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April 20 - May 6, 2025
Ultimately Kushner and Manafort helped persuade him to go with Pence, who had the advantage in Trump’s mind of looking perfect for the part. “He’s right out of central casting, isn’t he?” Trump said of the former radio host. Trump also liked that he could be sure his cautious and conflict-averse number two would never upstage him.
Trump aides were blunt in private discussions that they planned to try to elevate the campaign of Green Party nominee Jill Stein, who had quiet backing from the Home Depot cofounder Bernie Marcus, with the goal of strengthening her as a competitor on Clinton’s left flank to draw votes away from the Democrat.)
She was one of the only people who withstood an emotional cannon blast from Trump without withering.
A few weeks later, feeling better about his prospects in Florida, Trump told Wiles, “I’m sorry we had to have that little motivational talk.” Wiles objected quickly. “That was nothing short of abuse, and we can’t do that again,” she replied. “We won’t have to,” Trump assured her.
He approached the new bureaucracy in much the same way he had a family-run business, demanding that employees sign agreements that would prevent them from ever speaking publicly about the experience. The White House counsel made clear to some staff that the contracts were not enforceable.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson once bumped into Mexico’s foreign minister at a restaurant in a surprise encounter, only to discover that he was in Washington to meet the president’s son-in-law.
When the discussion turned to Northern Ireland, Trump appeared to get bored and turned the conversation to an offshore wind project he wanted to block near his Scottish golf course.
While Japan’s prime minister Shinzo Abe was at Mar-a-Lago, which Trump now called the Winter White House, his country came under threat from a North Korean missile launch. Trump and Abe examined sensitive documents, as dinner guests—many of whom paid a club membership fee that Trump had doubled to two hundred thousand dollars when he became president—looked on, posting snapshots of the de facto open-air war room on social media.
Trump’s aides tried to argue that the meeting with Mueller, along with the fact that Mueller was a former member of one of Trump’s golf courses, created a conflict of interest for the special counsel, a claim that made little sense. When that effort to disqualify him failed, Trump tried to grab control of the investigation by directing McGahn to tell officials to remove Mueller, which McGahn refused to go along with, and prepared to resign. Trump, still uncertain about how the White House functioned, did not go any further.
When the coverage did not turn out the way he wanted it to, Trump labeled the press “the enemy of the American people.” (It went well beyond Bannon’s habit of calling journalists “the opposition party.”) It was a refrain often used by despots around the globe, and Trump would repeat it dozens of times over the years.
He developed a habit of tearing up documents, scattering their pieces in a trash bin or on the floor, leaving presidential record keepers in a scramble to tape them back together to preserve the documents in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.
One tweet, posted shortly after midnight in the spring, trailed off midsentence. “Despite the negative press covfefe,” the tweet said. Scavino told colleagues that Trump had simply fallen asleep midtweet.
Trump was plainly furious at nearly everyone in the world. He did not want to shoulder costs for defenses overseas. He was willing to slap tariffs on various countries. All the effort the group had put into trying to make him understand the connections between national security, military security, and economic security—that instead of seeing them as three separate pillars, it was just one—proved pointless.
Trump demonstrated once again that he simply didn’t believe that the post–World War II order benefited the U.S. He treated foreign countries as one-off entities, with which to engage primarily through bilateral trade deficits, a data point he often sought before speaking with their leaders. That was how he could tell which one was “up” and which was “down.”
After Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, Trump was reluctant to dispense aid, due in part to his refusal, in conversations with aides, to accept that the island was a part of the United States;
As Cohn left the Oval Office, Kelly whispered to him, “If I were you I’d have shoved that paper up his fucking ass.”
For Trump, who never fully accepted the fact that Congress was a separate and equal branch of government, the ability to deliver “justice” on a case-by-case basis hit like a revelation.
But the next day on Fox & Friends, Trump supporter Pete Hegseth condemned the bill as a “swamp budget,” a betrayal of Trump’s base because it failed to fund a wall along the southern border. So Trump began to condemn it, too, threatening—again on Twitter—to veto his own budget deal.
at one point during Kelly’s tenure, Trump questioned in Kelly’s presence why people would choose to go into the military. At that moment, he and Kelly were standing together at the Arlington National Cemetery gravesite where the retired general’s son was buried.
It was reported much later, by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, based on several sources, that Trump had derided the war dead and told Kelly that he did not want his hair to get wet in the rain.
A Marine to the end, Kelly declined for years after he left to be openly critical of the commander in chief except for occasional remarks amid extreme circumstances. But several people who spoke with him said he described Trump as a “fascist,” uninterested in history or geography, and uniquely unfit for the job of leading a constitutional democracy.
That the troops in Europe were essential to NATO’s strategy toward Russia did not mean much to Trump, who frequently told cabinet secretaries “we should just get out” of the alliance. Some cabinet officials dealt with his statements by saying that should be a second-term priority, and Trump agreed.
Some saw nefarious ends in this behavior while others believed he was operating with the emotional development of a twelve-year-old, using the intelligence data to get attention for himself.
(Trump had similar difficulty with a national security adviser’s name, John Bolton, repeatedly calling him “Mike” in apparent confusion with the singer Michael Bolton.)
Much of the government became reoriented to moving Trump off what one former cabinet official called “nutty” ideas, and managing him throughout the day as he popped off about various topics and chased fragments of conversations with outside advisers or things he’d heard on television.
When the articles of impeachment were introduced, Trump reacted at different points with a familiar refrain. “I’ll just sue Congress,” he told his top advisers in the Oval Office. “They can’t do this to me.” He believed, he said, that if Pelosi didn’t send the articles to the Senate after he was impeached—she held on to them for no clear reason for several days—he could “go straight to the Supreme Court.” “They’ll dismiss the case,” he said. White House aides explained to him that this wasn’t an actual trial, and that it was beyond his control. He was forced to wait.
“Newsom said nice things about me, Inslee said bad things about me,” Trump said from behind the Resolute Desk. Pence replied that the decision could not be made that way and had to be based on data showing local need.
I later learned that Trump, angry about my published stories, would bellow that he wanted administration officials to obtain my phone records and identify my sources. It did not appear that anyone ever acted on it.
“You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run over you. You’re going to look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate.”
Nine months after being impeached for using the powers of the presidency to advance his reelection, Trump finally dropped any pretense of attempting to separate the two. (Pompeo made arrangements to record a campaign speech from Jerusalem, where he was traveling on government business, a breach of long-standing diplomatic protocol and ethical norms.)
As Meadows was reassuring Klain and telling Senate Republican leadership that there would be a peaceful transition, he was trading texts with Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, who was urging him to elevate Sidney Powell and to continue contesting the election. “This is a fight of good versus evil,” Meadows wrote to Thomas.
Just as Priebus had prevented another attorney general, Jeff Sessions, from resigning three and a half years earlier, Cipollone, the White House counsel, rushed to follow Barr and banged on the window of his car, telling him Trump had changed his mind.
“Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me” and my House allies, Trump said on one call.
“So look. All I want to do is this,” Trump told Raffensperger. “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”
At 2:24 p.m., as his vice president had been hustled away from the Senate chamber and would be taken to an underground loading dock by a Secret Service detail that feared for his life, Trump wrote on Twitter, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country.”
Watching television, Trump told aides that perhaps Pence should be hanged.
(Kushner was not particularly interested in helping some colleagues who sought him out after the White House years ended, complaining, “No good deed goes unpunished.”)
reflecting on the meaning of having been president of the United States, his first impulse was not to mention public service, or what he felt he’d accomplished, only that it appeared to be a vehicle for fame, and that many experiences were only worth having if someone else envied them.
“The greatest comeback in American history!” Graham declared. Trump looked at me. “You know why Lindsey kisses my ass?” he asked. “So I’ll endorse his friends.” Graham laughed uproariously.
“I thought building a building in Moscow would be good and would be glamorous,” he said. “But the concept is very tough. You know, the ownership position with Russia is not like the ownership position here.” It’s “much different. You know, when they tell you, you know, ‘Build a building, but by the way you don’t own it.’ ”
I spent the four years of his presidency getting asked by people to decipher why he was doing what he was doing, but the truth is, ultimately, almost no one really knows him. Some know him better than others, but he is often simply, purely opaque, permitting people to read meaning and depth into every action, no matter how empty they may be.
