Anecdotal Account of Trump’s 2017 Shutdown Threat and Bannon’s Influence

28 MICHAEL WOLFF That Friday morning, he came down from the residence into the Oval Office in a full-on rage so violent that, for a moment, his hair came undone. To the shock of the people with him, there stood an almost entirely bald Donald Trump. The president’s sudden change of heart sent the entire Republican Party into a panic. If Trump carried out his threat not to sign the bill, he would bring on what they most feared: a shutdown. And he might well blame the shutdown on his own party. Mark Meadows, the head of the House Freedom Caucus and a | staunch Trump ally in Congress, called the president from Europe to say that after the vote on Thursday afternoon most members had left town for the congressional recess. Congress wouldn't be able to undo the previous day’s vote, and the shutdown was due to commence in mere hours. Mitch McConnell rushed Defense Secretary Jim Mattis into action to tell the president that American soldiers would not be paid the next day if he didn't sign the bill. This was a repeat performance: Mattis had issued a similar warning during a threatened shutdown in January. “Never... never... never... again; Trump shouted, pounding the desk after each “never.” Once again he caved and agreed to sign the bill. But he vowed that next time there would be billions upon billions for the Wall or there really would be a shutdown. Really. Really. * Bannon had been here before, so many times. “Dude, he’s Donald fucking Trump,’ said Bannon, holding his head and sitting at his table in the Embassy the day after the president signed the bill. Bannon was not confused: he had a clear understanding of how great a liability Trump could be to Bannon’s own vision and career. To the ner- vous titers of the people around him, Bannon believed he was the man of populist destiny and not Donald Trump. The urgency here was real. Bannon believed he represented the workingman against the corporate-governmental-technocratic machine whose constituency was the college-educated. In Bannon’s romantic view, oe ] SIEGE 29 the workingman smelled of cigarettes, crushed your hand in his, and was hard as brick—and not from working out in a gym. This remembrance of things past, of (if it ever existed) a leveled world where a workingmar was proud of his work and identity, was inspiring, Bannon believed, : global anger. It was a revolution—this worldwide unease and fear anc day-by-day upending of liberal assumptions—and it was his. The globa hegemon was in his sights. He was the man behind the curtain—and h might as well be in front of it, too—trying to snatch the world back fron its postmodern anomie and restore something like the homogenized an: neighborly embrace of 1962. And China! And the coming Gétterdammerung! To Bannon, thi was way-of-life stuff. China was the Russia of 1962—but smarter, mor tenacious, and more threatening. American hedge funders, in their secre support of China against the interests of the American middle class, wet the new fifth column. How much of this did Trump understand? How much was Trum committed to the ideas that moved Bannon and, by some emotion osmosis, the base? Trump was more than a year in, and not a shovelful dirt had yet been dug for the Wall, nor a penny allocated. The Wall ar so much else that was part of Bannon’s populist revolution—the detai of which he had once listed on whiteboards in his White House offic expecting to check each one off—were entirely captive to Trump's inatte: tion and wild mood swings. Trump, Bannon had long ago learned, “does: give a fuck about the agenda—he doesn't know what the agenda is.” 4% + In late March, after the gloom of the budget bill disaster had lifted, the was a brief, optimistic moment for the faithful in Trump’s inner circle. Chief of Staff John Kelly, fed up with Trump—just as Trump was f up with him—seemed surely on the way out. Kelly had joined the Wh House, replacing Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff, in Aug) 2017, charged with bringing management discipline to a chaotic W Wing. But by mid-fall, Trump was circumventing Kelly’s new prox dures. Jared and Ivanka—with many of the new rules designed to c' tail their open access to the president—were going over his head. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021138