The president, while often a fabulist in his depiction of the world, was quite a literalist when it came to how he saw himself. Hence he rebutted this picture of him as a half-demented or seriously addled midnight stalker in the White House by insisting that he didn’t own a bathrobe.
“Do I seem like a bathrobe kind of guy, really?” he demanded, not humorously, of almost every person with whom he spoke over the next forty-eight hours. “Seriously, can you see me in a bathrobe?”
Who had leaked it? For Trump, the details of his personal life suddenly became a far greater matter of concern than all the other kinds of leaks.
The New York Times Washington bureau, itself quite literal and worried by the possible lack of an actual bathrobe, reverse-leaked that Bannon was the source of the story.
Bannon, who styled himself as a kind of black hole of silence, had also become a sort of official black-hole voice, everybody’s Deep Throat. He was witty, intense, evocative, and bubbling over, his theoretical discretion ever giving way to a constant semipublic commentary on the pretensions and fatuousness and hopeless lack of seriousness of most everyone else in the White House. By the second week of the Trump presidency, everybody in the White House seemed to be maintaining their own list of likely leakers and doing their best to leak before being leaked about.
But another likely leak source about his angst in the White House was Trump himself. In his calls throughout the day and at night from his bed, he frequently spoke to people who had no reason to keep his confidences. He was a river of grievances—including about what a dump the White House was on close inspection—examples of which many recipients of his calls promptly spread throughout the ever attentive and merciless gossip world.
* * *
On February 6, Trump made one of his seething, self-pitying, and unsolicited phone calls without presumption of confidentiality to a passing New York media acquaintance. The call had no discernible point other than to express his bent-out-of-shape feelings about the relentless contempt of the media and the disloyalty of his staff.
The initial subject of his ire was the New York Times and its reporter Maggie Haberman, whom he called “a nut job.” The Times’s Gail Collins, who had written a column unfavorably comparing Trump to Vice President Pence, was “a moron.” But then, continuing under the rubric of media he hated, he veered to CNN and the deep disloyalty of its chief, Jeff Zucker. Zucker, who as the head of NBC had commissioned The Apprentice, had been “made by Trump,” Trump said of himself in the third person. And Trump had “personally” gotten Zucker his job at CNN. “Yes, yes, I did,” said Trump.
He then repeated a story that he was obsessively telling almost everyone he spoke to. He’d gone to a dinner, he didn’t remember when, where he had sat next to “a gentleman named Kent”—undoubtedly Phil Kent, a former CEO of Turner Broadcasting, the Time Warner division that oversaw CNN—“and he had a list of four names.” Three of them Trump had never heard of, but he knew Jeff Zucker because of The Apprentice. “Zucker was number four on the list, so I talked him up to number one. I probably shouldn’t have because Zucker is not that smart but I like to show I can do that sort of thing.” But Zucker, “a very bad guy who has done terrible with the ratings,” had turned around after Trump had gotten him the job and had said, well, it’s “unbelievably disgusting.” This was the Russian “dossier” and the “golden shower” story—the practice CNN had accused him of being party to in the Moscow hotel suite with assorted prostitutes.
Having dispensed with Zucker, the president of the United States went on to speculate on what was involved with a golden shower. And how this was all just part of a media campaign that would never succeed in driving him from the White House. Because they were sore losers and hated him for winning, they spread total lies, 100 percent made-up things, totally untrue, for instance, the cover that week of Time magazine—which, Trump reminded his listeners, he had been on more than anyone in history—that showed Steve Bannon, a good guy, saying he was the real president. “How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me?” Trump demanded and repeated the question, and then repeated the answer: “Zero! Zero!” And that went for his son-in-law, too, who had a lot to learn.
The media was not only hurting him, he said—he was not looking for any agreement or really even any response—but hurting his negotiating capabilities, which hurt the nation. And that went for Saturday Night Live, too, which might think it was very funny but was actually hurting everybody in the country. And while he understood that SNL was there to be mean to him, they were being very, very mean. It was “fake comedy.” He had reviewed the treatment of all other presidents in the media and there was nothing like this ever, even of Nixon who was treated very unfairly. “Kellyanne, who is very fair, has this all documented. You can look at it.”
The point is, he said, that that very day, he had saved $700 million a year in jobs that were going to Mexico but the media was talking about him in his bathrobe, which “I don’t have because I’ve never worn a bathrobe. And would never wear one, because I’m not that kind of guy.” And what the media was doing was undermining this very dignified house, and “dignity is so important.” But Murdoch, “who had never called me, never once,” was now calling all the time. So that should tell people something.
The call went on for twenty-six minutes.
7
RUSSIA
Even before there was reason to suspect Sally Yates, they suspected her. The transition report said Trump wouldn’t like the fifty-six-year-old Atlanta-born University of Georgia career Justice Department lawyer slated to step up to acting attorney general. There was something about a particular kind of Obama person. Something about the way they walked and held themselves. Superiority. And about a certain kind of woman who would immediately rub Trump the wrong way—Obama women being a good tip-off, Hillary women another. Later this would be extended to “DOJ women.”
Here was an elemental divide: between Trump and career government employees. He could understand politicians, but he was finding it hard to get a handle on these bureaucrat types, their temperament and motives. He couldn’t grasp what they wanted. Why would they, or anyone, be a permanent government employee? “They max out at what? Two hundred grand? Tops,” he said, expressing something like wonder.
Sally Yates could have been passed over for the acting AG spot—to serve in place while the attorney-general-designate, Jeff Sessions, waited for confirmation—and before long Trump would be furious about why she wasn’t. But she was the sitting deputy and she’d been confirmed by the Senate, and the acting AG job needed someone with Senate confirmation. And even though she seemed to see herself as something of a prisoner held in hostile territory, Yates accepted the job.
Given this context, the curious information she presented to White House counsel Don McGahn during the administration’s first week—this was before, in the second week, she refused to enforce the immigration order and was thereupon promptly fired—seemed not only unwelcome but suspect.