After five days of suspense, the president-elect decided to split the baby. He named Priebus his chief of staff and Bannon his chief strategist and senior counselor. (Bannon received top billing in the press release, sending gasps through the tea leaf readers in Washington.) Trump had not yet been sworn in, but already he had created warring power centers in his White House.
THOUGH NOT AN ELECTED OFFICIAL, THE WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF has long been considered the second-most powerful figure in Washington. Traditionally, the chief is given supremacy to organize, authorize, hire, fire, and speak on behalf of the president. The position is that of manager, decision shaper, and ultimate gatekeeper, filtering the flow of people and information reaching the Oval Office so that a time-constrained president is met only with the most pressing matters.
Priebus knew that would not be his job description.
Having spent the past four months traveling with Trump and observing his management style, Priebus realized that the president-elect would never empower someone to run such a structured enterprise. Anyone who read his books or watched his television show knew that Trump thrived on turmoil and dissent, competing viewpoints and warring personalities. He hated to be overbooked; he wanted to go into the office with a wide-open schedule each day and see what happened.
No staff member, regardless of title, was going to change that.
To the extent it was possible to curb Trump’s instincts toward chaos, the chief of staff position required a strong hand, someone who could go nose to nose with the president and talk him down if necessary. But Priebus was never going to be that person. Meek and mild-mannered, he had thrived as party chairman precisely because of the job’s accommodating nature. He spent most of his days doing maintenance: donors, RNC members, elected officials, activist groups. Priebus’s job as chairman had been, above all, to raise money, keep the peace, and win elections. By those metrics, he had been a historic success.
Recognizing all this, the chairman’s friends warned him not to take the chief of staff’s job. Ride into the sunset, they urged him. Give some paid speeches. Write a book. Go make a million bucks a at some law firm or lobbying office. Steer clear of the shitshow.
The warnings were always the same. And so was Priebus’s response: “We need a sane voice in the Oval Office,” he told friends. “There has to be a reasonable person in the room with him.”
Sane and reasonable, Priebus was. But he lacked the authority, the swagger, the piss-and-vinegar personality needed to rule Trump’s White House. And he knew it.
Shortly after Thanksgiving, Priebus sat down for a private dinner with former Bush 43 chief of staff Josh Bolten. They were at Bolten’s downtown office, in a conference room overlooking Lafayette Square and the White House. Carefully arranged around the table were four-by-six cards with the titles of the key assistants to the president as well as some of the deputy assistants whom Bolten considered important—a system nearly identical to the one used by the Obama White House.
As they munched on takeout food, Bolten explained all the positions to Priebus and advised him on which were the most critical for him to fill personally—jobs where he needed experienced people, not just Trump loyalists, who could fit into a manageable structure. “Either you create the org chart and you fill in these boxes, or someone else will,” Bolten warned. “And you’ll have a very hard time running the White House.”
Bolten also described the “Andy Card Principle,” named for his predecessor as Bush’s chief: “There’s a difference between wanting to be in a meeting and needing to be in a meeting.” It would be his role, Bolten told Priebus, to direct traffic and dictate an efficient schedule.
Priebus listened politely. But he seemed distant, even disinterested. It wasn’t that he didn’t appreciate the advice. But he knew that much of what Bolten was prescribing was implausible. Priebus had been allowed to hire a deputy, his RNC chief of staff, Katie Walsh, as a security blanket who could reaffirm him and look out for his interests. But most of the other positions Bolten was describing would be filled by Trump or by members of his inner circle.
“He had already, I think, relegated himself to an executive assistant role rather than the chief of staff, the person that actually organized and ran the White House,” Bolten recalls of Priebus. “He did not treat himself as the chief of staff, and it was probably because his boss was unwilling to treat him as chief of staff.”
The one person excited for Priebus was his old friend from Wisconsin, the Speaker of the House. They went back decades and had served as mutual sounding boards and grief counselors throughout the 2016 campaign. With changes to their party gusting all around them, Ryan and Priebus clung to each other, a buddy system that did not escape the watchful eye of Trump.
After ensuring his own survival on Election Night, Ryan now saw as his new concern the perching of angels and devils on the new president’s shoulders. He was horrified at the prospect of Bannon running the White House. As a self-proclaimed figurehead of the “alt-right,” an internet movement of knuckle-dragging misfits who rejected the classical liberal philosophies that underpinned modern conservatism, Bannon had used Breitbart to stoke the embers of xenophobia that smoldered beneath the tinder of nationalism.
Not only that, but Bannon had led a ruthless onslaught against the GOP itself, with Ryan occupying an honored place in Breitbart’s crosshairs. On editorial calls with the outlet’s reporters during the 2016 campaign, Bannon would refer to Ryan as “the enemy,” according to reporting by journalist Jonathan Swan, and plot for his ouster as Speaker.7 Swan quoted one former Breitbart staffer who said Bannon “thinks Paul Ryan is part of a conspiracy with George Soros and Paul Singer, in which elitists want to bring one world government.”
Even though they had pretended to make up and play nice after the election, Ryan could not stomach the idea of Bannon as chief of staff. The selection of Priebus, then, gave the Speaker great comfort. He would have an ally inside the Oval Office who could help him to influence the president’s thinking.
None of this was lost on the House Freedom Caucus. They had long resented Ryan for his undermining of the GOP nominee. Now they feared the Speaker, whom Trump likened to “a fine wine” after their postelection rapprochement, would be steering the president’s agenda while they, who had stood publicly behind Trump through his tribulations, would be treated as second-class legislative citizens.8
This was foreshadowed by a December incident in which Jordan informed Ryan of his intention to proceed with an effort to impeach the IRS commissioner. Ryan’s office objected, and when Jordan ignored them, the Freedom Caucus chairman got a sudden call from Priebus (whose phone number Jordan didn’t recognize), asking him to please hold back. Jordan pushed ahead, all the more motivated after Ryan’s apparent decision to enlist Priebus to stop him. (Jordan’s resolution was rejected on the House floor and referred back to committee.)
The thought of being sidelined by a Ryan-Priebus axis was especially irksome to Mark Meadows. The North Carolina congressman had, in private, been as skeptical of Trump as anyone. The month before the convention, Meadows told friends in the Freedom Caucus that he was considering not going to Cleveland, despite being a delegate, because he feared living with the legacy of nominating the erratic Trump. As the campaign progressed, Meadows was instrumental in stifling criticisms of the GOP nominee that brewed within the Freedom Caucus. He told his comrades that when Trump lost—not if, but when—the base would be out for blood. Did they want to be blamed for Trump’s loss? Or did they want Ryan to own it?