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

by Philip Rucker

Still, Kelly gave Trump some advice about how he could get what he wanted. As president, he was the final authority on access to classified material. He could legally decide on his own to grant Kushner a permanent clearance. The conversation went back and forth as Trump tried to get Kelly to do it instead, and the chief of staff held firm. In the end, Trump did what he promised the media he would not do: he bypassed the typical process to grant Kushner permission to see the country’s most carefully guarded secrets.

Rosenstein also knew Nunes was raising money among conservative voters by claiming donations could help expose the secrets Rosenstein was trying to keep hidden from the public. Rosenstein’s mother, who lived in Florida, about as far away as one could get from Nunes’s central California congressional district, had received some of the congressman’s fund-raising letters. “You’re making money off this,” an angry Rosenstein bellowed, leaning over the conference table and looking at Nunes and Gowdy. “We’re suffering the consequences of your fund-raising. My wife is getting death threats based on what you’re doing.”

Atkinson had been reviewing the attempted intrusions by the Russian GRU’s Unit 26165 and had found an amazing coincidence—one he knew couldn’t be a coincidence. It showed exactly what the Russian hackers had been up to on July 27, 2016, within just five hours of Trump’s making his infamous “Russia, if you’re listening” comment at a news conference in Florida, saying he hoped they could find Hillary Clinton’s missing thirty thousand emails. In that bizarre moment, Trump had actively encouraged a foreign government to illegally hack his political opponent. Just days earlier, WikiLeaks had published nearly twenty thousand documents that appeared to have been stolen from Democratic National Committee servers, and U.S. intelligence agencies concluded Russia was the thief, in a hit ordered by Putin himself. At the time the press was reporting Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening” comment, it was dinnertime in Moscow. Most Russian government offices were closed. But, as Atkinson discovered more than a year later, some Russian military intelligence operators in Unit 26165 were busy late that July night sending outbound pushes to Clinton’s private domain and sending malicious links targeting fifteen email accounts on her server. This was a stunning find, one that U.S. intelligence agencies had not tracked earlier. The digital pushes did not show that Trump or anyone in his campaign had committed a crime, but they established that Russians were doing his bidding in real time, litera...

Just before leaving for Singapore on June 9, Trump announced that he would be able to determine whether a denuclearization deal was attainable “within the first minute” of meeting Kim. How? “My touch, my feel—that’s what I do,” he boasted to reporters.

Then press secretary Sarah Sanders made the argument that proved persuasive: if he moved the summit up to June 11, a Monday, then it would air live on Sunday night in the United States, because Singapore is twelve hours ahead of Washington. “Sir, you’re doing a historic meeting and you don’t want it on prime time?” Sanders asked Trump. Of course, he did.

In the days following his Singapore trip, Trump spoke with apparent envy of Kim’s rule. He admired how the North Korean people “sit up at attention” when their dictator spoke and marveled at how tough Kim’s guards appeared. After watching clips from North Korean state television, Trump noted the female news anchor’s sycophancy and joked that she was even more lavish in her praise of the dear leader than Fox News hosts were of Trump.

Eliot A. Cohen, a neoconservative who served as a top State Department official in the George W. Bush administration and was a critic of Trump’s candidacy, said in the aftermath that the Singapore summit was “just the latest manifestation” of Trump’s authoritarianism. He “has classic traits of the authoritarian leader. The one that’s always struck me most is this visceral instinct of people’s weaknesses and a corresponding desire to be seen as strong and respected and admired,” Cohen said. He added, “We’ve been very fortunate that the institutions have contained him.”

During the George W. Bush administration, he called Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, a “tyrannical dictator,” to which the North Korean leader responded by calling Bolton “rude human scum.”

Both can be true.

In bilateral meetings with foreign leaders, Trump developed a habit of teasing Bolton for his warmongering instincts. The president would often say a variation of this: “I’ve got hawks and I’ve got doves. Bolton will just bomb you. He’ll turn your country into a parking lot. That’s just how he is.”

Gérard Araud, the French ambassador, recalled a senior White House official explaining to him that Trump “can’t stand people who try to moderate him, but he loves people who are stronger or harsher than he is. He loves to be the moderator in the building. So compared to Bolton, he knows that Bolton wants to bomb anything. To Bolton, any problem can be solved by bombing, so he gets to be the voice of reason.”

At about 8:30 in the morning on July 17, Trump called counselor Kellyanne Conway, who was at her West Wing desk, and told her to meet him in the private dining room off the Oval Office. The president was upset. He had been watching brutal cable television analysis about his “I don’t see any reason why it would be” comment. “That isn’t what I said,” Trump told Conway. “It is what you said,” Conway told him. “I didn’t say that,” the president insisted. “Why would I say that?” “That’s a great question,” Conway said. “Why did you say that?” Trump had written down what he meant to say in Helsinki: “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” He handed Conway the piece of paper. “I meant to say this,” he told her. “Here, go out and tell everybody that this is what I meant to say.” “No,” Conway said. “I think you should do that. . . . “You need to clear that up right away,” she added. “That’s not just a difference of three letters. That’s a difference of intent.”

Former CIA Director John Brennan, whose security clearance you revoked on Wednesday, is one of the finest public servants I have ever known. Few Americans have done more to protect this country than John. He is a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question, except by those who don’t know him. Therefore, I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency. Like most Americans, I had hoped that when you became president, you would rise to the occasion and become the leader this great nation needs. A good leader tries to embody the best qualities of his or her organization. A good leader sets the example for others to follow. A good leader always puts the welfare of others before himself or herself. Your leadership, however, has shown little of these qualities. Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation. If you think for a moment that your McCarthy-era tactics will suppress the voices of criticism, you are sadly mistaken. The criticism will continue until you become the leader we prayed you would be.

I have to remind myself I said an oath to a document in the National Archives. I swore to the Constitution. I didn’t swear an oath to this jackass.”

“I like to believe [Trump] is too self-engrossed, too incompetent and disorganized to get us to 1930,” this aide added. “But he has moved the bar. And another president that comes after him can move it a little farther. The time is coming. Our nation will be tested. Every nation is. Rome fell, remember. He is opening up vulnerabilities for this to happen. That is my fear.”

Winning a Nobel had been a fixation of Trump’s, in large part because Obama was awarded one in 2009, less than one year into his presidency.

“The White House was so broken,” one administration official later remarked, looking back on this tense period on immigration policy. “There was no process. Ideas would come to the president in a no-process method. Half-baked ideas come in to him. God knows how. It was totally disorganized. To this day, no one is in charge at the White House. No one.”

Trump just didn’t understand that U.S. Armed Forces don’t simply hop on a C-17 one night and start patrolling the banks of the Rio Grande the next afternoon. “No one would push you to show that except the one person who doesn’t know,” a Defense Department official said of the president.

Macron warned that “the old demons are reappearing” and summoned the world’s political leaders to “break with the new ‘treason of the intellectuals,’ which is at work and fuels untruths, accepts the injustice consuming our peoples and sustains extremes and present-day obscurantism.”

Through September and October, Trump’s lawyers kept telling the public that they were working with the president to complete the written answers to Mueller, but the reality is they were having significant trouble getting time with their client, even though he spent many hours a day watching television.

In the week after returning from Paris in mid-November, Trump agitated to withdraw U.S. forces from the wars in Afghanistan and Syria, as well as bases in South Korea. He talked openly about pulling out of NATO.

One senior administration official summed up the sentiment: “Trump was like: You want that pile of dirt, Erdogan? Fine.” Without thinking it through or conferring with any of his government’s many experts on the region, Trump effectively condemned a tireless partner of the U.S. military, the Kurdish general Mazloum Abdi, to death. Kelly called Kevin Sweeney, Mattis’s chief of staff, to let him know what Trump had just done.

“Sending the troops to the border was obviously a no-no and inappropriate, especially based on the circumstances at hand. That began to chip away at his feelings of being a patriot. And then the Syria thing. We were six weeks away from annihilating these guys and then he just tweeted it out. That was devastating.”

Around the table at the Pentagon were dejected faces. “We were all resigned to the fact that he was going to massacre the Kurds,” one civilian official said of Erdogan.

McGurk warned that because of the president’s lack of planning, the odds were high the Kurds would be slaughtered. The SDF might crack apart. ISIS would rush back in to wreak havoc on the villages the United States and its partners had temporarily turned into peaceful havens. Nobody spoke up to dispute him or to counsel against the derisive way he was speaking about Trump. The miliary officers in the room looked resigned and defeated, as if mourning the loss of something sacred. Before and after the meeting, several talked privately in small clusters about Mattis, their rock. They wondered how he was going to handle this latest assault on a soldier’s code, the military’s duty to its brothers-in-arms. Trump had effectively forced Mattis to abandon a fellow warrior on the battlefield. “This is an abandonment of a partner and an ally in such a cavalier fashion,” recalled one person who attended the meeting. “He had worked so hard to get us out of Syria, and out of Afghanistan, in a responsible way.” This person added, “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know how Mattis deals with this.’”

The president—who has made more than his share of whoppers—complained about Giuliani to one of his political advisers. “He’s the only guy in the world who’s less prepared than I am,” Trump said. “Rudy goes on TV and doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.”

and copies of letters Cohen wrote at Trump’s direction threatening civil and criminal action against his high school, colleges, and the College Board if they ever released his grades or SAT scores.

Notably, no Republican on the panel tried to defend Trump by engaging with the substance of Cohen’s testimony. They only attacked Cohen’s credibility as a witness.

Here again Trump accepted the words of a foreign autocrat, just as he had believed Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman did not order the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and as he had believed Russian president Vladimir Putin did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Trump said that Kim “felt very badly,” but claimed to only know about Warmbier’s case after the fact. “He tells me that he didn’t know about it,” Trump said, “and I take him at his word.”

“There were people in the group who were pushing for a clearer expression of the president’s misconduct and why they were not charging it,” said one person who talked with members of the team. They believed they “definitely had enough to indict any other human being.”

The report was classic Mueller: brimming with damning facts, but stripped of advocacy or judgment, and devoid of a final conclusion.

Some team members were livid at what they considered Barr’s calculated and selective word choices that sidestepped the unpleasant evidence the team had uncovered about Trump himself and his campaign’s encouragement of the Russians. The team had made groundbreaking discoveries about Russian bots and intelligence officers rushing to hack Clinton’s personal emails hours after Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening” remarks, yet that work was reduced to less than a sentence in Barr’s letter. Even the portion of the dependent clause in that sentence that Barr chose to make public put Trump in the most flattering light.

Quoting from the report, Barr wrote that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” He left out the thirty-nine preceding words from that passage, which confirmed the very facts Trump hated to acknowledge and refused to hear: “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”

The authors of volume 2, who struggled to reveal every detail of Trump’s moves to shut down or curtail the criminal investigation, practically had steam coming out of their ears. Barr’s letter appeared to the uninformed reader to say the opposite of what they painstakingly laid out in their report. For example, Barr wrote that none of Trump’s actions, “in our judgment,” were done with corrupt intent. Actually, the report’s author...

In May, more than a thousand former federal prosecutors who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations signed an open letter stating that Trump’s conduct as documented in Mueller’s report “would, in the case of any other person not covered by the Office of Legal Counsel policy against indicting a sitting President, result in multiple felony charges for obstruction of justice.”

Trump framed the 2020 election as a referendum not merely on his performance in office but also on “the un-American conduct” of investigators. “This election is a verdict on whether we want to live in a country where the people who lose an election refuse to concede and spend the next two years trying to shred our Constitution and rip your country apart.”

Just like that, Trump effectively asked the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The brazen request—an apparent attempt to leverage taxpayer dollars to extort Ukraine for opposition research on a domestic political opponent—revealed how little Trump had learned from the Mueller investigation.

Two and a half years into his term, Trump had grown so confident of his own power, and so cocksure that Republicans in Congress would never dare break with him, that he thought he could do almost anything. And by the time he deputized Giuliani to run a shadow foreign policy with the Ukrainians, no one was there to stop or even to warn the president about the dangers of doing so. Trump was surrounded by willing enablers.

On October 6, the White House’s national security team hastily arranged a phone call between Trump and Erdogan. The goal was simple: have Trump cool down Erdogan’s chest-beating talk of a Syria invasion. Instead, Trump got rolled. He mishandled the nuanced conversation, reversed U.S. policy in a few terse exchanges, and weakened American national security interests in the region—potentially for decades to come.