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

by Philip Rucker

From the moment Trump swore an oath to defend the Constitution and commit to serve the nation, he governed largely to protect and promote himself.

Two kinds of people went to work for the administration: those who thought Trump was saving the world and those who thought the world needed to be saved from Trump.

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.

“I’ve served the man for two years. I think he’s a long-term and immediate danger to the country,” a senior national security official told us.

“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.”

“Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”

The intelligence agencies were on guard in part because, as the Post reported on February 27, they had intercepted private conversations of leaders in China, Israel, Mexico, and the United Arab Emirates talking about the ease with which they could manipulate Kushner.