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

by Philip Rucker

This was a president who had been labeled a “draft dodger” for avoiding service in the Vietnam War under questionable circumstances. Trump was a young man born of privilege and in seemingly perfect health: six feet two inches with a muscular build and a flawless medical record. He played several sports, including football. Then, in 1968 at age twenty-two, he obtained a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels that exempted him from military service just as the United States was drafting men his age to fulfill massive troop deployments to Vietnam.

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.

Others at the table noticed Trump’s stream of venom had taken an emotional toll. So many people in that room had gone to war and risked their lives for their country, and now they were being dressed down by a president who had not. They felt sick to their stomachs. Tillerson told others he thought he saw a woman in the room silently crying. He was furious and decided he couldn’t stand it another minute. His voice broke into Trump’s tirade, this one about trying to make money off U.S. troops. “No, that’s just wrong,” the secretary of state said. “Mr. President, you’re totally wrong. None of that is true.” Tillerson’s father and great-uncle had both been combat veterans, and he was deeply proud of their service. “The men and women who put on a uniform don’t do it to become soldiers of fortune,”

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

Others noticed that the president was obsessed with knocking down as inferior what his predecessors had built. “His whole DNA is, whatever anybody else has done is stupid, I’m smarter, and therefore that’s why he goes around breaking glass all the time,” one senior Republican senator recalled. “He’s torn a lot of things up. He likes to break things. But what has he put together yet?”

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.

The white supremacist rally occurred during the time that cities around the country, from Annapolis to New Orleans to Louisville, were removing monuments to the Confederacy. Trump opposed what was happening. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” he tweeted on August 17. Trump had told his aides many times that summer, “This is a shame. They’re destroying our heritage. This is ridiculous.”

Some Trump loyalists had come to consider the West Wing’s chaos a ladder for personal ambition, back channeling to the president and influencing the government in ways beyond the scope of their positions. But once their wings were clipped, they sought to undermine Kelly, in ways the new chief of staff did not necessarily see.

“When you take Fallujah, you know the incoming is coming directly in front of you because you can see it,” one Trump adviser explained. “When you’re in Washington, it’s coming from everywhere. . . . You don’t know if I’m killing you from inside the tent or outside the tent.”

Tracking “the dump” was in some ways far more important to establishing proof of criminal interference in the election. Another GRU division, Unit 74455, pushed out the material after creating two phony personas: the website DCLeaks, which hosted the hacked goodies, and the social media figure Guccifer 2.0, who pretended to be an individual hacker and tried to communicate with journalists and other key influencers. Tracing the hackers’ theft was like chasing a house burglar. “It’s like, the house was robbed, some jewelry was taken,” said one person familiar with the work. “The bracelet that was taken is now in this pawnshop on the corner. We found the same bracelet. We’ve got a match!”

Tillerson had high hopes for the meeting—even though, back at the White House, Trump was known to have affected an Indian accent to imitate Modi, a sign of disrespect for the prime minister.

“It’s not like you’ve got China on your border,” Trump said, seeming to dismiss the threat to India. Modi’s eyes bulged out in surprise. Aides noticed him giving a sidelong glance at Tillerson, who accompanied Trump as part of the U.S. delegation. The Indian prime minister considered Tillerson among the best-versed Americans on the region’s security challenges, and together they had been plotting a new partnership. Tillerson’s eyes flashed open wide at Trump’s comment, but he quickly put his hand to his brow, appearing to the Indian delegation to attempt not to offend the president as well as to signal to Modi that he knew this statement was nuts.

“I think he left that meeting and said, ‘This is not a serious man. I cannot count on this man as a partner,’” one Trump aide recalled. After that meeting, “the Indians took a step back” in their diplomatic relations with the United States.

McMaster had difficulty holding the president’s attention. Trump, meanwhile, would get annoyed with what he considered McMaster’s lecturing style. The president felt his national security adviser was always determined to try to “teach me something.” Indeed, Trump constantly shifted and grumbled when staff were trying to bring him up to speed on a topic, immediately threatened by the notion that his knowledge wasn’t sufficient if he needed experts. 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.”

In March, McMaster was in the Oval Office briefing Trump on the visit of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, a favorite foil for the president. Trump got so impatient that he stood up and walked into an adjoining bathroom, left the door ajar, and instructed McMaster to raise his voice and keep talking. It was unclear if the strange scene was a reflection of Trump’s feelings about McMaster or Merkel or both.

As one of Trump’s confidants said, “I call the president the two-minute man. The president has patience for a half page.” But McMaster understandably resented the fact that Trump was reading Porter’s version of CliffsNotes. Porter and Reince Priebus suggested an alternative approach: McMaster could deliver verbal briefings to Trump. Nothing in writing. “Everyone agreed we needed to stop giving the president paper to read,” one former National Security Council staffer recalled. “H.R. was uncomfortable with this. McMaster kept saying, ‘How are we not going to give the president any papers?’”

McMaster and his deputies were mindful of history and fearful of failing to document a risk or of missing an important alarm. President George W. Bush had faced withering criticism when it was discovered that in the summer of 2001 he had been briefed on intelligence suggesting Osama bin Laden planned to orchestrate terror attacks using airplanes. Bush had actually received briefing books on this, but the intelligence did not prompt any corrective action. Eliminating briefing books for the president seemed to tempt disaster. McMaster came up with yet another plan that the staff put into full effect in September: note cards with bulleted factoids.

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!”

Then Trump would ridicule McMaster further by describing the topic of the day and deploying a series of large, complex phrases to indicate how boring McMaster’s briefing was going to be. The National Security Council staff were deeply disturbed by Trump’s treatment of their boss. “The president doesn’t fire people,” said one of McMaster’s aides. “He just tortures them until they’re willing to quit.” The cruelty also was uncomfortable for Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Kelly, and other advisers to watch. Kelly was weary of McMaster’s inability to take the hint that Trump was done listening. One day in the fall, Trump was meeting with a group of his advisers in the Oval Office, and Kelly decided the president was growing more obstinate on an issue and it was time for the gathering to break up. “Thank you very much,” Kelly said. “Everyone can leave now.” McMaster moved closer to the Resolute Desk and said, “Mr. President, I’d like to keep talking to you. I have a few more things.” Kelly did not take kindly to McMaster disobeying his order. The chief of staff stood nose to nose with the national security adviser and decreed, “I said the meeting was over.” Here was a four-star marine general and a three-star army general nearly coming to blows in front of the president of the United States. Trump loved it, later

Trump’s tweet landed

I feel so bad for these professionals having to deal with this baby

Tillerson said he would call Kelly to say his staffer shouldn’t be faulted for issuing his statement, but Goldstein told him there was no need to try to reverse the decision. He said he was mostly sad about the country losing a stand-up public servant like Tillerson. He didn’t care about his own job. 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.”

Trump acted as if he and Tillerson would be buddies, never actually mentioning the firing or offering a rationale for it. At the same time, some of Trump’s top aides were privately trashing Tillerson to reporters. They argued that Tillerson had been a poor manager at the State Department, isolating himself from thousands of career diplomats and getting bogged down in a bureaucratic restructuring plan. They said Trump had soured on Tillerson in part because of how much negative press he received and because the president thought he was too arrogant. And they said Tillerson lacked necessary gravitas abroad because foreign leaders did not believe he spoke for the president. They didn’t mention the real reason for that: Trump had repeatedly contradicted Tillerson publicly.

Kelly felt defeated. He had struggled to protect Tillerson’s job and feared the result of Trump’s grinding through another of his guardrails. Aboard Air Force One en route to California, Kelly uttered an ominous view to a handful of other aides: “The forces of darkness have won today.”

few days later, the White House delivered yet another demeaning insult to Tillerson, this time a blunder by Kelly, his friend. The chief of staff convened an off-the-record session with a couple dozen reporters and shared his account of Tillerson’s firing. Kelly said that when he reached Tillerson in Nairobi to let him know he may soon be fired, the secretary of state was suffering from traveler’s diarrhea. “He had Montezuma’s revenge, or whatever you call it over there,” Kelly said. “He was talking to me from the toilet.” The journalists and White House aides in the room grimaced. Kelly later regretted that his off-the-record remark was reported in the media, another humiliation for Tillerson. It hadn’t even been true. Tillerson and his staff had all caught a bug that caused violent vomiting and dehydration. He had a mild case compared with some of his senior staff and had canceled some of his appearances to let them rest. When Kelly called Tillerson with the bad news, his very ill chief of staff and another aide had dutifully come to the secretary’s room to wake him from a deep sleep. He took the call in his bedroom suite.

As a twenty-year veteran of the bureau, McCabe was set to retire as soon as he turned fifty on March 18 and would be eligible for his full retirement benefits. But Trump, with the help of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, sought to punish a foe. Just before ten o’clock on the evening of March 16, Sessions fired McCabe effective immediately, saying that he was acting on the recommendations of the inspector general and the FBI office that handles discipline. The swift termination threatened to cost McCabe a portion of his retirement benefits.

Unsaid was the fact that the Russian election was anything but fair. The most popular opposition leader challenging Putin, Alexei Navalny, had been barred from the ballot. Another opponent, Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, had been relentlessly attacked by the state media, which Putin and his cronies controlled, and finished a distant second with 12 percent of the vote. It was, as the BBC dubbed it, the election Putin “could not lose.” Back in Washington, Trump monitored the election results and swelled with pride for Putin. He was impressed by the size of his victory.

presidents on Tuesday, March 20. 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.”

To ensure the president would not miss what it said, the first card had all capital letters and bold lettering: “DO NOT CONGRATULATE ON ELECTION WIN.” It was the first time anyone on the White House career staff working on national security could remember a president being handed marching orders from the NSC in all capital letters.

Trump opened his conversation with Putin as if greeting an old friend, congratulating him on his amazing election victory. Trump ignored the first cue card in its entirety. Then he ignored the others. He did not say a word about what Britain had concluded was the Putin-ordered poisoning of a former KGB agent in England, declining to confront the Russian strongman in defense of America’s oldest ally.

Putin had developed a knack for manipulating Trump, making him believe that the two of them could get big things accomplished if they ignored their staffs and worked one-on-one. National security aides feared Putin knew how to feed the unusual combination of Trump’s ego and insecurity and to cultivate conspiracies in his mind.

“It’s not us,” Putin had told Trump. “It’s the subordinates fighting against our friendship.”

Trump had been scheduled to speak with Temer in March 2017, and at the time the Brazilian president was embroiled in a major corruption scandal. Before Trump and Temer’s call, White House aides foresaw what might happen and preventively urged Trump not to invite the Brazilian leader to Washington. Trump did it anyway.

Staffers tried to suggest edits, but it usually fell to McMaster to talk Trump out of ideas that would reveal too much or piss off Western allies. On this day, Trump was adamant about what he wanted the statement to say. “I want Putin to come here,” Trump told McMaster. “Yes, Mr. President,” McMaster said. “We’ll start working on it ASAP.” “Let’s announce the invitation and put out a statement about it,” Trump said. McMaster didn’t think Trump should publicly announce his invitation, much less have Putin visit Washington at all, but figured the situation could be managed. He explained to Trump that state visits or face-to-face meetings of this magnitude should be kept secret until closer to the event and after the two countries negotiated a concrete agenda.

The Kremlin statement made clear what Trump had said. “Donald Trump congratulated Vladimir Putin on his victory in the presidential election,” the statement began. It went on to say, “Special attention was paid to making progress on the question of holding a possible meeting at the highest level. In all, the conversation carried a constructive, businesslike character, and was oriented toward overcoming the problems that have piled up in U.S.-Russian relations.”

The NSC staffers wanted to try to stop Trump from firing McMaster without any warning. Ivanka and Hicks talked to the president and persuaded him not to tweet-fire McMaster, as he had Tillerson a week earlier. They argued that the military officer deserved more respect—at a minimum, the courtesy of a phone call.

Trump was insisting that McMaster fire the leakers. Hannity had fingered McMaster’s deputies as the guilty parties. The president’s alt-right fans on the internet were openly accusing Cutz by name, even though an early internal investigation ruled out both him and Bajraktari because neither ever had access to the document. And still, here was Kelly, standing in front of Cutz and insisting that both he and the president wanted him to stay.

McMaster did not go quietly, however. During the two-week handoff period, he delivered a stinging rebuke of Trump’s Russia policy. On April 3, in a dinner speech at the Atlantic Council, McMaster denounced Russia’s aggression around the world and said the United States was falling short in confronting it.

Earlier that same day, Trump said during a news conference with the leaders of the Baltic States that he was hopeful of forging an alliance with Putin. “Ideally we want

Sekulow had been expecting to eventually downsize his own role in the Trump legal battle, and though an avid fan of the president, he never planned to lead his legal defense team. But after a week of turmoil, Sekulow, a rock music fan, adopted a Zen attitude and a gallows humor to try to roll with the punches. “Welcome to the Hotel California,” Sekulow said in a joking reference to the Eagles hit when a colleague asked him what the turnover meant for him. “You can check out anytime you want. But you can never leave.”

The morning raid was extraordinary. Cohen was not merely Trump’s attorney. He was his virtual vault—the keeper of his secrets and executor of his wishes, from business deals to personal affairs. “This search warrant is like dropping a bomb on Trump’s front porch,” remarked Joyce White Vance, a former U.S. attorney. The three criminal statutes listed near the top of the warrant they presented were a confusing blur to Cohen. But within hours Trump’s trusted fixer would understand that they conveyed a double-barrel threat. The sections of the U.S. criminal codes typed on the legal document showed that FBI agents, overseen by the famously aggressive prosecutors of the Southern District of New York, had significant evidence to suspect that Cohen had engaged in three kinds of federal crimes: bank fraud, mail fraud, and campaign finance violations.

Trump also asked Cobb what he should do now to shield these records from the prying eyes of prosecutors. That wasn’t really Cobb’s job, as a special adviser to the president on the Russia probe. This battery of questions, combined with Trump’s visible discomfort, created awkwardness for Cobb. The president needed to be talking to his personal lawyer, someone to vent to who was inviolable. Cobb worked for the White House and did not represent Trump personally; therefore, his interactions with the president were not protected by attorney-client privilege. With Dowd out of the picture, that “Trump whisperer” was Sekulow. Cobb called him. “You really need to get over here because this isn’t a White House event,” he told Sekulow. “This is a personal thing.”

The afternoon of April 9, Trump chose an ill-fitting moment to reveal his sudden vulnerability: a special all-hands meeting with his Pentagon leaders to discuss how to respond to the Syrian government’s latest slaughter of innocent civilians by dousing them with chemical weapons. Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad had gassed his own people, and the top military brass had come to the White House to meet with Trump to review his options. National Security Council officials had worked with Defense Department officials to prepare specific targets should Trump authorize a mission to take out, or at least temporarily weaken, Syria’s ability to fly chemical weapon sorties.

But there was only one subject on Trump’s mind as the meeting began, and it wasn’t dead Syrian children. “So I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys, a good man, and it’s a disgraceful situation. It’s a total witch hunt,” Trump said sternly as he sat hunched forward slightly over the conference table, his arms crossed at the wrists. “It’s, frankly, a real disgrace,” Trump added. “It’s an attack on our country in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for. So when I saw this and when I heard it—I heard it like you did—I said, ‘This is really now a whole new level of unfairness.’” The military leaders looked on stone-faced.

One day, Trump gave what Kelly considered an order: “I want you to give it to them.” Kelly refused, saying it was improper and politically stupid. He was mindful of the career people who considered the granting of clearances a religion and who would have reason to rat out an abuse. “No, I won’t,” Kelly said. “It’s not ethical. This will come back and bite us.” Still, Kelly gave Trump some advice about how he could get what he wanted. As president, he was the final authority on access to classified material. He could legally decide on his own to grant Kushner a permanent clearance. The conversation went back and forth as Trump tried to get Kelly to do it instead, and the chief of staff held firm. In the end, Trump did what he promised the media he would not do: he bypassed the typical process to grant Kushner permission to see the country’s most carefully guarded secrets. Kelly wrote a memo to his file, in shades of Comey’s own moves to document his interactions with Trump. The chief of staff then alerted the White House security office, which granted Kushner the privilege he had been denied for months.

Ivanka would later tell ABC News, “There were anonymous leaks about there being issues, but the president had no involvement pertaining to my clearance or my husband’s clearance, zero.” And Kushner would later claim to associates that Kelly had assured him he got his clearance through the normal process. But very little had been normal about it.

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 appeared to have been stolen from Democratic National Committee servers, and U.S. intelligence agencies concluded Russia was the thief, in a hit ordered by Putin himself.

At the time the press was reporting Trump’s “Russia, if you’re listening” comment, it was dinnertime in Moscow. Most Russian government offices were closed. But, as Atkinson discovered more than a year later, some Russian military intelligence operators in Unit 26165 were busy late that July night sending outbound pushes to Clinton’s private domain and sending malicious links targeting fifteen email accounts on her server. This was a stunning find, one that U.S. intelligence agencies had not tracked earlier. The digital pushes did not show that Trump or anyone in his campaign had committed a crime, but they established that Russians were doing his bidding in real time, literally working the graveyard shift at his request from half a world away.

Traditionally, the G7 has been a forum for the United States and its allies to express common democratic principles and fortify economic partnerships and aspirations. In the recent past, the annual summits had amounted to carefully scripted shows of unity against authoritarian adversaries, including Russia, which had been a member (it was then the Group of Eight) until it was kicked out in 2014 following the annexation of Crimea. But over two days in Quebec, Trump effectively blew up the G7. He abruptly withdrew the U.S. endorsement of a joint declaration of unity, which his own representatives had already agreed to, and upbraided Trudeau on Twitter as “very dishonest & weak” because the prime minister objected to Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada and other nations. Then he stormed out of Quebec.

according to many economists, blocking foreign imports would have been counterproductive and actually harmful to the U.S. economy.

The president envisioned the historic disarmament summit as the ultimate Donald J. Trump production. He thought meeting with Kim might even earn him the Nobel Peace Prize.