The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

by Peter Baker

Trump spent several minutes at a Michigan rally going after Schiff, whom he renamed “Little Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff,” and Trump’s campaign soon began selling $28 “Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff” T-shirts.[16]

Schiff was soon the only member of the House outside of its leadership to require a twenty-four-hour Capitol Police security detail.

testify before Congress. Pompeo would continue to fulminate about the Ukraine scandal. He refused to hand over documents and claimed Congress was trying to “intimidate, bully, & treat improperly” his officials.[22] His temper spilled into public view. A couple months later, Pompeo was asked about Ukraine by Mary Louise Kelly, a host of NPR’s All Things Considered. He abruptly cut their interview short and walked out, then sent an aide to demand that Kelly join him in his private sitting room. There, he erupted in fury and insisted that his staff bring him a map. “Could you even find Ukraine on a fucking map?” he demanded of Kelly, a veteran correspondent who had reported from Ukraine and Russia many times. When she readily pointed to it, this caused Pompeo to get even angrier. “Do you think Americans care about fucking Ukraine?” he yelled.[23]

Eventually, Pelosi grew frustrated. She stood and pointed at the president sitting directly across the table from her. “All roads with you lead to Putin,” she said. “You gave Russia Ukraine and Syria.”

Instead, the image went viral as an example of Pelosi’s confronting Trump, when all the big men at the table could not or would not.

This, Mulvaney claimed, just moments after announcing the president’s decision to award the contract for an international summit worth millions of dollars to himself, was because he and Trump were big opponents of “corruption” and Ukraine was a corrupt country: President Trump is not a big fan of foreign aid. Never has been. Still isn’t. Doesn’t like spending money overseas, especially when it’s poorly spent. And that is exactly what drove this decision….I’ve been in the office a couple times with him talking about this and he said, “Look Mick, this is a corrupt place.” Everybody knows it’s a corrupt place.

Others willingly embraced the role of ringleaders, most notably Matt Gaetz, a young Florida congressman who appeared regularly on Fox News and had emerged as perhaps Trump’s most persistently sycophantic cheerleader in the House.

Trump’s Washington was not Putin’s Russia, Vindman reassured his father. “Here,” said Vindman, “right matters.”[36]

“Everybody was fighting with everybody,” recalled the senior impeachment adviser, who described “a constant four-way power struggle,” complete with secret communications, siloed information, and enough duplicity to rival the Trump White House.

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.

Lindsey Graham around the same time said he did not need a trial to decide Trump’s innocence. “I have made up my mind,” he said. “I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.”[5] Never mind the oath that he and McConnell were about to take to “do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws.”

But Trump did not bother to hide his political motivation and confided in associates that he saw the strike against Suleimani as a way to bolster Republican support in the upcoming Senate trial, even if it brought him closer to full-scale war with another nation than at any point in his presidency.

“I think it is appropriate for me to admonish both the House managers and the president’s counsel in equal terms to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body,” the chief justice said. He noted that a House manager was chided for using the word “pettifogging” during the 1905 impeachment trial of a judge. “I don’t think we need to aspire to that high a standard, but I do think those addressing the Senate should remember where they are.”[16]

“The Senate is being called to sit as the high court of impeachment all too frequently,” Starr told the senators. “Indeed, we are living in what I think can aptly be described as the Age of Impeachment.” It was, of course, an age he played a role in ushering in.

“Nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense,” Alan Dershowitz told the senators. Like Starr, Dershowitz made an argument that conflicted with his position from two decades earlier. He maintained that impeachment required a statutory crime, not something abstract and undefined like “abuse of power”—the opposite of what he contended during the Clinton impeachment, when he said a “technical crime” was not required. Dershowitz went even further into the constitutional netherworld by arguing that even if Trump’s action with Ukraine was self-interested, it could not be impeachable so long as it was not technically criminal and he was at least partially motivated by the public interest. “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment,” Dershowitz declared.[24] Was Dershowitz seriously saying that a president could abuse the powers of his office for political gain so long as he believed his own re-election was good for the country?

At that point, there was little more to say, but it being the Senate it took days to say it anyway.

Joe Biden, who worried Trump so much that he had sought to pressure a foreign leader into investigating him, setting in motion the actions leading to impeachment, finished a miserable fourth place in Iowa and was on his way to an even worse fifth place in New Hampshire. Trump’s team was eager to run against Sanders.

In the end, the divisions that Trump stoked had helped save him.

The evening of his acquittal in the Senate trial, Trump hosted a small private dinner in the White House for about a dozen religious leaders in town for the next day’s National Prayer Breakfast. He called it his “Un-impeachment Celebration.” The annual prayer breakfast was a bipartisan tradition since the Eisenhower era, and it seemed particularly well timed for a nation in need of post-impeachment reconciliation. The president, however, was not thinking about forgiveness, much less atonement.

One of his dinner guests reminded the president of Jesus’s injunction to “love your enemies.”

Trump turned to Robert Jeffress, the pastor of a Dallas megachurch, for his thoughts on that advice. Trump was not a religious man, but if he had been, Jeffress would have been his kind of cleric. He was a paid contributor to Fox News who often appeared on the president’s favorite shows defending this or that Trumpian outrage. Trump’s evangelical voters “knew they weren’t voting for an altar boy,” Jeffress had once said of the thrice-married, hush-money-paying president.[1] He had told Lou Dobbs that “even heaven itself is going to have a wall around it,” called Islam “a false religion based on the teachings of a false prophet,” and later in 2020 would tell his congregation that only those who “sold their soul to the Devil” would vote against Trump for a second term.[2] In the fall, at the start of the House’s impeachment pro...

This was not a preacher who was going to lecture Trump about turning the ot...

What were they going to do? Impeach him again?

The Republican senators who had objected during the trial to the suggestion that Trump would put heads on pikes in retribution for impeachment largely remained silent as the skulls piled up.

Trump could not accept that. How could he? He was riding high. He was invincible.

The last thing Trump wanted to do was disrupt the election-year truce.

A few days later China abruptly ordered a lockdown in Wuhan, essentially walling off one of its largest metropolises. It did not require secret intelligence briefings to comprehend this was no longer some isolated problem but a serious crisis. Still, Trump seemed more worried about jeopardizing his new trade deal than pressing China on the virus. Hours after the Wuhan lockdown, he told advisers he wanted to publicly praise Xi Jinping for his handling of the outbreak.

“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus,” Trump tweeted. “The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American people, I want to thank President Xi!”

Navarro was no medical expert. His hyperbolic personality and over-the-top hostility toward China made it easy to write off his alarm. He played rough, and he often inserted himself in White House fights far outside his official lane, which in theory was trade and manufacturing. Like Trump, he fancied himself an expert on many things or at least so smart that he could become one overnight. Some of his colleagues therefore had a hard time reconciling their view of Navarro as a rogue actor with the reality that he could still be right about the emerging threat.

At most, the travel limits bought time to slow the spread of the virus to the United States, time for the government to get ready for its eventual impact—to make sure hospitals were prepared and personal protection equipment was stockpiled, to develop a robust testing system, and to undertake measures to limit transmission within the United States. But February came and went without any of that.

Every time friends had asked him about political interference in his high-profile cases, he had told them, “The Justice Department doesn’t work like that.” Except now it seemed that it did.

Trump was not content to leave to Bill Barr his mission of reversing prosecutions of his friends. The president spent much of February 18, a day when the global coronavirus death toll topped two thousand, issuing formal forgiveness to those he saw as fellow victims of official persecution. The recipients were a rogues’ gallery of celebrity felons and rich Republican insiders with connections to the president who jumped the line ahead of fourteen thousand other petitioners whose requests for clemency were languishing at the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney. Trump had come to love his pardon power, which was virtually unfettered under the Constitution. It embodied his idea of being president—he could just sign a decree and not have to persuade Congress or worry that the courts might overrule him. Trump relished the kingly sensation of dispensing mercy so much that he would personally call some of the recipients or their spouses to deliver the good news himself.

That was justice, Trump style—not dispassionate and neutral but driven by friendship, fame, and politics.

Trump was so eager to come to terms that he cut the Afghan government itself out of the negotiations altogether, although its troops had been fighting alongside America for two decades.

As for the coronavirus, Trump remained in denial mode. The president repeatedly told the public that the outbreak was “totally under control,” that it would “miraculously” disappear on its own with warmer weather, that it “will go away,” that it was comparable to the ordinary flu, that the number of cases would go “down close to zero,” that a vaccine would be available soon, and that anyone who wanted to be tested could get a test.[21] None of it was true.

He toyed with canceling a trip to India in late February that he dreaded, until Jared Kushner talked him into going by telling him that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had promised to produce a stadium with 100,000 people to greet him. Trump exaggerated even that, boasting before he left that “I hear they’re going to have 10 million people.”[24]

Senior administration officials could not recall him saying anything of consequence on virtually any subject at virtually any meeting.

It was a ferocious discipline beyond that of any other person who served Trump, and a remarkable exercise in self-preservation.

But to others in Trump’s orbit, Pence was not much of a presence even when he was in the room. To say Pence was vanilla was to underestimate the blandness he projected. “Mike Pence is vanilla ice cream,” explained a prominent adviser to Trump, “but he’s not Breyers vanilla ice cream or Häagen-Dazs. He’s like Stop & Shop vanilla ice cream”—generic, boring, predictable, and not necessarily worth opening the freezer to get.

“I would recommend bowing your head or you’re going to announce to the world that you’re the Deep State.”

The day after Pence was put in charge, Health and Human Services officials submitted their planned communication message to his office. “While the situation could change rapidly, at this time, Americans don’t need to change their day-to-day lives, but should stay informed and practice good hygiene,” the understated message said. Still, Pence’s communications director, Katie Miller, objected. “Even for HHS this is a bit alarmist,” she wrote department officials in an email on February 27. “Couldn’t we just start with Americans don’t need to change their day-to-day lives and leave out the rapid change?”[32]

“This is their new hoax.”

When it was his turn, Eric Trump pushed sibling boundaries as he wrapped his arm around Guilfoyle. “You’re so freaking beautiful I might take you home tonight,” he said. “Would Don be upset?” Turning to his wife, Lara, Eric asked, “Honey, would you be upset?”

Guilfoyle’s birthday bash would incubate a Covid hot zone,

bragging about his “natural ability” to understand science,

“I’m willing to jump out of the plane without a parachute if necessary,” Gaetz answered.[7]

Trump had no idea how to handle it. The virus did not respond to his favorite instruments of power. It could not be cowed by Twitter posts, overpowered by campaign rally chants, or silenced by playground insults. For so long, Trump had believed he could overcome nearly any obstacle through sheer force of will, and in many cases he had been astonishingly successful. Over the course of his seven decades, Trump had managed to bluster and bully his way past bankruptcies, failed business ventures, lenders demanding repayment, fraud and discrimination lawsuits, and, once he reached the White House, a special counsel and even congressional impeachment. But he could not will away a plague. So he tried denial, another favorite Trump tactic. That did not work either. The emerging pandemic would expose all the weaknesses of his divisive presidency—his distrust of his own staff and the rest of the government, his intense focus on loyalty and purges, his penchant for encouraging conflict between factions within his own circle, his personal isolation, his obsessive war with the media, his refusal, or inability, to take in new information, and his indecisiveness when forced to make tough decisions.

George W. Bush and Barack Obama had taken steps to ready the federal government for the prospect of a once-in-a-century outbreak, and a study by Johns Hopkins University just a few months earlier had rated the United States the best prepared country in the world for a pandemic. The Obama administration had put together a sixty-nine-page playbook for just such an emergency.