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

by Philip Rucker

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.

Trump framed the 2020 election as a referendum not merely on his performance in office but also on “the un-American conduct” of investigators. “This election is a verdict on whether we want to live in a country where the people who lose an election refuse to concede and spend the next two years trying to shred our Constitution and rip your country apart.” The crowd roared in approval.

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.

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 Joe Biden, a leading 2020 Democratic challenger, and lucrative fees his son, Hunter, collected from a Ukrainian energy firm. Speaking in the language of crime bosses, Trump reminded Zelensky that the United States had been “very, very good to Ukraine,” a reference to years of military aid that helped Ukraine protect itself from its aggressive neighbor, Russia. Trump didn’t mention that he had personally blocked the most recently approved U.S. aid package, nearly $400 million. He didn’t have to; a U.S. diplomat had warned Zelensky’s government that Trump wanted something before releasing the funds. “I would like you to do us a favor though,” Trump added. He asked Zelensky to work with Rudy Giuliani as well as Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the Bidens and look into an unproven conspiracy theory—which Trump embraced—that his perceived enemies had fabricated evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. “I would like you to get to the bottom of it,” Trump said. Just like that, Trump effectively asked the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The brazen request—an apparent attempt to leverage taxpayer dollars to extort Ukraine for opposition research on a domestic political opponent—revealed what little Trump had learned ...

The next day, July 26, one of the White House aides who had listened to the call confided in a CIA official that Trump’s comments to Zelensky had been “crazy,” “frightening,” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security.” The aide added that “the President had clearly committed a criminal act.”

He had concluded he was above the law, after dodging accountability for flouting rules and withstanding the Mueller investigation. He had grown so confident of his own power, and cocksure that Republicans in Congress would never dare break with him, that he thought he could do almost anything. The result was a historic test for America’s institutions and the very durability of its democracy.

Trump came into office uncertain about how to operate the machinery of government and tolerated to some degree the efforts of his top advisers to influence him. John Kelly, Jim Mattis, Don McGahn, Rex Tillerson, and others tried to tutor him about the three branches of government and the constitutional balance of powers. They tried to temper his rash impulses. They tried to coach him about his sacred duty as leader of the world’s most powerful nation to always put country first. Over time, however, Trump had systematically dispensed with these human guardrails.

Trump had grown increasingly emboldened to make his own decisions and to enforce them. “It’s very easy actually to work with me. You know why it’s easy? Because I make all the decisions,” Trump quipped on September 12, reflecting on John Bolton’s abrupt exit as national security adviser.

By the fall of 2019, Trump was acting as if he were convinced of his own invincibility, believing that he could wield the vast powers of his office in pursuit of his personal and political goals without accountability. He genuinely believed that his interests came first and that, as president, he was above the law. Trump had good reason to think so, having sidestepped any legal punishment after the Mueller investigation produced extensive evidence that he had worked to block and thwart the Russia probe. Trump skirted penalties for a battery of other offenses, ranging from past racist, misogynistic, or otherwise bigoted comments to accusations of self-dealing in violation of the emoluments provision of the Constitution to blocking Congress’s ability to conduct oversight.

As the legislative branch scrutinized his actions, Trump looked in the mirror and saw no wrongdoing. Rather, he nursed a deep and inescapable sense of persecution and self-pity, casting himself as a victim in a warped reality and alleging that Democrats and the media were conspiring to perpetuate hoaxes, defraud the public, and stage a coup. This mind-set followed the historical pattern of authoritarian leaders creating a cult of victimization to hold on to power and to justify their repressive agendas.

As autumn bore on, the question facing the Congress and indeed the country was not whether Trump had done anything wrong. The emerging fact pattern plainly showed a quid pro quo with Ukraine and a White House scheme to cover it up. The question was who might enforce the Constitution. When Alexander Hamilton wrote the two essays in The Federalist devoted to the idea of impeachment, Trump was the kind of president he had in mind—a populist demagogue who would foment frenzy, pander to prejudices, feed off chaos, and secretly betray the American people in the accumulation of power—according to Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow. Two hundred thirty-two years after Hamilton put pen to paper, Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine forced a reckoning. Would the system the Founding Fathers imagined withstand the pressures of this moment? Or would Trump prevail yet again, another pursuit of justice stymied by his sheer political force and the fealty of his followers? As Congress considered impeaching President Richard Nixon in 1974, most Republicans defended their president’s claim that he was the victim of a political witch hunt. But the decision of one Republican congressman marked a turning point. Maryland’s Lawrence J. Hogan became the first Republican to side with the Democrats and vote for all three articles of impeachment against Nixon. He said he wished “with all my heart” he could say the president had not committed impeachable offenses, but he knew the truth was that Nixon ha...