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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.
He sought out enemies and where they did not exist, he invented them. With Trump, there was always an us and always a them.
He vindictively ordered the pullout of thousands of troops from Germany because he was mad at its leader. He tried to buy Greenland after a billionaire friend told him it was a good idea. He secretly sought to abolish a federal appeals court after it ruled against him.
His intelligence chief privately wondered whether the president was a Russian stooge. His chief of staff secretly consulted a book by psychiatrists questioning Trump’s mental fitness. His wife thought he was blowing it against the coronavirus and his daughter and son-in-law thought he was wrong about the supposedly stolen election.
The painful fact is that those who stopped Trump from committing this or that outrage also helped him learn how better to get what he wanted the next time.
He could not pay attention, could not do details, was not bothered by inconsistency. “He hasn’t read a book in thirty years,” Sternlicht said. “He’s not encumbered by the truth.” To
Trump always insisted that he won, whether he did or not. He did not even think of it as cheating.
He was probably the least knowledgeable new president in the modern era.
Trump believed he had more power than he did, expecting to rule as he always had in the Trump Organization, a family-owned company with no shareholders where he called all the shots. He never liked the idea of sharing power. “Making choices is a lot easier when you have to answer only to yourself,” he once said.
He switched political parties at least five times, constantly looking for one that would welcome him as the savior that he believed himself to be.
Trump respected three types of people—those with money, those with Ivy League credentials, and those with stars on their uniform.
Looks mattered as much as anything to Trump, who stocked his administration as if he were casting a new reality show.
One result of this hiring process was that nobody had ever staffed a modern White House with so few people who knew how government worked.
This was the moment, in the view of some network insiders, that Trump effectively cowed Fox News into submission.
A Fox producer sent daily emails to a Trump campaign list summarizing the latest news developments while offering suggestions about how, for instance, to reply to a Hillary Clinton speech.
The two families were close enough that Wendi Deng Murdoch brought Jared and Ivanka back together after a break-up, the Murdoch daughters served as flower girls at the resulting wedding, and the young couple vacationed on the Murdoch yacht. Ivanka for years helped oversee a $300 million trust fund for Murdoch’s children, a position she gave up only after her father was elected.
“The two most effective ways of communicating with Trump are Fox & Friends and Hannity,
Trump saw nothing wrong with using the power of the presidency to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, especially if it benefited himself or his friends.
When Amazon acquired Whole Foods, Procter & Gamble, which sold many of its products in North America directly in Walmart stores, suddenly faced a major threat from the online retailer. Peltz accused Amazon of controlling prices and wanted Trump to take action against it. And Trump was eager to help.
Barack Obama had lobbied Merkel to run for a fourth term as chancellor so that she could serve as a counterweight to Trump and the rising forces of right-wing populism in Europe.
“Washington, D.C., is now the epicenter of global instability in the world,” one of Abe’s top advisers told Strobe Talbott, a former deputy secretary of state who headed the Brookings Institution.
Adelson had announced a $25 million gift to Trump in September of 2016, as
decision making was essentially random, as much about who got to talk to Trump, and when, as anything else. White House staffers were soon calling Corker with strategic advice on how to be the last voice in Trump’s ear:
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.
Few themes were more persistent than Trump’s desire to prove that his predecessors, all of them, had made the worst deals.
His plan was to blow them up and make better ones—or at least new versions of the old ones, with full credit to himself.
That day, Priebus confided to others, had been the closest of close calls, a moment when Trump was truly prepared to upend the global economy for the sake of an applause line at a political rally.
“He wanted to pull out of NATO on a number of occasions. That was actually much more serious than people realized.”
The national security adviser shrugged. There was no training for something like this. “I shoot guns,” McMaster joked.
it would also be seen as an effort by the president to obstruct a federal investigation into his own campaign, one they had failed to stop.
Just before being sworn in as president, Trump paid $25 million to former students of his defunct Trump University to settle fraud claims. The New York State attorney general later found a “shocking pattern of illegality” at the Trump Foundation,
Some of Mnuchin’s relatives despised the president, seeing him as a vulgar narcissist, and were unhappy to be in his presence. Mnuchin’s mother went so far as to feign a broken arm, wrapping it in a sling, to avoid having to shake hands with Trump.
He grabbed Trump’s attention with a proposal from the security contractor Erik Prince, the Blackwater founder and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, that would, in effect, privatize the war in Afghanistan by sending in 5,500 of Prince’s mercenaries to fight alongside the Afghan military and appointing an American “viceroy” to oversee the war. Prince had, with Bannon’s connivance, designed a proposal so shamelessly aimed at Trump that the PowerPoint presentation he prepared for it compared his war plan to Trump’s turnaround of the Wollman ice-skating rink project in New York’s Central
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Trump managed to alienate Mattis even further when he tweeted, seemingly out of nowhere, that he was reinstating the military’s ban on transgender troops that Barack Obama had lifted. The president even lied about doing so “after consultation with my Generals and military experts.” There had been no such consultation.
“Scaramucci” would soon become a Trump-era unit of measurement, a sort of Washington shorthand for how long an official could make it in Trump’s turnover-ridden administration,
Trump ordered McMaster to produce a plan for a military strike against Venezuela too. Kelly, channeling Mattis, told him not to do any such thing.
had been hired to help produce the event. “I want tanks and choppers. Make it look like North Korea.”[37] Trump never seemed to understand or care that his generals might recoil at such a display, or why his strongman style might be incompatible with the world’s oldest democracy.
The only specific point that seemed to matter to Trump was lowering the corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, a headline-friendly cut that by itself would drain the Treasury of $2 trillion,
Republican campaign donors considered the bill an important part of their reward for sticking with a president they had only reluctantly supported.
It slashed the corporate tax rate to 21 percent rather than the 15 percent he demanded, while bringing down individual income rates and nearly doubling the standard deduction and child tax credit. The changes for corporations were permanent but the cuts for individual taxpayers would expire in 2025 unless renewed by Congress first.
He told associates that if he were to write a book on his time as chief of staff, he would title it Tweets Not Sent, Decisions Not Made.[46]
it was often said of Tillerson that he did not suffer fools gladly. Or in this case “fucking morons.” By March, the list of issues on which he disagreed with Trump was long. It was not just North Korea. It was the Paris climate accord and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the steel and aluminum tariffs, the attacks on NATO, the embassy move to Jerusalem.
the Koch brothers, were hardly enthusiastic about Trump either, although they had refused to make the eight-figure media buy attacking him advocated by Marc Short, the head of their political arm, Freedom Partners, and a friend of Pompeo’s. Short quit to work for Rubio, but after Rubio lost ended up working for Mike Pence, another longtime Koch beneficiary, when Trump selected him as his running mate. Short then brought in Pompeo to advise Pence on debate preparations that September. The Koch network had found its way into the Trump camp after all.
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.
was a gut punch, he told others, “to see the president of the United States say, ‘well, you know my intelligence director Dan Coats tells me one thing and Vladimir Putin tells me another. Why would I have any reason to not agree with Vladimir?’ I just, I was in shock.”
the Trump administration had one Russia policy while Trump had another Russia policy and the two were in stark conflict with each other. “I’ve seen Washington where State and Defense were at odds. I’ve seen Washington where State and NSC were at odds. I’ve never seen Washington where State, NSC, and Defense were all in one place, with a couple of exceptions, and the president was in another place,”
motivation. Power had shifted in Washington, and Graham would shift with it. “If you knew anything about me,” he told host Dana Bash, “I want to be relevant.”[7]
“There are people talking about using heat rays on innocent women and children.”
“We need to take away children,” Sessions told five United States attorneys from the border region on a conference call in May.[6] His deputy, Rod Rosenstein, told prosecutors a week later that it did not matter how young the children were.
Of some four thousand children ultimately removed from their parents and detained in separate facilities, hundreds were still not brought back together by the time Trump left office.
