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

by Peter Baker

We could think of no more urgent project than to record and seek to understand what really happened when Trump was in the White House. It is not yet a matter for the archives; it is a report from an active crime scene, still under investigation by multiple authorities. Someday, whether soon or not, it will no longer be a subject of current events. And then, we hope, this book can play a different role, explaining for future disbelieving generations what it was like when a crude New York real estate mogul with an itchy Twitter finger, an outsize self-regard, and an extreme disdain for all who came before him ended up as the president of the United States.

Fact-checking was never part of the process. He now had access to experts on basically every subject known to humanity but would rely instead on something he saw on Fox News or read online without asking if it was true or caring if it was not. Spelling and punctuation were strictly optional. “He often said that he was creating a new language,” Westerhout recalled.[34] At the beginning, he tweeted on average nine times a day, and many were so inflammatory that he would generate multiple news stories. When Washington erupted in outrage over some wild tweet, he took it as a victory—“owning the libs,” as his people put it. And if something he wrote proved problematic, he simply changed the subject by posting something even more explosive. Stories that would have bedeviled other presidents for days or weeks quickly vanished with the next sensation.

Trump was about to find out what it meant to fire the FBI director who was investigating him. At 12:30 p.m. on May 16, Rod Rosenstein and a couple of his aides met with Andrew McCabe, the Comey deputy now serving as acting FBI director, who dropped a bombshell: he had just authorized his agents to expand the investigation of Trump’s campaign to look at whether Trump himself had colluded with Russia or obstructed justice, and he planned to tell congressional leaders the next day. Rosenstein was reeling. The president was under investigation? With Jeff Sessions’s recusal, Rosenstein was in charge of the matter and now confronted a scenario that sounded like a Cold War spy novel, the acting FBI director telling the acting attorney general that the commander in chief might be under the influence of a hostile foreign power. But it was no John le Carré plot line. It was real.

vintage tanks rolling down the Champs-Élysées and fighter jets roaring overhead, all calculated to appeal to Trump. “You are going to be doing this next year,” the French general in charge had predicted to an American counterpart as they watched Trump’s delight. Sure enough, Trump returned home determined to have the Pentagon throw him the biggest, grandest military parade for the Fourth of July ever. “I’d rather swallow acid,” Mattis said, when the idea came up in one of many Pentagon meetings meant to find a way out of having to give in to the president.[38] Eventually, military officials would point out that the parade would cost millions of dollars and the heavy equipment would ruin Washington’s city streets.

But the gulf between Trump and his generals was not really about money or practicalities, just as the endless policy battles were not only about clashing views of Afghanistan or North Korea or Syria. Their divide was wider than that—it was about what the generals believed in and what the president believed in. That was never clearer than when Trump told John Kelly about his vision for the parade. “Look, I don’t want any wounded guys in the parade. This doesn’t look good for me,” Trump said, explaining that in the Bastille Day parade in Paris there had been several formations of injured veterans, including wheelchair-bound soldiers who had lost legs and arms. Kelly, still early in his tenure, could not believe what he was hearing. “Those are the heroes,” Kelly told him. “In our society, there’s only one group of people that are more heroic than they are and they are buried over in Arlington.” Including, he did not add, his own son.

Selva, however, had one of those moments that were all too rare in the Trump presidency: instead of saying what Trump wanted to hear, Selva said what he thought. “I didn’t grow up in the United States, I actually grew up in Portugal,” he told the president, according to an account he later gave colleagues. “Portugal was a dictatorship—and parades were about showing the people who had the guns. And in this country, we don’t do that.” He added: “It’s not who we are.” Even after this impassioned speech, Trump still did not get it. “So, you don’t like the idea?” the president asked, incredulous. “No,” Selva responded, in as blunt an answer as Trump would ever get. “It’s what dictators do.”

Trump, for his part, seemed less concerned that he would be seen as a cheat than a not-particularly-well-endowed cheat. A few months later, when Stormy Daniels published a book in which she said he had a small and oddly shaped penis, the president called Grisham from Air Force One to deny it. “Did you see what she said about me?” Trump said. “All lies. All lies.” Grisham was not sure how to respond. “Yes, sir,” she said simply. “Everything down there is fine,” he insisted. “Okay,” she replied, hoping the call would somehow be disconnected.[45]

Porter’s departure had a broader ripple effect on the building as well. He had been a steady hand, competent and levelheaded at least at work, someone who had smoothed out a tumultuous operation and stopped some of Trump’s more extreme ideas from getting too far. He insisted that “these outrageous allegations are simply false” and the result of “a coordinated smear campaign,” without going into further detail.[56] But it said something about the Trump White House that the resignation of an accused domestic abuser would cost it perhaps its most effective and professional staff member.

Jackson, a Navy doctor, had little managerial experience beyond the White House Medical Unit, where he had a propensity for heavy drinking and freely dispensing prescription drugs to White House aides. But he had forever endeared himself to Trump by holding a news conference after the president’s annual physical exam that January, at which he claimed the obese septuagenarian president was in “excellent” health, enthused about Trump’s “incredible genes,” failed to mention his cardiac disease, and said that “absolutely he is fit for duty.”[21]

All of which underscored the remarkable fact that by this point in the administration, Pompeo had managed the dual feat of spending more face time with Trump than almost any other cabinet member while also never getting in an argument with him. The senior White House official who watched Pompeo with Trump found him to be, aside from Mike Pence, perhaps “the most sycophantic and obsequious” of Trump’s advisers.[25] He was, according to an American ambassador who worked with Pompeo during this period, “like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.”[26]

From then on, Trudeau was almost persona non grata with Trump. The young Canadian had started out willing to play along with Trump’s photo ops but had ended up a target just like all those who challenged Trump publicly. While en route to Asia, Trump dispatched advisers to attack the Canadian prime minister in television interviews. Peter Navarro would prove to be especially zealous, claiming in one appearance “there’s a special place in hell” reserved for Trudeau.[53] For years afterward, Trump would randomly disparage Trudeau during unrelated conversations. Once, flying on Air Force One, he turned to Stephanie Grisham, then his White House press secretary. “Trudeau’s mom,” he said out of the blue. “She fucked all of the Rolling Stones.”[54] Back on the ground in Quebec, meanwhile, the Germans exacted a bit of revenge for all those Trump Twitter blasts, releasing on Instagram a soon-to-be-iconic photograph of a scowling Trump, sitting with his arms crossed, as he was confronted by Merkel, who stood over him surrounded by the world’s other democratic leaders. She seemed the very picture of determination in a pale-blue silk jacket, intently trying to talk some sense into the petulant president. Thus did Trump land in steamy Singapore on his way to meet with a thirty-four-year-old nuclear-armed tyrant who ran the world’s biggest modern-day Gulag.

The trip proved a breaking point not just with Macron, whom Trump predictably assailed in response to the speech, but also with Kelly. The chief of staff was appalled by Trump’s behavior. The president had long scorned soldiers in private, much as he had expressed disdain for John McCain’s combat service. “Anyone who went to that war was a sucker,” Trump had once said about Vietnam, as Kelly recounted it to colleagues. “I don’t know why you guys think these guys who get killed or wounded are heroes. They’re losers.” When Trump at one point accompanied Kelly to visit his son’s grave in Arlington Memorial Cemetery, the president said he could not understand why anyone would give up his life in a war. Kelly told colleagues that Trump seemed genuinely perplexed at the notion of sacrifice for something greater than oneself.

Since summer, Mattis had been quietly talking about leaving by the end of the year. For months, his long-term schedule included no events after December and he was wearing down the pages of his copy of Marcus Aurelius’s book on meditations trying to deal with the stress. But the betrayal of the Kurds was the tipping point. He printed out the ready-to-go letter of resignation that he, like so many in Trump’s administration, had spent hours writing and rewriting just in case, and brought it with him to the White House, where he made one last effort to convince Trump to change his mind. After failing to do so, Mattis handed him the letter. Like Chris Christie, he feared how Trump would spin the decision, so Mattis promptly returned to the Pentagon and instructed aides to print out fifty copies of the resignation letter and spread it far and wide.

Trump had not bothered to read the letter and missed the jab until he saw media coverage pointing it out. Realizing that he had been dissed, Trump abruptly announced that he would install Patrick Shanahan, the deputy defense secretary, as acting secretary as of January 1 rather than wait until the February 28 departure date Mattis had set, effectively pushing him out the door two months early. Only Trump would fire someone who had already quit.

The two had grown so estranged that Trump publicly branded the grizzled Marine “sort of a Democrat,” which was akin to an accusation of treason in his administration.[17] When a congressman that fall asked how things were going, Mattis had replied, “Well, every morning I get up and I go up to my driver and I say, ‘Did they fire me?’ And if he says no, I get in the car and I go to work.” Everyone including Mattis knew his time was coming to an end, the only question had been when.

For all of Trump’s schoolboy crush on Putin, aides could not help noticing that it did not appear reciprocated. Where other autocrats like Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Kim Jong-un figured out how to stroke Trump’s ego during their meetings, Putin never bothered to try. He gave the impression to American aides watching their interactions that he couldn’t care less about winning Trump over. It was all a one-way street. Trump, they thought, seemed so inexplicably anxious for the Russian leader’s approval, yet never got it.

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.” Just a few weeks earlier, Pelosi had publicly questioned Trump’s fitness for office and urged his family or his advisers to conduct an “intervention” with the erratic president. She thought there was nothing more Trump could say that would astound her. But she was astounded nonetheless. They like being in those camps. Really? “Mr. President,” she eventually responded, “that’s what an authoritarian would say, but they most certainly do not like being separated from their families.”

His estimation of his abilities was both vast and highly specific. The list of things Trump publicly claimed to “know more about than anybody” had grown to include borders, campaign finance, courts, construction, drones, debt, Democrats, the economy, infrastructure, the Islamic State, lawsuits, money, nuclear weapons, politicians, polls, renewable energy, social media, steelworkers, taxes, technology, “things” generally, trade, the United States government, and the visa system. He even said he knew more about New Jersey Democratic senator Cory Booker than Booker knew about himself. The president often explained publicly that windmills caused cancer, climate change was a hoax, and American toilets did not work properly anymore because of federal regulations.

On August 15, amid rising concern of a Chinese crackdown on protesters in Hong Kong, Trump tweeted, “If President Xi would meet directly and personally with the protesters, there would be a happy and enlightened ending to the Hong Kong problem. I have no doubt!” (The protests ended instead with Xi locking up the protest leaders and eliminating democratic guarantees that had been promised to Hong Kong residents.) On August 26, while in Biarritz, France, for a G7 meeting, Trump stunned advisers from both countries when he greeted Egypt’s brutal military leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, by calling out, “Where’s my favorite dictator?”[26]

The final vote that day was 230 to 197 with one abstention from Tulsi Gabbard, a Putin-admiring, Fox News regular from Hawaii who was nominally a Democrat.[50] The only Republican who voted in favor of impeachment was Justin Amash, a libertarian from Michigan who had quit the party the previous summer over his concerns about Trump and announced he was not running for re-election. Trump, meanwhile, spent the evening in Amash’s district in Battle Creek, Michigan, being cheered at a rally by tens of thousands of his red-hatted fans. When the vote came, around 8:30 that night, an aide carried a sign to the stage so Trump could see the final tally and he exulted that Republicans had stuck with him. “The Republican Party has never been so affronted,” Trump said, “but they have never been so united as they are right now.”[51] He was right. 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.

As if that were not surreal enough, Trump’s team then handed the lectern to Ken Starr so that the man who helped impeach one president could argue against conviction of another. More than twenty years earlier, Starr said quite soberly that the rule of law was so important that a president should be held accountable for defying the judicial system even if the underlying issue was just about sex. Now he contended that a president’s subversion of foreign policy for the purpose of tearing down a domestic opponent did not rise to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. “The Senate is being called to sit as the high court of impeachment all too frequently,” Starr told the senators. “Indeed, we are living in what I think can aptly be described as the Age of Impeachment.” It was, of course, an age he played a role in ushering in. “Like war, impeachment is hell,” he allowed. “Or at least presidential impeachment is hell.”[23]

At seventy-nine, Fauci had the reassuring bedside manner and scientific credibility that Trump did not. He was a legend in medical circles, having served as the federal government’s top infectious disease specialist under seven presidents going back to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, when he was at the forefront of the fight against AIDS. Back then, Fauci was initially the subject of enormous anger by the gay community that felt he was not doing enough, but over time he became one of their leading allies in the struggle to defeat the scourge. He was also a prime architect of George W. Bush’s program to combat AIDS in Africa, a program credited with saving millions of lives.

“Well, then I have my answer.” 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.

“Mr. President, that’s not how it works,” Azar tried to explain. “We started trials, but you have to actually test it.” “No, Larry Ellison says it works. Approve it today. And Laura says hydroxychloroquine works. It’s perfectly safe, so just approve it.” “Mr. President, we don’t have data,” Azar protested. “Laura takes it,” Trump said. “It’s safe.” “Laura may take it, but hydroxychloroquine with people with heart disease can suffer fatal reactions so we have to be—” “No,” Trump demanded. “I want it approved today. That’s an order.” Laura Ingraham had been pushing hydroxychloroquine on her Fox News show for a couple days, hosting a Long Island lawyer, Gregory Rigano, who falsely passed himself off as an adviser to Stanford Medical School. When her guest asserted that hydroxychloroquine would “just get rid of it completely,” Ingraham exulted, “That’s a game changer.” Trump loved it. Game changer. That’s what he wanted. Why was Azar resisting?

That night, Fox News continued its drumbeat for hydroxychloroquine as Tucker Carlson brought the same lawyer from Ingraham’s show onto his program. The next day, Trump took matters into his own hands. The doctors might not be willing to tell Americans to take hydroxychloroquine, but the president was. “We are very excited about, specifically, what we talked about with the chloroquine,” Trump said at his televised briefing. “I think it could be something really incredible.” Adopting Ingraham’s term, he said, “it could be a game changer.”[25] Asked by a reporter the next day if there was evidence that the drug would be effective against Covid, Tony Fauci, with Trump standing right next to him, said flatly, “The answer is no.”[26]

Third, I swore an oath to the Constitution of the United States and embodied within that Constitution is the idea that says that all men and women are created equal. All men and women are created equal, no matter who you are, whether you are white or Black, Asian, Indian, no matter the color of your skin, no matter if you’re gay, straight or something in between. It doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Jew, or choose not to believe. None of that matters. It doesn’t matter what country you came from, what your last name is—what matters is we’re Americans. We’re all Americans. That under these colors of red, white, and blue—the colors that my parents fought for in World War II—means something around the world. It’s obvious to me that you don’t think of those colors the same way I do. It’s obvious to me that you don’t hold those values dear and the cause that I serve. And lastly it is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945. Between 1914 and 1945, 150 million people were slaughtered in the conduct of war. They were slaughtered because of tyrannies and dictatorships. That generation, like every generation, has fought against that, has fought against fascism, has fought against Nazism, has fought against extremism. It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t under...

At the White House and the campaign, some Trump advisers hoped the rash defiance of even basic safety protocols during the pandemic would finally come to an end, now that the president and first lady were stricken and others were testing positive too, including McEnany and Stephen Miller. Maybe, some imagined, there might even be a reckoning, and a political reset. Could Trump use his own life-threatening battle with Covid to present a more empathetic face to Americans as he closed out the campaign? Kushner had Alyssa Farah, the strategic communications director, and other aides draft a speech for a recovering Trump to give, expressing compassion for the suffering of others with Covid and a newfound understanding of the hardships afflicting the country. But of course it was not to be. By Monday evening, Trump was back at the White House, a return punctuated with a dramatic, made-for-television-commercials helicopter arrival in the fading early-evening light followed by an appearance on the Truman Balcony where he stripped off his mask with a flourish. He did not rip open his shirt to reveal a Superman costume underneath, as he had joked about doing with Mark Meadows before they left the hospital. But he had thought about it. He had survived the virus and the country could too. There would be no remorse, no second-guessing, no new approach to the crisis. “Don’t let it dominate your lives,” he exhorted in an address to the nation. “Get out there.”[28]

Donald Trump was, by many measures, the most politically unsuccessful occupant of the White House in generations. He was the first president since Benjamin Harrison to lose the popular vote twice. He was the only president in the history of Gallup polling never to have the support of a majority of Americans for a single day of his tenure. Instead, surveys showed that he was the most polarizing president in the history of surveys. And he was the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose the White House, the House, and the Senate in just four years. As Trump himself might put it, he was not just a loser, but a big loser.

Trump, the Napoleon of Mar-a-Lago, knew little about history. But like the French emperor banished to Elba, his aspirations for a comeback could not be ruled out. History is full of similarly improbable might-have-beens. Just because no American president before or since Grover Cleveland has managed the feat of returning to office once cast out of it does not mean it cannot happen. After Napoleon reclaimed the throne and was finally defeated once and for all at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the victorious British general, the Duke of Wellington, summed up the twelve-hour fight. It was, he wrote a friend, “the nearest-run thing you ever saw.”