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

by Philip Rucker

“With Putin, you have to stay on it every day,” Tillerson explained. “He’ll wait to see the pressure ease and then seize his opportunity.”

Putin was a master manipulator, a former KGB agent trained to find the soft spots of his foes and to exploit them.

“I know more about this than you do,” Trump said.

So Trump took charge to cover up the truth.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had grown alarmed over the

first six months of the Trump administration by gaping holes in the president’s knowledge of history

and of the alliances forged in the wake of World War II that served as the foundation of Amer...

Cohn had confided to his peers he had been surprised at the many gaps in Trump’s understanding of world affairs.

To have a useful discussion with him, the trio agreed, they had to lay a foundation with Trump and create a basic knowledge, a shared language.

So on Ju...

Mattis invited Trump to the Tank for what he, Tillerson, and Cohn had carefully organized as a tailored tutorial on the state of the ...

but in reality the session was to be a gentle lesson on American power, with the president as a student.

The organizers viewed it as a course correction, an intervention to educate Trump and give him some fundamentals for analyzing the world.

he would not read written materials or have the patience for lectures.

So his briefers would huddle around the Resolute Desk and show Trump maps and charts and pictures and videos, as well as “killer graphics,”

One surefire way to get Trump’s attention, they found, was to feature his nam...

“You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”

Just ridiculous

This was a president who had been labeled a “draft dodger” for avoiding service in the Vietnam War under questionable circumstances.

Trump was a young man born of privilege and in seemingly perfect health: six feet two inches with a muscular build and a flawless medical record. He played several sports, including football. Then, in 1968 at age twenty-two, he obtained a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that exempted him from military service just

as the United States was drafting men his age to fulfill massive troop d...

Tillerson in particular was stunned by Trump’s diatribe and beg...

The more perplexing silence was from Pence,

Always just sitting there looking.

“He’s sitting there frozen like a statue.

Why doesn’t he stop the p...

Another recalled the vice president was “a w...

But some surmised Pence feared getting crosswise with Trump.

“A total deer in the headlights,” recalled a third attendee.

“He’s a fucking moron,” the secretary of state said of the president.

I know that's right!!!!

Everybody was on board, 100 percent agreed with that sentiment. [But] they were dismayed and in shock when not only did it not have the intended effect, but he dug in his heels and pushed it even further on the spectrum, further solidifying his views.”

The Tank meeting had so thoroughly shocked the conscience of military leaders that they tried to keep it a secret.

One victim of the Tank meeting was Trump’s relationship with Tillerson, which forever after was strained.

The secretary of state came to see it as the beginning of the end.

It would only worsen when news that Tillerson had called Trump a “moron” was reporte...

As Trump rambled off script, speaking for thirty-five minutes in total, his aides cringed.

The head of the Boy Scouts of America later apologized to scouting families who were offended by the president’s comments.

In Washington, Chuck Rosenberg, the acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, watched the speech with horror.

given his tendency to embellish or fabricate.

Trump liked to talk off the cuff, as part of his process of testing ideas and gathering information.

Others noticed that the president was obsessed with knocking down as inferior what his predecessors had built.

“His whole DNA is, whatever anybody else has done is stupid, I’m smarter, and therefore that’s why he goes around breaking glass all the time,” one senior Republican senator recalled.

“He’s torn a lot of things up. He likes to break things. But what has...

I said, Trump strikes me as that kid who would run up and knock the other kids' blocks down.

Trump was hypersensitive to any suggestion that he was on vacation, even though he effectively was,

But they occupied only an hour or so of his time, and he spent the rest of each day playing a round of golf, chatting with friends in the clubhouse, and hanging out in his private cottage.

But he spent hours each day alone in the cottage watching cable news and reading

newspapers.

Aides carted up from Washington boxes that contained back issues of The New York Times and The Washington Post that the president had not had a c...

Trump was not only bothered by the Russia investigation. He was confounded over what to do about North Korea. Ever since Obama had told him, back in November 2016, that North Korea would be the greatest challenge

he would confront as president, Trump had been vexed by the security threat posed by Kim Jong Un.

A series of missile tests in the spring and summer of 2017 rattled him, and as he vacationed at Bedminster, he was getting regular updates from National Security Adviser H. R. McM...

“They will be met with fire and fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,”