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

by Philip Rucker

this day, Trump seemed stiff and uncomfortable. Though he was technically in his own home, he did not greet his guests. Rather, he stood waiting for someone to approach him. Pelosi moved in to thank Trump for participating in this special history project, but he appeared to have no idea who she was, apparently not briefed on her political lineage or her role as the director. The president asked for some water, and with no staff bringing any to him, Pelosi handed him a bottle of Aquafina from her purse. “I’ve been into the White House,” Pelosi later said of visits to see previous presidents. “There are always protocols. Here there were no rules, no protocol.” She added, “There’s so much wrong with the whole thing. I’m thinking, isn’t there someone who’s supposed to guard what he’s eating and drinking?”

President Trump was deep into his search for a new FBI director on May 16, 2017, when a stone-faced, central-casting G-man was secretly escorted into the White House. Robert Mueller had the kind of law-and-order credentials and don’t-mess-with-me look that Trump prized: champion athlete, Princeton grad, Marine Corps platoon leader, federal prosecutor, FBI director through the first twelve years of the war on terrorism, chiseled jaw, neatly cropped silver hair, and permanent glower. A living legend in the law enforcement community, Mueller, seventy-two, was now finally in a kind of semiretirement in private practice at WilmerHale, one of Washington’s most prestigious firms.

Mueller made a friendly aside about their shared background in the military. “I can’t believe a member of the senior naval service allowed his daughter to matriculate at West Point,” Mueller told Bannon, who had been an officer in the navy. Bannon was surprised and impressed that Mueller knew where one of his daughters, Maureen, was in college. “Here’s the bad news,” Bannon said. “She actually was recruited by the Naval Academy.” They both laughed and talked a bit longer, but Bannon couldn’t help feeling distracted, even a little spooked. He thought about how much homework Mueller must have done to study up on a Trump aide he wasn’t even scheduled to meet. “This guy is so fucking good to do the research,” Bannon thought to himself.

“I want to win,” he said. “We don’t win any wars anymore. . . . We spend $7 trillion, everybody else got the oil and we’re not winning anymore.” Trump by now was in one of his rages. He was so angry that he wasn’t taking many breaths. All morning, he had been coarse and cavalier, but the next several things he bellowed went beyond that description. They stunned nearly everyone in the room, and some vowed that they would never repeat them. “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.

McMaster lived by paperwork and process. He believed his duty was to give the president information so that he could make the best decisions, and then to help carry out the commander in chief’s will. But his briefings to Trump were academic and detail-oriented, and the two men’s stylistic differences inspired epic clashes. McMaster had difficulty holding the president’s attention. Trump, meanwhile, would get annoyed with what he considered McMaster’s lecturing style. The president felt his national security adviser was always determined to try to “teach me something.” Indeed, Trump constantly shifted and grumbled when staff were trying to bring him up to speed on a topic, immediately threatened by the notion that his knowledge wasn’t sufficient if he needed experts. As the president repeatedly told Kelly when he proposed a subject briefing: “I don’t want to talk to anyone. I know more than they do. I know better than anybody else.”

White House aides arranged for the president and first lady to make a somber pilgrimage so many of their predecessors had made: to visit Pearl Harbor and honor the twenty-three hundred American sailors, soldiers, and marines who lost their lives there. The first couple was set to take a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial, which sits just off the coast of Honolulu and straddles the hull of the battleship that sank into the Pacific during the Japanese surprise bombing attack in 1941. As a passenger boat ferried the Trumps to the stark white memorial, the president pulled Kelly aside for a quiet consult. “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Trump asked his chief of staff. Kelly was momentarily stunned. Trump had heard the phrase “Pearl Harbor” and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else. Kelly explained to him that the stealth Japanese attack here had devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet and prompted the country’s entrance into World War II, eventually leading the United States to drop atom bombs on Japan.

The questioners were thorough and incredibly well prepared, asking the same questions several different ways to elicit revelatory answers. As one witness recalled, “They don’t ask any question they don’t know the answer for.” The inquiries often lasted for many hours and sometimes for multiple days. The witnesses were afraid both of oversharing, for fear of eventually facing the president’s wrath, and of slipping into a lie, for fear of becoming the next Michael Flynn. Mueller’s deputies led most of the questioning, but Mueller would come in and out of the room, looming silently over the sessions with his rigid bearing. A second witness described Mueller’s stare as downright frightening: “He comes in and puts those dead eyes on you like a fucking shark. . . . Shark eyes. Dead eyes. Big, old, dead eyes.”

When a reporter asked Trump if he might attack NATO on Twitter after departing, just as he had maligned Trudeau following the G7 in Quebec, the president replied, “No, that’s other people that do that. I don’t. I’m very consistent. I’m a very stable genius.”

On January 23, Giuliani tried to explain his various statements and clarifications by telling The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey, “There is a strategy. The strategy will become apparent.” Then he pleaded with Dawsey, “You have to be patient.” Trump was not a patient man, however. 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.” For the next several days, Giuliani stopped appearing on TV. Trump temporarily benched his lawyer.

What had once been Trump’s defiant mantra of “No collusion! No obstruction!” instantly became a rallying cry for his reelection, lines he and his surrogates repeated on every media platform. Never mind what the Mueller team actually had found. Trump was winning the spin war. Mueller had himself to blame for the misrepresentation of his work, in that he was a by-the-books creature of bureaucratic norms miscast for the Trump era, a period of profound polarization, fraying institutions, and news delivered like an IV to the public in fits and spurts. “We’re the Twitter society,” said Frank Figliuzzi, a former Mueller colleague at the FBI. “We’re the digital streaming society. We’re the scan-the-headlines-to-get-some-news society. That’s not Mueller. That’s not a four-hundred-page report. Somebody’s got to show their face on a TV screen and scream and yell. What many of us have asked is, in the age of Trump, as steadfast as Mueller’s been to the principles of democracy that got us here, has Mueller served us well with this style? The answer is no.”

Senior National Security Council, Pentagon, and State Department officials had no advance warning of the president’s decision on the phone with Erdogan to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria in anticipation of Turkey’s invasion. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley were suddenly forced to execute the wishes of a foreign autocrat. At 3:00 a.m. in Syria, a senior U.S. official contacted General Mazloum Abdi, the commander of their Kurdish brothers-in-arms, the Syrian Democratic Forces, to ask him to join an important video teleconference with an American military commander. That U.S. official gave him the news: Trump had ordered roughly fifty to a hundred U.S. troops located in two of the three border zone outposts in northeastern Syria to pull out immediately. Kurdish commanders, expecting a Turkish invasion on Syria’s north border, warned their U.S. counterparts that they would have to abandon the captured Islamic State fighters. They would need to rush to the front lines to protect their own troops and leave their Syrian prisons unguarded. Still, Mazloum showed magnanimity. He told U.S. military leaders in Syria he held no grudges against them and knew this withdrawal was not their doing.

Trump finished the day in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he rallied some ten thousand supporters in a sports arena just as the House was concluding its floor debate and preparing to vote. Trump decried the “lawless partisan impeachment,” but his words would not silence the Democrats back in Washington. On Trump’s 1,062nd day in office, there was a reckoning. Pelosi and her Democrats left an indelible mark. Trump was impeached.

President Trump rang in the year 2020 in Palm Beach in blissful denial of the crisis about to confront his administration. A mysterious virus was infecting people in China, spreading quickly. The World Health Organization was on alert. On January 3, U.S. intelligence agencies included information about the virus in the President’s Daily Brief, but Trump did not have the interest or the attention span to read his national security briefings. Plus, this was Trump’s vacation week, and he had other things on his mind. Golf rounds. Cable shows. Twitter taunts. Mar-a-Lago mingles. Buffet dinners. Black-tie soirees.

Earlier that month, Trump’s advisers had tried to get him to pay attention to this public health tsunami building just offshore, but he was distracted by the Senate’s impeachment trial. On January 18, Alex Azar, the secretary of health and human services, finally got Trump on the phone to register his concern, but Trump changed the topic, interrupting to ask when Azar was going to allow flavored vaping products back on the market.