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

by Philip Rucker

Mexican foreign minister Luis Videgaray, however, cultivated a friendship with Kushner during the campaign, and in the fraught early months of Trump’s presidency Videgaray would lean on Kushner as a troubleshooter.

On March 2, McGahn called Sessions to tell him that Trump was not happy about the idea of his removing himself from the Russia investigation. Sessions responded that his hands were tied and that he intended to abide by the Justice Department’s rules of recusal and follow the advice of the career ethics staff who were evaluating the situation.

To Trump, this was the end of Sessions. His attorney general had betrayed him. But this was also the moment Trump started to turn on McGahn, one of his earliest backers, for failing to stop the recusal.

“The rages, they build and they build,” one of his advisers said. “He’s screaming and he’s a big guy and he looks like he could get physical.”

Trump installed Sessions at the Justice Department with a mandate to oversee a hard-line anti-immigration agenda and start rolling back civil rights protections.

On March 21, 2017, Trump directed Don McGahn to find a way to get James Comey to tell the public the president himself was not under investigation. Trump was upset about the FBI director’s confirmation in congressional testimony the day before that the bureau was probing possible coordination between Russia and Trump’s campaign, leading to speculation that the president was a suspect. Over the next five days, Trump made similar requests of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, CIA director Mike Pompeo, and National Security Agency director Michael Rogers. On March 30, he personally called Comey to ask him to help “lift the cloud.” Yet none of these government officials, sworn to serve the public and protect the integrity of investigations, complied with Trump’s requests.

On May 3, Trump reached the boiling point when Comey declined in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee to say that the president was not under investigation.

As McGahn told colleagues, he was never entirely sure when the president barked out a plan whether he was giving orders or merely crowdsourcing an idea by saying it aloud.

“Oh, my God,” Trump exclaimed. “This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked!” He went on. “It doesn’t matter what the truth is,” the president said. “They just fuck you up the whole time. They never find anything. They just put a bunch of people who never talked to you through the ringer.” Then Trump turned his full venom on Sessions. “It’s your fucking fault,” he said. “You’re weak. This is all your fault.”

Tillerson got along with Putin but also had his number. Once he became secretary of state four years later, he tried to use his extensive experience with Putin wisely to tutor Trump. He explained Putin’s deep desire to restore Russian greatness and credibility, or at least give it the sheen of a country to be feared, in part by forging a partnership with a world power such as the United States. He stressed that Putin would always look to save face with his citizenry. And he said Putin’s hidden default move was picking at his enemies’ scabs. “The only thing Putin understands is truth and power,” Tillerson explained to Trump. “He will lean in as far as he can until he fears defeat. The last thing he wants is a defeat with his own people.” Tillerson emphasized the most important trait he thought Trump should know: Putin’s moves might seem slick and quick, but he was playing a long game, always thinking several moves ahead, years in the distance. He impressed upon Trump the fact that Putin sought to destabilize Western alliances and remake the post–World War II power structure to weaken America’s global influence. Putin, Tillerson told Trump, “wakes up every morning asking, ‘Where is America having problems? Let’s go there now and make it worse.’” He explained that Putin’s government was nimble and sparked brush fires around the world to which the United States was slow to respond.

Trump listened to Tillerson, but to those watching, he seemed absentminded. He did not ask questions or try to keep the conversation going. He had only one direct comment. He rejected the notion that Putin would try to take advantage of the United States.

Trump’s confidence about how to handle Putin changed dramatically after their face-to-face meeting July 7 in Hamburg. Trump believed he was the expert on Russia now. He owned the relationship. Tillerson’s years of negotiating with Putin and studying his moves on the chessboard were suddenly irrelevant.

Again, the news coverage triggered a spasm of fury from Trump, who in conversations with advisers had called the attorney general “fucking worthless,” a “fucking idiot,” a “fucking jerk off,” a “fucking moron,” and a “fuck head.”

Rosenstein warned the White House that the Justice Department building would effectively clear out within an hour of any such move by Trump. His objective was to instill fear of a mass exodus that could be politically crippling for the president. Secretly, however, Rosenstein and the team developed a different plan. Whether to stay or quit was dependent on each person’s conscience, of course, but it was important to Rosenstein that enough senior people remain in their jobs to protect the Justice Department and the integrity of the special counsel investigation.

Dreeben laid out for Cobb one way the White House could cooperate. He cited a 2008 opinion under Attorney General Michael Mukasey that found the White House could share sensitive internal documents with another executive branch office, such as the Justice Department, for the purposes of an investigation. As Dreeben explained, the White House wouldn’t have to deal with the question of whether these records should be shielded by executive privilege because under the Mukasey memo the executive branch would agree not to divulge any of the records without White House permission.

Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who confirmed Dreeben’s interpretation: the White House would not waive executive privilege or risk anything by sharing internal notes or the recollections of staff with the special counsel.

The Mukasey memo meant no potentially sensitive or embarrassing material would automatically become public without White House agreement, and sharing broadly with Mueller would speed up the investigation. Trump immediately embraced what lawyers on the team dubbed an “open kimono” strategy.

Over the next several days, Cobb further consulted the Office of Legal Counsel, reviewed the law, and became even more convinced. He was familiar with a ruling in an independent counsel investigation of Mike Espy, an agriculture secretary under President Clinton, which set a very high bar that investigators had to meet in order to question a president and force his or her testimony. Investigators had to show they couldn’t get the information any other way. Under the Espy precedent, the more the White House cooperated by providing detailed records and responsive witnesses, the more difficult it would be for Mueller to subpoena the president himself.

The discarding of Bannon underscored the fact that the president wanted all the glory for himself. He had deeply resented the Saturday Night Live portrayal of Bannon as the Grim Reaper making presidential decisions behind the Resolute Desk while Trump played with an expandable toy from behind a kiddie desk.

With Bannon out, Kelly centralized power inside the White House and inspired new confidence that he could get the president to act more like a president.

on October 8 the president attacked Corker on Twitter. Trump stated falsely that Corker had “begged” him for his endorsement and that after the president said “NO,” the senator decided not to run for reelection. In fact, Trump had told Corker several times he would endorse him and earlier that week had called, asking the senator to reconsider his decision and seek another term. Corker responded about an hour later with a tweet of his own: “It’s a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.” —

each time Modi tried to get Trump to engage on the substance of U.S.-India relations, the American president veered off on another non sequitur about trade deficits and the endless war in Afghanistan.

one Trump aide recalled. After that meeting, “the Indians took a step back” in their diplomatic relations with the United States.

“I’m scratching my head,” Napolitano said. “I don’t understand why Donald Trump is in favor of this.” Napolitano said he did not trust the surveillance program and warned, erroneously, that it had likely been used to spy on the Trump campaign and give birth to the Russia investigation. Then, forty-seven minutes later, at 7:33 a.m., a gap in time explained perhaps because Trump had been watching Fox & Friends on a delay, the president announced his opposition to the bill that his own White House had been championing in language that eerily echoed Napolitano’s commentary. “House votes on controversial FISA ACT today,” Trump wrote on Twitter, quoting verbatim the headline that had been used on Fox during Napolitano’s appearance. “This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by previous administration and others?”

it instantly sparked mayhem at the White House and on Capitol Hill. Key officials tore up their schedules for the morning to try to fix the mess created by the president.

Trump was confused. He conflated, as Napolitano had, Section 702 with the broader FISA law, which governs a vast assortment of surveillance practices. Trump and his allies were angered by FISA warrants, signed and approved three times by three judges, that had been issued to surveil the former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. But Section 702 was a separate and valuable classified program that could primarily target fore...

Section 702 had been a backbone of the FBI’s post-9/11 efforts to both spot these plots in the making and provide critical pieces of intelligence in the President’s Daily Brief.

John Kelly intervened to reiterate the program’s importance to the president. He asked House Speaker Paul Ryan to give Trump a thirty-minute primer on the difference between surveilling Americans with a judge-approved warrant and spying on foreigners. Kelly and Marc Short, the White House legislative affairs director, then huddled with lawmakers on Capitol Hill who were in a state of disbelief over the president’s out-of-left-field tweet, trying to calm them down and round up votes. Tom

“This is irresponsible, untrue, and frankly it endangers our national security,” the Democratic senator Mark Warner tweeted. “FISA is something the President should have known about long before he turned on Fox this morning.”

Kelly hurried to clean up the mess, arranging for FBI director Christopher Wray and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats to explain to Trump how the Section 702 program worked and its value in keeping Americans safe. 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.

Trump finally tweeted a correction at 9:14 a.m., using language recommended by Bossert, as a reply to his original tweet, as if he were merely continuing the same thought. “With that being said,” Trump’s message read, “I have personally directed the fix to the unmasking process since taking office and today’s vote is about foreign surveillance of foreign bad guys on foreign land. We need it! Get smart!”

Later that day, the House voted overwhelmingly to reauthorize the foreign surveillance program, 256 to 164, and the Senate immediately took up debate on the measure.

At her afternoon briefing on January 11, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders struggled to explain Trump’s tweets, insisting there was no discrepancy, and said any confusion over the president’s position on the policy was with the media. “The president fully supports the 702 and was happy to see that it passed the House today,” she said. “We don’t see any contradiction or confusion in that.” When the NBC News correspondent Hallie Jackson asked about Trump’s contradictions, Sanders snapped. “I think that the premise of your question is completely ridiculous and shows the lack of knowledge that you have on this process.”

the security clearances issue ultimately ruined Kelly’s relationship with the kids. He was furious that Ivanka was using her standing as first daughter to cajole her father to intervene on an issue of national security importance. Kelly would never trust her or Kushner again.

When the president decided to proceed with tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which threatened to touch off a global trade war, Cohn called it quits.

It would take several phone calls and letters before Trump lawyers felt the special counsel gave an explicit answer about whether they believed they could indict a sitting president. The answer was no.

The special counsel typically deferred to Quarles or Zebley to interact with the opposing side—so much so that the president’s lawyers wondered how much work Mueller was actually doing. “I always had a feeling they were hiding him,” Giuliani would later remark. “He had only one case. It was a case against the president of the United States, a very sensitive case. The inmates were running the insane asylum.”

Giuliani would recall John Dowd telling him, “Well, he’s not really on top of the case. He’s kind of like delegating it.”

European allies, including German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Emmanuel Macron, and British prime minister Theresa May, were pressing Trump to sign a joint statement committing to “a rules-based international order.” The president had resisted, believing his counterparts were ganging up on him, before eventually relenting.

over two days in Quebec, Trump effectively blew up the G7. He abruptly withdrew the U.S. endorsement of a joint declaration of unity, which his own representatives had already agreed to, and upbraided Trudeau on Twitter as “very dishonest & weak” because the prime minister objected to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada and other nations. Then he stormed out of Quebec.

Just before leaving for Singapore on June 9, Trump announced that he would be able to determine whether a denuclearization deal was attainable “within the first minute” of meeting Kim. How? “My touch, my feel—that’s what I do,” he boasted to reporters.

In the days following his Singapore trip, Trump spoke with apparent envy of Kim’s rule. He admired how the North Korean people “sit up at attention” when their dictator spoke and marveled at how tough Kim’s guards appeared.

On April 6, Sessions had announced the zero-tolerance policy for prosecuting every immigrant who crossed the border illegally. It had been the existing law, but this was a hard-line interpretation, and it would require the government to separate adults from their children while they faced charges.

The president broke first. On the morning of June 20, he called Nielsen at home to say they had to fix what had become a public relations disaster. His conflicting instructions left her scratching her head. “Yeah, yeah, we got to fix this. Just stop it,” Trump told Nielsen, referring to family separations. “But I want zero tolerance to continue.”

“So we’re going to have strong, very strong borders, but we’re going to keep the families together,” Trump said while signing the order. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.”

But at this exact moment, the White House distributed information showing the president had signed a different order from the one Nielsen thought they had agreed to. It said the United States would stop family separations but continue zero tolerance.

“All I can do is ask the question,” Trump replied. Referring to his director of national intelligence, the president continued, “My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others and said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

Intelligence operators had determined Putin had ordered the interference. The prosecutors also knew Trump had repeatedly been provided evidence of it.

Senator John McCain did not mince words in his statement: “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.”

At one point in late 2017, he even suggested that he might award himself the Presidential Medal of Freedom,