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SIEGE 
Trump Under Fire 
MICHAEL 
WOLFF 
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
NEW TONN 
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Contents 
AUTHOR'S NOTE XI 
1. BULLSEYE 1 
2. THE DO-OVER 21 
3. LAWYERS 38 
4. HOME ALONE 50 
5. ROBERT MUELLER 6o 
6. MICHAEL COHEN 75 
7. THE WOMEN 88 
8. MICHAEL FLYNN 99 
9. MIDTERMS 113 
10. KUSHNER 125 
11. HANNITY 1 43 
12. TRUMP ABROAD 156 
13. TRUMP AND PUTIN 169 
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x 
CONTENTS 
14.100 DAYS 185 
15. MANAPORT 196 
16. PECKER, COHEN, WEISSELBERG 209 
17. MCCAIN, WOODWARD, ANONYMOUS 223 
18. KAVANAUGH 234 
19. KHASHOGGI 246 
20. OCTOBER SURPRISES 257 
21. NOVEMBER 6 268 
22. SHUTDOWN 282 
23. THE WALL 295 
EPILOGUE: THE REPORT 309 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 317 
INDEX 319 
Author's Note 
Shortly after Donald Trump's inauguration as the forty-fifth president of 
the United States, I was allowed into the West Wing as a sideline observer. 
My book Fire and Fury was the resulting account of the organizational 
chaos and constant drama—more psychodrama than political drama—of 
Trump's first seven months in office. Here was a volatile and uncertain 
president, releasing, almost on a daily basis, his strange furies on the world, 
and, at the same time, on his own staff. This first phase of the most abnor-
mal White House in American history ended in August 2017. with the 
departure of chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon and the appointment of 
retired general John Kelly as chief of staff. 
This new account begins in February 2018 at the outset of Trump's 
second year in office, with the situation now profoundly altered. The pres-
ident's capricious furies have been met by an increasingly organized and 
methodical institutional response. The wheels of justice are inexorably 
turning against him. In many ways, his own government, even his own 
White House, has begun to turn on him. Virtually every power center left 
of the far-right wing has deemed him unfit. Even some among his own 
base find him undependable, hopelessly distracted, and in over his head. 
Never before has a president been under such concerted attack with such 
a limited capacity to defend himself. 
His enemies surround him, dedicated to bringing him down. 
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XII 
AUTHOR'S NOTE 
AUTHOR'S NOTE 
XIII 
* * * 
I am joined in my train-wreck fascination with Trump—that certain 
knowledge that in the end he will destroy himself—by, I believe, almost 
everyone who has encountered him since he was elected president. 
To have worked anywhere near him is to be confronted with the most 
extreme and disorienting behavior possible. That is hardly an overstate-
ment. Not only is Trump not like other presidents, he is not like anyone 
most of us have ever known. Hence, everyone who has been close to him 
feels compelled to try to explain him and to dine out on his head-smacking 
peculiarities. It is yet one more of his handicaps: all the people around 
him, however much they are bound by promises of confidentiality or 
nondisclosure agreements or even friendship, cannot stop talking about 
their experience with him. In this sense, he is more exposed than any 
president in history. 
Many of the people in the White House who helped me during the 
writing of Fire and Fury are now outside of the administration, yet they are 
as engaged as ever by the Trump saga. I am grateful to be part of this sub-
stantial network Many of Trump's pre-White House cronies continue to 
both listen to him and support him; at the same time, as an expression both 
of their concern and of their incredulity, they report among one another, 
and to others as well, on his temper, mood, and impulses. In general, I 
have found that the closer people are to him, the more alarmed they have 
found themselves at various points about his mental state. They all spec-
ulate about how this will end—badly for him, they almost all conclude. 
Indeed, Trump is probably a much better subject for writers interested in 
human capacities and failings than for most of the reporters and writers 
who regularly cover Washington and who are primarily interested in the 
pursuit of success and power. 
My primary goal in Siege is to create a readable and intuitive narrative—
that is its nature. Another goal is to write the near equivalent of a real-time 
history of this extraordinary moment, since understanding it well after 
the fact might be too late. A final goal is pure portraiture: Donald Trump 
as an extreme, almost hallucinatory, and certainly cautionary, Amer-
ican character. To accomplish this, to gain the perspective and to find 
the voices necessary to tell the larger story I provided anonymity to any 
source who requested it. In cases where I have been told—on the prom-
ise of no attribution—about an unreported event or private conversation 
or remark. I have made every effort to confirm it with other sources or 
documents. In some cases, I have witnessed the events or conversations 
described herein. With regard to the Mueller investigation, the narrative 
I provide is based on internal documents given to me by sources close to 
the Office of the Special Counsel. 
Dealing with sources in the Trump White House has continued to 
offer its own set of unique issues. A basic requirement of working there 
is, surely, the willingness to infinitely rationalize or delegitimize the truth, 
and, when necessary, to outright lie. In fact, I believe this has caused some 
of the same people who have undermined the public trust to become pri-
vate truth-tellers. This is their devil's bargain. But for the writer, interview-
ing such Janus-faced sources creates a dilemma, for it requires depending 
on people who lie to also tell the truth—and who might later disavow the 
truth they have told. Indeed, the extraordinary nature of much of what 
has happened in the Trump White House is often baldly denied by its 
spokespeople, as well as by the president himself. Yet in each successive 
account of this administration, the level of its preposterousness—even as 
that bar has been consistently raised—has almost invariably been con-
firmed. 
In an atmosphere that promotes, and frequently demands, hyperbole, 
tone itself becomes a key part of accuracy. For instance, most crucially, 
the president, by a wide range of the people in close contact with him, is 
often described in maximal terms of mental instability. "I have never met 
anyone crazier than Donald Trump" is the wording of one staff member 
who has spent almost countless hours with the president. Something like 
this has been expressed to me by a dozen others with firsthand experience. 
How do you translate that into a responsible evaluation of this singular 
White House? My strategy is to try to show and not tell, to describe the 
broadest context, to communicate the experience, to make it real enough 
for a reader to evaluate for him- or herself where Donald Trump falls on a 
vertiginous sliding scale of human behavior. It is that condition, an emo-
tional state rather than a political state, that is at the heart of this book. 
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1 
BULLSEYE 
T
he president made his familiar stink-in-the-room face, then way 
his hands as though to ward off a bug. 
"Don't tell me this; he said. "Why are you telling me this?" 
His personal lawyer John Dowd, in late February 2018, little mo 
than a year into Trump's tenure, was trying to explain that prosecutc 
were likely to issue a subpoena for some of the Trump Organizatio: 
business records. 
Trump seemed to respond less to the implications of such a deep di 
into his affairs than to having to hear about it at all. His annoyance set i 
a small rant. It was not so much about people out to get him—and pe 
ple were surely out to get him—but that nobody was defending him. T 
problem was his own people. Especially his lawyers. 
Trump wanted his lawyers to "fix" things. "Don't bring me problen 
bring me solutions; was a favorite CEO bromide that he often repeate 
He judged his lawyers by their under-the-table or sleight-of-hand ski 
and held them accountable when they could not make problems disa 
pear. His problems became their fault. "Make it go away" was one of t 
frequent orders. It was often said in triplicate: "Make it go away, make 
go away, make it go away" 
The White House counsel Don McGahn—representing the Whi 
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MICHAEL WOLFF 
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House rather than, in a distinction Trump could never firmly grasp, the 
president himself—demonstrated little ability to make problems disap-
pear and became a constant brunt of Trump's rages and invective. His legal 
interpretation of proper executive branch function too often thwarted his 
boss's wishes. 
Dowd and his colleagues, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow—the trio of law-
yers charged with navigating the president through his personal legal 
problems—had, on the other hand, become highly skilled in avoiding 
their client's bad humor, which was often accompanied by menacing, 
barely controlled personal attacks. All three men understood that to be a 
successful lawyer for Donald Trump was to tell the client what he wanted 
to hear. 
Trump harbored a myth about the ideal lawyer that had almost noth-
ing to do with the practice of law. He invariably cited Roy Cohn, his old 
New York friend, attorney, and tough-guy mentor, and Robert Kennedy. 
John F. Kennedy's brother. "He was always on my ass about Roy Cohn 
and Bobby Kennedy," said Steve Bannon, the political strategist who, 
perhaps more than anyone else, was responsible for Trump's victory. 
"'Roy Cohn and Bobby Kennedy; he would say. 'Where's my Roy Cohn 
and Bobby Kennedy?'" Cohn, to his own benefit and legend, built the 
myth that Trump continued to embrace: with enough juice and mus-
cle, the legal system could always be gamed. Bobby Kennedy had been 
his brother's attorney general and hatchet man; he protected JFK and 
worked the back channels of power for the benefit of the family. 
This was the constant Trump theme: beating the system. "the guy 
who gets away with it," he had often bragged to friends in New York. 
At the same time, he did not want to know details. He merely wanted 
his lawyers to assure him that he was winning. 'We're killing it, right? 
That's what I want to know. That's all I want to know. If we're not killing 
it, you screwed up," he shouted one afternoon at members of his ad hoc 
legal staff. 
From the start, it had become a particular challenge to find top law-
yers to take on what, in the past, had always been one of the most vaunted 
of legal assignments: representing the president of the United States. One 
high-profile Washington white-collar litigator gave Trump a list of twenty 
issues that would immediately need to be addressed if he were to to 
on the case. Trump refused to consider any of them. More than a doz 
major firms had turned down his business. In the end, Trump was left wi 
a ragtag group of solo practitioners without the heft and resources of I 
firms. Now, thirteen months after his inauguration, he was facing p 
sonal legal trouble at least as great as that faced by Richard Nixon and E 
Clinton, and doing so with what seemed like, at best, a Court Street lei 
team. But Trump appeared to be oblivious to this exposed flank. Ratch' 
ing up his level of denial about the legal threats around him, he breez 
rationalized: "If I had good lawyers, took guilty" 
Dowd, at seventy-seven, had had a long, successful legal career, be 
in government and in Washington law firms. But that was in the past. 
was on his own now, eager to postpone retirement. He knew the imp( 
tance, certainly to his own position in Trump's legal circle, of und. 
standing his client's needs. He was forced to agree with the presider 
assessment of the investigation into his campaign's contact with Russi 
state interests: it would not reach him. To that end, Dowd, and the ott 
members of Trump's legal team, recommended that the president coc 
erate with the Mueller investigation. 
"Sot a target, right?" Trump constantly prodded them. 
This wasn't a rhetorical question. He insisted on an answer, and 
affirmative one: "Mr. President, you're not a target?' Early in his tenu 
Trump had pushed FBI director James Comey to provide precisely tl 
reassurance. In one of the signature moves of his presidency, he had fir 
Comey in May 2017 in part because he wasn't satisfied with the enth 
siasm of the affirmation and therefore assumed Comey was plotti 
against him. 
Whether the president was indeed a target—and it would surely he 
taken a through-the-looking-glass exercise not to see him as the bullsc 
of the Mueller investigation—seemed to occupy a separate reality IN 
Trump's need to be reassured that he was not a target. 
"Trump's trained me;' Ty Cobb told Steve Bannon. "Even if it's bi 
it's great!" 
Trump imagined—indeed, with a preternatural confidence, nothi 
appeared to dissuade him—that sometime in the very near future he wot 
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MICHAEL WOLFF 
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hear directly from the special counsel, who would send him a compre-
hensive and even apologetic letter of exoneration. 
"Where he kept demanding to know, "is my fucking letter?" 
The grand jury empanelled by Special Counsel Robert Mueller met on 
Thursdays and Fridays in federal district court in Washington. Its busi-
ness was conducted on the fifth floor of an unremarkable building at 333 
Constitution Avenue. The grand jurors gathered in a nondescript space 
that looked less like a courtroom than a classroom, with prosecutors at a 
podium and witnesses sitting at a desk in the front of the room. The Mueller 
grand jurors were more female than male, more white than black, older 
rather than younger; they were distinguished most of all by their focus 
and intensity. They listened to the proceedings with "a scary sort of atten-
tion, as though they already know everything," said one witness. 
In a grand jury inquiry, you fall into one of three categories. You are 
a "witness of fact," meaning the prosecutor believes you have information 
about an investigation at hand. Or you are a "subject," meaning you are 
regarded as having personal involvement with the crime under investiga-
tion. Or, most worrisome, you are a "target,' meaning the prosecutor is 
seeking to have the grand jury indict you. Witnesses often became sub-
jects, and subjects often became targets. 
In early 2018, with the Mueller investigation and its grand jury main-
taining a historic level of secrecy, no one in the White House could be sure 
who was what. Or who was saying what to whom. Anyone and everyone 
working for the president or one of his senior aides could be talking to the 
special counsel. The investigation's code of silence extended into the West 
Wing. Nobody knew, and nobody was saying, who was spilling the beans. 
Almost every White House senior staffer—the collection of advisers 
who had firsthand dealings with the president—had retained a lawyer. 
Indeed, from the president's first days in the White House, Trump's tangled 
legal past and evident lack of legal concern had cast a shadow on those 
who worked for him. Senior people were looking for lawyers even as they 
were still learning how to navigate the rabbit warren that is the West Wing. 
In February 2017, mere weeks after the inauguration, and not ►ong 
after the FBI had first raised questions about National Security Ad. 
Michael Flynn, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus had walked into Steve I 
non's office and said, "going to do you a big favor. Give me your a 
card. Don't ask me why, just give it to me. You'll be thanking me for 
rest of your life:" 
Bannon opened his wallet and gave Priebus his American ExI 
card. Priebus shortly returned, handed the card back, and said, "You 
have legal insurance 
Over the next year, Bannon—a witness of fact—spent hundrec 
hours with his lawyers preparing for his testimony before the sp 
counsel and before Congress. His lawyers in turn spent ever moun 
hours talking to Mueller's team and to congressional committee coun 
Bannon's legal costs at the end of the year came to $2 million. 
Every lawyer's first piece of advice to his or her client was blunt 
unequivocal: talk to no one, lest it become necessary to testify about 
you said. Before long, a constant preoccupation of senior staffers in 
Trump White House was to know as little as possible. It was a wn 
side-up world: where being "in the room" was traditionally the r 
sought-after status, now you wanted to stay out of meetings. You wa 
to avoid being a witness to conversations; you wanted to avoid b 
witnessed being a witness to conversations, at least if you were sn 
Certainly, nobody was your friend. It was impossible to know whc 
colleague stood in the investigation; hence, you had no way of knot 
how likely it was that they might need to offer testimony about some 
else—you, perhaps—as the bargaining chip to save themselves by a 
crating with the special counsel, a.k.a. flipping. 
The White House, it rapidly dawned on almost everyone who wo: 
there—even as it became one more reason not to work there—was 
scene of an ongoing criminal investigation, one that could potent 
ensnare anyone who was anywhere near it. 
» * * 
The ultimate keeper of the secrets from the campaign, the transition, 
through the first year in the White House was Hope Hicks, the 14, 
House communications director. She had witnessed most everyth 
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MICHAEL WOLFF 
She saw what the president saw: she knew what the president, a man 
unable to control his own running monologue, knew. 
On February 27, 2018, testifying before the House Intelligence 
Committee—she had already appeared before the special counsel—she 
was pressed about whether she had ever lied for the president. Perhaps a 
more accomplished communications professional could have escaped the 
corner here, but Hicks, who had scant experience other than working as 
Donald Trump's spokesperson, which, as often as not, meant dealing with 
his disregard of empirical truth, found herself as though in a sudden and 
unexpected moral void trying to publicly parse the relative importance 
of her boss's lies. She admitted to telling "white lies: as in, somehow, less 
than the biggest lies. This was enough of a forward admission to require 
a nearly twenty-minute mid-testimony conference with her lawyers, dis-
tressed by what she might be admitting and by where any deconstruction 
of the president's constant inversions might lead. 
Not long after she testified, another witness before the Mueller grand 
jury was asked how far Hicks might go to lie for the president. The witness 
answered: "I think when it comes to doing anything as a `yes man for 
Trump, she'll do it—but she won't take a bullet for him." The statement 
could be taken as both a backhanded compliment and an estimate of how 
far loyalty in the Trump White House might extend—probably not too far. 
Almost no one in Trump's administration, it could be argued, was con-
ventionally suited to his or her job. But with the possible exception of the 
president himself, no one provided a better illustration of this unprepared 
and uninformed presidency than Hicks. She did not have substantial media 
or political experience, nor did she have a temperament annealed by years 
of high-pressure work. Always dressed in the short skirts that Trump 
favored, she seemed invariably caught in the headlights. Trump admired 
her not because she had the political skills to protect him, but for her pliant 
dutifulness. Her job was to devote herself to his care and feeding. 
"When you speak to him, open with positive feedback," counseled 
Hicks, understanding Trump's need for constant affirmation and his 
almost complete inability to talk about anything but himself. Her atten-
tiveness to 'frump and tractable nature had elevated her, at age twenty-nine, 
to the top White House communications job. And practically speaking, 
SIEGE 
7 
she acted as his de facto chief of staff. Trump did not want his administra-
tion to be staffed by professionals; he wanted it to be staffed by people who 
attended and catered to him. 
Hicks—"Hope-y," to Trump—was both the president's gatekeeper 
and his comfort blanket. She was also a frequent subject of his pruri-
ent interest: Trump preferred business, even in the White House, to be 
personal. "Who's fucking Hope?" he would demand to know. The topic 
also interested his son Don Jr., who often professed his intention to "fuck 
Hope The president's daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, 
both White House senior advisers, expressed a gentler type of concern for 
Hicks; sometimes they would even try to suggest eligible men. 
But Hicks, seeming to understand the insular nature of Trumpworld, 
dated exclusively inside the bubble, picking the baddest boys in it: cam-
paign manager Corey Lewandowski during the campaign and presiden-
tial aide Rob Porter in the White House. As the relationship between 
Hicks and Porter unfolded in the fall of 2017, knowing about the affair 
became an emblem of Trump insiderness, with special care taken to keep 
this development from the proprietary president. Or not: other people, 
assuming that Porter's involvement with Hicks would not at all please 
Trump, were less than discreet about it. 
In the heightened enmity of the Trump White House, Rob Porter may have 
succeeded in becoming the most disliked person by everyone except per-
haps the president himself. A square-jawed, 1950s-looking guy who could 
have been a model for Brylcreem, he was almost a laughable figure of 
betrayal and perfidy: if he hadn't stabbed you in the back, you would be 
forced to acknowledge how unworthy he considered you to be. A sitcom 
sort of suck-up—"Eddie Haskell," cracked Bannon, citing the early televi-
sion icon of insincerity and brownnosing featured in Leave It to Beaver—he 
embraced Chief of Staff John Kelly, while at the same time poisoning him 
with the president. Porter's estimation of his own high responsibilities in 
the White House, together with the senior-most jobs that the president, 
he let it be known, was promising him, seemed to put the administration 
and the nation squarely on his shoulders. 
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%IP 
Porter had, before the age of forty, two bitter ex-wives, at least one 
of whom he had beaten, and both of whom he had cheated on at talk-
of-the-town levels. During a stint as a Senate staffer, the married Porter 
had an affair with an intern, costing him his job. His girlfriend Samantha 
Dravis had moved in with Porter in the summer of 2017, while, quite 
unbeknownst to her, he was seeing Hicks. "I cheated on you because you're 
not attractive enough; he later told Dravis. 
In a potentially criminal break of protocol, Porter had gained access 
to his raw FBI clearance reports and seen the statements of his ex-wives. 
His most recent ex-wife had also written a blog about his alleged abuse, 
which, while it did not name him, clearly fingered him. Concerned about 
the damaging impact his former wives could have on his security review, 
he recruited Dravis to help him smooth his relationship with both women. 
Lewandowski, Hicks's former boyfriend, caught wind of the Hicks-
Porter relationship and began working to expose it; by some reports, 
he got paparazzi to follow Hicks. Though Porter's history of abuse was 
slowly making its way to the surface as a result of the FBI investigation, 
the Lewandowski campaign against Hicks cut through many other efforts 
to cover up Porter's transgressions. 
Dravis, in the autumn of 2017, heard the Lewandowski-pushed 
rumors of the Hicks-Porter relationship. After finding Hicks's number 
listed under a man's name in Porter's contacts, Dravis confronted Porter, 
who promptly threw her out. Moving back in with her parents, she began 
her own revenge campaign, openly talking about Porter's security clear-
ance issues, including to people inside the White House counsel's office, 
saying he had protection at the highest levels in the White House. Then, 
along with Lewandowski, Dravis helped leak the details of the Hicks-
Porter romance to the Daily Mail, which published a story about it on 
February 1. 
But Dravis, joined by Porter's former wives, decided that, outra-
geously, he had come out looking good in the Daily Mail account—he 
was part of a glam power couple! Porter called Dravis to taunt her: "You 
thought you could get me!" Dravis and his former wives all then publicly 
revealed their abuse at his hand. His first wife said he kicked and punched 
her; she even produced a photograph of her black eye. His second wife 
informed the media that she had filed an emergency protective ore 
against him. 
The White House, or at least Kelly—and likely Hicks—had been awi 
of many of these claims and, effectively, covered them up. ("You usua 
have enough competent people for White House positions to weed out t 
wife beaters, but you couldn't be so choosy in the Trump White House,' 
one Republican acquaintance of Porter's.) The furor that erupted arou 
Porter and his troubling gross-guy history not only annoyed Trump 
"He stinks of bad press"—it further weakened Kelly. On February 7, of 
both of his former wives gave interviews to CNN, Porter resigned. 
A publicity-shy Hicks—Donald Trump put a high value on associa 
who did not steal his press opportunities—suddenly found her love I 
in the glare of intense international press scrutiny. Her affair with the d 
credited Porter highlighted her own odd relationship with the preside 
and his family, as well as the haphazard management, interpersonal d: 
functions, and general lack of political savvy in the Trump court. 
* * * 
The affair was, curiously, among the least of Hicks's problems. Indeed, I 
Hicks the Porter scandal became perhaps a better cloud under which 
leave the administration than what almost everybody in the West Wi 
assumed was the real cloud. 
On February 27, a reporter at the Washington insider newsletter Axi 
Jonathan Swan, a favorite conduit for White House leaks, reported tl 
Josh Raffel was leaving the White House. In a novel arrangement, Rai 
had come into the White House in April 2017 as the exclusive spokespers 
for the president's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his wife, Ivanka, bypa 
ing the White House communications team. Raffel, who, like Kushn 
was a Democrat, had worked for Hiltzik Strategies, the New York Pub 
relations firm that represented ivanka's clothing line. 
Hope Hicks, who had also worked for the Hiltzik firm—perhaps b 
known for having long represented the film producer Harvey Weinste 
caught, in the fall of 2017, in an epochal harassment and abuse scam 
and cover-up—had originally had the same role as Raffel but at a higl 
level: she was the personal spokesperson for the president. In Septemb 
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Hicks had been elevated to White House communications director, with 
Raffel as her number two. 
The trouble had arisen the previous summer. Both Hicks and Raffel 
had been on Air Force One in July 2017 as the news broke about Donald 
Trump Jr.'s meeting in Trump Tower during the campaign with Russian 
government go-betweens offering dirt on Hillary Clinton. During the 
flight back to the United States after the G20 summit in Germany, Hicks 
and Raffel aided the president in his efforts to issue a largely false story 
about the Trump Tower meeting, thus becoming part of the cover-up. 
Even though Raffel had been at the White House for a little more than 
nine months, the Axios report said that his departure had been under dis-
cussion for several months. That was untrue. It was an abrupt exit. 
The next day, just as abruptly, Hope Hicks—the person in the White 
House closest to the president—resigned as well. 
The one person who perhaps knew more than anyone else about the 
workings of the Trump campaign and the Trump White House was sud-
denly out the door. The profound concern inside the White House was 
the reasonable supposition that Hicks and Raffel, both witnesses to and 
participants in the president's efforts to cover up the details of his son and 
son-in-law's meeting with the Russians, were subjects or targets of the 
Mueller investigation—or, worse, had already cut a deal. 
The president, effusive in his public praise for Hicks, did not try to 
talk her out of leaving. In the weeks to come he would mope about her 
absence—"Where's my Hope-y?"--but, in fact, as soon as he got wind 
that she might be talking, he wanted to cut her loose and began, in a 
significant rewrite, downgrading her status and importance on the cam-
paign and in the White House. 
Yet here, from Trump's point of view, was a hopeful point about Hicks: 
as central as she was to his presidency, her duties really only consisted of 
pleasing him. She was an unlikely agent of grand strategy and great con-
spiracies. Trump's team was made up of only bit players. 
• * * 
John Dowd may have been reluctant to give his client bad news, but 
he well understood the danger of a thorough prosecutor with virtually 
unlimited resources. The more a determined team of G-men sifts, stril 
and inspects, the greater the chance that both methodical and cast 
crimes will be revealed. The more comprehensive the search, the me 
inevitable the outcome. The case of Donald Trump—with his history 
bankruptcies, financial legerdemain, dubious associations, and gene) 
sense of impunity—certainly seemed to offer prosecutors something 
an embarrassment of riches. 
For his part, however, Donald Trump yet seemed to believe that 1 
skills and instincts were at least a match for all the thoroughness as 
resources of the United States Department of Justice. He even believ 
their exhaustive approach would work in his favor. 'Boring. Confusi 
for everybody:' he said, dismissing the reports of the investigation pi 
vided by Dowd and others. "You can't follow any of this. No hook." 
One of the many odd aspects of Trump's presidency was that 
did not see being president, either the responsibilities or the exposu 
as being all that different from his pre-presidential life. He had endur 
almost countless investigations in his long career. He had been involv 
in various kinds of litigation for the better part of forty-five years. Het, 
a fighter who, with brazenness and aggression, got out of fixes that wot 
have ruined a weaker, less wily player. That was his essential busing 
strategy: what doesn't kill me strengthens me. Though he was wound 
again and again, he never bled out. 
"It's playing the game," he explained in one of his frequent mor 
logues about his own superiority and everyone else's stupidity. is go 
at the game. Maybe. the best. Really, I could be the best. I think I 
the best.
 very good. Very cool. Most people are afraid that the wo 
might happen. But it doesn't, unless you're stupid. And. not stupid.' 
In the weeks after his first anniversary in office, with the Muel 
investigation in its eighth month, Trump continued to regard the si 
cial counsel's inquiry as a contest of wills. He did not see it as a war 
attrition—a gradual reduction of the strength and credibility of the t 
get through sustained scrutiny and increasing pressure. Instead, he sat 
situation to confront, a spurious government undertaking that was v 
nerable to his attacks. He was confident he could jawbone this "wit 
hunt"—often tweeted in all-caps—to at least a partisan draw. 
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MICHAEL WOLFF 
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12 
He remained irritated by efforts to persuade him to play the game in 
the usual Washington way—mounting a disciplined legal defense, negoti-
ating, trying to cut his losses—rather than his way. This was disconcerting 
to many of the people closest to him, but it alarmed them more to see that 
as Trump's indignation and sense of personal insult rose, so did his belief 
in his own innocence. 
By the end of February, in addition to the Mueller grand jury indictments 
of a group of Russian nationals for illegal activities involved with efforts 
by the Russian government to influence the U.S. election, Mueller had 
reached several levels into the Trump circle. Among those who were 
indicted or who had pled guilty to felonies were his former campaign man-
ager Paul Manafort, his former national security advisor Michael Flynn, 
the eager-beaver junior adviser George Papadopoulos, and Manafort's 
business partner and campaign official Rick Gates. This series of legal 
moves could be classically read as a methodical, step-by-step approach to 
the president's door. Or, from the Trump camp's point of view, it could be 
seen as a roundup of the sorts of opportunists and hangers-on who had 
always trailed Trump. 
The doubts about the usefulness of Trump's hangers-on was an implicit 
part of their usefulness: they could be shrugged off and disavowed at any 
time, which is what promptly happened at the least sign of trouble. The 
Trumpers swept up by Mueller were all declared wannabe and marginal 
players. The president had never met them, could not remember them, or 
had a limited acquaintance with them. "I know Mr. Manafort—I haven't 
spoken to him in a long time, but I know him: declared a dismissive 
Trump, pulling a line from the "who dat?" page of his playbook. 
The difficulty in proving a conspiracy is proving intent. Many of the 
president's inner circle believed that Trump, and the Trump Organiza-
tion, and by extension the Trump campaign, operated in such a diffuse, 
haphazard, gang-that-couldn't-shoot-straight manner that intent would 
be very difficult to establish. What's more, the Trump hangers-on were 
so demonstrably subpar players that stupidity could well be a reasonable 
defense against intent. 
Many in the Trump circle agreed with their boss: they believed tha 
whatever idiotic moves had been made by idiotic Trump hands, the Rus 
sia investigation was too abstruse and nickel-and-dime to ultimately stick 
At the same time, many, and perhaps all, were privately convinced tha 
a deep dive—or, for that matter, even a cursory inspection—of Trump' 
financial past would yield a trove of overt offenses, and likely a pattern o 
career corruption. 
It was hardly surprising, then, that ever since the beginning of th 
special counsel's investigation, Trump had tried to draw a line in the sang 
between Mueller and Trump family finances, openly threatening Muelle 
if he went there. Trump's operating assumption remained that the speck-
counsel was afraid of him, conscious of where and how his tolerant 
might end. Trump was confident that the Mueller team could be made t 
understand its limits, by either wink-wink or unsubtle threat. 
"They know they can't get me," he told one member of his cirri 
of after-dinner callers, "because I was never involved.. not a targe 
There's nothing.. not a target. They've told me. not a target. An 
they know what would happen if they made me a target. Everybod 
understands everybody." 
* * * 
Books and newspaper stories about Trump's forty-five years in busint 
were full of his shady dealings, and his arrival in the White House on 
helped to highlight them and surface even juicier ones. Real estate w; 
the world's favorite money-laundering currency, and Trump's B-level re 
estate business—relentlessly marketed by Trump as triple A—was qui 
explicitly designed to appeal to money launderers. What's more, Truml 
own financial woes, and desperate efforts to maintain his billionaire lib 
style, cachet, and market viability, forced him into constant and unsubt 
schemes. In the high irony department, Jared Kushner, when he was 
law school, and before he met Ivanka, identified, in a paper he wrot 
possible claims of fraud against the Trump Organization in a particul 
real estate deal he was studying—a subject now of quite some amuseme 
among his acquaintances at the time. Practically speaking, Trump hid 
plain sight, as the prosecutors appeared to be finding. 
EFTA00316522

14 
MICHAEL WOLFF 
SIEGE 
15 
In November 2004, for instance, Jeffrey Epstein, the financier later 
caught in a scandal involving underage prostitutes, agreed to purchase 
from bankruptcy a house in Palm Beach, Florida, for $36 million, a prop-
erty that had been on the market for two years. Epstein and Trump had 
been close friends—playboys in arms, as it were—for more than a decade, 
with Trump often seeking Epstein's help with his chaotic financial affairs. 
Soon after negotiating the deal for the house in Palm Beach, Epstein took 
Trump to see it, looking for advice on construction issues involved with 
moving the swimming pool. But as he prepared to finalize his purchase 
for the house, Epstein discovered that Trump, who was severely cash-
constrained at the time, had bid $41 million for the property and bought 
it out from under Epstein through an entity called Trump Properties 
LLC, entirely financed by Deutsche Bank, which was already carrying a 
substantial number of troubled loans to the Trump Organization and to 
Trump personally. 
Trump, Epstein knew, had been loaning out his name in real estate 
deals—that is, for an ample fee, Trump would serve as a front man to 
disguise the actual ownership in a real estate transaction. (This was, in 
a sense, another variation of Trump's basic business model of licensing 
his name for commercial properties owned by someone else.) A furi-
ous Epstein, certain that Trump was merely fronting for the real owners, 
threatened to expose the deal, which was getting extensive coverage in 
Florida papers. The fight became all the more bitter when, not long after 
the purchase, Trump put the house on the market for $125 million. 
But if Epstein knew some of Trump's secrets, Trump knew some of 
Epstein's. Trump often saw the financier at Epstein's current Palm Beach 
house, and Trump knew that Epstein was visited almost every day, and 
had been for many years, by girls III hired to give him massages that 
often had happy endings—girls recruited from local restaurants, strip clubs, 
and, also, Trump's own Mar-a-Lago. Just as the enmity between the two 
friends increased over the house purchase, Epstein found himself under 
investigation by the Palm Beach police. And as Epstein's legal prob-
lems escalated, the house, with only minor improvements, was acquired 
for $96 million by Dmitry Rybolovlev, an oligarch who was part of the 
close Putin circle of government-aligned industrialists in Russia, and who, 
in fact, never moved into the house. Trump had, miraculously, earned 
$55 million without putting up a dime. Or, more likely, Trump merely 
earned a fee for hiding the real owner—a shadow owner quite possibly 
being funneled cash by Rybolovlev for other reasons beyond the value 
of the house. Or, possibly, the real owner and real buyer were one and 
the same. Rybolovlev might have, in effect, paid himself for the house, 
thereby cleansing the additional $55 million for the second purchase 
of the house. 
This was Donald Trump's world of real estate. 
• * • 
As though using mind-control tricks, Jared Kushner had become highly 
skilled at containing his deep frustration with his father-in-law. He stayed 
expressionless—sometimes he seemed almost immobile—when Trump 
went off the rails, unleashing tantrums or proposing dopey political or 
policy moves. Kushner, a courtier in a crazy court, was possessed of an 
eerie calmness and composure. He was also very worried. It seemed 
astounding and ludicrous that this fig-leaf technicality—"You're not a 
target, Mr. President"—could offer his father-in-law such comfort. 
Kushner understood that Trump was surrounded by a set of mortal 
arrows, any of which might kill him: the case for obstruction; the case 
for collusion; any close look at his long, dubious financial history; the 
always-lurking issues with women; the prospects of a midterm rout and 
the impeachment threat if the midterm elections went against them; the 
fickleness of the Republicans, who might at any time turn on him; and the 
senior staffers who had been pushed out of the administration (Kushner 
had urged the ouster of many of them), any of whom might testify against 
him. In March alone, Gary Cohn, the president's chief economic adviser, 
Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, and Andrew McCabe, the deputy 
director of the FBI—each man bearing the president deep contempt—
were pushed from the administration. 
But the president was in no mood to hear Kushner's counsel. Never 
entirely trusted by his father-in-law—in truth, Trump trusted no one 
except, arguably, his daughter Ivanka, Kushner's wife—Kushner now found 
himself decidedly on the wrong side of Trump's red line of loyalty. 
EFTA00316523

16 
MICHAEL WOLFF 
SIEGE 
As a family insider, Kushner, in a game of court politics so vicious 
that, in another time, it might have yielded murder plots, had appeared to 
triumph over his early White House rivals. But Trump invariably soured 
on the people who worked for him, just as they soured on him, not least 
because he nearly always came to believe that his staff was profiting at his 
expense. He was convinced that everyone was greedy, and that sooner or 
later they would try to take what was more rightfully his. Increasingly, it 
seemed that Kushner, too, might be just another staff member trying to 
take advantage of Donald Trump. 
Trump had recently learned that a prominent New York investment 
fund, Apollo Global Management, led by the financier Leon Black, had 
provided the Kushner Companies—the family real estate group that had 
been managed by Kushner himself while his father, Charlie, was in federal 
prison—with $184 million in financing. 
This was troubling on many levels, and it left a vulnerable Kushner 
open to more questions about the conflicts between his business and his 
position in the White House. During the transition, Kushner had offered 
Apollo's cofounder Marc Rowan, the job of director of the Office of Man-
agement and Budget. Rowan initially accepted the job, declining it only 
after Apollo chairman Leon Black objected to what would have to be dis-
closed about Rowan's and the firm's investments. 
But the president-elect's concerns were elsewhere: he was more keenly 
and furiously focused on the fact that, in the constant search for financings 
that occur in mid-tier real estate companies like Trump's, Apollo had never 
extended itself for the Trump Organization. Now, it seemed baldly appar-
ent, Apollo was backing the Kushners solely because of the family's con-
nection to the administration. The constant accounting in Trump's head 
of who was profiting from whom, and his sense of what he was therefore 
owed for creating the circumstances by which everyone could profit, was 
one of the things that reliably kept him up at night. 
"You think I don't know what's going on?" Trump sneered at his 
daughter, one of the few people he usually went out of his way to try to 
mollify. You think I don't know what's going on?" 
The Kushners had gained. He had not. 
The president's daughter pleaded her husband's case. She spoke of the 
incredible sacrifice the couple had made by coming to Washington. Ai 
for what? "Our lives have been destroyed," she said melodramatically 
and yet with some considerable truth. The former New York sociali' 
had been reduced to potential criminal defendants and media laughir 
stocks. 
After a year of friends and advisers whispering that his daughter a 
son-in-law were at the root of the disarray in the White House, Trui 
once again was thinking they should never have come. Revising histo 
he told various of his late-night callers that he had always thought tl 
never should have come. Over his daughter's bitter protests, he declin 
to intercede in his son-in-law's security clearance issues. The FBI I 
continued to hold up Kushner's clearance—which the president, at 
discretion, could approve, his daughter reminded him. But Trump 
nothing, letting his son-in-law dangle in the wind. 
Kushner, with superhuman patience and resolve, waited for his opp 
tunity. The trick among Trump whisperers was how to focus Trun 
attention, since Trump could never be counted on to participate in al 
thing like a normal conversation with reasonable back-and-forth. Spc 
and women were reliable subjects; both would immediately engage h 
Disloyalty also got Trump's attention. So did conspiracies. And mono: 
always money. 
Kushner's own lawyer was Abbe Lowell, a well-known showboat of 
S
criminal bar who prided himself on, and managed his clients' exp 
cations and attention with, an up-to-the-minute menu of rumors 
insights about what gambit or strategy prosecutors were about to dish 
The true edge provided by a high-profile litigator was perhaps not col 
room skill but backroom intelligence. 
Lowell, adding to the reports Dowd had received, told Kushner i 
prosecutors were about to substantially deepen the president's—and 
Trump family's—jeopardy. Dowd had continued to try to mollify the pi 
dent, but Kushner, with Intel supplied by Lowell, went to his father-in-law v 
reports about this new front in the legal war against him. Sure enough 
March 15 the news broke that the special counsel had issued a subpo 
EFTA00316524

SIEGE 
19 
for the Trump Organization records: it was a deep and encompassing order, 
reaching many years back. 
Kushner also warned his father-in-law that the investigation was about 
to spill over from the Mueller team, with its narrow focus on Russian collu-
sion, to the Southern District of New York—that is, the federal prosecutor's 
office in Manhattan—which would not be restricted to the Russia probe. This 
was a work-around intended to circumvent the special counsel's restriction 
to Russia-related matters, but also an effort by the Mueller team to short-
circuit any attempt by the president to disband or curtail its investiga-
tion. By moving parts of the investigation to the Southern District, Mueller, 
as Kushner explained to Trump, was ensuring that the investigation of the 
president would continue even without the special counsel. Mueller was 
playing a canny, or ass-protecting, game, while also following precise pro-
cedures: even as he focused on the limited area of his investigation, he was 
divvying up evidence of other possible crimes and sending it out to other 
jurisdictions, all of which were eager to be part of the hunt. 
It gets worse, Kushner told Trump. 
The Southern District was once run by Trump's friend Rudy Giuliani, 
the former mayor of New York. In the 1980s, when Giuliani was the federal 
prosecutor—and when, curiously, James Comey had worked for him—
the Southern District became the premier prosecutor of the Mafia and of 
Wall Street. Giuliani had pioneered using a draconian, and many believed 
unconstitutional, interpretation of the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and 
Corrupt Organizations) Act against the Mob. He used the same interpre-
tation against big finance, and in 1990 the threat of a RICO indictment, 
under which the government could almost indiscriminately seize assets, 
brought down the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert. 
The Southern District had long been worrisome to Trump. After his 
election, he had an unseemly meeting with Preet Bharara, the federal pros-
ecutor there, a move whose optics were alarming to all of his advisers, 
including Don McGahn and the incoming attorney general, Jeff Sessions. 
(The meeting foreshadowed the one Trump would shortly have with 
Comey, during which he sought a pledge of loyalty in return for job secu-
rity.) His meeting with Bharara was unsatisfactory: Bharara was unwill-
ing to humor him—or, shortly, even to return his calls. In March 2017, 
Trump fired him. 
Now, said Kushner, even without Bharara, the Southern District was 
looking to treat the Trump Organization as a Mob-like enterprise; its law-
yers would use the RICO laws against it and go after the president as if he 
were a drug lord or Mob don. Kushner pointed out that corporations had 
no Fifth Amendment privilege, and that you couldn't pardon a corpora-
tion. As well, assets used in or derived from the commission of a crime 
could be seized by the government. 
In other words, of the more than five hundred companies and separate 
entities in which Donald Trump had been an officer, up until he became 
president, many might be subject to forfeiture. One potential casualty of 
a successful forfeiture action was the president's signature piece of real 
estate: the government could seize Trump Tower. 
In mid-March, a witness with considerable knowledge of the Trump 
Organization's operations traveled by train to Washington to appear before 
the Mueller grand jury. Picked up at Union Station by the FBI, the wit-
ness was driven to the federal district court. From 10:00 ■ 
to 5:00 III 
two prosecutors on the Mueller team. Aaron Zelinsky and Jeannie 
Rhee, reviewed with the witness, among other issues, the structure of the 
Trump Organization. 
The prosecutors asked the witness about the people who regularly 
talked to Trump, how often they met with him, and for what purposes. 
They also asked how meetings with Trump were arranged and where they 
took place. The witness's testimony yielded, among other useful pieces of 
information, a signal fact: all checks issued by the Trump Organization 
were personally signed by Donald Trump himself. 
The Trump Organization's activities in Atlantic City were a particular 
subject of interest that day. The witness was asked about Trump's rela-
tionship with known Mafia members—not if he had such relationships, 
but the nature of the relationships prosecutors already knew existed. The 
prosecutors also wanted to know about Trump Tower Moscow, a project 
EFTA00316525

20 
MICHAEL WOLFF 
pursued by 'frump for many years—pursued, in fact, well into the 2016 
campaign—albeit never brought to fruition. 
Michael Cohen, Trump's personal lawyer and a Trump Organization 
officer, was another significant topic. The prosecutors asked questions 
about the level of Cohen's disappointment at not being included in the 
president's White House team. They seemed to be trying to gauge how 
much resentment Cohen felt, which led the witness to infer that they 
wanted to estimate how much leverage they might have if they attempted 
to flip Michael Cohen against the president. 
Minsky and Rhee wanted to know about Jared Kushner. And they 
wanted to know about Hope Hicks. 
The two prosecutors also delved into the president's personal life. How 
often did he cheat on his wife? With whom? How were trysts arranged? 
What were the president's sexual interests? The Mueller investigation, and 
its grand jury, was becoming a clearing house for the details of Trump's 
long history of professional and personal perfidiousness. 
When the long day was finally over, the witness left the grand jury 
room shocked—not so much by what the prosecutors wanted to know 
but by what they already knew. 
* * * 
By the third week of March, Trump's son-in-law had the president's full 
attention. "They can not only impeach you, they can bankrupt you" was 
Kushner's message. 
Agitated and angry, Trump pressed Dowd for more reassurances, 
holding him accountable for the prior reassurances Trump had frequently 
demanded he be given. Dowd held firm: he yet believed that the fight was 
in its early stages and that Mueller was still on a fishing expedition. 
But Trump's patience was finally at an end. He decided that Dowd was 
a fool and should go back into the retirement from which, Trump kept 
repeating, he had rescued him. Indeed, resisting that retirement, Dowd 
pleaded his own case, assuring the president that he could continue to 
provide him with valuable help. To no avail: on March 22, Dowd reluc-
tantly resigned, sending another bitter former Trumper into the world. 
2 
THE DO-OVER 
T
he day John Dowd was fired, Steve Bannon was sitting at his dinini 
room table trying to forestall another threat to the Trump pres 
dency. This one wasn't about a relentless prosecutor but rather a betray( 
base. It was about the Wall that wasn't. 
The town houses on Capitol Hill, middle-class remnants of the nit 
teenth century, are cramped up-and-down affairs of modest parlor floor 
nook-y sitting rooms, and small bedrooms. Many serve as headquartc 
for causes and organizations that can't afford Washington's vast amou 
of standard-issue office real estate. Some double as housing for tin 
organization's leaders. Many represent amateur efforts or eccentric pt 
suits, often a kind of shrine to hopes and dreams and revolutions yet 
occur. The "Embassy" on A Street—a house built in 1890 and the font 
location of Bannon's Breitbart News—was where Bannon had lived a 
worked since his exile from the White House in August 2017. It was p 
frat house, part man cave, and part pseudo-military redoubt; conspire 
literature was scattered about. Various grave and underemployed you 
men, would-be militia members, loitered on the steps. 
The Embassy's creepiness and dark heart were in quite stark contr 
to Bannon's expansive and merry countenance. He might be in exile fr. 
the Trump White House, but it was an ebullient banishment, coffee-fue 
or otherwise. 
EFTA00316526

22 
MICHAEL WOLFF 
SIEGE 
23 
In the last few weeks, he had helped install his allies—and first-draft 
choices during the presidential transition—in central posts in the Trump 
administration. Mike Pompeo had recently been named secretary of state, 
John Bolton would soon become the national security advisor, and Larry 
Kudlow had been appointed director of the National Economic Council. 
The president's chief political aides were Corey Lewandowski and David 
Bossie, both Bannon allies, if not acolytes; both operated outside the 
White House and were frequent visitors at the Embassy. Many of the daily 
stream of White House defenders on cable television—the surrogates—
were Bannon people carrying Bannon's message as well as the president's. 
What's more, his enemies in the White House were moving out, includ-
ing Hope Hicks, H. R. McMaster, the former national security advisor, 
and the ever shrinking circle of allies supporting the president's son-in-
law and daughter. 
Bannon was often on the road. He was in Europe meeting with the 
rising populist right-wing groups, and in the U.S. meeting with hedge 
hinders desperate to understand the Trump variable. He was also looking 
for every opportunity to try to convince liberals that the populist way 
ought to be their way, too. Early in the year, Bannon went to Cambridge 
to see Larry Summers, who had been Bill Clinton's Treasury secretary, 
Barack Obama's director of the National Economic Council, and, for a 
time, president of Harvard. Summers's wife refused to allow Bannon into 
their home, so the meeting happened at Harvard instead. Summers was 
mis-shaven and wearing a shirt that was missing a button or two, while 
Bannon was sporting his double-shirt getup, cargo pants, and a hunting 
jacket. "Both of them looked like Asperger guys:' said one of the people 
at the meeting. 
"Do you fucking realize what your fucking friend is doing?" yelled 
Summers about Trump and his administration. "You're fucking the 
country!" 
"You elite Democrats—you only care about the margins, people who 
are rich or people who are poor," returned Bannon. 
"Your trade mumbo jumbo will sink the world into a depression," 
thundered Summers. 
"And you've exported U.S. jobs to China!" declared a delighted Ban-
non, always enjoying the opportunity to joust with a member of the 
establishment. 
Bannon was—or at least saw himself to be—a fixer, power broker 
and kingmaker without portfolio. He was a cockeyed sort of Clad 
Clifford, that political eminence and influence peddler of the 1960s am 
'70s. Or a wise man of the political fringe, if that was not an ultimate kin( 
of contradiction. Or the head of an auxiliary government. Or, perhaps 
something truly sui generic: no one quite like Bannon had ever player 
such a central role in America's national political life, or been such a thort 
in the side of it. As for Trump, with friends like Bannon, who needec 
enemies? 
The two men might be essential to each other, but they reviled anc 
ridiculed each other, too. Bannon's constant public analysis of Trump'. 
confounding nature—both its comic and harrowing components, thi 
behavior of a crazy uncle—not to mention his indiscreet diatribes of 
the inanities of Trump's family, continued to further alienate him from th 
president. And yet, though the two men no longer spoke, they hung ol 
each other's words—each desperate to know what one was saying abou 
the other. 
Whatever current feeling Bannon might have for Trump—his moo( 
ranged from exasperation to fury to disgust to incredulity—he contin 
ued to believe that nobody in American politics could match Trump' 
midway-style showmanship. Yes, Donald Trump had restored showman 
ship to American politics—he had taken the wonk out of politics. In sum 
he knew his audience. At the same time, he couldn't walk a straight line 
Every step forward was threatened by his next lurch. Like many grea 
actors, his innate self-destructiveness was always in conflict with his keel 
survival instincts. Some around the president merely trusted that th• 
latter would win over the former. Others, no matter the frustration o 
the effort, understood how much he needed to be led by unseen hands—
unseen being the key attribute. 
With no one to tell him otherwise, Bannon continued, unseen, b 
conduct the president's business from his dining-room table on A Street 
EFTA00316527

24 
MICHAEL WOLFF 
SIEGE 
25 
That afternoon, a bipartisan Congress with surprising ease had passed the 
$1.3 trillion 2018 appropriations bill. "McConnell, Ryan, Schumer, and 
Pelosi," said Bannon about the Republican and Democratic congressional 
leadership, "in their singular moment of bipartisan magnanimity, put one 
over on Trump?" 
This legislative milestone was a result of Trump's disengagement and 
everybody else's attentive efforts. Most presidents are eager to get down into 
the weeds of the budget process. Trump took little or no interest. Hence the 
Republican and Democratic leadership—here supported by the budget 
and legislative teams in the White House—were able to pass an enormous 
spending bill that failed to fund Trump's must-must item, the holy grail 
Wall, that prospective two-thousand-mile monument meant to run the 
entire length of the border between the United States and Mexico. Instead, 
the bill provided only $1.6 billion for border security. The current bill was in 
effect the same budget bill that had been pushed forward at the end of the 
previous September, when the Wall had once again not been funded. In the 
fall, Trump had agreed to have the Republican-controlled Congress vote to 
extend the September budget bill. The next time it carne up, the Wall would 
be funded or, he threatened, the government would be shut down. 
Even the hardest-core Trumpers in Congress seemed content not to 
have to die on the actual battlefield of funding the Wall, since that would 
mean embracing or at least enduring an always politically risky shutdown. 
Trump, too, in his way, seemed to understand that the Wall was more 
myth than reality, more slogan than actual plan. The Wall was ever for 
another day. 
On the other hand, it was unclear what the president understood. 
`We've gotten the budget," he privately told his son-in-law at the end of 
the March budget negotiations. "We've gotten the Wall, totally." 
* * * 
On Wednesday, March 21, the day before the final vote, Paul Ryan, the 
Speaker of the House, had come to the White House to receive the presi-
dent's blessings on the budget bill. 
"Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forth-
coming," the president shortly tweeted. 
The White House had originally asked for $25 billion for the Wall, 
although high-end estimates of the Wall's ultimate cost came in at $70 
billion. Even then, the $1.6 billion in the appropriations bill was not so 
much for the Wall as for better security measures. 
As the final vote neared, a gentlemen's agreement appeared to have 
been reached, one that extended to every corner of the government—
with, it even seemed, Trump's own tacit support, or at least his conve-
nient distraction. The understanding was straightforward: whatever their 
stripe, members of Congress would not blow up the appropriations pro-
cess for the Wall. 
There were, too, Republicans like Ryan—with the backing of Repub-
lican donors such as Paul Singer and Charles Koch—who were eager to 
walk back, by whatever increment possible, Trump's hard-line immigra-
tion policies and rhetoric. Ryan and others had devised a simple method 
for accomplishing this kind of objective: you agreed with him and then 
ignored him. There was happy talk, which Trump bathed in, followed by 
practical steps, which bored him. 
That Wednesday, Trump made a series of calls to praise everyone's 
work on the bill. The next morning, Ryan, in a televised news conference 
to seal the deal, said, "The president supports this bill, there's no two ways 
about it." 
Here were the twin realities. The Wall was the most concrete manifesta-
tion of Trumpian policy, attitude, belief, and personality. At the same time, 
the Wall forced every Republican politician to come to terms with his or 
her own common sense, fiscal prudence, and political flexibility. 
It was not just the expense and impracticality of the Wall, it was hav-
ing to engage in a battle for it. A government shutdown would mean a 
high-stakes face-off between the Trump world and the non-Trump world 
Should this come to pass, it would potentially be as dramatic a moment a! 
any that had occurred since the election of 2016. 
If the Democrats wanted to harden the partisan division and wen 
eager to find yet another example—perhaps the mother of all exam. 
pies—of Trump at his most extreme, a shutdown over the Wall wouk 
hand them one. If the Republicans wanted to shift the focus from a full 
barbarian Trump to, say, the tax bill the Congress had recently passed 
EFTA00316528

26 
MICHAEL WOLFF 
SIEGE 
27 
shutting down the government would sweep that approach right off the 
table. 
The White House, quite behind Trump's back, was aggressively work-
ing to pass the appropriations bill and avoid a shutdown. The vice presi-
dent gave Trump the same assurance he had been given previously when 
a budget had been passed without full funding for the Wall: Pence said the 
bill provided a "down payment" for the Wall, a phrase whose debt-finance 
implications seemed to amply satisfy the president and which he repeated 
with great enthusiasm. Marc Short, the White House director of legisla-
tive affairs, and Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Manage-
ment and Budget, in a joint appearance in the White House briefing room 
that Thursday, shifted the debate from the Wall to the military. "This bill 
will provide the largest year-over-year increase in defense spending since 
World War IV said Mulvaney. "It'll be the largest increase for our men 
and women in uniform in salary in the last ten years!" 
* 
* 
* 
The attempt to distract the Trumpian base with these bromides utterly 
failed. The hard-core cadre insisted on forcing the issue, and Bannon was 
delighted to serve as their general. 
Within minutes of the budget bill's passage on March 22, Bannon, 
in the Embassy, began working the phones. Calling Trump's most ardent 
supporters, his goal was to "light him up!" The effect was nearly imme-
diate: an unsuspecting Trump started to hear from many of those on his 
noisy back bench, who were suddenly furious. 
Bannon understood what moved Trump. Details did not. Facts did not. 
But a sense that something valuable might be taken from him immediately 
brought him up on his hind legs. If you confronted him with losing, he 
would turn on a dime. Indeed, turning on a dime was his only play. "It's 
not that he needs to win the week, or day, or even the hour; reflected 
Bannon. "He needs to win the second. After that, he drifts." 
For the hard-core Trumpers, it was back to a fundamental through 
line of Trumpism: you had to constantly remind Trump which side he 
was on. As Bannon organized a howling protest from the president's base, 
he took stock of the Trump reality: "There simply is not going to be a Wall, 
ever, if he doesn't have to pay a political price for there not being a Wall!" 
If the Wall was not under way by the midterm elections in Novem-
ber, it would show Trump to be false and, worse, weak. The Wall needed 
to be real. The absence of the Wall in the spending bill was just what it 
seemed to be: Trump out to lunch. Trump's most effective message, the 
forward front of the Trump narrative—maximal aggression toward ille-
gal immigrants—had been muted. And this had happened without him 
knowing it. 
The night of the twenty-second, the Fox News lineup—flicker Carlson, 
Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity—hammered the message: betrayal. 
The battle was on. The Republican leadership on the Hill, along with 
the donor class, stood sober and pragmatic in the face of both political 
realities and the prospect of unlimited billions in government spending—
with, certainly, no illusions that Mexico was going to pay for the Wall. 
Opposing them were the Fox pundits, righteous and unyielding in their 
appeal to the true emotion of Trumpism. 
The personal transformation of Trump over the course of the evening 
was convulsive. All three Fox pundits delivered a set of electric shocks:
each rising in current. Trump had sold out the movement. Or, worse. 
Trump had been outsmarted and outwitted. Trump, on the phone, roared 
in pain and fury. He was the victim. He had no one in his corner. He could 
trust no one. The congressional leadership: against him. The White House 
itself: against him. Betrayal? Almost everyone in the White House hac 
betrayed him. 
The next morning it got worse. Pete Hegseth, the most obsequious o 
the Fox Trump lovers, seemed, on Fox & Friends, nearly brought to tear: 
by Trump's treachery. 
Then, almost simultaneously with Hegseth's wailing, Trump abruptly—
confoundingly—shifted position and tweeted that he was considering vetoini 
the appropriations bill. The same bill that, twenty-four hours before, hi 
had embraced. 
EFTA00316529

28 
MICHAEL WOLFF 
SIEGE 
29 
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 titters 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, 
the workingman smelled of cigarettes, crushed your hand in his, and wat 
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 workingman 
was proud of his work and identity, was inspiring, Bannon believed, 
global anger. It was a revolution—this worldwide unease and fear am 
day-by-day upending of liberal assumptions—and it was his. The globs 
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 iron 
its postmodern anomie and restore something like the homogenized an. 
neighborly embrace of 1962. 
And China! And the coming Gotterdammerung! To Bannon, thi 
was way-of-life stuff. China was the Russia of 1962—but smarter, mot 
tenacious, and more threatening. American hedge funders, in their seen 
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, "doesi 
give a fuck about the agenda—he doesn't know what the agenda is." 
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 pro,
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. 
EFTA00316530

MICHAEL WOLFF 
SIEGE 
3' 
the end of the year, Trump was casually mocking his chief of staff and 
his penchant for efficiency and strict procedures. Indeed, both men were 
openly trashing each other, quite unmindful of the large audience for 
their slurs. For Trump, Kelly was a "twitcher" and "feeble" and ready to 
"stroke out:' For Kelly, Trump was "deranged" and "mad" and "stupid." 
The drama just got weirder. 
In February, Kelly, a retired four-star general, grabbed Trump adviser 
Corey Lewandowski outside the Oval Office and pushed him up against a 
wall. "Don't look him in the eye whispered Trump about Kelly after the 
incident, circling his finger next to his head in the crazy sign. The con-
frontation left everybody shaken, with Trump asking Lewandowski not 
to tell anyone, and Lewandowski, when talking to the people he did tell, 
saying that he had almost wet himself. 
By March, Trump and Kelly were hardly speaking. Trump ignored 
him; Kelly sulked. Or Trump would drop pointed hints that Kelly should 
resign, and Kelly would ignore him. Everyone assumed the countdown 
had begun. 
Various Republicans, from Ryan to McConnell to their right-wing 
adversary Mark Meadows, along with Bannon, had gotten behind a plan 
to push House majority leader Kevin McCarthy for chief of staff. Even 
Meadows, who hated McCarthy, was all for it. Here finally was a strat-
egy: McCarthy, a top tactician, would refocus an unfocused White House 
on one mission—the midterms. Every tweet, every speech, every action 
would be directed toward salvaging the Republican majority. 
Alas, Trump didn't want a chief of staff who would focus him. Trump, 
it was clear, didn't want a chief of staff who would tell him anything. 
Trump did not want a White House that ran by any method other than to 
satisfy his desires. Someone happened to mention that John F. Kennedy 
didn't have a chief of staff, and now Trump regularly repeated this presi-
dential factoid. 
* * * 
The Mueller team, as it pursued the Russia investigation, continued to 
bump up against Trump's unholy financial history, exactly the rabbit hole 
Trump had warned them not to go down. Mueller, careful to protect his 
own flank, took pains to reassure the president's lawyers that he wasn't 
pursuing the president's business interests; at the same time, he was pass-
ing the evidence his investigation had gathered about Trump's business 
and personal affairs to other federal prosecutors. 
On April 9, the FBI, on instructions from federal prosecutors in New 
York, raided the home and office of Michael Cohen, as well as a room he 
was using in the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue. Cohen, who billed him-
self as Trump's personal lawyer, sat handcuffed for hours in his kitchen 
while the FBI conducted its search, itemizing and hauling away every 
electronic device its agents could find. 
Bannon, coincidentally, also stayed at the Regency on his frequent 
trips to New York, and he would sometimes bump into Cohen in the 
hotel's lobby. Bannon had known Cohen during the campaign, and the 
lawyer's mysterious involvement in campaign issues often worried him. 
Now, in Washington, seeing the Cohen news, Bannon knew that another 
crucial domino had fallen. 
"While we don't know where the end is; said Bannon, "we can guess 
where it might begin: with Brother Cohen:' 
* * * 
On April 11, three weeks after the president signed the budget bill, Paul 
Ryan—one of the government's most powerful figures given the Repub-
lican lock on Washington—announced his plan to leave the Speakership 
and depart Congress. 
"Listen to what Paul Ryan is saying; said Bannon, sitting at his table 
in the Embassy early that morning. "It's over. Done. Done. And Paul Ryan 
wants the fuck off the Trump train today:' 
Ryan had been telling almost anyone who would listen that as many 
as fifty or sixty House seats would be lost seven months hence in the mid-
term elections. A Ryan lieutenant, Steve Stivers, chairman of the National 
Republican Congressional Committee, was estimating a loss of ninety to 
one hundred seats. At this gloomy hour, it seemed more than possible 
that the Democrats would eliminate their twenty-three-seat deficit and 
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