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

by Philip Rucker

Later that week, Christie was canned by Trump. Technically, he was fired by Bannon, who told Christie he was acting on orders from Kushner, but Trump had allowed the termination. He was replaced as transition chairman by Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Eleven years earlier, Christie had been U.S. attorney in New Jersey and had put Kushner’s father, Charles, head of the family’s real estate business, behind bars for tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign contributions. The case humiliated the Kushner family and left a lasting impression on young Jared.

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.”

Trump approached staffing the administration like a casting call and sought “the look,” a fixation in keeping with the beauty pageants he had once run.

“Rick? Rick who?” Trump asked his wife. “Rick Gates,” she said. Trump lost it. He started yelling. “What the fuck are you doing?” he asked. Trump decided to fire Gates on the spot and turned to McEntee and said, “Johnny, get with Melania. You’re the executive director.”

Ivanka and Kushner were eager to leave their mark on Washington and to serve in the West Wing, a role they thought would burnish the personal brands they had so carefully cultivated back in New York.

White House lawyers were concerned that Ivanka’s business interests created potentially huge ethical quagmires. In addition to her clothing company, she was involved in the Trump International Hotel in Washington, which could easily become a direct conflict with her White House role.

The president had the broad authority to name his relatives to join the White House staff. Antinepotism laws barred a president only from appointing family members to agency jobs, according to a ruling from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Ivanka was envisioning a norm-breaking role for herself. She wanted special treatment and sought to be immune from all of the cumbersome rules for government jobs, which she thought she could achieve by becoming an informal “volunteer” adviser.

During this infamous briefing at Trump Tower, the president-elect rejected what did not confirm his view. This was not how an incoming commander in chief was meant to act.

Trump had praised Comey for having reopened the Hillary Clinton email investigation in the final stretch of the 2016 campaign but now wondered whose team Comey was really on.

He concluded that the national security establishment would never respect him and was determined to sabotage his presidency.

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.

On January 11, just nine days before the inauguration, Trump held a news conference in the pink-marbled lobby of Trump Tower. His advisers pleaded with him once more to accept the intelligence community’s assessment, and he begrudgingly complied. “As far as hacking, I think it was Russia,” Trump told reporters. “But I think we also get hacked by other countries and other people.” Yet Trump also accused the intelligence agencies, without evidence, of leaking the Steele dossier to BuzzFeed, which had published the salacious material on January 10. “That’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do,” he said. “I think it’s a disgrace that information that was false and fake and never happened got released to the public.”

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.”

Separately, Yates issued a memo instructing Justice Department employees not to defend the travel ban because she had concerns it was unconstitutional. Trump and his allies considered this an abuse of her office and fired Yates that afternoon.

Trump was furious. He demanded that his aides root out the sources for the leaks and suggested that reporters needed to go to jail. Trump hated all leaks and made no distinction between West Wing infighting and sensitive national security decisions. Despite repeated efforts by his lawyers to explain, Trump did not understand that leaks of unflattering details of his constant television watching or limited understanding of government were not punishable crimes.

Trump told Comey that he did not believe Flynn had done anything wrong but explained that he still had to let him go. Then he pleaded for leniency, evincing no hesitation as he sought to use his power to let a loyalist off the hook. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump told Comey, according to the FBI director’s contemporaneous notes. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.”

Spicer had been holding the dual roles of press secretary and communications director and was drowning—and not only because of Melissa McCarthy’s devastating portrayal of him on Saturday Night Live. A stout five feet six inches, Spicer did not have “the look” that Trump envisioned representing him on television, nor did the former Republican National Committee spokesman have the renegade pedigree that would have made him a natural representative of the “Make America Great Again” insurgency. Trump dissed Spicer’s briefing performances behind his back. “Sean can’t even complete a sentence,” Trump told other aides. “We’ve got a spokesperson who can’t speak.”

In any normal government, this kind of knee-jerk decision would be madness. But in the Trump White House, this was just another Thursday.

turn on the TV, open the newspapers, and I see stories of chaos—chaos,” Trump said. “Yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.”

seventh full day of his presidency, and Trump was unscripted. The president denied dysfunction in an administration plainly defined by it.

The ineptitude came from the very top. Trump cared more about putting on a show than about the more mundane task of governing.

Tillerson, sixty-four, a former chief executive of ExxonMobil, and Kelly, sixty-six, a retired four-star Marine Corps general, were both men of substance and gravitas. They saw their jobs as capstones on their already decorated careers and had agreed to join the administration out of a patriotic call to duty to help a neophyte president navigate a complicated world. Yet their experience and knowledge mattered little in Trump’s cabinet.

The Mexicans kept their composure, which Kelly and Tillerson considered a gift. Setting aside the craziness from Trump, the Mexican leaders appeared to be working overtime to keep their eyes on the bigger prize: a productive working relationship with the United States, almost in spite of its president.

Kelly had gotten out the message but found a clever way to correct the president: scolding the press, even though they were merely reporting the president’s own words.

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.”

On March 1, 2017, nearly six weeks after President Trump had raised his right hand and swore to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, he struggled to read aloud the words of the founding document. A film crew had come to the White House to record the new president reading a section of the Constitution. Trump chose to participate in the HBO production because he did not want to forgo the chance to be filmed for history, and he knew that as the sitting president he would be the documentary’s most important character.

The president asked for some water, and with no staff bringing any to him, Pelosi handed him a bottle of Aquafina from her purse. “I’ve been into the White House,” Pelosi later said of visits to see previous presidents. “There are always protocols. Here there were no rules, no protocol.” She added, “There’s so much wrong with the whole thing. I’m thinking, isn’t there someone who’s supposed to guard what he’s eating and drinking?” Meanwhile, a White House staffer gave the other crew members instructions about what they could and could not do with the president. The very first rule was for the makeup artist: Do not touch the president’s hair. On his face, light powder only. The next instruction was for the technical crew: Could they make the lighting a little more orange? The president preferred a warm glow on camera. The mention of “orange” struck some in the room as an odd choice. Outside the bubble of the White House, late night TV show hosts and cartoonists had been mocking the perpetually orange hue of Trump’s skin.

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 president, already bristling about his missteps, was getting angry. He chided the crew, accusing them of distracting him. “You know, your paper was making a lot of noise. It’s tough enough,” Trump said. “Every time he stumbled, he manufactured something to blame people,” another person in the room recalled. “He never said, ‘Sorry, I’m messing this up.’ [Other] people would screw up and say, ‘Ohhhh, I’m sorry.’ They would be self-effacing. He was making up excuses and saying there were distracting sounds. . . . He was definitely blaming everyone for his inability to get through it. That was prickly, or childish.” Though stiff, he eventually made it through without any errors.

“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.”

“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.”

McGahn was convinced that some of Trump’s reasoning made sense, despite the angry tone he used to explain it. But other reasons were purely political. McGahn’s mind raced through the risks, knowing the president’s order had the potential not only to be a fool’s errand but also to get Trump into trouble for obstructing justice.

“I just want to do it. I’m the president. Can’t I do it?” Trump asked him.

The president said he had “total” confidence in Sessions.

When a reporter asked Sessions about Trump’s and White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s comments that the attorney general didn’t need to recuse, the attorney general smiled awkwardly and shrugged. “They don’t know the rules, the ethics rules,” he said. “Most people don’t.”

But this was also the moment Trump started to turn on McGahn, one of his earliest backers, for failing to stop the recusal. He began shutting out the very lawyer who had been working thanklessly to protect him from his own dangerous impulses.

“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.”

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.

McGahn, Priebus, and Bannon explained to Trump that Sessions had no choice. But Trump wouldn’t listen. To him, everything was personal, and he saw Sessions’s recusal as a betrayal. The attorney general is the top federal law enforcement official in the country, serving the American people and leading a quasi-independent institution, the Justice Department. In Trump’s mind, however, the attorney general’s job was to protect the president, and by that measure Sessions had failed. “Sessions should be fired,” he said. “I never would have appointed Sessions if I knew that he would have recused himself,” the president said at another point.

Trump’s advisers tried to explain that the attorney general is not the president’s personal attorney. Independence was expected at the Justice Department, and the attorney general could not be seen as the president’s fixer. Bannon told Trump that times had changed. “There’s something that happened between those days of having Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover bringing over the files,” he said. “It’s called Watergate. It just doesn’t work like that anymore.”

In Trump World, people’s fortunes can rise and fall based on the president’s changing moods, but the speed with which Sessions went from confidant to persona non grata was breathtaking.

Sessions invited Trump to testify before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on July 21, 2005, and Sessions was spellbound. He told the other senators on the subcommittee, “Mr. Trump is a breath of fresh air for this Senate,” and praised the star witness for his construction know-how. Sessions then invited Trump to his office to have lunch. Sitting at a conference table in the Russell Senate Office Building, the two men—one practiced discipline as a Sunday school teacher at his family’s Methodist church and kept the Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared,” engraved on a stone on his office desk, the other was a bombastic braggart from Queens who broadcast his sexual exploits on Howard Stern’s radio show and survived life by winging it—bonded over Subway sandwiches.

As McGahn told colleagues, he was never entirely sure when the president barked out a plan whether he was giving orders or merely crowdsourcing an idea by saying it aloud.

Hitler's advisors said the same thing. Weird.

a photographer with the Russian state-run news agency TASS accompanied the Russian contingent and snapped pictures of the jovial, relaxed U.S. president grinning and shaking hands with the Kremlin envoys, images the Russian Foreign Ministry almost immediately posted on Twitter. Trump boasted to the Russians, “I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Then the president told them what he considered the most important fact everyone doing business with him should know: “I’m not under investigation.”

At a black-tie gala the night before the inauguration, Trump profusely thanked Conway for more than holding her own with his adversaries. He called “my Kellyanne” up to the stage for a bow. “She gets on [television] and she does destroy them,” Trump said. “Thank you, baby, thank you.”

Mattis, Cohn, and Tillerson and their aides decided to use maps, graphics, and charts to tutor the president, figuring they would help keep him from getting bored.

"Explain it to me like I'm five"

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.”

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?”