But these elites were never to be trusted by Trump. Miller shared this mind-set and would later explain to Araud over dinner at the ambassador’s residence that the president had been elected for the explicit purpose of creating unease for the establishment. “This president is revolutionary, so he has to break China,” Miller said. “The scope and scale of change we’re seeking to implement by definition will involve disruption.” He added, “If we follow the normal procedures, we work into the hands of our enemies.”
By Monday, January 30, Flynn and White House aides wanted to hear his intercepted call with Kislyak. Yates called McGahn to tell him White House lawyers could come over to listen to the tape in one of their sensitive compartmented information facilities. Separately, Yates issued a memo instructing Justice Department employees not to defend the travel ban because she had concerns it was unconstitutional. Trump and his allies considered this an abuse of her office and fired Yates that afternoon. The White House said Yates had “betrayed the Department of Justice by refusing to enforce a legal order designed to protect the citizens of the United States.” The Flynn investigation continued without Yates.
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On February 2, The Washington Post reported a cantankerous phone call the president had had five days earlier with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull. Trump badgered Turnbull over an existing refugee agreement and accused him of seeking to export “the next Boston bombers.” Trump fumed, “This is the worst deal ever.” The Associated Press reported on the same day that Trump had a similarly blunt conversation with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto in which he threatened to deploy U.S. troops to stop “bad hombres down there.”
Trump was furious. He demanded that his aides root out the sources for the leaks and suggested that reporters needed to go to jail. Trump hated all leaks and made no distinction between West Wing infighting and sensitive national security decisions. Despite repeated efforts by his lawyers to explain, Trump did not understand that leaks of unflattering details of his constant television watching or limited understanding of government were not punishable crimes.
By February 7, a team of Washington Post reporters had confirmed that Flynn had indeed discussed sanctions in his December 29 call with Kislyak. With that story, Pence learned Flynn had lied to him. Neither Trump nor McGahn had felt it important to alert him earlier. Flynn continued in his job, flying that weekend with Trump to Florida for a summit with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago.
On February 13, with everyone back at the White House, the Trump team debated Flynn’s fate. Pence said he was willing to let bygones be bygones and wouldn’t oppose Flynn staying on. But Priebus, still smarting from having repeated Flynn’s lie early on, insisted he had to go. Flynn told Trump that he would go quietly, no whining. He submitted his resignation late that night, and Trump accepted. Flynn’s lie was not the only reason for his dismissal. Trump had had growing doubts about Flynn’s fitness for the job and had found Flynn’s briefings discursive and lacking precision.
The day after Flynn’s ouster was Valentine’s Day. Chris Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, traveled to Washington to have lunch with Trump. Jared Kushner joined them.
“I fired Flynn, so the whole Russia thing is over,” Trump said, referring to the FBI’s ongoing investigation of Russia’s election interference.
“Mr. President, we’re going to be sitting here a year from now talking about Russia,” Christie said.
Kushner said that was crazy, because there was nothing to any of the Russia nonsense. Christie replied that he’s the only one among them who had both conducted federal investigations, when he was U.S. attorney in New Jersey, and been the subject of one, the Bridgegate scandal.
“There’s absolutely no way you can make this shorter, but there’s lots of ways you can make it longer, so keep quiet, listen to your lawyers, and that’s the way it will go the shortest,” Christie told the president.
At that very moment, Spicer was holding his press briefing, and it played on the television in Trump’s private dining room. The president, Christie, and Kushner watched as Spicer threw Flynn under the bus. He told reporters that Trump asked for Flynn’s resignation on account of an “evolving and eroding level of trust as a result of this situation and a series of other questionable instances.”
As Spicer kept parrying questions, Kushner’s phone rang.
“It’s Flynn! It’s Flynn!” Kushner mouthed to Trump and Christie.
Flynn was pissed. He had thought if he left quietly he would not be disparaged.
“Make nice,” Trump instructed Kushner. “Make nice.”
Kushner told Flynn, “You know the president respects you. The president cares about you. I’ll get the president to send out a positive tweet about you later.”
The call ended. “We should try to help him out. He’s a good guy,” Kushner said to Trump and Christie.
“Bad people are like gum on the bottom of your shoe,” Christie replied. “Very hard to make them go away.”
Trump had some sympathy for Flynn. The two men had developed a genuine friendship as they hopscotched the battleground states together. That afternoon in the Oval Office, as a homeland security meeting wrapped up, Trump asked the FBI director to stay behind so they could speak alone. Trump told Comey that he did not believe Flynn had done anything wrong but explained that he still had to let him go. Then he pleaded for leniency, evincing no hesitation as he sought to use his power to let a loyalist off the hook. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump told Comey, according to the FBI director’s contemporaneous notes. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”
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Spicer had been holding the dual roles of press secretary and communications director and was drowning—and not only because of Melissa McCarthy’s devastating portrayal of him on Saturday Night Live. A stout five feet six inches, Spicer did not have “the look” that Trump envisioned representing him on television, nor did the former Republican National Committee spokesman have the renegade pedigree that would have made him a natural representative of the “Make America Great Again” insurgency. Trump dissed Spicer’s briefing performances behind his back. “Sean can’t even complete a sentence,” Trump told other aides. “We’ve got a spokesperson who can’t speak.”
Spicer needed help, so he reached out to Michael Dubke, a veteran operative who ran a public relations firm, and asked him to interview for the communications director job. On February 10, Dubke came to the White House to meet with Spicer. The Flynn story was still hot. Spicer was too busy to talk with Dubke, so for hours the job candidate hung around outside his office, next to the copy machine in the “upper press” area. Nobody paid much attention to Dubke except for the NBC correspondent Peter Alexander.
“So who are you?” Alexander asked.
Not wanting to blow his cover, Dubke said, “I’m a friend of Sean’s . . . and just wanted to see how things work around here.”
Finally, Spicer brought Dubke in. They talked for maybe twenty minutes about the job, and Spicer asked Dubke to come back Saturday to meet with Priebus. This time the three men talked for forty-five minutes, and Priebus asked Dubke if he had anything on social media trashing Trump. Dubke was a low-profile operative who mostly kept his opinions to himself. “No, you won’t find anything from me,” he assured Priebus.