'Defiance Disorder': Another New Book Describes Chaos in Trump's White House

By Ashley Parker, The Washington Post

22 January 18

n late July, the White House had just finished an official policy review on transgender individuals serving in the military and President Trump and his then-chief of staff, Reince Priebus, had agreed to meet in the Oval Office to discuss the four options awaiting the president in a decision memo.

But then Trump unexpectedly preempted the conversation and sent his entire administration scrambling, by tweeting out his own decision — that the government would not allow transgender individuals to serve — just moments later.

“?‘Oh my God, he just tweeted this,’?” Priebus said, according to a new book by Howard Kurtz, who hosts Fox News’s “Media Buzz.” There was, Kurtz writes, “no longer a need for the meeting.”

The White House — and the politerati diaspora — has just barely stopped reeling from author Michael Wolff’s account of life in Trump’s West Wing, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” and now another life-in-the-White-House book is about to drop, this one from Kurtz.

Like the books that came before it, and almost certainly like the ones still to come, Kurtz’s book, “Media Madness: Donald Trump, The Press, And The War Over The Truth,” offers a portrait of a White House riven by chaos, with aides scrambling to respond to the president’s impulses and writing policy to fit his tweets, according to excerpts obtained by The Washington Post.

Kurtz, who worked at The Post from 1981 to 2010, writes that Trump’s aides even privately coined a term for Trump’s behavior — “Defiance Disorder.” The phrase refers to Trump’s seeming compulsion to do whatever it is his advisers are most strongly urging against, leaving his team to handle the fallout.

The book officially hits stores Jan. 29.

Early in the administration, Kurtz describes White House aides waking up one Saturday morning in March, confused and “blindsided,” to find that Trump had — without any evidence — accused former president Barack Obama on Twitter of wiretapping him during the campaign.

“Nobody in the White House quite knew what to do,” Kurtz writes.

Priebus watched as his phone exploded with email and text messages, according to the excerpts. “Priebus knew the staff would have to fall into line to prove the tweet correct, the opposite of the usual process of vetting proposed pronouncements,” Kurtz writes. “Once the president had committed to 140 characters, he was not going to back off.”

In another scene, Kurtz paints a largely positive picture of Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, but notes — as has been previously reported — that Trump repeatedly worried whether the couple were making the right decision moving to Washington to take jobs in his administration.

Trump had reason for concern. At one point, Kurtz writes that Stephen K. Bannon — Trump’s former chief strategist who was a key on-the-record source for Wolff’s book and seems likely to have talked to Kurtz — dresses down the president’s daughter early in the administration.

“My daughter loves me as a dad,” Bannon told Ivanka, according to Kurtz. “You love your dad. I get that. But you’re just another staffer who doesn’t know what you’re doing.”

Kurtz also recounts an Oval Office meeting in which Bannon blamed Ivanka for a leak — and Trump supported him over his daughter: “?‘Baby, I think Steve’s right here,’ Trump told her.”

A White House official denied the account, and said, “The past three weeks have made very clear who the leakers are.” The White House did not respond to questions about other parts of the excerpts obtained by The Post.

While Kurtz at times seems to offer a more flattering portrayal of the West Wing staff than some other media accounts, he also captures a White House struggling to perform basic tasks and advisers reacting to the whims of a hard-to-control president.

Bannon, Kurtz writes, told Trump when he left the White House in August that he planned to go after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), saying his main goal was “to bring him down.”

“Trump said that was fine, that Bannon should go ahead,” Kurtz writes.

By Kurtz’s telling, Trump’s approach to replacing Priebus as chief of staff with John F. Kelly, who was then homeland security secretary, was also not exactly standard operating procedure. “Typically, Trump announced the decision without telling Priebus and without having made a formal offer to Kelly,” he writes.

In the excerpts, counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway emerges as one of the few calming presences on Trump. When, on his first full day as president, Trump wanted to send Sean Spicer, then the White House press secretary, out to attack the media for correctly reporting the crowd size, Conway initially tried to talk him out of it.

“She invoked a line that she often employed when Trump was exercised over some slight,” Kurtz writes. “?‘You’re really big,’ she said. ‘That’s really small.’?”

But ultimately, Spicer did attack the media at Trump’s behest, undermining his own credibility in his first official White House news conference and prompting a crowd-size debate that distracted from Trump’s first days in the White House.

Only then, Kurtz writes, did Trump make “a rare admission” — he had been wrong. “You were right,” he told aides, according to the book’s account. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

The cottage industry of scribblers chronicling life inside Trump’s White House exists, in part, because of well-placed leaks. The West Wing still sometimes executes internal searches for leakers — and yet the disclosures to reporters and authors keep coming.

One reason, perhaps? The president.

“The president himself leaked to reporters as well, his aides believed,” writes Kurtz. “And sometimes it was inadvertent: Trump would talk to so many friends and acquaintances that key information would quickly reach journalists.”

The Amazon Sweepstakes Racket

By Alex Shephard, New Republic

22 January 18

Why the giant e-tailer is gearing up for another round of bids for its second headquarters

n Thursday, Amazon announced that it had a finally whittled the hundreds of cities vying to house its second headquarters to just 20. The finalists are scattered throughout the country, from Los Angeles to Austin to Boston to Washington, D.C. (which has three candidates in the mix, including the nebulous “Northern Virginia”). They all more or less offer what Amazon is looking for. Quality of life is high. Public transportation, for the most part, exists. And there are incentives upon incentives—tax breaks, land grants, workforce training funds, and more tax breaks.

This announcement should end what has been an embarrassing and depressing nationwide spectacle, in which cities debased themselves in attempts to gain Amazon’s favor. The mayor of Kansas City (not a finalist) wrote 1,000 five-star reviews on Amazon.com. The mayor of New York (a finalist, unfortunately) lit up the Empire State Building “Amazon Orange.” Georgia’s Stonecrest (not a finalist) promised to make Jeff Bezos its King. And every location has offered Amazon the billions in incentives it is looking for.

But for the cities that made the cut, the race to the bottom may only be beginning. Amazon likely already has a real shortlist in mind. Denver has long been considered a favorite and Washington should be considered one as well, given that it takes up 15 percent of the finalists and would presumably help the company in the regulatory wars to come. In reality, the shortlist is a longlist, designed for Amazon to get a second round of kickbacks, perks, and stunts. But it’s not worth it.  

The offer that Amazon is making to cities is straightforward. In exchange for a sweetheart deal, the company will bring tens of thousands of high-paying jobs and spend $5 billion in capital expenditures. These jobs and investments, in turn, will presumably create other forms of growth, which will raise standards of living and tax revenue, and possibly even turn the location of HQ2 into a second Silicon Valley where tech jobs beget other tech jobs.

Mayors had no choice other than to play along, though the shamelessness with which many (I’m looking at you, Bill de Blasio) groveled before Amazon went far beyond what was necessary. Even for the mayor of New York, which has its fair share of mega-wealthy corporations, declining to court Amazon would have been political malpractice, giving easy fodder to one’s opponents. By making attention-grabbing proposals, 99 percent of cities were faced with a win-win. They could get headlines for being open for business—possibly winning the attention of other, smaller suitors—without actually having to go through with the kinds of ludicrous tax giveaways that could turn Amazon’s HQ2 into an albatross.

The incentives promised to Amazon are now standard practice in America, where states, desperate for high-paying jobs, bend over backwards to accommodate business. Amazon has received nearly $1 billion in such perks over the last decade, according to a study from Good Jobs First. In 2012, The New York Times found that states, counties, and cities are doling out $80 billion a year in corporate incentives.

But there is ample evidence that going all out for HQ2 will not be worth it—especially so now that Amazon is looking for localities to raise their bets. Because the costs of bringing these companies in is so high, the tax benefits are ultimately low. An influx of gentrification can lead to costly social ills. And while these new jobs may bring demands for better jobs and new infrastructure, the money tied up in luring corporations in the first place can make such expenditures infeasible.

By subsidizing high-paying jobs—often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per job—cities and states end up cancelling out whatever economic benefit these jobs bring. As David Dayen wrote for The New Republic during the first round of the Amazon HQ2 sweepstakes, “[T]hey’re worse than a zero-sum game between metropolitan areas; they’re net-negative, because the corporation extracts the subsidy while cities lose revenue that would otherwise go to education or infrastructure investment to benefit the common good.”

Amazon will now go to its 20 finalists and ask for another slate of high-profile concessions. Writing on Twitter, the professor Richard Florida argued that the 20 finalists should band together and resist the temptation.

This is an intriguing, albeit unlikely, idea. Amazon is, as Brian Ferguson writes in The Atlantic, exploiting an “advantage of the American system,” the division of power between states and the federal government. The only way to stop this nationwide bribery ring is through legislation. That won’t happen anytime soon, and certainly not before Amazon sticks certain taxpayers with the bill.