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

by Philip Rucker

From the moment Trump swore an oath to defend the Constitution and commit to serve the nation, he governed largely to protect and promote himself. Yet while he lived day to day, struggling to survive, surfing news cycles to stay afloat, there was a pattern and meaning to the disorder. Trump’s North Star was the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling our shaky democracy.

The universal value of the Trump administration was loyalty—loyalty not to the country but to the president himself. Some of his aides believed his demand for blind fealty—and his retaliation against those who denied it—was slowly corrupting public service and testing democracy itself.

Trump’s ego prevented him from making sound, well-informed judgments. He stepped into the presidency so certain that his knowledge was the most complete and his facts supreme that he turned away the expertise of career professionals upon whom previous presidents had relied. This amounted to a wholesale rejection of America’s model of governing, which some of his advisers concluded was born of a deep insecurity. “Instead of his pride being built on making a good decision, it’s built on knowing the right answer from the onset,” a senior administration official said.

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 of relatively low military wages.

door on Fifth Avenue delivered politicians, business leaders, and celebrities, who paraded through the lobby for their appointed visits. They came to pitch themselves for jobs in the administration or to curry favor with the president-elect or simply to get a piece of the action. “It was like walking into the Jabba the Hutt bar in Star Wars,” one Trump adviser said dismissively. “You never knew who was going to crawl in.”

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.”

Boy wss he right on!

When Mattis later interviewed candidates for senior staff positions at the Pentagon, he would ask, “Can you ride the brand?” What he really meant was, can you support Trump, warts and all? He knew this would be a controversial presidency.

Fate will have it.

“Donald Trump is a celebrity and he came to perform,” she said. “He had not practiced it beforehand. I don’t think anyone would show up to read the Constitution without practicing it first.” Whatever the reason for Trump’s discomfort with the reading, several watching agreed on this much: he behaved like a brooding child, short-tempered, brittle, and quick to blame mystery distractions for the mistakes. “I didn’t expect this, but I felt sorry for him,” another witness said. “When [Vice President] Pence is reading it, when [former vice president Dick] Cheney is reading it, I knew they knew the Constitution. And I thought, before he got this job, he really should have read it.”

Trump had unnerved trusted friends by dismissing existing relations with Western democracies as worthless, including by questioning the value of NATO, while cultivating friendlier ones with Russia and other authoritarian regimes. He wanted to tear up trade deals to squeeze more out of partners. And he advocated withdrawing troops not only from active theaters like Afghanistan but also from strategic outposts like South Korea, where U.S. forces were helping keep the peace, complaining that the military presence around the world was a waste of billions of dollars.

Addressing the room, the commander in chief barked, “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.” For a president known for verbiage he euphemistically called “locker room talk,” this was the gravest insult he could have delivered to these people, in this sacred space. The flag officers in the room were shocked. Some staff began looking down at their papers, rearranging folders, almost wishing themselves out of the room. A few considered walking out. They tried not to reveal their revulsion on their faces, but questions raced through their minds. “How does the commander in chief say that?” one thought. “What would our worst adversaries think if they knew he said this?”

Typical example of Trumps gutter and repulsive comments. This describes the hate and lack of civility. So sad!

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 deployments to Vietnam.

The more perplexing silence was from Pence, a leader who should have been able to stand up to Trump. Instead, one attendee thought, “He’s sitting there frozen like a statue. Why doesn’t he stop the president?” Another recalled the vice president was “a wax museum guy.” From the start of the meeting, Pence looked as if he wanted to escape and put an end to the president’s torrent. Surely, he disagreed with Trump’s characterization of military leaders as “dopes and babies,” considering his son, Michael, was a marine first lieutenant then training for his naval aviator wings.

But some surmised Pence feared getting crosswise with Trump. “A total deer in the headlights,” recalled a third attendee.

Typical of Pence a weak and timid leader.

His voice broke into Trump’s tirade, this one about trying to make money off U.S. troops. “No, that’s just wrong,” the secretary of state said. “Mr. President, you’re totally wrong. None of that is true.” Tillerson’s father and great-uncle had both been combat veterans, and he was deeply proud of their service. “The men and women who put on a uniform don’t do it to become soldiers of fortune,” Tillerson said. “That’s not why they put on a uniform and go out and die. . . . They do it to protect our freedom.” There was silence in the Tank. Several military officers in the room were grateful to the secretary of state for defending them when no one else would. The meeting soon ended and Trump walked out, saying goodbye to a group of servicemen lining the corridor as he made his way to his motorcade waiting outside. Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn were deflated. Standing in the hall with a small cluster of people he trusted, Tillerson finally let down his guard. “He’s a fucking moron,” the secretary of state said of the president.

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 he put together yet?”

As the president repeatedly told Kelly when he proposed a subject briefing: “I don’t want to talk to anyone. I know more than they do. I know better than anybody else.”

The mantra of Donald..

In March, McMaster was in the Oval Office briefing Trump on the visit of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, a favorite foil for the president. Trump got so impatient that he stood up and walked into an adjoining bathroom, left the door ajar, and instructed McMaster to raise his voice and keep talking. It was unclear if the strange scene was a reflection of Trump’s feelings about McMaster or Merkel or both.

And this guy is our President ?

He had tried to be concise from the get-go, boiling the material down to three pages, but McMaster and his team almost immediately realized the president wasn’t reading any of the briefing books, or even the concise three-page version. Staff secretary Rob Porter would synthesize the memos in a one-page cover letter, written in prose the president might find easier to digest. As one of Trump’s confidants said, “I call the president the two-minute man.

The president has patience for a half page.”

“The president doesn’t fire people,” said one of McMaster’s aides. “He just tortures them until they’re willing to quit.”

The first couple was set to take a private tour of the USS Arizona Memorial, which sits just off the coast of Honolulu and straddles the hull of the battleship that sank into the Pacific during the Japanese surprise bombing attack in 1941. As a passenger boat ferried the Trumps to the stark white memorial, the president pulled Kelly aside for a quiet consult. “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?” Trump asked his chief of staff. Kelly was momentarily stunned. Trump had heard the phrase “Pearl Harbor” and appeared to understand that he was visiting the scene of a historic battle, but he did not seem to know much else. Kelly explained to him that the stealth Japanese attack here had devastated the U.S. Pacific Fleet and prompted the country’s entrance into World War II, eventually leading the United States to drop atom bombs on Japan. If Trump had learned about “a date which will live in infamy” in school, it hadn’t really pierced his consciousness or stuck with him. “He was at times dangerously uninformed,” said one senior former adviser.

Trump said he did not realize until seeing the parade that France had had such a rich history of military conquest. He told Macron something along the lines of “You know, I really didn’t know, but the French have won a lot of battles. I didn’t know.” A senior European official observed, “He’s totally ignorant of everything. But he doesn’t care. He’s not interested.”

Fox & Friends, with its sycophantic hosts, was where the president picked up some of his preferred ideas.

Fox and Friends Brown nosing at best.

Throughout the tutorial, Trump never acknowledged making a mistake, never expressed any regret about wasting his staff’s time and imperiling his administration’s own legislative agenda. “He’s incapable of saying sorry,” said one senior government official.

Lying has been part of Trump’s act all his life. “People ask me if the president lies. Are you nuts? He’s a fucking total liar,” Anthony Scaramucci said. “He lies all the time. Trump called me one night after I was on Bill Maher and he said, ‘How come you always fucking figure me out?’ I said, ‘I’ve seen you around for twenty years. I know your act. I know when you’re saying shit you don’t really mean, and I know when you’re saying bullshit.’ He laughed.” Scaramucci recalled that he then asked Trump, “Are you an act?” Trump replied, “I’m a total act and I don’t understand why people don’t get it.”

Trump the perpetual liar who admits it.

Putin had developed a knack for manipulating Trump, making him believe that the two of them could get big things accomplished if they ignored their staffs and worked one-on-one. National security aides feared Putin knew how to feed the unusual combination of Trump’s ego and insecurity and to cultivate conspiracies in his mind. He told Trump his ideas were brilliant but warned him that he could not trust anyone in his administration in Washington to execute them. “It’s not us,” Putin had told Trump. “It’s the subordinates fighting against our friendship.”

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,” according to Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group.

Low class for sure.

Kim was a pariah, arguably the world’s greatest abuser of human rights, and committed to nuclear armament. But Trump threw Kim a party, showering him with respect and declaring himself honored to be in his presence. The summit was carefully staged to put both leaders on equal footing, which normalized the authoritarian Kim. 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.”

It was a fantasy. Trump lives in a fantasy world.

Eliot A. Cohen, a neoconservative who served as a top State Department official in the George W. Bush administration and was a critic of Trump’s candidacy, said in the aftermath that the Singapore summit was “just the latest manifestation” of Trump’s authoritarianism. He “has classic traits of the authoritarian leader. The one that’s always struck me most is this visceral instinct of people’s weaknesses and a corresponding desire to be seen as strong and respected and admired,” Cohen said. He added, “We’ve been very fortunate that the institutions have contained him.”

You see countless other examples of his point throughout the book.

“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.”

Another example of Trumps wacko way of thinking.

This period amplified Trump’s ugliest characteristics as president. “He goes out and says crazy, horrible things, blows race whistles and sits back and watches his topic of craziness dominate cable TV for the next 24 hours,” said Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist.

John Kerry, the former secretary of state and a decorated navy veteran, tweeted, “President @realDonaldTrump a no-show because of raindrops? Those veterans the president didn’t bother to honor fought in the rain, in the mud, in the snow—& many died in trenches for the cause of freedom. Rain didn’t stop them & it shouldn’t have stopped an American president.” The criticism of Trump was worldwide and merciless. Nicholas Soames, a grandson of Winston Churchill’s and a member of the British Parliament, called Trump “pathetic” and “inadequate” because he “couldn’t even defy the weather to pay his respects to The Fallen.”

This out to be brought up again so the voters don't forget what Trumps thinks of veterans .

Plunging into a government shutdown just before Christmas with no plan to reopen it was classic Trump. It was a decision made in duress. “It was a suicide mission,” one of Trump’s former White House advisers said. “There was no off-ramp. There was no way the Democrats would just back down. There was no way to win. It was done based on impulse and emotion and dogmatism and a visceral reaction rather than a strategic calculation. That’s indicative of a lot of the presidency and who he is.”

Trump declared himself the victor in “the greatest witch hunt in political history.” He called the Justice Department’s Russia investigation “an illegal attempt to overturn the results of the election” and to “subvert our democracy.” Never mind that the Russians actually did subvert America’s democracy by interfering in the 2016 election to help Trump win, a brazen act of subterfuge that got the FBI investigation started in the first place. “We call it the Russian hoax,” Trump said, still refusing two and a half years later to accept the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies.

Lie and twist the facts, Trump's modus operandi.

“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. Just like that, Trump effectively asked the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. 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 illegality of seeking political assistance from a foreign government.

Cause for impeachment 101.

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 contractors. This was, to borrow the Trumpian phrase, the art of the deal.

The Ukraine episode revealed some essential and worrisome truths about Trump, two and a half years into his term. He was a president entirely unrestrained, free from the shackles of seasoned advisers who sought to teach him to put duty to country above self and to follow protocols. He had concluded he was above the law, after dodging accountability for flouting rules and withstanding the Mueller investigation. He had grown so confident of his own power, and cocksure that Republicans in Congress would never dare break with him, that he thought he could do almost anything.

By the fall of 2019, Trump was acting as if he were convinced of his own invincibility, believing that he could wield the vast powers of his office in pursuit of his personal and political goals without accountability. 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. Trump skirted penalties for a battery of other offenses, ranging from past racist, misogynistic, or otherwise bigoted comments to accusations of self-dealing in violation of the emoluments provision of the Constitution to blocking Congress’s ability to conduct oversight. As the legislative branch scrutinized his actions, Trump looked in the mirror and saw no wrongdoing.

Thisnreally summarizea well how Trump.sees himself.as President

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 perpetuate hoaxes, defraud the public, and stage a coup. This mind-set followed the historical pattern of authoritarian leaders creating a cult of victimization to hold on to power and to justify their repressive agendas.

Continued

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.