A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America

by Philip Rucker

Some of them also harked back to the 1950s, envisioning a simpler, halcyon America in which white male patriarchs ruled the roost, decorous women kept home and hearth, and minorities were silent or subservient.

Two kinds of people went to work for the administration: those who thought Trump was saving the world and those who thought the world needed to be saved from Trump.

Pelosi assumed Trump would open the conversation on a unifying note, such as by quoting the Founding Fathers or the Bible. Instead, the new president began with a lie: “You know, I won the popular vote.” He claimed that there had been widespread fraud, with three to five million illegal votes for Clinton. Pelosi interjected. “Well, Mr. President, that’s not true,” she said. “There’s no evidence to support what you just said, and if we’re going to work together, we have to stipulate to a certain set of facts.” Watching Pelosi challenge Trump, Bannon whispered to colleagues, “She’s going to get us. Total assassin. She’s an assassin.”

Kelly had gotten out the message but found a clever way to correct the president: scolding the press, even though they were merely reporting the president’s own words. The moment was a forerunner for the rash actions he would confront again and again from Trump.

In one of the counsel’s first discussions of executive power with the president, McGahn told Trump he couldn’t automatically issue an executive order to impose tariffs on foreign countries’ goods—unless he had a grave reason. “I just want to do it. I’m the president. Can’t I do it?” Trump asked him. “No,” McGahn said, pointing out the standard role of Congress in imposing duties and tariffs on imports. “You need a study under the statute. There’s a process. They have to do reports, and there has to be public notice.”

Hicks and other aides went back and forth with the president editing a statement. She would type a draft on her computer and print it out in 16-point font; Trump would make changes with a black Sharpie.

“Thanks, Reid,” the president said. “If I smell trouble, when I smell the jail cell, I’ll call you.”

As McGahn would tell a few close allies, the seasoned lawyer warned him he had just one critical job now: do not let the president remove Mueller.

Ordinarily, for a veteran of the white-collar defense bar, representing a president would be a prestigious career capstone. Not so with Trump, however. These high-profile attorneys understood that many people who have an affiliation with Trump ultimately get discarded and diminished. He saw his attorneys as tools to help bend the law for him and to protect him as he took suspect or outright illegal actions. Then there was the issue of money. No one in Trump’s orbit could provide clear answers about who would pay, and Trump had a history of stiffing professionals, be they lawyers or construction contractors. What’s more, Trump had a reputation for being a notoriously stubborn client. As one lawyer who said no to Trump’s offer explained, “It’s like being the captain of the Titanic. ‘Turn left. Turn left.’ ‘No, no, I’m going straight.’”

Trump was incensed that Comey was going to testify before Congress on June 8. He did not understand how a man he fired one month earlier could discredit him on premium television airtime.

As they settled into a work pattern with the president, the lawyers increasingly saw Kushner and Ivanka Trump as problems. The kids wandered in and out of strategy sessions about the investigation, without so much as a knock on the door, asking what was going on. Ivanka would walk in, say, “Hi, Dad,” and the lawyers would stop talking about substance and simply smile at her awkwardly, waiting for her to leave. She and Kushner talked openly about details of the investigation with other staffers, as well as with the president, and privately offered him their own advice.

“The kids are always there,” Corallo later explained. “The discomfort is with the kids always being there and talking about the case with other people in the White House, which makes everybody a witness.” The dynamic, he added, “makes it impossible for the White House to function in a normal way.”

Others who interacted with Ivanka found her to be a spoiled princess who had absorbed her father’s worst narcissistic, superficial, and self-promoting qualities. “As a twelve-year-old, she was put on the phone with CEOs, and her father told her she was the most amazing thing in the world and her opinion was valued,” one administration official explained. “She is a product of her environment.”

“I’m tired of the president asking me to do crazy shit,” McGahn said, declining to elaborate further.

“You’ve been running around here for months just working for Ivanka and Jared,” Bannon said to Hicks. “Your client is the man in the Oval Office.” He added, “You don’t actually work for the president. You forgot how you got here.”

“Your Excellency, Mr. President,” Putin said, gamely flattering a man uniquely susceptible to it.

Trump listened to Tillerson, but to those watching, he seemed absentminded. He did not ask questions or try to keep the conversation going. He had only one direct comment. He rejected the notion that Putin would try to take advantage of the United States. “I don’t really think that’s what Putin is up to,” Trump said. Trump’s confidence about how to handle Putin changed dramatically after their face-to-face meeting July 7 in Hamburg. Trump believed he was the expert on Russia now. He owned the relationship. Tillerson’s years of negotiating with Putin and studying his moves on the chessboard were suddenly irrelevant. “I have had a two-hour meeting with Putin,” Trump told Tillerson. “That’s all I need to know. . . . I’ve sized it all up. I’ve got it.” Tillerson’s moral code and experience climbing the corporate ladder taught him to respect America’s commander in chief. In this moment, he had to deploy every diplomatic skill he had acquired to tell his boss to be careful, reminding him that Putin had a history of taking advantage if he saw an opening. Putin was a master manipulator, a former KGB agent trained to find the soft spots of his foes and to exploit them. But Trump waved him off. “I know more about this than you do,” Trump said.

The emails revealed that Donald Trump Jr. excitedly and naively set up a meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. In the exchanges, Rob Goldstone, a British talent promoter who was helping broker the meeting, relayed that the Russians were offering “to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” “If it’s what you say I love it,” Trump junior wrote in one of the emails to Goldstone.

Kushner had repeatedly joked that the Democrats’ claim that Trump or his advisers might have colluded with Russians was ridiculous because the campaign was so disorganized “we couldn’t even collude with ourselves.”

They told the Circa reporter that the Russian lawyer had ties to a Democratic opposition research firm and appeared to be trying to set up the Trump campaign to look stupid.

He remembered being mildly annoyed that Veselnitskaya offered no actual evidence linking Clinton to a scandal. Instead, the brunette lawyer spent most of the meeting talking about a proposed deal: the Russian government would lift a ban on U.S. adoptions of Russian children if the U.S. government revoked a law sanctioning prominent Russian billionaires. This was a personal priority of Putin’s, and Veselnitskaya had for years lobbied against the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on a so-called black list of accused human rights abusers. As Trump junior later recalled, it was a “wasted 20 minutes.” He and his lawyers had crafted a few versions of statements for him to explain the meeting when the time came, and Trump junior’s preference was a detailed account: a page-long description of how he came to hold the meeting and everything that happened.

So Trump took charge to cover up the truth.

“If I don’t have it in there it appears as though I’m lying later when they inevitably leak something,” Trump junior replied.

Trump junior, Lowell, Futerfas, and Garten were stymied. They all knew what was contained in the full email exchange, and they knew it would eventually come back not just to bite Trump junior but to ensnare Trump himself. However, none of them could overrule the president from afar. By the time Trump’s personal lawyers weighed in, it was too late.

Reporters and lawyers would later joke that the way the president and his aides mishandled the Trump Tower story could be the case study of a graduate seminar on how not to manage crisis communications.

Hanging prominently on one of the walls, along

They also felt that many of Trump’s impulsive ideas—and their continuing difficulty communicating U.S. interests abroad with the president—stemmed from his lack of familiarity with U.S. history, and even with the map of the world.

The meeting was billed as a briefing on Afghanistan, because Trump was in the midst of developing a long-term strategy to defeat the Islamic State there, but in reality the session was to be a gentle lesson on American power, with the president as a student. The organizers viewed it as a course correction, an intervention to educate Trump and give him some fundamentals for analyzing the world.

“I wouldn’t go to war with you people,” Trump told the assembled brass. Addressing the room, the commander in chief barked, “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.” For a president known for verbiage he euphemistically called “locker room talk,” this was the gravest insult he could have delivered to these people, in this sacred space. The flag officers in the room were shocked. Some staff began looking down at their papers, rearranging folders, almost wishing themselves out of the room. A few considered walking out. They tried not to reveal their revulsion on their faces, but questions raced through their minds. “How does the commander in chief say that?” one thought. “What would our worst adversaries think if they knew he said this?”

Tillerson realized in that moment that Mattis was genetically a marine, unable to talk back to his commander in chief, no matter what nonsense came out of his mouth.

“This is the eleventh time I’ve taken this oath to defend the Constitution and I want everybody here to know I’m here to defend the Constitution and to defend the rule of law,” Kelly told the other officials in attendance. When he later addressed the larger staff, in the soaring lobby of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, he pointed out that the oath “doesn’t say anything in there about being loyal to the president. It doesn’t say anything in there about the GOP being more important than your integrity.”

On August 1, Cobb authorized the Justice Department to give Mueller’s team the draft of Trump’s letter to fire Comey. Trump lawyers had reviewed four drafts of the termination letter, including the final version that Keith Schiller—“the Manila Killa,” as one adviser called him—carried in a manila envelope to FBI headquarters. They felt that the letter exonerated Trump of obstructing justice because they believed it showed he was firing Comey for declining to state publicly that the president was not under investigation, not because of corrupt intent to end the Russia probe.

Cobb argued that this mountain of cooperation could therefore shield the president from having to answer investigators’ questions, which Trump’s personal lawyers wanted to avoid in part out of fear that he might perjure himself, given his tendency to embellish or fabricate.

Others noticed that the president was obsessed with knocking down as inferior what his predecessors had built. “His whole DNA is, whatever anybody else has done is stupid, I’m smarter, and therefore that’s why he goes around breaking glass all the time,” one senior Republican senator recalled. “He’s torn a lot of things up. He likes to break things. But what has he put together yet?”

Trump was hypersensitive to any suggestion that he was on vacation, even though he effectively was, and he ordered aides to plan public events each day: a briefing on health care or a roundtable session on opioids, for instance. But they occupied only an hour or so of his time, and he spent the rest of each day playing a round of golf, chatting with friends in the clubhouse, and hanging out in his private cottage.

As with most of his foreign leader meetings, Trump had been briefed but didn’t appear to have retained the material and instead tried to wing it.

“It’s not like you’ve got China on your border,” Trump said, seeming to dismiss the threat to India.

“I think he left that meeting and said, ‘This is not a serious man. I cannot count on this man as a partner,’” one Trump aide recalled. After that meeting, “the Indians took a step back” in their diplomatic relations with the United States.

“Television is often the guiding force of his day, both weapon and scalpel, megaphone and news feed,” Ashley Parker and Robert Costa wrote in The Washington Post. He loved watching MSNBC’s Morning Joe and CNN to see how the enemies were describing him, but Fox & Friends, with its sycophantic hosts, was where the president picked up some of his preferred ideas.

Trump’s personal lawyers, John Dowd and Jay Sekulow, recognized the dangers of letting their client sit down with prosecutors and how a man who had such difficulty sticking to the facts could carelessly walk into a perjury accusation.

Contrary to previous accounts, Dowd did not hold a murder board session or mock interview with the president. It was just Dowd face-to-face with the president, trying out a few questions to attempt to convince him that an interview with Mueller would be not some boardroom handshake deal but rather a torture session and final exam that he was bound to fail. Dowd got through only one or two questions before it became obvious the president was winging it. It was palpably clear that he was not versed on the facts of the case and had not given much if any thought to how he might answer Mueller’s questions. He said versions of “I did this” and “I did that”—framing himself as the guy in charge, the one at the wheel. Dowd pointed out that several of his claims were inaccurate and conflicted with the accounts of events provided by multiple witnesses. Trump disputed the facts. He got frustrated when Dowd pointed out his errors and imperfections. Dowd tried to explain to Trump something he had sought to ingrain in his client many times before: there was a momentous difference between saying “No” and saying “I don’t recall.” Trump often bragged of having “the world’s greatest memory,” but Dowd reminded him that in a legal setting it was perfectly fine—even preferable—to say, “I don’t recall.”

Lying has been part of Trump’s act all his life. “People ask me if the president lies. Are you nuts? He’s a fucking total liar,” Anthony Scaramucci said. “He lies all the time. Trump called me one night after I was on Bill Maher and he said, ‘How come you always fucking figure me out?’ I said, ‘I’ve seen you around for twenty years. I know your act. I know when you’re saying shit you don’t really mean, and I know when you’re saying bullshit.’ He laughed.” Scaramucci recalled that he then asked Trump, “Are you an act?” Trump replied, “I’m a total act and I don’t understand why people don’t get it.”

Not sure Mooch has any better grasp on truth than Trump does.

Sanders was a willing warrior for Trump, at times sacrificing her own credibility in service to a president who obfuscated and lied for sport, but one day during the Porter scandal she lost it. She had had enough with the incomplete and misleading information she had been provided by her colleagues.

“People elect a president knowing so much about them, good or bad, but no one knows Jared Kushner in the game he is playing. The fact that he made so many blunders, starting with the backchannel talks with Russians, should have told one how in over his head he was.”

Cable television’s viewer in chief was not pleased.

Kushner was the classic profile of a person who would be rejected for a national security clearance, and Kelly’s move to downgrade his clearance level provided comfort to the CIA. Agency officials had been wary of allowing Kushner to see highly sensitive information about sources and methods, based on his pattern of talking to foreign leaders in the Middle East—including Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince—without State Department diplomats or other government experts guiding him.

The intelligence agencies were on guard in part because, as the Post reported on February 27, they had intercepted private conversations of leaders in China, Israel, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates talking about the ease with which they could manipulate Kushner. Some of these foreign leaders described Kushner as naive and easily pushed; others said his financial debts and search for refinancing for an underwater Manhattan skyscraper were one route that made him vulnerable to pressure.

Putin had developed a knack for manipulating Trump, making him believe that the two of them could get big things accomplished if they ignored their staffs and worked one-on-one. National security aides feared Putin knew how to feed the unusual combination of Trump’s ego and insecurity and to cultivate conspiracies in his mind. He told Trump his ideas were brilliant but warned him that he could not trust anyone in his administration in Washington to execute them.

The prosecutors would later argue to a federal judge that many of the records should not be protected by attorney-client privilege because very little of what Cohen did for Trump was practice law.

Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had gassed his own people, and the top military brass had come to the White House to meet with Trump to review his options. National Security Council officials had worked with Defense Department officials to prepare specific targets should Trump authorize a mission to take out, or at least temporarily weaken, Syria’s ability to fly chemical weapon sorties. But there was only one subject on Trump’s mind as the meeting began, and it wasn’t dead Syrian children. “So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, a good man, and it’s a disgraceful situation. It’s a total witch hunt,” Trump said sternly as he sat hunched forward slightly over the conference table, his arms crossed at the wrists. “It’s, frankly, a real disgrace,” Trump added. “It’s an attack on our country in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for. So when I saw this and when I heard it—I heard it like you did—I said, ‘This is really now a whole new level of unfairness.’” The military leaders looked on stone-faced.