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“the cruise missile cocktail party.”
the two princelings,
much to the delight of Vladimir Putin
Nearing the end of the tour, a glowering Trump shoved aside the prime minister of tiny Montenegro—whose accession to the alliance was being celebrated at the meeting—to secure his place in front for the cameras set up to record them.
Trump, who was sucking down Diet Cokes and chomping on a Hershey’s chocolate bar, seemed pumped up. “This is historical,” he kept saying. Finally, he summoned an official White House photographer to record the moment, then got into a discussion about how he should pose. “I should be reading something,” he said. “I can be reading Jeff’s letter.” Mike Pence arrived. “Mike,” Trump said, “this is a historic moment.” Historic, yes; well-planned, no.
The Nixon Presidential Library joined the fray with a tweet noting that even though the late president had pushed out the special prosecutor, “President Nixon never fired the Director of the FBI,” cheekily adding the hashtag “#notNixonian.”[2]
There was a reason why Congress mandated ten-year terms for FBI directors, to insulate them from politics.
A Putin cheerleader of long standing, he had written him a mash note in 2007 after the Russian was named Time’s Person of the Year, an honor Trump himself craved. “You definitely deserve it,” Trump gushed, adding, “As you probably have heard, I am a big fan of yours!”[3] For years, Trump had tried to build a tower with his name on it in Moscow potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Ever since American banks stopped doing business with him because he was so unreliable, Trump had been financed by Deutsche Bank, the German institution with close ties to Russia. “Russians make up a
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More than three decades after his death, Cohn still wielded enormous influence over Trump, a mentor from the grave whose take-no-prisoners approach to business and politics would define the forty-fifth president.
Lean and eternally tanned, with heavy-lidded, often bloodshot eyes, and a scarred nose, Cohn looked the part of the Mafia lawyer he was—the word “reptilian” was used a lot—and he reveled in his brazen defiance of tax collectors, prosecutors, judges, regulators, and civil libertarians.[34]
Cohn was a mass of contradictions, “a Jewish anti-Semite and a homosexual homophobe, vehemently closeted but insatiably promiscuous,” as the journalist Michael Kruse described him.[40]
In past administrations, such falsehoods would have been credibility-destroying career-enders.
“This is terrible. This is the end of my presidency. I’m fucked.”
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.
The Mnuchins were not the only family being torn apart by Trump.
“You don’t love us!” he reportedly yelled at Trump. “You don’t even love yourself. You just love your money!”[67]
What came next was unlike any other presidency as well, not so much a cabinet meeting as a televised Trump testimonial. Mike Pence set the tone. “It is the greatest privilege of my life,” he said, “to serve as vice president to a president who is keeping his word to the American people.” Jeff Sessions seconded the sentiment. “It’s an honor to serve you,” the attorney general said. “I want to thank you for getting this country moving again,” Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao said. “I just got back from Mississippi, they love you there,” Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said. Reince Priebus
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my generals,
“His entire context for the military at this point was watching the movie Patton,” said a retired general who served with Mattis, Dunford, and John Kelly. “The guy had no idea what a general did. He respected their power and status and he wanted to have them around him because he felt that having generals around him—‘my generals’—would make him appear even more powerful. What he hadn’t bargained for was the fact that his generals were going to oppose him on moral grounds on many things. He just thought they were all about power, and the wielding of power and destruction.”
“They were of the view that I’m not going to hand a sharp knife to a child just because he asked me to,” said a Republican on Capitol Hill who dealt with them.
What were his generals for, after all, if not for television?
After one too many entreaties from Sean Spicer, who served in the Navy Reserve, Mattis reportedly told him, “Sean, I’ve killed people for a living. If you call me again, I’m going to fucking send you to Afghanistan. Are we clear?”[14]
The disputes were not only over personnel and power. McMaster believed Bannon and others fed the president a warped view of history that played into Trump’s own idea of a world order closer to the brute realism of the late nineteenth century when great powers dominated lesser nations, exploited their resources, and competed for spheres of influence.
McMaster had not been in the job long before the Bannon wing orchestrated attacks to undermine him with Trump. The campaign, using the full ecosystem of the alt-right media led by Bannon’s old team at Breitbart News, portrayed McMaster and others on his staff, such as the Russia expert Fiona Hill, as shadowy “globalists” with a subversive anti-Trump agenda, often invoking the anti-Semitic trope that they were pawns of the wealthy Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros.[16] In late May, the conspiracy website Infowars “unmasked” Hill as a “mole” from Soros who was, as she later summed
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Bannon was delighted. “That was probably the nastiest, meanest meeting of the whole Trump administration,” he once said, and he did not mean it as a criticism. He had primed the president for the clash and relished it when it happened, all the more so because it was on the generals’ turf. In the fight over Afghanistan, Bannon was not hesitant to draw their fire.
The president even lied about doing so “after consultation with my Generals and military experts.” There had been no such consultation.
Unsurprisingly, the X-rated phone call from a Wall Street finance guy turned self-styled PR guru who called himself the Mooch was not seen as a sign of a White House getting its agenda on track.
Trump had not only publicly announced Kelly was taking a job he had not accepted, the president had not bothered to inform Priebus either.
“cesspool of domestic politics.”
In that interview with Foreign Policy, Kelly had criticized Trump’s signature proposal, saying “no wall will work by itself.” By the next April, he was telling reporters that “a border wall is essential.”[24]
His major accomplishments so far consisted of blowing up international agreements negotiated by his predecessor and reinventing the American presidency as a round-the-clock Twitter and television show.
They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” Trump said, glowering as he showily consulted a piece of paper that was actually an opioid fact sheet. Melania Trump looked on in puzzlement, sitting next to him dressed as if for a summer garden party. To underscore the point that this was no ordinary threat, but a potential nuclear holocaust, Trump added, “They will be met with fire, fury and, frankly, power the likes of which this world has never seen before.”[25]
The problem was Trump.
Trump stepped in the middle of that fight too, declaring that there were “very fine people on both sides,” as if there was an equivalence between the torch-bearing white racists marching through the streets defending Confederate statues and the peaceful counter-protesters who came out to reject them.
Gary Cohn had stood uncomfortably beside Trump at the photo op where the president made his “very fine people” comments; a few days later, invoking his Jewish roots, Cohn gave an on-the-record interview to the Financial Times saying the White House “can and must do better” in condemning hate groups and let it be known that he was considering resigning.[31]
But Cohn did not quit, nor did any other top aides, although he would later claim that he had told Trump he would leave as soon as they secured passage of tax cut legislation. Cohn told himself he could be more effective inside the White House than outside, neither the first nor the last Trump adviser to rely on such a rationale.
Steve Bannon, on the other hand, reassured Trump that the flap would ultimately help with his base. Even if the neo-Nazi thugs now cheering him were an embarrassment, Bannon told the president, embracing their cause of refusing to tear down Confederate monuments was a compelli...
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One abiding fixation was with the military itself, which Trump saw as an irresistibly theatrical backdrop for his presidency.
“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.
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
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Trump was not buying it. “Yeah, but I don’t want them,” the president replied. “It doesn’t look good for me.”
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.
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The White House that John Kelly had taken over remained far from a tightly disciplined Marine unit. Chaos was still the order of the day, encouraged by a commander in chief who liked to stir the pot while pitting members of his own team against each other. It was a place with a “Hunger Games vibe,” in the words of Stephanie Grisham, then communications director for the first lady.[1] Cliff Sims, a media aide, thought it was more like “Game of Thrones, but with the characters from Veep,” as he put it in a later book aptly named Team of Vipers.[2]
Mike Pence floated above it all, rarely saying much of anything that anyone could remember.
Trump could tweet all he wanted but without a Decision Memorandum prepared by the staff secretary and signed by the president, it was not legal. The sentence was underlined to make the point clear.
He needed enemies too much to be a bridge-builder.
Kelly kept trying to trap Trump into positions, a strategy that Kushner considered counterproductive. Trump would go along with it for a while, but was like a caged beast eventually seeking to escape.
(His pollster had tested the issue and found his position popular with the base.)
“They’re American citizens,” Kelly told him. “They’re not Americans,” Trump insisted. “Yes, they are,” Kelly replied. Trump toyed with ways to make that not the case, even asking in one meeting whether they could sell the island or “divest” themselves of Puerto Rico.[19]
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.
