Fear: Trump in the White House

by Bob Woodward

The president made fun of his Southern accent. “This guy is mentally retarded. He’s this dumb Southerner.”

The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.

“The great gift of the greatest generation to us,” Mattis opened, “is the rules-based, international democratic order.” This global architecture brought security, stability and prosperity.

U.S. arms deals abroad amounted to $75.9 billion in fiscal year 2017.

Trade deficits were growing the U.S. economy, Cohn asserted. “I don’t want to hear that,” Trump said. “It’s all bullshit!”

Tillerson said, “The best we can tell, they’re not in violation of anything.” All the intelligence agencies agreed on this. It was the critical point. How could they impose new sanctions, if there was no violation of the agreement?

the strategy was effectively to achieve a stalemate.

“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.

Trump got up and walked out. 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.

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.

A senior White House official who spoke contemporaneously with participants in the meeting recorded this summary: “The president proceeded to lecture and insult the entire group about how they didn’t know anything when it came to defense or national security. It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views.”

Tillerson was senior and so talked first at principals meetings.

McMaster said that at 6:03 a.m., Trump had tweeted: “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump campaign—‘quietly working to boost Clinton.’ So where is the investigation A.G. [attorney general]” It was clearly Russian propaganda, McMaster said. He and the NSC and intelligence experts had concluded that. But the president had picked it up and shot it out.

The operations of the Oval Office and White House were less the Art of the Deal and more often the Unraveling of the Deal.

No one had expected Trump’s tweet. When Miller and Scavino saw it, they hopped out of Priebus’s SUV to get into another car, leaving the former chief of staff alone. As he shut the car door, Priebus wondered if maybe Trump had drafted a tweet and sent it accidentally. No, that had not happened. The conversation in the cabin was just one more lie.

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.”

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.

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.”

Dowd was aware that he had illustrated the president was “clearly disabled.”

“I want to see if there was corrupt intent,” Mueller said again. This was the very heart of the matter. The obstruction statutes did not make specific acts alone unlawful. The acts had to be done “corruptly” or “willfully,” with the intent of obstructing justice.

“Mr. President, I cannot, as a lawyer, as an officer of the court, sit next to you and have you answer these questions when I full well know that you’re not really capable.”

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.”

Remember the first rule, Mr. President, is do no harm.

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.”

Trump named former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State in December 2016, telling aides that Tillerson looked the part he would play on the world stage. Tillerson had spent 40 years at Exxon and was untainted by government experience. “A very Trumpian-inspired pick,” campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said on television, promising “big impact.” Tillerson and Trump clashed regularly. He called the president a “moron” and was later fired on March 13, 2018.

Retired Marine General and Secretary of Defense James Mattis helped top White House Economic Adviser Gary Cohn and Staff Secretary Rob Porter underscore to Trump the necessity of staying in a crucial trade deal with South Korea. “Mr. President,” Mattis said, “Kim Jong Un poses the most immediate threat to our national security. We need South Korea as an ally. It may not seem like trade is related to all this, but it’s central. We’re not doing this for South Korea. We’re helping South Korea because it helps us.”

Trump felt Attorney General Jeff Sessions had failed him by recusing himself from the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. “Jeff isn’t a guy that, through thick and thin, is willing to stick with me,” Trump said. Sessions was an “idiot,” a “traitor,” and “mentally retarded” for recusing himself. “How in the world was I ever persuaded to pick him for my attorney general?” Trump asked. “He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama. “What business does he have being attorney general?”

Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff, believed the White House was not leading on key issues like health-care and tax reform, and that foreign policy was not coherent and often contradictory. The Trump White House did not have a team of rivals but a team of predators, he concluded. “When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody. That’s what happens.” In July 2017, Priebus was replaced by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.

Homeland Security Secretary and retired Marine General John Kelly privately criticized the disorder and chaos of the White House. Kelly told the president he believed he could straighten the place out. But he was taken by surprise when Trump announced that he had named him his new chief of staff via Twitter in July 2017. Kelly was soon sidelined by Trump, although he remained in his post.

Retired General Michael Flynn resigned as Trump’s first national security adviser on February 13, 2017, for lying about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn later plead guilty to lying to the FBI but denied emphatically that he had committed treason.

National Economic Council Chairman Gary Cohn formed an alliance with Staff Secretary Rob Porter and at times Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to curb some of Trump’s most dangerous impulses. “It’s not what we did for the country,” Cohn said. “It’s what we saved him from doing.”

Ivanka Trump, the president’s 36-year-old daughter, was a senior White House adviser whose influence with her father was resented and resisted by others in the White House. Chief strategist Steve Bannon got into a screaming match with her. “You’re a goddamn staffer!” Bannon yelled. “You’re nothing but a f---ing staffer! You walk around this place and act like you’re in charge, and you’re not. You’re on staff!” Ivanka shouted back, “I’m not a staffer! I’ll never be a staffer. I’m the first daughter.”

Steve Bannon became the Chief Executive Officer of Trump’s campaign in August 2016. Bannon had three campaign themes: “Number one, we’re going to stop mass illegal immigration and start to limit legal immigration to get our sovereignty back. Number two, you are going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the country. “And number three, we’re going to get out of these pointless foreign wars.”

As Staff Secretary, Rob Porter briefed Trump on decision memos and other important presidential documents. In alliance with Gary Cohn, he attempted to block Trump’s most dangerous economic and foreign policy impulses. Porter told an associate, “A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.”

FBI director James Comey was fired by Trump in May 2017. “Don’t try to talk me out of it,” Trump told his White House counsel, Don McGahn, and his chief of staff, Reince Priebus. “Because I’ve made my decision, so don’t even try.” He believed Comey was a grandstander and out of control. Trump seized on allegations that Comey had mishandled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails as grounds for his firing.

Former FBI director Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to investigate Russian election meddling and any connection to the Trump presidential campaign. Trump rejected him as Comey’s replacement for FBI director. “He was just in here and I didn’t hire him for the FBI,” Trump said. “Of course he’s got an ax to grind with me.”

John Dowd joined Trump’s legal team in May 2017. He convinced the president not to testify in the Mueller investigation, but resigned in March 2018 when Trump changed his mind and Dowd could not dissuade him. “Mr. President, I cannot, as a lawyer, as an officer of the court, sit next to you and have you answer these questions when I full well know that you’re not really capable,” Dowd told Trump.

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