Siege summary

In August 2017, after ten months of service, Trump unceremoniously fired his chief strategist Steve Bannon. Exiled to a townhouse on Washington’s Avenue A, which he nicknamed the “Embassy,” Bannon began plotting his next move.

Now that’d he’d left the White House, Bannon was worried that Trump wouldn’t follow through on some of his key election promises. The strategist had been integral to the successful 2016 campaign, in which he’d focused on a right-wing, anti-immigration message. Especially central to this campaign was the promise of a wall along the Mexican border, to halt illegal immigration. 

In the months before its verdict was delivered, the Mueller report was omnipresent in the White House. It was like a hologram that followed the president around, wherever he set foot. It began to haunt him. But it wasn’t just that he was being pursued that bothered Trump; it was the character of the pursuer that really got to him.   

Robert Mueller exemplified the cultural divide between the old establishment and Trump. In every possible sense, he was Trump’s opposite. He was someone who had always done everything by the book – he was an excellent student and athlete, a moderate Ivy League Republican, a Vietnam veteran, and subsequently an influential director of the FBI. He was, compared to Donald Trump, a “square” – a decent, straight-laced family man. 

On October 7, 2016, towards the end of the election campaign, a recording of Trump surfaced in which he boasted: “When you’re a star, you can do anything. They let you do it. Grab them by the pussy.” From then on, Trump’s attitude to women came into sharp focus.

Then, when it started in 2017, the #MeToo movement terrified Trump’s staff, who suspected that the president was responsible for many misdemeanors against women. 

As a lifelong Democrat who’d donated to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and endorsed Barack Obama, Jared Kushner seemed to be an odd fit for his father-in-law’s administration. 

Steve Bannon despised Kushner – he thought of him as the face of “liberal globalism,” and resented his easy access to the president. Indeed, he was waiting for the day that Kushner fell out of favor with Trump and was ejected from his advisory circle.

A key area of the Mueller investigation concerned the suspicion that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russian hackers in order to damage Hillary Clinton. While serving as secretary of state, Clinton had used her family’s email server for official communications, instead of secure federal servers. It was alleged that the Trump campaign had worked with Russian hackers to access these unsecured emails and manufacture a scandal around this breach of protocol.

With all of this as context, the Trump administration decided that the president would meet Vladimir Putin in Helsinki on July 2018 for something unprecedented: a private meeting between the leaders of the USA and Russia. 

In November 2018, Trump’s presidency faced its first real electoral test: the midterms. Many in the White House feared that if the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives, then Trump would face impeachment once the full ramifications of the Mueller report became apparent.

By this point, Steve Bannon was watching from the sidelines, frustrated with the Trump project. He thought that the Republicans were campaigning ineffectively. He believed that the only way Trump could win elections was through a kind of insurgent, anti-establishment campaign, with lots of passionate volunteers. 

The Mueller report had hung over Trump like a curse, set to imperil him at any moment. Now that the Democrats had taken the House of Representatives, its findings could be wielded to bring Trump’s presidency to a sudden end.

Many of those around Trump, like Kushner and Bannon, predicted that the report would deliver a crushing verdict.