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Once again she served as full collaborator and in the spirit—and with the level of effort—of a coauthor.
While discussing Fear on television, I was asked for my bottom-line summary of Trump’s leadership. “Let’s hope to God we don’t have a crisis,” I said.
Shortly after arriving at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Saturday, November 19, Mattis was escorted to an informal gathering around a table with Trump, Pence, chief strategist Steve Bannon, Ivanka Trump and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
This sounds like a table in hell.
The year before, Tillerson said he had been tooling around the Black Sea on Putin’s yacht. “And he said to me, ‘You need to remember we’re a nuclear power. As powerful as you. You Americans think you won the Cold War. You did not win the Cold War. We never fought that war. We could have, but we didn’t.’ And that put chills up my spine.”
Mattis, who had 7,000 books in his personal library
They gingerly acknowledged that Trump might be a difficult boss.
“I truly believe the office will change Donald Trump. I believe it will humble him. And I think even Donald will be impelled to turn to God for guidance.”
Bahahahahaha!!! How's about now, Marsha??
Coats began to think Trump was impervious to facts. Trump had his own facts: Nearly everyone was an idiot, and almost every country was ripping off the United States.
Aware of Trump’s obsessive TV watching, he thought he would like to advise the president, “Turn off the TV and run the country.”
“I don’t think it is a good idea to send this letter,” Rosenstein said. He didn’t think the letter showed criminal intent on Trump’s part to sidetrack the Russia investigation by firing the FBI director, but Comey’s removal would no doubt trigger suspicions. He also thought the scattershot nature of Trump’s draft letter showed a disturbed mind.
How is your wife? Trump asked. Jill McCabe, a pediatric physician, had run unsuccessfully for the state Senate in Virginia in 2015 as a Democrat. The Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe, a close friend and fundraiser for Bill and Hillary Clinton, had directed $467,500 from his political action committee to her campaign. The Virginia Democratic Party, effectively controlled by McAuliffe, gave her $207,788. That was a lot of money for a state Senate campaign. Trump had previously tweeted about this and insinuated some conspiracy. Jill was fine, McCabe said. How did she handle losing? the
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This effing guy.
To Rosenstein, it was pretty clear that the FBI leadership thought a group of Russian sympathizers had taken over the United States government.
Coats was troubled by the absence of a plan or a consideration of the human dimension—the impact on the troops, the allies, the world—or a sense of the weight of the office.
“True,” Coats agreed. “To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”
After months of apprehension, on July 3, 2017, North Korea had launched its first ICBM capable of reaching the United States. On a trajectory to maximize distance, the Hwasong-14 could have traveled between 4,000 and 5,000 miles to Alaska, Hawaii and perhaps even the West Coast. This was a genuine crisis. President Trump had publicly promised North Korea would not achieve this capability.
General Brooks said in a provocative public statement, “Self-restraint, which is a choice, is all that separates armistice and war.”
“I got over enjoying public humiliation by second grade,” Mattis once told the president.
On issue after issue, policy after policy, Mattis believed there were ways for a president to be tough and keep the peace. “But not with the current occupant. Because he doesn’t understand. He has no mental framework or mode for these things. He hasn’t read, you know,” he told an associate.
Reading, listening, debating and having a process for weighing alternatives and determining policy were essential, Mattis believed. “I was often trying to impose reason over impulse. And you see where I w...
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Brooks knew that Tillerson had zero credibility with North Korea. Trump had undermined his secretary of state with a tweet a month earlier, writing that Tillerson was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man. Save your energy Rex.” Intelligence picked up from the North was clear: If this person isn’t speaking for the president, we don’t need to waste our time with him.
