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

by Philip Rucker

Just like that, Trump effectively asked the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2020 ...

The brazen request—an apparent attempt to leverage taxpayer dollars to extort Ukraine for opposition research on a domestic political opponent—revealed what little Trump had learned from the Mueller investigation and the exhaustive national conversation about the...

Pressuring the leader of a far smaller and more vulnerable nation to help him smear Biden in hopes of boosting his own reelection chances came naturally to Trump. As a developer, he had bullied casino regulators and manipulated contractor...

As he ended the call, a handful of the nearly dozen U.S. off...

listening in fretted about what they had just witnessed. If they believed their ears and their gut, Trump had tried to use h...

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 ai...

That fear led the CIA official to blow the whistle in a formal complaint that triggered House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to formally open a...

The Ukraine episode revealed some essential and worrisome truths about Trump, two ...

term. He was a president entirely unrestrained, free from the shackles of seasoned advisers who sought to teach him to put duty to count...

He had concluded he was above the law, after dodging accountability for flouting rules and withstandi...

He had grown so confident of his own power, and cocksure that Republicans in Congress would never dare break with him, that he ...

“It’s Trump unleashed, unchained, unhinged.”

He spoke illogically and inconsistently,

Trump’s solipsism threatened to become his undoing. In Ukraine, the president’s determination to pursue his personal benefit even at the expense of the nation, coupled with his egocentric obsession with winning and exacting revenge on his enemies, led him into trouble.

He genuinely believed that his interests came first and that, as president, he was above the law.

As the legislative branch scrutinized his actions, Trump looked in the mirror

and saw no wrongdoing.

Rather, he nursed a deep and inescapable sense of persecution and self-pity, casting himself as a victim in a warped reality and alleging that Democrats and the media were conspiring to perp...

This mind-set followed the historical pattern of authoritarian leaders creating a cult of victi...

and to justify their repressi...

“We haven’t seen anything like this in my lifetime. He appears to be daring the rest of the political system to stop him—and if it doesn’t, he’ll go further,” William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance at the Broo...

The law has no force without people who are willing to enforce it.”