Let Me Finish

INTRODUCTION

BANNON BLINKS

Steve Bannon was never big on small talk.

But on this particular Thursday morning, two days after Donald Trump shocked nearly everyone by getting himself elected president, Trump’s self-impressed “campaign CEO” was even more abrupt than usual.

“Sit down a sec,” Steve mumbled in that distinctive rasp of his, summoning me from a transition-team meeting and into his spartan glass office on Trump Tower’s fourteenth floor. Steve Bannon is the only person I have ever met who can look pretentious and like an unmade bed at the very same time. He motioned for me to shut the door and sit down.

“We’ve decided to make a change,” he said, getting right to the point.

“Good,” I answered. “What are we changing?”

His response came in a single word.

“You.”

Me?

“The vice president is going to be the new chairman of the transition,” Steve went on, “and you’re out. Going forward, you have no position of any kind in the transition, and we do not want you to be in the building anymore.”

I wasn’t only being fired. I was being eliminated. Vaporized.

I’d been close to the president-elect for the past fourteen years, longer than anyone else in the inner circle who wasn’t related by marriage or blood. I’d been the first governor in the nation to endorse him—the first major elected official of any sort. I’d just spent the past nine months campaigning with and for him. Since May, I had been chairman of his transition team, a huge responsibility he had asked me to take on, designing an entire federal government in his image and likeness.

Was this really how it was all going to end?

I could feel my heart pounding as Steve barreled on, laying out my future as he imagined it. I had to call on all my experience as a US Attorney and governor just to hold my anger in. It was crucial to keep my cool. No way was I letting Steve Bannon see how devastating this development felt to me.

“Whose decision is this?” I asked him.

“It doesn’t really matter,” Steve deflected.

As far as I was concerned, that wasn’t remotely good enough. “I want to know whose decision it is,” I repeated. “Did the president-elect make this decision?”

“It’s really of no consequence, Governor,” Steve insisted. “The decision is made. There is no changing it. We expect you to comply.”

I’d been dealing with Steve periodically since August, when he left Breitbart News, at least officially, and moved into Trump Tower as chief executive of the Trump campaign. We’d worked together on debate prep. He’d gotten involved in some transition stuff. We’d talked strategy quite a few times. Gruff, bright, and never lacking faith in his own brilliance, Steve saw himself not as a political operative or a campaign adviser but as a high-level executive. From everything I had witnessed, he had one overriding goal: ingratiating himself with the Trump family. Everything else was secondary. For months, Steve had been telling the candidate he had a 100-percent chance of victory—then saying something far less optimistic behind his back. But now that the votes had all been counted and the impossible had occurred, Steve seemed certain that, come January 20, 2017, he’d be moving into the West Wing of the White House as the new president’s chief of staff.

I stared at Steve across his desk. So this was how he wanted to play it? Like I was an errant child who deserved no explanation as I was bounced out the door? Steve knew and I knew—and certainly Donald knew—that I’d been one of the very few grown-ups on this wild ride of a campaign. The president-elect and I had an excellent relationship. And now I was being banished—no warning and no fingerprints—just when the time came to execute our carefully crafted, thirty-volume transition plan. Was this where my friendship with the soon-to-be-president was going to crash and burn? I was about to find out.

“Okay, that’s fine,” I told Steve as I stood to leave.

“By the way,” I added, “just so you know. Since you won’t tell me anything, I’m going to have to assume it was your decision. You are the one conveying it. Now I’m going to go downstairs to that scrum of reporters in the lobby and tell them I was just fired by Steve Bannon. That it was Steve Bannon’s decision and Steve Bannon’s alone. And that’s not all I’ll say. You can count on the fact that I’ll have a lot to say. Then you can deal with all the incoming and explain everything yourself. Good to see you.”

The reporters in the lobby would eat this stuff up. I was certain of that. If there was anything I’d learned from two decades in New Jersey politics and as a federal prosecutor, it’s that reporters like nothing more than a life-or-death feud. Two minutes from now, Steve’s cell phone was going to explode.

Suddenly, Steve changed his tune. “No, no, no,” I heard him say, not quite as unequivocally as before. “Wait a second. You can’t walk out and do that.”

“Oh yeah, I can,” I told him. “I’m no longer associated with this place. I’m not allowed in the building. You made your decision. Now I am making mine.”

“Governor,” Steve pleaded. “Sit down, and let’s talk about it.”

“What do we have to talk about?” I asked, glancing at the open door. “I should leave.”

I knew this couldn’t be Donald’s idea. He and I had been there for each other, time and again. He said to me as far back as Labor Day: “Chris, you and I are so smart, and we’ve known each other for so long, we could do the whole transition together if we just leave the victory party two hours early!” I loved the self-confidence and appreciated the compliment, but, “No,” I’d told him, “we need to do this right.” Now that the election was over and victory was ours, I was even more grateful that I’d talked him down from his just-wing-it approach. It made no sense for Donald Trump, who had never held public office, to sever his relationship with one of the few people around him who’d actually run an executive branch of government. How did that serve him? Of course it didn’t. And now the momentum in Steve Bannon’s office seemed to be shifting my way.

“No, no,” Steve said. “I want to talk to you about this.”

“Well, I want to know who fired me, because I know it wasn’t you,” I said. “You’re just here as the executioner. Who fired me? The president-elect? Because, Steve, if you don’t tell me who it is, I am going to say it was you.”

That, right there, is where Steve Bannon blinked.

In the decade and a half I have known Donald Trump, I’ve seen in him many of the qualities that have defined America’s leaders through the years. He knows who he is and what he believes in. He has a keen understanding of what regular people are feeling. He commands extraordinary loyalty from his supporters and has unique communication skills. He is utterly fearless. Donald doesn’t care who he angers or how things used to be. He just doesn’t. The harsher the attacks on him, the more energized he gets. This is a man who wakes up every morning with unparalleled self-confidence.

But he also has deficits, significant gaps in his experience and personality that, if left unchecked, will inevitably hobble him. All presidents have these, even the greatest ones, though Donald’s are uniquely his. He acts and speaks on impulse. He doesn’t always grasp the inner workings of government, which are different from the intricacies of the business world. And he trusts people he shouldn’t, including some of the people who are closest to him.

That is why, as he prepared to take the oath of office, Donald so urgently needed the right people around him and a solid structure in place. Many of the problems he would go on to face during his first two years in office were caused at least in part by the absence of that foundation. The infighting and chaos in the White House. The failure to get important parts of his agenda through Congress. The revolving door of deeply flawed individuals—amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons—who were hustled into jobs they were never suited for, sometimes seemingly without so much as a background check via Google or Wikipedia.

Here are the facts of the Trump transition: The day after Trump was elected, he was handed a detailed road map that would have avoided many of these pitfalls and launched him on a far more promising path, a plan that was fully consistent with his values, his campaign promises, and his publicly stated views. But that plan was thrown in the trash. Literally. All thirty binders were tossed in a Trump Tower dumpster, never to be seen again. Steve Bannon, Rick Dearborn, Jared Kushner and others, for their own selfish reasons, got rid of the guidance that would have made their candidate an immensely more effective president and would have saved him an awful lot of heartache, too. In so doing, they stole from the man they’d just helped elect the launch he so richly deserved.

The situation isn’t hopeless. It can still be reversed. But America and its forty-fifth president have been paying the price for these foolish decisions ever since. Instead of a well-oiled administration with an effective one-hundred- and two-hundred-day legislative strategy, the president got the epic failure of the timing and execution of Obamacare repeal. Instead of a border wall and a merit-based immigration policy, he got an ill-conceived Muslim ban that was immediately blocked in court.

Instead of high-quality, vetted appointees for key administration posts, he got the Russian lackey and future federal felon Michael Flynn as national security adviser. He got the greedy and inexperienced Scott Pruitt as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. He got the high-flying Tom Price as health and human services secretary. He got the not-ready-for-prime-time Jeff Sessions as attorney general, promptly recusing himself from the Justice Department’s Russian-collusion probe. He got a stranger named Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. He almost got the alleged spouse abuser Andrew Puzder as labor secretary. Worse, he did get the alleged wife abuser Rob Porter as White House staff secretary. He almost got the hotheaded Vincent Viola as army secretary. He got the Apprentice show loser Omarosa Manigault in whatever Omarosa’s job purported to be. (I never could figure that one out.) Too often, these were the kinds of people he got. Too many Rick Dearborns. Too few Kellyanne Conways. A boatload of Sebastian Gorkas. Too few Steven Mnuchins. Out on the campaign trail, Donald had spoken frequently about knowing “all the best people.” Far too often, he’s found himself saddled with the riffraff.

I know exactly how this happened. I was there for most of it. I did everything I could to make sure my friend Donald reached the White House fully prepared to serve. But a handful of selfish individuals sidetracked our very best efforts. They set loose toxic forces that have made Trump’s presidency far less effective than it would otherwise have been. If this tragedy is ever going to be reversed, it is vital that everyone know exactly how it occurred.

Once Steve Bannon started unburdening himself that day in his Trump Tower office, he couldn’t seem to stop. “The kid’s been taking an ax to your head with the boss ever since I got here,” he blurted out. “It’s been constant. He never stops. Ancient bitterness, I guess.”

In Bannon-speak, the kid is only one person. Not Donald Jr. Not younger son Eric. Not Ivanka or Tiffany. The kid is Jared Kushner, the husband of Ivanka Trump and the son of the real estate developer Charles Kushner, a man I once sent to prison for tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions. The kid is the soft-spoken son-in-law of Donald Trump.

“What I’ve learned every day since August,” Steve continued, “is if you want to survive around here, you’ve got to agree with the kid ninety-five percent of the time. You have to.”

And there it was. Steve Bannon, chief executive officer of the Trump campaign, had just made clear to me that one person and one person only was responsible for the faceless execution that Steve was now attempting to carry out. Jared Kushner, still apparently seething over events that had occurred a decade ago, was exacting a plot of revenge against me, a hit job that made no sense at all for the man we had just helped elect. And Steve Bannon, hotshot, big-balls campaign executive, was quietly acquiescing to it.

What wimps. What cowards. And how disloyal to Donald Trump.

It says a lot about Steve that he was willing to fire me to stay on Jared’s good side, yet he couldn’t bear to be fingered as the one who’d done the deed. Back where I come from, which is New Jersey, that’s what we call a lying snake.

“It’s unacceptable to me that I’m no longer on the team and that I’m being publicly hung out in this way,” I said to him. “So we need to figure something out.”

Up till then, the conversation had lasted less than five minutes. What came next took two and a half hours. Steve and I sat there, face-to-face in that glass-walled office of his, going back and forth and back and forth over what my future role would be, while other staffers paraded up and down the hallway, peering in on us, wondering what on earth was going on in there for so long. I got it. Here was the presumptive chief of staff and the chairman of the transition both looking thoroughly agitated. Just from the traffic and the glances, I could tell that people were freaking out. They had to find out what was being said in there. Just a tidbit, just a little morsel, so the leaking could begin.

“By the way, you’re still a serious candidate for attorney general,” Steve said after he’d finally given up on my proposed banishment and I’d agreed to stay on as vice chair of the transition team, however meaningless that might be.

I couldn’t believe he was saying that. “Wait a second,” I said to him. “How can you tell me I’m a serious candidate for attorney general? Weren’t you just firing me? This makes no sense at all.”

Steve hinted strongly, without quite saying so, that the attorney general idea was coming straight from America’s next president. “There aren’t a lot of candidates he’ll trust for attorney general,” Steve said, immediately ruling out former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and US senator Jeff Sessions, from Alabama. “Rudy doesn’t want it. He will only take secretary of state. Sessions wants it, and I love Sessions. I’m a big supporter of Sessions, but he doesn’t belong as attorney general. He’s not strong enough. We need somebody really strong as attorney general, and you’re the best person for it. I’m going to advocate for you for attorney general. Please tell me you’ll be willing to continue to be considered.”

It all sounded nuts to me, and I told him so. “You guys are going to fire me publicly, and then you’re going to turn around and make me attorney general? Who’s going to buy this?”

Steve insisted it was all on the up-and-up, but I couldn’t believe anything I was hearing from him. I needed to get out of that office, out of the building, out of the city, and back home to New Jersey. I needed to be around some people who were sane.

Steve Bannon had just shown his true character to me. If he was telling the truth, he was a traitor, avoiding the heat from me by fingering Jared Kushner as my political assassin. If he was lying, he was blaming a member of the president-elect’s family for a deed he or someone else was truly behind. Either way, Steve really was a snake. Donald Trump would discover that in the months ahead, as would Jared, the young man Steve was hoping to curry favor with and was, according to Steve, obsessed with destroying me.

I’ve been waiting to tell this story, the whole story, the way it deserves to be told. To take readers to places they’ve never been before. To share hard-earned lessons and surprising insights. To clear up some lingering misconceptions. To unmask more than a few phonies, connivers, power grabbers, and snakes. To sing the praises of some overlooked heroes.

Others have written books: journalists with axes to grind, ex-staffers with unhappy exits, assorted hangers-on with dollar signs in their eyes. Not one of them, however, has known Trump for as long or as well as I have—or was right there in the room when much of this occurred.

So hold on tight now. That’s what this book is for.

I still talk to Donald. We respect each other’s skills, though some in his world sought to drive a wedge between us. I’ll get to all that. But to understand my unique kinship with the president, you first have to understand where I came from: a cramped apartment on the west side of Newark and the leafy lawns of Livingston, where I soaked up the Jersey version of the suburban American dream. Pushed by strong women who kept telling me, “You can do anything, Christopher, if you work hard enough.” And so I did. Learning to lead in high school and college. Catching baseballs and the political bug. Finding my soul mate early and starting a family with her. Running for small offices, then larger ones. From the rough-and-tumble of Jersey politics, learning how to get in peoples’ faces, always prepared to challenge them. Aiming higher than I had any right to. Becoming a US Attorney after 9/11 and sending criminals off to prison, and then serving as governor of my beloved state. Twice. Cutting taxes. Fighting unions. Telling the loudmouths, “Sit down and shut up!” Warning my fellow citizens in the path of danger to “get the hell off the beach!” Healing Jersey from Superstorm Sandy, always in the same blue fleece. Being stymied by bridge traffic and losing the benefit of the doubt. Running for president.

And there stood Donald Trump. Fearless Donald. Disruptive Donald. Upending the process. Breaking the rules. Decimating the competition. Doing it his way, whatever it was. Build the wall. Drain the swamp. Collusion? What collusion? Fake news media!

I got in early, and I spoke up loudly. I worked hard, and I never forgot where I came from. And I’m still ready for more. Let me finish. I’m not finished. I’m not even close.