Fear: Trump in the White House

by Bob Woodward

Porter took off his honest-broker cap. “Trade deficits don’t matter,” he said, “at least with individual countries. That’s an absurd way of thinking.”

That deficit depends on economic conditions, which country can produce various goods most efficiently and cheaply, the savings rate and the value of the currencies.

He quoted five former attorneys general or deputy attorneys general agreeing that Comey had violated the rules.

David Gergen, a voice of experience and reason who had served as a White House adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton during their impeachment investigations, sounded an alarm. “I think we’re in impeachment territory,” Gergen said. “What we see is a presidency that’s starting to come apart.”

A special counsel had virtually unlimited power to investigate any possible crime, Porter said. It was Watergate, Iran-contra and Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky scandal.

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.”

John Dowd, 76, one of the most experienced attorneys in white-collar criminal defense,

Dowd was both good-old-boy figure and hard-nosed investigator.

He ran several investigations, the most prominent leading to the banning of Pete Rose of the Cincinnati Reds for betting on baseball games.

First, he had been blindsided by Attorney General Sessions’s March 2 decision recusing himself from any investigation of Russian election meddling.

Sessions said, “I didn’t know about this.” He had turned to Sessions, “Well, doesn’t he work for you?” Sessions’s recusal left Rosenstein in charge of any Russia inquiry.

Third, Trump said that after he fired Comey, the former FBI director had gone on a testifying and leaking crusade to state that Trump asked him to drop the Flynn investigation.

Mueller did not respond. He was a master of silence.

“corrupt” motive,

In most cases that is a high bar and generally prosecutors need evidence such as urging others to lie to investigators, destroying documents or ordering the payment of money for illegal actions, such as buying the silence of witnesses as Nixon had in Watergate.

Trump was “very bothered by the possibility of FISA wiretaps in the campaign . . . a sense of sort of feeling violated. But that there was someone that had some power over him where he wasn’t the top dog.”

Melania’s primary concern was their son, Barron. “She’s obsessed with Barron,” one person said. “That is her focus 100 percent.”

Real power is fear. It’s all about strength. Never show weakness. You’ve always got to be strong. Don’t be bullied.

“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.”

Cohn wrote a joke for Trump to use at the Gridiron Dinner: “We’ve made enormous progress on the wall. All the drawings are done. All the excavating’s done. All the engineering is done. The only thing we’ve been stumbling with is we haven’t been able to figure out how to stretch the word ‘Trump’ over 1,200 miles.”

He stopped counting the times that Trump vented about Sessions. His anger never went away. Sessions’s recusal was a wound that remained open.

Silence could be interpreted as confirmation, they usually replied.

Tillerson raised the concern that the administration was targeting China with steel tariffs at a time when they needed its help to corral North Korea.

An executive order signed in 1981 by President Reagan stated, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the U.S. government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”

Iraq. The Desert Fox operation included 650 bomber or missile sorties against fewer than 100 targets over three days. It was billed as a large bombing attack to punish Iraq for failing to allow United Nations weapons inspectors to search for weapons of mass destruction.

The cost in lives included more than 100,000 Iraqis by conservative count and 4,530 Americans. The U.S. cost was at least $800 billion and probably $1 trillion.

Given the magnitude of the mistake, Brennan concluded that the Saddam problem could have been solved with what he called “indirect assassination.”

The CIA should not seek regime change, but “man change,” the elimination of Leader Kim Jong Un.

From October 17 to 19, 2017, the U.S. Air Force ran an elaborate series of simulated air strikes in the Missouri Ozarks. The region has a similar topography to North Korea.

“Do you want to bet a mushroom cloud over Los Angeles over it?”

Under the 2012 legislation called DACA—Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals—President Obama had given 800,000 Dreamers protection from deportation and made work permits available to them, hoping to bring them out of the shadow economy and give them an American identity.

or siblings. Two thirds (68 percent) of legal permanent residents entered under family reunification or chain migration in 2016. This was at the heart of Trump’s and Bannon’s anti-immigration stance: They wanted to stop illegal immigration and limit legal immigration. Bannon wanted a new, stricter policy. Graham and he were not able to come close to agreement.

When Priebus voiced his dismay, Trump regularly joked, “They’re Democrats.” They were New Yorkers infected with the liberalism of their city roots.

But the second option—remaining in the accord but doing nothing that harmed the economy and putting a hold on further financial contributions—would put the U.S. in good stead in terms of litigation, Tillerson said.

Trump had a giant TV going much of the time, alone in his bedroom with the clicker, the TiVo and his Twitter account. Priebus called the presidential bedroom “the devil’s workshop”

“Steve,” Mattis said, “I’m kind of one of those global trading guys. I think all that trade stuff’s pretty good.”

Over the weekend of July 8 and 9, The New York Times published two stories about a previously undisclosed meeting in Trump Tower in the middle of the campaign. Don Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner had met with a Russian lawyer who, among other things, was offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

there something wrong with that? No. Dowd knew that opposition research teams and investigative reporters would take dirt from anyone, even foreign governments.

One was to retain the Obama policy that allowed transgender people to serve openly, two was to issue a directive to Secretary Mattis giving him leeway, three was a presidential order to end the program but come up with a plan for those transgender people already in the military, and four was to ban all transgender people from military service. The likelihood of being sued increased as they got to number four, Priebus explained.

Porter was shocked that Trump was so vicious about his chief of staff.

“It’s not presidential. And guess what? I know it. But I had to do it anyway.”

The tweets were not incidental to his presidency. They were central.

In violation of security rules he invited Turnbull into his Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). Only those with the highest U.S. security clearances for Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information were allowed in the SCIF.

“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.

McMaster said that he believed Mattis and Tillerson had concluded that the president and the White House were crazy.

“You guys in the White House don’t have your act together,” Tillerson said, and the floodgates gushed open. “The president can’t make a decision. He doesn’t know how to make a decision. He won’t make a decision. He makes a decision and then changes his mind a couple of days later.”

It could cascade into a Watergate-like situation reminiscent of the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre, when Nixon fired the special prosecutor and the attorney general and his deputy both resigned.

Recusing himself made the attorney general a “traitor,” Trump said to Porter.