AP Photo Fourth Estate All the President’s Mice Palace intrigue is ripping apart the White House. Why doesn’t Trump stop it?

Jack Shafer is Politico’s senior media writer.

For quality trash talk, bury yourself in an eye-gouging, loose-ball NFL pileup. Those who don’t play pro football? The next best alternative would be eavesdropping on the not-for-attribution quotations White House sources have been dishing to the press about other White House sources over the first 100 days of Baby Donald’s presidency. If this were theater, it would be the Grand Guignol. If it were a movie, it would be The Shining with blood bursting through White House elevator doors. If it were a 911 call, it would be the report of a murder.

Politics has always had a unique way of converting allies into foes and transforming marginal disagreement into knife-fights. But rarely in the annals of White House palace intrigue have all the president’s anonymice stabbed more backs or spilled more blood than at Donald Trump’s 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. The ongoing dog-eat-dog and cat-eat-mouse dramatics at Trump’s White House would put Machiavelli in stitches. None of the big shots—including Prince Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus and Gary Cohn—can find sanctuary.


With annihilation the White House endgame, it makes sense for its players to form alliances and eradicate as many opponents as they can before the president dumps them. In New York Magazine, Olivia Nuzzi collects an anonymouse to look into his crystal ball to foretell the doom of Cohn, the president’s chief economic adviser:

“The president has started his love affair with Gary,” another source said, “Gary’s not aware of this: That love affair will end abruptly. Gary Cohn will step on a landmine.”

The Wall Street Journal put the same dig more dryly last month. “‘Steve is willing to go to war on policy,’ one person said, adding he was determined to cede no ground to Mr. Cohn.”

If the anonymice don’t rip White Housers while they’re working there, they rip them on the way out. The door hit Sebastian Gorka firmly in the ass as he began his departure from the Trump administration over the weekend. A “White House source” told the Washington Examiner’s Sarah Westwood that Gorka had no real national security portfolio. His own known duties were “speaking on television about counterterrorism, as well as ‘giving White House tours and peeling out in his Mustang.’”

Anonymity makes all this gratuitous cruelty possible—in fact, nourishes it. If names were attached to the White House insults and slights, honor would require daily duels on the South Lawn to settle the feuds. When Bannonites whisper their not-for-attribution slurs about Kushner to reporters, they give the Kushnerites moral sanction to send unsigned smears of their own to the press about Bannon, powering the cycle for another turn or two. Trash talk, like breast beating, expresses one’s high status and (relative) fearlessness inside a social group. At the same time, trash talk weakens its target, making opponents look foolish and helpless to stop the abuse.

As the trash talk has become ubiquitous, the confusion over who said what about whom has forced White House players to adopt reporters as allies, according to POLITICO’s Ben Schreckinger and Hadas Gold. “White House officials have turned to the only people they can trust: reporters, who have started getting calls from senior Trump aides asking whether other senior Trump aides have been leaking dirt on them,” they write.

“There is kind of a circle-the-wagons mentality, and if your wagon’s out of the circle for a while because you’ve gotta go do something, you’re out of the loop,” the former adviser told Nuzzi for a Kellyanne Conway profile. “Everyone has their own brand, if you will,” a senior administration official told Vanity Fair’s Sarah Ellison. “Without an ideology or a worldview, all you have is a scramble for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement,” another anonymouse told her.

The ripest White House targets have been Bannon and Kushner because of the size of their power portfolios. Bannon has probably attracted more fire than Kushner 1) because of his vocal willingness to play Darth Vader and 2) because Kushner plays everything Perry Como-cool. Long before Trump introduces Cohn to his landmine, a MOAB will land on Bannon, flattening his tubby form before detonating. Much of the trash talk thrown at Bannon appears to come from Prince Jared’s tent, and it comes at such high velocity that logic insists that their coexistence can’t last much longer.

“For whatever reason Bannon seems to be allied with Reince, and Bannon seems to be opposed by Jared,” one source told the Atlantic’s Rosie Gray. Which member of Jared’s royal court do you suppose whispered this to Vanity Fair’s Ellison?

“I’m not sure Steve does a lot of actual work,” said one person in the Trump circle shortly before Bannon was removed from the National Security Council, a position he had enjoyed for fewer than 10 weeks.

Maybe it was the same Judas who spat this out for Nuzzi: “[Bannon is] an intellectual messiah, right? There’s a little bit of a messianic, I’m gonna cure all the ills of the United States—him and Trump are like that together. But what I do think is he’s realizing he needs more allies.”

When attacked, the honey badger counterattacks. The Bannon camp’s anonymice appear to have issued their threats to Prince Jared. In Axios, Jonathan Swan writes, “Steve has developed strong and important relationships with some of the most powerful right-leaning business leaders,” said a close Bannon ally outside of the White House. “I see some bad press in [Jared’s] future.”

Because what could be crueler than bad press? Prince Jared’s anonymous spear carriers carry a bundle of honey badger genes of their own. Earlier this month, one told POLITICO’s Shane Goldmacher that Bannon wasn’t wise for “taking on a member of Trump’s family so openly.”

“For a Svengali, that doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do,” the White House official continued. “I don’t think that ends well for him.”

Bad Press and Bad Endings would be an excellent title for a book about the Trump White House. The Bannonites refuse underestimatation, Goldmacher reports. “A White House ally of Bannon noted that despite bumping up against Trump’s son-in-law, he had held sway over the most crucial policy rollouts, such as Trump’s hard line on immigration and trade. ‘Anyone who thinks that Steve has lost his influence, they don’t know what the f--- they’re talking about,’ this person said.”

Bannon allegedly called the slender, soft-spoken Prince Jared a “cuck” to his face once, according to the Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng. “‘Steve thinks Jared is worse than a Democrat, basically,’ another official close to Bannon said,” reports Suebsaeng.

Team Bannon denied he said it, but counterattacked by mocking Prince Jared’s overreach, which makes it easier to explain what he’s not working on for his father-in-law than what he is.

“[Kushner is] saving the government and the Middle East at the same time,’ one senior administration official quipped” to POLITICO’s Josh Dawsey, Kenneth P. Vogel and Alex Isenstadt. There’s much more abuse in the POLITICO piece: One anonymouse voices a “deep concern that Jared is not the person we thought he was—that this guy who is supposed to be good at everything is totally out of his depth.”

And still more: “When the White House is planning initiatives on those issues that might offend moderates, one of the senior administration officials said, ‘You can expect to read the anonymous story that Jared and Ivanka are trying to stop it.’” And this embarrassing anecdote conveyed by Ellison in which Kushner sought to escape responsibility for one Trump screw-up by exclaiming, “I’m not a fucking speechwriter. I am a real estate guy.”

Things have turned so internecine inside the Trump administration that the alt-right movement has started thumping on Bannon! A source described as “close to the White House” insisted to Nuzzi in this New York piece that Bannon must change to survive:

“He’s not achieving anything! What’s he achieving? He’s a zero. He’s incompetent!” the source said. “He doesn’t get back to the people at the Daily Caller. He doesn’t get back to the people at Infowars,” the source said, “I don’t care what you think of their politics, they reach millions of people. Why would you not respond to them?”

Dodging the hottest of the hot action has been White House chief of staff Reince Priebus. But in mid-February anonymice crawled up his pants legs and nibbled off bits of his manhood. Trump needed somebody to blame for the poor start of his presidency, and the broad hints were going Priebus’s way. “You’re not going to see Trump come out and say I was wrong,” the anonymouse said to POLITICO’s Isenstadt and Dawsey. “If you’re waiting on him to take the blame, you’re going to be waiting a long time.”

By March, the anonymice had gained foothold on Priebus’ face in an Isenstadt-Dawsey piece titled “Knives Are Out for Reince.” “There’s a real frustration among many—including from the president—that things aren’t going as smoothly as one had hoped,” said one senior administration official. “Reince, fairly or not, is likely to take the blame and take the fault for that.”

“It’s sheer incompetence,” another White House official told the duo. “There’s a lack of management, and a lack of strategy."

How did Priebus escape, his nose and wedding vegetables intact for the next skirmish? Perhaps he’s lucky, perhaps he’s too pure of heart to trash talk and receive trash talk in return, or perhaps he’s unmarked after countless rounds fought in the ring because he possesses political experience that Prince Jared and Bannon lack. Another explanation: He commands no power of his own—he’s a scheduler and message-taker—therefore no threat to either the prince or Lord Vader.

Lasting peace can only follow a decisive ending to a war. In recent weeks, the Bannon-Kushner dispute appears to have gone on hold, but not because anything decisive has happened in Trump’s “Yes-Drama” administration, so the anonymous rhubarbary will likely return. Trump can’t be oblivious to the White House double-crossing and treachery. Or, can he? He wants to carry on as if his top aides love one another. In a recent POLITICO piece, he refutes rumors of interstaff discord by summoning his brass to demonstrate for reporters the profound collegiality and accord found aboard the Ship of Trump.

“[Trump] called out their names and, one by one, they walked in, each surprised to see reporters in the room—chief of staff Reince Priebus, then chief strategist Steve Bannon, and eventually senior adviser Jared Kushner. ‘The team gets along really, really well,’ he said.”

Unreported by POLITICO was whether Priebus, Bannon and Kushner got down on the rug and rolled over and played dead when Trump commanded them.

Highbinders infest every White House. Former George W. Bush adviser Karl Rove, who knows a highbinder when he sees one, concluded on Fox News last month that Trump’s aides “have been leaking on each other for weeks” because they had coalesced into three competing tribes headed by Bannon, Kushner and Priebus. “Right now, there’s plenty of diversity of opinion, but there doesn’t appear to be sufficient unity of purpose inside this White House,” Rove said.

My preferred explanation would be to place responsibility for all the unattributed attacks on Trump himself. The White House’s verbal hardheartedness flows directly from the top, where our manchild president serves as its headwaters. If his staff is guilty of anything, it’s speaking sotto voce what he says out loud. Just listen to one anonymous official discuss how interchangeable Trump considers people to be in Nuzzi’s New York piece:

“You could play golf with this guy for forty years, have a heart attack on the ninth hole, he’ll pick up a new golf partner on the tenth hole like nothing happened. He doesn’t give a shit, ok? Doesn’t mean he doesn’t like you,” the official said, adding, “What happens with all these guys is they get very confident in their relationship with Trump and then Trump blasts them. As soon as you think you’re in Trump’s good graces and you start to be at ease and take that for granted, that’s when you get annihilated.”

Sometimes Trumpworld’s cruelness is calculated, sometimes it’s just a reflex. By tolerating anonymity in his White House, Trump encourages it. He has made a show of opposing anonymous sources, but as the New York Times’ Glenn Thrush and Michael M. Grynbaum (and others) have written, he has made a career of downshifting into anonymous mode and leaking to the press when it suits him. White House trash talk? From his mind to their incognito lips.

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