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

by Philip Rucker

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.

Trump’s defenders said those who fear his presidency have it all wrong. What others saw as recklessness, they saw as the courage to make decisions.

“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. The intelligence community because they didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. The Justice Department because it wasn’t doing what he wanted to do. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization because he doesn’t think they pay enough. . . . The press is ‘the enemy of the people.’ So he doesn’t have any regard for institutions, the role they play, why they’re important, and he delights in tearing them down.” Wehner pointed to the British philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke, who wrote in his 1790 pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France, that “the rudest hand” of any mob could annihilate an institution but rebuilding one from the rubble would be far more difficult. “Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”

The president-elect approached the ten-week transition as a casting call for a new season of The Apprentice, the NBC reality show that had made him a household name. Day after day, Trump Tower’s golden-framed revolving door on Fifth Avenue delivered politicians, business leaders, and celebrities, who paraded through the lobby for their appointed visits. They came to pitch themselves for jobs in the administration or to curry favor with the president-elect or simply to get a piece of the action. “It was like walking into the Jabba the Hutt bar in Star Wars,” one Trump adviser said dismissively. “You never knew who was going to crawl in.”

On December 19, the day the Electoral College electors were certified, officially affirming Trump’s victory, the president-elect celebrated over dinner with seven of his top aides: Priebus, Bannon, deputy campaign manager Dave Bossie, communications adviser Hope Hicks, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, social media director Dan Scavino, and Priebus’s deputy, Katie Walsh. The eight of them sat around the table, and when the conversation turned to personnel matters, Trump impressed upon his team the importance of loyalty. As they ticked through candidates for various jobs, the president-elect repeatedly asked, “Is he loyal?” “Is she loyal?”

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. In the days following the January 6 intelligence briefing, Priebus, Kushner, and other advisers pleaded with Trump to publicly acknowledge the unanimous conclusion the spy chiefs had presented to him. They held impromptu interventions in his twenty-sixth-floor office in which they tried to convince him that he could affirm the validity of the intelligence without invalidating or even diminishing his win. “This was part of the normalization process,” one adviser explained. “There was a big effort to get him to be a standard president.” But Trump dug in. Each time his advisers pushed him to accept the intelligence, he grew more agitated. He railed that the intelligence community’s leaders were deceitful and could not be trusted. “I can’t trust anybody,” the president-elect said. On that point, he was seconded by Bannon, who said of the Russia report, “It’s all gobbledygook.” The president-elect said he believed admitting that the Kremlin had hacked Democratic emails would be a “trap.”

Before his inauguration, President-elect Trump did not know that the FBI was secretly conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Michael Flynn, but once he did, it would plant seeds of paranoia that would germinate and take root during his presidency.

Despite his extroverted personality, Trump was a homebody and a creature of comfort. Having campaigned on the idea that the nation had been betrayed by its political class, Trump, now the most powerful man in Washington, did not know whom he could trust. He and his advisers feared from the moment they seized power that the capital’s entrenched interests would scheme to undermine the administration.

Just six weeks in office, Trump believed he was being tormented in ways known and unknown by a group of Obama-aligned critics, federal bureaucrats, intelligence figures, and, most especially, the news media. His angst over the “Deep State,” already well established, was fomenting daily and fueled by rumors and conspiracies.

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.”

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had grown alarmed over the first six months of the Trump administration by gaping holes in the president’s knowledge of history and of the alliances forged in the wake of World War II that served as the foundation of America’s strength in the world. Trump had unnerved trusted friends by dismissing existing relations with Western democracies as worthless, including by questioning the value of NATO, while cultivating friendlier ones with Russia and other authoritarian regimes. He wanted to tear up trade deals to squeeze more out of partners. And he advocated withdrawing troops not only from active theaters like Afghanistan but also from strategic outposts like South Korea, where U.S. forces were helping keep the peace, complaining that the military presence around the world was a waste of billions of dollars. 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.

As with many authoritarian or fascist movements during its early stages it required the support of the public and rely on simple slogans which would capture their imagination and stoke a sense nationalism. Trump struck gold with his "America First" slogan. It would trigger a lot of hostility towards people who were either not native to this country or anyone who did not share their skin pigment.

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. To have a useful discussion with him, the trio agreed, they had to lay a foundation with Trump and create a basic knowledge, a shared language. So on July 20, Mattis invited Trump to the Tank for what he, Tillerson, and Cohn had carefully organized as a tailored tutorial on the state of the world and America’s interests abroad.

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.”

July 24 turned out to be an eventful Monday for Trump. He flew to Mount Hope, West Virginia, to address the annual Boy Scout Jamboree. Some forty thousand boys, ranging in age from twelve to eighteen, assembled under the hot summer sun to hear inspiring words from their president. Onstage in West Virginia, Trump described Washington as a “cesspool”; attacked President Obama; trashed Hillary Clinton; threatened to fire Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price; lambasted the “fake news” media; mocked pollsters; and told a meandering tale about a famous home builder who frequented the Manhattan cocktail party circuit and engaged in “interesting” activities aboard his yacht, which he left to the boys’ imaginations. “Should I tell you?” Trump asked, teasing the crowd. “Oh, you’re Boy Scouts, but you know life. You know life.” As Trump rambled off script, speaking for thirty-five minutes in total, his aides cringed. Standing at attention behind him were two former Boy Scouts in his cabinet, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, but two others, Tillerson and Sessions, were not included on the trip. Zinke wore a scouting uniform, which White House aides mocked as a “Smokey the Bear” costume and said made the former Navy SEAL look absurd. At one point in his remarks, Trump reflected on Boy Scout values, saying, “As the Scouts law says, a Scout is trustworthy, loyal—we could use some more loyalty, I will tell you that.” The boys then chante...

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. Trump’s lack of basic historical knowledge surprised some foreign leaders as well. When he met with President Emmanuel Macron of France at the United Nations back in September 2017, Trump complimented him on the spectacular Bastille Day military parade they had attended together that summer in Paris. Trump said he did not realize until seeing the parade that France had had such a rich history of military conquest. He told Macron something along the lines of “You know, I really didn’t know, but the French have won a lot of battles. I didn’t know.” A senior European official observed, “He’s totally ignorant of everything. But he doesn’t care. He’s not interested.”

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.”

He had long admired Erdogan, attracted to him because of his ruthless rule in Turkey and the ease with which he dispatched political rivals.

Winning a Nobel had been a fixation of Trump’s, in large part because Obama was awarded one in 2009, less than one year into his presidency.

Trump loathed John McCain. Even as the Arizona senator was dying of brain cancer at his Sedona ranch, Trump attacked him at his rallies over his decisive 2017 vote against the GOP’s proposed health-care overhaul. 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.

The night of Christmas Eve, Trump made his first public appearance since the government closed. He and the first lady—who had flown back from Florida for the occasion—participated in an annual presidential tradition: a photo opportunity tracking Santa Claus on military radar. The couple sat in armchairs near a crackling fire in the State Dining Room, which was cleared of furniture, save for two Christmas trees. They talked into separate phones with children calling in as part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command’s Santa tracker. Trump risked blowing Santa’s cover when he was patched through to a seven-year-old girl, Collman Lloyd, calling from her home in South Carolina. “Are you still a believer in Santa?” Trump asked. “Yes, sir,” Lloyd replied. “Because at 7, that’s marginal, right?” the president said. Lloyd later told The Post and Courier that she had never heard the word “marginal” before.

Afraid of spooking the stock markets or impairing his reelection chances, Trump lied about the lethality of the virus. He insisted the contagion was under control and would soon magically disappear. Of course, the coronavirus was already spinning out of control in many of America’s cities and towns and stayed very much present throughout Trump’s fourth year in office. By fall, as voters decided whether Trump deserved another four years, more than 225,000 people had died in the United States, a higher death toll than any other nation had reported. The most powerful nation in the world held 4 percent of the world’s population but had suffered 25 percent of the world’s coronavirus deaths. The president had failed, and the consequences were catastrophic.

“The most important thing you ask for in a president is that willingness to assume responsibility,” explained the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “Why is it that most of the presidents we remember the best had moments of crisis, whether it’s George Washington or Abraham Lincoln or Franklin Roosevelt? It’s because they were able to communicate to the people what the crisis was, to make the people feel inspired to be part of working it out through empathy, taking responsibility and setting an example, and then to mobilize every resource in the country.” Trump did none of those things. His standard tool kit for getting out of trouble—bluster, manipulation, and deceit—fell far short in handling the pandemic. He couldn’t even keep himself safe. Trump’s false air of invincibility was vanquished when, thirty-two days before the election, the seventy-four-year-old with comorbidities, including obesity and high cholesterol, tested positive for the coronavirus.

Trump had come 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 had tried to tutor him about the three branches of government and the constitutional balance of powers. They tried to temper his rash impulses. They warned him that some of his ideas were illegal. 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, growing emboldened to make his own decisions and to enforce them. His solipsism was his undoing.

The president had tried to bend beleaguered public servants to his will. Some felt paralyzed to act, even in the face of this great peril they had been trained to battle, because they might anger the king, risking a tweetstorm or an abrupt firing. America’s mighty institutions were not strong enough to overcome Trump’s perversion of the government’s responsibility in a crisis. Trump was motivated to help not the American people but himself—specifically, to perpetuate his power. His response to the pandemic was almost entirely fashioned with his reelection in mind. The virus did not discriminate among red states and blue states, but the president did, sparring with Democratic governors over emergency resources and blaming them for his own administration’s shortcomings and failures.