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.

Trump’s North Star was the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling our shaky democracy.

They envisioned an America in which regulations didn’t strangle the family business, taxes weren’t so onerous, and good-paying jobs were plentiful and secure. Some of them also harked back to the 1950s, envisioning a simpler, halcyon America in which white male patriarchs ruled the roost, decorous women kept home and hearth, and minorities were silent or subservient.

The universal value of the Trump administration was loyalty—loyalty not to the country but to the president himself.

Two kinds of people went to work for the administration: those who thought Trump was saving the world and those who thought the world needed to be saved from Trump.

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.

“I’ve served the man for two years. I think he’s a long-term and immediate danger to the country,” a senior national security official told us.

“He is a transgressive personality, so he likes to attack and destroy and unsettle people,” Wehner said. “If he sees an institution that he thinks is not doing his bidding, not protecting him like he wants or is a threat to him, he’ll go after it.

“Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”

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.

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.”

On November 16, Pompeo traveled to New York to meet with the president-elect. Priebus had prepped Trump on Pompeo’s credentials, and Bannon had given Pompeo a pep talk, telling him something along the lines of “We’re just going to go in, I’m going to reiterate you’re number one in your class at West Point, number one in your class at Harvard Law School, you’re the best guy intelligence ever had. I’m going to tee you up—and don’t wait for him to say anything. You just rip. Do not wait for a question, because there won’t be a question. He doesn’t even know what intelligence is. Just rip.”

The transition’s official vetting process varied from minimal to nonexistent, depending on the candidate. Most important in researching one’s background was a review of news articles and social media accounts to see whether he or she had ever said anything derogatory about Trump. One senior Trump adviser recalled, “People

There were three core questions facing U.S. intelligence officials about Russia’s role in the 2016 election. First, did the Russian government itself interfere? The overwhelming evidence said yes. Next, did Russia try to help Trump win? Much of the evidence suggested yes. Finally, did Russia’s efforts change the election result? Intelligence leaders argued they lacked the ability to say definitively. But Trump believed that acknowledging Russian intervention effectively tainted his victory.

Pelosi assumed Trump would open the conversation on a unifying note, such as by quoting the Founding Fathers or the Bible. Instead, the new president began with a lie: “You know, I won the popular vote.” He claimed that there had been widespread fraud, with three to five million illegal votes for Clinton. Pelosi interjected. “Well, Mr. President, that’s not true,” she said. “There’s no evidence to support what you just said, and if we’re going to work together, we have to stipulate to a certain set of facts.” Watching Pelosi challenge Trump, Bannon whispered to colleagues, “She’s going to get us. Total assassin. She’s an assassin.”

Miller shared this mind-set and would later explain to Araud over dinner at the ambassador’s residence that the president had been elected for the explicit purpose of creating unease for the establishment. “This president is revolutionary, so he has to break China,” Miller said. “The scope and scale of change we’re seeking to implement by definition will involve disruption.” He added, “If we follow the normal procedures, we work into the hands of our enemies.”

Trump did not understand that leaks of unflattering details of his constant television watching or limited understanding of government were not punishable crimes.

“I fired Flynn, so the whole Russia thing is over,” Trump said, referring to the FBI’s ongoing investigation of Russia’s election interference. “Mr. President, we’re going to be sitting here a year from now talking about Russia,” Christie said. Kushner said that was crazy, because there was nothing to any of the Russia nonsense. Christie replied that he’s the only one among them who had both conducted federal investigations, when he was U.S. attorney in New Jersey, and been the subject of one, the Bridgegate scandal. “There’s absolutely no way you can make this shorter, but there’s lots of ways you can make it longer, so keep quiet, listen to your lawyers, and that’s the way it will go the shortest,” Christie told the president.

Trump cared more about putting on a show than about the more mundane task of governing. There would be no restraining the grievances Trump felt nor curbing the chaos he created. They could only be managed.

Kelly had a deep, nuanced, and personal understanding of the desperation that fueled the migration from Central America northward from his years as commander of the military’s U.S. Southern Command. Though Trump was fixated on erecting a wall, Kelly believed a sea-to-sea physical barrier was not the solution to illegal border crossings. In the secure confines of the Department of Homeland Security’s Washington headquarters, Kelly would snort at Trump’s public pronouncements about a wall with his top deputies. “Oh, come on, it’s bullshit. We’re not building any wall,” Kelly would tell them. He would really get a chuckle out of Trump’s promise to force Mexico to pay for the wall. Confiding in his aides, the secretary would say of his boss, “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

“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 is famously short-tempered, a trait that predated his presidency. A large physical presence even when he is sedate, Trump becomes monstrous when something sets him off. “He is scary,” said Barbara Res, a former Trump Organization executive who worked for Trump between the 1970s and the 1990s. She recalled Trump losing his cool during a tour of renovations at the Plaza hotel shortly after he purchased the crown jewel overlooking Central Park in 1988. Inspecting the knockoff furniture purchased for guest rooms, Trump tried to slide back the doors to an armoire and one of them got caught on a rail. He shook the door, and still it wouldn’t move. So he pulled the door off its hinges and threw it to the floor. Then, inspecting one of the bathrooms, he launched into a tirade at Res over the green Chinese marble. An Italian verde this was not. “You’re no fucking good!” Res recalled Trump yelling at her. “You’re making me look bad! This is cheap shit! Who told you to buy this?” Res had shown Trump three samples of green marble—one for $5, one for $9, and one for $13—and he had picked the cheapest one. “I just stood there and said, ‘Donald, you approved it,’” Res recalled. “I thought he might explode. He was that angry. He was that volatile. His face gets red and his lips get white. He gets in these rages. The screaming. The cursing.”

Trump complained that he wished Cohn were still alive because McGahn wasn’t properly protecting him. “I don’t have a lawyer!” the president screamed. “Where’s my lawyer?” McGahn felt Trump’s fury was aimed at him, although the president appeared to tilt back and forth in his tirade about his “attorney,” appearing to be complaining about the abdication of both his White House counsel and his attorney general. Neither was actually Trump’s attorney, an important constitutional detail lost on the president.

After being torn to shreds by Trump, Sessions huddled in his office with his advisers to draft a resignation letter. He was angry about how the president had treated him. The next morning, May 18, he hand delivered a signed copy to Trump.

As they settled into a work pattern with the president, the lawyers increasingly saw Kushner and Ivanka Trump as problems. The kids wandered in and out of strategy sessions about the investigation, without so much as a knock on the door, asking what was going on. Ivanka would walk in, say, “Hi, Dad,” and the lawyers would stop talking about substance and simply smile at her awkwardly, waiting for her to leave. She and Kushner talked openly about details of the investigation with other staffers, as well as with the president, and privately offered him their own advice. “The kids are always there,” Corallo later explained. “The discomfort is with the kids always being there and talking about the case with other people in the White House, which makes everybody a witness.” The dynamic, he added, “makes it impossible for the White House to function in a normal way.” Bannon and Priebus had warned Kasowitz and Bowe back in May about the problems created by having the president’s daughter and son-in-law working in the White House in the midst of a special counsel investigation. McGahn shared their concerns. But the kids wanted to be part of the action, and they wanted the lawyers on their side. They worked to charm Dowd, who was immediately taken by Ivanka as she profusely thanked him for joining the legal team and remarked about how valuable he would be to her father. Others who interacted with Ivanka found her to be a spoiled princess who had absorbed her father’s worst narcissi...

The lawyers had discovered correspondence suggesting Russians had a special pipeline into the campaign and that some people around Trump knew the Kremlin was trying to help his candidacy. They thought these exchanges were horrifying and certain to show Trump had lied, but did not necessarily pose a legal problem. “Anybody with half a brain realized it’s politically explosive even if legally irrelevant,” recalled one of the lawyers reviewing the material. “It’s just awful stuff.” The emails revealed that Donald Trump Jr. excitedly and naively set up a meeting at Trump Tower in 2016 with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. In the exchanges, Rob Goldstone, a British talent promoter who was helping broker the meeting, relayed that the Russians were offering “to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father. This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

As Lowell saw it, Trump junior, Kushner, and Manafort took a meeting with some goofy folks, including Veselnitskaya, that they shouldn’t have, but no deals were struck and nothing came of it. Kushner had repeatedly joked that the Democrats’ claim that Trump or his advisers might have colluded with Russians was ridiculous because the campaign was so disorganized “we couldn’t even collude with ourselves.”

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.”

Revoking the 2012 Magnitsky Act, a little-known law, was actually one of Putin’s biggest priorities. The U.S. legislation had infuriated Putin because it froze the assets and limited the travel of a circle of powerful Russian businessmen he relied upon as extensions of his own power. In retaliation, Putin had halted American adoptions of Russian children. Whenever Putin raised the issue of Russian adoptions, it was really code for his jihad to revoke the meddlesome U.S. sanctions. But when Veselnitskaya raised the “adoptions” code word with Trump junior at Trump Tower in June 2016, it sailed right over his head.

Trump organized his unorthodox worldview under the simplistic banner of “America First,” but Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn feared his proposals were rash, barely considered, and a danger to America’s superpower standing. They also felt that many of Trump’s impulsive ideas—and their continuing difficulty communicating U.S. interests abroad with the president—stemmed from his lack of familiarity with U.S. history, and even with the map of the world. Cohn had confided to his peers he had been surprised at the many gaps in Trump’s understanding of world affairs.

In his regular intelligence briefings, Trump would ravenously ingest glinting nuggets and latch onto names he recognized or hot spots he knew from the news, but he would not read written materials or have the patience for lectures. So his briefers would huddle around the Resolute Desk and show Trump maps and charts and pictures and videos, as well as “killer graphics,” as CIA director Mike Pompeo described them. One surefire way to get Trump’s attention, they found, was to feature his name somewhere in the text. “That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate,” Pompeo said.

Trump appeared peeved by the schoolhouse vibe but also allergic to the dynamic of his advisers talking at him. His ricocheting attention span led him to repeatedly interrupt the lesson. He heard an adviser say a word or phrase and then seized on that to interject with his take. For instance, the word “base” prompted him to launch in to say how “crazy” and “stupid” it was to pay for bases in some countries.

Before they could debate the Iran deal, Trump erupted to revive another frequent complaint: the war in Afghanistan, which was now America’s longest war. He demanded an explanation for why the United States hadn’t won in Afghanistan yet, now sixteen years after the nation began fighting there in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. Trump unleashed his disdain, calling Afghanistan a “loser war.” That phrase hung in the air and disgusted not only the military leaders at the table but also the men and women in uniform sitting along the back wall behind their principals. They all were sworn to obey their commander in chief’s commands, and here he was calling the war they had been fighting a loser war. “You’re all losers,” Trump said. “You don’t know how to win anymore.”

Trump by now was in one of his rages. He was so angry that he wasn’t taking many breaths. All morning, he had been coarse and cavalier, but the next several things he bellowed went beyond that description. They stunned nearly everyone in the room, and some vowed that they would never repeat them. “I wouldn’t go to war with you people,” Trump told the assembled brass. 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?”

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.

“He’s a fucking moron,” the secretary of state said of the president.

Four days later, July 28, Trump provoked similar outrage from his critics when he addressed a gathering of law enforcement officers at Suffolk County Community College in New York. The president used stark language in describing the violent transnational gang MS-13 to effectively approve of police brutality in combating illegal immigration. He said when police throw “these thugs” into the backs of paddy wagons, “Please don’t be too nice. . . . “When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over, like, don’t hit their head, and they just killed somebody—don’t hit their head,” Trump said. He mimed an officer shielding a suspect’s head from hitting the police vehicle. “I said, ‘You can take the hand away, okay?’” A number of police officers attending Trump’s event chuckled and applauded. The scene led the Suffolk County Police Department to distance itself by tweeting, “We do not and will not tolerate roughing up of prisoners.”

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. Trump was accompanied by a small coterie of aides, including Kelly, communications director Hope Hicks, and staff secretary Rob Porter. But he spent hours each day alone in the cottage watching cable news and reading newspapers.

That weekend, a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis held a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. People marched in a nighttime parade on August 11 holding tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” and on August 12 their daytime celebration of white nationalism turned deadly when one of the white supremacists deliberately drove his car into a crowd of peaceful counterprotesters, killing one woman and injuring twenty-eight others. Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” and initially refused to condemn white supremacy, a stunning ambiguity that drew bipartisan opprobrium. This abdication of moral leadership was one of the lowest points of his presidency and inspired one of his top advisers, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, to do an on-the-record interview with the Financial Times condemning his handling of Charlottesville.

Trump had begun chafing against Kelly’s restrictions, which his deputy, Kirstjen Nielsen, brusquely enforced. She ordered shut the doors of the Oval Office to block staffers from wandering in without appointments; screened the president’s phone calls, making it harder for outside friends to get patched in; and mandated prescreening any papers, including the printouts of news stories about himself that Trump liked to read, before they reached the president’s desk. Just about everything Kelly did ran counter to Trump’s spontaneity, setting the two men on a collision course. Trump was embarrassed by the media narrative that Kelly was “managing” the president with his rigid structures. Kelly instructed White House operators to patch him into many of Trump’s calls so that he could hear what people told the president and vice versa. And Kelly tried to restrict who had direct access. When some of his friends complained that their calls were not connected, Trump sometimes yelled at his personal assistant, Madeleine Westerhout. “People say they’ve not been able to reach me for two weeks,” the president fumed. Westerhout blocked the calls under Kelly’s orders. Worse, though, Trump thought Kelly was acting morally superior. Trump started derisively dubbing him “the church lady” behind his back.

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 lawmakers had been watching Trump’s presidency aghast. They saw Kelly, Mattis, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson as essential guardrails for an erratic president.

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.”

By the time of the November trip to Asia, Trump was openly mocking McMaster. When McMaster arrived in his office for a briefing, Trump would puff up his chest, sit up straight in his chair, and fake shout like a boot camp drill sergeant. In his play, he pretended to be McMaster. “I’m your national security adviser, General McMaster, sir!” Trump would say, trying to amuse the others in the room. “I’m here to give you your briefing, sir!”

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.

Tillerson developed a polite and self-effacing way to manage the gaps in Trump’s knowledge. If he saw the president was completely lost in the conversation with a foreign leader, other advisers noticed, the secretary of state would step in to ask a question. As Tillerson lodged his question, he would reframe the topic by explaining some of the basics at issue, giving Trump a little time to think. Over time, the president developed a tell that he would use to get out of a sticky conversation in which a world leader mentioned a topic that was totally foreign or unrecognizable to him. He would turn to McMaster, Tillerson, or another adviser and say, “What do you think of it?” “There was always the concern when no one was there that he would be maneuvered into a condition or an agreement that he didn’t realize he had committed to,” one former senior adviser said. “They tell him to do something and he does it.”

Oftentimes after meetings with Trump, Kelly and Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis would huddle together—sometimes with McMaster in the national security adviser’s office, sometimes without him—to compare notes on the presidential performance they had just witnessed. In words and sometimes simply facial expressions, they communicated a shared concern: “This guy doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

In the spring of 2017, as aides gathered in the Oval Office one day to brief Trump on upcoming meetings with foreign leaders, they made a passing reference to some foreign government officials who were under scrutiny for corruption, for taking bribes. Trump perked up at the mention of bribes and got rather agitated. He told Tillerson he wanted him to help him get rid of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. “It’s just so unfair that American companies aren’t allowed to pay bribes to get business overseas,” Trump told the group. “We’re going to change that.” Looking at Tillerson, Trump said, “I need you to get rid of that law,” as if the secretary of state had the power to magically repeal an act of Congress. The business developer turned president was angry about the FCPA ostensibly because it restricted his industry buddies or his own company’s executives from paying off foreign g...

“Television is often the guiding force of his day, both weapon and scalpel, megaphone and news feed,” Ashley Parker and Robert Costa wrote in The Washington Post.

“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.” In his back-and-forth with Dowd over the interview in mid-January, Trump continued to fume about the shift in plans. He ...