ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE YOU’VE NEVER HEARD OF

…The holder of the office next to the president, Dan Scavino

Is this the White House Kingmaker?

If you have followed the president’s Twitter account, you may have noticed that his so called “personal account” has very different tweets from one day to he next.

On one day there will be misspellings, many items that are all CAPS, while others include detailed government business and executive opinions that are much more properly stated instead of Trump’s normal bloviating.  There is obviously more than just the president that are using his “personal account”.

Because of that, last July, the president was sued in federal court over his Twitter habits.  The suit wasn’t due to the tone or content of Trump’s approximately 37,300 tweets that had landed him in trouble. Instead, it was the possible unconstitutionality way he/they  used one feature of the platform, and that was the block button. The plaintiffs, represented by Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, were seven individuals that ranged from a freelance journalist to a New York comedian to a Texas police officer.  These individuals had sent negative replies to an @realDonaldTrump tweet and they were all subsequently blocked by the president.

Though as I said, Trump’s Twitter account purports to be a personal one, the plaintiffs are arguing that his writings invariably involved multiple government business and executive opinions which makes his posts a public forum to which all American citizens should be guaranteed access.

Though @realDonaldTrump sometimes reads like the unabridged representation of a singular man’s impulses, three other defendants were named in the suit, which is expected to be ruled upon in the Southern District of New York in the coming months.

The suit also names three other individuals besides Donald Trump.  Those include his long-time associates Hope Hicks and his press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the president’s designated White House mouthpiece.  But there was a third individual that you have probably never heard of, a man named Dan Scavino Jr.

Scavino was one of the “originals” on Trump’s 2016 campaign, but few people have known exactly what he was doing for the campaign…?  The nondescript, Scavino could often be seen in a suit at the side of the campaign stage, taking photos of the immense rally crowds with his iPhone and later, while scowling at his laptop aboard Trump’s 757, posting the images to Facebook.   It appeared that Scavino’s only role was to document Trump’s popularity.

After Inauguration Day, Scavino then got an official title: “Assistant to the President and Director of Social Media”, a position that had never existed before and one that paid him the maximum White House staff salary of $179,700.

The Trump White House continued to employ an official photographer as well as a chief digital officer. This small digital team shared a suite across the street, in the Executive Office Building.  But Scavino got his personal office on the ground floor of the West Wing, just down the hall from the leader of the free world.

Perhaps the most profound effect of Scavino’s countless iPhone videos and photos is that they served as proof to so-called “shy Trump supporters” that they were not alone and that they were in fact, regardless of what the mainstream media reported, poised to make history. As Jason Miller, the campaign’s senior communications adviser, puts it: “You could make the case that without Dan [Scavino] fulfilling his core mission of conveying the excitement on Facebook, people wouldn’t have realized that they were part of a movement. It was absolutely critical in encouraging people to turn out.”

Scavino is now the longest-tenured Trump employee in the White House.   He has now taken over Hope Hicks office, just outside the Oval. By these measures, he is one of the most powerful people in Washington, despite the fact that no one can explain what Scavino does for a living.

Scavino has been a devoted Trump supporter for years and he has worked for Trump in various positions since 2013. 

When the campaign started, Scavino got the new job of going to the early primary states to tend to the needs of the local kingmakers. He also wandered the events, climbed the rafters and snapped smartphone pictures, which he then posted on both his and the campaign’s various social-media accounts. It happened that the campaign already had that professional photographer on the payroll and the campaign did nominally have a social media specialist, Justin McConney, who was the son of the Trump Organization’s controller.  But they lacked Scavino’s instinct for Trump’s base.  And in any event, McConney was stationed back at Trump Tower, away from the real action on the campaign trail.

By early 2016, Scavino had become in essence both the Trump campaign’s traveling photographer and its social media chieftain. And because the self-funding candidate had no intention of spending a dime on media coverage, Scavino with his Facebook videography also became the closest thing the Trump campaign had to an in-house ad maker.

Scavino’s willingness to take on other people’s online grunt work made him indispensable to the campaign. Early in the primary, the candidate’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, argued to Trump that Facebook was much more powerful than his preferred platform, Twitter. “Every Facebook user is probably worth 10 to 12 times more than one of your Twitter followers,” Kushner told him. “And look, I think your Facebook page is totally underutilized.” 

The candidate then responded, “Congratulations, you’re now in charge of my Facebook.” Kushner of course, turned around and handed over that job to Scavino.

At the time he announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015, Trump himself was unsure of the role Twitter would play in his campaign. His tweets then seemed to demonstrate only the fundamental unseriousness of his presidential ambitions.

As the campaign wore on, however, the candidate’s online complaints no longer suggested that he was a man bent on narcissism. Rather, they reinforced the campaign talking point that at long last, here was an honest politician who did not bother to conceal his lesser angels.  In offering his so called “smallness”, the billionaire New York developer managed to remove the differences between his real gilded life and that of white Middle America.  He made himself part of his base.

Today Trump has not so much drained Washington’s swamp as to have stirred it up. Journalists now routinely awaken to the sound on their smartphones, telling them that the president is already up and making the news in 280-character bombardments. A common spectacle today is the image of House Speaker Paul Ryan facing the microphones and, with a grim smile, trying to explain away his party leader’s latest tweet: “It’s what he does. We’ve kind of learned to live with it.”

There is no longer a question of whether Trump’s social media outbursts are actual news.  Twitter now will announce that his secretary of Veterans Affairs has been replaced, that he considers his own attorney general “beleaguered,” that “trade wars are good,” while “DACA is dead.”

The Trump presidency’s defining feature is above all the offerings of @realDonaldTrump, and that means it's from Dan Scavino.

Scavino’s importance to the president certainly helps explain how he has managed to survive a succession of bloodlettings in the West Wing.

But it’s also the case that he is well liked among his colleagues, several of whom understand his real value.

Here is what Whiter House associates say about Dan:  “I’ve never met anyone who’s as hard-working or as loyal.” “The one guy who outworked me.” “The president has zero concern that Dan has any interest in anything but serving him.” “You never see Dan out there hogging the limelight.”

One senior White House official said: “Golf is a sport of the least mistakes,” he said. “That’s how someone like Dan floats to the top……by not doing anything wrong.”

One of Scavino’s main roles is the care and feeding of his boss’s ego. He has learned how to fend off any negativity with a ready supply of superlatives. While Hope Hicks would inform Trump about how some matter might be playing in the mainstream media, Scavino, “tells him how things are playing with his people. That’s a gauge for Trump that the president takes seriously.”

Checking in with the base is as easy as Dan looking at his phone.  Scavino’s old friend offered an example: “Dan would scroll through his Twitter feed and if Franklin Graham says something particularly complimentary, he’ll say, ‘Look what Franklin Graham just wrote.’ Or if CNN show host Brian Stelter says something particularly stupid, he’ll run over and say, ‘Look what Fake News is doing.’ ”

More than anyone else in the White House, the director of social media spends his day online, monitoring the #MAGA congregation. “Dan talks to the base more than anybody else after the president,” said one senior White House official. “He’s the conductor of the Trump Train, and these people know he’s true blue, and he also knows all the influencers.” 

A year ago, the former chief strategist Steve Bannon shared a West Wing office with Scavino. “He has his hands on the Pepes,” Bannon recalls, referring to the cartoon frog that serves as mascot to the alt-right. “He knew who the players were and who were not. He’d bring me Cernovich — I didn’t know who Cernovich was until Scavino told me.” Bannon was referring to the alt-right blogger Mike Cernovich, who has frequently promoted false conspiracy theories.

Since arriving in the nation’s capital, Scavino has kept attacking President Trump’s opponents from his own Twitter account that included: Nancy Pelosi, Bill Kristol, and Morning Joe. Last April, he went after Justin Amash, a Republican congressman from Michigan and frequent critic of Trump. Calling Amash “a big liability,” Scavino’s tweet urged, “#TrumpTrain, defeat him in primary.”

Not easily intimidated, Amash replied, “Bring it on.” But what instead was brought on was an investigation by the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), which concluded that Scavino had violated the Hatch Act, the law that forbids engaging in political activity while acting in your capacity as a government employee.

On June 5, the OSC disclosed that it had put Scavino on notice. Though its statement made clear that future violations could result in harsher punishment, it neglected to say that only one individual could mete out that punishment: the president of the United States.

Scavino had long struggled to balance his ambitions with caring for his wife, who suffers from chronic Lyme disease.

Last December, The Washington Post reported that an executive with Vkontakte, Russia’s version of Facebook, had twice emailed Scavino and Donald Trump Jr. during the presidential campaign, offering to promote Trump’s candidacy on the Russian platform. According to an email read to The Post, Scavino’s response to the American intermediary, Rob Goldstone, was: “Please feel free to send me whatever you have. Thank you so much for looking out for Mr. Trump and his presidential campaign.”

A month after the Post story, Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democratic member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote Scavino a four-page letter. The letter noted media reports that Scavino is a “constant presence at Trump’s side,” therefore Feinstein speculated that Scavino would know the details about the president’s decision to fire the FBI director James Comey, as well as Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

The senator therefore was writing “to request documents and to schedule an interview with him in January 2018.”  Scavino then retained the services of an attorney, who informed Feinstein that Trump’s social media director would not be responding to her requests.

As it is, without bipartisan prodding from the Judiciary Committee, and with Trump’s backing, he was free to ignore the Senate inquiry. Still, Scavino’s tweet from November 2013 proved to be true in ways he had not expected: He truly would not be where he was today without @realDonaldTrump.

Copyright G.Ater  2018