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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.”
Trump replied. “I want a yes-man!”
the budget deficit swelled from $665 billion to $984 billion in Trump’s first two years in office.[15]
Mattis had a line to explain what was happening: Trump was so out of his depth that he had decided to drain the pool. Once it got shallow enough, he must have figured, he would not be underwater anymore.
“Mr. President,” she shot back, “please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory.”
would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched American soil,” Miller told fellow aide Cliff Sims.[21]
“First he’ll flatter, then he’ll bully, then he’ll sue.”
Trump and his team exhibited tone-deaf indifference to the burden imposed on the 800,000 unpaid government employees, many struggling to make the rent or pay utility bills.
In Mick Mulvaney, Trump finally had a chief of staff who would not try to tame him.
Trump unilaterally siphoned off $6.7 billion from military housing projects as well as counter-narcotics programs and other funds, daring Congress or the courts to stop what even some Republicans called a blatant abuse of power.
he called Nielsen and told her to get rid of the Ninth Circuit altogether. “Let’s just cancel it,” he said, as if it were a campaign event, not a court established by law.
even for Trump it seemed a step beyond, to demand elimination of a court just because it ruled against him.
“If you get in trouble for it, I’ll pardon you,” Trump told him. McAleenan was chagrined at the inappropriate comment but chose to believe the president was not really seriously instructing him to violate the law.
“I won’t stand down,” Miller yelled. “I won’t stand down. I won’t stand down.”[43]
The Pentagon’s top brass had long since concluded that Trump was indecisive, forcing his officials to argue with him over the same demands again and again. More than one called it a game of “whack a mole.”
“I’ve gotten away with more stuff than you’ll ever know. I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life,” Trump claimed over dinner one night with Lindsey Graham. “But I didn’t do this.”
So sensitive was Trump to the notion that he might not have won properly that in his private dining room he kept a stack of color-coded maps that he gave out to visitors showing how the United States voted in 2016, broken down by county so that the red swaths of Trump voters in sparse rural America misleadingly dominated the smaller blue splotches of Clinton voters in denser, more populous urban areas.
At one point in the spring of 2018, Trump instructed Don McGahn to direct Sessions to prosecute Clinton and Comey and, if the attorney general refused, said he would do it himself as president. McGahn had to explain that the president had no such power. “You
Quarles took to strolling through the office calling out “Pardon me! Pardon me!”
The Mueller team never investigated Trump’s possible financial ties to Russia, with Mueller reasoning that there was no need to look for evidence of motive if they could not establish an underlying conspiracy to begin with. Nor did prosecutors call Ivanka Trump to testify, fearing that it would make them look like bullies and enrage the president. They never forced Don Jr. to testify either, allowing him to invoke the Fifth Amendment without immunizing him to compel him to talk. Zebley would not even let Rhee subpoena Trump Organization emails to get more information about the Trump Tower
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They had conclusive intelligence proving that Moscow conducted a wide-ranging operation to interfere in the 2016 election with the goal of electing Trump. They also had plenty of evidence that the Trump campaign had extensive contacts with various Russians and intermediaries, welcomed Moscow’s help, and profited from
though Mueller’s team identified ten potential counts of obstruction, the special counsel ordered his staff not to make a straightforward declaration that those acts constituted crimes.
his report pointed out that Trump willingly and knowingly accepted help from Russia for the purpose of winning an election, certainly scandalous and unprecedented in American history even if not illegal. As for fully cooperating, the president had deprived Mueller of the most important witness—Trump himself. And Trump tried repeatedly to have Mueller restrained or fired even while hinting at pardons for witnesses who might testify against him.
he already believed that Trump engaged in “obstruction of justice as a way of life,” as he later would write,
a list that had grown by that point to include everything from pardoning himself and declaring a national emergency to build a border wall to revealing classified information.
Most of the public diagnoses posited that Trump had an extreme case of narcissistic personality disorder along with other problems that likely included a childhood learning disability, which would explain his lifelong aversion to books and written briefings—all
pathological liar whose inflated ego was in fact the sign of a deeply insecure person.
extensive public evidence of Trump’s dishonesty, personal attacks on others, highly transactional relationships, over-the-top bragging, and absence of discernible conscience or empathy for others.
Not only did he call the chairman of the Fed an enemy of the United States, he even spelled his name wrong.
“He’s not on receive; he’s on transmit,”
He even tweeted what appeared to be a classified image from his intelligence briefing of “a catastrophic accident” at an Iranian missile launch site, a leak of secret information on social media that would have been unthinkable in any other presidency.
Trump had, numerous times during his presidency going back to 2017, asked aides whether the United States could foil the storms by bombing them with nuclear weapons—a
president asked aides in August of 2018, before a disaster-recovery trip to Puerto Rico, whether they could just trade the American commonwealth outright for Greenland. Trump told them he wanted to do so “because Puerto Rico was dirty and the people were poor.”
to be his fourth national security adviser, the most any president had ever had in a single term.
Stonewalling, always Trump’s default,
In practical terms, the letter meant a “full halt” to any cooperation with the probe: no documents, no emails, no testimony. Neither Richard Nixon nor Bill Clinton had gone that far.
“All roads with you lead to Putin,” she said. “You gave Russia Ukraine and Syria.”
Mick Mulvaney had just admitted out loud exactly what the president’s legal team had been denying, that the aid suspension had in fact been tied to the demand for damaging investigations into Democrats. He could not have been clearer that Trump’s White House viewed foreign policy as a weapon to damage political opponents—even if it required blackmail of a country defending itself against Russian aggression.
that they believed Trump had every right to use Pentagon security assistance as leverage to get what he wanted from a foreign country. Trump had already done it before, holding up funds for Pakistan, for the Palestinian Authority, and for Central American countries.
Partisanship was a powerful drug; in Trump’s Washington, it was the intoxicant of choice.
Anti-Anti-Trumpism was a brilliant strategy.
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.
“This is a political process. There is not anything judicial about it. Impeachment is a political decision.”
The president who could survive the Access Hollywood tape, hush money payments to a porn actress, and a special counsel investigation documenting obstruction of justice had already shown an uncanny ability to deflect revelations that would have ended anyone else’s political career.
Yes, Trump was guilty of sticking up Ukraine’s president in furtherance of his own political interests, but no, he should not be convicted.
They had justified their service to him or their alliances with him or their deference to him on the grounds that they could ultimately control him. And what Schiff was saying is that three years had shown that was not possible.
“Bottom line: they aren’t taking this seriously enough.”
To conduct a broader purge, Trump enlisted Johnny McEntee, his onetime personal assistant,
McEntee began grilling officials to determine who would be pushed out. He asked one senior government official where he got his news.
Loyalty was now the defining job qualification for service in his administration.
