McIntosh hoped that Carrier would be a “one-off thing,” but there was evidence suggesting otherwise. Ten days after the election, Bannon put the party on notice in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter. “We’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” he boasted. “The conservatives are going to go crazy. I’m the guy pushing a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. With negative interest rates throughout the world, it’s the greatest opportunity to rebuild everything. Ship yards, iron works, get them all jacked up. We’re just going to throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks. It will be as exciting as the 1930s, greater than the Reagan revolution—conservatives, plus populists, in an economic nationalist movement.”10
Bannon was correct that traditional conservatives wouldn’t support the agenda he described. But in the era of Trump, the very definition of conservatism was up for grabs. Populism had become the new buzzword on the right; a few days after the election, Jordan made repeated references to “populist-conservative policy,” advocating the suddenly chic notion of a marriage between Trump’s Everyman appeal and the Tea Party’s ideological exactitude.
Yet it was never clear that such a merger was even possible. “Populism as an ideology is not ideological,” Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, said before Trump took office. “Populism basically says, ‘There’s a parade coming down the street and I’d better get out there because I’m their leader.’”
Trump’s threat to penalize companies that shipped jobs overseas might have excited a blue-collar worker in rural, red America, but the idea was fundamentally incompatible with the precepts preached by the elected Republican who represented that worker’s district. The politician in question might agonize over the violation of conservative orthodoxy, but when regular people are forced to choose between their livelihoods and a set of abstract principles, it’s a no-brainer. To that point: If Pence, who was once arguably the most ideological Republican in Congress, could be persuaded by Trump to stop supporting multinational trade deals while offering tax breaks to Carrier, it wasn’t hard to imagine Republican lawmakers writ large adapting to a new and different mandate from their constituents.
To combat this, Ryan had a plan: He would pack the GOP government’s schedule so full that Trump wouldn’t have time to deviate from party orthodoxy.
In mid-December, the Speaker arrived at Trump Tower carrying a Gantt chart with a meticulously detailed agenda for the year ahead. With the help of McConnell, Ryan had laid out on paper the policy initiatives, the key players, and the deadlines that would guide the GOP’s lawmaking process in 2017. He spent nearly three hours walking Trump and his senior staff through the chart, and to his surprise, the president-elect was engaged throughout.
Bannon, no fan of Ryan’s, spoke up to warn the president-elect of what he was committing to. “You realize that if you sign onto this, this is what we’ll be doing for the next year,” he said.
“I got it, I got it,” Trump replied. He looked at Ryan and shrugged. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
FOR MUCH OF THE YEAR PRIOR TO TRUMP’S ELECTION, JOURNALISTS, donors, lobbyists, and political professions had heard rumblings of the candidate’s shady association with Russia. The thrust of the speculation centered on his business dealings—namely, the attempt to build a Trump Tower in Moscow—and on the notion that he was hiding his tax returns because they would show a pattern of bribes and kickbacks involving foreign nationals. The theory of a Trump-Kremlin nexus was further fueled by his litany of head-snappingly suspicious comments, such as when he declared at a July 2016 press conference, “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find [Clinton’s] 30,000 emails that are missing.”
Trump aides knew that reporters and political rivals were investigating these questions. What they didn’t know was that a former British MI6 agent, Christopher Steele, was secretly compiling a dossier of intelligence reports on Russia’s relationship with Trump.
A respected veteran of undercover operations in Moscow, Steele had been contracted twice by the American political research firm Fusion GPS. The first time, in October 2015, his work was underwritten by the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative media outlet financed by Republican megadonor Paul Singer, a patron of Rubio’s campaign. The second time, in April 2016, Steele’s services were purchased through Fusion GPS by a lawyer working on behalf of Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. In both cases, Steele’s objective was the same: getting to the bottom of the Trump-Russia connection.
What Steele’s sources told him was so startling that he contacted American law enforcement to pass along the intelligence: Trump was in the pocket of Moscow. The Republican nominee’s team, Steele’s sources said, was actively coordinating with the Russian government, which had compromising information to wield against Trump. According to sworn testimony by Fusion GPS employees and interviews given by Steele’s associates, he believed his findings constituted a national security threat, hence his decision to share them with old counterparts in U.S. intelligence.11
As Steele’s warning slowly worked its way through the American law enforcement apparatus, then-CIA director John Brennan was busy launching his own investigation into the Republican nominee’s ties to Russia. He suspected that the Kremlin was not just interfering in the U.S. election but was actively boosting Trump, possibly with assistance from the Republican nominee’s campaign.
Despite mounting speculation around Washington about the existence of these inquiries, nothing was made public prior to Election Day. Democrats would later groan that Obama had bottled up the news of Brennan’s probe, fearing the optics of a politically motivated leak that would fuel Trump’s theorizing about a “rigged election.”
On January 10, ten days before Trump was to take office, CNN reported that both he and Obama had been briefed on classified documents that “included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information” on Trump.12
CNN did not publish the allegations, but BuzzFeed did.
Among the other findings in his dossier, Steele reported that Russia had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Trump for at least five years; that his team had accepted “a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin” on his political opponents; that several of Trump’s lieutenants had acted as intermediaries; and that the Russian government possessed compromising information, or kompromat, on Trump himself.
At the heart of the kompromat were allegations of “perverted sexual acts” that had been recorded by the Russian government. One particularly salacious claim was that back in 2013, while staying in the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow, Trump had paid Russian prostitutes to urinate on a bed that the Obamas had slept in.
Trump, for his part, seemed more bemused than angry by the details of the Steele Dossier. “Does anyone really believe that story?” the president-elect said at a January 11 press conference. “I’m also very much of a germaphobe, by the way.”13
Trump’s team was less sanguine. On the evening BuzzFeed published the dossier, Priebus and Bannon cornered Michael Cohen inside the president-elect’s personal office on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower. The dossier reported that Cohen had in August 2016 met with “Kremlin officials” in Prague on behalf of Trump to discuss coordinated efforts against Clinton. It was mortally dangerous intelligence, if true—and Priebus and Bannon thought it might very well be.