Confidence Man by Maggie Haberman

Author:Maggie Haberman [Haberman, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

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As a candidate, Trump had seen his initial success come at the expense of the party establishment; now, in at least some respects, he was the party establishment. He brought the Republican National Committee’s leadership into the White House—chairman Reince Priebus, and two of his top deputies, Katie Walsh and Sean Spicer—but all were gone within the first year. Trump had replaced Priebus at the committee with a state-party chair who, unlike some of her peers, had enthusiastically taken to his candidacy and seized control of the organization. It became a source of technical capacity that his political operation lacked, and a wealth of opportunity for people whom Trump aides or family members wanted to see receive consulting contracts.

In Trump’s earliest interactions with the party’s new chair, Ronna Romney McDaniel, he spoke admiringly of her grandfather, the former Michigan governor and cabinet secretary George Romney, as the kind of political patriarch whom Trump himself hoped to become. But antipathy for her uncle, Mitt Romney, complicated Trump’s view of her family heritage. In a familiar style of Trump commentary—a sincere statement that he could also pass off as playing for laughs—he suggested she should drop the Romney name and go by McDaniel instead. “It’s so beautiful,” he said of her married name. (She later said she made the name change on her own.)

Over time, Trump used McDaniel as everything from political sounding board to intermediary, even to deliver messages to his children. (He once called her to ask her to call his eldest son to complain about one of his tweets.) Trump’s interest in her put her on the radar of John Kelly, as Trump reached out to her without going through channels Kelly was trying to establish. Aides recalled a meeting involving Kelly and McDaniel, at which Kelly was angry that she and Trump were in direct contact, saying he would put her meetings on weekends, when it was personally inconvenient for the mother of two, if it continued. (They later forged a peace, and McDaniel found Kelly helpful in trying to sway Trump away from some of his more problematic impulses, such as backing some lost-cause candidates.)

Kelly tried to stop some of Trump’s more erratic impulses and did not see submitting to the president’s whims as part of his job. And his efforts to impose an orderly process on what was often described, before he got there, as the Oval Office’s rolling cocktail party worked for a time. But it produced a list of enemies who preferred the way things had been, including the man who’d hired Kelly. Trump had told Kelly to fix the place and then bristled at what he did and tried to undermine it. Kelly had a military brusqueness, and could be stern when he saw something as an affront. But many in the White House thought that Kelly, almost Trump’s peer in age, had done as well as possible in the situation he was working with. His colleagues believed he

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