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

by Philip Rucker

The parallels between Porter and the president were obvious. More than a dozen women have accused Trump of sexual assault and harassment, and he denied each claim—although he was infamously recorded in 2005 bragging to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush about grabbing women by their genitals against their will. In addition, the Porter case coincided with the burgeoning Stormy Daniels scandal, which had been flaring since January when The Wall Street Journal first reported hush-money payments to the porn star. Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, had been paid $130,000 in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign by Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime personal attorney and fixer, in exchange for her silence about a sexual encounter she claimed to have had with Trump in 2006, during his first year of marriage to Melania.

Kelly had been concerned with Kushner’s high level of access without a permanent clearance and was under pressure in the wake of the Porter scandal to overhaul the process for all White House clearances. On February 16, the chief of staff announced that he would be enforcing rigorous new rules that would prevent some officials with interim clearances from accessing top secret information. An aide briefed on Kelly’s thinking told The Washington Post that the chief of staff knew his policy put a “bull’s eye” on Kushner but that the rules were designed for national security and could not be ignored.

Much like Trump, Lewandowski was crude, combative, and cocky. During the campaign, he was charged with misdemeanor battery for grabbing the arm of a reporter. Kelly thought Lewandowski was nothing but trouble, a Trump sycophant and palace infighter who revved up the president’s riskier instincts and profited off their relationship with a lucrative consulting business. Just a couple months earlier, Kelly and Lewandowski had clashed in front of the president and other advisers during a meeting about political strategy. Lewandowski delivered a fatalistic outlook on the 2018 midterm elections: “You’re going to get fucking crushed. You guys don’t have your shit together.” He proceeded to fault Kelly, as well as White House political director Bill Stepien, for deficiencies in the political operation and congressional outreach. He argued that the staff was not being strategic enough in using the powers of incumbency to build a foundation for the midterms, now less than one year away.

The intelligence agencies were on guard in part because, as the Post reported on February 27, they had intercepted private conversations of leaders in China, Israel, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates talking about the ease with which they could manipulate Kushner. Some of these foreign leaders described Kushner as naive and easily pushed; others said his financial debts and search for refinancing for an underwater Manhattan skyscraper were one route that made him vulnerable to pressure.

But others in the administration felt unrelenting pressure from Kushner and Ivanka. The president’s daughter tried to prod McGahn to intervene, something she later denied to associates, but when the White House counsel didn’t deliver what she wanted, Ivanka whispered to her father and to other White House aides that McGahn was a “leaker” and not to be trusted. “Leaker” was about the worst red-flag name you could give someone in the presence of the bull named Donald Trump.

Not long after, Trump called Tillerson from Air Force One as he was flying to California for a fund-raiser. He spoke as if they were friends catching up on their respective days. “Hi, Rex,” the president said. “I hope you saw all the good things I said about you on TV.” Tillerson had not had time to turn on a television, much less to sit and watch one. He had no idea what Trump was talking about, but the president had complimented Tillerson to reporters earlier. “I actually got along well with Rex,” Trump told them, “but really it was a different mind-set, a different thinking.” “You should be very happy,” Trump told Tillerson. “You never really wanted to do this job. Now you can retire and go back to your ranch and relax.” Tillerson found this summary surreal. He responded without emotion. “Yes, Mr. President,” he said. “This will be great,” Trump said. “Yes, Mr. President,” Tillerson replied, robotically. “Okay, so I’m back Friday,” Trump said. “Come by the Oval and we’ll take a picture and I’ll sign it.” “Yes,” Tillerson said. “Sure, Mr. President.” They hung up.

Tillerson would stay on the job until March 31, to help ensure an orderly transition, but he never went to the White House to take his picture with the president. Nearly a year would pass before he and Kelly spoke again.

Later that Monday, March 19, in a prep session ahead of the Putin call, Trump again told his advisers that he wanted to give Putin an attaboy on his election victory. McMaster had resigned himself to the high likelihood that Trump would do whatever he wanted on the call. This is how it went with Trump. “The call was Trump’s idea, and his whole point was to congratulate Putin,” said one White House adviser. “H.R. couldn’t stop him.”

Ryan told Sekulow what he knew at that hour, which was only the basics about the raid of the three locations, including that agents had to bust open the door of Cohen’s law office in Rockefeller Center because no one was there. Later, Trump would get the details slightly wrong when he said agents “broke into” Cohen’s office, when they had a proper court-approved warrant to search the premises. Over the next hour, Ryan would learn worrisome new details about the purpose of the multipronged raid. He called the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan asking to speak to the prosecutor in charge of the Cohen matter and got the gist of the warrant. Ryan immediately realized the magnitude: investigators had opened a new front in their investigation of the president. The warrant specified that Cohen turn over all of his communications with Trump going back several years, as well as records related to payments Cohen negotiated with two women who had claimed extramarital affairs with Trump—Daniels and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate. Because Cohen had counted himself as Trump’s personal lawyer for most of that time, their communications would normally be sacred and protected by attorney-client privilege. But that protection was useless if prosecutors could show the communications were part of a criminal scheme, which was likely the case for Cohen’s hush-money payments to porn stars and models on Trump’s behalf.

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...

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. Then Trump put his hand in his suit pocket, took two Starburst candies out, threw them on the table in front of Merkel, and said, “Here, Angela. Don’t say I never give you anything,” according to Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group.

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. One longtime Trump adviser summed up the president’s mind-set about the North Korea talks: “He looks at it like he looks at everything, which is, this is another guy who is the mouse that roared, who’s tied his tail to China, to whom Donald Trump could be the messiah. Why? Because in Donald J. Trump’s mind, he thinks that he, the president, has the ability to figure out a way to give [Kim] what he wants and to get what he wants. It’s just another deal to him.”

When Trump first met Kim at the lush Capella hotel on the resort island of Sentosa, he shook the dictator’s hand for thirteen seconds, patted him on the back, and led him down a rich red carpet. Kim was a pariah, arguably the world’s greatest abuser of human rights, and committed to nuclear armament. But Trump threw Kim a party, showering him with respect and declaring himself honored to be in his presence. The summit was carefully staged to put both leaders on equal footing, which normalized the authoritarian Kim. The spectacle was so jarring that even Kim acknowledged the oddity. He was overheard telling Trump, through an interpreter, “Many people will think of this as a form of fantasy . . . a science fiction movie.”

Trump’s nearly nine-hour day with Kim epitomized the president’s reality-show diplomacy. The summit was short on substance but heavy on superlatives. Trump called Kim “very talented,” “very smart,” and a “very good negotiator.” He said the North Korean people were “very gifted” and their country’s future “very, very bright.” And he claimed personal credit for staving off a North Korean nuclear attack on Seoul, the South Korean capital, which is just thirty-five miles from the border and home to about ten million people. “This is really an honor for me to be doing this, because I think, you know, potentially, you could have lost, you know, 30, 40, 50 million people,” Trump said.

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. After watching clips from North Korean state television, Trump noted the female news anchor’s sycophancy and joked that she was even more lavish in her praise of the dear leader than Fox News hosts were of Trump. Eliot A. Cohen, a neoconservative who served as a top State Department official in the George W. Bush administration and was a critic of Trump’s candidacy, said in the aftermath that the Singapore summit was “just the latest manifestation” of Trump’s authoritarianism. He “has classic traits of the authoritarian leader. The one that’s always struck me most is this visceral instinct of people’s weaknesses and a corresponding desire to be seen as strong and respected and admired,” Cohen said. He added, “We’ve been very fortunate that the institutions have contained him.”

At his news conference, Trump revealed he had been disappointed with the media’s lack of coverage of him scolding the Europeans to pay more. “I was surprised that you didn’t pick it up; it took until today,” he said, as if his morning threat were a stunt orchestrated to generate headlines. Xavier Bettel, the prime minister of Luxembourg, had reminded reporters that Trump had wireless internet on Air Force One and could reverse his support for NATO in a single tweet once he left Brussels. When a reporter asked Trump if he might attack NATO on Twitter after departing, just as he had maligned Trudeau following the G7 in Quebec, the president replied, “No, that’s other people that do that. I don’t. I’m very consistent. I’m a very stable genius.”

On July 16, Trump and Putin spent two hours meeting alone, joined only by their interpreters, inside Finland’s neoclassical Presidential Palace along Helsinki’s glistening waterfront. Unlike in most foreign leader meetings, there was no note taker to compile an official record of what was said or what promises were made. What came next was historically unprecedented. As he held forth with Putin for a forty-six-minute joint news conference, Trump refused to endorse the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that the Russian government had tried to sabotage the U.S. election to help him win. In fact, he said he took the word of Putin over the collective assessment of his own intelligence agencies. Trump demurred when Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press asked, “Would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016? And would you warn him to never do it again?” “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.” Trump then raised a series of questions about Hillary Clinton’s emails before adding, “I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”

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.” The Arizona Republican senator added, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”

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...

As Tumulty sat in the waiting room transcribing McRaven’s voice-mail recording, she felt certain it deserved more than a few quotes in a news story. A national military hero had called the president a national embarrassment and a poor role model for America’s children. He even compared Trump to Joseph McCarthy. She consulted with her editors, and they agreed they should publish McRaven’s impromptu speech word for word as an opinion piece.

Before Trump, this government aide had always felt the presidency had a kind of magic. No matter which party the president came from, he bore the weight of history on his shoulders, with the seriousness it deserved. But not anymore. “He’s ruined that magic,” this aide said of Trump. “The disdain he shows for our country’s foundation and its principles. The disregard he has for right and wrong. Your fist clenches. Your teeth grate. The hair goes up on the back of your neck. I have to remind myself I said an oath to a document in the National Archives. I swore to the Constitution. I didn’t swear an oath to this jackass.”

After McCain passed away on August 25, 2018, at the age of eighty-one, Trump stubbornly rejected his aides’ suggestion to issue a statement about his death. The White House briefly flew the American flag at full staff, even though Washington protocol dictated that it remain at half-staff until the senator was laid to rest. On September 1, McCain’s memorial service at Washington National Cathedral served not only as a memorial for an American hero but also as a stinging rebuke of Trump and Trumpism. The cathedral rang with paeans to bipartisanship, compromise, and civility in a melancholy last hurrah for all that now seemed lost. One by one, mourners celebrated elements of McCain’s epic life—basic decency and morality; common values that transcended ideology, class, or race; service to nation over self—that Trump most starkly lacked. Meghan McCain, the late senator’s thirty-three-year-old daughter, delivered the rawest repudiation: “We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness. The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”

“Do we succumb to tyranny of radio talk show hosts? We have two talk radio hosts who influenced the president. That’s tyranny, isn’t it?” an exasperated Bob Corker, who was retiring from the Senate, told reporters at the Capitol. “This is a juvenile place we find ourselves. The reason we’re here is that we have a couple talk radio hosts that get the president spun up.” Plunging into a government shutdown just before Christmas with no plan to reopen it was classic Trump. It was a decision made in duress. “It was a suicide mission,” one of Trump’s former White House advisers said. “There was no off-ramp. There was no way the Democrats would just back down. There was no way to win. It was done based on impulse and emotion and dogmatism and a visceral reaction rather than a strategic calculation. That’s indicative of a lot of the presidency and who he is.”

Trump broke norms in his speech to the troops. He criticized their commanders for failing to meet his deadlines to withdraw from Syria and other conflicts. He told a number of falsehoods, including that troops had not received a raise in more than ten years until he recently authorized a 10 percent raise; in fact, troops had received raises every year for decades, and the one Trump authorized was 2.6 percent.

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. On January 4, Trump showed he was in charge when he dressed down Mulvaney in front of congressional leaders from both parties during a White House meeting to negotiate a budget compromise to reopen the government. Just as Mulvaney was trying to nail down specifics on border wall funding, Trump interrupted his chief of staff. “You just fucked it all up, Mick,” Trump said, according to Axios. The president rebuffed Mulvaney and hit the reset button. Needless to say, there was no deal.

After Pelosi became House Speaker the first week of January, the threat of congressional investigators bearing down on Trump became real. Democratic committee chairmen were readying a vast array of probes, from Trump’s efforts to thwart the Russia investigation and his secret communications with Vladimir Putin to the president’s tax returns and bank records to alleged abuse in the White House security clearance process and the separation of migrant children from their families at the border.

After two years of being told no by Mattis, Trump considered Shanahan precisely the kind of replacement he had in mind.

Working closely with Davis, Cohen cataloged dozens of stories he was ready to share about Trump that would spotlight the president’s dishonesty and depravity. Davis believed there were many words that described Trump: “insane,” “sociopath,” “monster,” and “cruel.” But he wanted to hear Cohen walk through the characteristics he had witnessed firsthand.

As Cohen studied his anecdotes and memories, he sorted them into three categories that he believed best described Trump: racist, con man, and cheat. In telephone calls and emailed exchanges of drafts, Cohen worked with Davis to structure the opening statement he would deliver before Cummings’s committee. Davis had two requirements for his client: Cohen had to acknowledge his regret and shame over what he had done in service to Trump, and he had to state unequivocally that he was not seeking and would not accept a pardon from the president. Together these two assertions would help address the skepticism many lawmakers felt about Cohen, a convicted felon who previously lied before Congress.

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 released his grades or SAT scores. Cohen offered testimony that drove at the heart of Mueller’s investigation. He said Trump directed negotiations over the proposed Trump Tower in Moscow, which continued throughout the 2016 campaign, and lied to the public about it. Cohen also alleged that then-candidate Trump knew that Roger Stone had spoken with Julian Assange in advance of WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic National Committee emails.

The most chilling part of Cohen’s testimony, however, was what he said about Trump’s character. Cohen argued that Trump ran for office “to make his brand great, not to make our country great,” and that as president he has become “the worst version of himself.” Cohen described Trump as far more craven, dishonest, and racist in private than he lets on in public. He said Trump “speaks in code, and I understand the code,” as if he were a mob boss giving orders to his henchman. Cohen said working for Trump was “intoxicating,” adding that he became so “mesmerized” by his boss that he routinely did things that he knew were wrong. And he said his experience should be a cautionary tale for Republican members of Congress. “I did the same thing that you’re d...

Here again Trump accepted the words of a foreign autocrat, just as he had believed Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman did not order the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and as he had believed Russian president Vladimir Putin did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Trump said that Kim “felt very badly,” but claimed to only know about Warmbier’s case after the fact. “He tells me that he didn’t know about it,” Trump said, “and I take him at his word.”

The number of migrants detained in February, seventy-six thousand, marked a twelve-year high for illegal border crossings. The arrivals deluged U.S. border agents.

Now that the midterms were over, Trump and his political advisers cared little about the humanitarian crisis of immigrants. “They said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you have a bunch of kids to take care of,’” a senior national security official recalled. “They [just] want the illegals to stop coming in.”

“There were people in the group who were pushing for a clearer expression of the president’s misconduct and why they were not charging it,” said one person who talked with members of the team. They believed they “definitely had enough to indict any other human being.”

Though they had virtually no chance of bringing the accused to trial in the United States, Mueller’s team had indicted thirteen Russian nationals who led a troll farm to flood U.S. social media with phony stories to sow division and help Trump. They also indicted twelve Russian military intelligence officers who hacked internal Democratic Party emails and leaked them to hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The Trump campaign had no known role in either operation.

The meeting then turned to the logistics and technicalities of the report itself. Mueller said the report would be lengthy and written in two volumes: the first, covering Russian interference, would clock in at about 140 pages, while the second, on obstruction, would be about 120 pages. Mueller and his deputies explained that the report would contain an executive summary. “We tried to take the facts as we saw them,” Mueller said.

On Friday, March 15, at 7:41 a.m., Trump began a three-day Twitter spree in which he would post sixty-three missives by the end of the weekend. The Justice Department chiefs kept Trump and his lawyers in the dark, and in a series of tweets Trump wrote that Mueller “should never have been appointed and there should be no Mueller Report. This was an illegal & conflicted investigation in search of a crime. Russian Collusion was nothing more than an excuse by the Democrats for losing an Election that they thought they were going to win.” Then came his conclusion: “THIS SHOULD NEVER HAPPEN TO A PRESIDENT AGAIN!”

Few media narratives got under Trump’s skin more than the impression that his staff was managing him, and whenever this happened, Trump found a way to prove that he could not be managed. He vented about it to Corey Lewandowski, one of his trusted outside political advisers. “These guys are going to tell me how to communicate?” Trump said. “They’re going to tell me when I’m going to do a rally and when I’m not?”

The 448-page report was a breathtaking catalog of presidential scheming and misconduct. Volume 2 detailed ten events that the special counsel scrutinized for possible obstruction of justice by Trump. It was not just a historical record. It also provided a dense legal analysis of the evidence, the kind of assessment prosecutors would ordinarily make to determine whether to bring criminal charges. 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.

The report was classic Mueller: brimming with damning facts, but stripped of advocacy or judgment, and devoid of a final conclusion.

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.

Barr’s letter appeared to the uninformed reader to say the opposite of what they painstakingly laid out in their report. For example, Barr wrote that none of Trump’s actions, “in our judgment,” were done with corrupt intent. Actually, the report’s authors had detailed four episodes in which they identified substantial evidence of Trump’s intent to thwart the probe. What had once been Trump’s defiant mantra of “No collusion! No obstruction!” instantly became a rallying cry for his reelection, lines he and his surrogates repeated on every media platform. Never mind what the Mueller team actually had found. Trump was winning the spin war.

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. We communicated that concern to the Department on the morning of March 25. There is now public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigations.” The letter said that the introductions and executive summaries of the report “accurately summarize this Office’s work and conclusions,” and included those redacted documents as attachments. “Release at this time would alleviate the misunderstandings that have arisen and would answer congressional and public questions about the nature and outcome of our investigation.” Barr’s office did not receive the letter until March 28. When they first read it, the attorney general and his team thought, “Holy shit! What is this? Give us a break.” To them, it was an uncharacteristically passive-aggressive move by Mueller. On April 30, the eve of Barr’s Senate testimony, the correspondence was reported by Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky of The Washington Post. At his hearing the next ...

The next day, April 5, Nielsen met up with Trump on the president’s tour of a section of new border wall in Calexico, California. Shortly before a pair of media appearances there, Trump told Nielsen, “Go tell them we’re full. We can’t take any more [migrants].” Nielsen declined. “That’s not a legal reason,” she told the president. Being “full” didn’t justify denying people legal asylum. Trump then pulled aside Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, for a chat out of Nielsen’s earshot. At a roundtable session with border security officials, Trump said himself what he had asked Nielsen to say: “The system is full. Can’t take you anymore. Whether it’s asylum, whether it’s anything you want, it’s illegal immigration. We can’t take you anymore. We can’t take you. Our country is full. Our area is full. The sector is full. Can’t take you anymore, I’m sorry. Can’t happen. So turn around. That’s the way it is.” When Trump toured the border wall in Calexico for his second media appearance, he did not praise Nielsen.

“Sir, can we agree on what we are trying to accomplish?” she asked. But they couldn’t. He was tuning her out. The conversation escalated. Trump made it clear he wanted her gone. “Sir, why don’t I give you my resignation,” Nielsen asked the president. Trump accepted. He wanted a change. “But I want you to be in my administration elsewhere,” he added. Nielsen didn’t respond to that offer, but returned to the substance. “Okay, but can I explain how you can fix this, whoever does it?” she asked. Trump didn’t want to hear it. “Why don’t we do a week of transition?” Nielsen offered. Trump agreed and the meeting was over. Within minutes, as Nielsen was being driven home a few miles away in Alexandria, the president tweeted, “Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen will be leaving her position, and I would like to thank her for her service. . . . I am pleased to announce that Kevin McAleenan, the current U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner, will become Acting Secretary for @DHSgov. I have confidence that Kevin will do a great job!” 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 se...

Trump seethed in particular over McGahn’s extensive cooperation with Mueller, which was clear given his ubiquity in the report’s sourcing. Giuliani attacked McGahn in a series of media interviews and argued that the White House counsel should have resigned if he thought what Trump was doing violated the law. Other Trump advisers said they believed McGahn was being singled out unfairly by some in Trump’s orbit because of his past tensions with key figures, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. One of these advisers told Robert Costa of The Washington Post, “If anything, Don saved this presidency from the president. If Don had actually gone through with what the president wanted, you would have had a constitutional crisis. The president’s ego is hurt, but he’s still here.”

If Mueller believed Congress ought to pursue impeachment, he did almost nothing to help achieve that outcome. By refusing to answer questions about his findings until his July 24 House testimony, by offering up a 448-page report and expecting the public or even members of Congress would have the attention span to absorb its lawyerly analysis, Mueller fumbled the moment. He was too pure and too invested in the norms of an institution of yore, the Justice Department, whose core values and the public servants who upheld them had been under assault for two straight years. “His silence, his telling people to just read the report, has allowed a guy like Trump and a disappointing guy like Barr to come in, and Barr knows Mueller and he knows that Mueller won’t fight back,” said Frank Figliuzzi, the former Mueller FBI colleague. The special counsel, he concluded, “ended up getting played. But I don’t mean that he should’ve done something different because it might turn out that history will look at Mueller and say the guy brought faith and credibility back to institutions and Barr and Trump could be dismissed by history. We don’t know where this is going. But in the moment, it looks like he was suckered and he lost the fight.”

That night, Trump swooped in to officially launch his reelection campaign. As he was aboard Air Force One en route to central Florida, the capacity crowd of roughly twenty thousand inside the Amway Center was rapturous. Paula White, a pastor and televangelist who said she had a nearly two-decade relationship with the Trump family, delivered the opening prayer. “I come to you in the name of Jesus,” White told the crowd. Quoting from scripture, she said, “We’re not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against principalities, powers, against rulers of darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. So right now let every demonic network that has aligned itself against the purpose, against the calling of President Trump, let it be broken, let it be torn down in the name of Jesus, let the counsel of the wicked be spoiled right now. According to Job 12:17, I declare that President Trump will overcome every strategy from hell and every strategy from the enemy—every strategy—and he will fulfill his calling and his destiny.” In White’s telling, naturally, Trump’s calling was to win reelection. And in interviews with people in the crowd, it became clear that Trump’s followers took his word as gospel. The Democrats? Liars and sore losers. The Russia investigation? A witch hunt. Mueller’s conclusion? No collusion. No obstruction. Total and complete exoneration. “The whole thing was based on rumors—unsubstantiated, made-up facts,” said Karen Osborne, a sixty-two-...