While enduring nightmares of self-implicating tweets and dreading the morning ritual of checking to see what the president had already posted, Trump’s aides looked forward to one period of relative peace: Sunday afternoons. It was then that the president went golfing, leaving his smartphone behind. (Trump, who savaged his predecessor for golfing on the job, would play roughly twice the number of rounds as Obama in his first two years in office.)
The president’s staffers lived in fear of one thing: bad weather. Some spent Saturday nights praying for clear skies the next day, knowing a tweet-free afternoon would give them a window of uninterrupted tranquility, time to spend with their families and decompress from a job known to be demanding under the most normal of circumstances.
“Rainy Sunday afternoons,” Priebus told Ryan, “are the devil’s play shop.”
Of all the president’s men, Priebus was the most fatigued. He had been a doormat from day one. Trump emasculated him, calling him “Reincey” and bad-mouthing him behind his back. Ryan, his longtime friend, who had expected a close alliance with the chief of staff, learned quickly that Priebus had no power in the White House, and he went around him to engage Trump directly.
Priebus did his best to exert authority. He would declare key meetings off-limits to certain staffers and stand guard at the Oval Office doorway, wary of unannounced visitors. But it was of no use: People poured in past him, and meetings spilled over with uninvited guests. Omarosa Manigault, a former contestant on The Apprentice whom Trump had brought into the administration to serve in part as a liaison to the black community, did little work that anyone ever saw but proved adroit at finding her way into ultra-important conversations in the West Wing. It later paid off: She had been secretly recording them to gather material for a tell-all book.
There was no structure, nothing resembling an organized commercial enterprise, much less a disciplined presidency. The West Wing was the Wild West—strangers roaming free, Trump springing new surprises on his staff at every turn, meetings running hours behind schedule, Secret Service agents scrambling to keep wanderers out of the Oval Office. Priebus aimed to stick near the president whenever possible, fearful that his influence was diminished by every moment he was not by Trump’s side. Yet he also had a White House to run, and spent his days sprinting between meetings, unable to trust many of the people whom he should have been delegating to. Friends compared the chief of staff to a battlefield medic hustling between patients but never able to stop the bleeding.
It wasn’t working for anyone. Despite his own penchant for such commotion, the president knew he needed an infusion of order. As for Priebus? He just needed a nap and a cold Miller Lite.
Spicer could tell that the chief’s days were numbered. After a rocky and bizarre tenure as White House press secretary, the former RNC flack had stepped down on July 21. His exit owed in part to the hiring of a hot-blooded political neophyte named Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director, an addition that Priebus vigorously opposed. It was his last battle as chief of staff—and unsurprisingly, it was a losing one.
A week later, on July 28, Priebus was replaced by John Kelly, the retired four-star Marine general who had previously run the Department of Homeland Security. In firing his chief of staff and the party chairman who’d helped him get elected, Trump was severing his last major tie to the Republican establishment. Looking around at the president’s inner circle, one saw Scaramucci, who had previously donated to Obama and Hillary Clinton; Bannon, who had used Breitbart to try to burn the GOP to the ground; National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, a lifelong Democrat; the director of strategic communications, Hope Hicks, who had zero history with GOP politics; and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, a pair of self-professed Manhattan progressives. Of Trump’s closest advisers, only Pence had any association with the Republican Party.
The staff makeover was only beginning.
One day before the chief of staff’s departure, the New Yorker reported on a phone call between Scaramucci and Ryan Lizza, one of its reporters, in which the White House communications director went on an expletive-laden tirade.8 During the conversation, Scaramucci called Priebus “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic” and said of the president’s chief strategist, “I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock. I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.”
The White House communications director was promptly fired—after six days on the job.
Capping an extraordinary stretch, a few weeks after Scaramucci’s dismissal, Trump fired Bannon. The president had long since grown tired of his taste for celebrity: the endless string of out-of-school interviews, the Saturday Night Live sketch depicting him as the Grim Reaper, and most recently, the book Devil’s Bargain, by journalist Joshua Green, painting Bannon as the president’s puppeteer.
When Kelly took over as the new White House chief of staff, his first priority was to jettison Bannon, whom he viewed as a destabilizing force inside the government and a self-promoting clown to boot. Trump acted swiftly on his new chief’s recommendation.
For a moment—for his first few weeks on the job, really—it appeared that Kelly was equipped to finally bring order to the White House. It wouldn’t last.
Chapter Twenty-One
August 2017
“God made me black on purpose.”
THE MURDER OF NINE BLACK PARISHIONERS INSIDE THEIR CHARLESTON church in June 2015—by a white gunman, Dylann Roof, who told police he wanted to start a race war—marked a genuine inflection point in the American argument over race, culture, and politics.
South Carolina’s subsequent removal of the Confederate flag from its statehouse grounds, spearheaded by Governor Nikki Haley, triggered a sweeping campaign to purge the nation of symbols that spoke to the dark echoes of its past. These efforts were concentrated in the South. All across Old Dixie, tributes to Confederate soldiers and their causes remained ubiquitous 150 years after the surrender at Appomattox. Coinciding with the ascent of Donald Trump, the fault lines were drawn: Some Americans argued that radicals were attempting to erase the nation’s rich and complex heritage; other Americans argued that radicals were attempting to preserve the nation’s historical architecture of oppression.
The conflict came to a head in Charlottesville, Virginia.
A neatly manicured city, home to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation and the pristine campus of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville was an unlikely backdrop for race rioting. Yet the proposed removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue from Lee Park—the city council had voted to rename it Emancipation Park—was becoming a fight of the utmost symbolic importance. In the heart of the Confederacy, in a settlement built by a slave-owning (and slave-impregnating) president of the United States, the South’s most famous general still sat high atop the city on his bronze steed, daring the forces of progress to topple him.
Charlottesville had braced for a planned demonstration the weekend of August 12, nicknamed “Unite the Right,” meant as a rallying point for the scattered cells of white supremacists and neo-Nazis nationwide. Counterprotesters from around the country mobilized quickly, descending on Charlottesville. With the city’s police and government officials in preparation mode, a group of several hundred right-wing demonstrators staged a surprise march through the UVA campus, hoisting torches and shouting racist slogans. Video of the event, captured with chilling precision by Vice News, showed them chanting, “You will not replace us! Jews will not replace us!” It was an ode to the theory that a Jewish-dictated demographic makeover of the United States was meant to dilute the power of the white race.