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

by Philip Rucker

Past presidential nominees had expressed humility, extolled shared values, and summoned their countrymen to unite to accomplish what they could only achieve together.

But Trump spoke instead of “I.” “I am your voice.”

“I will be a champion—your...

“Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I ...

It would be all too easy ...

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, ...

Trump’s North Star was the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling our shaky democracy.

Some of them also harked back to the 1950s, envisioning a simpler, halcyon America in which white male patriarchs ruled the roost, decorous women kept home and hearth, and minorities were silent or subservient.

The flashy promoter and reality-television star believed he could run the U.S. government the way he led his real estate development company from a corner suite on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower—on his own gut instincts to seize opportunities and to size up and cut down competitors.

Yet Trump’s own recklessness hampered his ability to accomplish the very pledges on which he campaigned.

The universal value of the Trump administration was loyalty—loyalty not to the country but to the president himself.

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

He engaged in a constant cycle of betrayal, rupturing and repairing relationships anew to constantly keep his government aides off balance to ensure the continuity of his supremacy.

They lament a president who nursed petty grievances, was addicted to watching cable television news coverage of himself, elevated sycophants, and lied with abandon.

He inherited a growing economy from President Obama and kept it humming,

some of his advisers concluded was born of a deep insecurity.

said. When Trump’s own intelligence analysts

Yet Trump escaped being accused of a crime, despite scores of federal prosecutors who believed he would have faced criminal charges if he were anyone other than a sitting president.

“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.

Another senior administration official said, “The guy is completely crazy.

Critics mockingly concluded that any man who feels compelled to announce to the world that he is a stable genius is neither stable nor a genius;

😂😂😂😂

“He is a transgressive personality, so he likes to attack and destroy and unsettle people,”

Because he never truly expected to win, he was unprepared.

Yet his former colleagues had shunned him for a bill of particulars that included Islamophobic rhetoric, coziness with Russia and other foreign adversaries, and a reliance on flimsy facts and dubious assertions. None of that mattered to Trump.

mortified his military and intelligence brethren, who believed he was leveraging his status as a decorated former military officer to fuel society’s more dangerous elements.

Flynn made himself indispensable to Trump, whispering in his ear that he couldn’t trust most intelligence officials but could trust Flynn.

the candidate’s ambitious son-in-law who had no experience in politics or foreign affairs, yet styled himself as Trump’s political strategist an...

“Oh, General Flynn, how loyal you’ve been to my father,” Ivanka said in her distinctive breathy voice, adding something to the effect of “What do you want to do?”

But others in the room noticed McGahn’s displeasure, which seemed to say, “Is this really how we’re going to do this?”

Some in the room could hardly believe people were being appointed to key jobs so indiscriminately and irresponsibly.

McGahn and Bannon, hardly allies, shared the belief that this was a recipe for missteps and, quite possibly, disaster.

The haphazard and dysfunctional transition was a harbinger for the administration. Trump placed a premium on branding and image at the expense of fundamental competence.

He and many of his advisers had no experience with public service, and therefore little rega...

Nobody bothered to vet Flynn. There was no review of his tenure as a U.S. military intelligence chief in Afghanistan, which had been the subject of a misconduct investigation. Nor of his time as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which President Obama

had cut short. Nor of his international consulting firm and his contracts with Kremlin-aligned companies. Nor of his attendance at a 2015 Moscow gala as a guest of Russia, seated at the table of President Vladimir Putin.

Flynn had used the Trump campaign as a gravy train, hoping to better his lifestyle after thirty-three years o...

Chris Christie, the New Jersey governor who had endorsed Trump and was the chairman of the presidential transition, was flabbergasted when the president-elect told him he would name Flynn his national security adviser.

“You can’t do that,” said Christie. “First, you have to have a chief of staff in place and let your chief of staff have input on that because the security adviser’s going to be reporting to the chief of staff. And Flynn’s just the wrong choice. He’s just a horrific choice.” “You just don’t like him,” Trump replied.

Eleven years earlier, Christie had been U.S. attorney in New Jersey and had put Kushner’s father, Charles, head of the family’s real estate business, behind bars for tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions. The case humiliated the Kushner family and left a lasting impression on young Jared.

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.

The president-elect approached the ten-week transition as a casting call for a new season of The Apprentice,

The president-elect loved to gin up the ratings, and was quick to seize on how the presidency could benefit his personal brand and his businesses.

In the helter-skelter, unstructured rhythms of the transition, a trio of campaign power players jockeyed for influence: Kushner, Bannon, and Reince Priebus.

Bannon had previously run the conservative website Breitbart and pitched himself to Trump as the essential conduit to his indispensable base, which he affectionately referred to as “the deplorables,” a reference to Clinton’s infamous gaffe about Trump’s “basket of deplorables. . . . The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”

During the March 5 Kansas caucuses, Pompeo had warned that Trump would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution,”

and he urged his fellow Kansans to “turn down the lights on the circus.”

But Pompeo was eager to join the...

He doesn’t even know what intelligence is. Just rip.”

Trump approached staffing the administration like a casting call and sought “the look,” a fixation in keeping with the beauty pageants he had once run.