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

by Philip Rucker

Tillerson emphasized the most important trait he thought Trump should know: Putin’s moves might seem slick and quick, but he was playing a long game, always thinking several moves ahead, years in the distance. He impressed upon Trump the fact that Putin sought to destabilize Western alliances and remake the post–World War II power structure to weaken America’s global influence.

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.”

Until Trump came down from the residence, usually between 11:00 a.m. and noon—a remarkably late start time for a commander in chief—Kelly did normal staff work. But the moment the president arrived in the Oval Office, all normalcy flew out the window, and Kelly stayed glued to his side. Once Trump went back to the residence, around 5:00 or 6:00 in the evening,

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.”

Part of McMaster’s process entailed providing Trump with written briefing documents on each big decision, with detailed descriptions of the risks and possible rewards. He had tried to be concise from the get-go, boiling the material down to three pages, but McMaster and his team almost immediately realized the president wasn’t reading any of the briefing books, or even the concise three-page version.

A senior European official observed, “He’s totally ignorant of everything. But he doesn’t care. He’s not interested.”

As the year came to a close, Trump and his administration did little to hold Russia to account for its illegal actions or to deter future Kremlin attacks and safeguard U.S. elections. The only punishment for Russia came from Congress, which voted in August to impose additional penalties against Moscow despite fierce resistance from Trump. As Trump pursued an alliance with President Vladimir Putin, he never convened a cabinet-level meeting on Russian election interference in 2017.

typical weekday morning in the White House. President Trump woke up and flicked on the television. This was a part of the day he loved. Alone in his bedroom, no aides to pester him, Trump manned the remote and surfed among channels on his two large screens. His television system was programmed to record all of the cable news shows so that he could fast-forward and rewind to when anchors and their guests discussed him—which, of course, was

most of the time.

“He’s incapable of saying sorry,” said one senior government official.

On Friday, February 16, Rosenstein announced a sweeping indictment of thirteen Russian nationals and three Russian companies with an extensive criminal scheme to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The thirty-seven-page indictment laid bare in exhaustive detail an ambitious Russian campaign of internet trolls and propaganda to trick Americans into supporting Trump. Rosenstein accused the Russian suspects of conducting what he termed “information warfare against the United States.”

Kushner was the classic profile of a person who would be rejected for a national security clearance, and Kelly’s move to downgrade his clearance level provided comfort to the CIA. Agency officials had been wary of allowing Kushner to see highly sensitive information about sources and methods, based on his pattern of talking to foreign leaders in the Middle East—including Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince—without State Department diplomats or other government experts guiding him.

Although independent counsel Kenneth Starr subpoenaed President Clinton for grand jury testimony in 1998, it was never tested in court, because Starr withdrew it once the president agreed voluntarily to sit for an interview.

A 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.

Around noon on May 10, Stephen Boyd, Rosenstein’s deputy for congressional relations, arranged a meeting for the principals to clear the air in the Justice Department’s sixth-floor Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. Attending were Sue Gordon, the deputy director of national intelligence, along with Rosenstein, Wray, O’Callaghan, Boyd, Nunes, Gowdy, and FBI deputy director David Bowdich. Rosenstein and Wray explained their fear about turning over any information that might be compromised and said their reluctance had nothing to do with hiding any funny business. “The FBI, DOJ are all run by Republican political appointees who were not here during the Clinton investigation. Nobody here has a motive to conceal anything. We are not your enemy,” Rosenstein said. “We have a duty to protect classified information.” At first, Nunes denied writing any letter to the White House with sensitive intelligence. Then one of Rosenstein’s deputies showed him the letter with his signature. Nunes said nothing. The Justice Department team members found that puzzling.

They wondered if Nunes’s staff had written it and not told him. For a short portion of the meeting, the conversation turned testy. In three decades of public service, Rosenstein had rarely raised his voice in a meeting, and he had almost never yelled. This was one of the exceptions. Things had gotten personal. Nunes and his Republican colleagues had been rattling their sabers on social media and in Fox News appearances accusing Rosenstein’s Justice Department of trying to hold back evidence proving the department’s corrupt investigative tactics. “You’ve got to stop this,” Rosenstein told Nunes. “This is ridiculous. You’re ginning up all these ludicrous conspiracy theories. You’re accusing me of being part of some vast left-wing conspiracy. I’m a lifelong Republican. My wife is a Republican. She’s getting death threats from these nuts.” Rosenstein also knew Nunes was raising money among conservative voters by claiming donations could help expose the secrets Rosenstein was trying to keep hidden from the public. Rosenstein’s mother, who lived in Florida, about as far away as one could get from Nunes’s central California congressional district, had received some of the congressman’s fund-raising letters.

“You’re making money off this,” an angry Rosenstein bellowed, leaning over the conference table and looking at Nunes and Gowdy. “We’re suffering the consequences of your fund-raising. My wife i...

Atkinson had been reviewing the attempted intrusions by the Russian 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.

Eliot A. Cohen, a neoconservative who served as a top State Department official in the George W. Bush administration and was a critic of Trump’s candidacy, said in the aftermath that the Singapore summit was “just the latest manifestation” of Trump’s authoritarianism. He “has classic traits of the authoritarian leader. The one that’s always struck me most is this visceral instinct of people’s weaknesses and a corresponding desire to be seen as strong and respected and admired,” Cohen said. He added, “We’ve been very fortunate that the institutions have contained him.”

Gérard Araud, the French ambassador, recalled a senior White House official explaining to him that Trump “can’t stand people who try to moderate him, but he loves people who are stronger or harsher than he is. He loves to be the moderator in the building. So compared to Bolton, he knows that Bolton wants to bomb anything. To Bolton, any problem can be solved by bombing, so he gets to be the voice of reason.”

Earlier, when the CBS anchor Jeff Glor asked Trump during a one-on-one interview whether he would ask Putin to extradite the twelve indicted Russian agents, Trump replied that he “hadn’t thought” of doing so.

Unlike in most foreign leader meetings, there was no note taker to compile an official record of what was said or what promises were made. What came next was historically unprecedented. As he held forth with Putin for a forty-six-minute joint news conference, Trump refused to endorse the conclusion of U.S. intelligence agencies that the Russian government had tried to sabotage the U.S. election to help him win. In fact, he said he took the word of Putin over the collective assessment of his own intelligence agencies.

Senator John McCain did not mince words in his statement: “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory. The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate. But it is clear that the summit in Helsinki was a tragic mistake.” The Arizona Republican senator added, “No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”

Suddenly the word “treason” became part of the public debate about Trump. The former CIA director John Brennan called Trump’s comments “nothing short of treasonous.” A dam had broken.

McRaven decided to speak aloud into the voice-mail message, saying what he would tell Trump directly if he had the chance. “Here is what I’ve come up with,” he said. “Do whatever you want to with it, Karen.” Then he dictated his comment, verbatim: Former CIA Director John Brennan, whose security clearance you revoked on Wednesday, is one of the finest public servants I have ever known. Few Americans have done more to protect this country than John. He is a man of unparalleled integrity, whose honesty and character have never been in question, except by those who don’t know him. Therefore, I would consider it an honor if you would revoke my security clearance as well, so I can add my name to the list of men and women who have spoken up against your presidency. Like most Americans, I had hoped that when you became president, you would rise to the occasion and become the leader this great nation needs.

A good leader tries to embody the best qualities of his or her organization. A good leader sets the example for others to follow. A good leader always puts the welfare of others before himself or herself. Your leadership, however, has shown little of these qualities. Through your actions, you have embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation. If you think for a moment that your McCarthy-era tactics will suppress the voices of criticism, you are sadly mistaken. The criticism will continue until you become the leader we prayed you would be.

Despite the pleasantries of the call, Rosenstein still thought, “I’ll be fired soon, just not today.” Rosenstein became the latest senior government official left hanging in one of Trump’s parlor games. “I think it pleases him to sort of paw at a wounded mouse in front of him because it asserts his

sense of control and authority, and he enjoys that to no end,” Trump’s biographer Tim O’Brien told The Washington Post’s Ashley Parker.

Trump did not see the law as an impediment, a mind-set forged as a real estate developer. A developer could always just sue, battle it out in court, and negotiate some middle ground. “Look, we’ll get sued and then we’ll work it out,” Trump told Nielsen during one such discussion. “Just block people from coming in.”

“Federal law enforcement doesn’t work like that,” Nielsen told Trump in one such meeting. “People could get in trouble. These people have taken an oath to uphold the law. Do you really want to tell them to do the opposite?” “Then we’ll pardon them,” Trump said.

In late October, with the caravan on the move, Trump badgered Nielsen almost endlessly. He suggested lining up border agents and other officers to form a sort of human wall along the portion of the southern border that lacked fencing, roughly 1,200 miles of the 1,933-mile border. A statistician at Homeland Security figured out it would take hundreds of thousands of people standing arm to arm to create a line that long. The number, a conservative estimate, was immediately discarded because it was so staggering. “We were like, this is absurd,” one aide remembered.

Speaking French, Macron delivered a speech that journalists interpreted as a pointed rebuke of Trump, as well as of Putin. In the darkest hours of World War I, Macron said, “that vision of France as a generous nation, of France as a project, of France promoting universal values, was the exact opposite of the egotism of a people who look after only their interests, because patriotism is the exact opposite of nationalism: nationalism is a betrayal of it. In saying ‘our interests first and who cares about the rest!’ you wipe out what’s most valuable about a nation, what brings it alive, what leads it to greatness and what is most important: its moral values.” Macron warned that “the old demons are reappearing” and summoned the world’s political leaders to “break with the new ‘treason of the intellectuals,’ which is at work and fuels untruths, accepts the injustice consuming our peoples and sustains extremes and present-day obscurantism.”

Baker picked up right away. “Governor,” he said, “if you’re calling me, you’re about to be offered the worst fucking job in America.” Christie asked what kinds of things he should request from the president. Baker went through a list of demands, including that he have walk-in privileges to the Oval Office; is able to attend any meeting in the White House that the president is in; chooses all staff and that all staff report to him, other than family members; controls his own media

appearances; and gets his own personal lawyer. Christie jotted down notes as he listened.

Trump broke norms in his speech to the troops. He criticized their commanders for failing to meet his deadlines to withdraw from Syria and other conflicts. He told a number of falsehoods, including that troops had not received a raise in more than ten years until he recently authorized a 10 percent raise; in fact, troops had received raises every year for decades, and the one Trump authorized was 2.6 percent.

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

“I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is,” Cohen continued. “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.” Cohen laid out a devastating bill of particulars against the president, sharing specific anecdotes and, in some cases, brandishing evidence to support his claims. 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.

“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.” Mueller argued a pure, apolitical view about the impropriety of concluding Trump had engaged in a crime, considering the OLC opinion. Amid an extensive back-and-forth over how they should summarize Trump’s actions—and all the indications he had sought to interfere in the probe—Mueller and his team agreed to language stating that Trump could not be exonerated: “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state.” But some on the team felt that phrasing was still unsatisfyingly passive. It was “as far as the special counsel was willing to go,” this person said, but added, “I don’t think that that was the consensus view. I think the boss made a call.”

Barr, Rosenstein, and O’Callaghan chewed over Mueller’s decision not to decide. They could hardly understand Mueller and Quarles’s reasoning, and they thought, this is going to be a big mess. Barr concluded that he would decide whether the president criminally obstructed justice. The special counsel was under the auspices of the Justice Department, using the criminal process to obtain evidence, and Barr, Rosenstein, and O’Callaghan all believed firmly that the department must make the decision. There was no hesitation. The attorney general would make the call.

Mueller laid bare in granular detail a presidency plagued by paranoia and insecurity, depicting Trump’s inner circle as gripped by fear of the president’s spasms as he frantically pressured his aides to lie to the public and fabricate false records.

On obstruction, he wrote that the special counsel had chosen not to reach a normal prosecutor’s decision on whether Trump had committed a crime. “The Special Counsel therefore did not draw a conclusion—one way or the other—as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction,” Barr wrote. “Instead, for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President’s actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction.” Barr explained he therefore concluded the evidence of obstruction was insufficient. “In cataloguing the President’s actions, many of which took place in public view, the report identifies no actions that, in our judgment, constitute obstructive conduct, had a nexus to a pending or contemplated criminal proceeding, and were done with corrupt intent,” Barr wrote. Barr’s letter included the key line from Mueller’s report that O’Callaghan had suggested adding in good faith that the report “does not exonerate him.” Nonetheless, Barr’s letter laid the groundwork for Trump to declare otherwise.

Barr had served his boss an unmistakable political victory, and a feeling of euphoria swept over Trump

Trump arrived by motorcade at Palm Beach International Airport for the two-hour flight home to Washington. He stood under the wing of Air Force One and offered his first reaction to the press corps: “There was no collusion with Russia. There was no obstruction—none whatsoever. And it was a complete and total exoneration.”

For example, 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.

Barr and his team regretted having used the word “summarize” in the March 24 letter. 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.

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.

Trump then pulled aside Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, for a chat out of Nielsen’s earshot. At a roundtable session with border security officials, Trump said himself what he had asked Nielsen to say: “The system is full. Can’t take you anymore. Whether it’s asylum, whether it’s anything you want, it’s illegal immigration. We can’t take you anymore. We can’t take you. Our country is full. Our area is full. The sector is full. Can’t take you anymore, I’m sorry. Can’t happen. So turn around. That’s the way it is.”

Jim Mattis, reminding her of the umbrage the president had taken at the defense secretary’s resignation letter. It turned out Trump feared Nielsen might criticize him or reveal damaging information about him on her way out the door, but the president thought if he made the first announcement, he could dismiss anything she might say later as sour grapes from a disgruntled former employee.