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When we set out to write The Divider, we began with a simple premise, that Donald Trump’s refusal to accept defeat in the 2020 election, and the insurrection at the Capitol he summoned to overturn his loss, were no violent outliers but the inexorable culmination of a sustained four-year war on the institutions and traditions of American democracy. As the historian Michael Beschloss observed on the afternoon of January 6, 2021, while the pro-Trump mob surged through the halls of Congress, chanting “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” and sending the vice president and lawmakers fleeing for their
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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.
Trump made divisiveness the calling card of his presidency.
He sought out enemies and where they did not exist, he invented them.
Mike Pence, Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, his four chiefs of staff, his lawyers, the Republican leaders on Capitol Hill. For them, every day was a moral challenge, a series of tradeoffs in which they weighed the benefits of accomplishing whatever agenda had brought them into Trump’s world in the first place—whether patriotism or personal ambition or policy goals or simply partisanship—against the need to stop the situation from spiraling out of control. There was a not inconsiderable element of hubris to this; they believed they could manage him, and often succeeded for a while in doing so, only to
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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. A senior national security official who regularly observed Trump in the Oval Office compared him to the Velociraptors in the movie Jurassic Park that proved capable of learning while hunting their prey, making them infinitely more dangerous.
Never did we imagine that two decades later we would be covering the rise of an American leader who venerated Putin and his strongman tactics, who admired the world’s other autocrats in China, Egypt, Turkey, the Philippines, and elsewhere, who “fell in love” with the overseer of North Korea’s Gulags, and who attacked basic principles of constitutional democracy at home.
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. The fact that he had an uncle who had taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology meant that he too must be brilliant. “It’s in my blood,” Trump once said.
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Trump’s mind was “unusual,” Sternlicht said. Something was “wrong” in his head. 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 golf with him was to see the real Trump. “Anyone who’s ever played with Trump knows the rules are for suckers,” he said. Trump would take the regulator off the golf cart so he could go faster. He sometimes raced off even before his partners took their swings. Trump always insisted that he won, whether he did or not. He did not even
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Asked once where he turned to for military information, he said, “Well, I watch the shows.”[11]
What Trump had that none of the rest of them did was supreme self-confidence that it did not matter. Having won an election against all odds, he acted as if he did not have to listen to the experts because, after all, he had prevailed when they said he could not. His most fervent allies would cite that victory as proof that even his most inane or uninformed ideas might turn out to be right since he had already disproved conventional wisdom. He was wedded to his successful formula. He did not need a policy process or an organization chart or a rigorous schedule or message discipline in 2016, so
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Bannon had also summoned another historical analogy. The first time he saw Trump descending the escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy with perfectly choreographed strongman imagery, he thought, “That’s Hitler.”[17] He meant it as a compliment.
Buchanan had vowed to build a fence along the border with Mexico to keep immigrants out, railed against the “globalist” elite, promised to rip up deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and made “America First” his campaign slogan. As it happened, even Trump thought Buchanan was too far off the deep end to be president. When the two of them briefly ran against each other for the 2000 nomination of Perot’s Reform Party, Trump denounced Buchanan as “a Hitler lover,” a “racist,” and an “anti-Semite” who “doesn’t like the Blacks, he doesn’t like the gays” and was appealing
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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.
He was, as one White House official observed, the first president who seemed to interpret the job as an extended tryout for the role of Mike Teavee in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, the television-addicted American kid glued to the box at all hours of the day and night who persuades Wonka to transport him inside a television set. When the Oompa-Loompas sing of his downfall—he was shrunk by one of Wonka’s wondrous machines into thousands of tiny pieces and had to be stretched back like a piece of taffy—they chant about how television turns the brain into goop.
“He was a guy who preferred cheeseburgers to foie gras. In every way you can imagine, the Rockefeller-Bush wing of the party was appalled. It’s as if we allowed the Clampetts to come in and take over the party.”
“Well, that was some weird shit,” he remarked to Hillary Clinton.[47]
Every White House has its factions, with officials vying for the best titles, the biggest staffs, the most time with the president, and the most prime real estate in the cramped warrens of the West Wing. But none had ever been torn apart by tribal warfare as intense and toxic as Trump’s White House. It was personal, it was political, it was philosophical. And from the very start, it was all-consuming. The polarization that Trump encouraged in the outside world, he fostered inside his own building too.
Within weeks, it was apparent that the Trump White House was a place where almost no one trusted anyone else—and for good reason. “Everybody lied. All the time. About everything,” recalled one aide who was there at the start.
The chaos was no accident.
“The president likes two kinds of people,” Priebus told colleagues. “The people who used to work for him and the people who are going to work for him.”
But Christie had a fierce enemy inside Trump’s family: Jared Kushner. When serving as a federal prosecutor more than a decade earlier, Christie had sent Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, to prison after the real estate magnate set up his brother-in-law in a videotaped encounter with a prostitute, then sent the tape to his own sister as revenge for cooperating with authorities.
The product of a blue-collar family in Richmond, Virginia, who served in the Navy and Goldman Sachs before refashioning himself into a right-wing rebel, the sixty-three-year-old Bannon, perpetually disheveled and shaggy-haired, gloried in grievance, rallying the “hobbits” with populist fury against elites like the Clintons.
Melania used the time to negotiate a more favorable prenuptial agreement guaranteeing that Barron’s inheritance was more in line with his older siblings.[11]
His admiration for her sometimes took on a creepy tone. More than once in the years before the White House, he had praised her body, most infamously during a 2006 joint appearance on The View when he said, “if Ivanka weren’t my daughter perhaps I’d be dating her.”[16]
Ivanka positioned herself as a champion of working mothers and had already pulled together a book to be published shortly after her father took office, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, that presumed to offer parenting tips for everyday moms from a real estate heiress who made millions of dollars a year marketing her name for “affordable” women’s office wear, $10,000 fine jewelry bracelets, and an array of made-in-China shoes at accessible price points. Copies of the thin volume, “a strawberry milkshake of inspirational quotes,” as Jennifer Senior of The New York Times dubbed
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“I don’t play the press,” Kushner would tell reporters on background even as he was playing them.
Kushner demonstrated scant humility given his lack of knowledge and, while he was a quick learner, at times he acted as if anybody who had served in government before he arrived was an idiot.
Giuliani now wanted to be secretary of state. Nothing else, he declared, was important enough.
Newt Gingrich seemed like a possibility, except for the fact that the former House speaker was among the least diplomatic figures of the modern age.
“The words Giuliani and diplomacy don’t seem to me to belong in the same sentence,” Gates interjected.
The media had dubbed him “Mad Dog” during the Iraq War, a name that appealed to Trump, who loved the macho tone of it so much that as time wore on he would claim, falsely, that he was the one who gave it to him. But Mattis winced every time Trump called him that. He preferred his call sign, “Chaos.”
Trump respected three types of people—those with money, those with Ivy League credentials, and those with stars on their uniform. Rich businessmen and generals were people who, in his view, had accomplished something and were worthy of admiration. Everyone else was a failure, a loser. There was no worse judgment.
But he was just as conservative, at one point calling climate change “a myth” and insisting that “smoking doesn’t kill.”[34]
How could a devoted evangelical Christian serve a foul-mouthed, thrice-married vulgarian who boasted of grabbing women by their pussy? What mix of ambition, duty, and expedience led to this bargain?
a “rat on acid,”
man who needed enemies,
“Why are you doing this?” Lesley Stahl of CBS News asked Trump about the media bashing during an off-camera conversation. “You know why I do it?” Trump replied. “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”[12]
To Trump, talking with Murdoch was more important than just about anything. No one played a more central role in Trump’s media world than the Australian-born impresario of conservative journalism who owned Fox News, Fox Business, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and other properties. If the mainstream news outlets were the new president’s enemies, Murdoch’s empire was to be his prime ally, amplifying his messages, taking on his adversaries, shaping the debate, and influencing his thinking. Fox was a source of power and a source of inspiration, an endless feedback loop in which the
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Murdoch always saw Trump as something of a poser. “This is a guy who has no regard for Donald Trump. None,” said one longtime Murdoch associate. “He thought he was a fraud. It’s one billionaire looking at another billionaire saying, ‘He’s not a billionaire, he’s not of my ilk.’ ” But Murdoch also thought Trump was “the perfect vessel” because “he’s not that smart.”
“You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs’ and ‘disgusting animals,’ ” she began. “Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Trump interjected, prompting laughter. “For the record, it was well beyond Rosie O’Donnell,” Kelly corrected. “Yes,” Trump acknowledged, “I’m sure it was.” Kelly went on. “You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?” Trump denounced the question as political correctness run amok, then turned on Kelly. “Honestly, Megyn, if you
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In his first two years in office, he would grant forty-nine interviews to Fox, compared with just thirteen for all the other major networks combined.[24]
On the Friday night after Trump’s incendiary news conference, Carlson aired a six-minute segment describing a crisis of violence in Sweden ignited by a recent wave of Muslim immigration and covered up by the government. “That is grotesque,” Carlson declared.[25] Trump was watching. The next day, he threw a line into a speech suggesting that a terrorist attack had happened “last night in Sweden.”[26] Except there had been no terrorist attack. Just like that, the president created a diplomatic dispute with a longtime American ally that resented his false characterization.
“Fox was the gas station where Trump stopped to fill up his tank of resentment,”
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.
If he were to become president someday, Trump promised, he “wouldn’t trust anyone.”[1]
“what better gift to give Donald Trump than a picture of himself?”
Tom Barrack would later be indicted but then acquitted in what prosecutors claimed was an undisclosed foreign-lobbying effort to shape the new administration’s policy toward the Middle East—including pushing for close ties between Trump and the young Saudi prince.
Corker showed up early, only to find Trump talking with the Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate whose major cause other than the GOP was the state of Israel and its longtime prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Adelson had announced a $25 million gift to Trump in September of 2016, as part of a $65 million overall donation to Republican campaigns, making him the largest single Republican donor that year. His investment looked prescient when Trump won, and several weeks later, the president-elect and Bannon listened approvingly in Trump Tower as Adelson demanded action on a
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It was quickly apparent to Corker and others that decision making was essentially random, as much about who got to talk to Trump, and when, as anything else.
