Fear: Trump in the White House(10)

Bannon read, “Handwritten ledgers show $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments designated for Mr. Manafort” from the pro-Russian political party.

“Twelve million fucking dollars in cash out of the Ukraine!” Bannon virtually shouted.

“What?” Mrs. Manafort said, bolting upright.

“Nothing, honey,” Manafort said. “Nothing.”

“When is this coming out?” Bannon asked.

“It may go up tonight.”

“Does Trump know anything about this?”

Manafort said no.

“How long have you known about this?”

Two months, Manafort said, when the Times started investigating.

Bannon read about 10 paragraphs in. It was a kill shot. It was over for Manafort.

“My lawyer told me not to cooperate,” Manafort said. “It was just a hit piece.”

“You should fire your lawyer.”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“You’ve got to call Trump . . . go see him face-to-face. If this comes out in the paper, and he doesn’t know about it, it’s lights out for you. How do you even take $12.7 million in cash?”

“It’s all lies,” Manafort said. “I had expenses.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m just a general consultant,” he explained. “I’ve got guys.” Many others had worked for him in Ukraine. “It all was paid to the guys. I didn’t take $500,000 out of there.”

“That’s all lost. It’s not laid out in the article. It’s ‘you got $12.7 million in cash,’ okay?”

Bannon called Jared.

“You’ve got to get back here,” he said.

The Times article on Manafort ran online that night and in the paper the next morning. As Bannon predicted, Trump was apoplectic. He’d had no heads-up.



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Trump called Reince Priebus to tell him that Steve Bannon was coming in as CEO. Priebus marveled that Trump would again bring in someone with little experience running anything, but he didn’t say much. He’d come around on Bannon’s Breitbart operation. After getting killed for about two years by Breitbart as part of the Republican elite, he’d developed a new strategy: It was a lot easier to work with Breitbart, and get less killed.



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Polls showed only 70 percent of Republicans were for Trump. They needed 90 percent. That meant getting the party apparatus on Trump’s side.

“Look, you don’t know me,” Bannon said. He had met Priebus briefly years before. “I need to have you here this afternoon. And this girl Katie Walsh, who I just hear is a superstar.” Priebus and Walsh, the RNC chief of staff, had the Republican database on every likely voter in the country.

Bannon wanted to be sure that the RNC was not going to leave Trump. There were rumors about donors fleeing and how everyone in the party was trying to figure a way out of the Trump mess.

That’s not the case, Priebus assured him. We are not going anywhere.

“We’ve got to work as a team,” Bannon said.

“You think you can do it?”

“Look, Trump doesn’t care about details,” Bannon said. It was up to them.

As Bannon later remarked with his trademark profanity, “I reached out and sucked Reince Priebus’ dick on August 15 and told the establishment, we can’t win without you.”



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Even if Trump and his campaign didn’t know it, Priebus knew Trump needed the RNC to stick with him. Trump had almost no field operations out where the voters were, and didn’t know some of the most fundamental things—Politics 101.

Priebus had spent the last years overseeing a massive effort to rebuild the RNC into a data-driven operation. Borrowing from Obama’s winning campaign strategy, the RNC started pouring vast sums—eventually more than $175 million—into analytics and big data, tracking individual primary voters, and using that information in areas divided into neighborhood “turfs” staffed with armies of volunteers.

All along, the expectation had been that once the Republican nominee was selected, the RNC would hitch this massive shiny new wagon to an already fairly robust and large campaign apparatus. For all the abuse the RNC had taken during the primaries—at one point Trump had called the RNC a “disgrace” and “a scam” and said that Priebus “should be ashamed of himself”—the RNC was effectively the Trump campaign staff.

The first step was for field staff to get an absentee or early voting ballot to those they deemed pro-Trump because they scored a 90 or above on a scale of 0 to 100 in the national database. In Ohio, out of perhaps 6 million voters, approximately 1 million would score 90 or above. Those 1 million would be targeted for early voting ballots, and the field staff and volunteers would hound each one until the ballot was sent in.

Next the field staff would move to persuade those who scored 60 or 70, trying to convince them to vote for Trump. The system was designed to reduce the randomness of voter contact, to make sure the volunteers and field staff concentrated their efforts on those most likely to vote for Trump.

The campaign announced the leadership changes on August 17. The New York Times reported, “Trump’s decision to make Stephen K. Bannon, chairman of the Breitbart News website, his campaign’s chief executive was a defiant rejection of efforts by longtime Republican hands to wean him from the bombast and racially charged speech that helped propel him to the nomination but now threaten his candidacy. . . . For Mr. Trump, though, bringing in Mr. Bannon was the political equivalent of ordering comfort food.”