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

by Philip Rucker

It would be all too easy to mistake Trump’s first term for pure, uninhibited chaos. His presidency would be powered by solipsism. From the moment Trump swore an oath to defend the Constitution and commit to serve the nation, he governed largely to protect and promote himself. Yet while he lived day to day, struggling to survive, surfing news cycles to stay afloat, there was a pattern and meaning to the disorder. Trump’s North Star was the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling our shaky democracy. Public trust in American government, already weakened through years of polarizing political dysfunction, took a body blow.

From the start, government novices and yes-men made up much of his inner circle, a collective inexperience that exacerbated the troubles, wasted political capital, and demoralized committed public servants.

The universal value of the Trump administration was loyalty—loyalty not to the country but to the president himself. Some of his aides believed his demand for blind fealty—and his retaliation against those who denied it—was slowly corrupting public service and testing democracy itself.

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

Trump’s ego prevented him from making sound, well-informed judgments. He stepped into the presidency so certain that his knowledge was the most complete and his facts supreme that he turned away the expertise of career professionals upon whom previous presidents had relied. This amounted to a wholesale rejection of America’s model of governing, which some of his advisers concluded was born of a deep insecurity. “Instead of his pride being built on making a good decision, it’s built on knowing the right answer from the onset,” a senior administration official said.

“I’ve served the man for two years. I think he’s a long-term and immediate danger to the country,” a senior national security official told us.

“Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”

At a long table in the State Dining Room, Steve Bannon, one of the inspirations of Trump’s “American carnage” address, could not stop looking at Nancy Pelosi. In the Democratic House leader, he saw Katharine Hepburn from The Lion in Winter—who looks up and down the table and thinks to herself, “These men are all clowns,” and plots her return to power.

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.”

If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.