On that night, Trump may have thought Priebus was “a superstar, like Secretariat.” But in the Trump White House, Priebus does not lead the conversation. He is trying to keep up. In the “Washington daily gossip” that Priebus was complaining to Chris Wallace about, Priebus began coming in second, or third, or fourth, behind Steve Bannon or Gary Cohn or Jared Kushner or Ivanka Trump or whoever else was calling the shots on that particular day in the White House where Priebus is, at best, a witness to history.
In a functional White House, the chief of staff position is supposed to count for something. This is the job once filled by the giants of Washington lore, the powers behind the throne who controlled the ebb and flow around presidents—advising the commander in chief, selecting staff, managing the message. But Priebus was no H. R. Haldeman to Trump’s Nixon, no Dick Cheney to Trump’s Gerald Ford, no James Baker to Trump’s Ronald Reagan. No one could imagine this guy named “Reince” announcing as Alexander Haig (a former chief of staff, then serving as secretary of state) did following an attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life that “I am in charge here.” Everyone could imagine Steve Bannon doing that; in fact, everyone suspected that Bannon was in charge during those first, tumultuous weeks of the Trump presidency. It was Trump who created the speculation, with his unprecedented announcement that the Machiavellian character who served as “chief executive” of the Trump campaign would serve as “White House chief strategist and senior counselor to the president,” a newly created position that, ominously for Priebus, was identified from the start as a parallel position to the chief of staff job. Priebus was a mandarin, not a powerbroker; an unthinking partisan, not a true believer. And no one doubted that Trump knew this.
Still, there were fabulists who imagined that Priebus might assert himself. Unfortunately for Priebus, they were not people who knew much about the man who was toiling as a clerk for the Wisconsin State Assembly Education Committee when Bannon was finishing a stint at Goldman Sachs and setting up his Bannon & Company investment bank. Priebus was losing a race for the Wisconsin state senate when Bannon was forging the relationship with Andrew Breitbart that scholars will eventually understand as a pivot point in the history of American media and politics.
Priebus came of age on the Wisconsin political scene that spawned Governor Scott Walker and House Speaker Paul Ryan—from neighboring counties in southeast Wisconsin, the trio knew each other from their aspiring days as Republican errand boys. But by 2004, when Walker was the elected chief executive of the state’s largest county and Ryan was emerging as a “Young Gun” leader in the U.S. House, Priebus got beat by Bob Wirch, a former sweeper at the Anaconda Brass plant in the blue-collar town of Kenosha who proudly listed his profession as “factory worker.” Priebus was, by then, a corporate lawyer with plenty of connections and all the campaign money he could have wanted. But Wirch, a working-class intellectual who had devoted much of his life to the labor movement, had street smarts. The Democrat swept to victory in the state senate race, even as Paul Ryan was winning reelection to the House from the same region.
Priebus got the message. He wasn’t electable. So he became a backroom man, parlaying his corporate connections and fund-raising prowess into the chairmanship of the Republican Party of Wisconsin and then the Republican National Committee. The Wisconsinite elbowed aside the first African American chairman of the RNC, Michael Steele, who had presided over the party’s “wave” win in the 2010 election cycle, and Priebus promised bigger things to come. But Republicans crashed and burned in the first national election cycle that Priebus oversaw, as Mitt Romney failed to displace Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential race and Harry Reid’s Democrats picked up two seats and clear control of the U.S. Senate.
Priebus, who had gingerly embraced the right-wing populist “Tea Party” movement before the 2012 election, announced after the humiliating defeat that “our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive.” Rejecting the image of intolerance that had come to define the party as anti-immigrant, anti-gay, anti-
woman and antithetical to young voters. Priebus ordered an “autopsy” of the party’s failings and got back a plan for a “Growth and Opportunity Project” that proposed extensive outreach to women, African American, Asian, Hispanic, LGBTQ and young voters. It also proposed a softening and shifting of party rhetoric, going so far as to endorse “comprehensive immigration reform.”
“To be clear, our principles are sound, our principles are not old rusty thoughts in some book,” said Priebus, who added that “the way we communicate our principles isn’t resonating widely enough.” The chairman acknowledged that “in many ways the way we communicate can be a real problem.”
That was true enough, and 2016 Republican prospects like former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Florida senator Marco Rubio embraced the new vision Priebus and the party insiders laid out. But Donald Trump had different ideas. He dismissed Bush as “the weakest person on this stage” and the candidate of “special interests and lobbyists.” He ripped Rubio as “little Marco.” Trump made obnoxious comments about women, slurred Latinos, proposed building a wall along the Mexican border, outlined plans for a ban on immigration from Muslim countries and dismissed the preachers of tolerance as “politically correct fools.”
It was the opposite of what Priebus wanted. But Trump started winning primaries and caucuses and eventually trounced the rest of the contenders for the party’s nomination. How did Priebus react? When many of his closest allies among the party’s fund-raising establishment and electoral elites were still spinning #NeverTrump scenarios, Priebus tweeted “@realDonaldTrump will be presumptive @GOP nominee, we all need to unite and focus on defeating
@HillaryClinton #NeverClinton.”
The party realignment that Priebus had advanced was finished. “Trump kills GOP autopsy,” explained a Politico headline. “Republican elders drew up a blueprint for a kinder, more inclusive Republican party. Trump is tearing it apart.” Priebus was cool with that. Sure, he looked like a fool, and a man without principles. But the hack is always prepared to play the fool, and to shed principles, if that is what is required to retain access to power.
While Trump continued to distrust many in the GOP establishment, the candidate who spoke openly of buying political favors with campaign checks saw something he liked in Priebus. He approved of the party chairman’s flexibility when it came to the definition of what it meant to be a Republican. When Priebus arranged a Republican National Convention that short-circuited dissent and let the nominee call the shots, on everything from speakers to platform language, the relationship was sealed. And it proved to be highly beneficial for Trump.
Donald Trump had imagined himself as a potential presidential contender for the better part of two decades. He toyed with the prospect of mounting an independent campaign, going so far as to announce the formation of a presidential exploratory committee as part of a bid for the 2000 nomination of what remained of Ross Perot’s Reform Party. But even Trump’s enormous ego was insufficient to assure him that he would run any better than Perot had in his losing 1992 and 1996 bids. Trump knew that if he was going to get anywhere near the presidency, his name had to appear on the ballot line of a major party. He bet on the Republicans and took full advantage of a nomination process that Priebus had crafted to benefit a sufficiently well funded and prominent establishment figure but that worked just as well for a sufficiently well funded and prominent “anti-establishment” figure. When that process brought the billionaire to the brink of the nomination, Priebus helped him cross the line more gracefully than even Trump’s strategists had imagined possible. That, in turn, legitimized Trump in the eyes of Republicans who were not necessarily enthused by his “New York values.” Pundits spent much of 2016 talking about how Trump was dividing the Republican Party, but with vetting from Priebus and other political hacks who maintained the party infrastructure, like Sean Spicer, Trump won 88 percent of the votes of self-described Republicans (just as 89 perc
ent of self-described Democrats backed Hillary Clinton).
Trump could not have become president without that high level of Republican support. So Priebus did his part, and the new president was appreciative: less than a week after the election, Trump named the Republican National Committee chairman as his chief of staff.
The only problem was that Priebus had actually been right about his party’s image problem. And Trump, with his crude complaints about political correctness, had been wrong. Trump won the presidency in 2016 not because of his broad popular appeal but because of a narrowly focused Electoral College strategy. In that 2012 campaign where Priebus griped that “our message was weak; our ground game was insufficient; we weren’t inclusive,” Mitt Romney had won 47.2 percent of the vote nationwide. Trump won just 46.1 percent, one of the lowest levels of support for a Republican nominee in modern times. Fifty-four percent of Americans had opposed Donald Trump.
The defeated state senate candidate from Wisconsin was willing to change direction to facilitate a Trump candidacy even as more conscionable Republicans recognized this was the wrong candidate for their party and their country. Donald Trump said that made Priebus a “superstar.” And superstar status has its rewards: a title and a fine office in the West Wing. For a hack, that’s enough—even if he has to play the fool on TV.
— 19 —
SPICERFACTS
Sean Spicer
White House Press Secretary
When George Orwell’s 1984 is studied in the future, English teachers may want to refer to White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s remarkable briefing on January 21, 2017, at the close of the first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Trump had been sworn in the day before, as a commander in chief without a mandate—a candidate who lost 54 percent of the popular vote and trailed his chief opponent by close to 3 million votes. The pretender delivered an uninspired sixteen-minute inaugural address to an unimpressive crowd and then paraded through the streets of a capital city where 96 percent of the electorate had rejected him, and where evidence of enthusiasm for his inauguration gave new meaning to the term “modest.”
The next morning, January 21, 2017, in the same capital city, the streets were filled by a crowd of Americans, conservatively estimated at more than a half-million, who had come to challenge the new administration’s policies toward women in particular and humanity in general. These Americans marched and rallied as part of a national (and global) outpouring of opposition to this president that was so dramatic that Britain’s Guardian newspaper headlined its report “Women’s March on Washington overshadows Trump’s first full day in office.”
It had the makings of a nightmare scenario for the newly minted press secretary for a minority president who obsessed about his electoral dysfunction. But Spicer should have known what to do. He’d been around the block in DC, several times. A Naval War College graduate who worked for Republican congressmen like Florida’s Mark Foley before joining the Bush-Cheney administration as the assistant U.S. trade representative for media and public affairs, Spicer co-founded a lobbying firm (Endeavor Global Strategies) to represent foreign governments like that of Colombia when they were wrangling with U.S. officials. He jumped to the Republican National Committee when Reince Priebus took over in 2011, first as communications director and then as an all-around communications czar with the vaguely Bannonesque title of “chief strategist.”
Spicer, one might suppose, knew how to handle ticklish situations. (With the Republican National Convention, he had even put Trump in his place a few times; for instance, when he pushed back against the presidential candidate’s dismissal of U.S. senator John McCain’s military record by explaining that there was “no place in our party or our country for comments that disparage those who have served honorably.”) Spicer had options. Should it come up, he could have approached the crowd-size conflict from any number of directions. Or he could simply have said nothing on a Saturday night when no one was expecting the partied-out Trump team to add anything to the narrative.
Unfortunately, Trump was fretting that the legitimacy of his new presidency was in question. He had reason to worry, as even his own supporters were beginning to question the wisdom of their 2016 choices. (While Trump won 46 percent of the vote on Election Day, the Real Clear Politics average placed his approval rating at just 41.8 percent on the eve of his inauguration, and some surveys put the number as low as 32 percent.)
So Spicer was pushed out in front of the cameras to deliver a diatribe that surely merited the application of the often misapplied term “Orwellian.”
Trump’s man declared that “yesterday, at a time when our nation and the world was watching the peaceful transition of power and, as the President said, the transition and the balance of power from Washington to the citizens of the United States, some members of the media were engaged in deliberately false reporting.”
In other words, don’t believe news reports.
Spicer asserted, at length, that “photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall. This was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings have been used to protect the grass on the Mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual. This was also the first time that fencing and magnetometers went as far back on the Mall, preventing hundreds of thousands of people from being able to access the Mall as quickly as they had in inaugurations past.”
In other words, don’t believe what you are seeing with your own eyes.
“Inaccurate numbers involving crowd size were also tweeted,” Spicer continued. “No one had numbers, because the National Park Service, which controls the National Mall, does not put any out. By the way, this applies to any attempts to try to count the number of protesters today in the same fashion.”
In other words, don’t accept any numbers that are not provided by an “official” source, such as, say, the Trump White House.
Then Spicer provided numbers that were deliberately chosen to produce a false impression of Trump’s inauguration. The press secretary insisted that “this was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.” To pound in his point, Spicer added a this ends the discussion assertion: “Period!”
In short order, PolitiFact reviewed the statement and the data, and headlined its report “Donald Trump had biggest inaugural crowd ever? Metrics don’t show it.” After reviewing the multiple falsehoods uttered by the new White House press secretary, the nonpartisan fact-checking site concluded its report with the line “We rate Spicer’s claim Pants on Fire.” As in pants-on-fire lying.
The following morning, an even higher-ranking Trump apparatchik, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway, was asked by NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd to explain “why the president asked the White House press secretary to come out in front of the podium for the first time and utter a falsehood.”
“Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that,” replied Conway. And so was launched the Twitter hashtag #SpicerFacts. As the months went on, Spicer repeated the performance on an almost daily basis. His “Trump can do no wrong” preachments provided the ultimate show of Republican Party loyalty to a Republican president. The same went for his biased treatment of the news outlets that asked the toughest questions, as when Spicer excluded reporters from the New York Times, CNN, Politico and several other outlets from attending a press gaggle.
What Spicer was doing was bad for journalism; the White House Correspondents’ Association protested the exclusion of the reporters from the gaggle. It was also wrong for Spicer. His daily briefings became must-see viewing for the writers of comedy sketches. NBC’s Saturday Night Live shredded Spicer by having actress Melissa McCarthy appear as an only slightly more addled and agitated version of the real thing.
McCarthy’s impersonation was pitch-perfec
t. So perfect that, by March, the press secretary seemed to be imitating the comic imitating him. Or perhaps Spicer, whose disputes with the media dated to college days when the school paper printed his name as “Sean Sphincter,” was finally losing it.
On March 7, 2017, Spicer tried to make the argument for replacing the Affordable Care Act’s “Obamacare” with a Republican reform that was being referred to as “Trumpcare” by placing a copy of the final version of the original 974-page law next to the sketchy Republican substitute.
Forget about the contents, argued Spicer. “Our plan, in far fewer pages, 123… so far we’re at 57 for the repeal plan and 66 pages for the replacement portion… And remember, half of it, 57 of those pages, are the repeal part. So when you really get down to it, our plan is 66 pages long, half of what we actually even have there.”
Say what?
“[Look] at the size. This is the Democrats, this is us. You can’t get any clearer in terms of this is government, this is not,” said Spicer, as he moved back and forth, hovering over the two stacks of paper. “And I think that part of the reason the visual is important is that when you actually look at the difference, you realize this is what big government does.… I think the greatest illustration of the differences in the approaches is that size.”
The Spicer “size” video went viral.
The White House press secretary was getting a little weird. And that was unsettling. But what really unsettled people was that no one in the administration seemed to care. In fact, they seemed to approve.
Spicer was not off message. He was weirdly on message. His daily performances grew increasingly laughable, and by the time the administration reached its “one hundred days” mark there was already talk of getting a new press secretary. But Spicer had already set the tone. No matter how absurd his pronouncements became, he made them with the straight face of an unblinking, unquestioning loyalist, not to the truth but to his boss. And that was the point. George Orwell imagined a dystopian future in which authoritarians aspired to “reality control.” What was required of mandarins was an ability “to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies.”