Thread by @andykhouri

Fire and Fury. We all know everything so I’m just gonna share stuff I found surprising.

During the campaign Ivanka and Jared went on vacation with David Geffen. What the fuck? Seems after you become rich enough you no longer have what we call “personal beliefs”.

“So mortifying was [the Billy Bush] development that when Reince Priebus, the RNC head, was called to New York from Washington for an emergency meeting at Trump Tower, he couldn’t bring himself to leave Penn Station. It took two hours for the Trump team to coax him across town.”

“What is this ‘white trash’?” asked the model.
“They’re people just like me,” said Trump, “only they’re poor.”

“Trump liked to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your friends’ wives into bed.”

For the chief of staff job, Ailes recommended House Speaker John Boehner.

Trump replied, “Who’s that?”

“Don Jr. and Eric—behind their backs known to Trump insiders as Uday and Qusay, after the sons of Saddam Hussein”

“Finally, it was the right-wing diva and Trump supporter Ann Coulter who took the president-elect aside and said, “Nobody is apparently telling you this. But you can’t. You just can’t hire your children.”

I don't think I knew this. Chris Christie had successfully prosecuted and sent Jared's dad to jail. This is why he never had a chance in the Trump regime. Ivanka played her husband's revenge card for him.

ANNA WINTOUR THOUGHT SHE WAS GOING TO BE AMBASSADOR TO THE UK?

This is a truly absurd notion of one’s own importance and abilities. No wonder Kanye’s obsessed with her.

“Among Trump’s first moves as president was to have a series of inspirational photographs in the West Wing replaced with images of big crowd scenes at his inaugural ceremony.”

“[Rupert Murdoch believes] a president really had only, max, six months to make an impact on the public and set his agenda, and he’d be lucky to get six months. After that it was just putting out fires and battling the opposition.”

Sounds like launching a monthly comic.

This reads like a passage from a Douglas Adams novel. "Nobody really had a job, because nobody could do a job."

Stephen Miller wrote the Muslim ban after reading about executive orders on the Internet.

“Asked how his children were adjusting to their new school several weeks after the move, Jared said that yes, they were indeed in school—but he could not immediately identify where.”

Giuliani was offered attorney general, head of homeland security, and national intelligence director. Turned it all down because he wanted State. So in the end he got nothing.

Interestingly, I’m 130+ pages into this book and Mike Pence has been mentioned only once.

Bannon on Russia:

“It’s just a conspiracy theory.” And, he added, the Trump team wasn’t capable of conspiring about anything."

Trump has always had a hard-on for Russia, including being duped by a Gorbachev look-alike who visited Trump Tower in the 1980s.

“The worry...was not about collusion...but what, if the unraveling began, would likely lead to the messy Trump (and Kushner) business dealings...This was the...consensus—not that Trump was guilty of all that he was accused of, but that he was guilty of so much else."

“...the intelligence community so distrusted Flynn, and so blamed its bad blood with Trump on him that Flynn was the target here. Within the White House there was even a feeling that a soft trade was being implicitly offered: Flynn for the goodwill of the intelligence community.”

“There was a new rationale that Flynn should be fired not because of his Russian contacts, but because he had lied about them to the VP. This was a convenient invention of a chain of comman: Flynn did not report to Pence, and he was arguably a good deal more powerful than Pence.”

Former Trump deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh on how shit works. This is maddening. What a crummy job.

“Others concluded that [Trump] didn’t read because he just didn’t have to, and that in fact this was one of his key attributes as a populist. He was postliterate—total television.”

Jesus.

When they got elected Bannon went through all of Trump speeches and tweets to extrapolate a policy agenda, since no one had bothered to write one. Jared questioned Brannon’s version so he tried to do the same, but was so frustrated with the task that he just gave up.

“Everybody was a potential leaker; everybody was accusing everybody else of being a leaker.

Everybody *was* a leaker.

One day, when Kushner accused Walsh of leaking about him, she challenged him back: “My phone records versus yours, my email versus yours."

“In early March, Walsh confronted Kushner and demanded: “Just give me the three things the president wants to focus on. What are the three priorities of this White House?”

“Yes,” said Kushner, wholly absent an answer, “we should probably have that conversation."

“There was a suggestion that CPAC had chosen Yiannopoulos precisely to hoist Bannon and the White House on the implicit connection to him. “[Milo] had been... a Bannon protégé. Two days before CPAC, a conservative blogger discovered [the pedo video]."

That is amazing. A conservative conspiracy to take out Bannon and Milo in one stroke.

Thanks?

Confirmed: Trump tans with a sunlamp

Trump basically punished Jared for being Jewish.

“Jared's going to make peace in the Middle East,” Bannon said often, his voice reverent and his expression deadpan, cracking up all the Bannonites.”

One surprising thing from this book? Bannon's funny.

“In the Trump White House, observed Henry Kissinger, “it is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”

After the election, former Trump critic Paul Ryan, “rising to a movie-version level of flattery and sucking-up painful to witness,” according to one senior Trump aide, was able to delay his execution.”

“Trump had no interest in the GOP goal of repealing Obamacare. An overweight 70-year-old with various physical phobias (he lied about his height to keep from having a body mass index that would label him obese), he found health care and medical treatments a distasteful subject.”

Remarkable. When first briefed -as in, for the first time ever- on healthcare, even Trump saw universal makes sense.

“Why can’t Medicare simply cover everybody?” he had impatiently wondered during one discussion with aides, all of whom were careful not to react to this heresy.”

“As an antisocial, maladjusted, post-middle-aged man, [Bannon] had to make a supreme effort to get along with others, an effort that often did not go well."

“Bannonites would with lowered voices and certain pity, ask each other how he seemed and how he was holding up; invariably they would agree about how bad he looked, the strain etching ever deeper into his already ruined face. David Bossie thought Bannon “looked like he would die"

“In an age when all successful candidates are at the beck and call of difficult, even sociopathic, rich people pushing the bounds of their own power—and the richer they were, the more difficult, sociopathic, and power-mad they might be— the Mercers were quite onto themselves.”

“Trump had no interest in personnel problems, since they put the emphasis on other people.”

“the Office of American Innovation was created and Kushner was put in charge. Its stated mission was to reduce federal bureaucracy—that is, to reduce it by creating more of it

A remarkable takeaway from the book is that as much as the media played up the war between Bannon and the Kushners, it still didn't come close to expressing the seriousness of the real thing. The first 200 days were the direct consequence of their contest to wrangle an imbecile.

“Bannon knew Trump to be a fundamentally emotional man, and was certain the deepest part of him was angry and dark. However he wanted to support the Kushners, their worldview was not his. As Walsh saw it "Steve believes he is Darth Vader and that Trump is called to the dark side"

An email from chief economic advisor Gary Cohn. Amazing. This got forwarded around the White House.

“For anything that smacked of a classroom or of being lectured to—“professor” was one of Trump's bad words, and he was proud of never going to class, never buying a textbook, never taking a note—he got up and left the room.”

“[General] McMaster's efforts to inform the president had become an exercise in trying to tutor a recalcitrant and resentful student. Meetings had ended up in near acrimony, and the president was telling several friends that his new National Security Advisor was too boring”

Here's the rigorous process by which Trump selected his National Security advisor: nagging.

"Since taking office, the president had been developing an intuitive national security view: keep as many despots who might otherwise screw you as happy as possible. A self-styled strongman, he was also a fundamental appeaser. In [Syria], then, why cross the Russians?”

“A chemical attack didn’t change the circumstances on the ground, Bannon argued; besides, there had been far worse attacks with far more casualties than this one. If you were looking for broken children, you could find them anywhere. Why these broken children?”

“A pox on all your houses,” it was not our mess, and judging by all recent evidence, no good would come of trying to help clean it up. That effort would cost military lives with no military reward. Bannon was proposing a new foreign policy doctrine: Fuck 'em."

“Bannon was supposed to babysit Flynn. But Bannon, quite to Kushner’s shock, had not just an isolationist worldview but an apocalyptic one. Much of the world would burn and there was nothing you could do about it.”

“It had even been difficult to get a consensus on releasing a firm statement about the unacceptability of the use of chemical weapons. To both Kushner and McMaster it seemed obvious that Trump was more annoyed about having to think about the attack than by the attack itself.”

“A few hours after the O’Reilly announcement, Ailes sent an emissary into the West Wing with a question for Steve Bannon: O’Reilly and Hannity are in, what about you? Ailes, in secret, had been plotting his comeback with a new conservative network.”

*sad trombone*

“(1) Trump proved the power of a smaller but more dedicated base—just as, in cable TV, a small hardcore base was more valuable than a big, less committed one; (2) this meant an inverse dedication by an equally small circle of passionate enemies; (3) hence, there would be blood"

“Trump himself was desperately wounded by his treatment in the mainstream media. He obsessed on every slight until it was overtaken by the next slight. Slights were singled out and replayed again and again, his mood worsening with each replay (he was always rerunning the DVR)”

“And he was upset not only when he was attacked, but when the people around him were attacked. But he did not credit their loyalty, or blame himself or the nature of liberal media for the indignities heaped on his staffers; he blamed them and their inability to get good press.”

This is an excellent explanation of the Trump Media Paradox, whereby hating that which he craves most is what makes him powerful and further separates him from his fondest desire.

“The central problem [with the White House Correspondents' Dinner] was that the president was neither inclined to make fun of himself, nor particularly funny himself—at least not, in Conway’s description, “in that kind of humorous way.”

L. O. L.

“Trump did not see the media’s lack of regard for him as part of a political divide on which he stood on a particular side. He perceived it as a deep personal attack on him: for unfair reasons, ad hominem reasons, the media just did not like him. Ridiculed him. Cruelly. Why?”

Trump is closer to women in his employ because he believes they're more naturally inclined to serve a man's purpose, while men are likely to have their own needs.

Ivanka and Jared haaaate Kellyanne. They think she's shameless and vulgar.

“When referring to her, they were particularly partial to using the shorthand “nails,” a reference to her Cruella de Vil–length manicure treatments.”

On 26 year old Hope Hicks:

“Hicks’s family increasingly, and incredulously, viewed her as having been taken captive. (Her friends and intimates talked with great concern about what kind of therapies and recuperation she would need after her White House tenure was finally over.)”

“Worrying about [her sometimes boyfriend] Lewandowski’s treatment in the press and wondering aloud how she might help him. Trump looked up and said, “Why? You’ve already done enough for him. You’re the best piece of tail he’ll ever have,” sending Hicks running from the room.”

“Hicks, sponsored by Ivanka and ever loyal to her, was in fact thought of [by staff] as Trump’s real daughter, while Ivanka was thought of as his real wife.”

Jesus christ

Hope Hicks' actual job was to achieve Trump's true #1 priority in life: a positive write-up in the New York Times. Other staffers referred to this pursuit as "an alternate universe".

“Kushner had his personal press operation and Bannon had his. The leaking culture had become so open and overt—most of the time everybody could identify everybody else’s leaks—that it was now formally staffed.”

This is my favorite subplot.

“Bannon had unique access to Breitbart’s abilities to change the right-wing mood and focus. Bannon insisted he had cut his ties, but that strained everybody’s credulity—and everybody figured nobody was supposed to believe it. Rather, everybody was supposed to fear it.”

This is pretty interesting. Basically everybody Trump knows told him the DoJ was going to fuck him right from the start.

“The kids”—Jared and Ivanka—exhibited an increasingly panicked sense that the FBI and DOJ were moving beyond Russian election interference and into family finances. “Ivanka is terrified,” said a satisfied Bannon."

“The Kushner position was not helped by the fact that the president had been gleefully telling multiple people that Jared could solve the Middle East problem because the Kushners knew all the crooks in Israel.”

HAHAHAHA

It was Jared and Ivanka who manipulated Trump into firing Comey. Amazing self-own. Just amazing

“His daughter and son-in-law encouraged him, arguing that the once possibly charmable Comey was now a dangerous and uncontrollable player whose profit would inevitably be their loss."

“That son of a bitch is going to try to fire the head of the FBI,” said Ailes.”

Here's an INSANE thing. Emphasis mine. When Trump sees John Dean on TV he “launches an inevitable talk-back monologue to the screen about loyalty. It might also be accompanied by several revisionist theories Trump had about Watergate and how NIXON HAD BEEN FRAMED.”

“Offering forceful and dire warnings, Bannon told the president: “This Russian story is a third-tier story, but you fire Comey and it’ll be the biggest story in the world."

“Kushner gave Miller notes on why the FBI director should be fired and asked him to draft a letter that could set out the basis for immediate dismissal. Miller—less than a deft drafting hand—recruited Hicks to help, another person without clearly relevant abilities."

😂

“For Bannon, reducing the political world to face-offs and spats... belied the real powers they were up against. Not people—institutions. To Trump, he was just up against Sally Yates, who was, he steamed, “such a cunt.”

“In Trump’s view all news was...planned and planted. All news was to some extent fake—...he himself had faked it so many times in his career. This was why he had so naturally cottoned to the “fake news” label. “I’ve made stuff up forever, and they always print it,” he bragged.”

These pages have to be read to be believed.

“In presidential annals, the firing of FBI director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.”

“The daughter will take down the father.”

“Everybody gets this. Well, maybe not Trump so much. Not clear. Maybe a little. Not what he imagined.”

Bannon talks like Rorschach.

“They were unable to hire a top-notch white-collar government practice law firm. All of them were afraid they would face a rebellion among the younger staff if they represented Trump, afraid Trump would publicly humiliate them, and afraid Trump would stiff them for the bill."

“In the Oval Office, in front of her father, Bannon openly attacked her. “You,” he said, pointing at her as the president watched, “are a fucking liar.” Ivanka’s bitter complaints to her father were met by a hands-off Trump: “I told you this is a tough town, baby.”

“Whatever breach there had been between Bannon and Priebus came smoothly together over their mutual loathing of Jared and Ivanka. The professional White House was united against the amateur family White House.”

“[Withdrawing from the Paris agreement was]the move that Ivanka Trump had campaigned hardest against in the White House.
“Score,” said Bannon. “The bitch is dead.'

“It was Bannon’s widely advertised virtue and advantage: “I’ve never been to Russia. I don’t know anybody from Russia. I’ve never spoken to any Russians. And I’d just as well not speak to anyone who has.”

“Bannon observed a hapless Pence in a lot of “wrong meetings,” and helped to bring in the Republican operative Nick Ayers as Pence’s chief of staff, and to get “our fallback guy” out of the White House and “running around the world and looking like a vice president.”

What I’ve learned from the book is the only reason Trump hasn’t dropped dead is because he’s too oblivious to recognize the serious trouble he’s in or the massive consequences of his actions. Otherwise the stress would kill him. Ignorance is truly keeping him alive.

“Bannon, watching the Sessions testimony from the West Wing, quickly became frustrated. “Come on, Beauregard,” he said."

DYING.

“A sylphlike Kushner, wearing a skinny gray suit and skinny black tie, slipped into the room. (Recently making the rounds was a joke about Kushner being the best-dressed man in Washington, which is quite the opposite of a compliment.)”

“In his daily out-of-body experience, as a witness to his own humiliation and loss for words, Spicer understood after a while that he had “gone down a rabbit hole."

Ok there are a LOT of great insults about the Trump boys. Bear with me.

“Don and Eric's role was to be Donald Trump’s heirs and attendees. Their father took some regular pleasure in pointing out that they were in the back of the room when God handed out brains”

“In fact, the brothers had grown into reasonably competent family-owned-company executives (this is not saying all that much) because their father had little or no patience for actually running his company."

“Lewandowski regarded [the boys] with rolling-on-the-floor contempt: not only were Don Jr. and Eric stupid, and Jared somehow both supercilious and obsequious (the butler), but nobody knew a whit about politics—indeed, there wasn’t an hour of political experience among them"

On Don Jr trying to impress his father with the "dirt on Hillary" meeting. “It was a case, or the lack of one, not of masterminds and subterfuge, but of senseless and benighted people so guileless and unconcerned that they enthusiastically colluded in plain sight.”

“Whatever the reason for the meeting, no matter which of the [below] scenarios most accurately describes how this comical and alarming group came together, a year later, practically nobody doubted that Don Jr. would have wanted his father to know that he seized the initiative.”

“The chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero,” said an astonished and derisive Bannon, not long after the meeting was revealed.”

Brannon's now famous reaction:

“Ivanka, in the view of almost every White House staffer, profoundly misunderstood the nature of her job and had converted traditional First Lady noblesse oblige efforts into White House staff work.”

“Nowhere in the Trump campaign, nowhere on Bannon’s white boards, nowhere in the heart of this president was there an interest in women entrepreneurs in developing countries. The daughter’s agenda was singularly at odds with the father's."

“With what by now was starting to seem like an almost anarchic tone deafness, Ivanka sat in for her father between Chinese president Xi Jinping and British prime minister Theresa May at the main G20 conference table.”

“It was a real-time example of denial and cover-up. The president believed, belligerently, what he believed. Reality was what he was convinced it was—or should be.”

One of the most extraordinary scenes in the book; the plot to cover up Don and Jared's Russian meeting.

“The lawyers, in disgust and alarm, saw, in effect, each principal becoming a witness to another principal’s potential misdeeds—all conspiring with one another to get their stories straight. The client and his family were panicking and running their own defense."

“The persistent Trump idea that it is not a crime to lie to the media was regarded by the legal team as at best reckless and, in itself, potentially actionable: an explicit attempt to throw sand into the investigation’s gears.”

It seems like if this thing ever goes to trial, that meeting on Air Force One is going to be a crucial piece of the prosecution. Wolff refers to it as “the disaster on Air Force One.” People quit on Trump for fear of being linked to it, believing it to be obstruction of justice.

Bannon explodes at Hope Hicks, Jarvanka ally.

“Moving into the president’s earshot, “a loud, scary, clearly threatening” Bannon, in the Jarvanka telling, yelled, “I am going to fuck you and your little group!” with a baffled Trump plaintively wanting to know, “What’s going on?"

“Hicks ran from Bannon, hysterically sobbing and “visibly terrified.” Others marked this as the high point of the boiling enmity between the two sides... Jarvanka referred the matter to WH counsel, billing this as the most verbally abusive moment in the history of the West Wing”

That’s all for tonight.

Tomorrow: SCARAMUCCI.

“McMaster wants to send more troops to Afghanistan, so we’re going to send him,” said a triumphal Bannon. In Bannon’s scenario, Trump would give McMaster a fourth star and “promote” him to top military commander in Afghanistan.”

Diabolical.