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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Peter Baker
Read between
September 27 - September 28, 2022
period in our history when the United States had a leader for the first time who neither knew nor subscribed to many of the fundamental tenets of the Constitution and even actively worked to undermine them.
Trump sought to bend if not break many of the rules that constrained presidents in the American system, so that holding on to power despite the will of the voters was only the next logical step.
Trump pitted Americans against Americans, the United States against its allies, and his own staff and family members against each other.
Trump made divisiveness the calling card of his presidency.
He hijacked a Republican Party that was riven and ailing—a party that has now lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections—and turned it into a cult of personality so dedicated to him that instead of producing a policy platform at its last convention it simply issued a resolution saying it was for Trump.
The people who were most fearful of his reign were those in the room with him, the ones he himself appointed, who behind his back compared him to a czar or a mob boss or even, in the case of his first White House counsel, a monster in a horror movie.
His intelligence chief privately wondered whether the president was a Russian stooge.
He would spend exhaustive amounts of time each morning combing and twisting the long strands of his awkwardly colored hair into place, a three-step process
He was an accidental president but, it was assumed, he would learn. And if he did not, well, this was what checks and balances were for. Congress would push back; the courts would push back; the media would push back.
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.”
“Anyone who’s ever played with Trump knows the rules are for suckers,”
He did not know that Puerto Rico was part of the United States, did not know whether Colombia was in North America or South America, thought Finland was part of Russia, and mixed up the Baltics with the Balkans.
did not grasp the concept of constitutional separation of powers,
Trump fully admitted to being a narcissist who avoided even a hint of self-examination.
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.
The night he defeated Hillary Clinton against all odds, his first thought when told by an aide that he would become president was how to use the office to take revenge on his enemies.
“It’s really Kellyanne that nobody likes,” Priebus confided.
The polarization that Trump encouraged in the outside world, he fostered inside his own building too.
while Priebus, Bannon, and Kushner disliked each other, the one thing they agreed on was they all loathed Conway.
Melania considered it an intrusion into her domain and decreed that no one, including Jared and Ivanka, would be allowed into the residential sections of the White House without her permission.
Looks mattered as much as anything to Trump, who stocked his administration as if he were casting a new reality show.
One result of this hiring process was that nobody had ever staffed a modern White House with so few people who knew how government worked. Rather than seeking out experienced hands, he enlisted a team as unschooled and unprepared as he was. In part, this was out of disdain for expertise and “the Swamp,” as he called Washington, but it was also a function of his refusal to hire anyone who had said anything critical of him during the campaign, which ruled out a large swath of Republican professionals.
Some, like Dan Coats, a former Republican senator from Indiana tapped to serve as director of national intelligence, took on the new mission with the understanding that their job would be to protect their agency from the president who appointed them.
When the Access Hollywood tape came out, Pence’s wife, Karen, was outraged and pushed him to drop off the ticket. But Pence concluded it was too late. His wife did little to hide her disgust.
minute he descended that golden escalator at Trump Tower to greet a bought-and-paid-for crowd of sign-wavers earning $50 each.
“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.”
What lines there used to be between newsmakers and the news organization were increasingly blurred. A Fox producer sent daily emails to a Trump campaign list summarizing the latest news developments while offering suggestions about how, for instance, to reply to a Hillary Clinton speech. When Diana Falzone, a Fox reporter, uncovered allegations that Trump had had an extramarital tryst with a porn star who went by the professional name of Stormy Daniels and negotiated a cash settlement buying her silence, the story was quashed. “Good reporting, kiddo,” her boss told her, according to a report
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Fox remained the president’s focus, not to mention a feeder source of personnel for the Trump administration. Trump would eventually hire straight off the Fox airwaves a national security adviser, a deputy chief of staff, a press secretary, multiple communications directors, cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and the top spokespeople for the State and Treasury Departments.
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.
After Trump’s “American carnage” Inaugural Address, Peter Wittig, Germany’s ambassador to the United States, immediately called Berlin in a panic. “God, what I’ve just heard is a nightmare,”
