behavior, and shit the president says, told in a knowing, deadpan style. Beyond acknowledging that Trump was a boy from Queens yet in awe of the 7imes, nobody in the West Wing could explain why he and Hicks would so often turn to Haberman for what would so reliably be a mocking and hurtful portrayal. There was some feeling that Trump was returning to scenes of past success: the 7imes might be against him, but Haberman had worked at the New York Post for many years. “She’s very professional,” Conway said, speaking in defense of the president and trying to justify Haberman’s extraordinary access. But however intent he remained on getting good ink in the Zimes, the president saw Haberman as “mean and horrible.” And yet, on a near-weekly basis, he and Hicks plotted when next to have the Times come in. * KK Kushner had his personal press operation and Bannon had his. The leaking culture had become so open and overt—most of the time everybody could identify everybody else’s leaks—that it was now formally staffed. Kushner’s Office of American Innovation employed, as its spokesperson, Josh Raffel, who, like Hicks, came out of Matthew Hiltzik’s PR shop. Raffel, a Democrat who had been working in Hollywood, acted as Kushner and his wife’s personal rep—not least of all because the couple felt that Spicer, owing his allegiance to Priebus, was not aggressively representing them. This was explicit. “Josh is Jared’s Hope,” was his internal West Wing job description. Raffel coordinated all of Kushner and Ivanka’s personal press, though there was more of this for Ivanka than for Kushner. But, more importantly, Raffel coordinated all of Kushner’s substantial leaking, or, as it were, his off-the-record briefings and guidance—no small part of it against Bannon. Kushner, who with great conviction asserted that he never leaked, in part justified his press operation as a defense against Bannon’s press operation. Bannon’s “person,” Alexandra Preate—a witty conservative socialite partia