Priebus, a trained lawyer, sat Cohen down and began deposing him. It was a vivid scene, with members of the transition team frozen outside the office watching the confrontation unfold. Priebus interrogated Cohen on his specific whereabouts for the entire month of August 2016, and demanded to know every country he’d ever visited in Europe. Cohen grew increasingly heated during the exchange, swearing that he had never been to Prague in his entire life.
“Prove it,” Priebus said. “Go get your passport and show us.”
Cohen, a tenant of Trump Tower, obliged them. Returning a short time later with his passport, he handed it to Priebus. There was no stamp from the Czech Republic.
Priebus, Bannon, and other top incoming White House officials were satisfied that Cohen was telling the truth. But they remained deeply wary of him. Everyone who had spent time around Trump had heard him complain about the recklessness of his personal lawyer. “Michael’s supposed to be the ‘fixer,’” Trump liked to say. “But he causes more problems than he fixes.”
Chapter Nineteen
January 2017
“Did you see my tweets?”
THE WEATHER WAS ALL TOO APPROPRIATE. WHEREAS EIGHT YEARS earlier vivid sunshine had illuminated Barack Obama’s inaugural address, storm clouds moved in over Washington as Donald Trump took the oath of office to become America’s forty-fifth president. Not a minute into his speech, the skies dimmed and rain began to fall. His would be fairly described as the angriest, the gloomiest, the most ominous inaugural address ever delivered.
“Today, we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another or from one party to another, but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C., and giving it back to you, the people,” Trump declared.1
“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen before.”
Trump continued, “Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. These are just and reasonable demands of righteous people and a righteous public. But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists. Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system flush with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge; and the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.
“This American carnage,” the president said, “stops right here and stops right now.”
TRUMP COULD BE EXCUSED FOR NOT DIVING INTO POLICY SPECIFICS IN an inaugural address. But the sweeping condemnations and blanket pronouncements were startling given the lack of nuance. While he no doubt connected with many Americans on an emotional level, the intellectual corruption of his remarks was breathtaking.
As of January 2017, violent crime rates had dropped precipitously from their modern high in 1991.2 More people had jobs in the United States than ever before. Inflation-adjusted wages were higher than at any point in the country’s history. The United States remained the wealthiest nation in the world by gross domestic product. And while there certainly were some “rusted-out factories” blighting the landscape of middle America, the manufacturing sector had come roaring back in the years since the Great Recession. As of 2017, U.S. manufacturing exports were at an all-time high, thanks in no small part to the Bush-Obama bailout of Detroit’s automakers, which had more than doubled their exports between 2009 and 2014.3
Other key sections of the president’s speech were similarly lacking in context.
When he decried “the very sad depletion of our military,” Trump failed to mention the role of the Republican-authorized sequestration cuts, preferred by conservatives to the alternative of a major budget compromise with the White House that could have raised tax revenues by closing loopholes for the wealthiest earners only.
When he said, “Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength,” warning against “the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs,” Trump denied not just his personal history of developing products overseas, but also the net benefits of international commerce. Global prosperity had contributed tremendously to American wealth, and while trade deals had hurt a certain segment of the population, they were hardly the chief driver of domestic job loss. In December 2016, the Financial Times reported that of the estimated 5.6 million manufacturing jobs lost between 2000 and 2010, “85 percent of these jobs losses are actually attributable to technological change—largely automation—rather than international trade.”4
And when he said, “We have defended other nations’ borders while refusing to defend our own,” Trump ignored the fact that Obama deported more illegal immigrants than any president in U.S. history and “more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century,” according to ABC News.5 Also missing: the history of how conservatives rejected the 2013 Senate bill, which offered an unprecedented influx of border agents, without offering any alternative in the House. Neither party had been innocent when it came to playing politics with immigration.
Trump was selling plenty of evocative sound bites but few fact-based assessments—and even fewer practical solutions.
The speech was, however, coherent in presenting a worldview that had remained consistent from the moment Trump first began flirting with a White House bid three decades earlier. “From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first,” the president said. “Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs will be made to benefit American workers and American families.”
The phrase “America First,” the rallying cry of noninterventionists resisting entry into World War II, had been off-limits in the generations since due to its anti-Semitic intimations. The speech was crafted by Steve Bannon as well as Trump’s incoming policy adviser, Stephen Miller, who had been a longtime immigration staffer to Jeff Sessions. Deftly, Miller inserted a phrase to rebut interpretations of xenophobia: “When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice.” Yet given the rhetoric of Trump’s campaign, his associations with the likes of Alex Jones and the alt-right, and his incessant pitting of Americans versus non-Americans, it rang somewhat hollow.
Sitting on the dais behind the newly inaugurated president, George W. Bush couldn’t help but hear the “isms” he had warned of eight years earlier: isolationism, protectionism, nativism.
When the speech concluded, Bush made his way off the stage. “That was some weird shit,” he said aloud, according to journalist Yashar Ali.6 (Bush’s spokesman did not dispute the report.)
It was a sentiment shared by many on the dais—not just the Democrats whom Trump had spent the past year bashing (Obama, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, whose demeanor during her assailant’s inauguration was the stuff of hostage videos), but also the Republicans who had been encouraged by Trump’s post-election performance. They had heard him talk of unity in the wee hours of November 9. They had watched him assemble a generally respected cabinet. They were cautiously optimistic, on the eve of the inauguration, that the incoming president would feel the weight of his office, abandon his trademark bombast, and adopt a more thoughtful, deliberative approach.