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

by Philip Rucker

“The secretary has been fired on Twitter,” one staffer told him.

Dowd issued a short, simple statement announcing his exit: “I love the President and wish him well.” But he left the legal team in a bind, and without a clear replacement. And he was the only Trump lawyer with a security clearance, meaning no one was left on the president’s personal legal team who could review classified information pertaining to the case.

Joe diGenova, the lawyer Trump had announced he was hiring based on his Fox News appearances, lasted less than one week.

At first, Nunes denied writing any letter to the White House with sensitive intelligence. Then one of Rosenstein’s deputies showed him the letter with his signature. Nunes said nothing. The Justice Department team members found that puzzling. They wondered if Nunes’s staff had written it and not told him. For a short portion of the meeting, the conversation turned testy.

“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.”

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, literally working the graveyard shift at his request from half a world away.

It had been an unusually acrimonious summit. European allies, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Emmanuel Macron, and British prime minister Theresa May, were pressing Trump to sign a joint statement committing to “a rules-based international order.” The president had resisted, believing his counterparts were ganging up on him, before eventually relenting. Then Trump put his hand in his suit pocket, took two Starburst candies out, threw them on the table in front of Merkel, and said, “Here, Angela. Don’t say I never give you anything,”

WTF

The spectacle was so jarring that even Kim acknowledged the oddity. He was overheard telling Trump, through an interpreter, “Many people will think of this as a form of fantasy . . . a science fiction movie.”

By this point, the Department of Homeland Security had separated an estimated twenty-three hundred children from their parents since the zero-tolerance policy began in April.

Trump then attacked Germany—whose longtime leader, Merkel, was respected as a consensus builder within NATO—as “totally controlled by Russia” because of an oil and gas deal between the two countries.

The entire Western alliance scrambled for an hour to keep itself together in the face of the possibility that the United States could withdraw from NATO, which it helped found in 1949 to counter the Soviet Union.

“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 took this as a personal affront. He had long admired Erdogan, attracted to him because of his ruthless rule in Turkey and the ease with which he dispatched political rivals. Ever preoccupied with optics, Trump told advisers he admired the deep and commanding sound of Erdogan’s voice.

They took private comfort reading McRaven’s words. As one of those low-level cogs described it, finally somebody revered, a boldfaced name, was declaring, in essence, “No more.”

The disregard he has for right and wrong. Your fist clenches. Your teeth grate. The hair goes up on the back of your neck. 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.”

“If he wanted to, how far could he push this?” this aide asked. “Look back. Did people in the 1930s in Germany know when the government started to turn on them?

“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.

“It’s time. Obama got it without doing anything. I brought peace to North Korea. I need to win the Nobel.”

Trump concurred and, turning to Nielsen at the far end of the table, asked, “Why haven’t you shut down the border?” It was more of an admonition than a question. Nielsen knew this would be illegal, not to mention economically disastrous because it could choke off trade routes. “I’m not sure what we are saying here,” Nielsen said. “As the attorney general knows, people have a legal right to cross the border and try to claim asylum. That’s just the law.” Trump looked back at Sessions. “No,” Sessions said, “we should just shut the border down.” Trump then lit into Nielsen.

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 remarked at a campaign rally in Montana that evening, “We have our military on the border. And I noticed all that beautiful barbed wire going up today. Barbed wire, used properly, can be a beautiful sight.”

May was calling Trump to congratulate him on his party’s successes in the midterm elections. Of course, it was not lost on her that the Republicans lost control of the House, but she nevertheless sought to appeal to Trump’s ego. It did not work. The ornery president blew up at the mannered prime minister. Trump berated May over Brexit and told her she was a lousy negotiator. He lit into her about trade deals with European countries that he considered unfair to the United States. It felt like a one-way conversation, with Trump doing most of the talking. Then, suddenly, he changed the topic and told her she must not have brought up Iran because she was ashamed of Britain’s position. In fact, she hadn’t raised Iran because it wasn’t a scheduled topic of conversation—and besides, she could hardly get a word in.

May had previously been subjected to Trump’s erratic temper, but her aides were shaken by the acrimony of this call. They described it as the worst in May’s career. The president was so churlish that a British official told The Telegraph that he had acted like “Trump the Grump.”

The Speaker in waiting said debating the wall with Trump was “like a manhood thing for him. As if manhood could ever be associated with him.”

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. “He told Erdogan we’re pulling out of Syria,” Kelly said. Sweeney knew this spelled disaster. Words failed him at first. “Phhhhhfffft,” he exhaled. “Fuck.”

“He began to feel like he was becoming complicit,” recalled one of the secretary’s confidants. “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.”

General Mazloum. He had explained that ISIS was still a threat, but if the United States let the Turks rush into Syria from their northern border, Mazloum would have to redirect his fighters to the north to protect themselves. 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. A question arose about whether the U.S. forces should technically reclaim the weapons they gave the SDF fighters.

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.

Marines revered Mattis, and the guard was no exception. The general had earned his reputation the slow and steady way. A bachelor who never married, the commander made it a tradition that he would volunteer to take a junior officer’s shift on Christmas Day so his subordinates could spend the holiday with their families.

The event was a tradition for all departing secretaries. They wanted a line of Pentagon personnel that stretched for a mile applauding Mattis as he left the Pentagon for the last time as secretary. It was going to be “yuge,” staffers joked, borrowing from Trump’s glossary. But Mattis would not allow it. “No, we are not doing that,” he told his aides. “You don’t understand the president. I work with him. You don’t know him like I do. He will take it out on Shanahan and Dunford.”

Trump risked blowing Santa’s cover when he was patched through to a seven-year-old girl, Collman Lloyd, calling from her home in South Carolina. “Are you still a believer in Santa?” Trump asked. “Yes, sir,” Lloyd replied. “Because at 7, that’s marginal, right?” the president said. Lloyd later told The Post and Courier that she had never heard the word “marginal” before.

“The debate was more spirited,” said the person who talked to multiple team members. “Did it ever get angry? Did anyone get short? Yes. But that is business as usual. That does not mean that it is contentious necessarily. This is how these things go when you have nineteen lawyers debating how to handle something.”

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.”

The most chilling part of Cohen’s testimony, however, was what he said about Trump’s character. Cohen argued that Trump ran for office “to make his brand great, not to make our country great,” and that as president he has become “the worst version of himself.”

The White House abruptly banned Lemire and three other U.S. journalists from covering Trump’s dinner with Kim shortly thereafter, where the leaders tried to bond over grilled sirloin and chocolate lava cake. This was an extraordinary act of retaliation by the U.S. government, which had historically upheld the rights of journalists whenever a president traveled overseas, and especially in the presence of autocrats whose countries do not have a free press.

That spring, Department of Homeland Security officials counted fourteen hundred immigrant children under their care in a single day. Fresh from her frustrating meeting with Trump, Nielsen began urging White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to convene a cabinet meeting to create a crisis action plan.

After she returned from the White House, Nielsen told her senior leadership team, “Forget it. We’re going to pull down our own cabinet meeting.” She convened other agency heads on a conference call, and they made a plan to address the emergency together. It was what a normal White House would have taken the lead in doing.

Mueller and his team agreed to language stating that Trump could not be exonerated: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.”

They found the evidence truly disturbing but felt they couldn’t prove the president had corrupt intent. They asked themselves, could we get a criminal conviction on this evidence and survive an appeal? Their conclusion was unanimous: no.

Nielsen would soon learn that the White House had one main goal for her three days of transition: to get her to sign off on changing the legal succession plan so the White House could install the people they wanted in the department’s top jobs without following the civil service regulations that would place Nielsen’s deputy in charge.

He didn’t have to; a U.S. diplomat had warned Zelensky’s government that Trump wanted something before releasing the funds. “I would like you to do us a favor though,” Trump added. He asked Zelensky to work with Rudy Giuliani as well as Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the Bidens and look into an unproven conspiracy theory—which Trump embraced—that his perceived enemies had fabricated evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. “I would like you to get to the bottom of it,” Trump said.

If they believed their ears and their gut, Trump had tried to use his public office for personal gain. The next day, July 26, one of the White House aides who had listened to the call confided in a CIA official that Trump’s comments to Zelensky had been “crazy,” “frightening,” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security.” The aide added that “the President had clearly committed a criminal act.”

“There’s a new ethos: This is a presidency of one,” this official added. “It’s Trump unleashed, unchained, unhinged.”

He genuinely believed that his interests came first and that, as president, he was above the law. Trump had good reason to think so, having sidestepped any legal punishment after the Mueller investigation produced extensive evidence that he had worked to block and thwart the Russia probe.

When Alexander Hamilton wrote the two essays in The Federalist devoted to the idea of impeachment, Trump was the kind of president he had in mind—a populist demagogue who would foment frenzy, pander to prejudices, feed off chaos, and secretly betray the American people in the accumulation of power—according to Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow. Two hundred thirty-two years after Hamilton put pen to paper, Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine forced a reckoning. Would the system the Founding Fathers imagined withstand the pressures of this moment? Or would Trump prevail yet again, another pursuit of justice stymied by his sheer political force and the fealty of his followers?

Yet the time was nearing to consider not merely the judgment of their party or the punishment from their president, but the fate of history.