HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021139.jpg

30 MICHAEL WOLFF

the end of the year, Trump was casually mocking his chief of staff and his penchant for efficiency and strict procedures. Indeed, both men were openly trashing each other, quite unmindful of the large audience for their slurs. For Trump, Kelly was a "twitcher" and "feeble" and ready to "stroke out." For Kelly, Trump was "deranged" and "mad" and "stupid."
The drama just got weirder.
In February, Kelly, a retired four-star general, grabbed Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski outside the Oval Office and pushed him up against a wall. "Don't look him in the eye," whispered Trump about Kelly after the incident, circling his finger next to his head in the crazy sign. The confrontation left everybody shaken, with Trump asking Lewandowski not to tell anyone, and Lewandowski, when talking to the people he did tell, saying that he had almost wet himself.
By March, Trump and Kelly were hardly speaking. Trump ignored him; Kelly sulked. Or Trump would drop pointed hints that Kelly should resign, and Kelly would ignore him. Everyone assumed the countdown had begun.
Various Republicans, from Ryan to McConnell to their right-wing adversary Mark Meadows, along with Bannon, had gotten behind a plan to push House majority leader Kevin McCarthy for chief of staff. Even Meadows, who hated McCarthy, was all for it. Here finally was a strategy: McCarthy, a top tactician, would refocus an unfocused White House on one mission—the midterms. Every tweet, every speech, every action would be directed toward salvaging the Republican majority.
Alas, Trump didn't want a chief of staff who would focus him. Trump, it was clear, didn't want a chief of staff who would tell him anything. Trump did not want a White House that ran by any method other than to satisfy his desires. Someone happened to mention that John F. Kennedy didn't have a chief of staff, and now Trump regularly repeated this presidential factoid.

* * *

The Mueller team, as it pursued the Russia investigation, continued to bump up against Trump's unholy financial history, exactly the rabbit hole

SIEGE 31

Trump had warned them not to go down. Mueller, careful to protect his own flank, took pains to reassure the president's lawyers that he wasn't pursuing the president's business interests; at the same time, he was passing the evidence his investigation had gathered about Trump's business and personal affairs to other federal prosecutors.
On April 9, the FBI, on instructions from federal prosecutors in New York, raided the home and office of Michael Cohen, as well as a room he was using in the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. Cohen, who billed himself as Trump's personal lawyer, sat handcuffed for hours in his kitchen while the FBI conducted its search, itemizing and hauling away every electronic device its agents could find.
Bannon, coincidentally, also stayed at the Regency on his frequent trips to New York, and he would sometimes bump into Cohen in the hotel's lobby. Bannon had known Cohen during the campaign, and the lawyer's mysterious involvement in campaign issues often worried him. Now, in Washington, seeing the Cohen news, Bannon knew that another crucial domino had fallen.
"While we don't know where the end is," said Bannon, "we can guess where it might begin: with Brother Cohen."

* * *

On April 11, three weeks after the president signed the budget bill, Paul Ryan—one of the government's most powerful figures given the Republican lock on Washington—announced his plan to leave the Speakership and depart Congress.
"Listen to what Paul Ryan is saying," said Bannon, sitting at his table in the Embassy early that morning. "It's over. Done. Done. And Paul Ryan wants the fuck off the Trump train today."
Ryan had been telling almost anyone who would listen that as many as fifty or sixty House seats would be lost seven months hence in the midterm elections. A Ryan lieutenant, Steve Stivers, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, was estimating a loss of ninety to one hundred seats. At this gloomy hour, it seemed more than possible that the Democrats would eliminate their twenty-three-seat deficit and

HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021139