alleged scam groups for potential illegal activities.”

At the time, Bossie was also a Fox News contributor. In the direct aftermath of the Axios revelations, his regular column at FoxNews .com suddenly stopped being printed. He disappeared from the airwaves of Fox News and Fox Business Network, the president’s two most beloved channels, for many weeks before reemerging from the doghouse.

Several people familiar with this disappearing act noted that it was no coincidence. It was part of an effort by those in charge of Fox opinion programming not to infuriate their pal Trump.

RAINING ON THE POTUS PARADE

As soon as he was elected on that night in November, Trump’s team began planning what the winning candidate surely wished would be the party of the century: his inauguration weekend. And Hollywood began planning to subvert it.

On December 22, 2016, @realDonaldTrump exclaimed, “The so-called ‘A’ list celebrities are all wanting [tickets] to the inauguration, but look what they did for Hillary, NOTHING. I want the PEOPLE!” A month later, the president-elect was unable to identify who these supposedly existing A-listers were. “Many of the celebrities that are saying they were not going, they were never invited,” he said during a January 18, 2017, interview with Fox & Friends’ Ainsley Earhardt. “I don’t want the celebrities; I want the people. And we have the biggest celebrities in the world there.”

This was two days shy of the infamously poorly attended inauguration. And when the Fox host cited Trump as an example of a celeb attendee, Trump laughed and said, “Well, I won’t say that.” Asked to name check a celebrity who would deign to attend, Trump told Fox News, “We have President Obama,” with whom he briefly tried to build a rapport during the transition.

Trump didn’t know at the time that the dearth of talent on the guest list was partly the product of a Tinseltown conspiracy. And for a president who can spot a deep state or media-driven conspiracy behind nearly everything he finds annoying, this was a hell of a blind spot.

In the nearly three months between his shock victory and the inauguration in Washington, D.C., there was a covert effort launched among Democratic Party loyalists in Hollywood and among the pop-music industry elite to undermine and bleed Donald Trump’s big soiree of star power. They despised the Apprentice creator and Trump’s partner in crime, Mark Burnett, and sought to hobble his efforts to apply a veneer of glamour to the inauguration. According to a December 2016 article published by TheWrap, “Burnett, who produces ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ with Trump and has been overseeing entertainment for inauguration festivities, has brought in talent recruiter Suzanne Bender, a former ‘Dancing With the Stars’ and ‘American Idol’ booker, to end an effective freeze-out by Hollywood.”

In the end, Mark Burnett couldn’t save Donald Trump from the harsh reality that nobody wanted to play with Donald Trump.

From the start, Trump and his staff were negotiating from a position of crippling weakness. Virtually all of the president-elect’s favorite acts had supported Bernie or Hillary in 2016 and didn’t want to be caught dead toasting President Trump’s fortunes. Still, the Republican victor had a wish list for who would perform for him. At the top was the Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin.

In the days after election night, President-elect Trump ordered Tom Barrack, his longtime confidant who was chairing the Presidential Inaugural Committee, to reach out to the music icon or her people to see if she would sing at his inaugural concert. Trump, who knew Franklin leaned liberal and had sung for Obama, had for years claimed the legendary soul artist was his dear “friend” and desired it to be pitched to her as a chance to bridge the ideological chasm and to help heal the country following an emotional, unsparing general election. What Franklin never got the chance to tell Trump to his face is that around the time she had learned of Team Trump’s overtures, she privately stressed to friends that “no amount of money” could make the singer, a committed Hillary Clinton supporter, perform at a Trump inauguration. More bluntly, in the year and a half before she passed away, Aretha Franklin would repeatedly call Donald Trump “despicable” and, even more pointedly, a huge “piece of shit.”

Upon the occasion of Franklin’s death in August 2018, Trump claimed that she was “a person I knew well” who “worked for me on numerous occasions.” (It’s not at all clear what President Trump was getting at when he boasted that she’d “worked for me,” though she had appeared or performed at Trump-branded properties.)

In late 2018, Swin, together with the Daily Beast media reporter Maxwell Tani, began reporting on this and discovered other examples of these big names and their managers attempting to subvert Trump’s enjoyment of his first weekend as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. The funniest example would have to be the curious case of the informal, small collective of liberal, center-left Hollywood insiders and operators who deployed every dirty trick they could muster to ensure that Trump’s inaugural festivities were as punishingly lame as humanly possible. We are, for now, withholding the names of the members of this shadowy cabal, on the condition of our reporting certain details. Just think of them as potentially forever anonymous, as you would a group of CIA analysts who helped a foreign death squad do a coup.

These people knew that Trump hadn’t changed all that much since his days of carousing and begging for dates with the entertainment and motion-picture aristocracy. No matter what incoming president Trump said publicly, he still couldn’t help but crave the attention and, preferably, the amorous approval of the glitterati. Sadly for the former Apprentice star, the glitterati were largely in the tank for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and abhorred him even more widely now than they already had before he became the Republican Party standard-bearer. Trump could deny it all he wanted, but he cared—he really cared. And these Hollywood insiders could sense it and wanted to hit him where it hurt.

The average profile of each of these guys is exactly what you might expect: the entertainment-industry manager class who dabbled in liberal politics and Democratic Party sycophancy. They were big Hillary and Obama people. They detested Trump and all for which his 2016 campaign stood. Near the tail end of the 2016 race, they quietly searched for the rumored “Trump tapes” that never materialized. They chased rumors of his physically assaulting his third wife, Melania, in an elevator at Trump Tower and of his blurting out the word “nigger” on buried footage from The Apprentice, and hit dead end after dead end. But these guys also had the ears of agents and other managers of marquee names in music and celluloid. The message conveyed by these insiders to agents and managers of top performers and the A-list was clear: Tell your clients that if they perform, or get caught on camera looking happy, at the Trump inauguration, they can kiss that next big job or paycheck goodbye. If your star clients are going, it had better be to protest or attend the Women’s March.

For a short while close to the start of the transition, a handful of entertainment bigwigs had lightly pressured certain popular artists to perform—not out of any ideological commitment to the GOP or Trumpism, but out of pure business calculation. There were a lot of ostensible liberals in the pop-music business who wanted the incoming president—even if that president was named Trump—to support and sign obscure legislation that would effectively help pad the bottom line of concert hosts. As soon as the militantly anti-Trump insiders caught wind of this, they set upon their counteroffensive. They began leaking to friendly reporters the names of famous people who were thinking of—or who they thought were thinking of, at least—performing any Trump inauguration events, in an attempt to intimidate celebrities into not showing up or entertaining the Republican president-elect. They knew that a public outcry would be a powerful deterrent.

The group started whispering in journalists’ and associates’ ears—in a nakedly obvious attempt to apply some public pressure—that acclaimed singers such as Elton John and Andrea Bocelli were approached, or possibly leaning toward the gig. It was plausible because Trump and Elton John had rubbed elbows going back years. “Taking piano lessons from my friend Elton John,” Trump wrote in December 2013, tweeting an old pic of them posing together at a white grand piano. When Trump and his ex-wife Ivana were going through brutal divorce proceedings in 1990 (during which Ivana stated in a deposition that her husband had raped her), their celebrity pals were split into two camps. At the time, the tabloid press and New York gossip papers—which once counted The Donald among their chattiest anonymous sources—widely reported that the English “Rocket Man” singer-songwriter was on Donald’s side. For instance, the Daily News reported in February 1990 that Team Ivana included Princess Diana, Prince Charles, Calvin Klein, and Oprah Winfrey. Along with Elton John, the future president reportedly got Frank Sinatra, Don Johnson, Mike Tyson, Melanie Griffith, Oscar de la Renta, Cher, and Liza Minnelli in the divorce.

Similarly, Donald Trump had long bragged about Bocelli as a close personal buddy. In 2010, he hosted an evening with the Italian tenor at his private Mar-a-Lago getaway in Florida. By December 2016, rumors and anonymously sourced news items cropped up that Bocelli was on the verge of booking his performance in honor of President Trump. A report on Page Six, for instance, blared that Bocelli “is being personally approached by President-elect Donald Trump to perform at the inauguration.” It took one week for Bocelli to pull the plug. Following a wave of backlash from his fans on social media, the singer decided not to perform, with, again, Page Six quoting an unnamed source that “Bocelli said there was no way he’d take the gig . . . He was ‘getting too much heat’ and he said no.” The chairman of the inaugural committee, Barrack, subsequently insisted on CNBC that “the Bocellis came to [Trump] and said, ‘Look, if it would be helpful to you, if you would like us to perform, we would consider it,’” adding that Trump once allowed Bocelli to use one of his planes. Barrack’s spin was that it was in fact Trump who let Bocelli, of whom Trump is a gigantic fan, off the hook for his big, glitzy weekend: “Donald said: ‘You don’t need to. We’re not in that kind of a framework. Thanks very much for the offer. You’re my friend. You are always welcome at the White House.’”

As for the Elton leaks, they didn’t even have to get that far because the Mooch did most of the work for them. Long before Anthony Scaramucci started screwing up royally for Trump as a short-lived part of his West Wing, he was already screwing up royally and needlessly for Trump as a member of the inauguration team. In late November 2016, the Mooch went on the BBC’s HARDtalk and declared that “Elton John is going to be doing our concert on the Mall for inauguration” and that “this will be the first American president in U.S. history that enters the White House with a pro-gay-rights stance.” (Trump’s presidency quickly launched rollback after rollback of LGBTQ gains of the previous era, but these are apparently minor details.)

Team Elton sprang into action, seeming to not know what the hell this daft Trump adviser was talking about. “Elton will not be performing a Trump inauguration,” his publicist Fran Curtis rapidly emailed Swin just minutes after he reached out that Wednesday morning.

As story after story piled up in the national political and entertainment press that the Trump inauguration was building to a star-studless dud, the small huddle of Hollywood insiders felt their stealth campaign vindicated. “President-elect Donald Trump’s team is struggling so hard to book A-list performers for his inaugural festivities that it offered ambassadorships to at least two talent bookers if they could deliver marquee names, the bookers told TheWrap,” in another story that ran that same December. Boris Epshteyn, now an inaugural committee spokesman and an incoming White House official, tried to shoot down the Wrap story, telling the news site, “There is no truth to this insinuation,” and swearing that “first-class entertainers are eager to participate in the inaugural events.”

To this day, President Trump will get super-defensive if you bring up the lack of wattage at his inauguration.

Ultimately, those A-list top-of-the-pops stars 3 Doors Down and the Piano Guys played Trump’s “Make America Great Again!” welcome celebration, thrown at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. At that same concert, where the president-elect sat in the audience wearing a long black coat and one of his standard-issue bright blue neckties (with the tip of the tie, as Trump always wore it, nearly touching his toes), the lineup also included DJ RaviDrums, a Mohawk-styled drummer whom Trump likely did not care for and has not thought of in the years since the inauguration. The DJ’s past credits included being part of the Slumdog Millionaire original-song performance at the 2009 Academy Awards. He told Billboard, “I had many friends begging or advising me to boycott. I even got offers of far more [money] to boycott. But if I put my word down, I do it. I was raised on hard work and ideals and the deep appreciation of America. So I wanted to celebrate that” by playing Trump’s inaugural concert.

The Trump team extended an invitation to a surprised RaviDrums shortly before Christmas Day that year. The pro-Hillary cabal couldn’t have been gladder. It was mean-spirited, but how else does one try to effectively combat Donald Trump, the cattiest, pettiest man alive? They took solace in their quiet, small victory as DJ RaviDrums performed before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to a joyless-looking Donald and Melania Trump. No Elton, no Bocelli, no Celine Dion, no Mick Jagger.

Nothing.

“DID YOU SEE THIS CRAP?”

On March 19, 2000, The Simpsons aired what would become the storied sitcom’s most prophetic episode. Set in the year 2030, it imagined Lisa Simpson as “America’s first straight female president.” About halfway through the episode, President Simpson throws out this line: “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.”

We all laughed at the thought two decades ago. (Though, perhaps not all of us, given that it was a throwaway joke in what is also widely considered one of the most distinctly mediocre Simpsons episodes of the series run.) Yet on January 20, 2017, Trump fulfilled Lisa Simpson’s prophecy.

As soon as Trump finished reading out his inaugural address on a cold day in late January 2017 in Washington, D.C.—a speech that insisted, “We will not fail. Our country will thrive and prosper again”—he and his country fell into a protracted state of deep anxiety.

His administration’s original “Muslim ban” (or “travel ban,” as we were all spun into accepting as nomenclature) shit the bed in a cacophony of legal challenge, protest, and bush-league plotting. The GOP and Trump team’s signature legislative push to torpedo and replace Obamacare ranged from ham-fisted to missed orgasm. The border wall went unrealized, he escalated the “endless foreign wars” he regularly groused about, and his big, beautiful infrastructure spending never took off beyond the planning stage of lazy punch line.

President Trump’s first days in the West Wing were very much like all his later days occupying the Oval Office—spent asking resplendently stupid questions and acting accordingly.

Trump has a propensity for asking moronic questions at a near-constant clip. And when the questions don’t make him sound as if he were in the middle of violently asphyxiating himself and cutting off oxygen to his brain, they sound as if they were being asked by a mean and obsessive six-year-old. President Trump has asked, according to the Cliff Sims book, Team of Vipers, if his Disney World Hall of Presidents animatron could say that America invented the skyscraper. (America did not invent the concept of taller buildings.) In late April 2019, Trump hauled Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, into the Oval Office, for a meeting in which the president devoted a shocking amount of time to grilling Dorsey about his lost Twitter followers, asking if the phenomenon was a product of some nefarious anti-Trump, anti-conservative tech bias. (Dorsey had to explain to the idiot, baby-boomer-brained president that numerous Twitter users regularly lose followers when the site purges fake accounts and bots. Dorsey’s insight didn’t take, and the president continued in the months ahead with his petulant jihad against Big Tech and Twitter.)

And, as has not been previously reported, President Trump would also badger his former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus about, well . . . badgers. Literally.

For years, Donald Trump has had a superficial, incredibly basic fascination with wildlife and outer space. As those who know him well have observed, conversations with “experts” on these topics often send him into states of toddler-like wonder. For instance, after entering the White House, Trump would grill his space policy advisers on trash. Whether it was while discussing his precious “Space Force” or his administration’s moves to plant his flag on Mars, Trump would ask for comprehensive updates on space junk and debris: Where does it go? Where does it crash to earth? What, exactly, is up there, circling the globe? Who, or what, is creating all this space garbage? Is this a national security threat?

When considering this president’s silliest, most annoying inquiries, these actually rank on the smarter tier. In April 2019, America’s top military officer in charge of protecting the United States from space threats traveled to Capitol Hill to warn legislators about the perils of space trash. “I’ve advocated for a long time for the development of some kind of international norms and behaviors in space,” the U.S. Air Force general John Hyten said at a hearing before members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “If we keep creating debris in space, eventually we are going to get to the point where it’s very difficult to find a place to launch, very difficult to find a place to put a satellite, to operate a satellite without having to maneuver it all the time to keep it away from debris. All of those things are complicated and have to be worked in an international perspective.”

In his space camp–style fixation on the issue, President Trump isn’t so much worried about the “international norms” as he is about asking juvenile-sounding questions like “What’s with all the garbage up there in space?” as he points to the White House ceiling.

It was far nuttier and way funnier when Trump would waste Priebus’s time bothering him not about outer space but by subjecting his senior aide to sustained questioning about badgers, the state animal of Priebus’s old stomping ground of Wisconsin. This would sometimes occur at moments when Priebus was attempting to brief the president on matters of health-care initiatives, foreign policy, or Republican legislative agenda. After Trump was reminded that the short-legged omnivore was practically synonymous with the Badger State, he’d make a point of bringing it up at seemingly random occasions to his beleaguered chief of staff.

“Are they mean to people?” Trump at least twice asked Priebus in the opening months of his presidency. “Or are they friendly creatures?” The president would also ask if Priebus had any photos of badgers he could show him, and if Priebus could carefully explain to him how badgers “work” exactly. He wanted Reince—resident White House badger historian, apparently—to explain to him Wisconsin’s obsession with the animal, how the little critters function and behave, what kind of food they like, and how aggressive or deadly they could be when presented with perceived existential threats. Trump also wanted to know if the badger had a “personality” or if it was boring. What kind of damage could a badger do to a person with its flashy, sharp claws?

An obviously enthralled president would stare at Priebus as the aide struggled for sufficiently placating answers, all the while trying to gently veer the conversation back to whether we were going to do a troop surge in Afghanistan or strip millions of Americans of health-care coverage.

For a frame of reference, this was back during a time when a classified guidance was distributed to professional intelligence analysts, urging them to keep it as truncated and as simple as responsibly possible while collating materials for the President’s Daily Brief on national security threats around the world. At the time, Trump was receiving roughly a quarter of the information President Barack Obama had received in comparable briefings. This was done to accommodate President Trump’s notoriously slim attention span and his penchant for fidgeting and rebelling at the image of throngs of nameless lanyard nerds lining up to lecture him on foreign affairs.

President Trump couldn’t be bothered with receiving an actual intel briefing but could seemingly harangue his chief of staff for hours on end about mundane details of Wisconsin’s flagship grassland mammal.

—

DONALD Trump had dreamed of affixing the title “president” to his name since at least 2000, when he mounted an ill-fated presidential run on the Reform Party ticket. When he finally succeeded, it became clear that his conception about significant elements of the job came from watching movies about the presidency.

That was a bit problematic, because Trump seemed to be particularly keen on cinematic violence. He famously enlisted his eldest son to fast-forward through the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Bloodsport, stopping only to watch the film’s fight scenes. On the other end of the spectrum, the first movie Trump screened in the White House was Finding Dory, a 2016 Pixar animated film in which Ellen DeGeneres reprises her role as a brain-damaged fish. According to those in attendance, the flick quickly bored him and he walked out.

The president’s fascination with action movies in particular might have explained one of the oddest quirks of his early time in the White House: Trump was terrified that he would be assassinated.

During the presidential transition and into his early days occupying and redecorating the West Wing, President Donald J. Trump would inquire numerous times about the quality of the U.S. Secret Service agents protecting him. He would ask if members of his detail had voted for him. He’d ask if individual agents were “tough” enough, or at least as tough as his personal bodyguard and pal Keith Schiller. He would ask about the number of threats that had been made against his life since he defeated Hillary Clinton for the presidency and if the number outpaced that of his predecessor and foe, Barack Obama.

He would ask if the windows in the White House were, in fact, bulletproof, as he had heard about in “the movies.”

“You sure?” Trump asked after one adviser assured him they were.

“You sure?” he asked again.

For a president and political candidate who so prolifically bragged about how much the American people supposedly adored him, he was privately fairly up-front about his crippling fears of one of them trying to take a shot at him and self-aware about the intense hatreds he had inspired.

Like a bed-wetting child at a new, hazing-prone boarding school, the new president also seemed terribly, viscerally homesick.

In his first few months in office, Trump constantly asked various aides and associates who worked for him and visited him in Washington about people he dubbed his high-profile, wealthy friends in New York City and if they still said nice things about him. Or if they had forever “turned on” him following his demagogic rise.

There would be times that he’d be on the phone with the Democratic Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, a fellow boroughite, to talk legislation or political impasses, and Trump would instead insist on gossiping about what he’d seen in the New York tabloids and papers or about high-society types he assumed were mutual friends.

“Hey, you hear he’s getting a divorce?” Trump once asked, to Schumer’s confusion, regarding some wealthy New Yorker whom the president was convinced the Senate Democrat intimately knew. (Schumer did not.)

Oftentimes, the president would get the Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth on the line, with the Fox News star trying to steer the conversation in the direction of policy matters, particularly regarding the Department of Veterans Affairs and privatization efforts, an issue near and dear to Hegseth, himself an Iraq War veteran.

Trump would routinely and abruptly say things like “yeah, well . . . ,” only to steer that chatter immediately back to what he last saw on the conservative media behemoth or, better yet, grill Hegseth on what was going on behind the scenes at Fox News, in the personal lives of top on-air talent.

It was the same tendency that had Trump musing to campaign staffers about Joe and Mika’s love life. And it was how the Page Six president would solicit gossip from his Fox buddies and how he found a way to feel even more comforted and connected to the right-wing media giant that once gave him a prominent perch as gasbag commentator and crank.

He kept tabs on weekly installments of the NBC sketch comedy staple Saturday Night Live—a show that had once viewed him as a vaguely lovable, if aloof and racist, oaf—and its routine weekly skewerings of him as a crotchety idiot. He hated Alec Baldwin’s pout and pantomime, knocking the actor’s impression of him as “garbage” and the actor himself as a “shithead.” And he hated hated HATED how the series, in the Trump administration’s dawn, would portray Steve Bannon as the devilish brains of the operation—The Donald’s puppet master, and the true, shadow leader of the free world. Guerrilla art posters even began to spring up around Washington depicting a sinister profile of the former Breitbart chief’s face above the hashtagged caption #PresidentBannon.

“Did you see this crap?” Trump once angrily quizzed a confidant, referring to an SNL cold open in which Bannon, the recently installed White House chief strategist, was portrayed as a Grim Reaper/Svengali–type character who manipulates Baldwin’s Trump into launching diplomatic crisis after diplomatic crisis.

At the conclusion of the sketch, “Bannon” tells “Trump” to give him back his Oval Office desk and chair, with the president addressing the Reaper as “Mr. President.” Baldwin’s Donald then shuffles off to play with children’s toys.

(Yes, this stupid sketch actually managed to affect the most powerful person in the world on an emotional level, and at the very least helped contribute to his rapid souring on Bannon, which would culminate in his ouster in the first year of the Trump presidency. As you continue reading this book, keep reminding yourself that this is the level of fragility and self-parody that defines presidential power and world affairs in the age of an ascendant Trumpism.)

President Trump’s other complaints at this time bordered on self-satirizing. He vented to close friends and officials about how Melania Trump and the White House chef and dining staff had “put me on a diet” and how he didn’t get to order in McDonald’s nearly as much as he wanted to, and did routinely back in New York. (The nearest McDonald’s to the White House is less than a five-minute walk, and the Secret Service would never let the president himself wander over.)

It was during this time that we started working together, in the Washington, D.C., bureau of The Daily Beast, a political and pop culture news website that had billed itself, in the words of the former editor in chief John Avlon, as “the smartest tabloid on the web.”

We had been friends for years, getting acquainted as drinking buddies way back, pre-Trumpism, when Lachlan was an investigative journalist at the neoconservative Washington Free Beacon (shortly after his stint at the right-wing Heritage Foundation) and when Swin was an entertainment and politics reporter at Mother Jones, the magazine named after a legendary socialist organizer and self-described hell-raiser.

On the night of Trump’s historic upset in November 2016, Lachlan was watching returns from the Free Beacon offices, where opinions were mixed on Trump but decidedly less so on Hillary Clinton. The mood was one less of a righteous victory than a righteous vanquishment. A former colleague, who maintained his antipathy to Trump throughout the campaign, later recalled dropping by the office of the Beacon’s editor in chief, Matt Continetti, son-in-law of the prominent Never Trumper Bill Kristol, after polls closed. The two poured drinks, looked at each other, and just started laughing.

On the same night, Swin was bouncing around different areas of Northwest D.C. and gloomily texting Run the Jewels member Killer Mike, a leftist rap artist and a campaigner for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary, who simply messaged back a flushed-face emoji () in apparent despair.

Just weeks prior to that evening, during Swin’s birthday dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Washington, we had been out drinking margaritas with several D.C. Republicans, all predictably bemoaning the nightmarish, cartoon-grade authoritarianism of Trump, as well as the roster of sexual assault and misconduct allegations against him.

But in the end, what bound Trumpism to the Republican elite would always be stronger than the quality of his character that irked them. No amount of mean tweets could possibly keep the mainstream GOP from bowing to Trump-branded nativism, given the right opportunity and the right deregulatory priorities. As it happened, one of those Republicans present at Swin’s birthday would soon become a very senior official in Trump’s administration, proudly serving in a new, ascendant era of conservatism, and that person wasn’t the only one struggling to make peace with the new reality in Washington.

—

FEW dynamics defined the early Trump White House more starkly than the divisions that had set in during the 2016 campaign. The Trump campaign had been staffed with the dregs of political talent for the primary, and they had been forced to lean heavily on the RNC during the general election campaign. And the RNC, stacked with operatives who were, by and large, not of the party’s Trumpian wing, had been forced to back the party’s presidential nominee, regardless of any misgivings. Any staff member who wasn’t aboard the Trump Train, the RNC made clear, should find new employment.

The tensions lingered from a campaign in which the Trump faithful saw RNC betrayals everywhere. And many career Republicans had flunked what became known as the October 8 test, referring to the day after The Washington Post reported that Trump, on an on-set crew bus for the show Access Hollywood, had bragged about sexually assaulting women. If you stuck by the president during the ensuing fallout, publicly defended him, and refrained from any second-guessing of his candidacy, you had passed the October 8 test. If you hadn’t, you hadn’t.

Months later, these two competing camps were working side by side. And if you’ve never had the pleasure of touring the White House, know that it is a very small, cramped space. The physical proximity wouldn’t help with any lingering tensions.

As they tried to establish a decent working relationship, a number of former campaign hands would begrudgingly admit that the former RNCer Michael Short, for instance, was a skilled communications operative. But they would quickly add that he just couldn’t be trusted after he was supposedly seen vacating his desk at Trump Tower when The Washington Post broke the news of Trump’s behind-the-scenes pussy-grabbing comments. Short insists to this day that he did no such thing and was scheduled to head back to D.C. anyway. But the reputation set in, and it was a microcosm of the intense divisions in the early White House that kept its staff at each other’s throats.

The fourteenth-floor crew was convinced that Reince Priebus and his RNC contingent were, at best, out to co-opt this political insurgent for their own very swampy ends. And the White House hiring process didn’t put their minds at ease, with RNC staffers landing senior West Wing gigs as campaign hands languished, waiting and wondering if they’d even be invited in.

The resulting White House staff was largely divided into two distinct camps that would soon set off an internal power struggle. But first, they had to figure out how to work the phones.

White House staffers who showed up to their new offices in January found the place a disaster. In the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where the vast majority of White House offices reside, incoming staffers found desks and chairs piled up against walls. Phone lines were not set up, and the arcane system required professional installation. Some staffers couldn’t even figure out how to turn on the lights. During past administration transitions, some staffers in the outgoing White House stuck around to show their successors the ropes. No one from the Obama White House extended that courtesy.

For the first few weeks, a number of staffers recalled huddling in vacant offices or working on colleagues’ couches, receiving little direction on how they should set up work spaces and the basic office functionality they’d require.

—

FOR the White House and the new administration, the widespread chaos, dysfunction, and internal backbiting was a disaster. It made a coherent policy strategy difficult and a coherent communications strategy out of the question. It was impossible for midlevel staffers, the types who do the actual grunt work, to get much done, simply because internal deliberation was no longer internal; it was not a possibility but a guarantee that any sensitive subject discussed with White House colleagues would wind up in the press.

The leaking started on day one. Internal cooperation was largely a joke. No one trusted anyone outside, and often within, their immediate office. Looping colleagues in on an internal project was just a way to exponentially increase the odds that those colleagues would leak your work to the press, shit-talk you to a superior, or perhaps both.

This was especially problematic for the communications department, the arm of the White House tasked with putting together a public-facing strategy for the new administration. During the transition, many incoming officials, particularly those who’d worked on the campaign, expected that Jason Miller would be heading up the comms shop. And sure enough, he was tapped for communications director in December. And then soap opera–style drama consumed the place once again.

During the presidential transition, the former Trump campaign adviser A. J. Delgado blew up Miller’s spot on Twitter, revealing to the public that a married Miller had fathered her love child during the 2016 campaign. This led to Miller’s quickly withdrawing himself from the list of incoming White House staff and kicked off a legal fight between Team Jason and Team A.J. that is still ongoing well into the end of 2019. Delgado herself was supposed to get a position in the Trump White House as a deputy assistant to the president. Titles such as “deputy press secretary” were thrown around as Delgado’s prize for being a vocal supporter of Trump’s early in the race. That all came crashing down for her when she started airing dirty laundry.

By all accounts, Delgado ended up on the losing end of the affair. Back in her home state of Florida, she began raising the child whom Miller fathered while he went on to a plum gig at the powerhouse global consulting firm Teneo. Miller’s own professional prospects would collapse a couple years later when other sordid details about his personal life would emerge through a lawsuit he himself filed against a news outlet that reported details of claims made in a custody battle between him and Delgado. But at the time, Miller, though denied a role in the White House, was still very much in the president’s good graces while Delgado was stuck raising a child, without a visible future in Republican politics. Shortly into the Trump era, Delgado was given—at the request of the Trump family—a cushy gig at a Trump super PAC to perform the duties of a MAGA media envoy, though that job evaporated almost as quickly as it materialized.

Perhaps it was understandable, then, that Delgado saw every interaction with either her or Miller through the lens of that dispute. But as tensions brewed within Trumpworld, and her onetime colleagues picked sides in an ever-escalating dispute, Delgado also developed a reputation in Trumpworld as someone who was more than happy to dish it out just as hard as she got it.

We found ourselves on the receiving end of just that side of Delgado as we reported stories from inside Trumplandia. She had been happy to speak to us early in our tenure covering the White House, but sometime in 2018, Delgado for some reason developed the impression—the certainty—that we were carrying Miller’s water. So when we reached out to her to inform her that we were writing this book, and that she would be mentioned in it, Delgado responded with a twenty-three-hundred-word emailed tirade. “I realize you are thirsty and eager to please Miller,” she fumed. “Damn, you sell yourself cheap . . . Nothing personal but gosh, you really do sell your ethics for peanuts.”

After the dust settled on the first phase of the Miller-Delgado debacle, the top role in messaging and communications fell to Sean Spicer, who would soon enter the West Wing with his old RNC chum Reince. And few of those Trump “loyalists” from the fourteenth floor had much respect for Reince Priebus—a nice guy, sure, but a consummate insider and, worse, the type of timid pushover anathema to Team Trump’s burn-it-all-down, own-the-libs, killer ethos. (At least in their eyes.) But now these two guys, Priebus and Spicer, were basically running the show, and in particular staffing up the office where White House messaging would take shape.

The result was a communications shop stacked with RNC alums—Spicer up top, flanked by aides including Raj Shah, Michael Short, Adam Kennedy, Ninio Fetalvo, and Natalie Strom, who’d been Spicer’s personal assistant at the RNC. Those and other RNC alums were graced with White House positions shortly after Election Day. Prominent campaign hands, in contrast, found themselves in January without firm job offers. When Spicer finally contacted several campaign loyalists, they largely found themselves deprived of coveted senior staff roles that they considered their due. With a few exceptions, they initially ended up in midlevel positions that afforded them little if any face time with the president.

All of this made for a tense, chaotic, and distrustful work environment. In the communications shop in particular, staff simply couldn’t work through a messaging strategy, because every memo and email was liable to wind up in the press—sometimes word for word. One comms staffer recalled crafting a document detailing a list of the White House’s accomplishments to date. The document was designed for internal use, to fill in spokespeople and surrogates on good talking points when pressed to rattle off some of the administration’s positive agenda items. Within days, he read the same memo, in full and nearly verbatim, in the Washington Examiner.

That staffer soon instructed his colleagues and subordinates to never put anything in writing—not even in an internal email to a boss or co-worker. It would, the staffer warned, inevitably end up in the press.

No White House is leakproof. What set Trump’s West Wing apart wasn’t just the volume of press leaks but the petty smallness of those doing the leaking. These tips to the press weren’t designed to affect White House policy or expose some internal wrongdoing. Neither were they all dramatic or consequential or limited to those with actual influence in the West Wing.

No, everyone leaked, and they leaked about everything. Low-level staffers attempted to kneecap internal competition for a higher post, or even to get in the good graces of a superior. It could be done by leaking damaging information about a colleague or leaking in a way that made it sound as though the information came from that colleague—a good way to get someone marginalized internally or even fired. There was no larger purpose to most of these leaks; they were self-serving and frequently accomplished little beyond giving staffers a bit of satisfaction to see their own opinions on the matter in print.

With the new regime struggling to cobble together a functional workplace, a number of staffers, in both the White House and the larger administration, were obviously very frustrated. Many of them were young Republican professionals who’d maybe just caught the last few years of the Bush administration but had largely been forced to toil away in the opposition during eight long years under Barack Obama. Finally they got to the White House . . . and it was miserable. They weren’t getting anything done, and, worse, the president seemed incapable of avoiding repeated self-inflicted wounds. He’d just effectively ended Hillary Clinton’s political career, a historic achievement in the annals of Republican politics. So why couldn’t this guy stop stepping on his own dick?

The White House beat in journalism had, in administrations of the recent past, become a largely ceremonial and boring post, the type of place where newsroom veterans could relax, get a few on-camera moments during regular press briefings, and mostly avoid breaking any news in favor of a steady and largely uneventful four-hour workday. But when Spicer took the lectern for his first-ever press briefing, famously lying through his teeth about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowd, it was immediately clear that the stodgy humdrum of White House reporting past was very much over. And before long, some of the best political reporters in the country would be vying for scoops on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This was the atmosphere into which the two of us were dropped, with not a minute of White House reporting experience between us. There was no road map to follow in covering this insane new administration, its endless leaks, its Caligulan chief executive, its motley band of grifters and hangers-on, and its rabid political base. But one thing became clear very quickly: the people working in the administration were just as aware as we were that the whole thing was off the rails. And many of them were happy to say so, as long as no one knew it was them saying it.

Major news organizations were largely covering the Trump administration as they had previous ones, with a focus on an emerging policy agenda, early staff hires, and internal jockeying. We found a different if often complementary angle. We covered the daily toils of the staffers forced to manage the unmanageable. Often this simply consisted of calling or texting White House and administration sources in the wake of the daily catastrophes that enveloped Washington. Sources’ reactions soon became somewhat predictable: no, the president is not on script, and no one knew he’d tweet that insane thing; no, that is not administration policy, and I have no idea why he’s saying it; yes, this indictment or investigation is terrible for us and is going to end very poorly; yes, the whole thing is supremely fucked up. We soon carved out a role for The Daily Beast’s White House coverage as an outlet where White House and administration staffers could freely vent their frustrations about the chaos and dysfunction that surrounded them.

They weren’t saying anything that wasn’t obvious from the outside. But as an insider, you’re not supposed to admit any of this. The fact that our sources would give us their unvarnished opinion about the internal chaos that defined the early Trump White House was in a sense a credit to the administration and consistent with Trump’s campaign rhetoric: Many on his staff weren’t trying to put lipstick on this pig of a White House operation. They were telling it like it was, and it was quite bad.

Things came to a fever pitch in May 2017, which we still remember as the White House beat month from hell. In the course of a few weeks, Trump fired the FBI director, James Comey; revealed classified information to the Russian foreign minister at an Oval Office meeting covered solely by a Russian state news outlet; sought to reach out to the ousted national security adviser, Mike Flynn, despite a mounting counterintelligence case against him; and offered his unvarnished thoughts on all those controversies and others, routinely contradicting official White House talking points, occasionally within hours of when White House spokespeople publicly issued them.

On May 12, three days after Comey’s firing, Swin happened to be on the phone with a White House source as the president unleashed a torrent of such tweets, raging about Comey, the Russians, China, and contradictory statements from his own staff.

“As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” @realDonaldTrump tweeted. “Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future ‘press briefings’ and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???”

That tweet happened to post as Swin discussed the day’s events with his White House source. “Did you see the latest tweet?” Swin asked.

“What? No,” the source said, clearly caught off guard. “Hang on one second.” The staffer pulled up Twitter and simply responded, “Jesus.”

Stories on those sorts of reactions from inside the White House made for colorful coverage during an extremely hectic period in the White House. They also, we felt, added a certain human element to a time of unbridled chaos. It’s not clear that a staff of the utmost political professionals would have been able to keep a lid on things amid the president’s frequent public outbursts. But the staffers he’d brought with him to Washington were obviously unequipped or unable to keep White House strategy on track. Trump himself was the major story in all that, of course, but a corollary to his own idiosyncrasies was this crew of D-listers who seemed hapless in the face of an increasingly unmanageable administration.

—

FOR journalists covering this White House, there’s little more amusing than senior Trump officials railing against the damage done by internal leakers. That’s because, more often than not, the officials doing so are routine, shameless leakers themselves. The not-uncommon sight of Kellyanne Conway decrying duplicitous White House staffers on some cable news show would be enough for any White House reporter to publicly cry hypocrisy if Conway weren’t in all likelihood one of their go-to sources.

Trump himself, scourge of leaks and anonymous sources, is known to provide information to a select few reporters, provided they attribute the information to something like a “senior administration official” or “a source with direct knowledge” or a person “familiar with the president’s thinking.”

So much of the MAGA Right and its triumph is built on massive levels of irony. President Donald Trump spends his nights and days chastising “the fake news media” for, among other supposed injustices, frequently citing anonymous sources, even though he spent years in real estate and entertainment whoring himself out as a regular “well-placed,” faceless source, particularly to the New York tabloids.

In a mildly clever way, Trump has long understood that being a source with juicy information for reporters can serve as a form of protection for the self-interested. The logic goes like this: the more the press relies on you, the more they’ll go out of their way not to upset you. This worked out well for other demagogues of American history, including the red-baiting senator Joe McCarthy, who was protected by certain editors and journalists who knew the monster he was but who viewed his gossipy, dishy nature as too helpful to meeting their deadlines.

Back in the 1990s, Trump frequently used phrases like “off the record but you can use it” when dealing with journalists. (Not to get too pedantic here, but what Trump might have meant is “on background” or “on deep background,” which in journo-talk means that the information and/or quotations can be used anonymously, with agreed-upon attribution. “Off the record” means it stays between the reporter and the subject/source, so “off the record but you can use it” is technically a contradiction.)

But as he got older, the common usage of anonymous sourcing simply became yet another bad-faith attack, routinely deployed by a president who knew the vast majority of his millions of supporters didn’t know any better or didn’t give a shit. “When you see ‘anonymous source,’ stop reading the story, it is fiction!” Trump tweeted in August 2018.

As a matter of public messaging, Trump despises leakers, and so his staff, rife with leakers itself, was forced, especially in the early days, to make a show of cracking down on unauthorized conversations with the press.

No one made a bigger show than Sean Spicer. Few reporters elicited more consternation from Spicer than Politico’s Alex Isenstadt. Their feud went back years but escalated dramatically in February 2017. Isenstadt and a colleague reported that Spicer was interrogating his own staffers in an effort to root out comms shop leakers, even grilling one staffer, the deputy comms director Jessica Ditto, so viciously that she was brought to tears.

Spicer went nuclear. Isenstadt had of course asked him about his Ditto tip, and Spicer insisted that she was crying over the recent death of a U.S. Navy SEAL during an early Trump administration raid in Yemen. Isenstadt laughed off Spicer’s patently absurd attempt to downplay the incident. But on the day his Politico story dropped, a very strange piece appeared in the Washington Examiner. It was written by Paul Bedard, the same Washington Examiner columnist who published the leaked White House accomplishments. He was a frequent dumping ground for West Wing spin doctors, and Bedard claimed, citing an “informed official,” that Isenstadt “started laughing about that SEAL.” Who was the “informed official”? Well, Spicer had emailed Isenstadt after their phone conversation, pledging to “get that out.” And get it out he did.

Behind the scenes, Spicer was determined to root out leakers in general, and in particular anyone leaking to Isenstadt. The reporter’s account of Spicer’s phone checks was correct. Spicer was randomly reviewing devices of a number of his staffers, looking for anyone who might be providing information to Isenstadt and other reporters.

That made for a particularly awkward moment for Steven Cheung, the White House’s rapid-response director. In the wake of his public blowup with Isenstadt, Spicer instituted one of his now-routine phone checks. Cheung handed over his device as requested. As Spicer took the phone, it began ringing, and a familiar name popped up on the caller ID: Alex Isenstadt. This led Spicer to immediately, in front of Cheung and dozens of members of President Trump’s press, comms, and legal teams, flip through Cheung’s text message app and call log to determine if he had been in contact with the Politico reporter. Satisfied that Cheung wasn’t the snitch he was looking for, Trump’s press secretary handed the iPhone back to the rapid-response director.

—

AS the Spicer-Isenstadt episode illustrated, leaks in the early Trump White House were not just a fact of life but the way business was done. Given that sensitive internal information would end up in the press, the question then became how to leverage that fact to advance the White House’s agenda, or, more commonly, one’s own agenda—or, occasionally, to embarrass the reporters routinely embarrassing them. In practice, that meant a whole lot of disinformation coming from White House sources. Few leaked out of a noble desire to improve things internally. The leaks generally fell into four categories: cathartic venting (this is frustrating, and I want to talk about it), accurate but self-serving information (I’m leaking you something to advance myself or screw over internal enemies), inaccurate and self-serving information (I’m leaking you bullshit to do the same), and inaccurate and destructive information (I’m leaking to screw over you, the reporter). The decision to publish leaked information required figuring out which of those four categories applied and whether the information’s public interest or news value outweighed the certainty that the leaker was using you to achieve some other end.

Fortunately, early White House attempts to manipulate reporters were obvious and ham-fisted.

Cheung might have been a UFC promoter, but few would mistake him for a professional boxer. So it was a bit strange for Lachlan to see an anonymous “tip” land in his in-box in April 2017 claiming that the White House aide was secretly fighting in an underground bare-knuckle boxing ring in Wilmington, Delaware. The email came from a very on-the-nose email address, swampydcinsider@yahoo.com. The first email Lachlan received from that sender claimed Cheung had not signed ethics paperwork required of all incoming administration staffers.

Lachlan had actually heard about Cheung’s ethics agreement issue from another source and decided to ask him about it. Cheung didn’t answer directly; he just told Lachlan to circle back with his source. Lachlan checked with his actual source on the story, not this supposed anonymous tipster, who reiterated that, no, Cheung had not signed the ethics agreement required of incoming officials under Trump’s “drain the swamp” executive order. Lachlan exchanged a few more emails with Cheung, who repeatedly refused to say that he’d signed the ethics pledge. He arranged for a call with the short-lived White House communications director Mike Dubke, who insisted that Cheung had signed it as required. Not much came of that tip, but it did provide some insight into who was sending these swampydcinsider emails.

Then there was the issue of Cheung’s supposed underground boxing fights. “Found out Chung [sic] fights in Delaware in an old building called Wilmington Blue Printing company,” swampydcinsider wrote in an early May email. That building and the underground fights that took place there were the subjects of a 60 Minutes investigation a few years earlier. It was pretty obvious at this point that swampydcinsider was shoveling bullshit our way in an effort to get us to either run a bogus story or reveal who our White House sources were. (When Swin reached out to Cheung about this weird-as-hell email about him moonlighting as an underground cage-match fighter, or whatever, Cheung simply laughed, and said, “I have never heard that before in my life, and it’s hilarious someone would send you that.”)

We decided to play along, and sure enough, over the next few months, “anonymous tipster” made very obvious attempts to elicit the identities of our West Wing sources. Swampydcinsider would throw out suspects, claiming we were seen talking to some White House official or that some other official had been seen sending us information during meetings in the West Wing. “Your source about the warroom was part of a honeypot. Distraction. You’ll see why later next week,” claimed one email in response to the story that earned us Sims and Surabian’s ire. “Your story set off a lot of alarms and outed your source.” We never did see why, and our source for the story was never discovered.

We never used swampydcinsider as a source for any story, of course, and never seriously pursued any information that wasn’t also provided by a White House source we knew personally. The “anonymous tipster” was very clearly an effort to mess with us and try to root out people providing us with information.

We were later informed that it wasn’t an anonymous tipster but an email account that was indeed shoveling horseshit our way. Multiple Trump loyalists and White House staffers had been given access to, or the ability to view, the account and were laughing their asses off about it. We thought it was pretty amusing as well. In the vaunted annals of political dirty tricks, these guys weren’t even trying. And who could blame them? When you’re working a desk job, serving at the pleasure of the lizard-brain game-show host, you gotta do something to pass the time.

“WHY WOULD I TALK TO YOU?”

While the White House press shop wallowed in dysfunction, top Trump aides were doing what they could to get a policy agenda on track in the face of a president who made grandiose promises of security and prosperity on the campaign trail but had little interest in the minutiae of policy or government. Trump’s signature style seemed to be one of convening. He would assemble teams of experts—or people who he believed were experts—in a room in the White House, often on camera, and lavish praise on their brilliant ideas to improve the country. Often that’s as far as the ideas went.

For those surrounding Trump, the challenge wasn’t just a president who didn’t understand the complex problems the country faced. It was that he seemed to have little interest in understanding them. And the roster of third-rate talent with which the president surrounded himself from the beginning meant that it often was not, in fact, the Best People trying to get him up to speed.

That’s not to say there weren’t highly intelligent and talented people on Trump’s staff and in the upper echelons of his administration. But one of the president’s defining characteristics is a distrust of anyone whom he perceives to be smarter than himself. Barbara Res, whom Trump hired to oversee construction of his flagship Trump Tower in New York, put it this way: “Although some [Trump Organization executives] were very competent, they were, by and large, weak . . . Trump could not take a chance in hiring his male equal, so he kept them in their place.”

It was tough to simultaneously hire the Best People while ensuring that no one would overshadow the president himself. And it was the source of notorious clashes between Trump and aides such as Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the chief executive of the country’s largest oil company and certainly someone whose accomplishments and intellect could, in the president’s eyes, rival his own. Tillerson ostensibly headed up the administration’s foreign policy, but Trump routinely ignored the former Exxon chief’s counsel. And with few political appointees confirmed to work under Tillerson, and career State Department bureaucrats eyed suspiciously by a White House ever concerned about the seditious “deep state,” foreign leaders soon found that Tillerson—like Secretary of Defense James Mattis and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster—held little sway over the president’s decision making on crucial military and foreign policy matters.

Instead, those leaders found that their interests were better served by lobbying officials with no actual expertise but with the trust and ear of the president—people like Jared Kushner, who became a lead point of contact for NATO allies trying to figure out whether Trump planned to follow through on his threats to effectively dismantle the flagship military alliance.

But there was one major problem with Kushner’s role as the administration’s NATO point man: he didn’t seem to know what NATO actually did.

In May 2017, Kushner’s father-in-law was about to embark on a high-profile foreign trip, with the commentariat and political class wailing about how President Trump couldn’t be counted on to defend NATO allies, particularly against Russian aggression and in support of the collective defense principle of Article 5, which stipulates that an attack on one treaty member is to be considered an attack on all members. It’s been invoked only once: in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

In the days before kicking off the overseas trip, Kushner quietly convened several journalists from mainstream political outlets—the Post, the Times, whatever other legacy media—at the White House (we were not invited) for a background briefing on what to expect from the high-stakes visit. As Kushner went deeper and deeper into discussing the intricacies of NATO and what his father-in-law’s administration meant for the alliance, senior officials in the room started wondering what the hell the thirtysomething senior adviser to the president was talking about.

It was a word salad reminiscent of the president’s own rambling when it came to issues and minutiae with which he couldn’t be bothered.

After Kushner finished his show for the reporters, he smiled, people shook hands, and the hotshot reporters left, having enjoyed another taste of access to executive power. Michael Anton, at the time a spokesman for Trump’s National Security Council, followed Kushner on his way out the door. Anton respectfully asked Kushner about whatever it was that he had just muddled in the room moments earlier. Anton brought up Article 5.

“Oh, Article 5,” Kushner replied politely. “What’s that, again?”

—

THOSE Trump officials who did have actual political principles and knowledge of the policy matters with which they were tasked soon discovered that they were working for a man for whom such matters were at best irrelevant and more often an active impediment to his narcissistic governing style.

So discovered Mick Mulvaney in early 2017 when he was assigned to oversee the Office of Management and Budget. It was a perfect fit for the former South Carolina congressman, who’d earned a reputation as a conservative budget hawk determined to slash the entitlement state and cut down on the size of the federal leviathan. He was now in the employ of a president who had repeatedly hammered his predecessor over the federal government’s red-ink-covered balance sheets.

Mulvaney must have been taken aback, then, when the president punted the issue so hard it would’ve made an NFL kicker whistle.

The OMB chief had come to a meeting with the president prepared to convey the gravity of the problem. He knew that the president liked visuals, so he brought a chart showing the nation’s skyrocketing public debt.

Trump sat and took in the data Mulvaney presented to him. The chart’s “hockey stick” curve appeared to show that the national debt would reach a critical mass in the late 2020s. Mulvaney confirmed that that was indeed the case, stressing that in actuarial terms that was a very tight timeline.

“Yeah,” Trump responded. “But I won’t be here.”

The complete disregard for the future of the country and its people and baffling displays of supremely Trumpian buffoonery toward policy, politics, and outreach to outside groups were almost in pornographic abundance as the administration began figuring out which way was up and which down.

A jarringly stark example of this took place in the White House Roosevelt Room on March 17, 2017, when Trump met with various vets groups. Early in the Trump administration, the president for some unfathomable reason entrusted some of his most important tasks to Omarosa Manigault, the former Apprentice villain, now senior Trump administration official, who would soon turn on him and his family by secretly recording audio of the president and launching a whirlwind media tour lambasting her former boss and friend as a corrupt and insane racist. One of these tasks was veterans’ issues.

For some reason, Trump thought this was a smart choice—causing a swift backlash from vets groups who correctly read this as a hard smack in the face and a betrayal of his campaign sweet talk of “taking care of our veterans.”

Following a resounding chorus of public shaming from veterans and advocacy organizations, Trump and his senior staff succumbed and announced the March 17 White House meeting with the principals from various vets groups, giving them a chance to offer suggestions and air their grievances, hoping Trump might notice.

The subsequent gathering of vets advocates quickly degenerated into a prolonged argument between the president and war veterans about napalm, Agent Orange, and the movie Apocalypse Now.

The first part of the event was open to the press, and it went relatively smoothly. It was when the reporters, cameras, and microphones had been ushered out that the staggering imbecility was allowed to begin.

It started innocuously enough. Trump went around the table asking different envoys what each of them was doing and what he and his administration could do to better serve them.

Soon enough, he got to Rick Weidman, co-founder of Vietnam Veterans of America, who served as a medic in the late 1960s, during the height of that conflict. Weidman was one of multiple Vietnam vets in the room that day. (The president was not one of them, of course. Trump had famously dodged military service in that miserable war, supposedly due to his “bone spurs.” Many years later, he would joke on Howard Stern’s show that his promiscuous sex life was like his own “personal Vietnam.”)

At this point, Weidman brought up Agent Orange—a powerful, extremely brutal herbicide deployed by U.S. forces against the Vietnamese, which would later saddle American veterans with horrible health effects—and beseeched the president to grant access to health benefits for a larger number of Vietnam War veterans who say they were poisoned by Agent Orange.

Trump replied, confidently, “That’s taken care of.”

His response confounded the attendees, who had no idea what in God’s name he was talking about, a familiar theme for normal-brained humans who spend time within speaking distance of the forty-fifth U.S. president. The issue most certainly had not been “taken care of.”

Several people present tried explaining to him that the Department of Veterans Affairs hadn’t made sufficient progress on the matter to consider it “taken care of,” clarifications that Trump reacted to by abruptly upending the meeting and asking everyone present if Agent Orange was, in his inquisitive terms, “that stuff from that movie.”

There was a brief pause as the military veterans present shot glances and furrowed brows at one another, unsure of what exactly this had to do with an actual life-or-death topic for Vietnam vets.

At first, President Trump didn’t identify “that movie” he was referring to, but it didn’t take long to figure out, as Trump kept on babbling, that he was talking about the acclaimed 1979 Francis Ford Coppola war epic, Apocalypse Now—specifically, the iconic helicopter attack on a Vietnamese village thunderously set to Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”

Multiple people seated around Trump in the Roosevelt Room—including the actual Vietnam War veterans—chimed in to enlighten the president that the Apocalypse Now air-attack sequence featured Lieutenant Colonel William Kilgore ordering a napalm strike, not deploying Agent Orange. They also pointed out that it was not a film that portrayed Vietnam service members in a particularly positive or, they felt, accurate light.

The president was unimpressed and undeterred in the face of the instant fact check. (One clue that could’ve tipped him off in the moment is that the oft-quoted and co-opted Robert Duvall line from the scene is “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” not “I love the smell of Agent Orange in the morning,” but these are just details.)

Instead, Trump refused to accept the premise that he could have possibly gotten this wrong and kept saying things like “No, I think it’s that stuff from that movie,” to the roomful of veterans and senior administration officials (and moviegoers).

Trump then decided to start going around the room, polling aides and attendees about whether the “stuff” in the scene was, just for the record, Agent Orange or napalm, plunging the meeting into a pointless and surreal argument between the president and, well, everybody else about a Francis Ford Coppola movie.

Trump simply would not let this go.

Finally, Trump’s eye and pointed index finger landed back on Weidman.

“What do you think?” the president asked, nudging him on napalm or Agent Orange.

Weidman calmly reiterated what several others in attendance had already said: it was napalm. He added that he didn’t enjoy Apocalypse Now and saw it as an insult to Americans who served in the war in Vietnam.

Trump flippantly replied, “Well, I think you just didn’t like the movie,” before finally moving on to a different subject. At that point, the great debate in the Roosevelt Room had somehow lasted at least two minutes, according to estimates from several who suffered through its entirety. Because of this, the president did not end up having enough time to call on every veterans advocate at the roundtable on this occasion. One attendee would later succinctly characterize this meeting to Swin as “really fucking weird.”

—

SUCCESSFUL presidents depend, by design, on a coterie of knowledgeable and sober advisers who are able and allowed to offer candid advice that informs sound decision making. Those advisers generally have experience in the fields on which they counsel their presidents, and successful chief executives can effectively delegate and defer to their advisers and overrule them when necessary.

Trump had . . . very little of that.

The famously narcissistic president placed little value on actual competence and expertise, and far more on two qualities that made Sebastian Gorka a perfect fit for the senior White House role he was awarded early in the Trump administration: unflinching personal loyalty, and a good presence on television news.

Gorka is, without a doubt, a superb pundit. With his deep baritone and sophisticated-sounding British accent, the Hungarian-descended national security thinker commands attention during his frequent Fox News appearances and at campaign rallies. At the latter, he’s greeted as a celebrity, often garnering louder applause than the political candidates he appears to support. At conservative gatherings in Washington and around the country, Gorka is a perpetual draw for selfie-hungry young professionals. And his witty repartee makes him a cable news favorite. Arguing with CNN’s Chris Cuomo in 2017 over an incendiary Trump tweet about his Muslim travel ban, Gorka jibed, “You’re talking about one tweet, Chris, should we spend the whole program on it?”

Cuomo shot back, “I think that to call it a tweet is to run away from significance.”

“It is a tweet,” Gorka said, laughing. “What else is it, a bowl of petunias?”

Gold, Jerry.

Donald Trump was so captivated by how Sebastian Gorka would zealously lay into TV hosts that one day he invited the deputy assistant to the president into the Oval Office, where Kellyanne Conway and Mike Pence were already meeting with Trump. “A star is born,” Trump said, congratulating a beaming, blushing Gorka after having caught one of his television hits. At the time, Gorka was seen as a categorical joke among the national security brass. In early 2017, President Trump personally directed national security officials who loathed Gorka to give the former Breitbart staffer a seat at the table on actual decision making and foreign policy planning. It didn’t take long for officials outranking Gorka to figure out how to sideline him, because they thought he contributed worse than nothing to meetings. Gorka was known to derail actual, substantive policy conversation with talk of what random historical figures did in dire situations. To everyone who wasn’t Gorka (or President Trump, for that matter), it was akin to listening to a college freshman trying to impress fellow coeds in all the wrong ways.

Nevertheless, the president had other plans for Mr. Seb. “They tell me he’s a national security adviser,” Trump once said, simultaneously praising and knocking Gorka behind his back. “I don’t give a fuck what he is. He should be on TV every day.”

Gorka rose to prominence during the 2016 presidential race, when he was simultaneously an employee of Bannon’s Breitbart and a paid adviser to the Trump campaign. For a few years now, the Dragon of Budapest, as he’s been informally—and mockingly—dubbed, has gone to highly entertaining lengths to cultivate an image for himself as both a hardscrabble tough guy and an international man of mystery. He is instantly recognizable around Washington for his absurd mode of transportation, a black Ford Mustang—not the 5-liter V-8, but its far less powerful 2.3-liter EcoBoost model—adorned with 9/11 memorial license plates, customized to read “ART WAR.” Gorka is extremely proud of his Mustang, which he has a lot of trouble parking. On one occasion, he pulled the car onto an Arlington, Virginia, sidewalk and simply . . . left. A Twitter user captured the moment, complete with Gorka in the distance, walking away from the car that he’d just “parked” on a pedestrian walkway.

And of course no caricature of a red-blooded American conservative would be complete without guns. Lots of them. So few who know Gorka were surprised when he told Recoil magazine that he regularly carries not one but two sidearms on his person. More entertaining was the rest of his “everyday carry” kit: a Zippo lighter modified into a butane torch, a knife, a flashlight, a copy of the U.S. Constitution, and a tourniquet. “I can deploy it with one hand,” he bragged of the latter.

That penchant for weaponry caused Gorka a bit of a problem in Hungary, where he served as a government adviser to, among other officials, the anti-Semitic strongman prime minister Viktor Orban. At some point, Gorka appears to have ended up on the wrong side of the law. In early 2018, BuzzFeed noticed his name on a Hungarian police website listing fugitives from justice in that country, which noted that his offense related to “firearm or ammunition abuse.”

Gorka’s name was removed from that website shortly thereafter. But it wasn’t his only Hungarian red flag. His frequent contacts with British military and intelligence officials prevented him from obtaining a security clearance in the country, effectively scuttling his career as a counterterrorism adviser there.

Instead, Gorka moved to the United States, becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2012. He served a brief stint at the Gatestone Institute, a nonprofit once chaired by the former White House national security adviser John Bolton that warns that “Muslim mass-rape gangs” are transforming Britain into “an Islamist Colony.” He also set up his own counterterrorism training consultancy and received a few contracts from U.S. law enforcement agencies, including the FBI. Gorka’s training sessions largely consisted of anti-Islam jeremiads, according to agents who recalled the events to our Daily Beast colleague Spencer Ackerman. The bureau terminated their relationship in late 2016.

But Gorka had bigger things on the horizon. Trump absolutely loved him for the faux-sophisticate air he presented in his frequent cable news interviews and the fact that Gorka, like others who have earned the president’s affinity through TV hits, could find no fault in anything Trump had ever or could ever do. He checked every box for potential Trump employment—well, both boxes really: he was good on TV, and he was a total sycophant.

Gorka routinely dazzled the president with on-air zingers, including one accusing CNN staff of “handing around a crack pipe of Trump hatred” during commercial breaks. They were the sorts of lines that would keep him in the president’s good graces after his ignominious White House departure.

For the time being, though, his owning of the libs was earning Gorka a coveted role as a deputy assistant to the president, a title of “strategist,” and a starting salary of $155,000 per year.

What it could not get him was a security clearance. Gorka rode Bannon’s coattails in the White House, and as an ostensible counterterrorism expert he was brought into the fold of the Strategic Initiatives Group, a small committee of senior White House aides, headed by Bannon and Kushner, that attempted to operate as a shadow National Security Council. But even if it was a largely off-the-books effort to undercut the suspected deep state apparatchik H. R. McMaster, Trump’s second national security adviser, the work it was doing required that those in the room be cleared to handle highly classified material.

Gorka wasn’t, and so he found himself largely cut out of the policy making he was ostensibly at the White House to affect. Instead, he was known to kill time in the White House mess hall, with few responsibilities and even less influence.

After a few months on the job, such as it was, Gorka’s position was untenable. The White House began looking for other agencies in the federal government where he might be moved. And this is when we first crossed paths with the Dragon of Budapest.

We knew little about the guy when we received a tip in April 2017 that the White House was looking to give him the boot. A source at one agency where the West Wing was considering a relocation had clued us into the search, and we soon confirmed on the White House end that officials were indeed weighing a new position for him elsewhere in the administration, ideally somewhere that would not require a security clearance. We called up Gorka to ask for comment. He politely requested that we put our questions in an email, to which he never responded. It was the first and last time we would interact on a friendly basis.

A few days later, Lachlan attended an event at the National Press Club, where Gorka addressed a crowd of Republican lawyers about the threat of radical Islam. After the event, he peppered Gorka with questions about his status at the White House and potential future employment plans. Larry Levy, an official with the Republican National Lawyers Association, the hosting organization, literally boxed out Lachlan, physically preventing him from approaching Gorka as the self-proclaimed alpha male made a dash for the press club elevators.

Few people in Trump’s orbit entertain and thrill us to the degree Gorka does. He is undeniably witty (in his way), with a voice for radio and a carefully curated public persona that he has convinced himself exudes sophistication and general badassery. We decided to stay on the Seb beat if only for the pleasure of continuing to interact with this cartoonish character. We soon reported on Trump’s personal intervention to keep Gorka on staff at the White House, but his retention was short-lived. In August, after Gorka had managed to get a security clearance, the newly minted White House chief of staff, John Kelly, revoked it while Gorka was on vacation. He returned and was told he no longer had a job.

Gorka tried to claim he’d quit and leaked a “resignation letter” to friendly voices at The Federalist. “It is clear to me that forces that do not support the MAGA promise are—for now—ascendant within the White House,” he wrote in a characteristically conspiratorial tone.

A month later, Gorka found his next gig: he was paid $20,000 per month to advise a political group called the MAGA Coalition. We were once again on top of the story and reported that the group was founded and run by a crew of nutters who were among the leading boosters of conspiracy theories such as the underground pedophilia ring run by prominent Democrats out of a Northwest D.C. pizzeria (dubbed Pizzagate, the outlandish theory, which originated in internet forums dedicated to deciphering supposed coded messages in hacked Democratic emails in 2016, resulted in a shooting at the pizzeria shortly after Trump’s election). Gorka’s new employer soon sponsored a political rally for the accused child molester Roy Moore, then running for Senate in Alabama, headlined by Gorka himself and the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

Gorka left the MAGA Coalition after a couple months and hit up the campaign speaking circuit—usually not considered a circuit per se, except he collected thousands of dollars in speaking fees for each of his campaign rally appearances. He also slid into a Salem Radio slot vacated by Michael Medved, one of the few remaining Trump-skeptical voices on nationally syndicated conservative talk radio.

And for all—or perhaps because of—our coverage of Gorka’s Trump-era exploits, he never seemed to warm to us. “Why would I talk to you?” was a characteristic reply to one of our comment requests, and caterwauling about the “fake news” Daily Beast on his Twitter account—which we’ve both been blocked from viewing—became fairly standard. On one occasion, Gorka even sent an unsolicited email to Lachlan asking about his apparent drug problem. “A journalist just asked me if you have a problem with cocaine addiction. I was shocked,” he wrote. “It’s not true is it?” (It was not.)

After refusing to respond to a request for comment on a story Swin wrote in March 2018, Gorka emailed Swin: “I saw the piece you wrote. You are sad person fueled by hatred. I will prayer [sic] for you and all your colleagues who attack others they know absolutely nothing about. However I will be blocking you from this email address and my phone since there is no merit to any contact with you. Hopefully, with God’s grace, you will one day find your moral center again.”

Signed, “Dr Sebastian Gorka,” as always.

—

WITH talent like Gorka filling out the upper echelons of the White House staff structure during its first few months, and scandal after scandal engulfing an administration just trying to get off the ground, a ham-fisted kickoff to the Trump era was inevitable. But as the summer of 2017 kicked into gear, the true scale of the dysfunction really came into focus internally.

Kaelan Dorr got a taste of just how deep that rot went when he was summoned to Sean Spicer’s office in June and informed that he’d been doing the wrong job. Dorr was a campaign war room hand who’d been brought into the White House to coordinate with federal agency appointees on administration-wide communications strategy. Or at least that’s what he thought he’d been hired to do.

Spicer was conducting a communications-department-wide audit at the time, trying to root out the internal backbiting that was preventing any coherent comms strategy from taking shape. And much to Dorr’s surprise, Spicer informed him that his job was not, in fact, cabinet communications but rather congressional communications. Spicer’s friends on the Hill had informed him that they’d never even received an email from Dorr, let alone huddled to craft a joint messaging strategy. Spicer wanted to know what the hell he’d been doing with his time.

Dorr tried to explain that that wasn’t his job, or at least wasn’t the job he’d been assigned. He had even been reporting on his progress in daily comms meetings that literally included Spicer and other senior staffers. If this wasn’t supposed to be his job, perhaps someone—Spicer, even!—should have informed him of this. It was yet another microcosm of the rank disorganization and shambolic nature of the early Trump West Wing. Spicer was having none of it. He had a list on his desk that clearly showed that Dorr was tasked with congressional communications, not cabinet communications. That was his job, and he’d better start doing it.

Dorr shrugged. “This means I’m getting a raise, right?” he asked.

“GET ME A PLAN!”

Steve Bannon liked to talk about what he was working on, and his corner of the White House boasted a visual prop that helped illustrate the enormity of the fundamental transformation he hoped to foist on the country. Hanging on the wall of his West Wing office was a whiteboard filled with scribblings detailing the sweeping agenda he was working to enact. The board listed all the different policy items Bannon was pursuing.

The agenda was, to put it mildly, aggressive. In mid-2017, it rattled off dozens of goals, followed by check marks when they were accomplished to Bannon’s satisfaction. The sweeping agenda—revealed to the public in part because visitors to Bannon’s office, including Gorka and Dinesh D’Souza, kept taking selfies in front of it—covered immigration, trade, health care, infrastructure, and tax policy. The agenda wasn’t exactly a secret—most of the items were issues Trump had campaigned on—but they nonetheless presented an unvarnished view of the key policies that the White House, or at least Bannon’s faction of it, hoped to achieve.

But on May 10, 2017, Bannon wasn’t thinking about any of that. He was sitting in an office, holding court with a high-dollar Republican donor, and the television was tuned to CNN. The day before, Trump had fired the FBI director, James Comey, setting off a wave of recriminations that would hound the administration for years afterward. But Bannon wasn’t feeling sheepish or intimidated. He was just pissed off.

“THEY WANT TO TALK ABOUT RUSSIA? THEY CAN SUCK MY MOTHERFUCKING DICK!” he screamed while pointing at the TV in Reince Priebus’s chief of staff suite, which had on a chyron related to Trump-Russia. “They want to talk about Russia? We’ll fucking talk about Russia.” Bannon turned to the aide Andy Surabian, whom he had summoned to the room. He wanted to go on offense on the Russia front. He wanted to hit back. He wanted, to use his preferred term, to go to war. And what better mechanism to wage war than a war room? “Now go!” he bellowed to his lieutenant. “Get me a plan by the end of the night!”

The task to un-fuck Trump’s inundated, shitshow communications and press team fell to several campaign “originals,” including the “war room” vets Cliff Sims and Andy Surabian and their colleagues Steven Cheung and Andrew Hemming.

To those who’ve been reading this book from its beginning, you might see where this is going!

Over the weekend, they sat down to start mapping out the plan. But what they devised was far more than a new arm of the White House’s communications apparatus; it was a wholesale revamp of the department.

Nevertheless, news of the “Russia war room” spread, with Fox News reporting in late May on “Trump’s Russia war room of legal ‘A-Team,’ street fighters and surrogates” that was taking shape in the West Wing. Rumors were even circulating, again, that Lewandowski and Bossie could be brought in to head up the “rapid response” operation in an effort to combat the White House’s persistent leak problem and the growing headaches that the Russia narrative was creating for a White House looking to jump-start its legislative agenda.

We got wind of this “Russia war room” and started asking around among our White House sources. Before long, we got one to dish some details. Surabian and Sims were two of the people heading up the effort, the source said, while Bannon and Kushner were supervising. But no one we spoke with expected that the White House would be able to rein in a news cycle that was spiraling far out of its control—not because staffers charged with doing so weren’t up to the job, but simply because the president’s compulsive tweeting and tendency to run his mouth for the cameras made a coherent messaging strategy impossible.

We published that story on Friday afternoon under the headline “White House’s Russia ‘War Room’ Built on Ticking Time Bomb.” Lachlan left the office, got in his car, and began the two-hour drive to Charlottesville, Virginia, for the weekend. About fifteen minutes into the drive, he got a call from Sims. The story was total BS, Sims said. The comment request we’d sent to him earlier in the day wasn’t sufficient, he added. He suspected we were just fishing for information and that we wouldn’t report his involvement based on a single source (the source, it turned out, was solid). He demanded to speak to our editor. Lachlan provided Sims with her number. Sims never called.

Thus began our lengthy spat with two longtime Trump aides that would culminate in the near brawl in the lobby of the Trump hotel we recounted earlier. We’re on good terms with Sims and Surabian these days, even though they continue to claim that our story was inaccurate. There was no “Russia war room,” they insist every time the topic comes up. But they don’t dispute that the White House crafted plans for a war room. Or that the revamped rapid-response strategy was devised in large part to address the White House’s Russia-related problems. In June, Politico ran with the label as well. “White House ices Russia war room idea,” the paper reported, adding that the plan envisioned “two former campaign aides [taking] over rapid response on Russia questions.”

So, guys, if you’re reading this: We still stand by our story. But in the interest of burying the hatchet, we’ll stop calling it a “Russia war room” . . . starting now.

—

SIMS, Surabian, Cheung, and Hemming’s proposed Russ—ahem—comms department revamp envisioned a totally reorganized communications apparatus designed to streamline and clarify how the White House’s messaging strategy would take shape by establishing clear roles and lines of authority among the brutally fractious and disorganized staff. And the plan was a hit. Bannon loved it. For the next few weeks, he’d use a printed-out slideshow of the plan as his prop to underscore just how innovative and action oriented his team was. When he received notable visitors to his office, Bannon would grab the plan, furiously point to it, and exclaim, “Check this shit out right here! This is what we’re doing!”

Even more important, Kushner loved it. And the First Son-in-Law’s sign-off was going to be crucial if the plan was ever going to be implemented. Around the West Wing, Kushner began affectionately referring to Surabian, Sims, Hemming, and Cheung as “the killers.” He seemed to be fully on board. But there was one problem: Kushner considered Reince Priebus feckless and ineffective and wanted him out of the West Wing. And he knew that Priebus was on his last legs at the White House at the time. The communications chaos was, therefore, beneficial for Kushner, and he was determined not to improve things until Priebus was gone. He would revisit the communications plan when Priebus—and, hopefully, Spicer—were out the door. Then, under a competent White House leadership structure, including a new communications director, he could go about restructuring the comms shop.

That’s not exactly how things worked out. Instead, Kushner and the rest got Anthony Scaramucci and arguably the craziest eleven days of the early Trump era.

The Mooch was, of course, a known quantity in political circles, having served as a Wall Street fund-raiser for a number of prominent Republicans. They included no fewer than three 2016 GOP contenders. Trump was, in fact, Scaramucci’s last choice during the campaign. He initially backed the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, whose aides suspected the Mooch of leaking details from campaign fund-raising calls to the press. A Walker campaign aide described the leaks as just “stirring up drama with the donors.” It wasn’t even clear that he had an immediate goal in doing so beyond his insatiable need to share his unvarnished opinions with a reporter. It was that same impulse that would be his White House undoing.

When Walker dropped out of the race in late 2015, Scaramucci approached the Florida senator Marco Rubio’s campaign. Team Rubio, cognizant of his reputation, wasn’t interested in his support, so the Mooch signed on with the campaign of Rubio’s chief rival, the former Florida governor Jeb Bush. After Bush dropped out, Scaramucci finally threw his support behind the eventual victor.

Given his own reputation as a leaker—one solidified as early as the 2012 presidential campaign—Republican politicos were a bit taken aback at the number one agenda item that dominated Scaramucci’s raucous entry into the Trump White House. He would root out the internal leakers betraying the president’s trust and imperiling his agenda, Scaramucci vowed. The first step in that agenda was to scare the shit out of his new colleagues.

Tact and subtlety were not exactly the Mooch’s strong suits. In addition to his reputation as a willing source, he was known in some Republican circles for the hilarious but often outlandish comments he’d make in the course of friendly conversation. During one of our trips to the Trump hotel, Scaramucci came up in conversation with a group of Trump-backing black evangelical pastors who were in town for an event. It was shortly after Scaramucci’s White House tenure, so he was bound to be a topic of discussion. These guys recalled a conversation with the Mooch in which he attempted to burnish his credentials in the African American community. He was very in tune with the concerns of black Americans, Scaramucci said, citing the fact that he was, in his words, “black from the waist down.”

Naturally, we fell over laughing at that. Scaramucci was out at the White House, but we had to write that up. It was simply too good. We called up the Mooch the next day to ask about it. He denied up and down that he had ever uttered such a thing. It “sounds racist,” he objected. We pitched editors on the story, but they didn’t see the immediate news value in publishing a story on Scaramucci’s endowment. More than a year later, we got wind that Sims would be recounting a similar anecdote in his book. Excerpts from political books are frequently leaked ahead of time to generate buzz before the book’s release, and bombshell details from Sims’s account were already showing up in major publications. But we just wanted one anecdote from it. Finally, we got our hands on the chapter at issue. And sure enough, Sims recalled Scaramucci making the “black from the waist down” joke in a conversation with a number of White House media technicians, who were largely African American. With Sims’s book coming out, we at last had both corroboration and a news peg. We revisited the story, with the editors’ sign-off.

And naturally we went back to Scaramucci to see if he’d like to comment. “Nah thanks though,” he texted back.

After the announcement of his hiring, and the simultaneous resignation of his predecessor, Sean Spicer, whom Scaramucci was brought on to replace, the outgoing White House press secretary gathered communications department staff in his office for a heartfelt goodbye speech. The press secretary’s office is massive by the standards of the West Wing, big enough to fit a large desk, a table, and four chairs and have plenty of uncovered floor space. But the office was packed with staffers gathered to hear Spicer’s final words to his troops.

Steven Cheung happened to be standing near the office’s door as Spicer bade farewell. And Cheung was a bit taken aback when, in the middle of Spicer’s speech, someone sneaked up behind him and gave him a big, loud hug. He turned around to see a glowing Anthony Scaramucci.

For those of us covering the White House at the time, the Scaramucci era looked to be a gift from the heavens. Just for the sheer entertainment value of it, a Scaramucci-run communications department was going to be gold for the political news business. He seemed to be the perfect Trump spokesman: amiable, brash, over the top, a consummate New Yorker, with a deep and unfiltered hatred of Washington business as usual and the whisper campaigns and backstabbing that defined it. “Anthony Scaramucci is Trump’s mini-me,” as CNN’s Chris Cillizza put it.

And Scaramucci love-hated the press, in the same fashion as Trump. He was vowing to crack down on leakers and trying to shame the fake news for going after his new boss. But the Mooch himself reveled in every minute in front of the cameras and passed up no opportunity to answer the media’s questions. That was clear from the outset of his White House tenure, which kicked off with a marathon ninety-minute press briefing during which he pledged he would take every question that reporters in the room had for him. And he followed through—mostly. Lachlan raised his hand after every answer. But when the presser wrapped up, it seemed he was the only one in the room who didn’t get a question in.

Nevertheless, part of the Mooch’s strategy for cracking down on press leaks appeared to be turning the White House communications shop into a functional and responsive place. He quickly implemented new rules for the press shop, including requiring that they respond to every single outstanding media request before going home each day. Perhaps if reporters got official responses from the White House, they wouldn’t need to resort to the unofficial ones, which were invariably far more damaging and, in Scaramucci’s eyes, less truthful.

When we heard that, there were high fives in the newsroom. Would the White House press shop finally begin doing its actual job of communicating with the press in a less hostile manner? Would we finally get questions answered when we reached out through official channels?

We would not, it turns out. Scaramucci’s new every-media-request-gets-a-response rule was completely, laughably unrealistic. The West Wing simply didn’t have the manpower for that herculean task. But we appreciated the sentiment nonetheless and figured that Scaramucci would at least usher in a more constructive relationship between us and our official contacts in the White House.

If Scaramucci was putting on a friendly face publicly, inside the White House it was a reign of terror. White House staffers lived in fear that the new communications director would finger them as leakers and have them summarily fired.

This internal leak hunt was designed to stem a practice in place since Trump’s inauguration: the use of leaked information to mess with or damage internal colleagues. But the vehemence with which Scaramucci went about it had the opposite effect. If a White House staffer wanted to kneecap an internal rival or simply someone he or she didn’t like, that staffer no longer had to leak negative information about that person but simply to intimate internally that that person was herself a leaker. The Mooch began putting together lists of staffers suspected of unauthorized press contacts, lists that would determine who would be fired when the impending leaker purge came. But he was also soliciting names from colleagues. And they had their own lists. Before long, there were dozens of leaker lists flying around the White House. Everyone down to the junior staff level had her own list of culprits that should be purged. And virtually everyone was on at least one of these lists. Like a Stalinist satire, it was hoped that the mere allegation of infidelity would be enough to rid the West Wing of a despised rival.

That panic nearly ensnared some top White House aides. One staffer there estimated that Raj Shah, then the White House deputy comms director and, as an RNC alum, a common name on the Mooch’s various shit lists, was literally hours from being fired before the whole Scaramucci mess imploded.

The Mooch had developed a paranoid, hair-trigger style when it came to leakers, so it didn’t comfort his new colleagues that he appeared to be totally ignorant of some of the basic functions of the government in which he was now a senior official.

“In light of the leak of my financial disclosure info which is a felony, I will be contacting @FBI and the @TheJusticeDept,” he tweeted five days into his White House tenure, tagging Reince Priebus in the tweet to boot. Scaramucci was angry about a Politico story that publicly posted a financial disclosure filing showing that he was worth tens of millions of dollars. But Politico had simply obtained a publicly available copy of the information Scaramucci had submitted to federal ethics officials when he was appointed to a post at the U.S. Export-Import Bank just weeks earlier. It wasn’t a leak; this was publicly available information. But days later, even after that fact was explained at length in the press, he was still demanding a federal criminal investigation into how the media was able to obtain it.

Even more alarming, Scaramucci appeared to be hunting for the leakers of information that he himself had leaked. He had taken his position as director of communications on a Friday. The following Tuesday, he made his first concrete move to oust a supposed White House leaker, telling Politico—on the record!—in a story that went live at around 9:00 a.m. that he planned to fire Michael Short, the former RNC aide and Priebus ally who served in a senior communications post. Scaramucci had openly previewed the move on Tuesday morning, but by that afternoon he was pointing to Politico’s report on his on-the-record comments as evidence of the White House’s leak problem.

“Let’s say I’m firing Michael Short today. The fact that you guys know about it before he does really upsets me as a human being and as a Roman Catholic. I should have the opportunity if I have to let somebody go to let the person go in a very humane, dignified way,” Scaramucci told CNN. “Here’s the problem with the leaking, why I have to figure out a way to get the leaking to stop, because it hurts people.”

Just to recap: Scaramucci publicly said he would fire Short, then complained that the “leak” of that news was unfair to Short and showed why press leaks were so damaging and immoral.

In the end, it was Scaramucci’s fundamental lack of understanding of the basics of his job that got him canned after just eleven short days. The New Yorker reporter Ryan Lizza reported that Scaramucci was dining with Trump, Sean Hannity, and the Fox News executive (and future White House communications director) Bill Shine at the White House. Scaramucci was incensed that news of the dinner leaked. He called up Lizza in a rage, demanding to know his source so the culprit could be fired. Lizza declined to name the source, and Scaramucci proceeded to go on a tear against his White House colleagues, telling Lizza, “I’m not trying to suck my own cock” like Steve Bannon, and dubbing Chief of Staff Reince Priebus a “fucking paranoid schizophrenic.”

When Lizza published a story on the interview, Scaramucci cried foul again, claiming the whole conversation had been off the record. Lizza denied that, and it soon became clear that the Mooch had just assumed that none of what he was saying would make it into print—a laughable assumption, as a paid press operative could attest, and not the type of mistake one hopes to see in the White House’s top communications hand.

Between Lizza’s story and the various other tumults of Scaramucci’s brief White House tenure, even the president, who adored the Mooch, began to wonder if he had a hold on things. By the time Lizza’s piece went to print, the Scaramucci news cycle was out of control. And the new comms director appeared not only unable to control it but to be intensifying it with his every public utterance. It got so bad that Trump began wondering aloud to aides and advisers if his communications director was on drugs.

After eleven insane days, it was too much to bear. Priebus offered to resign the day Lizza’s interview ran as it became clear he had completely lost any ability to control the spiraling disaster he oversaw. Trump replaced him with the former Marine Corps four-star general John Kelly. And Kelly’s first order of business was to fire Scaramucci.

John Kelly’s selling point was military discipline. He promised to impose order on a laughably chaotic West Wing, to regiment and structure a freewheeling White House, and to professionalize what was by all accounts a disastrously disjointed and amateurish operation more than half a year into Trump’s tenure. The challenge for Kelly was that there were high-profile people both inside and outside the White House who benefited tremendously from the West Wing’s total lack of order or structure. The ability to saunter into the Oval Office and drop a printed news article on the president’s desk made for a potent way to shift conversation and even policy in the White House. And some aides used that opportunity to tremendous effect. In cracking down on the revolving-door access to the Oval, Kelly was going to make some enemies who were very loud and had the ability to yell directly to the president.

Among his first targets was Omarosa Manigault Newman. As a longtime Trump friend and colleague, she considered her own stature in the White House unique and unrivaled. She could call up the president on his cell phone at three in the morning and he would pick up every time, she’d later brag to us. No one outside the Trump family itself, she insisted, knew the president as well as she did or had been as close to him for so long. Omarosa jealously guarded her self-appointed role as the Trump whisperer of the early administration and in particular sought to sideline other black women who might encroach on her nearly unique demographic standing in the White House. Kay Coles James, the president of the Heritage Foundation, the flagship conservative think tank, would later accuse Omarosa of blocking her from getting an administration gig in early 2017.

Omarosa’s day-to-day job at the Office of Public Liaison was fluid; no one was ever really sure what, if anything, she was doing. But her sense of self-importance was unrivaled. She even began referring to herself in official White House correspondence with the title “the Honorable,” which is generally reserved for people who actually hold, or have held, public office, not simply White House staffers.

Omarosa was almost universally reviled by her White House colleagues, who said she added little to any internal discussion and would more often show up to meetings simply to throw a wrench in the works. She was also known to try to micromanage the White House’s press and messaging operations. On one occasion, the White House press pool was gathered in the Oval Office for a public event. The White House assigns a junior staffer, known as a wrangler, to handle pool access to White House events. The wrangler shepherds the press to and from events and makes sure they’re updated on the day’s schedule. But Omarosa happened to be at this Oval Office event, and at one point she simply decided that the event was over and began ushering journalists out of the room, without any input from, or even warning given to, the wrangler or any other press staffer. For those in the press shop, whose actual jobs included handling media access, it was a constant point of annoyance. But Trump himself seemed to enjoy turning loose his famously short-tempered sidekick on the fake news media. On one occasion, as he grew impatient with the slow pace with which the press were evacuated from an Oval Office event, the president barked at Omarosa to get them the hell out. “Handle it like you handled it on The Apprentice,” he instructed.

Omarosa seemed to revel in conflict with her perceived inferiors, and colleagues would frequently text each other during meetings that Omarosa attended to frustratedly vent about her presence. “She doesn’t have any friends in high places, except the one place it matters,” one White House official remarked during her West Wing tenure.

Particularly annoying for staffers who interacted with the president was Omarosa’s frequent attempts to “trigger” Trump, as one White House official put it, by depositing on his desk printed-out copies of negative news stories or gossip tabloid items regarding figures in media and entertainment whom she knew Trump despised. The stories would inevitably send Trump into a tizzy and distract him from the actual business of the day. It was a persistent problem caused by a broad cross section of White House staff, but no one knew how to trigger Trump like Omarosa, and few enjoyed such unfettered access to the president.

John Kelly quickly went about putting a stop to that. Free access to Trump was a major problem as he saw it, and Omarosa was patient zero when it came to derailing the White House’s agenda and momentum on a given day.

Since the beginning of the Trump administration, Omarosa’s office had been relegated to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the White House. She would nonetheless set up camp in the West Wing, where, as first reported by Washingtonian Magazine, she kept a large cache of shoes scattered around the area of an empty desk, to the annoyance of her colleagues, who were forced to gather them up and kick them under the desk in order to avoid a safety hazard in the already cramped West Wing. Omarosa had always reviled Priebus and Spicer and was elated when the two were ousted just a couple of weeks apart. Finally, she hoped, a West Wing office was hers for the taking.

Not only didn’t she get the office, but Kelly moved swiftly to ensure that her access to the president was dramatically curtailed.

Omarosa bristled at being shut out, but lashed out at any reporter who suggested that she didn’t retain as much influence over the president as any West Wing employee without the last name Trump (or Kushner). When we reached out for a story on her Kelly-related travails, she defiantly bragged that no one, not even this general turned chief of staff, could stop the president from seeking her counsel. She remained, and would remain, the president’s most trusted and loyal aide, and those seeking to kneecap her were doing so out of jealousy or a desire to replace her. But Omarosa would not be replaced.

And then she was replaced.

In late 2017, Kelly finally fired her. The last straw was Omarosa’s routine use of the official White House car service to run personal errands. The administration was in the throes of numerous scandals involving high-level officials using government resources for personal tasks. Omarosa’s conduct was strictly forbidden and a huge liability for a PR-besieged White House. Kelly finally had the ammo he needed to rid the administration of this nuisance.

But Omarosa was not about to go quietly—literally. She learned she was being sacked late on a Tuesday evening. The Secret Service had deactivated her access card, which, after she left the White House grounds, would have prevented her from getting back in. But she wasn’t planning to leave. She was going to confront the president, who, she was convinced, couldn’t possibly know just how unfairly she was being treated. Trump was in the White House residence, an area of the complex where even senior staff are not permitted to aimlessly wander. But Omarosa wanted to march right up to the front door and get what she felt she was owed.

What happened next was described to us by various White House officials as an attempted “storming” of the residence, a darkly comical “ruckus,” and “the closest thing to reality TV [I’d experienced] since getting here.” Omarosa had to be physically removed from the White House campus.

She had nonetheless been able to extract one last concession from John Kelly’s White House, or so she thought. It was very important to her that she be able to say that she had spent one year in Donald Trump’s White House—not 358 days, but one year. So when the White House counsel’s office began putting together her exit paperwork, Omarosa was distressed to find that it listed her departure date as January 13, 2018—a week short of that one-year milestone.

On December 13, the day of her termination, John Kelly had summoned Omarosa to the White House Situation Room, the conference room where some of the nation’s most consequential national security decisions take place. This was not one of those decisions.

When Omarosa showed up, she was greeted by Kelly; two attorneys in the White House counsel’s office, Stefan Passantino and Uttam Dhillon; and the White House human resources aide Irene Porada. They were there to break the news of Omarosa’s firing—and to do their best to make sure she went quietly. “I’d like to see this be a friendly departure . . . and you can go on without any type of difficulty in the future relative to your reputation,” Kelly told her in what Omarosa interpreted as a threat.

We know that Kelly made that comment, because it turns out that Omarosa was recording the whole thing. It was one of a litany of internal White House meetings and phone calls that she had captured and that she began releasing to much media attention after her departure. But this wasn’t one of the clips that made it onto CNN after Omarosa’s relationship with the president turned sour in very ugly and public fashion. This audio is now on file with a federal court in Washington because John Kelly just had to stick it to Omarosa one last time.

Kelly departed the Situation Room meeting early, and Omarosa made one crucial request to Passantino and Dhillon. “How do I make it to the one-year mark?” she wanted to know. “That’s important to me . . . to make it to the one-year mark.” Dhillon said they would see what they could do. “Yes, to the twentieth of January,” he said about ten minutes later. “We’re taking you until the twentieth.” The next day, Sarah Sanders released a statement on Omarosa’s termination. “Her departure will not be effective until January 20, 2018,” Sanders said.

All senior administration officials who leave government service are required to complete ethics paperwork detailing their personal finances as of the date of their departure. In late January, Omarosa provided the counsel’s office with an email address where that paperwork could be sent. White House ethics officials sent a series of emails to that address with reminders that Omarosa needed to fill out that paperwork, and received no reply. Then they tried sending the reminders to the email address she’d provided as well as to a second one they had on file for her. The first two of those attempts went unanswered, but finally, in March 2018, Omarosa replied.

She would not fill out her termination ethics paperwork, she told the White House, because it inaccurately listed her departure date as January 13, not January 20. In late March, she got a phone call from Passantino. And once again, she was sure to record it.

“There’s an error on the report about my termination day. So, my last day is the twentieth and it’s indicated the thirteenth,” Omarosa complained. “You were in the room [meaning the Situation Room] when we all agreed to the twentieth, so once that’s corrected, I can complete the report and everything will be done. But, with that discrepancy, I don’t feel comfortable completing that report.”

Passantino was conciliatory, and he appeared to suggest that it was Kelly who had ensured that Omarosa would not, on paper, make it to her much-coveted one-year milestone. “When I talk to the chief [Kelly] and the chief is like, ‘No, we changed it from the twentieth to the thirteenth, it is the thirteenth.’ If I hear that, I guess I’ll just tell you,” Passantino said.

“I don’t think you’ll hear that,” Omarosa shot back, “because you were in the room when the twentieth was decided. . . . I don’t know where the discrepancy would have come from.”

Passantino tried his best to placate her. “Yeah. Right. No, no, no, no, no. I hear you and I was there for the conversation of the twentieth,” he assured her. “There would be only, if subsequently, subsequent to that conversation [the date] changed. But again, that’s not my issue, I’m not going to get in the middle of that.”

But Omarosa would not let it go. Six months after that conversation, she still had not been provided with a version of her termination paperwork that declared her preferred exit date. And as a result, she still had not signed that paperwork. She was legally required to do so, regardless of whether it dictated that she had served in the White House for a full year or just shy of one. She refused to do it, so on June 25, 2019, the Justice Department brought a civil case against her for knowingly violating the Ethics in Government Act.

As of our writing this, that case is still ongoing. And as more details emerge in the case about the circumstances of her departure, it becomes ever clearer that Kelly, ostensibly the stern and stately leader, had intervened to deny Omarosa a personal victory that was obviously so important to her.

“I WISH HIM THE VERY BEST”

Even in a town full of liars, where lying is in fact often the default state of professional conversation, there are only two people who are so irredeemably dishonest that we will never, under any circumstances, use them as sources. One of them is Corey Lewandowski (the other being Roger Stone), and he is, in our experience, the single most dishonest person in the upper echelons of Donald Trump’s coterie of aides, advisers, and hangers-on. As a matter of policy over the last few years, we will not use any information he provides unless it’s on the record. Even if he tells us something we’ve also heard from half a dozen other unnamed sources, the eventual story will attribute the information to six sources; Corey will never be the anonymous seventh.

The American public seems to be more attuned to political dishonesty these days than in the recent past. Sean Spicer and Sarah Sanders are pop culture fixtures the way Obama’s press secretaries Josh Earnest and Jay Carney never were. And the ease and consistency with which Trump’s spokespeople peddle dishonesty on a daily basis is enough to make a mob attorney blush. But when it comes to sheer, unadulterated untruth, spread without hesitation or remorse, no one in Trump’s orbit can hold a candle to Lewandowski.

So when we began hearing, just a few months into the Trump administration, that Lewandowski, relegated to a D.C. consulting practice at the time, was sure of his imminent appointment to a senior White House role, we knew to take it with a few grains of salt. “Trump wants me there, just you wait,” as one associate relayed his comments to us in May 2017. That associate was one of six sources we spoke with for the story, all of them recounting various versions of the same assurance from Lewandowski: Trump trusted him more than anyone short of his family (sound familiar?), and a White House replete with leakers and deep state Never Trumpers needed a loyal and firm hand to set it on the right course.

We wrote up the story incredulously, with the lede “Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s controversy-courting former campaign manager, really wants you to think he’s about to land a job in the West Wing.”

With every staff shake-up or high-level vacancy, there’s been a Lewandowski whisper campaign—more often than not, spurred by Corey himself—that he’s the perfect man for the job, the president knows it, and pretty soon he’ll be running things in the West Wing, so you best stay on his good side. Every version of it hits the same notes: Corey knows Trump best and has always trusted his instincts, and DJT, as campaign originals know, reciprocates on both counts.

But it never happens. Lewandowski still has never served in any position in Donald Trump’s administration, let alone a senior White House one. Ask him, and he’ll tell you that he’s perfectly happy, and indeed more effective, as an outside adviser and spokesperson, and in any case he has a family to take care of and doesn’t mind the income of his lucrative political consulting business.

The truth is far simpler: virtually everyone of consequence in Trump’s White House beyond the president himself despises and distrusts Lewandowski. Trump’s own family members—Ivanka, Jared, Don junior—repeatedly voiced their suspicions, sometimes to DJT himself, that Lewandowski had been leaking damaging information or stories, concocted or otherwise, about them to the press.

Still, no one despised and distrusted him more than John Kelly.

The truth is that Lewandowski has retained significant influence with the president in spite of his lack of any official White House role. He still speaks with Trump regularly and drops by the Oval Office for meetings. And he’s highly active on the political side of things, maintaining a steady consulting gig with the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action that nets Lewandowski a monthly paycheck of $10,000. And Trump continues to solicit his opinion on matters of administration policy as he pines for the glory days of the 2016 campaign.

As Kelly sought to crack down on the access and influence of Trumpworld’s various gadflies, a confrontation with Lewandowski was inevitable. But few could have predicted that that confrontation would get physical.

After Omarosa was frozen out, one of Kelly’s first official acts as chief of staff was to deactivate Lewandowski’s access badge, throwing up a major roadblock to his Trump access. Lewandowski was livid, of course, but there wasn’t much he could do at the time beyond privately gripe. Trump had brought Kelly in to make changes, and until there was some sign that things were not improving internally, the general was going to have the run of the place.

Fortunately for Lewandowski, yet another scandal was brewing that would hand him all the ammunition he needed to kneecap Kelly and reclaim his position beside and influence over the president.

—

SENIOR staffers for the Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt were in Morocco in December 2017, on a trip arranged by a lobbyist who would later register as an agent of the Moroccan government. It was one of a number of controversies that bedeviled Pruitt. But in the course of the junket, something happened that, at the time, struck staff as odd. Only months later did they realize exactly how consequential it was.

At one point during the trip, at the hotel where the EPA delegation was staying, a member of Pruitt’s scheduling and advance staff was approached by Samantha Dravis, Pruitt’s top policy adviser. This advance staffer, a Trump 2016 campaign alum, had never personally interacted with Dravis, who was clearly very agitated. And she didn’t know what to say when Dravis began interrogating her about Hope Hicks, the longtime Trump communications hand and senior White House official.

Dravis was incensed with Hicks, multiple members of Pruitt’s delegation later told us, for carrying on a relationship with a man whom Dravis had been seeing romantically—and with whom she was living. It was a bizarre exchange, according to sources who witnessed it, but few at the time thought it was much beyond a strange and intriguing bit of workplace gossip. Within a few months, though, the real fallout from it would become very clear.

Dravis, it turns out, had been dating a senior White House aide, the staff secretary, Rob Porter. But at some point, Porter had ended their relationship and struck up a new one with Hicks. Dravis was rightfully distraught, and her former colleagues told us the drama was soon common knowledge at the EPA, where she freely aired details of the domestic dustup. But more damning details of Porter’s troubled personal life were soon to emerge—and thoroughly disrupt the entire Trump administration and derail the standing of the president’s most senior aide.

Porter was a former chief of staff for Senator Orrin Hatch, the veteran Republican from Utah. He joined the White House right at the beginning. As staff secretary, he retained significant influence over the people and information that made it to the Oval Office, and after Kelly took over in mid-2017, Porter became a go-to deputy in Kelly’s efforts to control access to the president. Porter would eventually become one of Kelly’s most trusted and relied-upon allies in the West Wing.

Virtually everyone who worked with Porter in the White House and in Hatch’s office had only good things to say about him. But the women in his life knew a darker side. He was twice divorced, and both of his ex-wives, it turns out, had accused him of various types of abuse. His first wife, Colbie Holderness, recalled Porter choking and striking her and forcefully pressing his limbs into her body in anger. On one occasion, she said Porter punched her in the face, giving her a black eye. She would later publicly release a photo of her face after that instance of abuse. Porter’s second wife, Jennifer Willoughby, recounted extensive verbal and emotional abuse at his hands. After they divorced, she took out a temporary restraining order against him. From the start, Porter denied that he had abused either of them.

Dravis had become obsessed with her breakup with Porter and his subsequent relationship with Hicks. Colleagues at the EPA recalled her repeatedly bringing it up in a woe-is-me fashion, complaining that she’d never be able to maintain a social life in Washington due to the awkwardness that the broken-off relationship had caused her in mutual social and professional circles.

In late 2017, Dravis also began dropping hints of Porter’s problematic personal life. Former colleagues recalled her making vague allusions to skeletons in his closet, but none knew the full extent of the controversy that would soon ensue. At one point, she reached out to the White House counsel, Don McGahn, to inform him of Porter’s “anger issues,” though it’s not clear how much detail she shared. If she did relay specifics, McGahn never acted on them. Even Pruitt was aware of some details of the relationship, according to multiple former colleagues whom we spoke with. Dravis denies ever discussing it with the administrator, but her former colleagues say, one way or another, Pruitt became aware of the situation, and pressed to keep the drama from bursting into public view and upending the agency’s relationship with the White House by embarrassing one of its most powerful and, internally, widely liked staffers.

To understand how deeply the Porter story shook the White House, one needs to understand the nature of news cycles in early 2018. This was in the heat of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian election meddling and potential Trumpworld ties to the effort. In December, the former national security adviser, Mike Flynn, had pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents investigating Russia-related matters. In February, the former Trump campaign hand Rick Gates pleaded guilty to the same as well, Mueller indicted thirteen Russian nationals, and he leveled an additional thirty-two charges against Paul Manafort. Meanwhile, scandals involving Trump cabinet secretaries were intensifying. The president was rolling out aggressive trade policies that roiled global markets. He had just signed the landmark Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law.

Despite the near-daily barrage of major news events, or perhaps because of it, few of these major developments on high-profile national issues seemed to penetrate the national media conversation and remain at the forefront for very long. The Mueller saga was always lingering behind the day’s events. News organizations focused significant resources on the policy front, but talking heads were always more fixated on breaking events. Few of these major news events appeared to have much staying power in an ever-shifting news cycle.

The Porter news was a major exception. The scandal dominated headlines for weeks, a nearly unheard-of degree of staying power at the time. Part of that had to do with the soap-opera nature of the allegations against the White House staff secretary. Sex and intrigue at the highest levels of political power have always been catnip for the news business, after all.

But that alone wasn’t what kept the nation’s newsrooms—and their audiences’ attention—so intently focused on this controversy. The real culprits were in the White House itself, and at each step in the story their public statements only served to exacerbate and prolong a deeply damaging public narrative about the character of a senior White House official and the seeming indifference with which his superiors, including the president, treated such disturbing allegations against him.

Virtually every major development in the Porter story managed to contradict a previous White House statement on the matter. First it was Sarah Sanders giving a fabricated timeline of when the West Wing knew about the allegations. Then they tried to blame a slow FBI background check process, only for the FBI’s director to contradict the story in congressional testimony. Then, when Porter finally left the White House, Kelly and the principal deputy press secretary, Raj Shah, both claimed he’d “resigned.” Just minutes later, Shah said that Porter had been “terminated.” The whole thing turned into a credibility crisis for a White House that already had a mutually antagonistic relationship with the press.

Kelly in particular was encouraging colleagues to publicly float falsehoods about the internal reaction in an attempt to tamp down the rapidly escalating Porter scandal. As a former White House official told New York magazine, “Not only did he lie, he tried to get everybody else to lie.”

—

WHEN the Daily Mail contacted the White House to request comment on its initial Porter story, the West Wing quickly went into a defensive posture. The story it eventually ran contained statements from Sanders, Kelly, and Orrin Hatch, who professed the integrity of his former chief of staff. But Hatch aides would later tell us that the White House had misled them about what exactly the senator was responding to. The White House called Hatch’s office and told them a story was incoming and that they needed a statement, but they suggested that the story would only recount allegations of verbal abuse—certainly a serious thing, but short of the extremely disturbing wife-beating allegations that ended up in the Mail’s piece.

And that wasn’t all that the White House told them. They assured Hatch that the story was a fictional product of a concerted smear campaign. And at least one of the people behind that smear campaign, the White House claimed, was Corey Lewandowski.

We had already heard, and reported, that Lewandowski was quietly bad-mouthing Porter to friends and allies, and we surmised that it had less to do with his relationship with Porter than with his burning desire to see John Kelly take one on the chin. This whole debacle was turning into a disaster for the chief of staff, and anything that prolonged or deepened the Porter scandal was reflecting directly on Kelly. And the president was taking notice.

We called up Lewandowski to get his reaction to the news out of Hatch’s office. As expected, he was not candid about it. “I’ve never had a bad word about Rob Porter,” he claimed. “I think he did a very good job, and I wish him the very best.” We already knew that he was talking shit behind the scenes. But he appeared to be caught off guard by news that White House officials themselves were fingering him as a culprit behind what they described as a “smear campaign.”

Lewandowski’s surreptitious involvement had an air of tabloid-esque jilted-lover drama in addition to the power politics that pitted him against the chief of staff. Hicks and Lewandowski, who is married, had long been rumored to have carried on a love affair during the 2016 campaign. New York magazine later reported, based on accounts by three sources, that the latter would, long after that relationship ended, try to keep tabs on Hicks’s romantic interests. The Porter debacle, one of those sources said, kicked up plenty of raw emotion.

In January 2018, as the Porter abuse story percolated and prepared to burst into public view, Willoughby, Porter’s second wife, began receiving frantic phone calls from her ex-husband. She had written a blog post on a personal website recounting her abuse at Porter’s hands, and that post was about to cause Porter some major problems. He pleaded with her to remove it. A former colleague, he told her, was out to get him and was threatening to leak the post to the press. Porter didn’t say who the colleague was, but told Willoughby that the culprit was angry with him for impeding his agenda—his “racist ideas,” as Willoughby later recalled—at the White House. She initially assumed Porter was referring to Steve Bannon. But after the abuse allegations blew up Porter’s White House job, she came to a different conclusion: the person Porter had been freaking out about was Corey Lewandowski.

As expected, Lewandowski denied involvement at every turn. But allegations of his involvement were hardly a secret. Indeed, Kelly himself knew, or at least suspected, that this longtime rival may have been trying to undermine him with the Porter situation. About two weeks after Porter resigned, students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the site of a horrific mass shooting a week earlier, were visiting the White House for a listening session with the president. Trump was in his office before the East Room event, and he was joined by Kelly and Lewandowski.

Kelly was making known his displeasure with the other. Lewandowski, he griped, was making money hand over fist through unscrupulous business and lobbying deals that capitalized on his relationship with the president. At the same time, Kelly alleged, he was undermining the White House on virtually a daily basis, in particular through a string of TV hits since Porter’s resignation that passive-aggressively laid the blame for the scandal at Kelly’s feet.

At some point, The New York Times later reported, the president put the meeting on hold to take a phone call. Kelly and Lewandowski left the office, and the former quickly instructed a subordinate to have Lewandowski escorted off the White House campus. A shouting match ensued, and Kelly grabbed Lewandowski by the collar and shoved him against a wall. Secret Service had to intervene and separate the two, leaving West Wing aides aghast at what they’d just witnessed.

Kelly had reason to be angry. The Porter debacle, fueled by Lewandowski’s public shots at Kelly and his behind-the-scenes campaign to sow White House dissension, marked the beginning of the end of Kelly’s tenure. The president had hired him to be a steady hand atop a chaotic West Wing, but he was presiding over more chaos than ever before. Kelly began receding from day-to-day operations, sitting out meetings and conference calls and kept out of the loop on key personnel decisions. He had spearheaded an effort to install his top deputy, Kirstjen Nielsen, as the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (he succeeded; she was not so fortunate). When allies griped to the president that Nielsen wasn’t enough of an immigration hard-liner, Trump exploded at Kelly. “You didn’t tell me she was a fucking George W. Bush person!” he raged, according to a Washington Post report. As the president went around Kelly to make his own high-level personnel decisions, such as sacking the Veterans Affairs secretary, David Shulkin, Kelly flew off the handle in private, venting that he was determined to get the hell out of the White House.

To the extent that Kelly was still involved in such decisions, his role generally consisted of simply passing along the president’s orders to those affected—occasionally in a humiliating fashion more befitting the commander in chief than a stern Marine Corps general. When Trump decided he’d had enough of his secretary of state, the former ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, he tasked Kelly with delivering the news that Tillerson had been fired. When Kelly called to inform him, the secretary of state happened to be on the toilet. The chief of staff for some reason decided to share that anecdote with reporters during an off-the-record conversation at the White House. We weren’t invited, and hence weren’t bound by the off-the-record ground rules. We got wind of that amazing anecdote and reported it out, resulting in the most awkward media request Lachlan ever had the displeasure of lodging with the State Department’s press office. “Believe me when I tell you I feel as awkward asking you this as you probably feel being asked about it, but I’m obligated to ask in any case,” he wrote to the then spokeswoman Heather Nauert. The press office would only respond off the record.

The story we published was a microcosm of Kelly’s diminished stature in the administration. To the extent Lewandowski was involved in using the Porter mess to sideline his White House rival, the effort was tremendously successful. The White House did its best to control fallout from the scandal, of course. But they could only do so much, given the flippancy with which the president seemed to treat the whole thing.

The day that Porter resigned happened to be the day that CBS released a preview of its upcoming season of the reality show Celebrity Big Brother. That season starred the recently fired Omarosa, and in the preview she went to task on the president. “I was haunted by [Trump’s] tweets every single day,” she said of her time in the White House. “Like what is he going to tweet next?” Asked whether “it’s going to be okay,” she warned, “No, it’s going to not be okay.”

It also happened to be the day that Raj Shah, the White House’s principal deputy press secretary, gave his first daily press briefing. He spent about an hour in the Oval Office before the briefing in what was supposed to be a strategy session with the president ahead of what everyone, and certainly Raj, expected to be a bruising round of press questions about Porter.

But the president seemed to have little interest in discussing the top aide who’d just been fired for alleged domestic abuse, or the dire questions facing the White House about what it knew about those accusations and when, or what the implications of the scandal might be on the White House security clearance vetting process. Instead, Trump just wanted to talk about Omarosa. He was livid that his former aide and friend was trash-talking him publicly, and he wanted Shah to stick it to her on camera. Of the hour that Shah spent in the Oval, Trump spent a cumulative twenty minutes, give or take, going over the official White House response to Omarosa. It was by far the largest amount of time he spent on any single topic during that briefing prep and the subject he inquired most comprehensively and deeply about. (Again, this is on a day when the Porter scandal is front and center.) He went back and forth with Shah several times, helping to draft what Shah should say to reporters later that day about how much Omarosa sucked. The two men would ultimately settle on something short and sweet.

It is unclear why President Trump ever thought Omarosa was worth his trust and affections. For one thing, we would later learn that even as she played the part of his close chum and adviser in the administration, she would gossip and spread unsubstantiated rumors about the president’s sex life. Some of those who heard Omarosa spreading the outlandish claims simply assumed she was making them up out of whole cloth.

Anyway, Shah stepped up to the lectern and read a statement on the Porter scandal. He took a series of questions on the situation, repeating defenses that would be called into question or outright contradicted by later events. And then he got the Omarosa question.

“Omarosa was fired three times on The Apprentice and this was the fourth time we let her go,” he said, trying and failing to suppress a grin. “She had limited contact with the president while here. She has no contact now.”

Trump absolutely loved it. Never mind that his White House was coming apart at the seams.

“DEFINITELY SOMEBODY KNIFING HIM”

Even in his reduced role, Kelly managed to hold on to his job for months more, outlasting regular and periodic bits of reporting based on White House sources who insisted that this time he was on the way out. But in the wake of the Porter debacle, others weren’t so inclined to stick around.

Just a few weeks after Porter resigned, Hope Hicks followed him out the door. She was serving as the Trump White House’s fourth communications director, a position she’d been in since August 2017. But 2018 brought the Porter scandal and found Hicks forced to testify before a congressional committee probing allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Hicks showed up at the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, flashed a knowing smile to news photographers on her way in, and told the committee that she had indeed told “white lies” for the president on occasion. She then resigned the next day. She went to ground for months before being tapped to lead corporate communications for Fox Corporation, the trimmed-down Murdoch media empire.

Hicks was the White House’s foremost “Trump whisperer.” Few in the West Wing understood the president as well as she did or had spent so much time at his side. She knew how to talk to him, how to translate issues into terms he’d understand and respond to, and how he’d react to a particular situation. This isn’t to say she would steer the president’s thinking; she knew better than to think anyone could do that, and she trusted his instincts enough in any case to, as the saying goes, let Trump be Trump. But Hicks understood the president at a level few outside the Trump family possibly could have.

That made her departure a significant blow to a White House that still had not figured out how to run a government with Trump at the helm. Hicks’s departure was about to leave a power vacuum that other type A personalities in the administration would rush to fill. And with its Trump whisperer on the way out and its chief of staff relegated to the fringes of West Wing influence, the ensuing fight was about to go off the rails in a way that aides hadn’t seen since the early days of the Trump administration. The adults were no longer in charge, and the rowdiest kids were about to have the run of the playground.

Two candidates quickly emerged to replace Hicks atop the West Wing comms shop. The first was Mercedes Schlapp, and she’d become one of the White House’s go-to surrogates in her role as director of strategic communications. The other was Tony Sayegh, a brash and affable New Yorker who left a job in media to run communications for Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin. Both had been Fox News fixtures prior to Trump’s election, and by all accounts they were on good terms and friendly in a say-hi-in-the-office-hallway fashion.

Any goodwill evaporated almost immediately. It was just days into the internal comms director jockeying, and the White House was already divided into Team Sayegh and Team Schlapp. And the latter wasted no time before unleashing an artillery strike.

In mid-March, the Washington Examiner published a story on the ongoing fight to replace Hicks, which the paper reported “has fed a sense of anxiety and strife within the West Wing.” The Examiner recapped the internal positioning before dropping a bombshell that was as vague as it was revealing. “Sources close to and within the administration said Sayegh has a tendency to ‘delegate too much,’ to boss people around, and to manipulate others for his own benefit,” the paper reported. “One senior administration official said such behavior has been particularly noticeable in Sayegh’s interactions with female staff.”

The story was published during one of the first great waves of the #MeToo movement of early 2018, when everyone from Hollywood moguls to government officials to media personalities were getting sacked and ostracized for various sexually charged misdeeds. So it was no accident that the Examiner’s source had added that bit about Sayegh’s alleged attitude toward female co-workers. The Examiner story itself quoted another source saying that the allegations were “‘definitely somebody knifing him’ in the race to replace Hicks, but added that the claims could damage his chances regardless of their authenticity.” The “but” in that sentence was an artful transition. Of course the claims could damage those chances; that was, obviously, the purpose of leaking them. The White House had just suffered through an intense and prolonged scandal involving a senior official’s treatment of women. There were few other accusations that could be so damaging to an aspirant for a senior West Wing gig.

But was there anything to the allegations? Swin started chasing the story. He spoke with ten senior Trump administration officials about Sayegh, and every one of them said they had never seen or heard of such conduct from him. Two of those sources, both women, separately used the term “bullshit” to describe the allegations. “A hundred percent not true and a complete cheap shot,” another source said.

The likely motive for the claim wasn’t hard to figure out. Julie Roginsky, a Democratic strategist and former Fox News contributor who had accused the late Fox chief Roger Ailes of sexual misconduct, called the allegations against Sayegh “really off base. Whomever [the leakers] are describing here bears no resemblance to the person I know and worked with for a long time.”

Inside the White House, it was abundantly clear that the Examiner piece was the opening salvo in an all-out war between Schlapp’s camp and Sayegh’s. And it was also seen as a massive own goal. Leaking and backstabbing were facts of life in this White House, but the Examiner’s story was seen as so brazen, so scorched-earth, that most of those we spoke with anticipated it would have the precise opposite of its intended effect and would turn off key White House decision makers to Schlapp’s internal candidacy.

“If you were to ask me today who was most likely to get the White House communications director job between Tony and Mercy, I would say Tony,” one source close to the White House told Swin. “But if you were to ask me who is most likely to get the job between Tony, Mercy, and ‘Fox News Personality X,’ I would go with Fox News Personality X.”

Schlapp and Sayegh were encouraged internally to reconcile their differences. They scheduled a meeting over coffee to sit down and hash out what was quickly becoming an unbearably brutal power struggle. But the meeting never happened, leaving tensions to fester.

Neither of them got the job. The communications director post remained vacant for four months after Hicks’s departure. And just as our source close to the White House predicted, it went to a Fox News personality—and not just any Fox News personality, but Bill Shine, the channel’s once powerful, ousted co-president.

—

WITHIN weeks of Hicks’s departure, Trump was already pining for his trusted former communications hand. The internal backstabbing had reached heights not seen since the campaign-RNC battles of early 2017. Kelly was a lame duck, the Mueller probe raged on, and no one seemed to have a handle on internal operations.

And then there were the leaks. The volume and tenor of West Wing press leaks remained out of control, and they were creating major headaches for the White House.

On the evening of Thursday, May 10, The Hill published a story that was on the one hand incredible and on the other perfectly in line with what one might expect of subordinates to a president known for denigrating prisoners of war. At the time, the White House was struggling to shepherd the nomination of the CIA chief, Gina Haspel, through the Senate. Republicans still had the majority, but two holdouts were making the task difficult: Rand Paul, an on-again-off-again civil libertarian, and John McCain, renowned for both his opposition to War on Terror–era CIA interrogation practices and the torture he’d endured at the hands of the North Vietnamese.

McCain, who had been diagnosed with brain cancer the previous year, came up in a White House communications meeting over the Haspel nomination. That’s when Kelly Sadler, an aide in charge of outreach to White House surrogates and allies, chimed in about McCain’s opposition to the appointment. “It doesn’t matter,” she said crudely. “He’s dying anyway.”

Even for a White House helmed by a man who never hesitated to deride McCain, it was a particularly cruel remark. But over the ensuing week, the West Wing appeared far less concerned about the comment itself than the fact that it had leaked to the press. Sadler called McCain’s daughter, the television personality Meghan McCain, to apologize for the comment, but neither she nor the White House made any public statement of contrition.

Instead, they insisted that Sadler was the victim of the ordeal. Matt Schlapp, a White House surrogate and Mercedes’s husband, used that precise word. Sadler was “a little bit of a victim here,” he claimed. Asked about the controversy during a White House press briefing, Shah complained that “if you aren’t able, in internal meetings, to speak your mind or convey thoughts or say anything that you feel without feeling like your colleagues will betray you, that creates a very difficult work environment.”

Internally, the White House recriminations focused on the leak as much as the comment itself. “I am sure this conversation is going to leak, too. And that’s just disgusting,” said Sarah Sanders in a communications shop meeting that did indeed leak. “You can put this on the record,” Mercedes Schlapp interjected at the meeting. “I stand with Kelly Sadler.”

Before long, in an effort to stem the leaks, Sanders slimmed down attendance at all internal meetings of the comms department. And in late May, the president summoned his top aides to the Oval Office to try to put a plan in place to stop internal deliberative information from getting to the press or, even more ideally, to purge the White House of the leakers who continued to bedevil it.

In attendance at that meeting were Kelly, Schlapp, Shah, and Sadler. The president was in one of his reality-TV moods. He was ready to employ his signature tagline. Whom, he wanted to know, should he fire to stop this incessant leaking? Who were these seditious loudmouths in their midst? And the president really wanted to get Sadler’s input, given the ordeal she’d just gone through.

No one in the room expected what came next. Asked to name colleagues whom she suspected of leaking, Sadler dropped a dime on Schlapp, the woman standing right next to her, who had just gone to bat for Sadler—“on the record”—in the comms shop meeting about stemming the leak problem. Schlapp recoiled in indignation at Sadler’s accusation, angrily assuring the president that she was not a leaker and was being falsely accused. Schlapp also turned to Sadler to snipe at her that her allegation was simply “outrageous.” Schlapp’s pushback was so fierce that even Kelly, the supposedly stately general, looked taken aback by her remarks and the whole scene. The president reclined in his chair behind the Resolute Desk and took in the Apprentice-style scene playing out before him.

The meeting adjourned shortly thereafter, but the drama wasn’t finished. Outside the Oval, Schlapp repeatedly hissed, “That bitch,” in outbursts she’d later deny up and down. The West Wing is a small space, and colleagues couldn’t help but notice the unfolding drama. Morale was already sagging under the weight of the brutal press the place was having to endure. And here were two top communications aides at each other’s throats. Things were not improving.

The most telling part of the whole episode lay in Sadler’s ouster. The White House never officially said whether she was fired or she quit. But by early June, less than a month after her McCain comment leaked, Sadler was gone. She wasn’t pushed out because of her McCain remarks. Instead, it was her intensifying feud with Schlapp, who was technically Sadler’s boss, that led to her departure.

Months later, after McCain passed away, the president couldn’t resist taking a few more shots at the late statesman, publicly deriding him for voting against an Obamacare repeal measure and his supposed role in disseminating the notorious Steele dossier. The flare-up in Trump’s still-burning hatred of McCain got us wondering what had become of Sadler. We called her to ask what she’d been doing since leaving the White House. “I don’t think so, thank you, goodbye,” she said before abruptly hanging up.

We called around to former colleagues and friends. Few had heard anything from her in the months since her ignominious ouster. She had disappeared from the proverbial political map. Those sources did recall to us that the White House had tried to land her in a comfortable administration gig somewhere, because naturally offending John McCain wasn’t too great an offense.

As one source recalled, “They gave her that option, but she told them to fuck off.”

Eventually, Sadler would land where so many other benighted Trump alumni would: in a senior role at a node of the constellation of political groups supporting the president. For those cast out of the White House under clouds of scrutiny and scandal, that seemed to be the only viable choice.

By April 2019, she had booked her next gig at the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action as its communications chief and appeared on cable news and radio to sing the president’s praises. But the president’s McCain feuding was far from over. And it would end up taking a very Trumpian turn.

“SHE’S BEEN GETTING FATTER?”

Donald J. Trump, leader of the free world, thinks Meghan M. McCain, the TV-prone daughter of the president’s dead archrival John, is a fat ass.

And a uniquely brainless and talentless one, at that.

During a hectic stretch of days in March 2019, not long before the Mueller report was finally delivered to the Department of Justice, President Trump couldn’t or wouldn’t stop picking fights with the late senator John McCain, in spite—or perhaps because—of the near-universal reverence accorded to the Senate veteran and Vietnam War hero in the wake of his passing. The president—on social media, while talking to journalists, and onstage in Ohio—renewed his attacks on McCain as a backstabber, a Trump hater, a deep state enabler, and a classroom dunce at Annapolis.

Meghan McCain responded from her perch co-hosting The View on ABC by calling the president’s life “pathetic” and small compared with her dad’s. “I don’t expect decency from the Trump family,” she said on the March 21, 2019, episode.

When the notoriously media-obsessed president caught wind of Meghan’s comments, he picked up the phone at the White House and began calling longtime friends to see if they’d join in on his cathartic minutes of hate against the McCain daughter and other enemies real and perceived.

“She’s been getting fatter?” Trump asked, before launching into a harangue about how she is somehow “dumber” than her father. One confidant to whom the president vented his grievances about the McCain family described a diatribe that lasted at least a minute and a half during which the president spoke without interruption. This person at one point put the phone on mute, hit the speakerphone button, and allowed others present to hear President Trump bash Meghan McCain’s chubby cheeks and, to the president’s eye (ever attuned to the basest aspects of entertainment and cable news), her ever-expansive waistline.

During the conversations, he aggressively fixated on how awful a TV host she was, both on The View and during her time as a Fox News contributor. He wondered why anyone would want to hire her. He rambled on and on about how nobody would care about who she was or what she had to say, if not for the genetic proximity to Senator McCain.

This was said without a hint of self-awareness, given the forty-fifth president’s last name, the cushy White House jobs afforded to his daughter and son-in-law, the interventions on their behalves when they were unable to secure government security clearances, the nepotism undergirding Trump’s own rise in New York real estate, to say nothing of the well-maintained fortunes of Tiffany, Eric, Don junior, and so forth.

It also offered a window into how the president prioritizes his time, his energy, and his grievance mongering. That week, Trump had just announced he was nixing the long-standing American policy on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, declaring “it is time” for the United States to “fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty” over the area.

Shortly thereafter, he was back working the phones, bitching about Meghan McCain’s weight to fellow members of a Trump-era ruling class.

It wasn’t the first time he’d maligned the appearance of a television news host. It wasn’t even the first time he’d done so for one of the women on The View.

“She’s a slob, she talks like a truck driver,” Trump, then in his reality-TV phase, told The Insider during a 2006 interview at his office, speaking of dear Rosie, toward the end of the George W. Bush era. This was during Rosie’s brief stint as a controversial, Bush-loathing View co-host, when Trump and O’Donnell began feuding publicly, replete with Trump’s prolific legal threats.

“How does she even get on television? . . . If I were running The View, I’d fire Rosie. I mean, I’d look her right in that fat, ugly face of hers, and say, ‘Rosie, you’re fired,’” he continued in his rant to The Insider. It would alarmingly mirror his broadsides made more than a decade later against, for example, world leaders and diplomats. “We’re all a little chubby, but Rosie’s just worse than most of us. But it’s not the chubbiness; Rosie is a very unattractive person, both inside and out. Rosie’s a person that’s very lucky to have her girlfriend. And she better be careful, or I’ll send one of my friends to pick up her girlfriend. Why would she stay with Rosie if she had another choice?

“She’s trying to use ABC and The View to get even with me. But with me, we fight back,” Trump said. “I’ll probably sue Rosie . . . It would be fun. I’d like to take some money out of her fat-ass pockets.”

Trump dramatically concluded, “Rosie . . . is a loser.”

Everything you need to know about Trump, the president and the celebrity and the lump of flesh, is contained in that Rosie clip. It’s a decoder ring just waiting to be picked up and utilized by every establishment-media dipshit who ever earnestly asked himself or herself, “Isn’t this beneath the dignity of the Oval Office?” It sure is! This is Trump when the cameras turn off, when staff depart the Oval Office and he’s left to work the phones with friends and allies and muse about the losers and haters polluting his airwaves, and the ugly faces and large waistlines that he can’t believe are on television but nonetheless can’t stop talking about.

The View co-host Abby Huntsman, a former Fox News anchor and the daughter of the former Republican presidential contender Jon Huntsman, also caught President Trump’s eye for physical detail and examination. Though this case was markedly more lustful and less scornful than his assessment of the McCain daughter.

On June 1, 2018, Kim Yong Chol, a senior North Korean official and confidant of the totalitarian ruler and Trump’s buddy Kim Jong Un, was in town to visit the U.S. president at the White House as the two governments continued down the path of ostensible negotiations on the future of nukes on the Korea Peninsula. During the high-profile swing through Washington, D.C., the official conversed with Trump for hours and delivered a personal letter to the president from the North Korean dictator himself. In remarks to reporters on the White House South Lawn following that meeting, Trump was buoyant, lauding the “very nice letter.”

To mark the occasion of this visit and diplomatic love letter, the White House invited some of the administration’s top brass to powwow and socialize with the excitable Donald that same week. The elder Huntsman, one of the GOP old guard’s many Civility Preachers and by this point Trump’s ambassador to Russia, was one of those dignitaries invited by the White House to shake his new boss’s hand and kiss the ring for good measure.

Jon Huntsman made the mistake of bringing along a plus-one: his spouse.

As Huntsman and Trump glad-handed in the West Wing, the ambassador’s wife captivated Trump’s attention. For a moment, Trump locked eyes with Mary Kaye, a blond, gorgeous, self-possessed, and Kennedy-esque-looking force in the room. He glanced her up and down.

“Now I know how Abby lost all her baby weight so fast!” a smirking Trump said to compliment the proud grandparents.

For a split second, the Huntsmans didn’t know exactly what to make of the president’s passive lechery and his comment about their daughter Abby or her appearance.

Soon enough, though, they put two and two together. In one short sentence, the president had managed to ogle both the daughter and the wife of one of his most important diplomats.

Trump is—if nothing else—a chemical addict of Fox & Friends. He adores the show, both weekday and weekend editions of it, so much so that it once caused him to trigger widespread tumult within the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.—over the NSA’s mass-surveillance schemes.

On the morning of January 11, 2018, the Fox legal analyst and civil libertarian Andrew Napolitano appeared on a Fox & Friends segment to discuss the spying authority afforded by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows for warrantless collection of gargantuan levels of data and communications. The section’s renewal was at the top of the legislative wish list for Trump’s Department of Justice and the U.S. intelligence services.

Napolitano, given his libertarian proclivities, saw things differently and urged Trump, through the TV, not to go along with this national security charade.

Then, at 7:33 a.m. eastern time, President Trump tweeted in response to the Fox segment, “‘House votes on controversial FISA ACT today.’ This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?”

That single, Fox-inspired tweet sent Trump’s allies and lawmakers on Capitol Hill on a mad dash to privately reassure the president that all was well with the deep state and that he should get back on board. With a few hours of counsel, it worked, but not after some heartburn.

Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, told The Daily Beast at the time that Trump’s Twitter outburst “certainly threw everything into turmoil this morning. I can only imagine that the reaction within the intelligence community and law enforcement and among his own cabinet was the same as it was here in Congress, which is hard to describe without the use of expletives.”

That is the degree of the forty-fifth U.S. president’s devotion to his favorite shows, on matters of national security, immigration policy, political strategy, foreign affairs, and life and death at home and abroad. That is what we are working with.

Anyway, Abby Huntsman, before her ascension to the wine-mom, gabfest popularity of The View, was a Fox & Friends weekend host who co-helmed the morning broadcasts for a time while pregnant with her first child. Before that era in her life, Abby was a regular on MSNBC and billed herself and other members of her family as the Tolerant, Hip Republicans—those who didn’t harbor a seething bloodlust toward gays or brown people, and perhaps viewed the Tea Party as a gang of knuckle draggers, useful idiots, and bovine bumpkins, but who also still wanted to turn Medicaid into a Powerball lottery.

Throughout her career, Abby has had no real coherent or discernible ideology and no obvious moral compass. She, like Trump, has worshipped at the altar of the ideology of the Self.

And in his ample time bingeing Fox & Friends in the White House, the president apparently noticed the pregnancy and watched her belly grow. The mental note stuck with the president long enough that when Abby returned to the Fox airwaves following her stint of maternity leave, Trump couldn’t help but be pleased and impressed with her snapback to her prior physique—the shedding of her baby weight.

By the summer of 2018, President Trump hadn’t forgotten and made sure to pat his Russia ambassador on the head for the achievement of spawning a scalding-hot daughter who took after her mother in all the most important ways.

Soon, word got back to Abby. In her retellings of this story in casual conversation, those present have noted that Abby grimaces at the thought of Donald “grab ’em by the pussy” J. Trump using what he’s dubbed his “super TiVo” to leer at her and grade her fluctuating weight.

“LOVELY JENNIFER”

Jennifer Rauchet is the most important name you’ve never heard before. Without her, Trump might never have become president. Her work helped alter the course of American and world history without your even knowing about it. Hell, she probably didn’t know she was about to change the course of history forever. And she did it all while doing nothing more than producing yet another piece of junk food for the brains of hundreds of thousands of aging viewers and culture-war obsessives.

You won’t read much about Rauchet in the news, except for the occasional tabloid story, blog post, or offhand mention in a newspaper article. In October 2017, Donald Trump smiled for a photo of a private dinner at the White House with his guests of honor: Robert J. O’Neill, a Fox News favorite who claimed it was he who heroically fired the shot that killed Osama bin Laden in the famous Obama-era raid—a claim forcefully disputed by multiple special operations sources. Seated to O’Neill’s left was his wife, Jessica. The president sat at the head of the table. On the other side of the table sat Pete Hegseth, a top Trump confidant, informal policy adviser, and Fox & Friends star.

Seated to Hegseth’s right, in a photo posted to Instagram that October, was Rauchet, sitting closest to President Trump.

Rauchet found herself the subject of tabloid gossip in the early Trump era when rumors swirled that she and a married Hegseth had carried on a secret affair. She would later give birth to their child. The gossip and reports around the relationship came up in Hegseth’s vetting for a possible senior post in the Trump administration and led to top officials tapping the brakes on his consideration, despite all the goodwill he’d built up with the president.

Hegseth would quickly rise as one of the key players in Trumpworld and end up marrying Rauchet in 2019—at Trump’s New Jersey club, no less. But Rauchet is the better half of the Fox News power couple who actually helped build Trump into what he is today. In fact, perhaps Rauchet was sitting closer to President Trump in that Instagram photo in part because she has known Trump longer than Hegseth has.

For years, Rauchet had served as a well-regarded executive producer on Fox & Friends. (She has since moved on to other positions in the network, largely to create some breathing room between her and her former illicit lover boy Hegseth.) In April 2011, Trump began appearing in a weekly Monday segment on Rauchet’s show Fox & Friends, calling in to the program to riff on culture, Obama, and political news of the day. It was a recurring segment that continued until 2015, when it was suspended as Trump began his quixotic and ultimately victorious journey to executive power.

Rauchet was instrumental in setting up that segment, going back and forth with Trump to hammer out the details of his involvement and produce it week after week. Long before Hegseth was a devoted follower of Trumpism (in fact, he had previously supported Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz during the 2016 GOP primary, before ultimately settling on The Donald), Rauchet saw in Trump the potential for a massive hit—not as a joke or celebrity oddity, but as a towering political and cultural presence in American life. And by God, his elevation at Fox & Friends was one potent way to accomplish that. Rauchet was known to defend the Trump segments to naysayers she came across at the Fox network and rib them for their out-of-touch elitism—for not getting it.

Trump valued her input and her commitment so much that during the 2016 election, when he would call in from the campaign trail or Trump Tower to the Fox control room to comment, or to give critique and suggestions, one of the people he’d ask to speak to most frequently was his “Jennifer!”

But before he embarked on his presidential warpath, the Trump call-in allowed him to regularly connect with the Fox audience in a unique way and early on forged the unshakable bonds between Trump and the morning news and commentary program. In doing this, Rauchet was central in making Fox & Friends a primary source of influence and information for Trump as he navigated the remainder of the Obama era. The gamble paid off handsomely for both Trump and Fox. Trump, a pop culture oddity and crank, was able to cement his status as a cable news attraction and driver of conversation. It was the original sin that years down the line would birth his Fox News presidency and bestow upon him a vast propaganda network. By February 2017, Fox & Friends would enjoy not only a ratings spike as the Trump surrogate but also its newfound position as Most Influential Program in the World.

Rauchet, for her part, has consistently made her support for the president and former Fox contributor clear on her personal social media posts. In return, Trump has anointed her the affectionate nicknames of “beautiful Jennifer” and “lovely Jennifer.”

“I DON’T KNOW THE TRUTH”

If Donald Trump’s crass comments make him sound like that bully from high school or that demeaning boss who once made an inappropriate sexually loaded comment or that drunk guy at the end of the bar at your local watering hole—well, that’s exactly what they are. Every modern entertainment cliché and every dark corner of our national id are on full display in the debauched hellhole that is modern television. Trump came from that world. He’s obsessed with it. And now he’s brought it into the White House with him. And all the greenroom navel-gazing and New York Times op-ed column space devoted to hand-wringing over this thoroughly twenty-first-century American phenomenon has yet to come to terms with one very disturbing but illuminating fact: millions of Americans knew exactly whom they were electing in 2016. They were electing themselves.

The classic Kurt Vonnegut short story “Harrison Bergeron” imagines a near-futuristic dystopia in which all levers of society seek to elevate the mediocre. The most prized attribute in this society is averageness, and citizens are assigned jobs at random for fear of rewarding anyone out of sheer merit. In the 1995 film adaptation, Eugene Levy plays the president of the United States, a man chosen at random to be the leader of the free world. And he brings his everyman credentials to the fore as he threatens to hit a populous Moroccan city with a nuclear weapon.

“The nuclear fallout could be apocalyptic!” an aide warns.

“Well, that’s what they get for building a T-bomb when we told them not to,” the president fires back. “Those cocksuckers gotta learn not to fuck with us!”

Trump hasn’t yet threatened to nuke a population center, notwithstanding his brief employment of the arch war hawk John Bolton. But that scene was a clever and prophetic warning about political populism. Sure, you can put an everyman in charge of the levers of power in the most powerful nation in the world. But for all the caterwauling about “elitism” in American politics, sometimes it’s nice to have elites—you know, the people who are trained, educated, and accomplished in their respective fields, as opposed to the creepy boss or the drunk slob at the bar—running the nation.

Nowhere are the pitfalls of everyman government in the Trump era more evident than in his thoroughly American reverence for television and nonstop gossiping and catty sniping about the personalities that appear on his screen. More than discussing and gossiping about them, he turns to them for direct policy advice, both by just watching what his favorite cable newsers have to say and by inviting them to comment on administration policy making directly. It turns out that a president obsessed with the whims of cable news hosts is not exactly a stabilizing force.

—

THIS is the sort of thing that takes up an inordinate amount of the forty-fifth president’s headspace. To be fair (though not necessarily charitable) to the president, it’s not just the gossip, the hate mongering, and the groaning and sniping that keep bringing him back for more. He also channels his avaricious media diet into personal murder-boarding for the politics, rhetoric, strategic salvos, and policy that drive the planet’s one remaining superpower.

Throughout the Trump era, it has been almost too easy for us to mine for stories on the command and influence that President Trump’s TV box has over his desires and decision making. All you have to do is ask about whom he puts on speakerphone or conference call. Various business interests and advocacy organizations have factored this into their daily operations, to the point where they have poured millions of dollars into advertising during Fox shows that they know Trump prodigiously consumes. In their efforts to influence him, some of these commercials will feature a person or a disembodied voice directly addressing President Trump. (The irony here is that it’s actually a colossal waste of money; those who know him will tell you that Trump doesn’t watch TV commercials. If people are in the room with him, he’ll mute the TV and start talking to whoever is closest. If he’s alone and using his TiVo, he’ll just fast-forward to the good parts, as he had been known to do while watching his VHS tape of Bloodsport.)

You simply cannot understand the Trump presidency, or his widespread appeal in the modern Republican Party, without first understanding Lou Dobbs, the star Fox Business Network host and one of the originators of a cable-TV-fueled, anti-immigrant conservatism that would become full-blown Trumpism.

For many years, Trump has made Dobbs’s show appointment viewing. Dobbs is the MAGA Socrates to The Donald’s Plato.

He regularly quizzes senior staff, longtime confidants, and near strangers alike if they’ve seen recent Dobbs segments. He calls “Lou” regularly to gossip and pulse him on ideas. And the president has patched him in on speakerphone during high-level gatherings in the White House.

Beginning in the early Trump era, the president started including Dobbs, via speakerphone, in (multiple!) Oval Office meetings so that Lou—the cable gasbag who’s repeatedly raged against St. Patrick’s Day and other “ethnic holidays”—can advise him and his senior officials.

The president will ask Dobbs for his analysis and counsel before and after his aides or cabinet members have given theirs. Sometimes he’s actually interrupted an official in the room so the Fox Business personality can get a say in.

Meetings Dobbs has been patched into include ones on trade or tax policy, with top-ranking officials such as the nativist hate merchant Stephen Miller, the “globalist” tax slasher Gary Cohn, the nationalist anime villain Steve Bannon, the China-loathing avatar Peter Navarro, and the Lego Batman and Collateral Beauty hype man Steve Mnuchin. Dobbs fit right in. The only difference was that he took a paycheck cut by Fox, not the federal government.

During his ultimately successful tax-bill blitz, Trump would make sure to tell his White House personal secretary to get Dobbs on the horn. At the end of one particularly memorable meeting—at least it was for the puzzled officials surrounding the president—Trump bade farewell to his dear friend and ideological precursor Lou, disconnected the line, and lifted up his head to survey the faces in the room. The president smiled and simply told everyone assembled to discuss the politics and intricacies of tax cuts, “Love Lou.”

“Department of Justice should have urged the Supreme Court to at least hear the Drivers License case on illegal immigrants in Arizona. I agree with @LouDobbs. Should have sought review,” our commander in chief shit-posted on the morning of March 21, 2018.

Trump’s Fox-to-Oval-Office pipeline hardly ends with Lou, of course.

—

BY the middle of the Trump era, so much ink had been spilled covering the obvious sway the Fox News megastar Sean Hannity holds over Trump’s mind and mayhem. If we’re to be even mildly honest about it, this included ink from us at The Daily Beast. Swin alone spilled enough to swim and then violently drown in.

Donald Trump has, of course, gifted numerous “EXCLUSIVE” interviews to Hannity, on both the Fox host’s TV show and his radio show. Hannity is so accommodating to his president and prime benefactor that he’ll signal to his own radio producers to stall as he takes phone calls from Trump, even if the call comes in during inconvenient moments like, well, as the live show is being broadcast.

But even for President Trump—a man who demands devotion and fealty from his fans and allies as if it were an elixir boosting sperm count—Sean Hannity can sometimes prove too accommodating.

In our time covering the Trump years, we discovered, or learned incidentally, more about the president and the TV babbler’s mutual affinities than we ever cared to know. For one thing, Trump has a slight tendency to trash-talk Hannity behind his back, primarily about the quality of the Fox News icon’s ultra-sycophantic method of interviewing Trump.

When Hannity’s not in earshot, the president has repeatedly—and sometimes for a prolonged, uncomfortable stretch of time—made fun of his interviewing skills, mocking the laziness of his questions and complaining that there isn’t any thrill or tension for Trump to work with. On several occasions since his inauguration, Trump simply used the word “dumb” to characterize Hannity’s prepared questions.

For any reader uninterested in looking up a clip on YouTube or jumping on a search engine to bear witness, a Hannity question for Trump has for years boiled down to nothing more than “Did you sprain anything when you fell from heaven?” or “Those Democrats, amirite?”

There’s a joke in national and political media circles about Hannity’s frequent interviews and conversations with the president and how gobsmackingly impossible it seems that someone with that much access to power can come away, almost each and every time, without breaking a single morsel of news. To any reasonable observer, it’s simpering propaganda, not even fun simpering propaganda.

When Swin asked Hannity about this, the Fox News host didn’t respond. He didn’t even bother to decry this reporting on Twitter as “#FakeNews,” as he has done with our work in the past. It’s unclear if Hannity knows, or believes, that his dear friend and Dear Leader disrespects him when he’s not around. Still, there’s practically nothing Hannity wouldn’t do, or hasn’t done, for this president, short of literally committing seppuku on live television.

During one of Trump’s appearances on Hannity’s radio program during the 2016 presidential campaign, the then candidate Trump repeated the National Enquirer–promoted, fringe conspiracy theory that Senator Ted Cruz’s dad, Rafael Cruz, was with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and thus might have had something to do with it.

“There was a picture a few weeks ago, and it was all over the place, about Lee Harvey Oswald and his father,” Trump told an enthralled Hannity.

“Was that verified ever? I saw that there was something on the internet,” the host credulously replied.

“It was a picture put in and [the Enquirer] wouldn’t put it in if they could be sued, that I can tell you,” Trump, hilariously, contended. “Ted Cruz, I don’t think denied it . . . [and] if that were true, what was [Rafael] doing having breakfast . . . three months before the JFK assassination?”

“I have seen it, but I never thought it was going anywhere,” Hannity said, entertaining the psychotic notion. “I don’t know the truth, the veracity of it.”

When Swin asked Hannity to comment further, Sean emailed, “I was saying that photo was not verified.”

Asked if he believed the National Enquirer is generally a reliable news outlet, Hannity demurred, writing, “If [you] want to interview me, contact Fox PR.”

Swin thought that was it, yet Hannity just couldn’t help himself.

“So is the picture authentic or not? You don’t have a clue either,” he later emailed Swin, unprompted. “Lol,” Hannity wrote, concluding his note.

Swin had never spoken to Hannity before this exchange, and it stuck with him as a perfect, distilled example of Hannity’s subjugation to Trump. The cable news star was willing to argue with a complete stranger over email about a manufactured debate over whether Ted Cruz’s father murdered JFK. Hannity, one of the most powerful on-air personalities in all of political media, couldn’t think of anything better to do with his time at that moment.

Because failing to do so might risk making Trump look bad, foolish, or misguided. And we can’t have that, now can we?

—

HANNITY, however, is a one-man target-rich environment. Beyond Hannity and Dobbs, there’s an embarrassingly large pool of Fox talent, behind and in front of the cameras, that President Trump draws from for counsel, as a sounding board, and for juicy gossip.

Take, if you will, the exemplar Pete.

Some might know Pete Hegseth, Rauchet’s baby daddy, from chapters past. Some might know him as the guy who almost killed that guy with an ax on live TV, during an ax-throwing demonstration on Fox & Friends in June 2015. (Hegseth missed his target, instead striking a member of the West Point Band, an official musical group of the U.S. Military Academy, who were there celebrating Flag Day. The victim would later bring a lawsuit against Hegseth, his almost killer.) A few might remember him as chief of the right-leaning advocacy group Concerned Veterans for America.

Others might remember him as the man who freely admitted on Fox News in 2019 to having a personal policy of not washing his hands, adding, “Germs are not a real thing. I can’t see them; therefore they’re not real.” (He subsequently insisted he was trying to make a funny.)

President Trump knows him as one of his absolute favorite Fox & Friends hosts and go-to dial-a-buddies. Since the dawn of the Trump era, Hegseth has been able to parlay that not only into having an outsize impact on the president’s talking points and messaging but also into guiding Trump on policy matters. It could be argued that Hegseth has more of an influence on policy—rather than mere rhetoric—than any of his Fox News cohorts, topping even Trump’s philosophical shepherd Lou Dobbs.

In March 2019, Trump personally intervened in the case of a U.S. Navy SEAL on trial over allegations that he had committed war crimes in Iraq, tweeting, “In honor of his past service to our Country, Navy Seal #EddieGallagher will soon be moved to less restrictive confinement while he awaits his day in court. Process should move quickly!” On this tweet, the president tagged “@foxandfriends.”

Gallagher had quickly become a cause célèbre for conservative media figures and politicians: a heroic, quintessentially American hero who had been strung up by a politically correct and masochistic system of American apology-tourists.

Hegseth, an Iraq War vet, had discussed the matter vigorously on the airwaves, but what was left unsaid was that the Fox & Friends mainstay had campaigned behind the scenes and had spoken to President Trump about the situation multiple times on the phone, prior to the “#EddieGallagher” tweet, urging the president to take a stand and some action. Hegseth also organized and spearheaded an effort to persuade Trump in 2019 to consider pardoning an array of accused and convicted American war criminals, chief among them Gallagher. In their many conversations about potential pardons, the president seemed receptive to Hegseth’s entreaties—at least, that is, until he wasn’t.

Around the time of Memorial Day 2019, Trump pulled back from the brink, following what he saw as unexpected blowback from envoys of the military and veterans community. After The Daily Beast broke the news that Hegseth had been counseling Trump on this matter (without disclosing such informal lobbying to his viewers), he got chewed out by Fox News brass for being too blatantly obvious with his advisory role. After he got reamed out, Hegseth started telling friends that he would need to be more discreet about his position as an unpaid policy adviser to President Trump, to avoid getting yelled at at the office.

But all the guff he got from Fox would be well worth it for Pete. On November 15, 2019, President Trump formally announced that he had absolved three U.S. servicemen in their respective war crimes cases. Trump had kept his trusted Hegseth in the loop till the end and even gave him a heads-up that the presidential intervention was imminent. The president cleared the three accused or convicted war criminals in the face of significant military, political, and international outrage and objections. The fallout caused by the two pardons and Trump’s reversal of Gallagher’s demotion even cost the Navy secretary, Richard Spencer, his job. But Clint Lorance, Mathew Golsteyn, and Edward Gallagher got their day made by President Trump—and nobody was giddier for them than Hegseth, who hosted Lorance on his Fox News program mere days after the pardons came down. “I love you, sir,” Lorance told Trump through the TV. “You are awesome!”

In early 2018, when the walls were closing in on the Department of Veterans Affairs secretary and Obama-era holdover David Shulkin—whom conservative critics saw as both an impediment to partial privatization of veterans’ health care and a corrupt buffoon—Hegseth was once again on the line, privately pushing Trump to discard Shulkin as quickly as humanly possible.

At the time, Shulkin had lasted far longer than his internal enemies felt comfortable with, in large part because Trump liked the guy. Shulkin felt so besieged that it got to the point where he even ordered an armed guard to be posted outside his office on the tenth floor of the VA and abrogated tenth-floor access to multiple appointees whom he suspected of subversion and backstabbing.

That year, when the Trump White House organized a meeting with vets groups, Shulkin initially sent over a list of organizations to invite, with the roster specifically excluding Concerned Veterans for America, Hegseth’s old stomping ground and a bastion of anti-Shulkin antagonism. By the time the meeting rolled around, Shulkin was bigfooted, and a CVA representative was invited to attend by White House staff, anyway.

Ultimately, the president sided with people like Hegseth, and Shulkin became yet another expendable person in Donald Trump’s ever-growing long line of expendables and forgettables.

—

WHEN “Judge Jeanine” Pirro was reprimanded and suspended for two weeks by Fox News for making bigoted comments regarding the left-leaning Muslim congresswoman Ilhan Omar, Pirro reached out to Trump for a lifeline. Soon enough, he was calling her, assuring her of his support, and tweeting his demand that Fox put her back on the air. And why wouldn’t he? The two have been chums for years and were nearly members of the same regime. During the presidential transition, Pirro interviewed for the role of deputy attorney general in the Trump administration.

That was around the same time that Laura Ingraham, another Fox host, had interviewed to become Trump’s first White House press secretary, a role that ultimately went to Sean Spicer. In the heat of the 2016 campaign, Ingraham had an unofficial advisory role on Team Trump, helping the Republican presidential contender craft and massage his speeches in the right-wing, “America First” vernacular that Trump had adopted and Ingraham had honed in her career in conservative talk radio. During the transition, she was rewarded with continued access to the upper echelons of Trumpworld. She even interviewed for the top spokesperson slot, with Trump’s son Eric doing the interviewing at Washington’s Four Seasons Hotel.

At the time, she nominally presided over the conservative culture and politics website LifeZette, where employees were on high alert the week of her Trump interview, unsure if Ingraham—a notoriously tyrannical, uncaring, and vindictive boss in D.C. media circles—would return to the office with a new gig and leave everyone at LifeZette holding the bag.

Under Ingraham’s watch, LifeZette became a cesspool of anemic web traffic and also a working environment where numerous sources told us that women felt sexually threatened and harassed. Some of LifeZette’s prominently placed content included such titles as “What to Do if Your Teenager Is Promiscuous,” courtesy of the MomZette vertical, and “Why So Many Women Don’t Like the ‘F-Word.’” The website promoted since-deleted pieces on the Clinton family “body count” conspiracy theories, which one such article charmingly titled “Could Crossing the Clintons Kill You?”

In early 2018, when Trump was deciding whom to invite to a quiet, intimate dinner at the White House for a random Monday night, the president could have picked from any of the brightest minds, the greatest statesmen, or even the best artists in the world (well, at least from the ones who can still stand him). Instead, he chose to fete the fratty, forty-year-old Fox News host Jesse Watters and the Fox contributor Sebastian Gorka, the latter having been sacked from Trump’s White House, though not his television set.

Later that week, Watters would giddily tweet out a photo of a White House dinner menu—which featured a dessert of milk chocolate mousse—signed by Donald J. Trump, reading “To Jesse[,] You are great!”

“FAKE NEWS SPECIALISTS”

This will no doubt come as a shock, but not everyone on cable television is a genius. To paraphrase the president, when the nation’s cable news bookers send their people to our living rooms, they’re not always sending their best. So a president who takes his emotional, personnel, and policy cues from the little box in his living room is inevitably giving two-bit loudmouths with less brains than bombast an unofficial but no less impactful role in the policy-making process. These are mouth-breathing commentators whom the average American probably has never heard of before, and perhaps never will. And yet the most powerful man in the world hangs on their every word.

Take the case study of Dan Bongino, a habitually mad-online former Secret Service agent and thrice-failed congressional candidate whose public political commentary more closely resembles someone stepping on a rake than making an argument. His public persona has anger issues and the emotional maturity of a five-year-old. He has said, without a hint of irony or joy, that he rededicated his life in 2018 to the religion of “Owning the Libs.”

He’s not someone whose opinion on anything should be taken seriously—unless, that is, you’re Donald Trump, who can’t get enough of the guy when he appears on Fox evening and early-morning programming.

During one of Bongino’s guest appearances on Fox News in mid-2018, the (now former) NRATV host delivered one of his standard, full-throated defenses of President Trump and played wingman to Trump’s dubious claim that the feds, under the spell of anti-Trump bias, embedded a “spy” in his presidential campaign. Inside the White House, Bongino’s voice resonated.

“Did you see what Bongino said?” Trump gushed to his advisers. “He’s so right; he’s just so right about it all. You have to see it.”

And “see it,” he did—over, and over, and over again.

On the day that much of the Republican and Democratic parties’ elite gathered to honor the memory of the late senator John McCain at Washington National Cathedral, President Trump was holed up in the White House, effectively banned by the McCains from attending. While the funeral goers mourned with three major political families—the Obamas, Bushes, McCains—who all openly despise Trump, the sitting president instead took to Twitter, posting Dan Bongino quotes from an episode of Fox & Friends he was watching. Then Trump and his Secret Service detail were off to his private golf club in Virginia.

Within Trumpworld, Bongino has other powerful allies as well. In January 2019, the president hosted a group of right-wing activists—led by Ginni Thomas, who’s married to the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas—for an hour as the delegation ranted wildly about culture-war and LGBTQ-related grievances and also about some of the Trump White House’s squishier hires.

One of the group’s main gripes was their insistence that certain senior White House officials were not serving the president’s best interests and were keeping Trump from hiring as many loyal supporters as they thought he deserved. During this confab, Thomas provided Trump with a list of potential hires for the White House and a title for which each name would be best suited.

On that list was Dan Bongino, listed next to a deputy chief of staff designation.

In the time since that meeting, Trump has yet to tap Bongino for any official assignment, though Bongino did get a signed contract with Fox News. It’s a shame, because such a professional marriage would be (at least stylistically) a match made in MAGA heaven. Like Trump, Bongino is a loud, flamboyant product of New York City. “I’m a Queens kid; he’s a Queens kid,” Bongino told Lachlan in an interview in late 2018.

That was the last time Lachlan and Dan spoke on friendly terms. We published a story at The Daily Beast about Bongino leaving NRATV that resulted in a firestorm of tweets during the course of which Dan dubbed us “fake news specialists” who either “have the absolute worst sources in the ‘journalism’ business OR [are] complete BS artists.” In a point of pride for Lachlan, he was dubbed an “alleged ‘reporter,’” while Swin was just his “looney tune sidekick.”

The numerous rage-tweets about us have since been deleted from Bongino’s feed. Lost in the purge were tweets in which Bongino repeatedly suggested that Lachlan had slept with a married woman, and urged Swin to ask Lachlan about it. (Swin asked, and Lachlan sincerely pleaded ignorance.) Just as we go to press on this book, Bongino has sued The Daily Beast (which his complaint calls “a digital assassin and controlled by billionaire Clinton-devotees Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg”) over that story.

Some of the other lower-tier members of the Fox ecosystem whom the president admires lean less on the decidedly rage-aholic end of the spectrum.

There’s the frequent Fox guest Tom Fitton, the head of the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, whom Trump regularly quotes on Twitter and praises as a supposed authority on FBI, DOJ, and Obama-era “deep state” abuses. In the shadow of the “corrupt” Mueller investigation, Fitton thought he’d found the crime of the century, and the president was all about it. Further, Fitton has the distinct pleasure of having a flattering nickname, courtesy of President Trump himself: “muscle man.” The president has recommended Fitton’s Fox News hits to friends while in the same breath complimenting Fitton for his toned, gratuitously muscular shape and, in Trump’s words, for “looking good.”

And then there’s Gregg Jarrett, legal analyst and author of The Russia Hoax, whom the president habitually watches and uses his quotable interviews to help sharpen his grievance-peddling talking points and whose book he has enthusiastically pimped. “NEW BOOK—A MUST READ! ‘The Russia Hoax—The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump’ by the brilliant Fox News Legal Analyst Gregg Jarrett. A sad chapter for law enforcement. A rigged system!” Trump tweeted in May 2018.

“Congratulations to Gregg Jarrett on his book, ‘THE RUSSIA HOAX, THE ILLICIT SCHEME TO CLEAR HILLARY CLINTON AND FRAME DONALD TRUMP,’ going to #1 on @nytimes and Amazon. It is indeed a HOAX and WITCH HUNT, illegally started by people who have already been disgraced. Great book!” he wrote in August 2018.

But all of them pale in comparison to the viral conservative-media sensation who managed to captivate the occupant of the Oval Office.

For the uninitiated, allow us to introduce you to Diamond and Silk.

—

SWIN had been following Diamond and Silk (Lynnette “Diamond” Hardaway and Rochelle “Silk” Richardson, formerly known as the “‘Stump for Trump’ girls”) since at least early 2016, when they emerged seemingly out of nowhere as a female, African American, formerly Democratic-voting duo on YouTube. Their grift? They had seen the light, were now all aboard the Trump Train, and believed the modern Democratic Party to be an existential threat to black America. Suddenly the pair were name checked by Trump on Twitter and invited to join him on the campaign trail.

Diamond and Silk’s cable news appearances had a tendency to veer into some freakish spaces. In February 2016, CNN still thought it would be wise or productive to invite the North Carolina–based sisters on the air to comment on the news of the day. The duo ended up fanning the flames of the fringe theory that Trump’s opponent Marco Rubio was a covert homosexual. Why? Because they read it somewhere on the internet.

“Marco Rubio told us to google Donald Trump, but I did one better—I googled him,” Diamond (Hardaway) told the CNN host. “And when I googled him—you know, he owes America and the gay community an apology, because it sounds like that he may have had a gay lifestyle in his past . . . Google him . . . That’s what’s on Google. So you have to be cautious when you tell people to google people. Stuff will come up. Now, we don’t know if it’s true. So we are saying ‘allegedly.’”

The following month, Diamond and Silk were stumping for Trump at a less savory venue, in an eighteen-minute “exclusive” interview with John Friend of American Free Press, talking about immigration and American workers.

“These people been in office for years and haven’t done anything,” Diamond told Friend. “They are okay with illegal people running in our country, and we don’t even know these people.”

Perhaps unbeknownst to Diamond or Silk, John Friend has been described by the Anti-Defamation League as a “virulent anti-Semite and Holocaust denier,” and he’s been fairly open in his writings and public statements about his feelings toward Nazism. “If you take an objective look at what [Adolf Hitler] did, what he was all about, the policies that he implemented and championed . . . you will recognize that this man and his movement were the greatest thing that’s happened to Western civilization,” Friend said on The Brian Ruhe Show in December 2015.

Associating with this Nazi hype man did nothing to slow Diamond and Silk’s ascent within Trump’s social and political circles. During the Trump presidency, the YouTube duo landed hosting duties at the Fox News online streaming service Fox Nation, brought down the house during their speech to the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference, authored several songs such as the pro-Trump, anti-Eminem diss track “Trump’s Yo President,” and have been welcomed by President Trump at the White House on multiple special occasions. (They even got to go to Lara Trump’s baby shower.)

To fully grasp the inextricable pop culture aspect of Trump’s success and the Trump era itself, any self-respecting political observer or reporter must watch Diamond and Silk’s video on a weekly basis, bare minimum. So we do.

Within the halls of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Trump himself has many times commented to White House aides about how much he enjoys watching Diamond and Silk on Fox, going out of his way to reference and laugh over specific segments they’ve done on shows like Hannity and Fox & Friends. Those close to the president say that Trump has repeatedly said that he finds their style and humor “fantastic.” One senior administration official joked to Swin that Diamond and Silk double as “senior economic advisers” to President Trump, citing a Fox & Friends segment in which the two women heralded the news that “black unemployment is low and home ownership is high” in the Trump years.

The president has also privately dubbed Diamond and Silk “my stars” and “my brilliant ladies” and has declared that “the internet loves them.”

“Thank you to two great people!” Trump tweeted on April 6, 2019, linking to a tweet featuring a photo of the two ladies standing beside President Trump behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. Curiously, the @DiamondandSilk tweet was from February 2019, and it’s unclear why this specific post was on the president’s mind.

For years, Swin has wanted to meet or at least jump on the phone with Diamond and Silk (particularly Diamond, clearly the front woman and primary voice of the outfit), but neither of them ever answered his emails seeking comment.

In late April 2018, Swin got his chance—all thanks to the bottomless cynicism of Republican congressmen. Conservatives on the House Judiciary Committee had called Diamond and Silk to testify at a hearing called “Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms,” during which the two Trump supporters hurled baseless allegation after baseless allegation that Facebook was targeting them for censorship due to their conservative viewpoints. (At the time, the sisters had 1.4 million followers on the social-media giant.)

Diamond and Silk potentially perjured themselves several times during the hearing, and it got so ridiculous that multiple Democratic lawmakers had to remind them that they were under oath and ask them if they knew lying under oath was, to say the least, ill advised.

At the conclusion of their madcap testimony, Swin approached the duo for a question. While talking to another journalist, Diamond saw Swin, furrowed her brow, and pointed.

“What’s your name?” she inquired.

Asawin, he replied, though he added that they might know him as simply Swin, if at all.

Without another word, both Diamond and Silk gestured for Swin to step closer and closer to them, until he was in reach for the two to simultaneously embrace him in a big ol’ group bear hug.

“We know who you are,” Diamond said, mid-embrace.

“Then why don’t you ever respond to my emails?” Swin asked.

“‘’Cuz we know how the media works!” one of them shot back as they were ushered out by their body man. On their way out the door, and when they weren’t exclaiming, “Facebook is a liar!” to huddled reporters, Swin asked if they were going to pay a visit to their good friend President Trump while they were in Washington, D.C., for the day.

Diamond replied they couldn’t possibly comment and smiled.

Trump apparently never got to see his two “senior advisers” that day, however. But, according to Instagram, the duo did make it just a few blocks shy of the West Wing: to the lobby restaurant of Trump International Hotel for lunch, snapping a photo at a table shared with their pal Katrina Pierson, herself an actual senior adviser to the president’s reelection campaign.

In more normal times, characters like Diamond, Silk, Bongino, and Jarrett would be at most tangential characters in the unfolding drama of an American presidency. The Trump era has turned them into something far more consequential: at best, informal advisers to a president who knows the power of media to shape events; at worst, literal policy makers whose pronouncements, tethered or not to the actual reality of events, directly inform the most consequential decisions of the nation’s most powerful elected official.

We’ve often been asked during our time reporting on this White House why we focus such seemingly inordinate attention on the apparent sideshows playing out on the fringes of right-wing media. The answer is that it’s not inordinate at all. These are the people who’ve captured President Trump’s attention. And it’s a direct and very short line from his attention to the official channels of communication and policy making at the West Wing. Enamor the president with a catchy sound bite, and a pundit could well end up shifting U.S. economic policy, or stoking a diplomatic conflict, or ousting a high-level government official or political appointee.

It would be an amazing level of influence were it handed to the wisest, most measured, even-handed, and responsible of pundits. Trump’s favorite media personalities are . . . none of those things.

“HE CAN’T HANDLE JAIL”

Unlike most members of President Trump’s legal war council, the former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani had a penchant for embedding a sense of gallows humor and excess into his day-to-day work.

Sometimes, he would get bored and kill time in a manner more closely befitting a crank caller than the lawyer and spokesman for the leader of the free world.

For all his fumbles and foibles, Giuliani was starting from a position of personal advantage and rapport with the forty-fifth president of the United States when he officially signed on to Trump’s outside legal team in April 2018. “He’s a cool guy,” Giuliani had told us multiple times since that April, when citing their friendship and their shared style of controlled chaos and fame, if not infamy. “Control the agenda,” Trump has told Giuliani on numerous occasions, while attaboy-ing him for his willingness to make copious media appearances, hurling himself on grenade after lobbed grenade, news cycle after news cycle, in the service of his client and pal Donald J. Trump.

The president trusted his outside counsel to keep his best interests at heart, or at least more so than he sometimes trusted his in-house White House attorney. Since the launching of the Mueller investigation, President Trump had asked those close to him if they thought it was possible or probable that Don McGahn, his first White House counsel, was helping the “corrupt” feds to nail the president by “wearing a wire.”

When it came to people like Giuliani, Trump worried far more about unchecked flamboyance than pledged fealty.

And whatever else could be said of a Trumpist Giuliani, he had a way of speaking his mind, oftentimes unapologetically, bafflingly on the record, with a brazen no-fucks-left-to-give disposition. One Friday evening in early December 2018, he rang up Swin in response to a standard inquiry seeking comment on the most recent court documents made publicly available about Trump’s estranged fixer Michael Cohen. On Giuliani’s end, it sounded as if there were music and loud commotion in the background as Giuliani angrily vacillated between growling and slurring his sentences. Giuliani said the court docs had shown that they were “fucking angry with” Cohen and must want to lock him up “for four years” at least.

Then Trump’s friend and personal attorney said something in a way that intimated the often grim and brutal realities of too many prisons in America: the violence, the retributions, the rape, the degradation, the deprivation.

“Believe me,” Giuliani said, taking a suddenly more hushed tone. “He can’t handle jail.”

Then there was that time in the summer of 2019 when the Trump attorney called Lachlan to discuss a story the reporter was working on, only to interrupt the conversation to abruptly ask someone at his side, “You wanna go dancin’?”

“I’m having too much fun,” Giuliani told Swin that year, around the time he was still working for Trump and also booking another new client—the authoritarian regime in Bahrain, where his firm landed a contract for training the police force. “One day, I’m gonna have to go back to boring lawyer work.”

The guy was definitely having the time of his goddamn life as the world around him was razed and salted, often at the hands of his biggest client. But perhaps the weirdest back-and-forth that either of us had ever experienced with Rudy G. involved his emojis and typos.

During the late afternoon of December 18, 2018, Swin was sitting at the dinner table in the house of his Ohio-based in-laws, running out the clock on a slow workday. Then his phone started dinging with unsolicited text messages sent from Trump’s “TV lawyer,” as Michael Cohen would soon brand him in congressional testimony.

“On tarmac for almost one hour. I think Mueller knew I was on this plane and is delaying it so he gets me to say whatever he wants me to say. But I’m just incapable of lying to save my own skin,” Giuliani wrote.

Swin had no idea what in God’s name was going on, but the bizarre messages kept coming:

“He wants me to say that 35 years ago DT didn’t pay two parking tickets. You say so what’s so important? Well they may have been right in front of then Soviet embassy. I WILL NOT BE BROKEN!”

Swin asked if this was supposed to be a (Joke? Irony?) tweet that Giuliani accidentally texted to a reporter. Giuliani clarified this was meant as a “Secret text.”

“It shows you how far they will go but they can’t brake me. I’m no rat ,” he assured Swin.

He added that he had “just landed and am seeing bail,” to which he then corrected himself, texting, “Seeking bail. May be liberated by NYPD.”

At this point, Swin wrote back, “Did someone steal your phone or are you just fucking with me, lol.”

The former New York mayor replied, “Would I do that. I have now secured release of entire plane.”

Swin was convinced that someone had stolen Giuliani’s phone and decided to mess with some of the contacts in his cell, or that he had synced his messages on a computer he had left unattended. (Maybe Giuliani’s son, Andrew, who was also a staffer in the Trump White House, felt like playing some games, was a thought that ran through Swin’s befuddled mind.)

It didn’t take long for Mr. Mayor to call Swin insisting that some plane, somewhere, that he had been stranded on by Robert Mueller had since been “liberated.”

The ruse lasted for a few more seconds before Trump’s media-friendly lawyer broke character and burst out laughing. Giuliani quickly revealed to Swin that he was, indeed, on a plane that was delayed on the tarmac and that he was feeling “bored.” So, in an effort to cure his boredom, he decided to send the series of peculiar, outlandish texts to, according to him, roughly ten people—some were friends, some were fellow Trumpworld figures, some were political journalists he knew—to see what their reactions would be.

He said he wondered who would take the bait. He was curious about who would believe him or accuse him of going clinically insane. He wondered if any of the reporters he messaged would tweet out his claims at face value or as an emerging crisis. (Swin did not.)

Then he said goodbye and hung up.

This was a week before Christmas, and Donald Trump’s attorney—brought on to shield the president in the face of a high-stakes Russia investigation—had just pranked Swin for no discernible reason beyond his mild episode of cabin fever and restlessness.

It took a few moments that evening for all of that to sink in. When it did, the only thing Swin could think to do was laugh hysterically (à la Sam Neill, at the conclusion of the film In the Mouth of Madness, staring paralyzed into the void).

We had done a lot of that over the first couple years of the Trump era, surrendering ourselves to a darkly comical nihilism that colored our interactions with the broader Trumpworld.

—

IT was late August 2018, a few months before Giuliani’s call, and Donald Trump’s legal team was getting impatient. Giuliani was hitting the TV news circuit to demand that Robert Mueller finish his investigation and publish a report on it by the following month. But the special counsel was either ignoring him or being obstinate. So Giuliani and his Trump legal team colleagues decided they weren’t going to wait. Instead, they’d craft a “counter-report” that would, essentially, try to poison the tree of the investigation by attempting to preemptively discredit Mueller, his investigative team, and the federal law enforcement bureaucracy more generally.

We got wind of the workings of the report, of course, during our regular conversations with Giuliani, who routinely, and to our endless delight, made the usual plumbing of less senior leakers unnecessary. Swin asked him for information about the project, and Rudy was more than happy to dish details. It would be broken into two sections, he explained, one undercutting the rationale for and objectivity of Mueller’s investigation and another responding to more substantive allegations stemming from the probe—or at least what the legal team anticipated those allegations would be. “Since we have to guess what it is, it is quite voluminous,” Giuliani said of the report.

We wanted more details, so naturally we called up Giuliani’s colleague on the legal team. But Jay Sekulow wasn’t nearly as eager to talk. In fact, he outright denied aspects of what Giuliani told us. Of course they couldn’t respond to Mueller’s allegations, he said; they didn’t know what those allegations would be. He conceded that the legal team was “preparing a comprehensive report that will include issues related to the commencement of this investigation through the legal issues of it.” But he was incredulous at some of the details that Giuliani had, just minutes earlier and on the record, provided to us.

“Rudy said that?” Sekulow asked us, clearly exasperated and failing to muffle an audible sigh.

—

IT was a microcosm of the often amusing relationship between the two lawyers, or at least what their relationship looked like to those of us reporting on them. Both men are New Yorkers, but that’s where the similarities end. In many respects, the two are polar opposites: Giuliani the moderate Republican, notorious divorcé, outgoing, and media savvy; Sekulow the devoted Christian, skeptical of the mainstream press, reserved, and intensely conservative. And while Giuliani seemed to revel in speaking with the press, even when doing so was at best a distraction and at worst an egregious legal or public relations misstep, Sekulow would almost never speak to the media without going off the record, and even then would hedge his language and tread carefully to avoid running afoul of a devised legal strategy. But while Giuliani was visible in pushing Trump’s agenda, Sekulow wielded a far different, but no less effective, strategy that combined more targeted media advocacy with what amounted to a shadow legal team staffed with his own colleagues and loyalists. When Sekulow isn’t orchestrating the president’s Mueller strategy or running his own legal advocacy outfit, he’s engaged in an activity far more typical for a middle-aged boomer: performing hokey classic rock covers. He’s the drummer for an eponymous rock group, the Jay Sekulow Band, that somehow managed to lead with his name despite boasting members such as the former front man of the band Kansas, John Elefante, and the former lead singer and former producer, respectively, for the Grammy-winning Christian rock act Petra and the Grammy nominee Relient K. The Jay Sekulow Band’s Facebook page bills it, excruciatingly, as a “unique alliance between law and music.”

The band covers 1960s and 1970s classic rock standards, including tunes by the Beatles, Cream, and Boston. But it’s also written some originals, particularly a ham-fisted song titled “Undemocratic,” about the U.S. government’s persecution of conservative Christians in contemporary America. “Democracy in motion means a right to take sides / Since when is one rewarded for the emails she hides?” ask a few lines of the song. It shares a title with, and was created to promote, Sekulow’s 2015 book of the same name. The song’s music video was published on the official YouTube channel of the American Center for Law and Justice, the nonprofit outfit that Sekulow leads and that employs a not insignificant portion of his immediate family.

Five of ACLJ’s six board members are members of the Sekulow family, and over the last twenty years ACLJ has steered millions to Jay’s sons, brother, and sister-in-law, among other family members. Some have even taken out six-figure loans from the nonprofit, only to have the bulk of those loans subsequently forgiven, with the difference classified as “compensation” from the organization.

ACLJ raises tens of millions each year, much of it in small-dollar increments courtesy of the group’s incessant telemarketing fund-raising pitches. They promise to defeat the liberals in court, to maintain traditional Christian conservative policies at the federal level, and, more recently, to expose the deep state saboteurs attempting to take down President Trump. One sample fund-raising call script filed in 2017 by the Donor Care Center, one of ACLJ’s telemarketing contractors, instructed callers to continue pressing potential donors for money even if they said they were unemployed, were on a fixed income, or “have no money.” For near-broke potential donors, the call script instructed telemarketers to appeal to people’s religious faith, asking if they can “make a small sacrificial gift of even $20.”

ACLJ’s telemarketers were even instructed to pursue donations in the event they ended up on the phone with a bereaved relative. “I’m so sorry to hear that. I will update our records,” callers were instructed to say in the event they tried to hit up a dead person for money and instead found themselves talking to a relative. “Let me ask,” they were advised to follow up, “are you also a supporter of ACLJ, and if so, do you still want to receive updates?”

Trump brought Sekulow on board for the same reason he’s hired so many staffers in the upper echelons of the modern American government: Sekulow was wary of speaking with reporters, but he was a great panelist on bomb-throwing Fox News shows, where he frequently attacked Hillary Clinton and other prominent Democrats and put up often facile legal defenses of the president’s conduct.

But Sekulow brought far more to the table than legal expertise or knee-jerk support of the president. ACLJ raised more than $53 million in 2017, and the organization was where Sekulow’s real value for the president’s legal team resided. He was always ideologically aligned with the president, in spite of Trump’s conspicuously impious lifestyle. He had a cadre of conservative lawyers at his disposal and a massive list of supporters around the country whom he could whip into a furor in the service of the Trump team’s outrage-driven counterattacks against Mueller and any other law enforcement officer who deigned to investigate the president and his cronies. If things got really bad, Sekulow could even pen a rock ballad about the injustices of the would-be deep state coup against America’s commander in chief.

—

FOR those on ACLJ’s email marketing list, the warnings were frequent and dire. “We’re on the brink of losing to the Deep State. We MUST take action now,” one email pleaded. “I’ve been telling you the Deep State bureaucracy is willing to violate federal law to defeat the conservative agenda. But the Deep State corruption and lawlessness is deeper than you think . . . The only thing standing between politically corrupt lawlessness and the integrity of our constitutional republic is YOU.”

“Our legal deadlines are looming,” the email concluded. “But, TODAY, every Tax-Deductible gift you make to defeat the lawlessness in federal court will be doubled—dollar-for-dollar.”

Donate now or the deep state will defeat the Trump agenda. It was a characteristic plea from ACLJ and one of dozens that showed how Sekulow’s group was capitalizing financially on his official legal role on Trump’s behalf. Supporting Trump independently would have juiced the group’s fund-raising anyway. But Sekulow’s actual representation of the president, as he derided the same deep state plots that pervaded ACLJ fund-raising pitches, added a tremendous amount of credibility to those pitches, even if Sekulow’s role went largely unmentioned.

That role was public enough, certainly for ACLJ supporters who followed Sekulow’s legal efforts. Less well known, and exposed only through The Daily Beast’s reporting at the time, was the extent to which ACLJ had become an unofficial extension of the Trump legal team. Sekulow insisted up and down that no such overlap existed, at least officially. But he admitted in interviews that a number of ACLJ attorneys were working behind the scenes on the president’s behalf, fulfilling many of the more mundane legal tasks that befall any high-profile person engaged in legal wrangling with the federal government. But they’ve also waded into more weighty territory, crafting preemptive legal strategies that focus on constitutional challenges to any effort to, say, subpoena the president. Sekulow himself was deeply involved in negotiations between Trump and Mueller over the possibility of an in-person interview.

None of ACLJ’s resources were going toward that activity, Sekulow repeatedly claimed. But that wasn’t entirely true either. Trump’s legal team frequently met in the conference room at the group’s Capitol Hill offices, which sit less than a block from the U.S. Supreme Court. ACLJ didn’t dispute that reporting. “Any non-ACLJ-related work that occurs at the ACLJ offices is reimbursed in compliance with all applicable tax laws,” a spokesperson for the group told us at the time.

Nonetheless, it was common for sources to tell us that the president’s lawyers—Giuliani, Ty Cobb, John Dowd—had popped into the ACLJ offices to discuss legal strategy.

It was in large measure a public relations strategy, so Giuliani’s value was obvious. He was a fixture on cable news, where he tried, with varying degrees of success, to advance Trump’s narrative of events in the face of spiraling legal controversy. Sekulow’s role also complemented that strategy, but in far more subtle ways. He was quiet and more careful with the media but arguably did far more to advance a public narrative of Mueller corruption and a “deep state” conspiracy than Giuliani could in a thousand cable hits. And Sekulow did it entirely through an independent “educational” nonprofit with an eight-figure budget provided by anonymous donors who received hefty tax write-offs for their support.

“OH, WE’LL FIND IT”

An entire generation of young Republican talent came up in the opposition. Eight years of President Obama, health-care fights, stimulus spending, Tea Party rallies, investigative hearings on Benghazi and Lois Lerner and Operation Fast and Furious, midterm drubbings, and a thoroughly botched 2012 campaign produced a field of up-and-coming GOP operatives and media voices and aspiring elected officials who had never known real federal political power. So when Republicans finally took the White House, a whole new crop of young Republicans were poised to finally put into action designs that for years they’d been reduced to simply shouting from a soapbox.

Many of these young professionals were not Trump fans. A bunch had worked for rival campaigns. Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, and Ted Cruz were all products of the same Republican Party that had thrived in the opposition, and now they were working to get one of their own in the White House. Then Trump burst in and all that inevitability went right out the window. But at the very least there would be an R in the West Wing. And conservative stalwarts at flagship organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society would ensure that the detailed policy proposals conservatives had crafted as Obama-era alternatives would finally be something more than think tank white papers.

Lachlan too had come up during the Obama years, when he considered himself a Republican and worked, through media and reporting, to try to advance conservative policy and communications goals. He wasn’t toeing a party line, but he believed that the GOP was advancing an objectively better vision for the country than its opposition. And he was moved by many of the issues considered quintessential Reagan-era conservative planks: reduced taxation, a smaller regulatory state, reduction of the national debt, a heavier reliance on the market, free trade, an energetic global U.S. military presence, and skepticism of what he considered progressive social engineering.

Trump seemed at best unconcerned with and at worst hostile to most of those positions. So when he won the Republican presidential primary in Indiana in May 2016, tallying the delegate count necessary to capture the Republican nomination, political reality set in. Not only was Trump a very different type of Republican than Lachlan was, but so too, it was suddenly clear, were the vast majority of Republican voters. It was obvious that there was not a significant constituency for the types of policies Lachlan favored. So be it. He literally burned his Republican voter registration card and figuratively washed his hands of the party. The GOP could go the way of Trump. Lachlan would go his own way. Everyone would be happier for it.

But there was a personal aspect to it as well. Lachlan worked with and befriended many of the Republican operatives who, in early 2017, found themselves looking for jobs in the new administration or in media gigs that would act as adjuncts of the Trump communications apparatus. And many of them were, like him, Trump skeptics—or outright opponents—before it became clear that Trump would be the GOP nominee. They shared a Reagan-esque antipathy to this new right-wing populism. But beyond the prospects for professional advancement, this new administration presented an opportunity to put into action many of the ideas they’d spent the last eight years musing about hypothetically. So they held their noses, deleted their social media histories, and shot off job applications.

Trump’s potential talent pool, in other words, was large and fired up in spite of its collective misgivings. But Trump decided that few of them were good enough. Or, more important, loyal enough.

The early Trump administration was racked by staffing problems—namely, a catastrophic lack of it. The White House simply couldn’t find enough people to fill the thousands of political appointments throughout the federal government. That problem was entirely of its own making. It’s not that the administration’s professional standards were too high; right off the bat, it would fill senior positions with people with as little experience as Lynne Patton and as much personal baggage as Rob Porter. Nor was there too small a talent pool to draw from. The problem was that Trump demanded absolute, retroactive loyalty. If you’d beaten an ex-wife, you could still land a senior White House post. But one negative tweet about Trump during the 2016 campaign—or, say, wondering aloud whether Trump should, in fact, “grab ’em by the pussy”—put your job application in jeopardy.

And if that tweet existed, Trump’s team would find it. While the FBI conducted its own background checks, standard for political appointees in any administration, the White House personnel office scoured job applicants’ social media pages for any hint of dissension.

In mid-2018, we ended up at a house party and in conversation with two sources, one of them a fairly senior White House aide and the other a House Republican staffer who was looking to land an administration post, ideally at State or Treasury, he said. Small talk quickly turned to what was, essentially, a preliminary job interview unfolding over cans of beer in a mutual friend’s living room.

The White House official offered to do what he could to help out the Hill staffer in securing a job. He was friends with a senior guy in the personnel office who oversaw much of the internal vetting process. But first he had a few questions, and none of them had to do with ideology, policy ideas, or qualifications.

Instead, this White House aide wondered if the potential job applicant had publicly said anything negative about the president, either in the year and a half since he took office or in the two years prior during the presidential campaign. This Hill staffer had supported Rubio during the 2016 campaign, but he assured his potential administration patron that he’d purged his Twitter account early the following year, deleting every tweet including the few that expressed some mild criticism of Trump during the heat of the presidential race.

The White House official laughed.

“Oh, we’ll find it,” he said cryptically. “If you posted something on Facebook in 2007 and then deleted it, we’ll find it.”

As of our writing this, the Hill staffer had not been hired in any job in the Trump administration.

Trump loved to blame his early staffing difficulties on obstructionist Democrats in Congress. And it’s true that they held up a huge number of his nominees to Senate-confirmed positions. But the vast majority of unfilled staff positions early in the administration were not ones that required a Senate vote. The personnel troubles that dogged the administration early were entirely a product of the president’s pathological aversion to even the mildest criticism, from even the lowliest subordinate.

For much of the young crop of Republicans hoping to finally occupy the halls of federal power, that meant an even steeper climb into positions of influence in the new government. But for those with little media footprint and no moral compunctions with Trump; those who’d stayed silent, acquiesced to, or outright backed his presidential bid; those who had no problem melding their private views and public personas to the toxic idiosyncrasies of the nation’s new commander in chief, this new hiring strategy presented an amazing opportunity.

Trump was keeping some of the most talented political talent in the country out of the ranks of his administration. That left plenty of vacant positions for those with malleable ethical constitutions or who prized power and influence above such silly things as principles and ideas. Fortunately for Trump, D.C. still had quite a few of those, and there were a few more on the way.

—

LYNNE Patton showed up in Cleveland in the summer of 2016 ready for her coming-out party. The longtime Trump Organization employee, and right hand to Eric Trump, was determined to bring down the house. Virtually unknown in political circles at the time, Patton was in town for the Republican National Convention, and she had a prime speaking slot lined up on Wednesday evening, the third day of the convention, right between two Republican stars and onetime Trump rivals. Patton would come on right after Wisconsin’s governor, Scott Walker, and right before Florida’s senator Marco Rubio.

For Patton, it wasn’t just a chance to make a first impression on the assembled crowd of prominent Republican officials, activists, and donors; she was determined to establish herself as the Trump campaign’s—and, she was fully convinced, the Trump administration’s—point person on all things pertaining to the African American community.

Patton arrived in Cleveland and immediately began making demands. She wanted the full VIP treatment. She wanted a private car service to shuttle her around during convention week. She wanted the full greenroom treatment. Her handlers were a bit taken aback. Party conventions are generally staffed by political operatives and volunteers, many of them assigned to take care of the needs of the event’s speakers and high-profile attendees. In 2016, they included senators, governors, billionaire businessmen, and household-name television personalities. Patton was demanding the treatment befitting the most prestigious convention attendees.

As she saw it, these other VIPs might have been powerful and important cogs in the American political machine. But this event wasn’t about them, or even about the Republican Party. This was the Trump show, and she’d been a starring cast member for years. Patton intuitively understood a reality that only set in months later for her handlers and the rest of the Beltway convention staff that had flown out for the week: their party was now an extension of the Trump brand, and their old hierarchies were no longer operative. The Trump loyalists were now the VIPs. Oh, you govern a moderately sized midwestern state? You’re one of a hundred legislators in Congress’s upper chamber? Well, Patton was a vice president of the Eric Trump Foundation. If it wasn’t yet clear to the party operatives in Cleveland how to order those positions in terms of importance, it certainly was to Patton.

Her speech went about as well as her handlers could’ve hoped. Patton surprised some observers when she threw a rhetorical bone to black America, assuring viewers that “as a minority, I personally pledge to you that Donald Trump knows that your life matters, he knows that my life matters.” She went on to bemoan that, “historically, black lives have mattered less. My life mattered less. Whether we like it or not, there are people out there who still believe this to be true.” It was a stark departure from a speech two days earlier by the Milwaukee sheriff, David Clarke, who blamed the Black Lives Matter movement for the recent deaths of police officers and led a round of applause for the recent acquittal of an officer who shot and killed an unarmed black man in Baltimore.

Clarke didn’t get an administration gig; Patton did. But it wasn’t because of her enlightened views on police brutality. It also wasn’t due to her qualifications. The résumé she submitted to the Department of Housing and Urban Development listed an education at three schools: the University of Miami, Quinnipiac Law School, and Yale University. But it turned out she’d simply taken a couple summer classes at Yale. She studied law for two semesters at Quinnipiac but did not graduate. After the press took notice, she removed both from her LinkedIn page.

But Patton’s chief qualification was not education, or pedigree, or experience, or breadth of policy knowledge. It was loyalty. The First Family adored her. She’d risen in the ranks of the Trump Organization to become an aide to Trump’s three eldest children. Patton was a longtime servant of the Trump empire. That, it turned out, was the new chief determinant in federal employment.

And for Patton, Trump’s election meant plenty of money and fame in her future. She planned to milk it for all it was worth.

Within six months of Trump’s taking office, Patton landed a senior role at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, where she oversees all federal housing initiatives in New York and New Jersey and a multibillion-dollar public assistance budget. Her total lack of experience in any field of housing policy was naturally no hang-up for either the officials who appointed her or Patton herself; she jumped headfirst into the new gig and quickly began picking fights with the notoriously dysfunctional and scandal-plagued New York City Housing Authority and the city’s mayor, the widely disliked Trump critic Bill de Blasio.

Like the Trump family itself, Patton has a gift for bombastic self-promotion and over-the-top political displays. Like the president himself, she maintained personal social media accounts in addition to the official government pages that came with her senior position in the administration. Those accounts are largely indistinguishable from the army of digital pro-Trump trolls that tend to pollute digital conversations on anything relating to the Trump administration. Full of memes and GIFs and emojis, Patton’s personal social media pages promote Trump and his family with a juvenile vehemence more typical of a tween pop star fangirl than a high-ranking federal employee.

In late 2018, Patton pulled off her most impressive bit of political theater yet when she announced that she would move into an apartment in a Queens housing project in order to live among the people whom she was tapped to serve, and experience the housing conditions with which they’re forced to live.

The move was clearly self-serving—Patton reveled in the press it earned her—but even critics had to admit that the thinking behind the move was laudable. NYCHA was in the midst of a massive lead paint scandal. It’d just been sued by the Department of Justice over allegedly routine negligence. Residents of the project where Patton moved in hoped that having a senior HUD official present might spur some needed action to get the place cleaned up.

But some of those residents also sensed that Patton was less eager to be living with them than she was to be seen living with them. She frequently had cameras in tow when she showed up to stay the night. The whole thing had a very reality-TV vibe to it.

That, it turned out, was no accident. As Patton was making a show of her stints in public housing, she was also in talks with a television producer to help create and star in a series about black Republicans in the Trump era. Devised by the creators of Bravo TV’s Real Housewives of Potomac, the “docuseries” entailed trailing prominent African American Trump supporters including Patton, Trump’s campaign hand Katrina Pierson, and Turning Point USA’s communications director, Candace Owens. Conspicuously not involved with the project was Omarosa Manigault, who, like Patton, had brought a reality-TV air to the Trump administration and angled to be its African American face. Patton, it seemed, was sliding nicely into both roles.

As Patton planned her NYCHA stunt, she was also pleading with HUD ethics officials for permission to retain her federal employment in some form even as she raked in TV income far exceeding the outside income limit for federal employees. Patton hoped to make in excess of $40,000 per episode, but federal rules allowed outside income of only $28,000 per year. Maybe she could take a leave of absence from her post for a couple months, she wondered, or even resign completely with the understanding that she’d be rehired when filming was completed? Ethics officials scoffed at the requests. But Patton seemed determined to carry on with the project in spite of the slight hiccup of her own agency’s lawyers.

Patton’s other starring TV role came in 2019, during one of the highest-profile congressional hearings of the Trump presidency. Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer and fixer, was testifying about all the dirty deeds he’d done at the president’s behest, including arranging hush money payments to his mistresses just weeks before the 2016 election.

Cohen also flatly stated that his former boss is a racist. “In private, he’s even worse,” he told the House Oversight Committee.

Committee Republicans had a plan for countering this allegation against their president. And her name was Lynne Patton. Mark Meadows, the committee’s ranking Republican, trotted Patton out as a testimonial to the success of a black executive in the president’s orbit. “You made some very demeaning comments about the president that Ms. Patton doesn’t agree with,” Meadows complained. “In fact, it has to do with your claim of racism. She says that as a daughter of a man born in Birmingham, Alabama, that there is no way that she would work for an individual who was racist.”

Patton stood behind Meadows, stone-faced. She had taken a day off from work to appear and stare down the former colleague now spilling the beans about the president. Whatever was happening at HUD that day, this was obviously more important. Patton didn’t get where she was by being the smartest housing policy thinker in the room. She did so by staying loyal.

“YOU’RE A PIECE OF TRASH”

Scott Pruitt’s ignominious downfall began in unlikely fashion for the time: it all started with a phone booth. The Environmental Protection Agency administrator oversaw the construction of a secure, soundproof cubicle in his office from which he could make calls without worrying about them being intercepted or about the career officials in the building—who he believed, rightly in some cases, were out to get him—overhearing him. It was initially planned, in mid-2017, as a simple secure phone line, with a price tag of under $14,000. By the end of the year, that cost had tripled as the EPA added more features, soundproof paneling, and silent ventilation systems. “It is a legal purchase,” a career EPA official warned in an internal email, “but it will be scrutinized,” according to copies of the exchange reported by Bloomberg News.

That official was only half right. The $43,000 phone booth was scrutinized. But it wasn’t legal. Government investigators later concluded that the EPA had violated a law giving Congress control over federal agencies’ purse strings. By that point, though, Pruitt had far bigger problems. The phone booth was just the first in a string of controversies that would dog Pruitt for over a year, subject him to intense congressional and media scrutiny, and eventually lead to his resignation.

Pruitt was arguably the most scandal-prone cabinet-level official of the early Trump presidency, and that was no small feat. But he had two things going for him that other senior federal officials did not, both of which prevented an early departure comparable to that of Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price or Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin. First, and most important, President Trump really liked him. Pruitt effectively discharged the president’s environmental and energy agendas and managed to stay on his good side in spite of all the controversies. But he also had another, related asset: a staff of senior aides willing to go to the mat for him, play dirty, and pull out all the stops in an effort to protect their boss, insulate him from criticism, and discredit, or at least hamstring, those who came after him.

Trump, of course, came to office promising a new era of ethical government. He would drain the swamp, he insisted ad nauseam on the campaign trail, a facile pledge that often took the form of Trump’s imposing new ethics regulations, only to waive them by presidential fiat every time they inconvenienced a policy or personnel decision.

More important to the administration than adherence to its own ethics rules was an official’s ability to discharge the Trump agenda. So when Erik Baptist, a former oil industry lobbyist, signed on as a top EPA lawyer in mid-2017, he was quickly excused from the provisions of a White House ethics pledge that would bar him from working on issues affecting his former clients. The White House counsel, Don McGahn, explained that forcing him to adhere to those ethics rules would impede the administration’s ability to carry out its regulatory agenda. “His deep understanding of . . . the regulated industry make[s] him the ideal person to assist the administrator and his senior leadership team to make EPA and its renewable fuel programs more efficient and effective,” McGahn explained in a memo officially waiving provisions of the ethics pledge for Baptist’s benefit.

This efficacy standard of ethics enforcement worked both ways. If you were important to the administration’s agenda, its ethical considerations fell by the wayside too. But woe unto the federal official who is not able to rack up policy wins to outweigh the bad press of his or her unethical conduct. That’s a lesson that Tom Price learned early.

Trump’s first HHS secretary was tasked with what would be a crowning achievement for the new administration. Obamacare, a law that had bedeviled Republicans for years and that they had railed against since its inception, would be repealed. With majorities in both houses of Congress and an aggressive new White House, the GOP would finally roll back a signature Obama-era law, which of course had the added benefit for the president of sticking it to a man whom he despised and about whose presidential legitimacy he’d spread racist lies just a few years earlier.

Price was an ideal candidate to spearhead the Obamacare repeal effort. He was an orthopedic surgeon, a longtime Obamacare critic, and a former congressman who maintained extensive alliances in the House Republican caucus that would be crucial to shepherding a repeal bill through Congress. Trump appointed Price to the nation’s top health-care regulatory post with Obamacare repeal at the front of his mind. Genteel, soft-spoken, a conservative very much of the Republican establishment, Price wasn’t a typical Trump Republican, but for this singular task he seemed a perfect fit. Rolling back Obama’s health law was the sole reason Price was in his post, a fact that the president didn’t hesitate to publicly make clear.

“Hopefully he will get the votes tomorrow to start our path to killing this horrible thing known as Obamacare that is really hurting us,” the president said in a speech to a gathering of Boy Scouts in mid-2017. “He better get the votes,” Trump joked. “Otherwise I will say, ‘Tom, you’re fired.’”

It turns out it wasn’t a joke.

Things were looking up in May 2017, when Trump, Price, and dozens of House Republicans gathered in the White House Rose Garden for an event celebrating the lower chamber’s passage of its Obamacare repeal bill. Price got a huge round of applause as Republicans jubilantly hailed the impending death of a law that they had worked for years to undo. Finally, with Price’s help, Trump would get repeal done. And the HHS secretary would be feted as the man who was able to shepherd this controversial piece of legislation through a notoriously fractious Congress.

But it was not to be. Internally, Price quickly alienated much of the career staff at HHS. His efforts to sell Obamacare repeal were often ham-fisted. In one instance, he made sweeping claims about repeal’s cost-savings projections, only to be contradicted by the Congressional Budget Office days later. The White House quickly sidelined Price in the repeal effort, leaving Hill negotiations to Vice President Pence and the White House’s budget and legislative affairs directors, Mick Mulvaney and Marc Short. In the end, they weren’t able to get it done either. Obamacare repeal failed in the Senate, with Senator John McCain casting a deciding vote and flashing what instantly became an iconic thumbs-down sign to the Senate Republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell, as he dashed Trump’s hopes of undoing his predecessor’s signature legislative achievement.

Trump was not pleased with his HHS secretary. But Price stayed in his post for months after Obamacare repeal fizzled out. It wasn’t until September 2017 that the deathblow landed. Politico reported that Price had been living large on the taxpayer dime, spending more than $1 million on private jet travel in less than a year on the job, a major break with the practice of prior cabinet officials. The negative press coverage that followed was swift and deadly. Ten days later, Price resigned.

In any other administration, that would be a fairly run-of-the-mill resolution to a major ethics scandal. Forced resignation is to be expected when a high-level official betrays the public trust in such a major way and embarrasses his boss in the press. But the subsequent year, full of other Trump administration scandals, would reveal that can’t have been the full story. Price’s resignation set off a wave of investigations into Trump cabinet secretaries and their travel and spending habits. Many of them engaged in conduct at least as objectionable as Price’s, but none were cast aside with anything approaching the speed that Price was. What determined Price’s fate wasn’t his conduct itself; it was the personal displeasure that Trump had with his HHS secretary. Had Obamacare been repealed, Price would likely have weathered the storm. But he got on Trump’s bad side. That, not any ethically problematic conduct on Price’s part, determined his fate.

Pruitt was another story, and his ability to survive waves of scandal and media scrutiny neatly illustrated the standards of ethical conduct under Trump. The president loved him. Staying on Trump’s good side kept him in office amid a rash of controversies that would’ve made Price blush. Pruitt’s staff, unlike Price’s, appeared to recognize that. And they set about determining their boss would not meet the same fate, unleashing a strategy of media aggression and presidential sycophancy that would insulate Pruitt from political pressure that would, in any other administration, have brought him down almost immediately. At the center of the strategy was a veteran Republican communications operative named Jahan Wilcox.

—

WILCOX could not have cared less what you thought about him or his boss. He joined Pruitt’s team in early 2017 and quickly became one of the EPA chief’s most trusted and relied-upon senior staffers. Pruitt, a devout Christian, was known to praise Wilcox in biblical terms, occasionally telling him during staff meetings that he believed Jesus Christ himself had sent his comms adviser to help them both carry out the Lord’s work.

Wilcox had worked in the offices of Republican bigwigs such as Mitch McConnell and Senator Roger Wicker and built a reputation as a savvy and aggressive operator with a large Rolodex of top political reporters willing to take his calls. He served as a senior communications adviser to Senator Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign and, when that fizzled out, decamped to North Dakota to work on the governor’s race there.

When Wilcox joined the EPA in a senior communications post in March 2017, the agency was riding high. Pruitt was rolling back Obama-era environmental rules left and right, earning major plaudits from industry allies and conservative policy advocates. Obama, stymied by even Democrats in Congress who refused to go along with his ambitious environmental agenda, had instead opted for executive and regulatory actions to implement his agenda. The EPA was ground zero for those efforts, and because they were largely undertaken at the executive’s behest, many could be undone with the flick of Pruitt’s pen. He quickly moved to scrap Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a major regulatory initiative to restrict greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, and to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accords. Unlike Price’s, Pruitt’s fortunes didn’t rely on securing congressional support. He could unilaterally enact much of the president’s environmental agenda, and Pruitt handily earned the president’s good favor by doing so.

For journalists covering the administration and its energy and environmental agendas in particular, Pruitt was a prime target from the get-go. The former attorney general for Oklahoma, Pruitt had spearheaded multistate lawsuits against Obama-era EPA regulations, and his industry-aligned agenda had earned him plenty of allies—and campaign donors—among the large companies he was tasked with overseeing, and occasionally prosecuting, in his perch as the nation’s chief environmental regulator. As Pruitt’s tenure kicked off, journalists dug into public records that illustrated how closely he’d worked with the oil and gas industry in Oklahoma and the influence that industry was slated to exert with Pruitt atop the EPA. And with officials like Baptist and Pruitt’s deputy, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, filling the top ranks at the EPA, there was plenty of material for muckraking reporters looking to dig into the apparent regulatory capture unfolding at the agency.

Some reporters in particular quickly became regular antagonists for the EPA’s press shop. They included Eric Lipton and Coral Davenport at The New York Times, Alex Kaufman at The Huffington Post, and Rebecca Leber and Russ Choma at Mother Jones. These reporters relentlessly covered conflicts of interest and regulatory capture at the EPA and the degree to which Pruitt’s deregulatory agenda benefited private interests with which he’d collaborated for years and that had lavishly funded Trump’s political efforts and supportive organizations.

Wilcox and his colleagues at the EPA’s press office were, if not friendly, at least professional in their dealings with most of them. But for one news outlet in particular, it was a different story entirely. And it just so happened to be one of the most influential news outlets in the country. Starting early, and for the duration of his time at the EPA, Wilcox would wage a knock-down, drag-out war, both publicly and behind the scenes, against the Associated Press and its lead EPA reporter, Michael Biesecker.

Biesecker drew Wilcox’s ire early with a story on Dow Chemical’s apparent influence over EPA policy making on pesticides. The AP had obtained internal meeting schedules for Pruitt, which showed that the administrator had met for half an hour with Dow’s chief executive before moving to scrap a study showing the harmful effects of the company’s pesticides. Biesecker asked the EPA for comment. They denied that any such meeting had taken place. Biesecker, relying on internal documents rather than the word of an agency flack, reported the meeting anyway. But when both Dow and the EPA told the AP that the meeting had been canceled, it was forced to correct the story.

It was an understandable error given the conflicting information, and the AP issued its correction swiftly. But for Wilcox and his colleagues, it was a clear, early sign that Biesecker and his outlet were going to be their chief antagonists. And going forward, Wilcox went about his job treating the AP not as an adversarial news organization but as an enemy to be kneecapped. He considered Biesecker a “dishonest,” “anti-Trump reporter,” as he told him directly in a 2018 email. “It could be why the Associated Press moves you from beat to beat.”

By September 2017, a few months after Biesecker first reported on the EPA’s pesticide study, Wilcox wouldn’t even respond to Biesecker’s comment requests. But he wouldn’t ignore them either. Instead, he would forward the reporter’s emails to AP’s Washington bureau chief, Julie Pace, and write his responses there. Pace would then forward Wilcox’s responses to Biesecker, who would in turn reach out to Wilcox directly. It made for hilariously passive-aggressive exchanges between a reporter and a flack who clearly despised each other, and an editor forced to be something resembling the parent in the room.

If Wilcox came off as angry or upset during any of those exchanges, it certainly didn’t reflect his internal mood about the AP spat. He loved every minute of it. He wasn’t a policy guy, and certainly not an environmental policy one. He’d shopped around for other jobs in the administration before landing at the EPA, after all. At heart, Wilcox was a campaign operative, and on a political campaign your goal is victory for your principal. That was the mind-set he’d brought to the EPA. But victory requires an opponent that can be vanquished. For a policy aide at Pruitt’s agency, that might be the Sierra Club or the Natural Resources Defense Council. For Wilcox, it was the AP. And he quickly turned his expertise as a campaign operative into a blunt instrument to wield against this perceived adversary.

If Wilcox’s beef with the AP was rooted in objections about the tone of its coverage, it quickly became far more personal. He was less concerned with avoiding negative press coverage of the EPA than he was with ensuring that that coverage didn’t come from the AP. If Pruitt was going to get beaten up in the press, he’d ensure that the AP’s competitors were the ones doing the beating. When Biesecker or a colleague reached out about a scoop, Wilcox would occasionally feed that scoop to another news organization. If he got word that the AP had filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the agency, he would try to find newsworthy documents or communications that might turn up in that FOIA response and offer to provide them to another outlet before the AP got ahold of them.

And just as a political campaign might conduct opposition research on its opponents, Wilcox started digging into Biesecker’s past in an attempt to sow doubts about his reporting and undercut his professional standing. In September 2017, he drafted a memo resembling the type of research document often produced by campaigns and political operatives. It laid out his case against Biesecker’s coverage and what he considered the AP’s professional duty to rein him in.

The memo, which was shared with at least one news organization that we know of, was headlined “Questions for the Associated Press” and included email addresses for Pace, the AP spokesperson Emily Leshner, and Sally Buzbee, the outlet’s executive editor. It dredged up Biesecker’s coverage of environmental issues in North Carolina during a 2014 stint as a beat reporter in the Tar Heel State. Biesecker, Wilcox wrote, “deliberately misled the public” and “invented facts to fit his narrative” in stories on a state environmental settlement with the company Duke Energy. The memo also brought up a 2013 scandal in which the AP’s veteran Richmond politics reporter, Bob Lewis, was swiftly fired after erroneously reporting a story on possible criminal conduct by the then gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe. (Wilcox had previously worked for McAuliffe’s 2013 opponent, the Republican Ken Cuccinelli.)

The memo asked, “Does the Associated Press hold their reporters to different standards for mistakes against public officials associated with Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party (Terry McAuliffe) than mistakes against individuals that serve in either President Trump’s Administration or the Republican Party (EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and former Governor Pat McCrory)?”

That openly hostile stance toward such a high-profile media organization drew plenty of hand-wringing from Washington’s press corps, especially amid Trump’s routine denunciations of the press as “the enemy of the people.” But that was precisely the point. Wilcox and his colleagues were ecstatic when The Washington Post’s media reporter tut-tutted the EPA press shop with a headline featuring Wilcox’s “anti-Trump reporter” accusation against Biesecker. Antipathy toward the press was just the sort of story that Pruitt’s team wanted written.

They, and Wilcox in particular, understood a few key facts about life in the employ of Donald Trump. Foremost among them is that your job depends entirely on the boss’s opinion of you at any given moment. For Pruitt and his team, that meant perpetually reminding the president that his EPA chief was doing things that Trump liked, namely rolling back Obama-era environmental regulations. Virtually every quote that Wilcox and his team gave to the press was crafted with a target audience of exactly one person and designed explicitly to remind him of the great job Pruitt was doing on the policy front.

But there’s one thing that Trump likes even more than policy wins, and it’s sticking it to his enemies. So even as Wilcox and his team took pains to inject EPA press coverage with appeals to its policy victories, they also picked every fight they could with reporters and reveled in every story about their conflicts with the press. Every breathless media report about the uncouth and aggressive EPA press operation was a win for Pruitt, a way to keep him on Trump’s good side. And catering to the president’s combative idiosyncrasies would soon be the only thing keeping Pruitt in his job.

—

LAYING out all the different overlapping scandals that eventually led to Scott Pruitt’s downfall is difficult to do comprehensively and comprehensibly without some sort of three-dimensional, interactive chart. There was the aforementioned $43,000 phone booth; the expensive biometric locks on Pruitt’s office door; the $3 million spent on an unprecedentedly large security detail; the use of that security detail’s motorcade to travel to upscale D.C. restaurants; the University of Kentucky basketball tickets provided by a coal executive; Pruitt’s tasking of staff to pick up his favorite brand of Greek yogurt; his efforts to use his position to land his wife a Chick-fil-A franchise; or the huge raises he secured for top aides in defiance of White House orders. As the scandals proliferated, so too did the congressional investigations into them. As those investigations progressed, they would turn up new, controversial details about Pruitt’s conduct.

Even Pruitt’s home life was embroiled in scandal. He had rented a room in a condo owned by the wife of a high-powered energy lobbyist, J. Steven Hart. Pruitt paid just $50 per night for a room in the “Williams & Jensen house,” as it was known among members of Congress, named for the firm that employed Hart. The sweetheart rate—no hotel in D.C. costs less than double what Pruitt was paying—raised persistent allegations of a conflict of interest.

Meanwhile, the same sort of controversy that dogged Tom Price was lingering around Pruitt. He was paying tens of thousands of dollars for private, charter, and first-class commercial jet travel and occasionally taking advantage of U.S. military aircraft for relatively short flights.

One EPA aide we spoke with compared the cascading series of controversies to the climactic battle scene at the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The heroes are attempting to repel a siege of orcs and find themselves forced to fight smaller skirmishes all over the walls of Helm’s Deep. They beat back the invading horde in one corner of the battle, only to find themselves nearly overrun in another corner, where they must rush, swords drawn, to try to maintain their defenses. They’re pulled in a million directions, but it seems as if they’ll be able to hold off the enemy.

But then one giant orc, armed with a medieval explosive device, charges the wall, rests the bomb in a drainage passage at the base of the ramparts, and blows a giant hole in the heroes’ defenses. The orcs come streaming through. This one disruptive blow turns the tide of the battle. The analogy wasn’t perfect, of course; the orcs eventually lose when opposing reinforcements arrive. And by this point in Pruitt’s tenure, reinforcements weren’t looking likely.

The EPA aide compared that demolition of the wall to one Pruitt scandal in particular. The administrator had tasked one of his aides, his twenty-six-year-old scheduler Millan Hupp, with securing Pruitt a new mattress. Well, not new exactly. Pruitt actually wanted a used one. And he specifically wanted a used one from the Trump International Hotel, which overlooks the EPA’s headquarters. It was just one of a litany of controversies throughout 2018. What made the mattress dustup particularly damaging was not just the act in itself but how Pruitt handled it. His reaction crystallized what many who had passed through Pruitt’s EPA in its first two years had come to realize: Like his boss, Pruitt demanded loyalty. But he would throw even his closest aides under the bus.

Hupp and her sister, Sydney, had both worked as servers at a Stillwater, Oklahoma, bar and grill called Eskimo Joe’s before joining Pruitt’s successful campaign for Oklahoma attorney general. They followed him to Washington, where they served as two of his closest and most trusted aides. But when Millan Hupp was dragged before a congressional committee in mid-2018 to testify about Pruitt’s various spending controversies, she had no choice but to tell the truth about what she’d been ordered to do on her boss’s behalf. Lying to Congress is itself a federal crime.

But Pruitt felt slighted. He considered the mattress anecdote particularly embarrassing. And he began lashing out at his scheduler in conversations with powerful allies in the conservative movement. Hupp had lied about his instructions, Pruitt alleged, or at least misunderstood them. Among the conservative luminaries he reached out to was Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the powerful legal advocacy group the Federalist Society. Pruitt vented to Leo that Hupp had stabbed him in the back and wasn’t to be trusted. The subtext of that conversation and similar ones around that time was obvious to Pruitt’s allies: they were not to hire Hupp and supply her with a soft landing after her inevitable resignation from the EPA. Both Hupp sisters would eventually leave the agency and return to Oklahoma.

We still don’t know why exactly Pruitt insisted on a Trump hotel mattress in particular—whether he’d stayed there once and simply liked the beds, or if it was some stranger attachment to things that bore the president’s name. But we do know that the mattress saga represented the breaking of a dam that had held the EPA together during a tumultuous year. Current and former aides saw Pruitt growing paranoid and lashing out at staff, even those who considered themselves intensely loyal. His treatment of Hupp was particularly disturbing. And current and former aides who found themselves the targets of Pruitt-related investigations by Congress and agency watchdogs were struggling with massive legal bills. Pruitt, who’d created a legal defense fund to pay his own lawyers, wasn’t even offering words of assurance, let alone financial assistance.

It was a cruel twist not just for Hupp but for the whole team of aides and advisers to a man who’d not just demanded loyalty from those around him but whose entire strategy for overcoming a year of bad press that would’ve taken down virtually any other administration official had revolved around unquestioning loyalty to his own boss.

From virtually the beginning of Pruitt’s tenure, every public utterance by the agency, the administrator, or a member of his staff was calibrated to satisfy the tastes and sensibilities of precisely one guy—the only person who mattered. If those statements riled up the press, it wasn’t just a necessary by-product; it was an added bonus. To the extent that Pruitt and his staff were seen as enemies of the fake news media, the thinking went, it would actually strengthen Pruitt’s standing in the president’s eyes.

But though Pruitt stayed in the president’s good graces well into 2018 as additional scandals enveloped the EPA, Trump himself seemed to be the only person inside the White House standing by the embattled administrator. The agency’s intense focus on pleasing the president meant, in many cases, either ignoring or working in active opposition to everyone else in the West Wing.

For Wilcox and his colleagues, trust of the White House eroded quickly. The EPA staff didn’t feel that the midlevel West Wing staffers frequently assigned to assist Pruitt and other cabinet secretaries with public relations challenges were particularly adept at doing so. And worse, any discussions they had or material they shared with the West Wing seemed to inevitably leak to the press.

The breakdown in trust led to a breakdown in communication as the EPA staff resisted any effort by the White House to “help” Pruitt through the tumultuous first half of 2018. In April, the White House requested a complete list of the administrator’s travel schedule and payments as controversy intensified over Pruitt’s first-class air travel. The EPA completely ignored the request, even as it provided a steady stream of information to congressional investigators probing the matter. When Pruitt geared up for a pair of bruising congressional hearings in late April focusing on the various controversies dominating EPA headlines at the time, the White House reached out to the EPA and offered to help them prepare for the hearings. The EPA’s response, in the words of one White House official, was “get lost.” In the EPA’s mind, they would at best provide poor advice on how to handle the hearings. At worst, Pruitt’s strategy and talking points would end up in The Washington Post before the hearings even began.

As the EPA hunkered down and tried to weather the storm, many on Pruitt’s staff considered senior White House officials just as hostile as adversarial journalists, congressional Democrats, or environmental groups determined to force Pruitt out. The White House chief of staff, John Kelly, was widely rumored to be angling for Pruitt’s ouster. When the president called Pruitt in early April to offer some encouraging words—“keep your chin up,” he told the administrator—Kelly followed up the next day with a far less amiable demand. These scandals had better stop, or your time in office will be coming to an end, he warned. A few weeks later, as Pruitt prepared for his pair of congressional interviews, senior White House staffers began reaching out to Republicans on the Hill and allies in the conservative movement cautioning them against defending Pruitt publicly. Better to cut bait, they intimated, than to further associate the Trump and Republican brands with an official who would soon be forced out under the weight of his escalating ethical troubles.

Tensions with the White House came to a head in May 2018. As Congress stepped up its Pruitt investigations, one name kept bubbling to the surface: Kevin Chmielewski, a Trump 2016 campaign advance staffer and Pruitt’s former deputy chief of staff. He was well known to us; Pruitt aides had been pointing to him for months as the culprit behind a series of damaging press leaks that revealed much of the ethical conduct bedeviling Pruitt. Chmielewski had left the EPA in early 2018. He claimed to have resigned in protest of Pruitt’s conduct. His former colleagues insisted he was fired for spotty attendance and lackluster time-card practices. In any case, Chmielewski had an ax to grind, and as Pruitt faced withering ethical scrutiny in mid-2018, his former senior aide went on the record in interviews with both congressional investigators and members of the press to hammer his former boss and allege widespread unethical, and perhaps illegal, conduct.

Here’s where things get a bit complicated. It’s a glimpse into how the sausage is often made in Washington, and it might make your head spin a bit. Here are the characters you need to know: Chmielewski, whom we’ve already met; the senior EPA press aide Michael Abboud; Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke; Alex Hinson, a top Zinke comms aide; Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host who’d since landed at NBC; Michael Bastasch, a reporter at The Daily Caller; and Patrick Howley, then the editor in chief of the website Big League Politics.

In early May, Abboud was out at a party in Washington when he struck up a conversation with Hinson. Hinson hinted that Chmielewski had given an interview to Kelly for her new NBC show and that the interview would be extremely damaging to Pruitt. Abboud knew that Hinson and Chmielewski were friends and interpreted Hinson’s comments as a signal that the two of them were collaborating to peddle dirt on Pruitt to the press.

The next day, Abboud called up Bastasch and Howley and told them that a top Zinke aide was collaborating with a disgruntled former Pruitt staffer who was trying to take down the EPA administrator. Word of that tip got back to Hinson, who informed the White House Office of Presidential Personnel, the West Wing office that oversees its cabinet agencies. And before the EPA knew what was happening, the story had been flipped on its ear: the emerging narrative wasn’t that Hinson was helping Chmielewski peddle dirt on Pruitt; it was that Abboud was peddling dirt on Zinke in an effort to take the heat off his own boss. A story in The Atlantic on the dustup reported that the White House was livid not with Hinson or Chmielewski but with Abboud and the EPA.

The Atlantic story on the controversy was authored by Elaina Plott, a talented and well-sourced White House reporter who’d been doggedly chasing malfeasance and unrest at the EPA. “This did not happen, and it’s categorically false,” Wilcox told her for her story on the supposed Zinke-Pruitt feud. She’d already clashed with Wilcox over her reporting on the ouster of scheduling aide Millan Hupp. Once again she asked Wilcox for comment. “You have a great day,” he told Plott. “You’re a piece of trash.”

The comment immediately reverberated around the Beltway, where Wilcox and the larger EPA press operation had already earned a reputation as the administration’s most antagonistic press shop. Wilcox publicly apologized to Plott, and in our conversations with him he seemed genuinely remorseful that he’d allowed his emotions to get the best of him and crossed a line from antagonistic to hostile and insulting.

Privately, though, some Trump officials were giving Wilcox proverbial high fives. He’d said what many of them secretly wanted to say to the legions of perceived “enemies” in the political press corps. Indeed, the remark seemed like a natural—if perhaps extreme—extension of the press strategy that had kept Pruitt in office.

By that point, though, Wilcox and a number of his colleagues were burning out on the job. Pruitt seemed to have little concern for the aides who were going to the mat for him day in and day out. His compounding unforced errors, and the seeming blitheness of his increasingly problematic personal and ethical conduct, made defending him on a daily basis feel downright Sisyphean.

As it happened, Pruitt’s days at the EPA were numbered anyway. Trump remained fond of his EPA chief in spite of all the controversies, and nearly as important Pruitt retained a key ally with the president’s ear. In his corner was Harold Hamm, the billionaire oil and gas tycoon and high-dollar Republican fund-raiser who had thrown his full financial might behind the president’s political and policy efforts, particularly in the areas of energy and environmental policy. Trump’s reverence for Hamm, and the latter’s backing of Pruitt, likely kept the EPA administrator in his post longer than anyone would’ve expected. But on July 4, 2018, during a meeting at the White House, Hamm finally gave his blessing to Pruitt’s departure. We don’t know what he told the president, but the weight of the scandals had simply become too much to bear. The next day, Pruitt announced his resignation.

MAKE AMERICA RAIN AGAIN

Lachlan didn’t write the headline, but the Trumpworld lobbyist extraordinaire David Urban will never let him live it down. “He Could Be Trump’s ‘Swampiest’ Pick Yet” declared the headline of a June 2017 story about Urban, the principal at the K Street giant American Continental Group and then widely considered a contender to replace the outgoing White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

The story noted Urban’s impressive list of high-dollar lobbying clients, which included Comcast, Monsanto, Walgreens, Raytheon, and Hewlett-Packard. ACG’s nearly three dozen clients would present a real quagmire if Urban joined the White House, Lachlan wrote, given Trump’s drain the swamp pledge and the ethics agreement he was requiring every administration appointee to sign, stipulating that they couldn’t communicate with former clients while in government service or work on issues on which they’d lobbied for those clients. The ethics pledge would put wide swaths of policy work out of bounds for Urban absent a waiver to the pledge (waivers that Trump’s White House has distributed liberally).

Urban didn’t dispute anything in the story, but the headline clearly irked him. And it would continue to irk him for a long time. In November 2018, Lachlan was on vacation in Europe when Urban texted, out of the blue, to see if there was any way we could change the headline more than eighteen months after the fact.

The headline remains as originally written, and Urban, though clearly bothered, has always been gracious about it. After the story ran, he invited Lachlan to his office to make introductions and put faces to names. It’s a good way to inject some empathy into political reporting that, we’re the first to admit, often glosses over the humanity of its subjects. Urban was friendly and affable, even after Lachlan showed up to the meeting late. Urban wore khaki shorts and a button-down, laughed about the Daily Beast story, and casually explained that while, yes, he was certainly a denizen of Washington’s influence-brokering business, he took steps to disclose everything, to keep it all aboveboard, to avoid pushing any legal envelopes. The unspoken implication was that that set him apart from other Trumpworld figures plying their trade on K Street.

Urban helped spearhead Trump’s political operation in Pennsylvania, which steered the state’s electoral votes to the Republican presidential candidate for the first time since 1988. He was widely considered a candidate to chair the Republican National Committee but opted to stick with his thriving lobbying practice. And despite persistent whispers about a move into the White House, Urban seemed content to stay on K Street and continue plugging the president and his priorities through a steady stream of appearances on CNN, where he is a paid contributor.

Urban is the sort of political operative whom the cable networks simply can’t resist in the Trump era. Those networks thrive on manufactured political antagonism, typified in the generic panel segment that pits a Republican against a Democrat, or a Trump supporter against a Trump opponent. But Trump’s outsider status and the widespread distrust of or outright hostility to him among Beltway Republicans early in his political ascent meant that the crop of supporters from which the cable nets could draw was limited. If you were an out-and-proud Trump supporter in 2017, odds are you were already working in the administration or for one of the outside political groups supporting the president. But such overtly pro-Trump professions generally preclude a role as a regular pro-Trump cable commentator; the conflicts of interest are simply too apparent.

That meant that the networks increasingly turned to folks like Urban, Trump supporters who didn’t have any official professional role in Trumpworld. But these aren’t the sorts of people who are getting by on just the income provided by a cable news contract. Like Urban, they have day jobs and, more often than not, paying clients. The search for TV talent that would defend the president increasingly meant turning to people who work in Washington’s sprawling political influence industry, whether as lobbyists, public relations executives, or “government affairs” advisers. Handed these powerful platforms, pro-Trump pundits have taken it upon themselves to go beyond simply defending the president and have actively gone to bat for the people and organizations that cut them huge checks to win favor and influence in Washington. In the Trump era, the influence business operates in greenrooms as much as boardrooms.

The cable networks didn’t appear prepared for that dynamic. Fox, MSNBC, and CNN didn’t have policies in place governing the appearance even of registered lobbyists on their networks, or whether their clients needed to be disclosed when discussing issues that might affect them. So when, for instance, Urban went on CNN in April 2019 to laud the proposed United States-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement, viewers had no idea that three days earlier he’d signed a lobbying deal for Trade Works for America, a dark money group working to ratify the deal.

The practice was by no means unique to Urban among cable news’s pro-Trump pundits. The Republican consultant Scott Jennings routinely rails against clean energy and environmentalist policy proposals in his capacity as a CNN contributor. He’s simultaneously working on behalf of some major coal, gas, and oil companies. The former campaign aide turned lobbyist Bryan Lanza even managed to exceed CNN’s ad hoc restrictions on conflicts of interest among its on-air influence peddlers when he inveighed against the Mueller investigation while representing a Russian oligarch who was a person of interest in that investigation.

In their defense, Urban, Jennings, and Lanza were probably not doing anything that ran directly counter to their own political views. Jennings is a conservative; he’s ideologically inclined to support a freer energy market that’s naturally more beneficial to the fossil-fuel-dominated status quo. Lanza’s former colleagues were caught up in what they all considered a sham investigation into Russia “collusion,” and the oligarch he represented was collateral damage. And it was precisely the types of populist trade policies championed by the president that had put him over the edge in Urban’s home state, so lobbying for a trade group supportive of those policies was a natural fit. But the fact remains that those conflicts of interest, undisclosed to cable news viewers watching them, ran afoul of basic standards of journalistic integrity.

Such conflicts aren’t a new occurrence for cable news. What was new was the tremendous influence that such news programs wield over the attentions of the most powerful man in the American government. Urban-esque influence strategies, where a client gets a nice plug on the cable airwaves, were suddenly extremely potent tools for those in the lobbying game. And more broadly, people seeking influence and favor with the Trump administration were finding all sorts of new ways to ingratiate themselves with the president of the United States.

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LARGE events are the lifeblood of Washington hotels, and few D.C. events are larger than trade association fly-ins. Industry lobbying groups bring their members to D.C., put them up in swanky suites, gather them in a hotel conference space, then send them over to Capitol Hill to hype their particular issue in the hope of getting some legislative carve-out or using the federal sledgehammer to keep a competitor at bay. Such events are by their nature political, so naturally, in the Trump era, the president’s hotel has become a chosen destination. Simply by virtue of a hotel choice, part of a group’s lobbying is already done!

So it was that the Seasonal Employment Alliance ended up at the Trump International Hotel in mid-2018. The group represents employers that rely on so-called H-2B visas, tens of thousands of which are given out each year to immigrant laborers who are granted temporary stay in the United States for nonagricultural jobs, typically in retail and hospitality. The industry has long been plagued by a stringent cap on the number of visas the Department of Homeland Security will give out each year. So politics is, for better or worse, integral to the business model, and its trade association is therefore essential.

On the board of the SEA is Veronica Birkenstock, the chief executive of the Texas-based H-2B agency Practical Employee Solutions. She is by most measures your average Trump-era red-meat conservative. She’s pro-life and anti–gun control and favors lower tax rates. Even on the immigration issue, she’s said she supports deporting illegal immigrants and building a wall on the southern border. But Birkenstock also makes a living importing low-skilled laborers from foreign countries, an issue that repeatedly came up in 2018 as she challenged Representative Michael Burgess of Texas in an unsuccessful Republican primary bid. Burgess’s campaign even set up a website, dubbed the Truth About Veronica Birkenstock, that called her “a political chameleon” whose “real business and actual political record prove she supports and lobbies Congress to give American jobs to foreigners over Americans.”

Birkenstock did her best to fend off the attacks, devoting significant chunks of her own campaign website to attempts to debunk what she called “myths” about the H-2B program. But the line of attack was a potent one in a border-state Republican primary in the era of Donald Trump. Which made it all the more ironic that Trump himself is one of Birkenstock’s clients.

Every year, the president uses the H-2B program to bring in scores of temporary laborers to fill positions in his resorts as maids, servers, dishwashers, bartenders, and landscapers. And for years, he’s had Birkenstock’s company on contract to facilitate that immigrant labor at his Trump International Beach Resort in Miami, for which Practical Employment Solutions has secured more than a hundred temporary foreign worker visas.

Birkenstock’s company wasn’t the only, or even the primary, H-2B broker that the Trump Organization kept on retainer; it continues to take full advantage of the program in its notorious and occasionally legally questionable efforts to minimize labor costs at its various hotels, resorts, and golf clubs. So when the Seasonal Employment Alliance visited Trump’s hotel in Washington, it was courting an obvious ally.

But the group wasn’t going to take any chances. So in late 2018, it brought on some more lobbying muscle from K Street—the heart of lobbying in D.C. Its new representatives, Cove Strategies, would go about attempting to secure more visas for low-skilled immigrants even as they proudly waved the banner of a president who, notwithstanding the hiring practices of his own company, insisted, at least publicly, on putting America first.

Few in Washington have so seamlessly made the transition from establishment swamp creatures to Trump devotees as the Cove Strategies principal Matt Schlapp and his wife, Mercedes, whom you might remember as the top White House comms aide turned Trump campaign bigwig who dubbed her colleague Kelly Sadler a “bitch” after Sadler ratted her out to the president. The Schlapps have carved out a niche for themselves as a Trump-era power couple, wielding influence in the president’s inner circle and translating that influence into lucrative lobbying deals. And they do it all behind a veneer of authenticity and principle, putting on an air of indignation anytime someone—say, us—suggests that they’re motivated by anything but an earnest desire for American greatness.

Trumpworld is full of hucksters who try to cloak their naked self-interest in the demagogic language of America First populism. But the Schlapps appear to effortlessly meld their political, ideological, and financial pursuits such that it’s often difficult to figure out where one begins and another ends. And few in D.C. have shown themselves more adept at couching their private financial interests in language that appeals to Trump in particular. They’re the ultimate Trump-era influence peddlers, simply because they know how—and are in a position—to influence the one man who matters in Washington today. And they have no compunctions about fully capitalizing on that ability.

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MATT Schlapp’s lucrative role as a for-hire Trump whisperer was on full display in mid-2019. He managed to turn the president’s disdain for a top 2020 rival into a legislative force that nearly sank supposedly uncontroversial legislation opposed by a casino company that had hired Schlapp just months earlier.

The company was called the Twin River Management Group, and in early 2019 it hired a coterie of Trumpworld luminaries to oppose the Mashpee Wampanoag Indian tribe’s efforts to obtain official federal recognition. The tribe wanted to build a casino in Taunton, Massachusetts, that threatened to compete with a Twin River casino in nearby Rhode Island. Twin River brought on Schlapp’s Cove Strategies and the firm Black Diamond Strategies, which tasked the former Trump campaign aides Doug Davenport and Rick Wiley with the account. Twin River clearly needed to get in the president’s good graces.

Schlapp, it turned out, was the man for the job. The House of Representatives and its new Democratic majority were considering legislation to recognize the Mashpee Wampanoag, and they considered the bill mundane enough to bring to the House floor under a process known as suspension. The suspension process requires a two-thirds vote to pass legislation and is generally reserved for uncontroversial legislation and designed to keep the chamber’s legislative business moving along. Democrats expected that few would care or notice that its Mashpee Wampanoag legislation was receiving a vote.

But then Trump tweeted. “Republicans shouldn’t vote for H.R. 312, a special interest casino Bill, backed by Elizabeth (Pocahontas) Warren,” the president declared. “It is unfair and doesn’t treat Native Americans equally!” This from a man who, in congressional testimony opposing Native American casino competitors to his Atlantic City resorts in the early 1990s, said, “They don’t look like Indians to me.”

There is exactly zero chance that Trump was aware that that legislation was coming to the floor before someone whispered in his ear. Who could that have been? Well, just an hour before Trump’s tweet, Schlapp had weighed in. And it just so happened that he’d invoked Warren’s supposed support for the bill as well, with a not-too-subtle nod to controversy over her claimed Indian heritage that dogged her early presidential campaign. “Soon full House will vote to reward Sen Elizabeth Warren with . . . wait for it . . . an INDIAN casino in Massachusetts,” Schlapp jibed.

What happened was obvious: Schlapp saw that Democrats were bringing a bill to the floor that his client opposed, and he tailored a very Trumpian pitch in an effort to sink it—likely something to the effect of “‘Pocahontas’ Warren supports this bill; you should oppose it.” The strategy worked, at least temporarily. House Democrats were caught off guard by the president’s tweet. Knowing that it would marshal enough Republican opposition to an otherwise uncontroversial bill, and that it wouldn’t be able to get the two-thirds vote required to pass it under suspension, they pulled the bill from the floor. It passed days later under normal House procedure.

The whole episode was instructive about what Trump-era lobbying by the president’s K Street allies entails. We wrote a story to that effect. Schlapp responded with a pair of tweets. “My wife and I follow the law, and she had no role in my advocacy,” he wrote. “The implication that this President marches to the beat of any drum other than his own is an absurd assertion.”

That last sentence gets to the heart of it. The suggestion that the president does his thing and can’t be influenced by those around him is, to borrow Schlapp’s phrase, absurd. It is of course true that Trump has his notorious idiosyncrasies and makes and comments on policy at the whim of his own addled psyche. But that is exactly why the Matt Schlapps of the world have been able to carve out such lucrative influence-peddling practices in the Trump era. Schlapp understands how the president ticks, and has the access and opportunity to act on that knowledge. Invoking “Pocahontas” to try to sink legislation that Trump wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise was vintage Trump-era lobbying. Schlapp figured out the president’s pressure point and then applied pressure. And true to form, he then tried to play off his advocacy as a principled position against cronyism, rather than a naked example of it.

It couldn’t have been more obvious that Schlapp’s lobbying on behalf of Twin River Management wasn’t motivated by any real convictions or beliefs. Just a few months earlier, the conservative nonprofit that Schlapp runs on the side, the American Conservative Union, had put on its annual Conservative Political Action Conference. One panel at the event was titled “All Nations, One America: Why Conservatives Should Support Tribal Sovereignty.”

—

CPAC, as the conference is known for short, quickly became a case study in the Trumpification of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. And that shift happened to coincide with Schlapp’s transition from a generic, if swampy, Republican operative—he can be seen in a famous photo of the Brooks Brothers riot, among a group of Republican staffers who stormed a Miami-Dade polling location during the 2000 presidential recount—to one of the country’s foremost Trump sycophants, and one who’s cashing in on the role to boot.

The American Conservative Union’s annual confab draws Republican politicians, activists, and voters from across the country and legions of journalists reporting on what was once a seminal annual event. The conference used to be a blast to cover. It was where elements of the conservative movement would gather to make their particular visions for the movement known or pitch their pet issues. When we first started covering the event in the early years of the second decade of the twenty-first century, CPAC was famously a place where the GOP’s libertarian and social conservative wings would square off. Indeed, a flaxen-haired real estate developer of some note made waves in 2011 when, at the height of his Obama birther phase, he spoke at CPAC and derided the libertarian crank Ron Paul’s 2012 election hopes, to cheers and jeers from the crowd.

The conflict made CPAC interesting. It made it entertaining. It made it a meaningful event. And it all but disappeared in February 2017. Overnight, the conference had become the Trump Show. When the conservative columnist Mona Charen was booed off the stage that year for criticizing Trump’s predatory sexual proclivities, the then Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam stated, aptly, “Frankly [Never Trump conservatives] have no place at Trump-era CPACs anyway.” For better or worse, he was entirely correct.

Schlapp was fully on the Trump Train at this point, so that was just fine by him ideologically. But it also presented exciting new opportunities to meld his roles as a lobbyist and an ostensible purveyor of conservative ideas. CPAC already had a reputation as a pay-to-play operation—pony up tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to sponsor the conference, and you get lots of perks and access to its influential attendees—but even former ACU board members told us that Schlapp had taken access peddling at the conference to new heights, even giving sponsors the opportunity to shape the programming of the event.

So it was that CPAC 2018 featured a panel discussion on a totally obscure policy fight over foreign airlines’ access to U.S. airports. The details of the policy fight are less relevant than how it was marketed at CPAC, where the conference’s official social media channels hailed it as an imperative for the Trump agenda to crack down on unfair trade practices. It just so happened that Schlapp had been lobbying for Delta Air Lines on the precise issue, and on the precise side of the issue, that the conference was promoting. And a trade association representing Delta and two other U.S. airlines had written ACU a $125,000 check to underwrite that year’s CPAC.

Schlapp is very sensitive to accusations that he uses his post at ACU, and its CPAC conference, to sell access and influence to special interests, including his own lobbying clients. Lachlan reported on the practice from CPAC 2018, and when the following year’s conference rolled around, he once again inquired with ACU’s spokesperson about a pair of top CPAC donors. Within minutes, Schlapp had personally called our editor to demand an explanation for those questions.

—

MERCEDES Schlapp nearly always kept her West Wing office door open, so it was odd in mid-2018 when, after inviting her colleague Cliff Sims to a meeting with a few people he’d never met before, Mercy (as colleagues know her) closed the door behind them. Even Sims’s presence at the meeting was a bit odd, acquaintances of each remarked to us; he and Schlapp weren’t out-and-proud internal enemies, but their relationship wasn’t exactly warm either. But she said she wanted Sims’s help with something, so he made the trek of a dozen or so feet from his office to hers.

Schlapp sat behind her desk as Sims took a chair against the wall. She made introductions. Sims was seated next to Van Hipp, a former chairman of the South Carolina GOP and one of D.C.’s premier Pentagon lobbyists. On a small couch in the office were two people one would normally be surprised to find in the Trump White House: Rick Harrison, co-owner of Las Vegas’s World Famous Gold & Silver Pawn Shop, better known for his starring role in the History series Pawn Stars, and, sitting beside him, an employee of his production company.

“I wanted to bring everyone together because I think Van and Rick have a wonderful idea that can help the president,” Schlapp told the room.

Then it got weird.

She turned the meeting over to Hipp and Harrison, who proceeded to pitch Sims on their idea for what amounted to a reality-TV show starring the president of the United States while he was still the sitting president of the United States. They were working on a pitch for a new television series, with each episode focusing on a particular historical event. They wanted to enlist Trump for on-camera interviews once a week focusing on each episode’s particular topic, according to several people with knowledge of their plans at the time.

Throughout the meeting, Schlapp kept talking up Sims. He’s your guy, she told Hipp and Harrison. He does all the video work with the president. They see each other every morning. He can make this happen. He can go and pitch the president on the idea.

Sims was trying to be polite, but he explained that there was no way they could fit weekly on-camera interviews into the president’s schedule like that. Hipp and Harrison anticipated the snag. Perhaps, they suggested, they could tail the president during his morning walk from the bottom of the residence elevator over to the Oval Office.

The meeting ended without any commitments, but Schlapp repeatedly followed up with Sims in the following weeks, pressing him on whether he’d pitched the president on the idea. The whole thing seemed very strange to Sims, who confided in multiple associates and friends about this strange occurrence, trying to figure out what on earth was going on. Why was Schlapp so big on this obscure idea? And why was she bringing it to him, rather than pitching the president herself, as her access to Trump would certainly allow?

Things really crystallized when Sims and others began asking around about Hipp. It turned out that he is a board member of Matt Schlapp’s American Conservative Union. And nestled among Hipp’s high-profile defense and pharmaceutical lobbying clients was a conspicuous one signed in late 2017: Rick Harrison Productions. Hipp had been at the White House meeting plugging his client’s latest project. Interestingly, Hipp didn’t disclose lobbying the West Wing on Harrison’s behalf until late 2018, after Sims left the White House.

The realization of all those connections also provided a clue about why Schlapp had come to Sims instead of pitching the president directly. She and her husband recoil at any suggestion that they’re using their positions and influence with the president to advance their private interests. Having Sims propose the idea would provide a degree of separation: the Schlapps could claim it wasn’t their idea; it was Sims’s.

Harrison’s history show never ended up happening. But in February of the following year, his fans could still find him addressing the main stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

When Swin approached Sims—who by that point did not want to punch the Beast reporter right in the jaw, for the record—about this story for our book in September 2019, Sims just chuckled and said, “No, thanks, I’m good. But I do love Pawn Stars.”

“I HAVE NO CLIENTS WHATSOEVER”

If it seems that we’re devoting an inordinate amount of space in this book to Corey Lewandowski, well, it is a lot of space, but it’s not inordinate. The man who was canned from the Trump campaign after assaulting a Breitbart reporter, helped to take down a White House chief of staff, and has been eyeing a U.S. Senate run in New Hampshire (this book is scheduled to be released around the time of the New Hampshire primaries, so good luck, Corey!) is in so many ways a walking microcosm of the minions and misfits for whom we’ve titled this book.

We’ve followed Lewandowski’s campaign to maintain his influence in the White House despite being widely reviled by virtually everyone in the West Wing not named Donald Trump. He was working so hard to maintain that influence for very tangible, financial reasons: from the first days of the Trump administration, Lewandowski had carved out for himself a very lucrative practice as what is commonly known in Washington as a shadow lobbyist.

Lewandowski is not a lobbyist as it’s narrowly defined legally. But neither are the legions of influence industry professionals in Washington with titles like “public affairs consultant” and “vice president for government relations.” Thousands of people ply their trade on K Street without ever officially crossing a very specific legal threshold into “lobbying,” which would require them to publicly disclose all sorts of information about their clients, how much those clients are paying, and what they’re paying for. And Corey Lewandowski is the Trump era’s quintessential shadow lobbyist.

He lost out on a Trump administration gig, due in large measure to the widespread distrust and antipathy he had drawn from elements of the president’s inner circle. So he opted to ply his trade in the influence business. As the Trump administration kicked into gear, Lewandowski teamed up with his fellow 2016 campaign hand Barry Bennett to form Avenue Strategies, the first major Trumpworld lobbying shop. By mid-2017, Avenue had signed ten clients, including the Bank of Beirut, the U.S. arm of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, a division of the Puerto Rican government, and a leading payday lender called Community Choice Financial.

Avenue’s very first federal lobbying client was more obscure. About two weeks after Trump was inaugurated, it signed a deal with a company called Flow Health, which had developed artificial intelligence technology that it said could help predict disease by synthesizing large amounts of genomic data. The company had just seen its five-year contract with the Department of Veterans Affairs canceled, due primarily to opposition from David Shulkin, the top health official at the VA at the time. Some of the concerns about the company’s business model seemed reasonable: it planned to collect massive amounts of data from American veterans, but all of that data would be proprietary and used to build a database of information that would redound to Flow Health’s financial benefit. But while privacy and data security were valid concerns, others raised just prior to the contract’s cancellation were outlandish. One writer on the VA beat noted that Flow Health had a Russian sister company, and warned breathlessly, “Russian software programmers, possibly some of the same programs linked to the election scandal, were being recruited to work for Flow Health.”

There was no evidence supporting that outlandish allegation. But if it wanted to ward off such claims, or more founded concerns about privacy and data security, the company needed a lobbying firm to help it get back in the VA’s good graces.

“We were going to hire another traditional lobbying firm, and then when Corey announced, I said this makes perfect sense,” Flow Health’s CEO, Alex Meshkin, told us. “New White House, new games, let’s go hook up with someone who can get us in the right door.” He met with Bennett and Lewandowski, who assured him of their deep relationships with the president and their ability to bend VA policy in the right direction. Trump, they assured Meshkin, would be breaking from Obama-era VA policy in a big way. That was good news for Flow Health, and Meshkin was hopeful that his company would soon be back at work.

That hope dissipated a bit when Avenue sent over its lobbying contract for him to sign. The document was copied in large part from a sample contract on the website LawDepot.com. “Our in-house general counsel is like, ‘Are we really going to do this deal?’” Meshkin remembers. Flow Health did end up doing the deal, or at least their part of it. They signed the LawDepot contract and sent it back to Avenue. But the firm’s representatives never inked their end.

Despite the lack of a fully executed agreement, Avenue started doing some work for the company, if not quite at the high level they promised. Meshkin says Lewandowski arranged a meeting at the firm’s offices, where he promised a sit-down with the VA’s general counsel. Instead, Meshkin showed up to find a former Trump campaign aide who’d been put in charge of some VA issues during the transition. Meanwhile, Shulkin, Flow Health’s prime enemy at the VA, had been unanimously confirmed by the Senate to continue to lead the agency. Bennett and Lewandowski assured Meshkin that “it’s a good thing for us. He’s just happy to have the position. He’s gonna listen to everything Mr. Trump tells him to do.” But he wasn’t doing what Flow Health needed him to do—reinstate their VA contract.

Finally, one of Avenue’s lobbyists, another former Trump campaign aide named Mike Rubino, informed Meshkin that Corey was going to “make the call”; at long last, he would exercise his supposed pull with the president on Flow Health’s behalf. This is what Meshkin had hired Avenue for. He spoke to Lewandowski in late March. As far as he knows, “the call” never happened. Lewandowski stopped returning his calls. They didn’t have a signed agreement, and eventually Meshkin just decided to walk away.

The whole episode left him wondering just how much pull Lewandowski and his ilk really had. “All these people attached to Trump that are peddling influence—how much of that information actually makes it into the White House?” Meshkin wondered aloud.

—

WHETHER Bennett, Lewandowski, and the rest really had the access they claimed depended on whom you asked. The internal jockeying for power and attention that dominated the early days of the White House was mirrored by those seeking to influence it from the outside. That meant for every person claiming intimate access to and sway over the president’s thinking and decision making, there were just as many rushing to tell colleagues, reporters, and potential clients that that person was full of shit and that the president didn’t even know his name, let alone seek his counsel.

But regardless of the level of actual influence wielded by Trumpworld’s K Street contingent, they did indisputably have one very valuable commodity: an understanding of how the president thinks, operates, and comes to a decision. Trump is, to put it mildly, unlike his predecessors. An influence industry built around processes and modes of thinking designed with your standard postwar White House in mind was no longer operative in January 2017. Titans of the influence industry and their deep-pocketed clients all found themselves scrambling for someone who could at the very least tell them what the president was likely thinking on a given issue, how he’d go about making a decision, or the points to stress in trying to push him in one direction or another.

This new class of Trumpworld political influencers could market just that ability, and the financial upside was tremendous. Even without the ability to influence the president himself, a lobbyist’s ability to predict which way the president would lean on a given issue could be tremendously valuable for a Fortune 500 company or a foreign government. And Trump’s idiosyncrasies turned even mundane insights into his style of governance into K Street gold.

Few seeking influence in Trump’s Washington knew how to deal, for instance, with this new president’s caustic and chaotic Twitter presence. Never had a commander in chief so breezily issued official statements on any matter to cross his mind. Such statements moved markets, affected international diplomacy, and upended congressional negotiations. So when Lewandowski’s Avenue Strategies opened up shop on December 21, 2016, it marketed an influence service that would have been laughable in any previous administration but was suddenly a very real financial concern for potential clients, and even had a new moniker.

“‘Tweet risk’ is now officially part of the Wall Street lexicon,” declared a popular financial news site the day after Trump’s inauguration. “The President of the United States is effectively commandeering entire companies via Twitter and forcing those companies to rethink their business models in the space of just a few hours . . . Worse, it’s not clear that Trump’s tweets are carefully considered—and that’s putting it very, very kindly. More often than not, he seems to say whatever’s on his mind irrespective of the impact 140 characters can have on corporate management teams that can’t afford to wait and see if the new President really means it when he threatens punishing tariffs or whether he was just angry-tweeting (that’s the Presidential equivalent of drunk-texting) at 3 in the morning.”

For multinational corporations worth tens of billions of dollars, the uncertainty that came with tweet risk was untenable. But here were Trump’s new cohort of aides turned lobbyists, and they promised to help insulate your company from the financial catastrophe that might ensue if the president decided to go after you by name on his kinetic Twitter account.

The first tweet risk occurred just a day after Avenue opened. On December 22, Trump opened fire on the defense contractor Lockheed Martin. “Based on the tremendous cost and cost overruns of the Lockheed Martin F-35, I have asked Boeing to price-out a comparable F-18 Super Hornet!” the president-elect declared. Losing out on the exorbitantly expensive F-35 contract would have been catastrophic for Lockheed. So the company turned to Avenue for advice on navigating this new administration. It retained Lewandowski and Bennett to shore up the company’s relationship with the president.

“What people don’t understand is how transactional he is,” Bennett told us a couple years later. “He’s perfectly willing to give you a win for a win for himself.” And sure enough, Avenue was able to get Lockheed back in Trump’s good graces in exchange for a talking point that the new president could trumpet as an early success for his administration. “I was able to get $600 million approximately off those planes,” Trump said in an interview a few weeks later after a meeting with Lockheed’s CEO, confirming that the F-35 project would move forward. It was a lie—those savings were announced long before the meeting—but Avenue had succeeded in preserving the company’s relationship with the president by providing Trump with a fig leaf of self-promotion. Lockheed had tried to win Trump over with a mundane presentation on its improving financials and the importance of the F-35 project. But Trump doesn’t care about the particulars; Avenue knew that all he wanted was a win for himself, never mind the actual substance of his objections. They gave him that, and business proceeded as usual. It was a thoroughly Trumpian bit of D.C. power brokering, and Avenue’s understanding of Trump’s approach to policy, and his unquenchable thirst for self-affirmation, might have saved Lockheed billions.

For policy wins like that, companies were willing to shell out a lot of money to these new K Street players. In D.C.’s influence industry, chaos and uncertainty mean a financial windfall. Businesses hate uncertainty, and anyone who can provide a measure of stability is a sought-after commodity. Firms with the ability to read or influence the president began raking in cash. It didn’t even take much effort; the big clients were seeking them out. “I’ll give you the secret of my marketing success: ‘Hello,’” quipped Bennett. “They called. I never pitched. They just started calling . . . In our first week in business, we probably had 50 people who were trying to hire us . . . because they didn’t know who else to go to.”

It was a gold rush for Avenue. But as is often the case with Lewandowski, tension with colleagues soon proved untenable. He absolutely did not want to register as a lobbyist. Which is tough to do when you run a lobbying firm. And his characteristically caustic public persona was proving a liability for Avenue.

“Corey was a big name and a big target,” Bennett told The Washington Post at the time. “The firm has been growing yet everything the firm did was associated with Corey, even though we have a lot of clients who Corey has not even met.”

—

THE nice thing about being a shadow lobbyist is you can lie with impunity. There’s no way to verify through public records that a shadow lobbyist represents a particular client or to see which issues he’s working on or which officials he’s contacting on clients’ behalves. It’s a black box of information, and that opacity served Lewandowski well as he continued peddling influence for special interests and flatly denying that’s what he was doing.

Shortly after his departure from Avenue, Lewandowski was back on the TV news circuit. In mid-2017, he appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, where he launched into a soliloquy on the president’s aggressive and hopeful legislative agenda, including tax reform, destroying Obamacare, and erecting a wall on the southern border. But then he mentioned a policy agenda item that was bizarre in its obscurity and randomness. “I think the general [John Kelly] should re-look at firing Richard Cordray,” he remarked of the then director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “He is a person who is now all but running for governor in the state of Ohio and he’s sitting in federal office right now.”

The host, Chuck Todd, was taken aback. “I have to say, Corey, that was sort of a random thing you just introduced there. What’s with the focus on Mr. Cordray? How is that at the top of the agenda there?” he asked. “Do you have any business interest here? Do you have a client that wants to see this happen?”

“No, no,” Lewandowski insisted. “I have no clients whatsoever.”

A month later, The New York Times reported that Community Choice Financial, a payday lender and former Avenue client that really wanted Cordray gone, had offered his new firm, Lewandowski Strategic Advisors, $20,000 per month to advocate on its behalf. Called on that reporting, Lewandowski tried to deny that he represented the company while leaving just enough wiggle room. The contract was never executed, he claimed. “They were a client under my previous firm. I left the firm in May.” Asked whether he had consulted for Community Choice, even absent that contract, Lewandowski said, “I give advice—free advice—all the time. And when people call me, you know what I do? I answer their telephone calls.”

About six weeks after the interview, Community Choice signed a new lobbying contract. The company began paying Turnberry Solutions, a new firm founded by the Avenue alums Mike Rubino and Jason Osborne and headquartered in the “Lewandowski Embassy.” Corey denied up and down for months that he had anything to do with the lobbying shop based out of his house. Then, in early 2019, Turnberry officially hired him.

Lewandowski still clings to the fact that he is not, and has never been, a registered lobbyist. In fact, he’s carved out a far more cushy position for himself as a K Street middleman. Rather than do the lobbying himself, he connects clients with firms that do the real legwork, and takes a percentage of the fees those clients pay. Sources familiar with his work have said those fees range from 10 to 25 percent. Community Choice alone has paid Turnberry $20,000 per month—incidentally the same fee it was reported the company had paid to Lewandowski’s firm—which would net Lewandowski a nice fee for doing none of the actual advocacy work.

But on K Street, the real money lies in foreign government advocacy, and Lewandowski has thrown his very sharp elbows about in an effort to secure those high-dollar contracts for firms that can steer him some large finder’s fees. And that role has put him at the center of a D.C. drama so bizarre that it could only ever have occurred in the era of President Donald Trump.

—

WHEN we reached out to a spokesperson for Jill Kelley, his chief complaint was that we referred to her as a Washington “socialite.” The term was inherently sexist, he claimed. You wouldn’t call a man a “socialite,” would you? The gripe was fair as far as it went, but whether she likes it or not, Kelley is most famous for her role in a sex scandal that brought down one of the most celebrated military officers of the twenty-first century. Kelley was the target of a harassment and stalking campaign perpetrated by Paula Broadwell, a journalist and biographer of the disgraced former general David Petraeus. Broadwell viewed Kelley as a threat and pursued a harassment campaign against her that burst into public view when Petraeus was relieved of duty after it was revealed that he shared classified information with Broadwell, with whom he was having a romantic affair.

By the time that scandal exploded into public view in 2012, Kelley was a darling of high-profile military officers including the Marine general Jim Mattis, who would go on to serve as Trump’s secretary of defense. She cultivated extensive connections at the Pentagon and even received honorary ambassador titles from U.S. Central Command, which Mattis then led, and the South Korean embassy in Washington. From Washington and her home in Tampa, Florida, Kelley served as an informal agent of U.S. foreign policy, connecting high-ranking military and diplomatic officials with their foreign counterparts in an informal, disarming setting. Senior officials in the United States and abroad reportedly adored her, and Kelley became something of a diplomatic power broker akin to famous past socialites such as Joanne Herring, of Charlie Wilson’s War fame.

Whether “socialite” was a fair descriptor or not, Kelley cherished the role, and it proved both lucrative and fulfilling. When the Polish government sought U.S. assistance in beefing up its missile defense system in early 2017, the potential business opportunity for Kelley was a twofer: she could help advance Western geopolitical interests by facilitating Eastern European defenses against Russian encroachment and simultaneously get a piece of what was sure to be a high-dollar D.C. lobbying deal.

The client in that deal would be Poland’s state-owned defense contractor conglomerate, Polska Grupa Zbrojeniowa, or the Polish Armaments Group in English. Made up of about sixty military, defense, and aerospace contractors, the group was looking for help enhancing the country’s Wisla and Homar missile defense programs. Kelley had been tipped off to the opportunity by a contact in the Polish embassy who said PGZ was looking for new representation in Washington. Kelley didn’t have the expertise to do that lobbying herself. What she did have was an uncanny ability to connect the right people, help them build relationships, and see that a deal was done.

She was savvy enough to know, during the first year of the Trump presidency, that arranging the right meetings would require bringing on board someone with high-level connections in the new administration. And it appears Kelley had already built a relationship with Lewandowski; in late 2017, they co-hosted a party at the Trump International Hotel to celebrate the first anniversary of Trump’s election victory. Kelley began telling friends around D.C. that she and Lewandowski were teaming up to land PGZ a high-dollar lobbying deal that would help facilitate some major missile defense contracts.

Lewandowski, apparently, had other ideas.

At the time, he was still vehemently denying that he was doing any “foreign work,” or any work on behalf of Turnberry Solutions. But in July 2017, he received an email from Ed Rogers, a veteran Republican lobbyist and principal at BGR Group, a powerhouse firm founded by the former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour. Rogers wanted an update on Lewandowski’s contacts with the Azerbaijani ambassador to the United States, a BGR client. “Corey, we’re [sic] you able to talk to the Azerbaijan ambassador?” he asked, according to a copy of the email that we reviewed. “Call and let’s catch up for 15 minutes.” Rogers cc’d Turnberry’s Mike Rubino on the email. And Lewandowski, it turned out, was promising the Azerbaijani ambassador access to the Trump White House.

At the same time, Lewandowski was sitting in on Turnberry conference calls with clients and on one occasion traveled with Rubino and Osborne to Poland to court business there. That turned out to be the same business for which Kelley had brought Lewandowski aboard. But Lewandowski had already cut her out—or “fucked her over,” as one source familiar with the arrangement described it to us. Instead of working with Kelley to facilitate a PGZ lobbying deal, Lewandowski did the connecting himself and landed BGR the contract independent of Kelley.

The contract, worth $70,000 per month, was officially signed on October 25, 2017. It’s not clear what Lewandowski’s cut of the PGZ-BGR deal was. But the lower end of his reported referral fees would’ve netted him $3,500 per month just for making introductions. And his jaunt to Poland with the Turnberry guys paid off as well. In January 2018, BGR signed Osborne as a subcontractor on its PGZ and Azerbaijan accounts. Three months later, it brought on Rubino too. When BGR signed the Polish Ministry of Defense in early 2019, it added Osborne to that account as well.

The PGZ contract was inked right before Kelley and Lewandowski co-hosted their Trump International Hotel election anniversary bash. But Kelley didn’t know she’d been cut out until the contract showed up on the Justice Department’s website, where all lobbyists and public relations professionals must disclose their relationships with foreign government clients. That didn’t happen until November 20, about two weeks after the party.

Kelley had been partying at the Trump International Hotel with the very man who had just screwed her out of a lobbying deal that she herself had put together and brought to him. Lewandowski hadn’t bothered to mention it.

“THAT CHAPTER ISN’T CLOSED”

In his years as an investigative reporter, Lachlan had spent an inordinate amount of time poring over financial records on file with the Federal Election Commission, the nation’s elections and campaign finance regulator. Hundreds of hours spent scrolling through those documents meant he had a sense for what these records generally looked like and what is and is not a noteworthy bit of information. So in late 2018, as Lachlan sifted through a quarterly financial filing from the pro-Trump group America First Action, one particular line item, a $325,000 contribution from a company called Global Energy Producers LLC, practically leaped off the page.

He thought he’d just stumbled on a shady campaign donor. But a year of digging instead turned up a motley band of Trump-backing businessmen with some very shady associations, a cockamamie strategy to cash in on the Trump presidency, and an alliance with the president’s personal lawyer that they’d try to use to kneecap political rivals from Hillary Clinton to Joe Biden to a career U.S. ambassador.

It turned out he’d also just stumbled on the fringes of a scheme by the president to solicit foreign government assistance with his reelection efforts, a scheme that would eventually result in a congressional impeachment investigation that once again engulfed the White House in a scandal very reminiscent of the Russia collusion inquiry that had dogged Trump’s first two years in office.

The Mueller affair had its own quixotic, thoroughly Trumpian cast of characters at its center, replete with the typical idiocy and bombast that we—and hopefully, by this point in the book, you too—have come to expect from the president’s team. But those characters were, by and large, known quantities at that point, people like Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and Michael Flynn.

The Global Energy Producers fiasco offered a whole new casting call for the Trump show blooper reel. And these guys were on our radar before anyone else’s. Initially, it wasn’t because they’d attempted to assist Trump and Giuliani in their efforts to usurp a democratic contest. It was simply because the guys behind it, a repeated failure of a penny stock investor and a Ukrainian businessman with ties to the country’s own corrupt political machine, had all of a sudden decided they too were going to be players in the vast expanse of amateurish graft that has defined the forty-fifth president’s tenure.

America First is a notable node in the Trump graft network. It is the official super PAC of the Trump political operation. That’s supposed to be an oxymoron; in theory, super PACs are wholly independent of the candidates they support. That’s why they can accept and spend unlimited amounts of money, including contributions from corporations and labor unions. But that’s mostly a legal fiction effectively circumvented by both political parties in ways that don’t run afoul of rules barring campaigns from coordinating with super PACs. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both pioneered novel legal strategies for maximizing coordination with their supportive super PACs without crossing legal boundaries.

But Trump dispensed with the pretense altogether. In early 2019, he publicly endorsed America First as the official “independent” supporter of his reelection effort. Donating to America First, itself a landing ground for presidential loyalists hounded from more respectable corners of Trumpworld, was effectively the same as donating to Trump’s reelection campaign. The contributions would just be routed through a different legal entity.

America First has received some massive financial contributions from big names in Republican fund-raising. The casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife have each chipped in $5 million. The California real estate developer Geoff Palmer has donated $6 million. The group has counted no fewer than fourteen separate million-dollar donations since 2017.

Those were all noteworthy and impressive. But as Lachlan perused the group’s financial records in late 2018, none of those donations stuck out like the six-figure contribution earlier that year from Global Energy Producers. What made it so noteworthy was that there was no record of this company’s actually doing anything. There was barely a record of its existence. Incorporation documents on file in Delaware, a state renowned for the secrecy it affords companies headquartered there, showed that GEP had been formed just a month before its huge donation to America First. It had also written a $50,000 check to the Republican Ron DeSantis’s successful Florida gubernatorial campaign.

The key to investigative reporting in the digital age is to find any unique bit of information—a name, a phone number, an address, a website—and plumb public records for every bit of insight you can glean on the people and organizations associated with it. Delaware makes it virtually impossible to find out anything about the companies incorporated there. But FEC records provided one bit of unique information: an address in Boca Raton, Florida. Small world, Lachlan thought; his parents had just moved to Boca a few years earlier.

Lachlan’s first story on the GEP donation was a short blurb at the end of his weekly campaign finance newsletter, Pay Dirt. “Who’s behind this six-figure donation to a leading Trump PAC?” the newsletter item asked. He kept digging on the address in Boca, and within a couple weeks he’d discovered two names. The people behind GEP were a pair of businessmen, the Soviet-born Lev Parnas and the Ukrainian-born Igor Fruman. Little did Lachlan know at the time that he’d just stumbled on a small cadre of Trump supporters who, with the aid of Trumpworld figures including Rudy Giuliani, would soon be front and center on the national political stage.

—

WHEN Michael Pues cut a $350,000 check to Lev Parnas in late 2010, he thought he’d be financing a cool new spy thriller starring Jack Nicholson. The movie, tentatively titled “Anatomy of an Assassin,” was in its early stages, but Pues, a friend and client of Parnas’s, was impressed by the star power. Parnas arranged for him to have dinner with Nicholson and the producer Rudy Durand at the Carlyle hotel in New York. Pues agreed to pony up the $350,000 investment, which he withdrew from his parents’ retirement fund. Pues would later tell a federal judge that he trusted Parnas, who assured him he was a highly successful investment adviser who drove around in a Bentley and had never lost money for his clients.

The movie project fizzled. Pues lost his investment. He sued Parnas and won a breach of contract claim. The court ordered Parnas to repay Pues. Parnas still has not done so. And in the years since, the Pues lawsuit has provided some of the most interesting—and damning—information to come out about a major Trump donor during the first term of his presidency.

Parnas was not, in fact, a highly successful investor. By the time GEP made its huge America First donation, his landlord was attempting to evict him over $11,000 in unpaid rent. Public records revealed a trail of business activity going back a decade and involving a host of investments gone bad, scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, and one joint business venture with a big-name music producer that could not have been more poorly timed. It came just months before the producer was criminally charged for orchestrating a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme that ripped off some of the biggest pop music acts of the last quarter century.

Parnas’s early career in the financial services industry included a five-month stint in 1996 and 1997 at a penny stock brokerage called Euro-Atlantic Securities. A few years later, federal prosecutors would allege that Euro-Atlantic was a criminal front for the Colombo organized crime family. Parnas wasn’t mentioned in indictments or accused of any wrongdoing, and indeed had moved on to other ventures long before those allegations became public. But he would remain in the penny stock game and take jobs with other legally dubious firms.

A couple years after he left Euro-Atlantic, Parnas took a position atop a firm called the Program Trading Corp. Parnas was its chief executive, and another one of his companies, Aaron Investment Group (remember that name), owned at least 75 percent of Program Trading, according to regulatory filings. About a year before Parnas took over the company, it had been fined more than $150,000 for fraudulently soliciting investment with fabricated claims of the firm’s notable clients such as Shaquille O’Neal and George Foreman. Parnas signed on as CEO after those claims were settled, but according to regulators the firm kept failing to pay the fines. In 2005, FINRA expelled the firm over that failure. Parnas would nonetheless brag about his “nine years as CEO of Program Trading Corp.” in future business pitches.

In 2009, Parnas took another position at a penny stock brokerage, registering with the firm Basis Financial LLC. He spent only three months at that firm, according to FINRA documentation. A few years later, the firm would be hit with allegations that it lured investors with fraudulent promises of impending IPOs for “highly suspect” penny stock companies. The activity had gone on for years, FINRA alleged, but Parnas wasn’t named or implicated in the scheme.

Between his stints at Program Trading and Basis Financial, Parnas had started up his own business, which was itself listed on the “pink sheet” penny stock exchange. The firm was called Edgetech International, and it produced a PalmPilot-type device called the PC Edge, which it marketed as “the world’s fastest hand-held Internet access device.” Edgetech went in search of partners to help market and provide content for the device and in late 2006 found a major collaborator in Lou Pearlman, a big-time record producer who’d previously worked with some of the hottest acts in pop music, including the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync.

By the time Parnas announced the partnership in a September 2006 press release, Pearlman was widely suspected of—and under investigation for—perpetrating fraud against his clients. Around that time, Justin Timberlake would compare ’N Sync’s work with Pearlman years earlier to “being financially raped by a Svengali.” Around the time that he signed up to work with Edgetech, Pearlman’s business empire was being scrutinized by law enforcement in Florida. Just a few months after a Parnas press release announcing its collaboration with Pearlman, Florida’s Office of Financial Regulation seized one of Pearlman’s Orlando-based businesses. The following year, the Justice Department charged him with running a massive, $300 million Ponzi scheme. Pearlman died of a heart attack in federal prison almost exactly ten years after the Edgetech deal was announced.

Edgetech stuck around for another few years, but by 2014 the Securities and Exchange Commission wasn’t convinced that the company was doing anything to merit its listing on the pink sheet exchange. The SEC suspended trading for the company, citing “a lack of current and accurate information concerning the securities of EdgeTech International, Inc. because questions have arisen as to its operating status, if any.”

The year before, Parnas had launched a new company by the name of Fraud Guarantee. Its business model was more or less the opposite of its name, taken literally. Parnas claimed on its website that he had been the victim of financial fraud and was determined to prevent the same fate from befalling others. One of Parnas’s co-founders was John Cardillo, a former NYPD detective who years later would go on to be a marginally popular pro-Trump radio host.

Another of Fraud Guarantee’s co-founders was David Correia, a former professional golfer and longtime Parnas business associate. Correia also appears to share Parnas’s pro-Trump sentiments, judging by a perusal of his Twitter account.

One tweet in particular caught our eye. Two days after Trump was inaugurated, Correia replied to a generic “thank you, it’s been an honor”—type message from the outgoing vice president, Joe Biden. “[I] assume the day your son took his position in Ukraine was also a great moment?” Correia wrote. “I have a feeling that chapter isn’t closed.”

In the immortal words of the Boston front man Tom Scholz, it was more than a feeling.

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ABOUT two weeks before Election Day 2016, Parnas began cutting big checks to Trump and the GOP. He gave $50,000 to a Trump campaign fund-raising committee and another $33,000 to a Republican political outfit aiming to win seats in the House of Representatives. The giving subsided after Trump’s election, then picked up in a big way in early 2018. Parnas starting writing more checks, and he was joined by Fruman, who runs a Ukrainian import-export business that deals in dairy, coffee, produce, and luxury goods, among other sectors.

Parnas and Fruman had a new business venture, and it would rely on courting extensive political favor with the Trump administration. Since the first year of his presidency, Trump had pledged to boost U.S. natural gas exports to Eastern European allies as a way of blunting Russian energy domination in the region. Ukraine was slated to be one of the major beneficiaries of the policy, and Parnas and Fruman had the connections in the latter’s home country to capitalize. Now they needed connections in the United States as well. And dropping gobs of cash at the feet of the nation’s most prominent elected officials seemed like a good way to go about it.

Political connections, and the donations used to secure them, were integral to Global Energy Producers’ business model. When Parnas and Fruman approached the Russian American energy executive Felix Vulis in late 2018 to solicit an investment in the company, they bragged about their extensive relationships with top Trumpworld figures, Vulis later said in a lawsuit seeking to recoup that investment. They boasted specifically, Vulis said, of their ties to Rudy Giuliani; Mike Pence’s then chief of staff, Nick Ayers; and the leading Trumpworld lobbyist and fund-raiser Brian Ballard.

Parnas and Fruman told Vulis, he recalled, that they “had made several large personal contributions to various political organizations, including America First Action, Inc. and Friends of Ron DeSantis, in excess of $400,000.00 in [Global Energy Producers’] name and that, as a result, [they] had garnered substantial good will with various powerful political allies that would greatly assist the business.” (A lawyer for GEP denied that they ever made such statements to Vulis.)

GEP was also staffing up in Trumpworld. By 2018, it had started enlisting multiple former White House communications hands to help manage its relationship with the press.

Global Energy Producers would leverage its Trumpworld relationships to win huge contracts to export energy products to Europe, Parnas and Fruman hoped. Their goal was nothing less, they told Vulis, than to become the single largest liquid natural gas exporter in the United States.

Just a few months later, Vulis was convinced he had been scammed. “Your friends Lev and Igor have ripped me off for $100k,” he texted David Correia in February 2019. “All those stories I was told about them ripping off their ‘friends’ I could never imagined can apply to me. I sincerely offered them a partnership [where] I could bring them a lot of wealth. Instead they screwed me.”

Vulis filed a lawsuit in Florida in early 2019 seeking to recoup the $100,000 he had lent to Global Energy Producers, alleging that Parnas and Fruman had repeatedly ignored his requests for repayment despite an agreed deadline of December 1, 2018. His lawsuit also alleged that GEP was less a company for legal purposes than an alter ego for Parnas and Fruman. That would have major implications for other legal actions against the company.

More generally, Vulis’s lawsuit, which was settled in August 2019 under undisclosed terms, also provided an unvarnished look at how these two businessmen were running a largely political operation reliant on paying money in exchange for political favor. Such an arrangement is hardly unique, of course, but the revelations in Vulis’s lawsuit were striking for how nakedly transactional the whole operation was. In an era in Washington defined by such transactional relationships, Parnas and Fruman were simply playing the game.

But in true Trumpian fashion, they didn’t seem to be playing it very well. Indeed, their apparent failure to repay Vulis on time resulted in stunning public revelations about an investment pitch and accompanying deliberations that they surely wished to remain private. And it wouldn’t be the only time that the GEP executives’ alleged deadbeat habits would expose incriminating details about the business for which they’d banked on the Trump administration’s good graces.

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PARNAS wasn’t just making huge political contributions. With his Pues debt still outstanding, he and Fruman managed to find the resources to enlist the services of Rudy Giuliani, who would publicly describe the two men as his “clients,” and who, it turns out, was on the Fraud Guarantee payroll. It began with a phone call in early 2018, CNN would later report. A mutual connection, whose identity remains unknown, arranged for a phone call between Giuliani and Parnas. As Parnas and Fruman worked to secure lucrative political deals with the Trump administration, they were also colluding with the president’s personal attorney to dig up dirt on Trump’s political opponents, upending a key U.S. diplomatic relationship in the process and eventually leading to a political and national security firestorm that would possibly even lead to the third impeachment vote in U.S. history.

Parnas and Giuliani had developed a relationship throughout 2018, when the former used his new Republican megadonor credentials to finagle meet and greets with powerful congressional committee chairmen, top GOP fund-raisers, and even the president of the United States himself. In late 2018, as Global Energy Producers sought Trump-facilitated energy export deals, Fruman got a call from a former prosecutor in Ukraine, Viktor Shokin, who wanted help exacting revenge for a political scandal in the country that had cost him his job a couple years earlier.

Shokin’s target was an auspicious one: he wanted to go after Hunter Biden, the son of the former vice president and a businessman with extensive, and controversial, business ties in Ukraine.

Parnas and Fruman turned to Giuliani for help, according to extensive reporting on their efforts by BuzzFeed News and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. Trump’s attorney recognized a unique opportunity to advance the political interests of his highest-profile client. At the time, Joe Biden was widely seen as a likely 2020 challenger to Trump, and a formidable one. By assisting Parnas and Fruman in digging up dirt on his son’s potentially shady activities there, Giuliani could get a head start on 2020 opposition research, with assists from people on the ground in Ukraine who knew where the bodies were buried.

At the same time, Giuliani could pursue a separate line of inquiry that might help undercut Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into 2016 election meddling, which was still very active at the time. It had been publicly reported that Democratic operatives had approached Ukrainian officials during the 2016 campaign to solicit damaging information about Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s business dealings in the country (the same ones that eventually landed him in prison). If Giuliani could expose more information on that front, he could turn the Mueller narrative on its ear: it was the Democrats, not Trump, he could insist, who colluded with a foreign power.

Parnas and Fruman set up meetings with Shokin and other high-profile Ukrainian politicians. Shokin told Giuliani that he had been investigating a Hunter Biden consulting contract in the country when, in 2016, Joe Biden publicly called for Shokin’s resignation over corruption allegations. Giuliani dutifully alleged a conflict of interest by the former vice president.

Not all of their meetings went so well. In April 2019, Parnas and Fruman flew to Israel to meet with the billionaire Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, who had gone into exile after Ukraine’s government seized a bank he owned amid a criminal investigation. Kolomoisky had denied any wrongdoing, and with the election of Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, that April he was suddenly back in the good graces of the country’s ruling administration.

But Kolomoisky didn’t react well when Parnas and Fruman began pressing for a meeting with Zelensky. And he wasn’t impressed with their name-dropping either. “They tried to say something like, ‘Hey, we are serious people here,’” he later told BuzzFeed. “‘Giuliani. Trump.’ They started throwing names at me.”

When Kolomoisky refused to cooperate, Giuliani and his clients went ballistic. Trump’s attorney fired off a tweet accusing the Ukrainian of threatening to kill Parnas and Fruman. Lachlan called up Giuliani to get more information. He was cagey. “All I know is the allegations,” Giuliani said. “When I looked online, there are questions about his having done violence in the past. That makes me very concerned.”

Parnas and Fruman weren’t just going after Ukrainian leaders; they also targeted the American ambassador to Kiev. In May 2018, Parnas and Correia, his longtime business associate, traveled to Washington for a meeting with Representative Pete Sessions, a Texas Republican who chaired the powerful House Rules Committee. Parnas, who posted photos from the meeting on his Facebook page, would later tell BuzzFeed that he used the meeting to bad-mouth the U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. And Parnas knew the precise buttons to press: Yovanovitch, he claimed, had been privately criticizing the president!

On the same day, Sessions penned a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “I have received notice from close companions that Ambassador Yovanovitch has spoken privately and repeatedly about her disdain for the current administration,” Sessions wrote. It took awhile, but in May 2019, Yovanovitch was recalled from her post.

—

IT was a couple months after Yovanovitch’s departure from Kiev that the president held his now-infamous phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the newly inaugurated president of Ukraine. A former comedian who first burst into the public eye with a winning performance on Ukraine’s Dancing with the Stars spin-off, Zelensky was a superficially Trumpian figure in his own right. Funny and affable, he parlayed television popularity into an insurgent presidential campaign that unseated an incumbent with a message focused on battling corruption. Zelensky told Trump in their phone call on July 25, 2019, that the American president’s “drain the swamp” campaign mantra had been an inspiration for his own presidential bid. Zelensky was also sure to mention that he stayed at a Trump property the last time he was in New York.

Then Trump dropped the bomb. Or rather, threatened not to. Zelensky wanted the president to know that Ukraine was ready to get some more of those sweet American missiles—specifically some Javelins, the shoulder-fired anti-tank weapons manufactured by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Ukraine was still dependent on U.S. aid to maintain its territorial integrity against constant Russian-backed incursions and insurgencies in the country’s east. Zelensky was still waiting on hundreds of millions of dollars in promised American military aid. Kiev was ready to receive more military support, he told Trump.

“I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Trump replied. First off, he wanted Zelensky to look into the company CrowdStrike, which had conducted an internal investigation into Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Trump wanted Zelensky to help find the DNC email servers. Why he thought such a server existed, was in Ukraine, and could be obtained with Zelensky’s help remains a train of thought indecipherable to those without direct insight into the president’s conspiracy-theory-addled mind. The whole thing appears to have been born of the right-wing fringe, where cranks and kooks had insisted since 2016 that the DNC had covered up the real nature of the cybercrime against it, and might even have assassinated a staffer, Seth Rich, who had really provided internal emails to WikiLeaks. As it happens, this was central to Roger Stone’s federal criminal defense at the time. It was also thorough, largely incomprehensible bullshit. Yet here was the president peddling it in his first official call with a key global counterpart.

If that had been all the president told Zelensky, it would’ve been just another minor national embarrassment in a string of cringe-worthy presidential statements to other world leaders. But the president wanted more. He wanted Zelensky to look into the Hunter Biden allegations, and he even offered the assistance not just of his personal attorney, Giuliani, but of the attorney general of the United States. Trump was prepared to bring the full might of America’s federal law enforcement apparatus to bear in investigating a political opponent.

All of this information emerged into public view thanks to a whistle-blower in the U.S. intelligence community who drew on secondhand accounts of the Zelensky call and other conversations with White House staffers to paint a damning portrait of the president’s conduct. Naturally, the whistle-blower became the target of attacks from Trump and his allies, and the larger case against him fit nicely into Trump’s larger narrative of victimization at the hands of malicious deep state bureaucrats. The strategy generally resembled that brought against Special Counsel Robert Mueller and FBI and congressional investigators probing Russian interference in the 2016 election.

There was a key difference this time, though. Rather than simply stonewall and obfuscate, the president agreed to release a transcript of his call with Zelensky. And the transcript basically confirmed the whistle-blower’s central allegations. It remains utterly baffling to us that Trump, ahead of the transcript’s release, apparently believed that it would exonerate him. Certainly that’s what he and the Republican apparatus in Washington insisted up and down after the fact. But here was the precise text of exactly what was said, and what was said was very, very bad for the president.

It was, in other words, a totally unforced error on the president’s part. He was behind the scenes employing the might of his official office for political ends. Knowing that congressional Democrats were chomping at the bit to bring down his administration, knowing that they would take any excuse to press for impeachment, and knowing exactly what he had said to Zelensky during that fateful phone call, he nonetheless agreed to put it all in public view.

As we write this, the outcome of this impeachment bonanza is very much up in the air. For all we know, by the time this is published, Mike Pence will be president, this whole scheme will have been plumbed in far more detail than is available now, and everything we’re writing will be old hat. But for now, a truly striking theme throughout the scandal has been the emergence of crucial information about it through just those sorts of unforced errors.

At the top, it was the president freely volunteering details of his communications with Zelensky. He also mentioned on tape that he had sought a similar Hunter Biden investigation in China. He didn’t need to say any of this, and each detail made his predicament worse.

And once again, Trump’s minions and misfits mimicked some of his more destructive idiosyncrasies. Just as the president was publicly offering information that would damn him, we were getting big new details on the midlevel operatives working behind the scenes to advance his illicit crusade against the Bidens. And as with Trump, details about their activities were coming out due purely to their own ineptitude.

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EVEN as Parnas and Fruman jet-set around the globe in their Giuliani-assisted influence campaign, and even as they and their company poured money into political campaigns, Parnas was ignoring demands from Pues, his former friend and client, to repay the money that Pues had invested in the “Anatomy of an Assassin” film project years earlier. A federal court awarded Pues $350,000 in damages in 2011, and with interest and legal fees the sum that Parnas owed had swelled to more than $500,000. So when Lachlan first reported that it was Parnas behind the huge GEP contribution to America First Action in the summer of 2018, Pues’s attorney took note.

The attorney restarted legal proceedings in federal and state courts in an attempt to recoup the money owed to his client. And before long, those lawsuits started to produce more inside information about Global Energy Producers, its executives, and their political contributions. We found out, for instance, that Parnas had also been earning some money by referring clients to Ballard Partners, the lobbying firm run by Brian Ballard.

Of more immediate interest, though, were the detailed financial records emerging as part of the lawsuit.

When Lachlan first reported on the America First donation, it caught the eye of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit watchdog group. The CLC filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging reason to believe that GEP was illegally masking the identity of the real donor behind its America First contribution. The company had been around for only a month, the group reasoned. It was unlikely that it had the capital to be making six-figure political donations.

Lachlan reported on that complaint and soon got a call from a Trumpworld communications operative. He said he knew Parnas personally and was livid at the story. He screamed that the CLC knew nothing about the company’s finances and that its allegations were borderline libelous. He warned Lachlan not to lend credence to these fabulous allegations. GEP too vehemently denied the allegations. “The amount donated to America First PAC represents only a small fraction of the operating costs of GEP,” the company said in a statement on CLC’s complaint. “The implication that GEP is some sort of shell company, couldn’t be further from the truth, as the company is committed to a longterm plan to export American LNG and is in the process of partnering with major industry leaders both domestically and internationally to achieve that end.”

Months later, Pues’s attorneys would submit records in federal court showing that the contribution did not, in fact, come from GEP. Wire transfer records showed that the actual donor was a Parnas-run company called Aaron Investments I LLC. The CLC had been even more correct than it knew, and the information had only emerged due to Parnas’s years-old debts, which he still wouldn’t—or couldn’t—pay.

It was those records, released publicly and first reported by The Daily Beast, that made it clear that something was legally amiss with Parnas and Fruman’s massive political spending spree. But the full depth of their alleged campaign finance chicanery emerged only on Wednesday, October 9, 2019. The duo had lunch with Giuliani at—where else?—the Trump International Hotel. That night, they traveled to Dulles International Airport, each holding a one-way ticket to Frankfurt. The FBI was waiting for them. Parnas and Fruman were arrested and charged with knowing and willful violations of federal campaign finance laws. At issue were contributions not just to America First, but to Representative Sessions, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, and a handful of state-level officials whom Parnas and Fruman had allegedly plotted to bribe with campaign donations in exchange for assistance in securing permits for a recreational cannabis business they were starting up with a Russian émigré in Sacramento. Correia, Parnas’s longtime business partner, allegedly even drafted a spreadsheet detailing each politician they needed to pay off, then circulated it to Parnas, Fruman, and an unnamed Russian businessman who allegedly provided them with at least $1 million with which to make those contributions.

As we write this, we still don’t know what the outcome of that case will be. Parnas and Fruman have pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges against them. But the indictment alone largely vindicated the reporting we’d been doing for more than a year. It also underscored a common theme throughout the Parnas and Fruman fiasco: these guys are really, really bad at graft. First off, they had violated a rule of criminal conduct spelled out by fictional kingpin Stringer Bell in the HBO series The Wire when he asks a subordinate incredulously, “Is you takin’ notes on a criminal fuckin’ conspiracy?” If allegations are accurate, Giuliani’s team of misfit henchmen were literally writing down the names of people they planned to bribe and the sums each would receive, then going out and trying to bribe them. They even wrote to each other about the need to ensure—illegally, prosecutors say—that their identities remained hidden. “This is what happens when you become visible . . . the buzzards descend,” a Parnas associate told him when media coverage of GEP’s America First donation began to swirl. “That’s why we need to stay under the radar,” Parnas replied.

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AS we write this, Pues’s lawsuit against Parnas, Fruman, and GEP is still ongoing. To the extent that it alleges anything illegal in the manner in which they’ve financed the president’s political operation, the parties involved all flatly deny any wrongdoing. But every day that lawsuit goes on is a day when more incriminating information might emerge—the type of information that led the FBI to this case in the first place. It’s rare that reporters and the public get such an unvarnished view into the inner workings of an international political and business operation the way we have in this saga. The fact that we have is a testament to just how ham-fisted Parnas and Fruman have been throughout this ordeal—in undertaking the venture with hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills, in blaring their meetings with high-profile Trumpworld figures across public social media pages, and in issuing blanket denials of credible legal allegations, only for elements of those allegations to be confirmed by records released in the course of the very legal disputes they didn’t bother to resolve before embarking on this new business venture.

That’s been a godsend for us. Just as the chaotic and amateurish operations of much of the Trump administration have provided us with internal details that would’ve stayed well out of the limelight in any prior administration, the bumbling business practices of Global Energy Producers and its executives have served, unintentionally, to give us a rare, unvarnished view of how they’ve gone about monetizing their political connections.

Such efforts are of course present in any administration. Indeed, political corruption is as old as government itself. Trump’s plan to export more natural gas to Europe is just the sort of policy that, in any era in Washington, would attract pigs to the trough as companies recognize lucrative business opportunities in the offing.

What sets the Trump era apart is the rank incompetence of the people looking to cash in on such opportunities. The simple process of googling an address in some FEC forms set off a series of investigative stories that would expose incredible details about people looking to get rich off Trump. And it wouldn’t have been possible if they hadn’t been so sloppy about it. That’s great for us reporters. But it doesn’t inspire confidence in the administrative abilities of our present leaders that Trumpworld can’t even seem to do corruption right.

“AN AVERAGE NOBODY”

The United Talent Agency’s after-party at the 2019 White House Correspondents’ Dinner had a fairly impressive guest list. The ranking Democrats on the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees stopped by. Their former colleague Al Franken was there too. The Daily Show comedian Aasif Mandvi made the rounds, as did the actress Danielle Panabaker. The media industry heavyweights Wolf Blitzer, Dana Bash, Jake Tapper, and Ali Velshi were all spotted. Even Sir Kim Darroch, the United Kingdom’s ambassador to the United States, dropped in for high-end cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.

Also in the crowd was the former White House press secretary Sean Spicer. But he didn’t appear to be doing much partying. Instead, he was sticking a microphone in the faces of other high-profile partygoers as he jostled for on-camera interviews in his capacity as a correspondent for the syndicated television newsmagazine Extra. The place was packed, and pretty soon Spicer’s interviews were getting in the way. The hosts of the party told Spicer that if he wanted to interview guests, he’d have to step out on the sidewalk. “He was getting in the way of guests trying to move around the party and basically just killing the vibe,” one of the party hosts later told us. “It was so sad and just the perfect microcosm of his career falloff.”

We can’t say whether Spicer was sufficiently humiliated. But we were humiliated for him. It was painful to watch. It wasn’t Spicer’s first cringe-worthy Extra assignment either. A couple months earlier, he interviewed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on the latter’s lawn. Spicer asked Pompeo about his musical tastes and which film should win Best Picture at the Oscars.

Spicer’s predecessors in previous White Houses went on to be the top communications executives for Fortune 500 companies, to run highly successful public relations firms, or to host their own cable news programs. And here was Spicer, groveling for thirty seconds of camera time with people who, after a stint in any prior administration, would’ve been his peers in the eyes of D.C. society and the city’s political industry.

It was a dramatic fall from grace for the man who, while running communications for the pre-Trump Republican National Committee as a “chief strategist,” was widely liked and respected by the reporters he worked with on a daily basis. His seven-month stint as White House spokesman, starting right at the beginning with his bald-faced lies about Trump’s inauguration crowd size and his later bizarre assertions about Syria and Hitler’s “Holocaust centers,” shattered all of that goodwill and turned Spicer into a national laughingstock.

To his credit, Spicer was a good sport about it. So when he got the opportunity to be a contestant on the wildly popular game show Dancing with the Stars, he fully embraced it. He remained a laughingstock, but at times it was tough to tell whether his former colleagues and professional acquaintances were laughing at him or with him. In his opening night appearance on the show, Spicer burst onstage in white pants and an absurd, frilly lime-green top that looked like an outfit for a belly dancer in a science fiction movie. He nonetheless grinned from ear to ear as he made his reappearance on national television, seeming to revel in finally being able to strut for the camera without a cable news host or a roomful of angry reporters berating him.

Washington heaved a collective groan when Spicer’s first DWTS episode aired. And it only got sadder when he took it upon himself to take the skills he honed during a lifetime in the political trenches and put them to work in an effort to win a whole new, and wholly absurd, democratic contest. Spicer was going to win this thing, and he was going to do it with thoroughly Trumpian tactics and with the support, literally, of Trump’s political operation. When, after the first episode aired, Mike Huckabee suggested that a Spicer win would “create an emotional meltdown in Hollyweird,” Spicer went full culture war in an effort to secure his advancement on a television game show. “Clearly the judges aren’t going to be with me,” he complained in a since-deleted retweet of Huckabee. “Let’s send a message to #Hollywood that those of us who stand for #Christ won’t be discounted.” Over the next few weeks, Spicer’s “candidacy” turned into a minor cause célèbre for the Trump political operation. He even received an official endorsement from America First Action, the Trump campaign’s official super PAC. That’s right, a political group with an eight-figure budget was, right as election season heated up, throwing its weight behind a Dancing with the Stars candidate. As we write this, Spicer has just been eliminated from the season’s competition—though he did receive a pat-on-the-back tweet from Trump, one stating that he was “proud” of Sean’s stint, on his way out the DWTS door.

Spicer is perhaps the best illustration, though certainly not the only one, of the inevitable consequences of service to Trump by those who volunteer for such duty. High-profile people who have served in the highest echelons of his administration have been stuck with post-government work in the various political arms of Trumpworld—the campaign, the super PACs, the dark money groups. Aside from organizations that are explicitly pro-Trump, there is little professional upside to having served in the Trump administration—unless of course your career plan includes a stint on a celebrity dancing show. And that’s assuming you can make it out without landing under indictment or in federal prison—no sure thing when serving this president.

In prior administrations, senior White House positions were springboards to extremely lucrative jobs in corporate America. With very few exceptions, almost no Trump White House officials have managed to secure C-suite private sector gigs after leaving the president’s employ. Their boss’s stink has rubbed off on them.

And despite demanding unquestioning loyalty from those he employs, Trump is very stingy about reciprocating. “We’re all on our own, man,” as Michael Caputo, a 2016 Trump campaign adviser, told us in late March 2019.

In the years since Trump’s election, Caputo had become a peripheral figure in the Trump-Russia investigations and had been interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team. Because he had ended up on the wrong end of negative publicity, Caputo’s legal costs had ballooned to upwards of $200,000, his business had closed two of its offices, he laid off half of his workforce, and his company said farewell to about three-quarters of its client base. If Trump hadn’t won, there’d be no Mueller probe, and Caputo would have dodged the otherwise inevitable federal crosshairs. “Why did my family, my children, myself, my company, my employees, my clients, why did they all get trashed?” Caputo asked rhetorically.

In early 2018, Trump set up a legal defense fund to cover just those sorts of costs for his White House subordinates and other allies caught up in the Mueller probe. The Patriot Legal Expense Fund Trust, as the group was officially dubbed, brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars from high-figure Republican donors such as the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson.

Whom that money actually supported remains more or less a mystery. Transparency requirements are lax for legal defense funds, so the group never had to say whose legal bills it actually paid. But we do know that Caputo was not among its beneficiaries, even though he stayed loyal to the president to the end and consistently maintained that the whole Mueller probe was a sham.

Caputo at least made it out alive and a free man, with a salvageable reputation and without any sort of excommunication from Trumpland. Indeed, shortly after the Mueller report was finally sent to the Justice Department, Trump invited Caputo and his family members over for a private meet and greet in the Oval Office. Others weren’t so lucky.

Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Rob Porter, Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos, Rex Tillerson, John Kelly, Steve Bannon, Kirstjen Nielsen, Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, John Bolton, Kelly Sadler, David Shulkin, Anthony Scaramucci, and legions of others who’ve toiled away in the service of the president but didn’t make it into this book—they’ve all been taken down a peg or humiliated one way or another, all because they opted to associate with DJT. President Trump, a man who prizes loyalty and genuflection as if it were a rare form of oxygen, has already sicced legal threats on several former “loyalists” since his presidency began.

For all the bodies piled up on the street, some Trump alums did manage to level up into prominent and lucrative post-administration gigs. Hope Hicks landed a gig as Fox Corporation’s top communications executive. Josh Raffel, a former consigliere to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, is running comms for the e-cig giant Juul. Other senior officials managed to earn back spots at the companies they’d left to join the White House. Reince Priebus is back at his white-shoe Milwaukee law firm. The former chief White House economist Gary Cohn landed a plum gig at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. And some mid-level Trumpworld operatives secured gigs in various arms of D.C.’s political economy.

But by and large, those leaving Trump’s administration are shunned by the commanding heights of American business and culture to a far greater degree than officials in any prior White House. Many of them can’t even get a meal in public without being hounded by angry citizens.

But it’s not, we suspect, just the baggage that comes with serving such a gleefully divisive figure that lands these folks in their unfortunate employment (and dining) predicaments. It’s the general sense, among both those who follow political events as closely as we do and the American public more generally, that something in Trump’s Washington is broken.

During the hectic months of mid-2017, unquestionably the most exhausting and excruciating time to be covering White House politics, we co-opted a term to describe the unending shitshow that surrounded us and in which we were forced to immerse ourselves daily. We called it “omnishambles,” a convergence of complete chaos, ineptitude, and scandal in which few really know what’s going on and fewer still what will come next. In the omnishambles presidency, no one is really steering the ship. The captain is shit-faced, and we’re all just hoping that the wind blows us past that next looming iceberg.

If, like us, you feel overwhelmed by political events these days, it’s a product of that constant, mind-numbing dysfunction. Trump himself is of course to blame for the state of things in Washington. But just as important to comprehending the depths of this national moment of insanity is the ridiculous crew of minions and misfits he’s brought along for the ride. If he’s at the tiller, they’re manning the oars. And they’re rushing us full speed ahead to some unknown but almost assuredly disastrous destination.

For us, the Trump era has made for a weird mix of emotions. There’s a perversely proportional relationship between the horrors and dysfunction of daily life in Washington and the professional and financial benefits accorded to the town’s press corp. The worse things get, the more people want to hear us describe how bad they are. BuzzFeed’s editor in chief, Ben Smith, once relayed an anecdote from a friend in Brazilian political journalism. “You could tell his country was in political crisis because everyone was talking about politics all the time,” Smith wrote. “In a normal country, nobody cares about politics.”

It follows that in a normal country there’s much less demand for political journalism—for folks like us. As reporters, we sometimes crave dysfunction because it gives us something to write about, entertaining and compelling stories about the people and institutions degrading political life in this country. As Americans and normal, non-sociopathic everyday people, we sometimes wish we were unemployed, or at the very least bored.

And as much as the man at the top has set the tone for this ridiculous moment in American history, it’s all the people below him who have really sustained our bylines over the past few years. You can write only so many stories about the president of the United States. Below him lies a seemingly unending trail of political toxic waste dumped by those ostensibly brought to Washington to drain the swamp they’re now poisoning.

As a plurality of these minions, misfits, and co-conspirators can attest, Donald J. Trump has spent a lifetime chewing people up and hacking them out with some bile to boot. They’re not the victims you should feel sorry for, of course. Still, if there’s any pathos to the denizens of Trumpworld, it’s that—in keeping with the inspiration for the book you’re now done reading—most every bagman and water carrier for this president ends up a Henry Hill.

“We ran everything,” Hill, played by Ray Liotta, says at the very end of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. “Everybody had their hands out. Everything was for the taking. And now it’s all over. And that’s the hardest part. Today, everything is different. There’s no action. I have to wait around like everyone else . . . I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

LACH

I’ve been blessed to work under some amazing bosses and editors during my decade-plus in Washington, including Matt Sheffield, Rob Bluey, Mike Gonzalez, Matt Continetti, Mike Goldfarb, Aaron Harison, John Avlon, Noah Shachtman, Jackie Kucinich, and Sam Stein. I owe a tremendous debt to each of them for their mentorship and guidance, and for constantly helping to improve my work.

I wouldn’t have made it to Washington but for the patience and empathy of Oxford Academy’s Leon Palmieri, Zack Hayden, Phil Cocchiola, Phil Davis, and Mike Susi. And I owe the joy I get in being a professional gadfly to Hamilton College’s Ted Eismeier. Keith Urbahn, Matt Latimer, and their team of consummate professionals at Javelin were instrumental in getting this book across the finish line, and we could not have done it without them.

Thank you to Anna and Lou for putting up with long hours of writing and the numerous bouts of exasperation and exhaustion. And to Griff for always giving me the perspective of a smart person who’s not steeped in this daily insanity.

And the most eternal, undying, inexpressible gratitude to Mom and Dad, to whom I owe everything and whom I will never be able to sufficiently thank or repay. I love you guys.

SWIN

Firstly, I’d like to thank the Deep State. Keep up the good work, especially you, “Derek.” (Derek knows why.)

I’d also like to thank my bosses over the years—such as but certainly not limited to Noah Shachtman, John Avlon, Jackie Kucinich, Sam Stein (in spite of his numerous dad jokes), David Corn, Nick Baumann, Dan Schulman, Monika Bauerlein, and Clara Jeffery—for not firing me when they had the chance(s).

To my mom, Parita; my dad, Apinya; my sister, “Tammy”; my second mom and childhood babysitter, Uam; and the rest of my sprawling, overachieving family—from Boston to Bangkok—for somehow never making me feel like the idiot son (even though I am 150 percent the dumbest, least impressive one in the family.)

I owe you guys—and Alisa and Chris!—the world, and then some. I am what I am because of your sacrifices and your support. I hope I’ll earn it someday.

On an unusually earnest note, I would like to extend the warmest of thanks to my lovely wife, Elizabeth Nolan Brown, for being a better person than I am, a superior writer and thinker, and the person who makes this all worth it. Also, thank you, babe, for bringing ragdoll cats into my life. (I know they can’t read this, but Esme and Gemini, you guys get shout-outs, too. Gemini, stop stealing your sister’s food, I’m serious.) And shout-out to the Ohio contingent—see you at Christmas, Keith, Diane, Becca, Geoff, Baby Oliver, and the whole crew!

I would like to thank my closest of friends; there are too many of you to count and list, and you know who the hell you are, but I’m going to at least start by thanking Timothy K. Mak, because he was best man at my wedding, and he said he would be mad if he didn’t get an acknowledgment. Dear friends such as Julius Taranto, Wesley Lowery, Dave Weigel, Sahil Kapur, Byron Tau, Jonathan Swan, Robbie Suavey, Carrie Soave, Justin Webster, Sam Ruchlewicz, John Hudson, and all you other idiots who are gonna text me like “What the hell, man” for not putting your name in here will be in my heart forever as well, for all your love and carousing.

Raising a shot glass to my wonderful reporting partners in crime, such as Betsy Woodruff, Erin Banco, Max Tani, and so forth, whose ideas I’ve all stolen for this book, leaving them bitter, forever alone, and penniless. (Don’t sue, please.)

And I’d like to tip my hat to people in this godless, depraved business of ours who were gracious and warm to me back when I was a brat and less than nothing, such as Jason Fagone, Tara McKelvey, Adam Serwer, Ron Rosenbaum, Maggie Haberman, Bill Press, the Bangkok Post crew (hope you’re seeing this one, fellas!), Marc Cooper, and Peter Suderman, among other stand-up folks. Furthermore, this book is un-dedicated to all the high-school-cafeteria-clique, overfed, undersourced, backbiting, supremely unimpressive members of an effete media class. (You know who you are.)

To Dan Spinelli, our intrepid fact checker for Sinking in the Swamp—Lachlan and I owe you about twelve rounds of thank-you drinks. Cash that in sometime this decade, okay?

And to our agents (Keith and Matt), book editors (Wendy and Terezia), mentors, teachers, and professors who made this all possible, I truly hope we were only minor-to-moderate pains in the ass.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Lachlan Markay and Asawin "Swin" Suebsaeng are investigative and White House reporters for The Daily Beast. Before joining the publication, Suebsaeng worked for Mother Jones and the Bangkok Post, and Markay wrote for the Washington Free Beacon and the Heritage Foundation. NPR has compared the unlikely duo to "Bert and Ernie." Trump acolyte Sebastian Gorka has accused one of them of having a cocaine habit and the other of having no moral center.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Another Shitstorm in Fucktown

Tic Tacs and Uncle Toms

Joe, Mika, and “That Bitch with the Tranny Dad”

Talking the Talk

“Okay, Lad, That’s Enough”

“Get Him the Fuck Away from Me”

Raining on the POTUS Parade

“Did You See This Crap?”

“Why Would I Talk to You?”

“Get Me a Plan!”

“I Wish Him the Very Best”

“Definitely Somebody Knifing Him”

“She’s Been Getting Fatter?”

“Lovely Jennifer”

“I Don’t Know the Truth”

“Fake News Specialists”

“He Can’t Handle Jail”

“Oh, We’ll Find It”

“You’re a Piece of Trash”

Make America Rain Again

“I Have No Clients Whatsoever”

“That Chapter Isn’t Closed”

“An Average Nobody”

Acknowledgments

About the Authors