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

by Philip Rucker

I alone can fix it.” On July 21, 2016, as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland, Donald John Trump spoke more than four thousand words, but these five would soon become the tenet by which he would lead the nation.

It would be all too easy to mistake Trump’s first term for pure, uninhibited chaos. His presidency would be powered by solipsism. 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. Public trust in American government, already weakened through years of polarizing political dysfunction, took a body blow.

Pelosi had let presidents and vice presidents choose the portion of the Constitution they wanted to read. Many were wary of reading the section on the rules for impeachment or foreign emoluments. Trump had selected the opening of Article II, the part of the Constitution that addresses a president’s election and the scope of his or her power. It would normally have been the perfect selection for a president—but was an ironic one for Trump, who had spoken of his desire to exercise his executive power as much as possible, including by threatening Congress and challenging the judiciary. With LED lights on stilts in front of him, Trump took his seat. “You’re lucky you got the easy part,” Pelosi told him cheerfully. “It gets complicated after this.” But the president stumbled, trying to get out the words in the arcane, stilted form the Founding Fathers had written. Trump grew irritated. “It’s very hard to do because of the language here,” Trump told the crew. “It’s very hard to get through that whole thing without a stumble.” He added, “It’s like a different language, right?” The cameraman tried to calm Trump, telling him it was no big deal, to take a moment and start over. Trump tried again, but again remarked, “It’s like a foreign language.” The section, like many parts of the Constitution, was slightly awkward—an anachronistic arrangement of words that don’t naturally trip off the tongue. Members of the crew exchanged looks, trying not to be obvious. Some believed Trump would...

Ordinarily, for a veteran of the white-collar defense bar, representing a president would be a prestigious career capstone. Not so with Trump, however. These high-profile attorneys understood that many people who have an affiliation with Trump ultimately get discarded and diminished. He saw his attorneys as tools to help bend the law for him and to protect him as he took suspect or outright illegal actions. Then there was the issue of money. No one in Trump’s orbit could provide clear answers about who would pay, and Trump had a history of stiffing professionals, be they lawyers or construction contractors. What’s more, Trump had a reputation for being a notoriously stubborn client. As one lawyer who said no to Trump’s offer explained, “It’s like being the captain of the Titanic. ‘Turn left. Turn left.’ ‘No, no, I’m going straight.’”

Others who interacted with Ivanka found her to be a spoiled princess who had absorbed her father’s worst narcissistic, superficial, and self-promoting qualities. “As a twelve-year-old, she was put on the phone with CEOs, and her father told her she was the most amazing thing in the world and her opinion was valued,” one administration official explained. “She is a product of her environment.”

Monday, June 12, was a day of ritual, which masked the president’s agita. Trump convened his first full cabinet meeting, a now infamous session in which U.S. government officials took turns pledging fealty to their master. “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda and the American people,” Reince Priebus crowed. But no one was loyal to anyone in the orbit of Donald Trump.

On June 21, The Wall Street Journal published a story by Eli Stokols and Michael Bender reporting that the White House was “riven by division between senior aides” and that the expanding Russia investigations had frustrated Trump and exacerbated the administration’s struggle to recruit new talent. The piece reflected poorly on Bannon and Priebus. Bannon was furious and lit into Hicks, screaming like a deck seaman at the former fashion model. He confronted her in front of Trump, accusing Hicks of having “leaked” a negative story to the Journal. She explained that her interactions had been entirely proper; it was, after all, her job to talk to reporters. Bannon was effectively taking on the president’s family. No senior White House staffer, other than Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, had a longer or deeper relationship with the president than Hicks, whom he treated like a surrogate daughter. The next day, June 22, Bannon, Hicks, Priebus, and Sean Spicer met in the chief of staff’s office. Hicks knew she had done nothing wrong interacting with the Journal and expected Priebus and Spicer to defend her. But they did not. “You’ve been running around here for months just working for Ivanka and Jared,” Bannon said to Hicks. “Your client is the man in the Oval Office.” He added, “You don’t actually work for the president. You forgot how you got here.” Sitting at the end of Priebus’s long conference table and looking down at his phone, Bannon threatened Hicks: “That’s it. I’m going t...

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. By helping Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Putin was creating a toehold for Russia in the Middle East....

By nature a micromanager, Trump sought to minimize what he considered a public relations disaster—for his son, but primarily for himself. As was often the case with Trump, he didn’t know all the details, and yet he also knew what he planned to say wasn’t entirely true. He was just trying to wrest control of that day’s headline and survive. “You all think that he has some master strategy, but really he’s just trying to get past the crisis of that moment,” said one top adviser. “He thought to himself, ‘Those emails aren’t going to see the light of day until the fall,’ and we’re talking about this story right now. That was an eternity to him.” So Trump took charge to cover up the truth. Hicks sent Trump junior a series of text messages from the plane explaining that the president was proposing a different tack. They would emphasize that the meeting with Veselnitskaya was about Russian adoption policy and say nothing about the campaign. In conferring with Kushner and Hicks, Trump insisted that the statement not touch upon his campaign but rather focus on the obscure policy connections between the ban on Russian adoptions and the U.S. Magnitsky Act. Trump junior conveyed his irritation that his father was crafting a statement that sidestepped the Clinton element, a glaring and problematic omission.

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?”

In August, the West Wing underwent a renovation for two weeks, so Trump had a change of scenery. The staff was displaced, just as Kelly was settling into his new post, and Trump decamped to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Trump was hypersensitive to any suggestion that he was on vacation, even though he effectively was, and he ordered aides to plan public events each day: a briefing on health care or a roundtable session on opioids, for instance. But they occupied only an hour or so of his time, and he spent the rest of each day playing a round of golf, chatting with friends in the clubhouse, and hanging out in his private cottage.

Kelly was nearly killing himself in the job. He woke up most mornings at 4:00, and his Secret Service detail waited outside his home in Manassas, Virginia, to drive him to work. On the roughly forty-five-minute drive—there was no traffic at that predawn hour—Kelly read The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, the Fox News and Breitbart websites, and Axios. He learned early in the job that the president’s addiction to press accounts of himself was so strong that Kelly’s daily tasks and discussions inevitably would be determined by the news cycle. Once he got to the White House, CIA officials went over the latest intelligence with him for the President’s Daily Brief. Until Trump came down from the residence, usually between 11:00 a.m. and noon—a remarkably late start time for a commander in chief—Kelly did normal staff work. But the moment the president arrived in the Oval Office, all normalcy flew out the window, and Kelly stayed glued to his side. Once Trump went back to the residence, around 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening, Kelly snuck in a couple more hours of work. On many days he slept only four or five hours. Famously blunt, Kelly routinely commiserated with other staffers about the difficulties of working for Trump. “He can’t make up his mind,” the chief of staff once told aides. “He says one thing and does another thing. Look what I have to deal with.” Still, Kelly was considered a stabilizing force on Capitol Hill, where veteran lawma...

When a CNN reporter caught up with Kelly in the halls of Congress to ask if Trump’s behavior made legislating more difficult, the chief of staff said, “It’s not more difficult. It’s a juggling act.” Meanwhile, 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. “He’s incapable of saying sorry,” said one senior government official. 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.

Also on January 11, Trump met in the Oval Office about immigration policy with a group of lawmakers, including the Democratic senator Dick Durbin, the Republican senators Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, and the Republican congressman Bob Goodlatte. As the group discussed a possible bipartisan immigration deal that would protect migrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries, Trump grew frustrated. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” the president asked. He specifically denigrated Haiti, an impoverished Caribbean nation made up mostly of descendants of African slaves, and said the United States should instead allow migrants from Norway, a Nordic country that is one of the world’s whitest and wealthiest, and other countries. Trump’s comment in the closed-door meeting, which was first reported by The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey, triggered a days-long backlash. White House officials knew Trump had used the vulgarity and did not try to deny the story. The next morning, on January 12, Durbin told reporters that he had personally heard Trump say “things that were hate-filled, vile and racist.” But Trump later denied what his aides would not, tweeting that his language had been “tough, but this was not the language used.”

Trump’s friends and advisers had long observed that he had an amazing ability to disconnect from facts and remember experiences the way it suited him at the moment, a dangerous habit when being interviewed by federal prosecutors in a criminal investigation. “The problem with him: he tells you what he thinks he knows or what he thinks he remembers,” said one adviser. “He might actually believe it. And he may not think he is lying. When you confront him and say, but no, ‘Remember this fact?’ He’ll say, ‘That’s right.’ He’ll work closer to the truth. It’s not an inattention to the detail. It’s his feeling that the details and pieces are irrelevant. He’s a big-picture, broad-point guy. He says, ‘Hey, I know this big point is true. Who cares about the other stuff?’” 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.”

The entire special counsel office, located next to train tracks and the newly opened Museum of the Bible, was a SCIF. Everyone—including investigators, agents, staffers, and visitors—surrendered their phones each day upon entry to avoid any minuscule chance of improper breach or mishandling of classified information. Mueller’s team had become experts in the vast and unsettling power of criminals to steal and spy on private email communications, and not surprisingly they often eschewed the typical workplace habit of casually chatting by email with colleagues a few desks away. Instead, when they had updates to share, they often yelled down the hallway. One day in late May 2018, Rush Atkinson, one of the youngest members of the team and considered a phenom for his diligence and stamina, hollered to Rhee, “You gotta come over here, Jeannie!” Atkinson had been reviewing the attempted intrusions by the Russian GRU’s Unit 26165 and had found an amazing coincidence—one he knew couldn’t be a coincidence. It showed exactly what the Russian hackers had been up to on July 27, 2016, within just five hours of Trump’s making his infamous “Russia, if you’re listening” comment at a news conference in Florida, saying he hoped they could find Hillary Clinton’s missing thirty thousand emails. In that bizarre moment, Trump had actively encouraged a foreign government to illegally hack his political opponent. Just days earlier, WikiLeaks had published nearly twenty thousand documents that appea...

Trump began his grand-finale news conference in Singapore by playing a film he had commissioned, first a version in Korean and then one in English. It was startlingly reminiscent of Pyongyang’s propaganda videos. The movie portrayed North Korea as some kind of paradise, with gleaming high-rises, time-lapsed sunrises, high-speed trains, majestic horses running through water, and children merrily skipping through a city square. It included a montage of images of Kim and Trump waving their hands and flashing thumbs up, as if running mates in a campaign. Journalists were flabbergasted. Trump explained that he had it made to show Kim what his country’s future would look like if it abandoned its nuclear weapons and normalized relations with the West. The shores of North Korea could be an exclusive resort destination! Trump said he played the video personally for Kim on an iPad—and, yes, the North Korean dictator liked it. “They have great beaches,” Trump told reporters. “You see that whenever they’re exploding their cannons into the ocean, right? I said: ‘Boy, look at that place. Wouldn’t that make a great condo?’ And I explained it. I said, ‘Instead of doing that, you could have the best hotels in the world right there.’ Think of it from a real estate perspective.” The summit put a pause on bellicose rhetoric and threats of war but produced nothing concrete—certainly not a commitment from Kim to give up his nuclear arsenal. In the days following his Singapore trip, Trump spoke ...

As a child growing up in San Antonio, McRaven had been in the same fifth-grade class as Karen Tumulty, who had become a distinguished political correspondent at The Washington Post and had recently moved to the opinions section as a columnist. McRaven figured he would give her an on-the-record quote she could share with whichever Post colleague was writing about the Brennan controversy. Tumulty was heading to a doctor’s appointment when the admiral dialed. She didn’t recognize the Colorado number and let the call go to voice mail. Not sure when he’d be able to call her back later, McRaven decided to speak aloud into the voice-mail message, saying what he would tell Trump directly if he had the chance. “Here is what I’ve come up with,” he said. “Do whatever you want to with it, Karen.” Then he dictated his comment, verbatim: Former CIA Director John Brennan, whose security clearance you revoked on Wednesday, is one of the finest public servants I have ever known. Few Americans have done more to protect this country than John. He is a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question, except by those who don’t know him. Therefore, I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency. Like most Americans, I had hoped that when you became president, you would rise to the occasion and become the leader this great nation nee...

On August 21, in a courtroom in lower Manhattan, Michael Cohen was set to appear that afternoon as part of a plea agreement with federal prosecutors related to the hush-money payments he made to women claiming to have had affairs with Trump. More than 250 miles south, in a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, a jury was deliberating on charges against Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman. Just after four o’clock in the afternoon, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felony counts and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in New York. He testified that he had made these criminal payments “in coordination and at the direction of” Trump. At nearly the same time, the jury in Alexandria reached a verdict in the Manafort case. Manafort was also found guilty of, coincidentally, eight counts: five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud, and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The judge declared a mistrial on the remaining ten charges. The news broke as the president traveled to West Virginia for a rally, where he used his bully pulpit to repeatedly denounce the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt.” The president cried out, his voice rising, “Where is the collusion? Where is the collusion?” Unbeknownst to his throngs of supporters or the journalists covering the day’s events, Trump had used this day to try to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He worked the phones, seeking a recommendation for the prize. His main target was Japanese prime minister...

On December 12, Trump called Christie with an urgent request. He asked his old friend if he could come down from New Jersey right away. They made plans to meet on December 13 at 5:30 p.m. in the White House residence. When Christie asked what was going on, Trump wouldn’t tell him. But on the train down to Washington the afternoon of December 13, Christie got a call from Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer and another old friend. “Listen,” Giuliani told Christie. “He’s going to offer you chief of staff tonight. “He just got off the phone with me,” Giuliani added, referring to Trump. “He told me that that’s the decision he’s made. You’re the best person in position for the reelect. You’re the smartest politician. You can run the place. He needs you.” “Rudy, is Jared leaving?” Christie asked. “No,” Giuliani said. “Why the fuck am I going to take this job?” Christie said. “You guys are nuts. I’m not going in there and [having] Jared down the hall.” As the train hurtled toward Union Station, Christie’s mind was racing. If Trump really was about to offer him chief of staff, he had to figure out what to say. So he called Jim Baker, a legendary former White House chief of staff under both President Reagan and President George H. W. Bush. Christie knew Baker and relied on his sage advice; when he was Trump’s transition chairman, Christie had spent two hours in Houston talking with Baker about staffing administrations. Baker picked up right away. “Governor,” he said, “if you’re ca...

The morning of February 27, Cohen stood in the House Oversight Committee’s hearing room, raised his right hand, and swore an oath that his testimony was the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Looking down to read from his prepared statement before a hushed room, Cohen expressed far more than an apology. “I regret the day I said ‘yes’ to Mr. Trump,” he said. “I regret all the help and support I gave him along the way. I am ashamed of my own failings, and I publicly accepted responsibility for them by pleading guilty in the Southern District of New York. I am ashamed of my weakness and misplaced loyalty—of the things I did for Mr. Trump in an effort to protect and promote him. I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump’s illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience. “I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is,” Cohen continued. “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.” Cohen laid out a devastating bill of particulars against the president, sharing specific anecdotes and, in some cases, brandishing evidence to support his claims. He presented copies of Trump’s financial statements from 2011 to 2013; a copy of a check Trump wrote from his personal bank account after becoming president to reimburse Cohen for hush-money payments to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels; and copies of letters Cohen wrote at Trump’s direction threatening civil and criminal action against his high school, colleges, and the College Board if they ever release...

What Barr included in his summary of principal conclusions, what he left out, and how he framed the special counsel’s findings were the first and only words the public received that month about the probe’s long-awaited conclusion. 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. Some team members were livid at what they considered Barr’s calculated and selective word choices that sidestepped the unpleasant evidence the team had uncovered about Trump himself and his campaign’s encouragement of the Russians. The team had made groundbreaking discoveries about Russian bots and intelligence officers rushing to hack Clinton’s personal emails hours after Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening” remarks, yet that work was reduced to less than a sentence in Barr’s letter. Even the portion of the dependent clause in that sentence that Barr chose to make public put Trump in the most flattering light. Quoting from the report, Barr wrote that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” He left out the thirty-nine preceding words from that passage, which confirmed the very facts Trump hated to acknowledge and refused to hear: “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and ...

So much for that week of transition, Nielsen figured. Trump’s announcement made it sound immediate. She finalized her resignation letter and made it effective that date, April 7. Just like some other secretaries who had departed before her, Nielsen did not directly thank Trump or celebrate his leadership in her letter. Rather, she singled out the men and women of her department. “I could not be prouder of and more humbled by their service, dedication, and commitment to keep our country safe from all threats and hazards,” she wrote. Mulvaney called Nielsen later that evening, after getting her letter. “Why are you resigning today?” he asked. Nielsen was surprised by the question. “I’m not the one who changed the date,” she said. Mulvaney explained they weren’t trying to force her to leave immediately. But the president was in a rush, wanting to announce that he was the one making the decision for her to leave and trying to control the story. Mulvaney invoked Jim Mattis, reminding her of the umbrage the president had taken at the defense secretary’s resignation letter. It turned out Trump feared Nielsen might criticize him or reveal damaging information about him on her way out the door, but the president thought if he made the first announcement, he could dismiss anything she might say later as sour grapes from a disgruntled former employee. Mulvaney asked her to stay on until April 10 to ensure a smooth transition and explained that Trump intended to keep McAleenan as an a...

In June, Gallagher would stand trial in a military courtroom in San Diego and on July 2 would be found not guilty of murdering the ISIS captive, although the military jury would convict him of posing for photos with the dead fighter’s body. The next day, Trump would celebrate the ruling and claim partial credit for the outcome with a Twitter message directed at the Gallagher family: “You have been through much together. Glad I could help!” Trump would intercede once more on Gallagher’s behalf, ordering the navy to penalize the military lawyers who prosecuted the war crimes case against him. “The Prosecutors who lost the case against SEAL Eddie Gallagher (who I released from solitary confinement so he could fight his case properly), were ridiculously given a Navy Achievement Medal,” Trump would write July 31 on Twitter, adding that he had directed Richardson and Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer to “immediately withdraw and rescind the awards.” The law permitted Trump to order the prosecutors be stripped of their medals, but there was little precedent for the move. Unlike the Medal of Honor, achievement medals are determined within the military and do not require a president’s endorsement. The presidential decree—made on Twitter no less—was yet another reminder for the Pentagon brass that Trump had no qualms about maximizing his power and intervening whenever he saw fit.

The week of April 8, Washington was in a state of panicky anticipation for the release of Robert Mueller’s report. For the past couple of weeks, Justice Department officials had been carefully redacting portions of the 448-page document, but the public version was expected to drop imminently. Reporters were being told by their sources to be on standby. Trump and his lawyers were being told the same. They had been wrestling with a major decision—whether to read the report before it became public. The normal answer for any attorney representing a client was a resounding yes. But Trump had to consider his lawyers’ fear that his critics could accuse him of getting the attorney general to redact portions that were particularly embarrassing to him before the document was publicly released. “He could have said at any time, ‘I want to see the report.’ He didn’t do that,” one of the team members recalled about the president. “Everybody involved in that process was very concerned that Mueller’s report and the attorney general’s review and summary or release was viewed as being allowed to proceed without intervention. We wanted it to be clean. We didn’t want to give anyone an excuse to say we are sticking our fingers in.” On the other hand, Trump’s legal team knew Mueller had delivered a monster of a document, which they jokingly called “a son of Starr report,” a reference to the 211-page document on Clinton investigations released in 1998 by independent counsel Kenneth Starr. The si...

Trump strode onto the stage with his wife, Melania, to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” The cheers were so loud that the arena’s concrete floors pulsated. People craned their necks and raised their phones in the air to snap photos and record videos. For the sweaty masses who had waited all day to see the president, this was the moment. “Thank you, Orlando!” Trump said. “What a turnout! What a turnout!” 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. Invoking the “18 very angry Democrats,” as he inaccurately described the special counsel team, Trump added, “They went after my family, my business, my finances, my employees, almost everyone that I’ve ever known or worked with, but they are really going after you. They tried to erase your vote, erase your legacy of the greatest campaign and the greatest election, probably in the history of our country. And they wanted to deny you the future that you demanded and the future that America des...

EPILOGUE On July 25, 2019, as the sun rose on a hot, humid Thursday morning, President Trump declared the witch hunt over. He had triumphed over Robert Mueller, who a day before gave Congress a halting, inconclusive summary of his investigation of the president—a painful capstone to the special counsel probe. Finally, the Russia cloud had lifted. Trump no longer had to obey his cautious advisers. He was invincible, or so he thought. 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. So many of Trump’s impulsive and reckless decisions had shocked the conscience. His aides and advisers had long ago grown accustomed to mad scrambles to avert dangerous plans or to repair the damage he had caused to 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. Trump’s call was supposed to be the clincher of a dodgy diplomatic effort that he had initiated that spring to help convince the Ukrainian government to announce it was investigating former vice president...