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January 23 - January 26, 2020
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.
Trump’s North Star was the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling our shaky democracy.
“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.
To be the adult in the room is to suffer the tantrum of the kid and not to take it seriously.”
Two things the forty-fourth president said stuck with the forty-fifth: one, that North Korea was the biggest foreign policy challenge and security threat, and, two, that he should not hire Flynn.
Trump approached staffing the administration like a casting call and sought “the look,”
By communicating about U.S. policy with Kislyak before Trump took office, Flynn was undermining the current administration and breaking the standards of diplomacy. His communications were instantly picked up and stored by the massive listening apparatus of the National Security Agency, which routinely surveils prominent government officials
Watching Pelosi challenge Trump, Bannon whispered to colleagues, “She’s going to get us. Total assassin. She’s an assassin.”
Videgaray asked, “Was this a setup? Were Tillerson and Kelly in on this joke?” “Videgaray was saying, ‘What the hell? What are we going to do now?’”
“You always take the path of the hard right against the easy wrong,” he said. “You never compromise your principles. You do what is right no matter what is the cost. What matters is honesty, integrity, loyalty to your family and to your principles. That’s Bob. I kid because he’s so straight he’s a pain in the ass. He will never cross the line in
“You don’t understand how any of this works,” communications director Mike Dubke told Kushner. “These will all go on simultaneously. There is going to be Mueller; there’s going to be investigations in the House, in the Senate. They are coming after you.”
“If you have to have a special counsel, there is nobody better than Bob Mueller. If there’s nothing there, there will be a report that says there’s nothing there. He’s your golden ticket.”
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.
As often was the case when aides rushed to satisfy Trump’s demands, Kasowitz ended up damaging his reputation with his televised appearance that day
He was specifically trying to shield her from exposure to this obstruction of justice, so he told her only that Trump demanded he contact the Justice Department to do something McGahn did not want to do.
The Russians emerged with the distinct impression that Trump would not hold them accountable.
“When I saw Mr. Trump lean over and say to Mr. Putin, it’s a great honor to meet you, and this is Mr. Putin who assaulted one of the foundational pillars of our democracy, our electoral system, that invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea, that has suppressed and repressed political opponents in Russia and has caused the deaths of many of them, to say up front, person who supposedly knows the art of the deal, I thought it was a very, very bad negotiating tactic, and I felt as though it was not the honorable thing
Putin’s moves might seem slick and quick, but he was playing a long game, always thinking several moves ahead, years in the distance.
He impressed upon Trump the fact that Putin sought to destabilize Western alliances and remake the post–World War II power structure to weaken America’s global influence. Putin, Tillerson told Trump, “wakes up every morning asking, ‘Where is America having problems? Let’s go there now and make it worse.’”
They had been working with a friendly conservative outlet, Circa, which also knew a little bit about a meeting with Russians. Bowe and communications strategist Mark Corallo hoped to cast the story in a very different light
President Trump’s advisers staged an intervention inside the Tank to preserve the world order. The July 20, 2017, meeting in the Tank has been documented numerous times, most memorably by Bob Woodward in Fear, but subsequent reporting reveals a more complete picture of the moment and the chilling effect Trump’s comments and hostility had on the nation’s military and national security leadership.
“Oh, baby, this is going to be fucking wild,” Bannon thought. “If you stood up and threatened to shoot [Trump], he couldn’t say ‘postwar rules-based international order.’ It’s just not the way he thinks.”
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
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Tillerson in particular was stunned by Trump’s diatribe and began visibly seething. For too many minutes, others in the room noticed, he had been staring straight, dumbfounded, at Mattis, who was speechless, his head bowed down toward the table. Tillerson thought to himself, “Gosh darn it, Jim, say something. Why aren’t you saying something?” But, as he would later tell close aides, 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.
The more perplexing silence was from Pence, a leader who should have been able to stand up to Trump. Instead, one attendee thought, “He’s sitting there frozen like a statue. Why doesn’t he stop the president?” Another recalled the vice president was “a wax museum guy.”
Others at the table noticed Trump’s stream of venom had taken an emotional toll. So many people in that room had gone to war and risked their lives for their country, and now they were being dressed down by a president who had not. They felt sick to their stomachs. Tillerson told others he thought he saw a woman in the room silently crying. He was furious and decided he couldn’t stand it another minute.
Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn were deflated. Standing in the hall with a small cluster of people he trusted, Tillerson finally let down his guard. “He’s a fucking moron,” the secretary of state said of the president.
Trump had been openly imitating Sessions’s Alabama drawl and mocking him for being portrayed by a woman, Kate McKinnon, on Saturday Night Live.
and told a meandering tale about a famous home builder who frequented the Manhattan cocktail party circuit and engaged in “interesting” activities aboard his yacht, which he left to the boys’ imaginations. “Should I tell you?” Trump asked, teasing the crowd. “Oh, you’re Boy Scouts, but you know life. You know life.”
These episodes illustrated what some of Trump’s subordinates considered his cruelty as a manager. He was willing—eager, really—to belittle the people working for him.
Privately, Kelly told Mattis and other administration officials that he thought Ivanka and Kushner were “idiots” and needed to leave the White House because “we’ve just got to run this country.”
He learned early in the job that the president’s addiction to press accounts of himself was so strong that Kelly’s daily tasks and discussions inevitably would be determined by the news cycle.
When Modi mentioned his concern about China’s ambitions and aggression in the region, Trump revealed a stunning ignorance about geography. “It’s not like you’ve got China on your border,” Trump said, seeming to dismiss the threat to India.
Modi tried to keep the conversation on an elevated plane, hoping to follow the path Tillerson had laid out for them in the previous weeks to work together to protect India and fend off China’s Belt and Road Initiative. But each time Modi tried to get Trump to engage on the substance of U.S.-India relations, the American president veered off on another non sequitur about trade deficits and the endless war in Afghanistan.
In March, McMaster was in the Oval Office briefing Trump on the visit of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, a favorite foil for the president. Trump got so impatient that he stood up and walked into an adjoining bathroom, left the door ajar, and instructed McMaster to raise his voice and keep talking. It was unclear if the strange scene was a reflection of Trump’s feelings about McMaster or Merkel or both.
“I call the president the two-minute man. The president has patience for a half page.”
“The president doesn’t fire people,” said one of McMaster’s aides. “He just tortures them until they’re willing to quit.”
He told Macron something along the lines of “You know, I really didn’t know, but the French have won a lot of battles. I didn’t know.”
He told Tillerson he wanted him to help him get rid of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump told the group. “We’re going to change that.” Looking at Tillerson, Trump said, “I need you to get rid of that law,”
“All these countries need to start paying us for the troops we are sending to their countries. We need to be making a profit,” Trump said. “We could turn a profit on this.”
Dunford had much earlier joked with Tillerson that in past administrations the secretaries of state and Defense Department leaders wouldn’t be caught dead walking on the same side of the street, for their rivalry was that fierce. But now, as both men served Trump, they were brothers joined against what they saw as disrespect for service members.
“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.
Trump’s tweet was only thirty-nine words long, but it instantly sparked mayhem at the White House and on Capitol Hill. Key officials tore up their schedules for the morning to try to fix the mess created by the president.
“He’s incapable of saying sorry,” said one senior government official.
As the group discussed a possible bipartisan immigration deal that would protect migrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries, Trump grew frustrated. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” the president asked. He specifically denigrated Haiti, an impoverished Caribbean nation made up mostly of descendants of African slaves, and said the United States should instead allow migrants from Norway, a Nordic country that is one of the world’s whitest and wealthiest, and other countries.
“The problem with him: he tells you what he thinks he knows or what he thinks he remembers,” said one adviser. “He might actually believe it. And he may not think he is lying. When you confront him and say, but no, ‘Remember this fact?’ He’ll say, ‘That’s right.’ He’ll work closer to the truth. It’s not an inattention to the detail. It’s his feeling that the details and pieces are irrelevant. He’s a big-picture, broad-point guy. He says, ‘Hey, I know this big point is true. Who cares about the other stuff?’”
What followed was Trump once again plotting to snuff out a federal investigation, an episode that apparently went undetected by Mueller, for it garnered no mention in the special counsel’s final report.
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.
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.”
Later, Bannon told Burck, “He did that just to say, ‘You’re one of us. Besides all your bullshit, you’re actually a naval officer and your daughter is a West Point grad. Remember that.’”
