Fear: Trump in the White House

by Bob Woodward

Trump was always shifting, rarely fixed, erratic. He would get in a bad mood, something large or small would infuriate him, and he would say about the KORUS trade agreement, “We’re withdrawing today.”

It was no less than an administrative coup d’état, an undermining of the will of the president of the United States and his constitutional authority.

The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader. Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.

Ailes said they were there for their weekly debate prep. The first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton was a month and a half away, on September 26. “Debate prep?” Bannon said. “You, Christie and Rudy?” “This is the second one.” “He’s actually prepping for the debates?” Bannon said, suddenly impressed. “No, he comes and plays golf and we just talk about the campaign and stuff like that. But we’re trying to get him in the habit.”

It was one of Trump’s paradoxes: He attacked the mainstream media with relish, especially the Times—but despite the full-takedown language, he considered the Times the paper of record and largely believed its stories.

As they sat down to dinner, Trump wanted to gossip about the news of the day. Senator John McCain, displaying his maverick credentials, had publicly criticized the U.S. military raid in Yemen. Trump lashed out, suggesting that McCain had taken the coward’s way out of Vietnam as a prisoner of war. He said that as a Navy pilot during the Vietnam War McCain, whose father was Admiral John McCain, the Pacific commander, had been offered and taken early release, leaving other POWs behind. “No, Mr. President,” Mattis said quickly, “I think you’ve got it reversed.” McCain had turned down early release and been brutally tortured and held five years in the Hanoi Hilton. “Oh, okay,” Trump said.

“Sean,” Mattis finally said, “I’ve killed people for a living. If you call me again, I’m going to fucking send you to Afghanistan. Are we clear?”

Porter had never seen Trump so visibly disturbed. He knew Trump was a narcissist who saw everything in terms of its impact on him. But the hours of raging reminded Porter of what he had read about Nixon’s final days in office—praying, pounding the carpet, talking to the pictures of past presidents on the walls. Trump’s behavior was now in the paranoid territory.

“I am the president,” Trump said. “I can fire anybody that I want. They can’t be investigating me for firing Comey. And Comey deserved to be fired! Everybody hated him. He was awful.”

Trump gave some private advice to a friend who had acknowledged some bad behavior toward women. Real power is fear. It’s all about strength. Never show weakness. You’ve always got to be strong. Don’t be bullied. There is no choice. “You’ve got to deny, deny, deny and push back on these women,” he said. “If you admit to anything and any culpability, then you’re dead. That was a big mistake you made. You didn’t come out guns blazing and just challenge them. You showed weakness. You’ve got to be strong. You’ve got to be aggressive. You’ve got to push back hard. You’ve got to deny anything that’s said about you. Never admit.”

Porter observed that anytime anybody challenged Trump—in a policy debate, in court, in the public square—his natural instinct seemed to be that if he was not exerting strength, he was failing.

Having failed in efforts to control or curtail the president’s tweeting, Priebus searched for a way to have practical impact. Since the tweets were often triggered by the president’s obsessive TV watching, he looked for ways to shut off the television.

Bannon realized that the cascade of NSC presentations about Afghanistan, Iran, China, Russia and North Korea was not really connecting with Trump. Without some organizing principle, it was too much for his attention span.

Getting dirt on people was commonplace in campaigns and the nation’s capital. It even had a name—“opposition research” or “investigative reporting.” That’s what half of Washington seemed to be paid for. Is there something wrong with that? No. Dowd knew that opposition research teams and investigative reporters would take dirt from anyone, even foreign governments. All the media posturing was disgusting. They were treating it like the crime of the century.

On July 17 Trump tweeted: “Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. That’s politics!”

Coming back from the G20 summit, Trump was editing an upcoming speech with Porter. Scribbling his thoughts in neat, clean penmanship, the president wrote, “TRADE IS BAD.” Though he never said it in a speech, he had finally found the summarizing phrase and truest expression of his protectionism, isolationism and fervent American nationalism.

Cohn had witnessed this for over a year—denial when needed or useful or more convenient. “He’s a professional liar,” Cohn told an associate.

“It’s all a diversion.” “What do you mean?” “Jared’s testifying.” Trump’s son-in-law was appearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Monday and the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. “They didn’t think they had enough cover.” “He wouldn’t do that to me,” Sessions said. “He’d fucking do that to you in a second. He’s doing it to you! You watch! When Jared finishes testifying, if they think it’s good testimony, he’ll stop tweeting.” On July 24 Kushner released a long, carefully lawyered statement ahead of his congressional appearance. “I did not collude, nor know of anyone else in the campaign who colluded, with any foreign government. I had no improper contacts. I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector.” The Trump attacks on Sessions subsided for a while. It was a sideshow, a diversion. He did believe Sessions had failed him, though, so it was a diversion with conviction.

Trump flipped to Afghanistan, where he already had endured half a dozen recent NSC and smaller meetings. “When are we going to start winning some wars? We’ve got these charts. When are we going to win some wars? Why are you jamming this down my throat?”

“You should be killing guys. You don’t need a strategy to kill people.”

“We’re upside down” on trade deals, Trump said. “We’re underwater on every one of these.” The other countries are making money. “Just look at all this stuff up there. We’re paying for it all.” Those countries were “protectorates,” he declared. “It’s actually good for our economy,” Cohn said again. “I don’t want to hear that,” Trump replied. “It’s all bullshit.” As the meeting was winding down, Tillerson leaned back in his chair. He seemed to be speaking to the president but did not make eye contact with him. Instead he looked at Mattis. “Your deal,” the secretary of state said. “It’s your deal.” It was a Texas walk-back—as if to say, I will obey and execute, but it is your design, not mine.

All the air seemed to have come out of Tillerson. He could not abide Trump’s attack on the generals. The president was speaking as if the U.S. military was a mercenary force for hire. If a country wouldn’t pay us to be there, then we didn’t want to be there. As if there were no American interests in forging and keeping a peaceful world order, as if the American organizing principle was money. “Are you okay?” Cohn asked him. “He’s a fucking moron,” Tillerson said so everyone heard.

Cohn concluded that Trump was, in fact, going backwards. He had been more manageable the first months when he was a novice. For Priebus, it was the worst meeting among many terrible ones. Six months into the administration, he could see vividly that they had a fundamental problem of goal setting. Where were they going? The distrust in the room had been thick and corrosive. The atmosphere was primitive; everyone was ostensibly on the same side, but they had seemed suited up in battle armor, particularly the president. This was what craziness was like, Priebus concluded.

Tillerson would argue for more economic integration, coordination of development assistance and the need to address the motivators of violence and actively use diplomacy. What was often lacking or delayed was an execution plan assigning responsibility and accountability. Endgame goals were fuzzy or unstated. The result was often weeks or months of delay.

The generals aren’t sufficiently focused on getting or making money. They don’t understand what our objectives should be and they have the United States engaged in all the wrong ways.

Trump liked to do things spur of the moment, Porter concluded, to fly by the seat of his pants. He acted like doing too much advance preparation would diminish his skills in improvising. He did not want to be derailed by forethought. As if a plan would take away his power, his sixth sense.

What the president would bring up in the morning most often was what he had seen on television, especially Fox News, or something from the newspapers he read more thoroughly than the public generally knew.

All presidencies are audience driven, but Trump’s central audience was often himself. He kept giving himself reviews. Most were passionately positive. Much of his brain was in the press box.

On matters in which Trump had developed decades of opinions, arguments were pointless. One of the most experienced West Wingers in 2017 and 2018 said, “There’s some things where he’s already reached the conclusion and it doesn’t matter what you say. It doesn’t matter what arguments you offer. He’s not listening.”

At one point Trump said he had decided to impose tariffs. “Great,” Cohn said. “The stock market will be down 1,000 or 2,000 points tomorrow, but you’ll be happy. Right, sir?” “No, no, meeting’s over! Let’s not do anything.” “Your biggest fear is being Herbert Hoover,” Cohn said.

Trump repeatedly said he was going to get out of the trade deals and impose tariffs. Several times he said, “Let’s do it,” and asked for an order to sign. “We’ve got to distract him from KORUS,” Porter said to Cohn. “We’ve got to distract him from NAFTA.” Cohn agreed. At least twice, Porter had the order drafted as the president had directed. And at least twice Cohn or Porter took it from his desk. Other times, they just delayed. Trump seemed not to remember his own decision because he did not ask about it. He had no list—in his mind or anywhere else—of tasks to complete.

It made no sense, Priebus realized, unless you understood the way Trump made decisions. “The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.”

The most important part of Trump’s world was the ring right outside of the bull’s-eye: the people that Trump thought perhaps he should have hired, or who had worked for him and he’d gotten rid of and now thought, maybe I shouldn’t have. It was the people who were either there or should have been there, or associates or acquaintances that owed nothing to him and were around him but didn’t come in for anything. It was that outside circle that had the most power, not the people on the inside. It wasn’t Kelly or Priebus or Bannon.

Months after his departure from the White House, Priebus made a final assessment: He believed he had been surrounded in the West Wing by high-ranking natural killers with no requirement to produce regular work products—a plan, a speech, the outline of a strategy, a budget, a daily and weekly schedule. They were roving interlopers, a band of chaos creators. There was Ivanka, a charming huntress dipping in and out of meetings or the latest presidential business. Jared had the same rights. Theirs was a portfolio without experience. Kellyanne Conway had, or took, license to weigh in on television or interviews almost at will, often without coordinating with the communications and press secretary offices that Priebus was supposed to control. Then there was Bannon, who had snagged a key West Wing office near the Oval and lined his walls with whiteboards listing Trump’s campaign promises. He was a strategist in an operation that had none. He came forward to enter discussions with his fire when the nationalist-populist agenda might be at risk, or seemingly at random or when he needed something to do. Trump had failed the President Lincoln test. He had not put a team of political rivals or competitors at the table, Priebus concluded. “He puts natural predators at the table,” Priebus said later. “Not just rivals—predators.” These were people who had no experience in government, an astonishingly common distinguishing characteristic. They had spent their lives dabbling in political op...

To Rob Porter, Charlottesville was the breaking point. Trump rejected the better judgment of almost all of his staff. He had done that before. His perverse independence and irrationality ebbed and flowed. But with Charlottesville the floodgates just opened. For just the sake of a few words, he had drawn a stark line. “This was no longer a presidency,” Porter said. “This is no longer a White House. This is a man being who he is.” Trump was going ahead no matter what. As Porter saw it from up close—perhaps as close as anyone on the staff except Hope Hicks—the Trump election had rekindled the divide in the country. There was a more hostile relationship with the media. The culture wars were reinvigorated. There was a racist tinge. Trump accelerated it. Porter wondered if trying to repair any of those divisions after Charlottesville was almost a lost cause. There was no turning back. Trump had crossed the point of no return. To the Trump opponents and haters, he was un-American, racist. There was so much fuel on that fire already, and Trump had added so much more. The fire was going to burn, and it was going to burn brightly. It was now an almost permanent state of suspicion, disbelief and hostility. “It’s just all-out war now.”

There was no process for making and coordinating decisions. Chaos and disorder were inadequate to describe the situation. It was a free-for-all. The president would have an idea and say, “I want to sign something.” And Porter would have to explain that while Trump had broad authority to issue executive orders, for example, a president was frequently restricted by law. Trump had no understanding of how government functioned. At times he would just start drafting orders himself or dictating. The basic tactic Porter had employed from the Priebus days until now was to stall and delay, mention the legal roadblocks and occasionally lift the drafts from the Resolute Desk.

Trump liked signing. It meant he was doing things, and he had an up-and-down penmanship that looked authoritative in black Magic Marker.

“The president’s unhinged,” Kelly said. There would be something, especially about trade agreements or the U.S. troops in South Korea. “We all need to try to talk him out of it,” Kelly said. They needed to stand up to the president. He wasn’t listening.

NAFTA was another enduring Trump target. The president had said for months he wanted to leave NAFTA and renegotiate. “The only way to get a good deal is to blow up the old deal. When I blow it up, in that six months, they’ll come running back to the table.” His theory of negotiation was that to get to yes, you first had to say no. “Once you blow it up,” Cohn replied, “it may be over. That’s the most high-risk strategy. That either works or you go bankrupt.” Cohn realized that Trump had gone bankrupt six times and seemed not to mind. Bankruptcy was just another business strategy. Walk away, threaten to blow up the deal. Real power is fear.

Grievance was a big part of Trump’s core, very much like a 14-year-old boy who felt he was being picked on unfairly. You couldn’t talk to him in adult logic. Teenage logic was necessary.

One person present said Mattis’s message was clear: Stop fucking around with this. We’re doing this because we’ve got to prevent World War III. This isn’t some business gamble where if you happen to go bankrupt or whatever, it’s not a big deal. It seemed Mattis and others were at the end of their rope with the president. How are you possibly questioning these things that are obvious and so fundamental? It was as if Mattis were saying, God, stop it!

The president left. Among the principals there was exasperation with these questions. Why are we having to do this constantly? When is he going to learn? They couldn’t believe they were having these conversations and had to justify their reasoning. Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like—and had the understanding of—“a fifth or sixth grader.”

Dowd wanted to dress it up as much as possible, to say, it’s not your fault. It’s the burden of the office. He knew in this confrontation he could not be insulting. He could not say what he knew was true: “You’re a fucking liar.” That was the problem. So Dowd said, “You do have trouble staying on the subject. And that can defeat you. Then you try to catch yourself, and you misstate something, and bam. It’s like Mike Flynn not remembering the conversation with Kislyak.”

Dowd believed that the president had not colluded with Russia or obstructed justice. But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”