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August 12 - August 24, 2023
Despite his Apprentice catchphrase, Trump hated firing anyone directly himself.
Trump barely knew Bannon but took quickly to his bawdiness and authoritative demeanor if not his disheveled physical appearance. (After taking the job, Bannon got a haircut and started wearing dress shirts to work.)
Even those of us who had covered Trump for years struggled with how to handle the gush of falsehoods that dotted his sentences.
It would be an early look at a future in which Republican leaders discovered the deep disconnect between what they found beyond the pale and what many of their voters did.
Kushner mixed know-it-all confidence with a stunning lack of preparation on some issues.
“You know why it’s presidential?” he would say. “ ’Cause I’m the president!”
When the coverage did not turn out the way he wanted it to, Trump labeled the press “the enemy of the American people.”
“Despite the negative press covfefe,” the tweet said. Scavino told colleagues that Trump had simply fallen asleep midtweet.
Efforts to keep meetings productive usually required limiting attendance to a compact group. Anything above a handful of people inspired Trump to play to the room; a smaller number left a chance that work would get done.
After the ninety-minute meeting, Trump’s advisers tried to make sense of it. (“He’s a fucking moron,” Tillerson concluded.)
Trump knew that he was being told something he did not fully comprehend, and instead of acknowledging that, he shouted down the teachers.
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; he seemed to view it as a distressed property, referring to it as a place with “absolutely no hope” when an aide described its potential.
Trump appealed to Cohn not to quit his job over the issue. “I’ve got one major legislative agenda,” said Trump, sitting on the arm of a couch. “Without you, I’m not going to get tax reform.” And then, the hammer: “If you leave, you’re committing treason.”
Even as Trump avoided direct one-on-one confrontation, he created a world in which those working for him felt compelled to fight for primacy.
Kushner never fully divested from his company, raising questions about specific aspects of policy that he was involved in.
For dessert, Trump made sure to receive one more scoop of ice cream than his guests were served.
As Trump spent more time in office, the allure of being celebrated by fans only grew.
Visitors to the White House were struck by how much more easily Trump could recount who and what he’d seen on television than he could details of policy, and how much more interested he was in gossiping with people, some of whom he barely knew.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he barked in a White House meeting with lawmakers, specifically singling out Haitian, El Salvadorian, and African immigrants among those he did not want entering the country, according to people briefed on the meeting.
A producer at CBS News’s 60 Minutes, Ira Rosen, later revealed that, while at the White House, Bannon had said to him he worried the president suffered from some sort of dementia and privately floated the idea of invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment’s mechanism for removing the president as “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
As Mueller’s inquiry expanded, to cover not just Russian election interference but potential obstruction of justice afterward, Trump struggled to find white-collar defense lawyers willing to take on a client notorious for not listening to advice and refusing to pay his bills.
He deployed his first presidential pardon on behalf of Joseph Arpaio, the nativist former sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County whose raids in search of undocumented “aliens” made him a national poster boy for aggressive immigration enforcement.
Over time, Trump wanted the wall to be painted black so that the skin of immigrants trying to scale it would burn when they touched it, with spikes on top, and a moat dug along it.
Ultimately, thousands of children were separated from adults in the span of a month between May and June, typically one of the higher months for border crossings. Hundreds would remain separated from their parents for years, incurring incalculable psychological damage.
After Trump’s election, McCain became the standard-bearer of a Republican Party—aggressively internationalist, favoring immigration and global trade, committed to at least the rhetoric of bipartisanship—that Trump had sent into exile.
McCain had made sure before he passed away that Trump would not receive an invitation to the funeral;
He often found himself more animated by conflicts with fellow Republicans than with Democrats, because the divides were over interpersonal dynamics such as loyalty and respect rather than policy differences or ideology.
Even when Trump didn’t intend to tweak Kelly, he managed to offend him: 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.
Trump had derided the war dead and told Kelly that he did not want his hair to get wet in the rain.
When Trump observed to Ayers that he was getting “a lot of good press,” Ayers said he did not know what was driving it. Trump, who by then was known among his own staff as the “leaker-in-chief,” replied, “It was me.”
Mueller’s investigators found that Russian hackers first tried to enter Clinton’s personal office servers the same day in 2016 that Trump publicly said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the thirty thousand emails that are missing.” They also found that Russians had paid to stage pro-Trump rallies in the United States.
(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.)
Trump described all missiles as “Patriot missiles,” not realizing it was a specific type of weapons system.
(After seeing a news report that some advance staff at the rally had tested positive for the virus, Trump told aides that the campaign should stop testing staff, lest it reveal more cases.)
Bernie Marcus, the cofounder of Home Depot and an ally of both Trump and Bannon, urged Trump in early summer to move Kushner aside and bring in Bannon.
Never before in history had a president refused to vacate the White House—the closest parallel might have been Mary Todd Lincoln, who stayed in the mansion for nearly a month after her husband was assassinated—and Trump’s cold declaration left aides uncertain as to what he might do next.
Powell and Flynn were said to favor plans for having the government seize voting machines to produce irrefutable evidence the election was stolen from him;
Giuliani, whom Trump struck from the speaking list and then restored to it, called for a “trial by combat”—Trump
“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them,” he said. “Because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Yet there it was: 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.
“I liked Putin, and Putin liked me.”
“No, I thought it would be a glamorous project. I do a lot of things for glamour. I like glamour. You know the word ‘glamour’?” he said. “I love glamour.”
Republicans and even some Democrats pointed to the rule-defying Bill Clinton presidency as helping to pave the way for Trump, decades earlier.
When the tide sank, all boats were lowered. Trump had proven that the majority of Washington Republicans who had initially opposed him were exactly as craven as he had said they were, as he bent them to his will because they saw personal opportunity or necessity for survival, even after the Capitol riot.
she had painted a familiar portrait of Trump, one that dozens of people who worked for his company, political campaigns, and government tried masking over four decades: a narcissistic drama-seeker who covered a fragile ego with a bullying impulse and, this time, took American democracy to the brink.
The reality is he treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists—reporters, government aides, and members of Congress, friends and pseudofriends and rally attendees and White House staff and customers. All present a chance for him to vent or test reactions or gauge how his statements are playing or discover how he is feeling.
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.
