was a horrifying face. The president’s worst impulses seem to run through Conway without benefit of a filter. She compounded Trump’s anger, impulsiveness, and miscues. Whereas a presidential adviser was supposed to buffer and interpret his gut calls, Conway expressed them, doubled down on them, made opera out of them. She took Trump’s demand for loyalty too literally. In Ivanka and Jared’s view, Conway was a cussed, antagonistic, self-dramatizing cable head, and Powell, they hoped, would be a deliberate, circumspect, adult guest on the Sunday morning shows. By late February, after the first helter-skelter month in the West Wing, the campaign by Jared and Ivanka to undermine Bannon seemed to be working. The couple had created a feedback loop, which included Scarborough and Murdoch, that reinforced the president’s deep annoyance with and frustration about Bannon’s purported importance in the White House. For weeks after the 7Zime magazine cover story featuring Bannon, there was hardly a conversation in which Trump didn’t refer to it bitterly. (“He views 7ime covers as zero sum,” said Roger Ailes. “If someone else gets on it, he doesn’t.”) Scarborough, cruelly, kept up a constant patter about President Bannon. Murdoch forcefully lectured the president about the oddness and extremism of Bannonism, linking Bannon with Ailes: “They’re both crazy,” he told Trump. Kushner also pressed the view to the president—ever phobic about any age-related weakness—that the sixty-three-year-old Bannon wouldn’t hold up under the strain of working in the White House. Indeed, Bannon was working sixteen- and eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, and, for fear of missing a presidential summons or afraid that someone else might grab it, he considered himself on call pretty much all night. As the weeks went by, Bannon seemed physically to deteriorate in front of everybody’s eyes: his face became more puffy, his legs more swollen, his eyes more bleary, his clothes more slept in, his attentio