Rage

by Bob Woodward

“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, told Trump, expressing a jarring, contrarian view as deliberately and as strongly as possible.

Byers was in the Oval Office, seated by the Resolute Desk, on July 21 as Trump signed an executive order to assess how to strengthen the manufacturing and defense industrial base. “You were a wrestler?” Trump asked Byers. “Yes, sir, I was,” Byers replied. He had been the captain of the North Carolina wrestling team for two years and qualified three times for the NCAA championships. “Why would you ask?” “Those ears,” the president said. “You have wrestling ears.” This was classic cauliflower ear, the buildup of fibrous tissue from repeated impacts. “Were you any good?” “Yes, sir. I can hold my own.” “I bet you were good,” Trump said. “You know what? I would’ve been a great wrestler. I never wrestled in my life, but I would’ve been a great wrestler. You know why?” “No sir. Why?” “Because I’m tough,” Trump said. “And you’ve got to be tough to be a wrestler.” Trump had hosted several pro-wrestling events and even participated in a “Battle of the Billionaires” in 2007. He was inducted into the World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame in 2013. Trump signed the executive order and they all posed for a picture. The group included White House trade adviser Peter Navarro. “Peter,” Trump said, “I need you to take charge of negotiations on steel.” Trump said that U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross were weak negotiators and that Navarro needed to be tough, hard-line. Trump added, “Not to mention my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. T...

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 president asked. Is it tough to lose? It’s tough to lose anything, McCabe answered. She had rededicated herself to taking care of kids in the emergency room. That must’ve been really tough, Trump said in what sounded like a sneer. To be a loser. Shifting dramatically, the president said, You’ll do a good job. He said he had a lot of faith in McCabe.

Mattis later described for others what it was like to attend meetings with Trump: “It is very difficult to have a discussion with the president. If an intel briefer was going to start a discussion with the president, they were only a couple sentences in and it could go off on what I kind of irreverently call those Seattle freeway off-ramps to nowhere. Shoot off onto another subject. So it was not where you could take him to 30,000 feet. You could try, but then something that had been said on Fox News or something was more salient to him. “So you just had to deal with it. He’d been voted in. And our job was not to take a political or partisan position. It was, how do you govern this country and try to keep this experiment alive for one more year?” Mattis frequently used a phrase coined by George Kennan, the father of the doctrine to contain the Soviet Union: “the treacherous curtain of deference” that comes down when someone is around high-level officials, especially presidents. In Trump’s case, there were additional impediments to connecting and communicating with the president. Mattis said beyond that sense of “Oh my gosh, I’m in the Oval Office,” advisers had to push past “the additional curtains of Fox News, of his formative years. Those are long-held beliefs. So those were the real curtains. Because I saw Rex Tillerson and Dan Coats and Mike Pompeo at CIA and certainly Gina Haspel, myself, quite willing to come up with the facts. Joe Dunford never hesitated on it.” Nei...

Mattis summarized, “When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit.”

“This is not good,” Mattis said. “Maybe at some point we’re going to have to stand up and speak out. There may be a time when we have to take collective action.” “Well, possibly,” Coats said. “Yeah, there may.” “He’s dangerous,” Mattis said. “He’s unfit.” Speaking out didn’t seem to work, Coats said. Admiral Bill McRaven, who had led Operation Neptune Spear, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in 2011, had continuously mounted an aggressive, personal and public criticism of Trump. In an open letter to Trump published in The Washington Post in August 2018 after Trump revoked John Brennan’s security clearance, McRaven had written that the president had “embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, worst of all, divided us as a nation.” He challenged Trump to revoke his security clearance: “I would consider it an honor.” McRaven, a Navy SEAL, was one of the most celebrated military figures, a warrior scholar, bestselling author and now chancellor of the University of Texas system. Trump had blasted back, calling McRaven “a Hillary Clinton fan” and suggested he should have captured bin Laden earlier. As best Coats could tell, McRaven’s gutsy stand seemed to have had no impact. Mattis said they still had to consider stepping forward. “Jim, what would that be?” Coats asked. “I don’t know,” Mattis replied, “but we can’t let the country keep going” on this course. He repeated, “This is dangerous.” “Look,” Coats said, “others have t...

Trump said he had just “signed my 187th federal judge,” and reminded me of his two Supreme Court appointments. “When I get out, I’ll probably have more than 50 percent of the federal judges in the country appointed under Trump,” he bragged. “The only one that has a better percentage is George Washington, because he appointed 100 percent.” Although Trump has repeated this claim often, it is not factual. Among recent presidents, Clinton, Carter and Nixon had each filled a greater percentage of federal judgeships by late January of the fourth year of their first term. He was also not alone in appointing two Supreme Court justices in his first term—Presidents Obama, Clinton and George H. W. Bush had also done so. I said my reporting showed that Trump had nominated some judges that Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and other Republicans had rejected. “Yeah,” Trump said. “When they don’t like them, I don’t put them in.” He added, “In some cases they’re not conservative or they don’t believe or they came out with a couple of bad decisions or something.”

Then on February 8, 2020, Kushner advised others on the four texts that he said someone in a quest to understand Trump needed to absorb. First, Kushner advised, go back and read a 2018 opinion column by The Wall Street Journal’s Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist Peggy Noonan. Her column on Trump said: “He’s crazy… and it’s kind of working.” Kushner made it clear that his endorsement of the column was not an aside or stray comment, but was central to understanding Trump. The son-in-law had to know that Noonan’s column, dated March 8, 2018, and titled “Over Trump, We’re As Divided As Ever,” was not positive. Rather it was quite devastating. In it she called Trump a “circus act” and “a living insult.” “What you feel is disquiet,” she wrote, “and you know what it’s about: the worrying nature of Mr. Trump himself… epic instability, mismanagement and confusion.” A conservative speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, Noonan wrote that with Trump, “We are not talking about being colorfully, craftily unpredictable, as political masters like FDR and Reagan sometimes were, but something more unfortunate, an unhinged or not-fully-hinged quality that feels like screwball tragedy.” Warming to her theme, Noonan wrote, “Crazy doesn’t last. Crazy doesn’t go the distance. Crazy is an unstable element that, when let loose in an unstable environment, explodes. And so your disquiet. Sooner or later something bad will happen.… It all feels so dangerous. “Expecting more from the president of th...

the national response. “When somebody is the president of the

After Trump stood in front of the church waving a Bible Lindsey Graham privately said that night, “I’ve never been more worried than I am right now.” In Graham’s view, Trump could have chosen three ways to respond to the racial unrest unleashed by the George Floyd murder: “George Wallace, Robert Kennedy or Richard Nixon.” Graham believed Trump had chosen Wallace, the firebrand former Alabama governor, who embodied defiant resistance to civil rights. In his inaugural address Wallace had promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” In 1963 he stood in the door at the University of Alabama to block two Black students from enrolling.

In another conversation, Trump told Graham that he wanted to go higher than $3 trillion for another economic stimulus and recovery package. “Don’t worry about the base,” Graham said. “Nobody elected you as a fiscal conservative.” He tried to reinforce his plan. “Just imagine the combination of police reform—bipartisan. DACA—bipartisan. Infrastructure—bipartisan. Stimulus—bipartisan. A growing economy. All before November.” A big infrastructure package would give the country a needed facelift, Graham said. No other Republicans would spend the needed money. Not George W. Bush and not Graham’s great friend, the late John McCain.