Antisocial, page 28
* * *
• • •
Wintrich sublet his apartment in the East Village and rented a place in D.C., near Logan Square—“a bit characterless,” he said, “but I consider it a personal challenge to make it cute.” He bought a vintage Louis Vuitton steamer trunk on eBay to use as a coffee table, and flanked his TV with wall-mounted busts of a gazelle and a gemsbok. Most nights, he could be found mixing bourbon cocktails for some anarcho-capitalists he’d met at CPAC, or serving rare flank steak to a group of graphic designers and Instagram models. Occasionally, if the mood struck, he’d shush his guests and start a Periscope video to analyze the news of the day, by which he usually meant his most recent Twitter spat. Once, when I arrived at Wintrich’s place in D.C., he told me that I’d just missed Chelsea Manning. I found this hard to believe; since her release from prison, Manning had become a prominent Antifa activist. “Fine, think whatever you want,” Wintrich said.*
One night, he looked up from writing a text. “What’s the name of that gay island?” he asked the room.
“Lesbos?” one of his guests, a tech correspondent for Breitbart, suggested.
“Fire Island,” Wintrich said, and went back to typing. The room fell quiet, and people started to look bored. Wintrich, ever the assiduous host, put on some music, poured prosecco, and started a round of Cards Against Humanity, which its creators describe as “a party game for horrible people.”
* * *
—
Mainstream reporters kept getting triggered whenever Wintrich appeared in the briefing room, so he kept showing up. He was a floater. Most days, he didn’t prepare any questions. Spicer never called on him anyway. Still, his mere presence was an effective act of trolling. “The Aryan Trump twink photo guy, now reporting—in a suit, thank God—from the White House,” Rachel Maddow said on MSNBC.
One Friday morning, before the press briefing started, Jon Decker, a White House correspondent from Fox News Radio, saw Wintrich standing across the briefing room. “Gateway Pundit is here,” Decker warned, sharing his opinion of the site with anyone who cared to listen. The upshot was that Wintrich was an avowed white nationalist (false) who lacked journalistic integrity (true). Wintrich took advantage of the moment, tweeting falsely that Decker had “assaulted” him. Conflict is attention.
The fracas spilled outside. At the O.K. Corral, a verbal dispute is liable to become a gunfight; at the White House, a verbal dispute is likely to stay a verbal dispute, with a bunch of reporters crowding around and filming it on their phones. Snow was falling. Wintrich, cheating toward the cameras, put on a pair of sunglasses and lit a cigarette.
April Ryan approached, holding her iPhone in front of her like a talisman, and asked Wintrich to state his political beliefs.
“Um, small government? Personal freedom?” he said. “Half my family died in the Holocaust. To call me a Nazi or whatever else is wildly—it’s disgusting.”
“OK,” she said. “Are you a racist?”
“No, of course not.”
“What are your views when it comes to integration?”
“I’m all for it.”
“Races mingling?”
Wintrich smirked. “My boyfriend’s Colombian, so we tend to mingle,” he said.
The blows weren’t landing. This was Ryan’s chance—a spontaneous solo press conference with the infamous briefing-room troll—but she didn’t know enough about Wintrich to catch him red-handed.
For months, the Deplorables had been derided for their many obvious transgressions: their dishonesty, their xenophobia, their misogyny. Recently, though, the range of concerns had rapidly narrowed. In many leftist circles, both on social media and in real life, the Deplorables were coming to be defined in a single, simple way: they were all Nazis. Or, at the very least, they were committed white supremacists. To call them anything less was considered a cowardly form of soft-pedaling.
This was an understandable response to a profoundly vexing problem. Since World War II, the lunatic fringe in the United States had always included a few hundred freaks with swastika tattoos; now there was an increasingly organized white-supremacist movement in America, one that had several points of contiguity with both Congress and the White House. This was novel, and terrifying; yet it was often referred to in the mainstream press as merely “edgy” or “controversial.” I understood, given the state of things, the longing for clarity. Why not speak plainly about what was happening in front of our eyes? Could we not break the habit of false equivalence even when it came to literal Nazis?
Yet it also didn’t make sense to insist that every bad guy on the internet was bad in exactly the same way. This was both a logical mistake and a tactical mistake. For one thing, focusing exclusively on one kind of badness risked leaving every other avenue of badness unchecked.* If Wintrich’s critics wanted to make the case that he didn’t deserve to work in the White House, there were plenty of good arguments to choose from. But if the only way to discredit a Deplorable was to call him a Nazi, then the charge could be falsified easily—“I’m Jewish” seemed to do the trick. The critic would be left with nothing, and the Deplorable would be left with a talking point.
I have agreed with Gavin McInnes exactly once. He was being interviewed by Milo Yiannopoulos, on the latter’s YouTube channel. They were both mocking the mainstream media’s habit of asking them, in essence, the same question, again and again: “Are you a white nationalist?”
“I did an interview with NBC yesterday,” McInnes said. According to him, the NBC journalist was single-mindedly determined to expose him as a textbook white supremacist. He told her that, if that’s what she was after, “then your bad guys are everywhere . . . the alt-right would be happy to talk to you, and they say what they mean.” Still, he went on, if she wanted to impugn him, she should already have more than enough material to work with, even without broaching the subject of white nationalism. “I’m an Islamophobe, I’m a xenophobe, I’m pretty darn sexist,” he said. “Go jump on that!”
* * *
• • •
I kept getting swept up in the ongoing drama of the news narrative. How could I resist? Every headline—“Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts with Russian Intelligence”; “Trump Turns Mar-a-Lago Club Terrace into Open-air Situation Room”—was enough to spark half a dozen activating emotions at once. And yet a small, naïve part of me was still surprised that any newspaper headline or TV chyron could say anything other than “White House Currently Occupied by Donald Trump, Other Assorted Goons and Frauds.” Traditional reporters were facing essentially the same dilemma they’d faced when covering online troll raids, only on a far larger scale. They could be evenhanded, or they could tell the truth. It was impossible to do both. The big newspapers couldn’t quite bring themselves to adopt a strident, Gawker-esque tone, but they were edging closer to it, especially online. The urgency of the national situation seemed to demand a strident response. Besides, audiences loved it—this much was clear to anyone who so much as glanced at the social analytics. The stridency, in turn, only heightened Trump’s sense that the press was the enemy of the people—or, at least, the enemy of him, the only person he seemed to care about.
One morning, while Wintrich was out of town, I went to the briefing room by myself. When I arrived, around 11:00 A.M., the reporters were in a frenzy.
“The president just said he was gonna do a press conference!” someone announced. It would be his first solo press conference since taking office.
“He is? When?”
“In an hour, I think? He just said it, out of nowhere.”
“What?”
“Does he know that ‘press conference’ means he has to take questions? Like, from multiple people?”
“How should I know what he knows?”
Kyle Mazza strolled by, carrying two cans of vending-machine tuna.
Ostensibly, Trump was going to announce his new pick for secretary of labor. But the hope was that he would also take questions on other subjects, including the Russia scandal. The reporters lined up, waiting to be escorted into the East Room. Normally, a seating plan is drawn up in advance; this press conference, organized on a presidential whim, would be a free-for-all. A few correspondents tried to elbow their way toward the front of the pack.
“OK, guys, nice and orderly,” a press aide said.
“We’ll get orderly when you’re orderly,” a TV correspondent muttered under his breath.
The reporters were led down the marble hallway and into the ballroom. They fanned out across several rows of seats: The Huffington Post near the front, Newsmax in the middle, NPR near the back. Kyle Mazza pushed through the pack and dove into a third-row seat.
Jim Acosta, CNN’s White House correspondent, walked toward the front of the room and stood on a wooden riser, facing a camera. He had a conversation, via earpiece, with the anchor Jake Tapper; the rest of the room listened, in tense silence, to Acosta’s side of the conversation. “That’s right, Jake,” Acosta said. “I sure hope this is not fake news.” The reporters in the room laughed; the White House staffers did not.
When the TV hit was over, a White House staffer named Boris Epshteyn said, “Jim’s trying to get on SNL.”
“Did that work?” Acosta asked, playing along.
“Nope,” Epshteyn responded, stone-faced.
* * *
—
Trump entered twenty minutes late, spent less than a minute discussing his secretary of labor pick, and then got down to business. It became clear that he intended to deliver not so much a press conference as an antipress conference. “I’m making this presentation directly to the American people, with the media present—which is an honor, to have you this morning—because many of our nation’s reporters and folks will not tell you the truth,” he said. This sentence contained a misstatement—it was actually afternoon—which was the first of dozens of misstatements, ranging from the trivial to the risible to the potentially impeachable. He was asked repeatedly whether his campaign had any links to Russian officials. He denied the charge succinctly—“Russia is fake news”—and then again at more length: “Russia is a ruse. I have nothing to do with Russia. Haven’t made a phone call to Russia in years. Don’t speak to people from Russia. Not that I wouldn’t, but I just have nobody to speak to. I spoke to Putin twice.”
It went on like this for more than an hour. “I do get good ratings, you have to admit that,” the president said. As reporters asked questions, he assessed their performances in real time, pitted them against one another, and, like a power-drunk Merlin, ordered them to stand or sit, speak or go silent. I’d seen the most outrageous highlights from Trump’s campaign rallies, of course, but most of those were held in airplane hangars or football stadiums. In such venues, Trump did what any stadium act would do: cranked up the volume and played the hits. This press conference was his solo acoustic set. Judging it purely as a technical performance, I found it far more impressive. He had such a limited rhetorical toolkit—a meager lexicon, a warped memory, a weirdly specific kind of monotonal charisma—and yet, with those rudimentary implements, he was able to do so much. He was a vocalist with a raspy timbre and a half-octave range, but he sang with feeling.
At one point, Trump called on April Ryan, who is African American. “This is going to be a bad question,” he said. “But that’s OK.”
Ryan asked a question about Trump’s “urban agenda.”
“That was very professional and very good,” the president said, as if speaking to a child.
Ryan, who had been a White House correspondent for twenty years, said, “I’m very professional.”
Trump rambled for a while, likening the city of Chicago to Hell, before asking Ryan if the members of the Congressional Black Caucus were “friends of yours.”
“No, no,” Ryan answered. “I’m just a reporter.”
During a moment of crosstalk, Kyle Mazza stood and asked a question about Melania Trump. “She does a lot of great work for the country,” Mazza said. “Can you talk a little bit about what First Lady Melania Trump does for the country?”
“Now that’s what I call a nice question,” Trump said, jabbing a finger in Mazza’s direction. “Who are you with?”
“UNF News,” Mazza said.
“Good,” Trump said. “I’m going to start watching.”
* * *
—
The reporters were escorted back to the briefing room, where they exchanged shell-shocked smiles. “Did he literally say ‘Russia is fake news’?” one reporter asked another, checking his notes. A correspondent who had covered Latin American dictatorships said, “Who’s the banana republic now?” Another journalist kept repeating the word “surreal” more than a dozen times, under his breath.
When Ryan walked in, several people looked up at her with wry sympathy.
“Do you know every black person in the country, April?”
“April, I have a black friend in Cleveland—could you send him a message for me?”
Ryan shook her head and smiled. “I mean, I can’t even,” she said, and left it at that.
The reporters dispersed to file their stories. They were trying to use the tools at their disposal—asking pointed questions, highlighting contradictory answers—to challenge Trump’s mendacity, his volatility, his thinly veiled racism. They were also, simply by doing their jobs as they’d been trained to do them, legitimizing and disseminating Trump’s message. He had invited the press corps into an elegant ballroom in order to debase them, and they had broadcast their debasement live, on TV and on Twitter. It was the metamedia equivalent of the schoolyard bully tactic known as “Why are you hitting yourself?” To some viewers, Trump came off as childish and incompetent, and the press seemed diligent, perhaps even heroic. To other viewers, Trump looked like their embattled, stalwart president, and the press looked like a bunch of braying jackals. Either way, the ratings were terrific.
I texted Wintrich to ask if he’d been watching. “SO FUCKING GOOD,” he replied. “Incredibly disappointed I wasn’t there for it.” Even if he had been there, though, his skills would have been superfluous. The press conference had been handled by the world’s most gifted media troll, the president of the United States.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Success and Empire
Amonth and a half after the DeploraBall, one of the party’s co-organizers, Jeff Giesea, invited a few friends to meet for drinks in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. “This is an informal ‘MAGA meetup,’” he wrote in an email. He wanted to keep up the momentum he’d felt on inauguration weekend, to continue building a grassroots movement. “It’s up to us to redefine conservatism for the next generation,” Giesea told me—by which he meant the alt-light, or the New Right, or whatever the non-white-nationalist half of the movement was calling itself.
MAGA Meetups became a monthly affair. Whenever I was in D.C., I spent time in the lobby of the Trump Hotel; even on nights when no official meetup was scheduled, I always ran into a few familiar Deplorables. One night, Wintrich and Cassandra Fairbanks were sitting on an overstuffed velvet couch with Yoni and Mary Clare Amselem, who’d hosted the pregame party before the DeploraBall.*
“I’m thinking of starting a podcast,” Yoni said. “Everyone’s so safe and boring these days. I wanna invite Louis Farrakhan to debate a white nationalist from Sweden—you know, provocative stuff. Provocative is fun, right?”
The lobby was nine stories high and covered with a glass ceiling, like a gigantic greenhouse or the interior of a cruise ship. Liveried employees stood at attention against every wall. “This is my safe space,” Fairbanks said. “I have to worry about getting harassed by Antifa everywhere else. Here, people leave me the fuck alone. Plus, my daughter loves it—she calls it Trump’s Palace.”
Corey Lewandowski stood in the middle of the lobby, backslapping with a few bros and granting the occasional selfie to an admirer. The volatile first manager of Trump’s 2016 campaign, Lewandowski was fired for various indiscretions that may or may not have included assaulting a female reporter. He then became a freelance political consultant, and, for a while, one of the token pro-Trump commentators on CNN.
“Were you on good terms with anyone there?” an admirer asked.
Lewandowski made a sour face. “I talked to Jeff Lord, Kayleigh, and Jason Miller,” he said—three of the other Trumpists on the network. “The rest of ’em can kiss my ass, honestly.”
The music was insipid EDM played at low volume. The scent was Ivanka Trump by Ivanka Trump. (Men’s fragrances—Success by Trump, Empire by Trump—were available for sale in the gift shop.) Donald Trump Jr. sat a few feet away, drinking wine with a retinue, while a Secret Service agent stood watch nearby. Kellyanne Conway and Anthony Scaramucci, two of the president’s favorite TV surrogates of the moment, had been spotted eating dinner, at separate tables, in the steakhouse adjacent to the lobby.
Entering the Trump Hotel felt like visiting an exclusive club in a fledgling autocracy—a society where all power flows from a single source, and where the only way to get ahead is to put your body and your cash as close to that source as possible. A huge inert American flag hung from the rafters, perpendicular to the floor; the stripes pointed down at the bar, with its backlit imperial bottles of Trump Blanc de Blanc and its bank of four huge flatscreens (Fox News, Bloomberg, CNN, ESPN). I met Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign’s digital strategist, who told me that he’d be happy to talk anytime, then ignored my subsequent emails. I met Katrina Pierson, a talking head and Trump booster for hire, who told me that she loved my work, although she clearly said that to everyone. I met irate soccer moms, bow-tie-wearing libertarians, tatted-up Proud Boys, and 4chan shitlords who seemed flummoxed by the mechanics of face-to-face conversation. I met a former Marine wearing a hunting vest, a wealthy deaconess from Nigeria wearing a gaudy church hat, and several young bureaucrats who had just joined the State Department. The lobby was the embodiment of the MAGA coalition—a big tent stretched across a motley swamp. Trump had won. The libs had been triggered. Now the Deplorables drank together in the same glassed-in atrium, listening to the same elevator music, trying to figure out what they actually had in common.
