And then came “American carnage.”
Trump would not be relinquishing his penchant for provocation—or his appetite for conflict. It wasn’t outwardly apparent at first. He floated through his first hours on the job: After finishing the inaugural address, speaking to a VIP luncheon inside the Capitol (feeling so magnanimous that he singled out Hillary Clinton for a standing ovation), and completing the parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, the new president had been paralyzed by wonder upon entering the Oval Office for the first time. “Wow,” he said to Reince Priebus, turning in circles and glancing from carpet to ceiling. “Can you believe it?”
Everything was perfect—until he learned of the crowd-size comparisons.
Days earlier, the incoming president had predicted “an unbelievable, perhaps record-setting turnout.” But while Obama’s 2009 inauguration had been record-setting; Trump’s had not. Obama’s crowd had swelled to some 1.8 million people; using the most generous estimate, Trump’s was one-third that size.
The new president could not suffer this indignity. On the occasion of his coronation, the man who had once felt compelled to vouch for the size of his penis during a televised debate would not stand for unfavorable comparisons to his reviled predecessor.
The next day, in what the White House called his first official act in office, the president visited CIA headquarters in Virginia. It was meant as an olive branch: Trump had frequently derided the intelligence community, including ten days earlier, when he compared American spies to Nazis for their role in disseminating the Steele Dossier. The president was met with applause upon his arrival, and he was careful to emphasize his support for the CIA and its officials. But his appearance went off the rails thereafter. Standing in front of the agency’s sacred memorial to its fallen officers, Trump boasted of his election win, bashed the media for its coverage of him, and claimed that his crowd a day earlier had surpassed one million people.7
Meanwhile, Trump asked his new press secretary, Sean Spicer, to go even further.
Spicer was a curious choice to be the administration’s mouthpiece. As much as any official in the party, he had objected to and actively opposed the new president’s ascent. Even after Trump won the primary and Priebus worked to rally the GOP apparatus behind him, Spicer remained cool to the prospect of associating with the presumptive nominee. He did not trust Trump or any of the characters around him. More than once during the campaign, Spicer warned people heading to Trump Tower for meetings to watch what they said; he believed the inside of the building was wiretapped. (Whether he thought the recordings were made by the candidate himself or by the government investigating a possible crime was unclear.)
Spicer’s tepidness was not a state secret. During the transition, some of Trump’s allies took to calling Spicer a “November Ninth Republican” or a member of the “November Ninth Club,” in reference to those longtime skeptics who were reborn as loyalists the day after the election. Trump knew this. Also, as a stickler for appearances, he wasn’t big on the idea of putting a short, pale, provincially dressed party hack in front of the world’s cameras as his emissary. But the pickings were slim. None of the television veterans Trump envisioned in the role wanted to work for him. Kellyanne Conway thought the job beneath her erstwhile status as campaign manager. And Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t have enough experience in front of the cameras.
Trump reluctantly agreed to install Priebus’s longtime spokesman. The president, however, told friends that he would be watching carefully to gauge the depth of Spicer’s allegiance. When the crowd-size dispute grabbed headlines, Trump saw a perfect opportunity to test his new flack. He wanted Spicer to issue a definitive, on-camera statement from the White House press podium declaring the 2017 inauguration to be the biggest in U.S. history.
This struck many in the West Wing as an unequivocally awful idea. The administration was less than twenty-four hours old. It was a pointless and losing fight to pick, Priebus told Trump. Shouldn’t they be concentrating their energies elsewhere?
Trump was adamant, giving Spicer the chance to prove himself. Confronting the White House press corps for the first time, on the evening of Saturday, January 21, Spicer proclaimed, “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.”8
Priebus was across the street. With loads of his extended family flying in from Greece to witness the inauguration, he and his wife seized the occasion to have her baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church. Having already been late to the ceremony, Priebus tried to shut out all distractions at the dinner reception afterward. It wasn’t until some of the other attendees, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, eyes transfixed on their smartphones, alerted him that Priebus caught wind of what was happening at the White House.
Wearing an ill-fitting pinstriped suit and sonorous bags under his eyes, Spicer barked his nearly six-minute statement, spawning a devastating Saturday Night Live parody featuring actress Melissa McCarthy. One day into his presidency, Trump had chosen to squander the White House’s capital on a decidedly unimportant and easily disproven argument. It set a troubling tone: Trump had lied and misrepresented facts at an astonishing clip on the campaign trail, and his administration, it appeared, would treat the truth with similar disregard.
That same day, as the president girded for a clash over crowd sizes, the “Women’s March” attracted more than half a million protesters to Washington in a show of opposition to Trump. Hundreds of thousands of women were also demonstrating in cities around the country (and around the world), an unprecedented show of antagonism toward the one-day-old administration.9
Then, on day three, Kellyanne Conway went on NBC’s Meet the Press. The winning campaign manager had wanted the chief of staff’s job but had settled on the title of “counselor to the president.” Instead of counseling Trump, it was her duty to clean up a needless mess of his making. The host, Chuck Todd, asked why Trump had asked Spicer to “utter a falsehood” in his first statement from the White House press podium.
“You’re saying it’s a falsehood,” Conway responded. “Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave . . .” She hesitated. “Alternative facts.”
Finally, on the fourth day of his presidency, Trump used his first meeting with congressional leaders to complain that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for some three to five million ballots being cast illegally. The baseless claim drew a fresh round of harsh media coverage; election officials around the country, both Republican and Democratic, said there had been no indications of meaningful voter fraud, much less on a massive scale.
By any metric, this was a baneful start for the new administration.
IT WAS LATE ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AND A WEARY WASHINGTON WAS looking forward to the weekend. The first seven days of Trump’s presidency had been no calmer than his seventeen months as a candidate. With an approval rating of 45 percent in January 2017, Trump was the most unpopular new president in modern American history, according to Gallup.10 It would not rise based on the week’s developments: the Women’s March, the politicized appearance at the CIA, the lies about crowd size, the “alternative facts.” Everyone, including and especially the members of his administration, needed to catch their breath.