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

by Philip Rucker

When Melania asked Christie how he intended to deal with Kushner and Ivanka, considering his famous tensions with the presidential son-in-law, the president interjected. “Don’t worry about that,” Trump said. “I’ll handle that part of it.” “Sir, that is something to be concerned about,” Christie said. “Jared really doesn’t have any problem with you,” Trump said. “Mr. President, please, this is ridiculous,” Christie said. “Don’t worry about that,” Trump insisted. Christie wanted to avoid giving the president an answer to his offer on the spot. He was looking to buy some time. And as they wrapped up their conversation, Trump told him, “I know you. You’re going to want to talk to Mary Pat about this, so go home and talk to Mary Pat and I’ll call you in the morning. But I want you here.”

Trump was already frustrated by Ayers’s rejection of the job and the resulting media narrative that no one wanted to be his chief of staff. So Christie proposed a face-saving way to bow out without embarrassing the president. “How about if I just tweet out that I’m withdrawing from consideration, that way I didn’t say no to you?” he asked. Trump liked that idea. “That will be a great story for us, you withdrawing from consideration,” Trump said. “Like the Axios story last night. Wasn’t that a great story?” “I wondered about that,” Christie said. “It was just me, you, and Melania in the room, and I’m pretty sure nobody saw me coming in, so how’d that happen?” “Oh, I did it,” Trump said. “Who did it for you?” Christie asked. “No, no, I did it myself,” Trump said. “I called Jonathan and told him.” Christie thought to himself, “You’re leaking yourself? And to think I came this close to being your chief of staff?” But he held his tongue. “You’re really not supposed to be doing that,” Christie told Trump.

On December 17, Christie returned to the White House with his wife to attend a Christmas party for cabinet members and other administration officials. As soon as he walked in, he locked eyes with Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis. “Look at this! A ray of sunshine has entered the building,” Mattis said. “To what do I owe that compliment, General?” Christie asked. They shook hands and Mattis said, “Because you’re smart enough not to get into the shitshow.”

Why did the United States have to keep arming Kurdish fighters to fight ISIS? And why did Trump need two thousand U.S. military personnel in Syria if they were close to triumphing over the caliphate? Erdogan argued that his forces could ensure ISIS didn’t creep back to power—and that they didn’t need the Kurds, an enemy of the Turkish regime. “You know what? It’s yours,” Trump told Erdogan. “I’m leaving.” One senior administration official summed up the sentiment: “Trump was like: You want that pile of dirt, Erdogan? Fine.” Without thinking it through or conferring with any of his government’s many experts on the region, Trump effectively condemned a tireless partner of the U.S. military, the Kurdish general Mazloum Abdi, to death.

Trump’s announcement drew immediate criticism, from Republicans as well as Democrats. Sarah Sanders called over to Mattis’s office asking if the Pentagon would be sending any military brass or spokespeople out for media hits to discuss the value of withdrawing from Syria. Dana White, Mattis’s communications chief, checked with Sweeney. “No one is going out,” Sweeney told White. “You can go back and tell her that this was a White House decision. So help her, but no one in this department is going out to represent this decision.”

The Pentagon’s leaders, still licking their wounds, had more serious work to do than help the White House generate sound bites defending the president.

A question arose about whether the U.S. forces should technically reclaim the weapons they gave the SDF fighters. Some discussed whether the National Security Council should review and decide whether militia members kept or surrendered the weapons. Rood stepped in with a firm no. He said something to the effect of “It’s not our priority to take back certain weapons because this is too lethal for them. ISIS is not defeated. We are not taking them back.” At that moment, McGurk had had it. He burst into the discussion with a fury. “Let’s just be real, everybody,” McGurk said. “Stop the wishful thinking. The president’s ordered us to leave without a plan or any apparent thought. We’re not picking up weapons on our way out. We can’t get out safely without the Kurds. They protect our supply lines, convoys, and facilities. To say we’ll take their weapons as we invite in the Turks is nuts. It will get Americans killed. The Kurds will be slaughtered from all sides.” McGurk warned that because of the president’s lack of planning, the odds were high the Kurds would be slaughtered. The SDF might crack apart. ISIS would rush back in

“My views on treating allies with respect and also being clear-eyed about both malign actors and strategic competitors are strongly held and informed by over four decades of immersion in these issues,” Mattis wrote. He added, “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.” McGurk also resigned that day, which Trump would later dismiss as a “nothing event!”

Trump risked blowing Santa’s cover when he was patched through to a seven-year-old girl, Collman Lloyd, calling from her home

“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.

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. The episode, later confirmed by attendees, was stunning and, for Mulvaney, humiliating. It illustrated the limited regard with which Trump held the man he had just entrusted with helming his West Wing, and it diminished him in the eyes of the principals in Congress with whom he would need to regularly negotiate.

Giuliani gave divergent accounts of when conversations about developing a Trump Tower project in Moscow occurred. He first said they occurred throughout the 2016 campaign, then said they were hypothetical altogether, then said they might have gone on for the entirety of the campaign, and then said they ended around January 2016, just before the Iowa caucuses. Then there was the matter of the Michael Cohen tapes. Giuliani claimed to have listened to recordings that showed Trump had not instructed his personal attorney to lie to Congress about the Moscow project, then said he should never have mentioned the tapes at all, then said such a conversation would have been “perfectly normal,” then said he wasn’t sure whether they had spoken, before claiming, finally, that they definitely had not.

On January 23, Giuliani tried to explain his various statements and clarifications by telling The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey, “There is a strategy. The strategy will become apparent.” Then he pleaded with Dawsey, “You have to be patient.” Trump was not a patient man, however. The president—who has made more than his share of whoppers—complained about Giuliani to one of his political advisers. “He’s the only guy in the world who’s less prepared than I am,” Trump said. “Rudy goes on TV and doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.” For the next several days, Giuliani stopped appearing on TV. Trump temporarily benched his lawyer.

“It takes a lot to get me angry, but I’m about as angry as I’ve been in a long, long time,” Wray said in a video message to FBI employees. “I’m not a loser,” the president said. “I’m not going to lose this. I’m not going to look weak. I’m not going to give in.” But on January 25, Trump gave in.

Shanahan was acting, and Trump liked it that way. He was more vulnerable to the president’s pressure. “He gets to lord it over them,” explained one senior administration official. Shanahan was left shaky in his interim position. It was clear that Trump would never nominate him as the permanent secretary of defense unless he played ball.

“He likes the red carpet,” one military official said of Shanahan. “But he can’t stand up to Trump. He doesn’t have the credibility and experience to say, ‘Hey, this is why you shouldn’t do that.’” After two years of being told no by Mattis, Trump considered Shanahan precisely the kind of replacement he had in mind.

Cohen’s decision to turn on the president—to become “a rat,” in Trump’s mobster lingo—was set in motion several months earlier. On November 29, 2018, a week after Thanksgiving, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about then-candidate Trump’s interest in a Trump Tower project in Moscow. Cohen admitted that he told a false story to match Trump’s repeated public denials that he had pursued the project deep into the presidential campaign. Cohen also acknowledged repeated contacts with Russian officials to try to secure approvals for the Trump project, and that he kept Trump apprised of his progress.

As Cohen studied his anecdotes and memories, he sorted them into three categories that he believed best described Trump: racist, con man, and cheat.

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 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.”

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 argued that Trump ran for office “to make his brand great, not to make our country great,”

“People that follow Mr. Trump, as I did blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”

Notably, no Republican on the panel tried to defend Trump by engaging with the substance of Cohen’s testimony. They only attacked Cohen’s credibility as a witness.

Trump had hoped his interactions with Kim would drive news coverage back home, showing him acting as a statesman, just as in Singapore seven months earlier. Instead, television networks aired round-the-clock coverage of Cohen’s testimony.

Before leaving Hanoi, Trump delivered a stunning defense of Kim’s brutality. Early in his presidency, Trump made Otto Warmbier the heart of his maximum-pressure campaign on North Korea. He spotlighted the twenty-two-year-old University of Virginia student’s death upon being released by the North Koreans in a coma following seventeen months in captivity, and invited Warmbier’s grieving parents as his guests to his first address to a joint session of Congress. Yet when The Washington Post’s David Nakamura asked Trump in Hanoi whether he had confronted Kim about Warmbier’s death, the president said Kim was not to blame. “I don’t believe that he would’ve

allowed that to happen,” Trump said. “Just wasn’t to his advantage to allow that to happen. Those prisons are rough. They’re rough places. And bad things happened. But I really don’t believe that he was—I don’t believe he knew about it.”

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 afte...

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.

The Department of Homeland Security wasn’t supposed to keep children in its custody longer than seventy-two hours. The border patrol stations—concrete slabs with little jail cells that resembled the inside of a small-town sheriff’s department—were never designed to detain kids, but they had crammed four times as many people as the fire code allowed in ten border stations.

The first volume was complicated, with a series of shadowy figures with strange-sounding names, but fairly straightforward to write. It documented the Russian government’s effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. The second volume was far more controversial and caused internal angst. It documented the evidence the team had gathered on ten episodes when Trump appeared to be seeking to thwart or shutter a criminal investigation of his campaign and himself.

“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.

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?”

Inside the White House, some aides nicknamed Barr “the Honey Badger,” a reference to a viral video in which a fearless badger climbs a tree to kill a snake, gets bitten by the snake, passes out, and then starts eating the slithering creature.

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.

“We’re the Twitter society,” said Frank Figliuzzi, a former Mueller colleague at the FBI. “We’re the digital streaming society. We’re the scan-the-headlines-to-get-some-news society. That’s not Mueller. That’s not a four-hundred-page report. Somebody’s got to show their face on a TV screen and scream and yell. What many of us have asked is, in the age of Trump, as steadfast as Mueller’s been to the principles of democracy that got us here, has Mueller served us well with this style? The answer is no.”

Despite his well-established lack of interest in public relations, Mueller zeroed in on the media coverage of his report. He said something along the lines of “We have concerns that our report is losing its impact because the full story’s not out there and the media’s not covering it the way we want them to.”

unwanted gap of time as a consequence of the report’s being 448 pages and not containing the necessary redactions. “To be clear, we’re not trying to summarize the work; we’re just giving the principal conclusions,” Barr told Mueller. “We offered you the opportunity to look at the letter and you said no. We’re flabbergasted here.”

“Your summary letter fails to put into context the decisions we made,” Mueller said.

They also lamented that Trump was claiming that Mueller had “totally exonerated” him. That was false, but Barr decided not to publicly correct his boss.

Nielsen could tell he was angry she hadn’t taken his call the night before. The president didn’t seem to understand the obstacles the time difference presented.

He hated when she focused on other missions of her department, whose central reason for being was to prevent another terrorist attack like 9/11. “Why is she doing this?” Miller would ask. “All the president cares about is the border.”

“I don’t know why you’re away,” Mulvaney told Nielsen as he mentioned the high volume of migrant crossings, a reaction that only exacerbated her concern. When she told him there were many things the Department of Homeland Security did besides border enforcement, Mulvaney replied, “Right now, all we’re doing here at the White House is the border.”

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.

The law permitted Trump to order the prosecutors be stripped of their medals, but there was little precedent for the move. Unlike the Medal of Honor, achievement medals are determined within the military and do not require a president’s endorsement. The presidential decree—made on Twitter no less—was yet another reminder for the Pentagon brass that Trump had no qualms about maximizing his power and intervening whenever he saw fit.

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.

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.”