Trump’s art
of the steal
How Donald
Trump rode to power by parroting other people’s fringe ideas, got himself
impeached for it — and might prevail anyway.
By MICHAEL
KRUSE 1/10/20, 1:20 PM CET Updated 1/12/20, 1:54 AM CET
Illustration
by Brian Stauffer
Sometime
soon, Donald Trump, the third president in the history of the United States to
be impeached, is expected to face a trial in the Senate, charged with abuse of
power and obstruction of Congress. Traced back to its roots, this is a crisis
entirely of his own creation: He came across a sketchy scrap of information, a
debunked piece of Russian propaganda relating to Ukraine, and he saw it as
something he could use, to help himself and to hurt an opponent. He latched
onto it, pumped it up, and passed it along.
Anyone
wondering how the president could make this kind of mistake has missed
something important about Trump’s rise. For as long as he has been in politics
— in fact, for longer — he has been a ruthlessly effective practitioner of the
art of parroting others’ most provocative, salacious ideas. “There are a lot of
people that think …” “That’s what I heard …” “Some people even say …” His
gossipy M.O. was a staple of his campaign, propelling his historic victory, but
it also has driven the scandal that has consumed his presidency — “I would like you to find out what happened with
this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike,” he said on the now
well-known call last July with President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
If what he
was referencing sounded kind of like a dodgy talk radio rant, that’s not an
accident. It’s a deliberate tactic, one that Trump was developing, and
exploiting, from the moment he first seriously started to consider a run for
the White House.
In the
early to middle part of the previous decade, Trump’s proto-political operation
was essentially a two-man team — there was Roger Stone, now a felon, and there
was Stone’s protégé, Sam Nunberg. One of Nunberg’s self-appointed tasks was to
help Trump understand what the masses on the right really wanted. And one way
he did that was by listening to Mark Levin’s increasingly popular radio show.
The people who were tuning in most intently to Levin, Nunberg thought, were the
people most likely to vote for Trump if he launched an actual bid. “Donald
Trump,” Nunberg told me, meaning his candidacy, meaning his victory, “would
never have happened without Mark Levin.”
“Donald was
never a CEO. He was a brand manager — you know, how do I appeal to the masses?”
— Alan Marcus, former Trump publicist
Nunberg’s
frequent emails to Trump, sent via an assistant in Trump’s office and which
have not been reported on before, were accounts of the many grievances that
animated Levin and his listeners. Union members resented union leaders.
Republican rank and file loathed Republican elites. The Tea Party, in the
estimation of Levin and his listeners, didn’t start as a reaction to the
liberal outrages of President Barack Obama — it started as a reaction to what
they viewed as the inconsistently hard-line conservative policies of President
George W. Bush. Amnesty for immigrants, for instance? An absolute no-go. Trump,
Nunberg stressed when we talked, didn’t want to be told what to say, but
Nunberg nonetheless made his pitch for him as an insurgent outsider: “This is
all marketing and you’re a great product … in a new type of market,” he said he
told Trump. “Help me help you sell gold to these people that normally buy
gold.”
Trump
started listening to the show.
“He would
call me up sometimes,” Nunberg recalled. “‘Oh, did you just hear what Levin
said?’”
For the
better part of the past half-century, Trump, 73, has extracted from an array of
similar sources — from the New York Post’s dishy Page Six to the toxicity of
Twitter to far-right websites and lowbrow TV — a knack for knowing what people
want. Not all people but many people. And not what they say they want, but what
they really want. Ostentatious and aspirational glitz. Plain talk to the point
of crude talk. Conflict.
Employees,
executives, aides and others who’ve known Trump well say he’s not a book-reader
so much as a room-reader, “sucking in information that he finds valuable,” grabbing
“nuggets” that he thinks can help him get what he covets, which is some slurry
of wealth, attention, respect and power. “A creature of feel,” the late
strategist Pat Caddell described him to me in the summer of 2018, “a visceral
stimulus creature” — who could repackage what he took in and sell it back to
the hoi polloi.
In 2010,
for example, he recognized a lightning-rod issue torquing emotions and jumped
right in, gleaning buzz for himself with his offer to purchase the site of the
so-called “Ground Zero Mosque” — which alerted him to the potential potency of
anti-Obama birtherism, which paved the way for his anger-girded, fear-mongering
presidential candidacy. Trump is in this way less a thinker and more a
megaphone, an amplifier of the ideas of others, the value of those ideas in his
mind based not on veracity so much as utility. Which is another way of saying
he’s not so much a leader as he is a follower. Perhaps the ultimate follower.
Trump is the Follower of the Free World.
“Donald was
never a CEO. He was a brand manager — you know, how do I appeal to the masses?”
former Trump publicist Alan Marcus told me recently. “It’s like Elmer Gantry.
It’s the carnival barker. It’s what every pitchman has always done. Tell the
people what they want to hear.”
“Taking the
information he wants or needs,” former Trump casino exec Jack O’Donnell said.
“Whether
it’s true or not,” former Trump Organization exec Barbara Res said.
Taking it
in. Sending it out. Over and over. Again and again.
This,
regardless of whatever else it is or means, is a remarkable and undeniable
talent: hoovering others’ ideas, making them his, and in doing so growing a
following uniquely his own that far exceeds the size of the even considerable
original audience. It’s what got him elected. In some ways, too, it’s what got
him impeached.
“Donald
just absorbs, absorbs, absorbs, he can extract so much information from his
awareness of his surroundings and of the world around him.” — Louise Sunshine,
former Trump Organization executive
“There’s no
question,” presidential historian Doug Brinkley told me last week. “He just
trolls around and looks for weird stories that grab his attention, and he
figures, ‘I know the American psyche, and this’ll grab their attention,’ and he
throws it out there.”
But
effective as cherrypicking and amplifying the most emotionally and politically
useful tidbits has been for Trump throughout his life, it has proved an uneasy
fit when practiced from the inside of an office that is supposed to represent
the accumulated knowledge and official position of the entire U.S. government.
In some sense, the entire impeachment process is a collision between Trump’s
magnification of random, unverified rumors and an official regime of fact and
process. The outcome will determine more than whether Trump is removed from
office. It may well establish a new standard for what our government defines as
true.
Speedy with
job-site arithmetic but dismissive of academics, whom he considered weak and
effete, Fred Trump Sr. of Queens, N.Y., bestowed upon his middle son and
eventual heir not just extravagant riches but an anti-elitist, expertise-averse
worldview. At New York Military Academy, at Fordham University in the Bronx and
then the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, classmates have said, a
young Donald Trump was a “disinterested,” skyscraper-doodling student, “loath
to really study much,” game to “bluff his way through.”
But the
fact that he wasn’t a scholar didn’t mean that he was stupid, according to
people who worked with or watched him closely over the decades of his
professional existence.
“If he’s
willing to listen, he’s a quick learner,” Res said.
“A quick
study,” biographer Gwenda Blair concurred.
“Donald
just absorbs, absorbs, absorbs,” former Trump Organization executive Louise
Sunshine said. “He can extract so much information from his awareness of his
surroundings and of the world around him.”
Starting in
the 1970s, he learned, of course, how to fight dirty and win from his
antagonistic attorney and mentor, Roy Cohn.
In the
’80s, he learned from Stone, and from watching George Steinbrenner, Ed Koch and
Ronald Reagan, too. Steinbrenner, the bombastic owner of the New York Yankees,
led as a loner. His secretary frequently could be heard saying, “Mr.
Steinbrenner, Trump on line 2”. Koch won three terms as the mayor of New York
in part “by playing the kibitzer,” wrote Martin Shefter, “the brash fellow who
has an opinion on everything.” The formula for success, Koch thought, was
relatively uncomplicated: Get attention to get votes. “And you can only do
that,” he once said, “by being bigger than life. It’s theatrics.” Staging news
conference after news conference, Koch packed the way he talked with
superlatives, “best this” and “best that.” Reporters joked about having to join
gyms just to keep up with him. But he seldom left them wanting for material. He
called foes “wackos” and “kooks.” He called the city council “a gaggle of
clowns.”
Reagan,
meanwhile, won the Oval Office in one way not dissimilar to Koch’s path to
Gracie Mansion — by winning over blue-collar, disaffected Democrats, who sought
“safety” in the face of the changing, increasingly diverse society surrounding
them. Reagan spent the decade blurring the lines between politics and
entertainment, wondering at times how anybody could be an effective president
without having been an actor first.
"If
the Republicans are going to win, they’re going to have to break away from the
Karl Roves of the world" — Donald Trump
For Trump,
the “visceral stimulus creature,” Steinbrenner, Koch and Reagan provided daily
tutorials of sorts. And while his political affiliations were elastic and his
overall ideology embryonic, Trump demonstrated early his acumen for tearing
pages from proven playbooks and giving them his own signature twists — with
blaring full-page newspaper ads in the late ’80s, criticizing American foreign
policy and calling for the death penalty for (the innocent) Central Park Five.
And in the
’90s, Trump learned from watching Ross Perot run for president (and lose) and
Jesse Ventura run for governor of Minnesota (and win). “The nutty billionaire
and the wrestler,” he called them, according to Stone. He watched Newt Gingrich
weaponize words in the political arena in a new and virulent manner, labeling
Democrats “traitors” and “sick,” urging his fellow Republicans to do the same.
He watched the rise of partisanship on cable TV, MSNBC on the left, Fox News on
the right, and the spiking clamor for conservative talk radio — from 240
all-talk stations in the country in 1987 to 900 in ’92 to 1,130 in ’95. Rush
Limbaugh, the trailblazer, the precursor to somebody like Mark Levin, railed
away about “feminazis” and “commie-libs” — and his listeners loved it. “He’s
saying what I think,” they thought.
And Trump
in 2011 seized on what people, some people — misguided, bigoted or both —
thought about the country’s first black president. The birtherism campaign he
began to wage was the distillation of his scattershot but resolute education as
the kibitzer, the gossip hound, the insurgent outsider, the nascent politician,
the feeder off the fever swamps. The follower.
“I’m
starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country,” he said
on Fox News in March of that year.
“He doesn’t
have a birth certificate,” he told talker Laura Ingraham two days later.
“Somebody told me …”
“A lot of
people do not think it was an authentic certificate,” he said on CNN in 2012,
long after the White House released Obama’s “long form” birth certificate.
“Was it a
birth certificate? You tell me,” he told ABC News in 2013. “Some people say
that was not his birth certificate.”
That same
year, Nunberg arranged for Trump to make his Levin show debut, preparing a memo
“to familiarize Mr. Trump with Mark Levin,” he wrote — deploying tried-and-true
ways to pique Trump’s interest. Nunberg emphasized Levin’s ratings history (“In
the first 18 months on the air, the program jumped to #1 in the time slot”),
the company he kept (considers Sean Hannity “his best friend”), his reach
(books Liberty and Tyranny and Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America sold more
than a million copies, Nunberg noted), and his compensation (“a reported annual
salary of $12.5 million a year”). Nunberg mentioned, too, that what he said on
the air often was disseminated on a variety of websites like TheRightScoop.com.
People, in other words, “some people,” “many people,” “a lot of people,” were
listening to what Levin was saying.
Armed with
this advance work, the memo as well as the emails, Trump fit in well with
Levin. In addition to shilling for the upcoming season of “The Celebrity
Apprentice” — “Trace Adkins, La Toya Jackson, Dennis Rodman” — Trump delivered
to Levin’s listeners what they wanted — which essentially was … Levin’s ideas,
studiously collected by Nunberg, consumed by Trump and regurgitated back to the
host.
“If the
Republicans are going to win,” Trump said, “they’re going to have to break away
from the Karl Roves of the world and, frankly, get more involved — you know,
the Tea Party, these people are great. I’ve done some speeches in front of the
Tea Party. They are great Americans, they love this country, they work so hard,
and they have been so mistreated by … the liberal media. … They truly are not
treated with proper respect.”
In 2014 and
’15, Sam Nunberg sent Trump nearly daily updates of snippets of news and
possible topics and wordings for tweets.
And he
landed especially hard on immigration and any notions of amnesty for
undocumented immigrants.
“I watched
last night,” he continued, referring to Obama’s State of the Union that year,
“as Senator McCain and everybody were jumping up and down, you know, applauding
— I never saw him move so fast, you know, nice guy, but he jumped up — and was
applauding as soon as the immigration became a part of the discussion, a part
of the speech.”
“Immigration,”
Trump said, “will be the next thing, based on what I’m watching.”
Trump and
Levin wrapped up by exchanging compliments.
“I’m
extremely impressed with what you’re doing,” Levin said.
A month
into the presidential campaign, after the Vietnam-avoiding Trump insulted
McCain by saying he was “not a war hero” | Charlie Leight/Getty Images
“You just
have a great show,” Trump said. “I’m always listening.”
“Donald
Trump,” Levin told his listeners after Trump signed off. “See that, folks? Very
solid. Very conservative. To the right of the Republican establishment. Strong
supporter of the Tea Party. I’m telling you. I’ve been watching this. I’ve been
listening. People have been sending me his tweets.”
There was a
reason for that. “He’s putting stuff out there,” Nunberg told me of Trump’s
tweets at the time, some of which Nunberg was suggesting, “that sounds like
Mark Levin.”
In the few
months before his interview with Levin:
Donald J.
Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Obama weak
on immigration. All words, no action. He's been Prez 4 years.
198
3:12 AM -
Oct 17, 2012
Twitter Ads
info and privacy
987 people
are talking about this
Donald J.
Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Obama is
laughing at Karl Rove & all the losers who spent hundreds of millions of
dollars and didn’t win one race, including the big one!
63
10:05 PM -
Dec 3, 2012
Twitter Ads
info and privacy
349 people
are talking about this
And in the
few months after:
Donald J.
Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Whether you
like it or not, Bush also gave us Obama!
54
5:12 PM -
Jun 27, 2013
Twitter Ads
info and privacy
190 people
are talking about this
This
ear-to-the-proverbial-ground political ramp-up wasn’t limited to Levin and talk
radio. It was around this time as well that Trump began to give more and more
talks on the pre-presidential hustings, GOP chicken dinners in places like Iowa
and New Hampshire.
He talked
to Pat Caddell about what he was picking up on the trail. “He would put forth his
position or his feelings, and he would judge the level of the response to it,
and that helped him organize, I suppose to whatever degree it was organized,
his views about issues,” Caddell told me in 2018. “Things he said that didn’t
go over disappeared. Things that did stayed.”
Twitter,
too, increasingly served a similar purpose.
“He glommed
onto it like it was an oxygen source,” Caddell explained. “And he would tweet
what he believed, and people would retweet or answer or whatever, and it was
kind of his ongoing focus group.”
“He loved
it,” Nunberg said. “He doesn’t trust the political people who do the focus
groups.” Instead: “What are we getting the most retweets on?”
Officials
have insisted to the president the CrowdStrike conspiracy is just that. He has
not heeded their counsel.
In 2014 and
’15 — well before Trump came down the escalator and announced his intention to
run — Nunberg sent Trump nearly daily updates of snippets of news and possible
topics and wordings for tweets. At the tops of the documents he showed the
number of Trump’s Twitter followers ticking up (a snapshot from December of
2014: 2,751,488 … 2,753,548 … 2,757,190 …) and the number of days left until
the GOP primary debate at the Reagan library and the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire
primaries ticking down.
A month
into the presidential campaign, after the Vietnam-avoiding Trump insulted
McCain by saying he was “not a war hero” and that he liked people “who weren’t
captured,” he refused to apologize. That, Nunberg said, partly was because of
what he had internalized by listening to Levin. Nunberg told Trump it was going
to help him. (It certainly didn’t hurt him.) “He said, ‘Why?’” Nunberg said.
“And I said, ‘Because our people despise John McCain. They despise the fact
that McCain hides behind his military record to shit on Republicans and you
can’t criticize him on anything because of his military record. I said, ‘John
McCain — he is hated almost as much as Barack Obama on talk radio.’ … I said,
‘He might as well be Barack Obama on talk radio.’”
Talk radio
led the way. Trump followed.
Theoretically,
Trump could have changed. As successful as this pattern of behavior had been in
the years preceding his run and during the campaign itself — he was, after all,
elected president — Trump could have adjusted once he took office, having at
his disposal, suddenly and quite unexpectedly, the world’s pre-eminent
intelligence-gathering apparatus. But no — sticking to “that gossip kind of
mentality,” said O’Donnell, the casino exec, Trump has continued to mine
Twitter, plucking what he wants, “very comfortable with half thoughts,” “always
looking for tidbits of information that he can use to his advantage.”
“He sees
the ones that are the most popular,” former Fox News anchor Eric Bolling,
identified by Time as someone who speaks regularly to Trump, told the magazine
in June of 2018, “and getting the most [of the] zeitgeist, most attention on
social media.”
If Trump
began his political ascent as a follower, cannily co-opting ideas that
resonated with a certain segment of the electorate, in doing so he clearly has
proceeded to forge a following of his own.
And then?
The last and most important piece of this by now almost rote process?
“He repeats
it,” Bolling said.
And for as
long as he’s occupied the Oval Office, Trump’s been thinking about Ukraine.
“Ukraine,” Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said a couple months back,
“has always been problematic, from Day One. He’s heard a lot about Ukraine from
a lot of people.” He’s heard about it, according to reports, from Rudy
Giuliani, from his favored right-wing media outlets, from Vladimir Putin.
He started
spreading it almost immediately.
“I heard
it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian,” he said of CrowdStrike, incorrectly, in
an interview with The Associated Press in April of 2017. “That’s what I heard.”
There are
those who predict Donald Trump’s tendencies will ultimately undo him | Don
Emmert/AFP via Getty Images
Officials
have insisted to the president the CrowdStrike conspiracy is just that. He has
not heeded their counsel.
It’s what
led to the call with Ukraine’s Zelensky that led to the series of events that
led to his impeachment. “The server,” Trump said, “they say Ukraine has it.”
“It’s
combustible because Trump’s only looking for news stories and information that
suits his persona, that build his persona up,” Brinkley, the presidential
historian, told me last week. “And by doing that he is following the trolls
down an ugly path.”
There are
those who predict Trump’s tendencies will ultimately undo him. Thomas Bossert,
who was Trump’s first homeland security adviser, logged a warning on a Sunday
morning last fall. “If he continues to focus on that white whale,” Bossert said
of Trump’s questionable Ukraine theory, “it’s going to bring him down.”
But it is
hard to see that happening now. It’s virtually assured that Trump’s impeachment
will end not with his ouster but with an acquittal by the Republican-controlled
Senate. This purported ordeal could even be a boost. In fundraising, and in
some polling, it already has been. And come November, he absolutely could win
again. And if that happens, Trump in some sense would possess more power than
any president ever — subjected to the gravest constitutional check, then given
by voters another four years.
If Trump
began his political ascent as a follower, cannily co-opting ideas that
resonated with a certain segment of the electorate, in doing so he clearly has
proceeded to forge a following of his own. He has become a leader of those who
are willing to be led in this way — solidifying lockstep support from the
agenda-setting base of his party as well as its kingpins and figureheads, who
parrot him the way he once did Levin. The result: a crescendoing feedback loop,
in which followers are leaders and leaders are followers, perpetuating ideas
based on what works rather than what’s real.
“One of the
sacred principles in U.S. history has been that presidents are supposed to tell
the public the truth,” Brinkley said. “So this is a new kind of Republican that
refuses to ever admit culpability or a mistake and is willing to destroy not
just institutions but fact-based thinking, empirical thinking.” Trump? “He
doesn’t care whether it’s true or not true, whether it destroys somebody or not
— there’s no morality into it. It’s just a strange, weird bit of information —
‘and it helps me, and I’m going to propagate it.’”
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