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

by Philip Rucker

from which there could be no complete recovery. Tillerson was entirely unbothered, confiding to friends there was nothing to learn or gain by taking Trump’s bait. “Don’t ask me,” he would say to associ...

“I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country. So I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it.” There it was. White House aides immediately felt a pit in their stomachs.

Their boss had just handed the Democrats an unexpected gift.

All that preparation was for naught. Tru...

She described the Oval Office meeting as being in “a tinkle contest with a skunk.”

The Speaker in waiting said debating the

wall with Trump was “like a manhood thing for him. As if manhood could ever b...

“Who did it for you?” Christie asked. “No, no, I did it myself,” Trump said. “I called Jonathan and told him.” Christie thought to himself, “You’re leaking yourself? And to think I came this close to being your chief of staff?” But he held his tongue. “You’re really not supposed

to be doing that,” Christie told Trump.

“Ahhh,” the president said playfully. “Don’t worry about it...

At that moment, McGurk had had it. He burst into the discussion with a fury.

“Let’s just be real, everybody,” McGurk said. “Stop the wishful thinking. The president’s ordered us to leave without a plan or any apparent thought.

We’re not picking up weapons on our way out. We can’t get out safely without the Kurd...

lines, convoys, and facilities. To say we’ll take their weapons as we invite in the Turks is nuts. It will get Americans killed. The Kurd...

It was going to be “yuge,” staffers joked, borrowing from Trump’s glossary.

“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.

They saw their mission as telling the president yes.

“He’ll enable rather than advise and manage, which in this presidency is a recipe for disaster.”

Trump was not a patient man, however. 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.”

“I’m not a loser,” the president said. “I’m not going to lose this. I’m not going

to look weak. I’m not going to give in.” But on January 25, Trump gave in. The master deal maker wasn’t the wizard he claimed. “It’s like McDonald’s not being able to make a hamburger,” the Republican strategist Mike Murphy said.

Trump cast about for someone to blame and pointed fingers at two staffers who led the negotiations on Capitol H...

As Cohen studied his anecdotes and memories, he sorted them into three categories that he believed best described Trump: racist, con man, and cheat.

am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is,” Cohen continued. “He is a

racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.”

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.”

Cohen described Trump as far more craven, dishonest, and racist in private th...

Cohen said working for Trump was “intoxicating,” adding that he became so “mesmerized” by his boss that he routinely did things that he knew were wrong.

“People that follow Mr. Trump, as I did blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”

Mueller and his team agreed to language stating that Trump could not be exonerated:

but we’re very comfortable saying there was no collusion,

no conspiracy.”

“While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Mueller had himself to blame for the misrepresentation of his work, in that he was a by-the-books creature of bureaucratic norms miscast for the Trump era, a period of profound polarization, fraying institutions, and news delivered like an IV to the public in fits and spurts.

What many of us have asked is, in the age of Trump, as steadfast as Mueller’s been to the principles of democracy that got us here, has Mueller served us well with this style? The answer is no.”

He was accused of serving as Trump’s defense counsel, not as the nation’s attorney general.

Donaldson’s notes, scribbled rapidly on a legal pad, were the closest thing the Trump White House had to the Nixon tapes: a sort of diary guiding Mueller’s prosecutors through months of West Wing chaos and chronicling Trump’s attempts to blunt the investigation.

Mueller fumbled the moment. He was too pure and too invested in the norms of an institution of yore, the Justice Department, whose core values and the public servants who upheld them had been under assault for two straight years.

“His silence, his telling people to just read the report, has allowed a guy like Trump and a disappointing guy like Barr to come in, and Barr knows Mueller and he knows that Mueller won’t fight back,” said Frank Figliuzzi, the former Mueller FBI colleague.

The s...

counsel, he concluded, “ended up ge...

We don’t know where this is going. But in the moment, it looks like he was suckered and he lost the fight.”

And then the unfettered president walked himself right over the edge of a legal precipice and into a politically treacherous crevasse. At 9:03 a.m., he picked up the phone in the White House residence and was connected to his newly elected Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky.

What Trump did next would stun national security officials, trigger impeachment proceedings, and culminate in the gravest test yet of whether America’s rule of law could survive its rogue president.

international alliances out of pique or ignorance. But what Trump said to Zelensky on July 25 set off alarm bells with an entirely new and ear-piercing peal.

Speaking in the language of crime bosses, Trump reminded Zelensky that the United States had been “very, very good to Ukraine,” a reference to years of military aid that helped Ukraine protect itself from its aggressive neighbor, Russia.

Trump didn’t mention that he had personally

blocked the most recently approved U.S. aid package, nearly $400 million. He didn’t have to; a U.S. diplomat had warned Zelensky’s government that Trump w...

“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...