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Trump’s love affair with “my generals” was long over. He was sick and tired of all the “yes, sirs” that never seemed to get him what he wanted. He would yell at Kelly about it often. “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?” he once demanded of his White House chief of staff, who relayed the story to associates. “Which generals?” an incredulous Kelly had asked. “The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded. “You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.
And you’re going to make the decisions and as long as they’re legal I’ll support it.” As long as they’re legal. It was not clear how much that caveat even registered with Trump.
Accompanying Pence to the White House, he had guided the new vice president through the first couple years of his relationship with Trump and come to admire the president’s determination and break-the-crystal approach to politics. He claimed to believe that Trump was perhaps the most effective conservative president ever and would one day win the Nobel Peace Prize.
The president himself was the leak? Don McGahn had been right. It was crazier than anyone realized.
A zealous budget-cutting former congressman from South Carolina who had helped found the renegade House Freedom Caucus, Mulvaney like other Republicans originally saw Trump as a danger to the Constitution and one of the most flawed people ever to run for the White House. Trump, he had said in 2016, was “a terrible human being” with a record of saying “disgusting and indefensible” things about women.[14] Yet when the chance to join Trump’s White House as budget director arose, Mulvaney eagerly sought it out, developing a case of selective amnesia and proving surprisingly willing to sacrifice
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Trump was so out of his depth that he had decided to drain the pool.
Okay, we’re now going to do things differently, he told the staff. John Kelly took it upon himself to try to stop the president from doing what he wanted, but we’re going to let Trump be Trump. “We’re not here to protect the country against the president,” he said.
His chief consigliere in this fight was Miller, an unlikely power in a White House brimming with outsized personalities. Rail thin, with an angular face, and still only thirty-three years old, he had a way of staying in the shadows while turning the gears of government in the direction he favored. To his critics, and there were many, he looked the part of a sinister movie villain. Vanity Fair decided that he was a shoo-in if there were ever a race for “World’s Biggest Bastard,” and an unsympathetic biographer titled her book on him Hatemonger.[8]
The idea that a president’s decisions “will not be questioned” in a democratic society struck an authoritarian chord that would become a theme of the Trump presidency.[16]
“I am shocked at your statement that you think that only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English,” Miller said. “It reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree.”[17] For the American right, “cosmopolitan” was a favorite insult, notwithstanding its ugly history as code for Jews targeted by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and all the more remarkable coming from Miller given his own Jewish roots.
It sure seemed that it was Stephen Miller assuming the power of the president.
Kevin McAleenan, the Customs and Border Protection commissioner, said a complete wall would cut illegal immigration by 20 or maybe 25 percent. Closing the loopholes, he said, would decrease it by 75 percent to 80 percent.
Wilbur Ross, the billionaire commerce secretary, expressed bafflement at why the sidelined workers did not simply borrow from a bank since they would eventually get back pay once the crisis was over.[34] Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president, said the workers were basically getting a free vacation.[35] Trump himself insisted that workers had told him they were happy to forgo paychecks so that he could promote border security.[36]
After three decades as a Border Patrol agent, Vitiello was hardly a liberal functionary of the anti-Trump Deep State; he had once referred to the Democratic Party as the “liberalcratic party or NeoKlanist Party.”[39] But he was not tough enough for Miller.
In his place, Miller helped install Matthew Albence, the agency’s acting deputy director, who had publicly dismissed concerns over the family separation policy by comparing detention facilities for children to “summer camp.”[40]
He had even edited his agency’s mission statement to delete the phrase “nation of immigrants.”[42]
“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.”
But Strzok and Page became a peculiar obsession of Trump’s, who would mimic “the lovers,” as he called them, during campaign rallies. Once, onstage in front of thousands of supporters, the president even simulated Strzok having an orgasm as he mockingly reenacted their text messages.
“He was a timorous McClellan to my and Jeannie’s Sheridan and Grant,” Weissmann later wrote in a memoir.[23]
Perhaps the most significant concession by Mueller was his decision not to try to force the president to testify. Trump claimed publicly that he would be happy to talk and John Dowd was initially supportive of that. At one point, they even agreed on a date for an interview at Camp David and began organizing logistics. But Dowd changed his mind, concluding that Mueller was laying a perjury trap for a president incapable of telling the truth. Camp David was canceled. But Trump continued to flirt with an interview, perpetually confident that he could talk his way out of anything.
That was no incentive for Trump,
Trump, who had boasted of having “one of the greatest memories of all time” and had mercilessly mocked Christine Blasey Ford for not remembering tangential details of her encounter with Brett Kavanaugh three dozen years earlier, told the prosecutors “I do not recall” or some variation thirty-six times.[26]
The prosecutors thought they had rock-solid evidence of obstruction of justice.
But the Justice Department’s long-standing policy, formulated under one president facing impeachment (Richard Nixon) and reaffirmed under another (Bill Clinton), held that a sitting president could not be indicted for a crime while in office.
For some time, there had been whispers in Washington that the aging Mueller was not as sharp as he had once been, but House Democrats ignored the warning signs and pressed him to testify about the report against his wishes.
“Had I known how much he had changed, I would not have pursued his testimony with such vigor—in fact, I would not have pursued it at all,” Schiff wrote later.[36]
Trump was not exonerated but he had won. He had cowed the investigators.
The resulting “professional ethos” was unveiled at an unusual all-hands pep rally in the grand foyer of the department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters, held to coincide with the first anniversary of Pompeo’s tenure. Many in the Foreign Service greeted the ethos as a loyalty oath aimed at potential leakers, and a veteran diplomat who had been consulted said it was both “incredibly condescending” and something right out of Orwell’s 1984.[3]
In his pep rally that April, Pompeo redefined the mission of the State Department, America’s oldest cabinet department, in strikingly personal terms, as “the premier agency delivering on behalf of the president of the United States.”[5] The message to the diplomats was explicit: their client was no longer a country, but a man.
Once again, Trump embraced the internal conflict that was endemic in his White House. This was not a failure of his administration, as he saw it, but a guarantee that he was the only one who mattered.
He wanted more summits, more glory, more shots at a Nobel Peace Prize.
Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host and occasional Trump contact, had even called Trump that week and told him he could forget about re-election if he got into a war with Iran. Minutes after pulling the plug on the strike, Trump turned on his television to catch the opening monologue of Carlson’s 8 p.m. show on Fox. Carlson praised Trump for resisting military intervention. “The same people who lured us into the Iraq quagmire sixteen years ago are demanding a new war, this one with Iran,” Carlson said. “The president, to his great credit, appears to be skeptical of this—very skeptical.”[18]
“How do I survive?” Esper asked. “You survive if you completely compromise your standards and your integrity and you become a yes-man and a lackey,” Kelly later recounted telling him. “I can’t do that,” Esper replied. “I know,” Kelly responded. “That’s why you’re going to get fired.”
He and Pompeo both knew—had known for months, actually—that Trump had a Ukraine fixation fed by Rudy Giuliani and others that portended no good. They had often heard Trump repeat Russian disinformation about Ukraine and 2016, suggesting that the hacking of Hillary Clinton’s emails was some sort of false-flag Ukrainian operation—and despite having been told this was a Russian lie, Trump publicly promoted it, just as Vladimir Putin had.
On whose behalf Giuliani was acting, it was not entirely clear.
Trump actively opposed the American policy of supporting Ukraine in its long-running fight with Russian-backed separatists, had a “deeply rooted negative view” of Ukraine grounded in Giuliani’s conspiracy theories, and had no intention of meeting with Zelensky.[26]
“They’re terrible people,” Trump said of Ukrainians. “They’re all corrupt and they tried to take me down.”
By the spring of 2019, he already believed that Trump engaged in “obstruction of justice as a way of life,” as he later would write, a remarkable statement by a national security adviser about the president.[30]
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.
Trump told her that Xi had explained that they “like being in those camps.”
That July, he told a conference of pro-Trump teenagers that Article II of the Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want as president,” which was both flagrantly incorrect and also consistent with Trump’s oft-stated view that he had the “absolute right” to do whatever he wanted at whatever moment he wanted to do it—including everything from pardoning himself and declaring a national emergency to build a border wall to revealing classified information.[2] He not only admired autocrats like Putin and Xi, he appeared determined to sound like one. And the presidential ego, never
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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
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“It’s not all in our heads,” they concluded. “It’s in his.”[8]
But it was Trump’s flawed judgment that most rattled Kelly, and he concluded that the problem was not that Trump did not know right from wrong, but that “he always does the wrong thing.”
Trump, not surprisingly, scored off the charts on the first part of the triad: narcissism. In fact, Lindsey said, the president was a “ten out of ten narcissist,” which he blamed on Trump’s mother, a withholding Scottish immigrant who had not, in his view, given Trump sufficient attention early in life. Lindsey, however, said that Trump did not rate on the two other personality disorders in the triad: Machiavellianism and sociopathy. “He’s not Machiavellian,” Lindsey said. “How many steps ahead does he think? Let’s just be honest with ourselves.” He compared Trump’s long-term planning ability
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In January of 2018, the publication of Michael Wolff’s book, Fire and Fury, drawn from inside access to Trump’s dysfunctional White House and relying heavily on the account of Steve Bannon, portrayed such a capricious president that Trump responded with one of the most memorable comments of his tenure, proclaiming himself “a very stable genius,” which then became the title of yet another shocking insider book about his presidency by the Washington Post’s Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig. Trump liked the phrase so much he used it about himself repeatedly. In May of 2019, the same week as
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Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements). Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. Believes that he or she is “special” and unique, and can only be understood by, or associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions). Requires excessive admiration. Has a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations). Is
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Trump kept demanding action, however. At various points, the president even suggested taking federal money from Puerto Rico, toward which he had a long-standing animus going back to the criticism of his handling of the deadly 2017 hurricane, and putting the funds toward buying Greenland. According to Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff who later publicly turned on Trump, the 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
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the tenth draft article was a placeholder titled “The Next High Crime” on the assumption that there would be one.[1]
But as the details came spilling out about Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine and apparent misuse of urgently needed military aid to fight off Russia as leverage for his own personal political purposes, they had their Next High Crime.
