The transition’s official vetting process varied from minimal to nonexistent, depending on the candidate. Most important in researching one’s background was a review of news articles and social media accounts to see whether he or she had ever said anything derogatory about Trump. One senior Trump adviser recalled, “People filled in paperwork on the airplane on their way down to the inauguration. . . . Well, they might as well have. They didn’t think about transition until literally the day they started the job.
“In hockey,” this official added, “you can lose a knee playing with a lot of inexperienced people. That’s how this has felt.”
Behind the scenes, Rick Gates, who had worked on the campaign as chairman Paul Manafort’s deputy, was putting together the inauguration. Gates and Manafort were longtime lobbying partners, specializing in representing foreign governments in shady plots, and when Manafort was fired from the campaign in August 2016, Trump figured his No. 2 would leave with him. Trump strongly disliked and distrusted Gates, due in part to a toxic reaction he had to a poll Gates had commissioned. Trump didn’t like the survey’s results, which rated his popularity as low, and felt Gates was cheating the campaign by paying the pollster for such junk. “Gates gives me the creeps,” Trump told some associates.
But Gates had a powerful champion in Thomas Barrack, who chaired the Presidential Inaugural Committee. Trump had no idea Gates was quietly helping Barrack direct the inaugural festivities until one night sometime in the middle of the transition when the president-elect overheard his wife, Melania, talking about him. At the same time, Johnny McEntee, twenty-six, Trump’s personal assistant and body man, had arrived at the Trumps’ penthouse to bring the president-elect a sub sandwich for dinner. In the living room, Melania and Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a friend of the incoming first lady’s who was helping plan inaugural events, were sitting on a sofa talking about inauguration plans. Trump walked into the room to get his sandwich from McEntee just as he heard Melania say the name Rick.
“Rick? Rick who?” Trump asked his wife.
“Rick Gates,” she said.
Trump lost it. He started yelling.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked.
Trump decided to fire Gates on the spot and turned to McEntee and said, “Johnny, get with Melania. You’re the executive director.”
By all accounts, McEntee was an excellent body man. Since joining the campaign before the primaries, he had spent most of his waking hours at Trump’s side. He looked up to the boss, was loyal to the family, and did not leak to reporters. McEntee had Hollywood good looks, just the kind of image Trump sought to project. He was athletic, too, having played quarterback for the University of Connecticut Huskies and even becoming something of a YouTube sensation for a viral video of football trick shots.
McEntee, however, had precisely zero experience in running a presidential inaugural. This was a $107 million operation, not merely a grand celebration of Trump’s election, but also a projection to the nation of the new president’s values and goals for governing. Within a few hours, after Barrack persuaded Trump to reverse his snap decision and simply put up with Gates for a little longer, McEntee was back to being the body guy and would move with Trump to Washington.
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The president-elect completely disregarded government ethics and the law. Ivanka and Kushner were eager to leave their mark on Washington and to serve in the West Wing, a role they thought would burnish the personal brands they had so carefully cultivated back in New York. Some Trump advisers saw this as a risky proposition, certain to invite cries of nepotism and create an untenable working environment. Yet even before the inauguration, no one felt they could tell the kids—among some West Wing colleagues, Ivanka and Kushner were called just that, the kids—no.
“There’s some things in life, when you shoot, you better kill. I knew that this was not a winning effort to stop the kids from coming into the West Wing,” recalled one of their colleagues. “They were dead set on coming, and there was nothing anyone was going to do about it. And I think everyone understood that.”
White House lawyers were concerned that Ivanka’s business interests created potentially huge ethical quagmires. In addition to her clothing company, she was involved in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which could easily become a direct conflict with her White House role.
The president had the broad authority to name his relatives to join the White House staff. Antinepotism laws barred a president only from appointing family members to agency jobs, according to a ruling from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Ivanka was envisioning a norm-breaking role for herself. She wanted special treatment and sought to be immune from all of the cumbersome rules for government jobs, which she thought she could achieve by becoming an informal “volunteer” adviser.
Even Trump had mixed feelings about whether it was a good idea for his daughter and son-in-law to follow him into the city he derided as a swamp. “Why would you want to kill yourself and come to Washington, D.C., and get shot up by all these media killers?” Trump wondered aloud to some of his advisers. But Trump couldn’t say no to the kids, either. He wanted family around.
As the inauguration neared, Trump did not fully trust all of the aides he was hiring. He did not know whether they were coming to work for him as Trump devotees or whether he was simply their means to a job in the White House, the ultimate résumé line for any political operative. His suspicions regularly burst into the open, including one evening shortly before Christmas at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach. On December 19, the day the Electoral College electors were certified, officially affirming Trump’s victory, the president-elect celebrated over dinner with seven of his top aides: Priebus, Bannon, deputy campaign manager Dave Bossie, communications adviser Hope Hicks, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, social media director Dan Scavino, and Priebus’s deputy, Katie Walsh. The eight of them sat around the table, and when the conversation turned to personnel matters, Trump impressed upon his team the importance of loyalty. As they ticked through candidates for various jobs, the president-elect repeatedly asked, “Is he loyal?” “Is she loyal?”
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Trump spent the week between Christmas and New Year’s at Mar-a-Lago, accompanied by a slimmed-down cadre of aides. The morning of December 29, as the president-elect enjoyed some golf at one of his nearby courses, CNN turned to a breaking story: “White House announces retaliation against Russia.” The Obama administration had decided to punish Russia for interfering in the 2016 election, shuttering two Russian compounds in the United States and ejecting thirty-five diplomats suspected of spying.
Trump was angry when he learned the news. He felt it was one thing for Clinton’s advisers and allies to accuse Russia of meddling in the election; he could just accuse the Democrats of sour grapes. But retaliatory action against Russia by the U.S. government effectively confirmed that Russia had actually interfered in the election—and that, Trump believed, raised doubts about his own victory.