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August 12 - August 24, 2023
But even those who rationalized staying close to him acknowledged that a “Bad” Trump always revealed himself.
He was interested primarily in money, dominance, power, bullying, and himself.
In a celebrity-obsessed country that over many years treated politics as a wrestling match or a game, Trump found his moment, fueling and benefiting from the collapse of cultural and political identities into one another as the country cleaved along the lines of whom you hate, or who hates you back.
It is an examination of the world that made Trump and the personality and character traits he possessed as he emerged from it, and how they shaped and defined his presidency.
Without understanding how the federal government worked, and with little interest in learning, he recreated around him the world that had shaped him.
There is the counterattack, there is the quick lie, there is the shift of blame, there is the distraction or misdirection, there is the outburst of rage, there is the performative anger, there is the designed-just-for-headlines action or claim, there is the indecisiveness masked by a compensatory lunge, there is the backbiting about one adviser with another adviser, creating a wedge between them. The challenge is figuring out at any given moment which trick he is using.
He is incredibly suggestable, skimming ideas and thoughts and statements from other people and repackaging them as his own; campaign aides once called him a “sophisticated parrot.”
Among his most consistent attributes are a desire to grind down his opponents; his refusal to be shamed, or to voluntarily step away from the fight; his projection that things will somehow always work out in his favor; and his refusal to accept the way life in business or politics has traditionally been conducted.
A core tenet of the Trump political movement has been finding publicly acceptable targets to serve as receptacles for preexisting anger.
Employees and advisers who wrapped their identities in him felt more bonded to him when he was under attack.
Trump might have succeeded in delivering vengeance, but he could not keep scrutiny of his finances at bay.
Trump told The Washington Times that “I see myself as a very honest guy stationed in a very corrupt world.”
But in practice you are either loyal or disloyal, there is no middle ground. I also learned that loyalty is not necessarily returned.”
“Whatever complicates the world more, I do.” When Singer asked him to elaborate, Trump explained, “It’s always good to do things nice and complicated so that nobody can figure it out.”
“There’s something very seductive about being a television star,” Trump said to a reporter at the time.
Bannon talked positively about populism, and suddenly Trump piped up. “That’s exactly what I am—a popularist,” Trump said. Bannon corrected him. “No, it’s populist,” he said. “Yeah, popularist,” Trump responded.
And there, in a nutshell, was the essence of how Trump was being interpreted. It seemed as though there was both a menacing psychological-thriller score and a sitcom laugh track playing behind him at all times.
(“I love the Hispanics,” Trump insisted in response to questions about the activists. “I have thousands of Hispanics right now working for me.”)
Within a Republican Party that was divided on matters of foreign and domestic policy, Trump had located a strain of thought uniting different factions of conservatives: anti-Muslim sentiment.
“Many people are saying” or “and other things” were Trump’s often-used filler descriptors. He had done a version of this for decades, but as a presidential candidate his words carried much more weight, so journalists pressed for details that Trump was inevitably unable or unwilling to provide.
Trump drove days of news based only on his reactions to people reacting to him, with one controversy rolling frictionlessly into the next, so that the controversies clouded the media’s line of sight.
Whatever he did, his base was meeting him there. “I’ve never seen a situation before where someone fucks up and their numbers go up,” a Trump political adviser told me at the time.
many evangelicals appeared willing to grade him on a curve. “His personal life is saintlike compared to Bill Clinton’s,” a self-described evangelical voter in North Carolina told a Times colleague;
It had all become a show of just how much he could get away with. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?” Trump said. “It’s, like, incredible.”
Within hours, it was clear that Trump had accepted nothing about the result. His equanimity about defeat had dissolved into fury. “It was stolen from me,” Trump told his advisers. For days thereafter, he called Iowa’s Republican chairman daily with an order to redo the vote, threatening to sue over what he called “fraud.”
New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who dropped out of the race after garnering less than 10 percent of the vote in New Hampshire, made a different calculation in the face of Trump’s seemingly unstoppable momentum. He endorsed his friend’s candidacy on February 25, becoming the first major Republican establishment figure to do so.
Christie quickly learned what it meant to be a Trump adviser as opposed to a friend.
(Trump would ultimately carry every state in the Deep South.)
In Louisiana, he beat his three competitors and claimed victory. But media estimates soon concluded he was likely to lose most of the delegates due to the arcane rules by which they were awarded.
The fact was simply that Cruz’s far more sophisticated campaign had figured out how to game a complex system that Trump’s small circle of advisers, some without presidential election experience, never bothered to learn.
The biggest source of tension was around his tax returns, which presidential candidates (including nearly every major-party nominee starting with Richard Nixon) had routinely released voluntarily.
he was more worried that people would see the actual amount of money he made than he was about scrutiny into his sources of income.
“So what I mean is, well I could just say, ‘I’ll release them when I’m no longer under audit,’ ” Trump said. “ ’Cause I’ll never not be under audit.”
Some Cruz supporters began laying a plot to wrest the nomination from Trump there by persuading his delegates to defect.
As the likely Republican nominee, Trump was automatically the center of attention and, for the first time in his life, did not have to perpetually scheme ways to get media coverage. Yet Trump did little to adjust to this new situation.
In a large primary field, Trump’s ability to generate press coverage out of nothing—by perpetually talking about everything, issuing provocations, and creating conflict, then making a story out of the coverage itself by turning on the media—had served him well: every time Trump was in the spotlight, it meant no other candidate was.
Trump treated the campaign as an opportunity to settle old scores and promote old products.
Trump insisted he should not be seen as backing down. “You think I’m going to change?” he asked when the issue came up during a press conference. “I’m not changing.”
Despite the celebratory tone that suffused the entire conversation, Trump had not offered the job to Pence, who was not given the chance to say whether or not he would accept.
Trump chose someone who filled a hole he couldn’t fill himself with evangelical voters, and who, most important, would never be a threat to step out of Trump’s shadow down the road.
Stone had formed a group, which he called Stop the Steal, to counter the last-ditch efforts of Cruz supporters to strip away Trump delegates.
We had gone into that interview hoping to distill Trump’s worldview and came away with a grab bag of statements about foreign countries.
Stylistically, a durable aspect of the exchanges was seeing Sanger invoke the term “America First,” the name of a discredited movement to keep the country out of World War II that seemed unfamiliar to Trump when Sanger said it during the first phone call (Trump claimed in the second phone call to be aware of its historical significance), then watching Trump begin to appropriate it constantly to characterize his ideology.
Over a forty-five-minute interview, for which Manafort was not present, Trump repeatedly took stances that aligned with Moscow’s view of the world.
History isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket,” Cruz told an associate—without
The Democrats held their convention the following week. It was quickly disrupted when the group WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee’s servers.
In Cleveland, mentions of Clinton’s emails elicited chants of “Lock her up!” among delegates.
Federal officials determined that Russia was behind the apparent hack; Vladimir Putin had long made clear his antipathy to Clinton.
Trump appeared to goad a foreign government in its quest to humiliate his domestic opposition. “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing,”
“Advisers who once hoped a Pygmalion-like transformation would refashion a crudely effective political showman into a plausible American president now increasingly concede that Mr. Trump may be beyond coaching,” we wrote.
