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

by Philip Rucker

Rosenstein became the latest senior government official left hanging in one of Trump’s parlor games. “I think it pleases him to sort of paw at a wounded mouse in front of him because it asserts his sense of control and authority, and he enjoys that to no end,” Trump’s biographer Tim O’Brien told The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker.

Trump’s instinct throughout was to defend his Supreme Court pick and muscle Kavanaugh’s nomination through the Senate. He calculated that the mere act of fighting to protect a conservative jurist would endear him to his political base and galvanize conservatives in the midterm elections, especially evangelicals.

The president was hypersensitive to the modern reality that a powerful man’s career could be ruined by a single accusation, as had occurred to a litany of business and media figures, some of whom were Trump’s friends or acquaintances.

Ford and Kavanaugh both appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee

First Ford declared herself “100 percent” certain that Kavanaugh was the prep school boy who assaulted her. She was credible.

Then, shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon, Kavanaugh appeared. He practically shouted his opening statement denying Ford’s allegations. His face was red with righteous indignation. He decried “a calculated and orchestrated political hit.” He was positively Trumpian, a performance artist spinning his own reality in direct contradiction to Ford’s testimony, and Trump was riveted. He loved it.

Trump took matters into his own hands. At a rally that Tuesday evening in Southaven, Mississippi, he delivered a thirty-six-second, off-script, ruthless jeremiad ripping into Ford’s credibility with the pacing and delivery of a stand-up comedian. From the presidential lectern, Trump reenacted Ford’s Senate hearing and mocked her memory lapses: “How did you get home?” “I don’t remember.” “How did you get there?” “I don’t remember.” “Where is the place?” “I don’t remember.” “How many years ago was it?” “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.” “What neighborhood was it in?” “I don’t know.” “Where’s the house?” “I don’t know.” “Upstairs? Downstairs? Where was it?” “I don’t know. But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.”

The Mississippi crowd of thousands was in stitches, hooting and hollering at the president’s impersonation of an alleged sexual assault victim.

the national discussion shifted to include doubts about the truthfulness of Ford’s allegations. It became a familiar “he said, she said” debate.

A number of federal agencies bore responsibility for managing the influx of migrants. The Justice Department housed asylum judges and administered the legal process. The State Department negotiated with Latin American countries and issued visas. The Department of Health and Human Services oversaw the care of migrant children. The Army Corps of Engineers managed construction of the border wall. But in Trump’s mind, everything related to immigration and the border fell under the Department of Homeland Security, and he held Nielsen accountable for it all.

In late October, Trump decided to use his authority as commander in chief to deploy military troops to the border to guard against migrants. On October 29, the Pentagon announced that it was sending fifty-two hundred troops, as well as Black Hawk helicopters and giant spools of razor wire.

The next day, Trump floated the idea of sending fifteen thousand troops to the border, an extraordinarily large number that was roughly the size of the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis vouched for the mission and said the military was providing “practical support” to homeland security operations.

Nevertheless, Trump made clear that his rush to put troops at the border was about taking strong action to galvanize his supporters to vote Republican in the elections. “If you don’t want America to be overrun by masses of illegal aliens and giant caravans, you better vote Republican,” Trump said on November 1 at a rally in Columbia, Missouri.

For Trump, deploying the troops wasn’t enough. He wanted images—propaganda—distributed through the media ...

Mattis’s aides agreed that to satisfy Trump’s wishes they would have to get pictures of National Guard troops and asked state National Guard officials who hadn’t yet shipped out if they could snap photographs or shoot video of their reserve troops training at home. The first images they finally got—after more than twenty-four hours of hustling—were of the Texas National Guard, the first to have images of troops in drills.

By November 3, the first wave of military troops had arrived at the border and photos emerged of uniformed service members installing razor-wire fencing along the Texas side of the Rio Grande.

Throughout the fall, the president’s lawyers had had reason to feel they were in the catbird seat. With Mueller’s capitulation to take some answers from Trump in writing, they were confident their client wasn’t going to be subpoenaed to testify. The agreement—to provide answers only about Russian interference, the central reason for Mueller’s appointment, and only pertaining to the time until the November 2016 election—was favorable.

He described Trump as “a man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather just kind of said, ‘Look, this is what I believe and you can try to convince me otherwise, but most of the time you’re not going to do that.’”

Never one to let a slight go unaddressed, Trump slammed Tillerson. He cast the man who rose from civil engineer to chief executive at one of the world’s largest companies and who considered himself a student of history as, of all things, unintelligent. Trump tweeted that Tillerson “didn’t have the mental capacity needed. He was dumb as a rock and I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. He was lazy as hell.”

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 associates with a chuckle months later. “I’m dumb as a rock!”

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.”

Mattis’s letter—distributed to reporters by his aides—was interpreted in the media as a scathing rebuke of Trump’s worldview.

Administration officials said Trump was retaliating against the negative news coverage, which he baselessly suspected Mattis had helped stoke.

Trump began the year 2019 as a president unchained. He had replaced a raft of seasoned advisers who sought to enlighten and restrain him with a cast of enablers who executed his orders and engaged his obsessions. Jim Mattis was replaced by Patrick Shanahan. Don McGahn was replaced by Pat Cipollone. Jeff Sessions was replaced by Bill Barr. John Kelly was replaced by Mick Mulvaney. They saw their mission as telling the president yes.

Trump did not give up on the wall, however. He reopened the government only temporarily, giving Congress three weeks to pass a longer-term budget. During that period, as a seventeen-member bipartisan panel of lawmakers negotiated a spending compromise, Cipollone, Mulvaney, and other officials devised a drastic plan for Trump to build his wall. The president would declare a national emergency at the southern border, which would trigger extraordinary powers to redirect taxpayer money.

he said his experience should be a cautionary tale for Republican members of Congress. “I did the same thing that you’re doing now for 10 years. I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years,” Cohen said. He added, “People that follow Mr. Trump, as I did blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”

Yet Quarles was saying they would not go down that road of deciding one way or another. Barr thought, why not? You’re the special counsel. Your job was to investigate and make charging decisions. Mueller spoke up to reiterate the position Quarles presented. “We determined we should not try to decide if the conduct constitutes a crime due to the reasoning of the OLC memo,” he said. “It would be possible for somebody else later on to decide.” Barr wanted to be sure. He asked specifically whether someone could review the report and make an independent decision about criminality. The special counsel’s team told him yes. Later, another Barr aide asked whether the attorney general could decide whether there was enough evidence to constitute a crime. Again, the Mueller team said they assumed the attorney general had that power. Of course, Barr was in charge of the probe and could have said to Mueller, “I want you to make a recommendation,” but he didn’t. Mueller’s team thought they were discussing legal authority in the abstract. They gave the answers never contemplating Barr might actually exercise that power within days.

In the days that followed, Barr, Rosenstein, and O’Callaghan chewed over Mueller’s decision not to decide. They could hardly understand Mueller and Quarles’s reasoning, and they thought, this is going to be a big mess. Barr concluded that he would decide whether the president criminally obstructed justice.

Barr, Rosenstein, and O’Callaghan all believed firmly that the department must make the decision. There was no hesitation. The attorney general would make the call.

The Justice Department chiefs kept Trump and his lawyers in the dark,

Mueller laid bare in granular detail a presidency plagued by paranoia and insecurity, depicting Trump’s inner circle as gripped by fear of the president’s spasms as he frantically pressured his aides to lie to the public and fabricate false records.

Though it did not state so explicitly, the report suggested that Congress should assume the role of prosecutor. “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law,” the report stated.

was not clear what the facts added up to, nor did it provide a road map for Congress to pursue impeachment proceedings.

On Saturday, March 23, Barr, Rosenstein, and O’Callaghan reconvened at the office to hash out the report. They tried to weigh the evidence in volume 2 and assumed, for the sake of argument, that each of the ten episodes constituted obstruction of justice and first considered each one alone. They found the evidence truly disturbing but felt they couldn’t prove the president had corrupt intent. They asked themselves, could we get a criminal conviction on this evidence and survive an appeal? Their conclusion was unanimous: no.

Inside the bunker of Mueller’s lawyers, Barr’s letter stung. Members of the special counsel team would later describe Mueller’s reaction: He looked as if he’d been slapped.

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.”

On March 27, Mueller signed a letter to Barr from the special counsel’s office objecting strongly to the attorney general’s handling of the principal conclusions: “The summary letter the Department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this Office’s work and its conclusions.

Barr told Mueller. “We offered you the opportunity to look at the letter and you said no. We’re flabbergasted here.” “Your summary letter fails to put into context the decisions we made,” Mueller said.

Barr and his team regretted having used the word “summarize” in the March 24 letter. They also lamented that Trump was claiming that Mueller had “totally exonerated” him. That was false, but Barr decided not to publicly correct his boss.

The lawyers were stuck on the fourth page, reading it over and over again. This part dealt with Mueller’s justification for investigating Trump for two years even if he couldn’t prosecute him. It was a window into the special counsel’s strategy and legal reasoning. Mueller’s team explained that even reaching a decision about whether Trump had engaged in criminal conduct that would normally warrant prosecution would be as unfair as charging him, something they were prohibited from doing. The only fair solution, Mueller’s team wrote, was to document the evidence in a report that could be shared with the Justice Department and ultimately Congress.

the president’s lawyers grew angry as they let this sink in. In their opinion, the report showed there was never any evidence that Trump engaged in an underlying crime, such as conspiring with Russians to interfere in the election, and so it was nearly impossible to conceive that he could be accused of obstructing a criminal probe. They thought, what was fair about investigating a president for the entirety of his presidency so far and then deciding not to determine whether the evidence amounted to a crime? The Trump lawyers firmly believed their client was innocent. His only “crime” was being a politician who felt shackled and slandered by being under investigation.