The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

by Peter Baker

It was all part of maintaining his own cartoonish mythology. In Trump’s telling, the new occupant of the Oval Office was an American superman—physically strong, mentally gifted, healthy as a horse, rich as sin, and a magnet for beautiful women. He worked around the clock and barely slept. He was not fat, his hair was natural, his skin color perfectly normal, his hands were not small and neither was any other part of his anatomy.

“Have you read Donald Trump’s Playboy interview?” Angela Merkel, the staid chancellor of Germany, asked Justin Trudeau, Canada’s suave young prime minister, a second-generation celebrity politician named one of Vogue’s “sexiest men alive.”

Good god

The president-elect raved about the time he had met Trudeau’s father. A search in the archives turned up a photo of the two, and the Canadians sent it to Trump as a present—because, as the Trudeau adviser said, “what better gift to give Donald Trump than a picture of himself?”

To Trump, NATO was a sort of protection racket that the United States had been suckered into for decades. Facts were irrelevant.

Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, later regaled a California audience with the scene. Trump, he said, had made the strike into “after-dinner entertainment.”[22] After dinner, Trump and his team returned to the makeshift secure room for an update on the strike, then many in the party retired to Mar-a-Lago’s Library Bar, where they ran up a $1,000 tab that was billed to the government.

In reality, of course, Trump was still Trump. He had not at all changed his mind about Syria, or anything else. It was just another spur-of-the-moment decision, driven by what he had seen on television.

Not even a year into his tenure, this was what it had come to: an insecure president challenging his secretary of state to an intelligence test to prove that he was not an idiot.

It was a reminder that, as one presidential adviser put it, “there are no heroes” in Trump’s White House.

That night, after flying to Florida for the holidays, he told wealthy guests over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, “You all just got a lot richer.”[35]

On the backs of the poor,the rich got richer

But Trump would not be cut off from his more radical advisers for long.

Bc he is a crazy person himself

Pompeo was hanging out in Urban’s box at the Army-Navy football game with the president-elect. His stated rationale for joining the administration was similar to that of many Republicans: Trump had won, and besides, the Democrats were the real enemy. “He just made his political peace with reality—this is our president,” one of his friends said.[17] A few months earlier, he had warned that Trump would be an “authoritarian president”; now he told colleagues that he would quit Congress in order to “right the wrongs” of the Obama years.[18] He also deleted his entire congressional Twitter feed, with its occasional biting criticism of Trump,

There is no character or soul with these abhorrent narcissists

Bolton had immediately cleaned house at the National Security Council, pushing out Tom Bossert, the homeland security adviser, both deputy national security advisers, the media spokesman, and assorted other aides. Among the changes he made was to eliminate a pandemic preparedness directorate created during the Obama years and fold it into a broader biodefense office.

Well that went well :/

Trump liked the video so much he even played it at the news conference afterward. His tweet on arriving back in Washington was nothing short of grandiose. “Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” he wrote. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea.” This was not even close to true.

By this point, Graham’s face was contorted in rage and covered with sweat. “Boy, you all want power,” he snapped at the Democrats. “God, I hope you never get it. I hope the American people can see through this sham.”[38]

You've got some fucking nerve, Graham

That set Trump off. “Kirstjen, why are you letting them in?” he demanded. “Why don’t you not let them in?” Nielsen, flustered, tried to correct the record. “Respectfully to the attorney general, that’s not how the law works,” she said. “As soon as they touch U.S. territory, they are guaranteed due process under the law. You can’t push them back across the imaginary border or across the line.” Trump refused to accept that. “You’re making me look bad,” he shouted. “What is the matter with you? Why can’t you get on the program? Why won’t you do this?”

To one friend, though, the slogan really did reflect the first lady’s view of the family separation issue. After returning from Texas, Melania had dismissed the whole contretemps in a conversation with her friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff. “They’re not with their parents, and it’s sad,” she told her. “But the patrols told me the kids say, ‘Wow, I get a bed? I will have a cabinet for my clothes?’ It’s more than they have in their own country where they sleep on the floor. They are taking care nicely there.”[14]

How very Barbara Bush

Kelly told colleagues that Trump seemed genuinely perplexed at the notion of sacrifice for something greater than oneself.

And yet all of them would vote for him again

Yet when the chance to join Trump’s White House as budget director arose, Mulvaney eagerly sought it out, developing a case of selective amnesia and proving surprisingly willing to sacrifice past positions as the budget deficit swelled from $665 billion to $984 billion in Trump’s first two years in office.[15]

did not catalogue the many ways he had grown frustrated with the president. He had resisted Trump’s efforts to withdraw from Afghanistan, abandon the Iran nuclear agreement, ban transgender troops from the military, cancel military exercises with South Korea and pull out troops or dependents, undercut or even leave NATO, and conduct a military parade down the streets of Washington. More broadly, Mattis thought Trump was wildly reckless, oddly blind to the threat posed by Russia, and irresponsibly cavalier about America’s international commitments.

Either way, there never was a deal, let alone the deal of the century. By the end of the Trump administration, North Korea had continued to grow its nuclear arsenal by an estimated fifteen more warheads since the two leaders first met, while improving its long-range missile capability, expanding its nuclear complex, and hardening it against attack.[17]

But Trump’s efforts to undermine the investigation were, in a sense, working. No other target of a federal investigation had the power to fire his investigators or dangle pardons for witnesses against him to encourage their silence. Mueller complained to Trump’s lawyers that his tweets were discouraging witnesses from cooperating, but that would not stop the president.

The answers they ultimately submitted were next to useless. Trump, who had boasted of having “one of the greatest memories of all time” and had mercilessly mocked Christine Blasey Ford for not remembering tangential details of her encounter with Brett Kavanaugh three dozen years earlier, told the prosecutors “I do not recall” or some variation thirty-six times.[26]

If taunted by Putin, Trump relished his meetings with other autocrats over the course of the summit, even as he once again attacked America’s closest allies. After publicly dumping on the decades-old mutual defense treaty with Japan, he sat with China’s Xi on the opening night of the summit and discussed the imprisonment of up to a million ethnic Uighurs in camps by the Chinese. Not only did he express no concern about such a massive human rights atrocity, Trump even agreed that Xi should continue building the camps, according to the account of Trump’s interpreter later made public by John Bolton. In a telephone call the next day with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had urged Trump to raise the plight of the Uighurs, Trump told her that Xi had explained that they “like being in those camps.”

Trump believed that his divisive commentary and attacks on enemies were important to rally his base, which was in turn the secret of his power over an otherwise skeptical Washington establishment. He believed this although polls throughout his presidency showed that his lies and Twitter attacks were a consistent turnoff even to Republicans who otherwise supported his agenda. He had also learned by this point that there was essentially no way for him to go too far, that his own party leaders and advisers would excuse and rationalize just about anything he did or said, even if they had previously proclaimed those words or actions to be unacceptable.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, he had been Barack Obama’s token Republican appointee to the Federal Reserve Board. Once there, he emerged as a solid ally of Obama’s chair, Janet Yellen. In his first year in office, Trump had the option of reappointing Yellen, whose liberal fiscal policies and preference for low interest rates matched the perennially indebted former real estate developer’s desire to keep it easy to borrow money. But Yellen had been chosen by Obama so Trump wanted his own pick.

Trump was soon angered at the Fed for failing, in his view, to pump enough cheap money into the economy by cutting interest rates—the key, Trump believed, to his re-election.

Nothing about what good policy is or how to help people, just about HIM

Trump’s plan to deal with Hurricane Dorian thankfully did not involve atomic warfare. In fact, his monitoring of the storm looked a lot like any other weekend of his presidency in that it included hours spent watching Fox News, tweeting and retweeting nearly sixty times before noon on the last Saturday of the month, and then motorcading to a Trump-branded golf course for his 226th day on the links at one of his own properties since becoming president.

A couple months later, Pompeo was asked about Ukraine by Mary Louise Kelly, a host of NPR’s All Things Considered. He abruptly cut their interview short and walked out, then sent an aide to demand that Kelly join him in his private sitting room. There, he erupted in fury and insisted that his staff bring him a map. “Could you even find Ukraine on a fucking map?” he demanded of Kelly, a veteran correspondent who had reported from Ukraine and Russia many times. When she readily pointed to it, this caused Pompeo to get even angrier. “Do you think Americans care about fucking Ukraine?” he yelled.[23]

And now....

Long afterward, Kinzinger reflected about his impeachment vote. He had come to consider it a mistake, one of many that he and other Republican members of Congress had made when trying to navigate the impossible situations that Trump had put them in. “Bad on me,” he said. Eventually, he would call it “my biggest regret.”[49]

*eye roll*

Trump had sought to extort Ukraine for a personal political favor, and there was not a single Republican congressman willing to call him on it. Not one.

Cowards

It did not help that Trump and his team gave shifting explanations for why he authorized the operation, with the president at one point claiming that Suleimani was on the verge of launching terrorist attacks on four American embassies, an assertion that neither military officials nor intelligence agencies backed up in briefings with congressional leaders.

But her emails. But benghazi. But obama

Trump had always been indifferent to most substantive policy matters and skeptical of anything that experts, scientific or otherwise, told him. He turned everything into a political question whose answer was whatever would benefit him politically. And that is how he would approach this crisis too. “From the time this thing hit,” said an adviser who spoke frequently with the president, “his only calculus was how does it affect my re-election.”

Throughout, Trump equivocated on just who was really in charge of the response to the disaster, claiming unfettered federal power when he wanted to call the shots and disclaiming responsibility when he wanted to pass the buck.

Of all the absurd ideas that Trump would entertain about the coronavirus, perhaps the most nonsensical was that the pandemic would not be so bad if the government simply stopped testing so much—as if the testing was causing the virus to spread. It was like a teenager hoping that as long as she did not take a pregnancy test, she would not actually be pregnant.

Like the president, who believed himself smarter than experts on just about every subject, Meadows decided he knew better on many of the most pressing issues raised by the virus.

For Trump, focusing on China’s misconduct was not so much a foreign policy pivot as a political one, allowing him to avoid scrutiny of his own administration’s failings. He had a narrative he could sell—it was not his fault, it was Beijing’s.

Instead, Trump marked the passing of 100,000 Americans from a disease no one had heard of just a few months earlier by retweeting a post from a Fox Business host who called him “arguably the greatest president in history.”

He probably played golf too

He typically deflected accusations of racism by noting that unemployment for Black and Hispanic Americans had fallen to all-time lows. Those trends, however, began under Obama and simply continued after Trump took over, and were not clearly related to any specific policy the new president advanced.[27]

He had signed Lamar Alexander’s bill making federal funding for historically Black colleges permanent, but it was a bipartisan measure that Trump expended little energy to pass and his own budgets requested less such financing than Congress provided each year. Still, Trump regularly claimed that he had done more for Black Americans than any president with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln.

The Trumpification of the party was so complete that the convention produced no platform, the document traditionally adopted by a party every four years to outline its agenda and positions on major issues of the day, an abdication unheard of in modern times. Instead, the Republican National Committee simply released a resolution declaring that it “enthusiastically supports President Trump,” rendering it a party that stood for nothing other than its leader.[53]

She was mocked when she once tried to awkwardly interject herself into a conversation with the leaders of Britain, France, and Canada as a camera caught the moment.

Bc she was unqualified

Kushner set about educating himself by reading books and consulting with the likes of Henry Kissinger. He tried to immerse himself in the nuances, at one point looking up the definition of “sovereignty” and discovering something like two dozen different variations on Wikipedia. But he approached the mission with more hubris than humility, openly expressing disdain for those who had come before him and suggesting they had no idea what they were doing while he, with no diplomatic experience, knew how to get things done.

“If we are going to fail, we don’t want to fail doing it the same way it’s been done in the past,” he said in a rare public appearance at a forum hosted by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “You want to be original in your failure,” joked Rob Satloff, his interviewer and the institute’s director.[12] Kushner did not think it was very funny, but Satloff’s joke turned out to be prescient.

In what remaining time they had in the White House, Kushner wanted to focus on expanding the Abraham Accords, which he felt validated his whole time in Washington—and would also help him cement contacts in the wealthy Gulf states that would prove lucrative in the private equity fund he would open after leaving Washington.

But hunter biden what??

America had read the results the same way. Joe Biden would be the next president. Voters had rejected Donald Trump.

YAY

In public, Pompeo had remained his usual staunchly pro-Trump self. The day after he had secretly gone to Milley’s house to express concern about the “crazies” taking over, in fact, the secretary of state had created a furor by not only refusing to acknowledge Trump’s defeat but snidely telling a news conference, “There will be a smooth transition—to a second Trump administration.”[16]

Asshole

But it did not matter to Trump. No matter how many times he was told the conspiracies he saw were not true, he refused to give up.

Plus all his followers: cult

As for Eastman, he went back to the Willard InterContinental Hotel, where he joined a “war room” that had been set up with Rudy Giuliani, Bernie Kerik, Steve Bannon, and others organizing efforts to pressure Pence and Congress to block Biden’s victory. The Trump campaign was footing the cost of the command center, a bill that would eventually run to tens of thousands of dollars. Roger Stone wandered in and out with members of the Oath Keepers militia serving as bodyguards. Giuliani asked Eastman how his meeting went. Eastman told him he did not think Pence was going to do it.

“Are you really saying, John, that Al Gore could have just declared himself the winner of Florida and moved along?” Jacob asked. “Well, no, no, there wasn’t enough evidence for that,” Eastman said, a remarkable assertion from someone telling the president that he did not need to cite any evidence at all of fraud to overturn the 2020 election.

At some point, the president called Giuliani, Eastman, and the others at the Willard command center to discuss the next day’s rally.