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

by Peter Baker

Trump’s history with Russia went back long before he was in 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 pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Don Jr. said in 2008.[4] Five years later, Eric Trump reportedly said the family did not need American banks because “we have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

In 2008, the future president sold a massive Palm Beach beachfront mansion complete with art gallery, ballroom, and forty-eight-car garage that he had bought for $41 million to a Russian oligarch for $95 million, an astonishing profit that drew plenty of suspicion.[6] Even then, he tried to keep the buyer’s nationality secret. “Don’t say Russian,” he asked a reporter at the time.[7] Buyers tied to Russia and other former Soviet republics separately made eighty-six purchases of Trump-branded condominiums in New York and Florida for a total of nearly $109 million—all in cash.[8] In 2013, the future president brought the Miss Universe contest to Moscow and tried unsuccessfully to meet with Putin while in town. “Will he become my new best friend?” Trump asked on Twitter.

After firing his first campaign manager, Trump replaced him with Paul Manafort, a Republican who had built a lucrative lobbying career working for Russians and Ukrainians aligned with Putin. And Trump openly asked Moscow for help winning his campaign, calling on the Kremlin to hack into Hillary Clinton’s email (“Russia, if you’re listening”).[13] When WikiLeaks obtained stolen Clinton campaign emails from Russian agents, Trump’s campaign, with the help of his old friend and adviser Roger Stone, appeared to know in advance when they would be released. Indeed, a wave of Clinton campaign emails was posted online hours after the American intelligence community publicly accused Russia of election interference and the Access Hollywood tape was disclosed. The timing was so extraordinary that it seemed like a deliberate effort to change the story line away from revelations that could hurt Trump.

Some of Mnuchin’s relatives despised the president, seeing him as a vulgar narcissist, and were unhappy to be in his presence. 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.

In the Trump family, father and son had long had a fraught relationship. From the start, Trump doubted that Don Jr. was worthy of the family mantle. When Ivana gave birth, he objected to sharing his name with his newborn son. “What if he’s a loser?” he asked.[66] Ivana prevailed, but Don Jr.’s upbringing was tumultuous. At age twelve, he grew estranged from his father during the divorce from his mother. “You don’t love us!” he reportedly yelled at Trump. “You don’t even love yourself. You just love your money!”[67] Don Jr. did not speak with Trump for a year, hanging up on him whenever he called.

The biggest rogue actor McMaster faced, however, was Trump himself. The president was repeatedly warned by advisers that Russia, China, and other countries were eavesdropping on his cell phone calls. He made them anyway and continued to crowdsource advice on even the most sensitive national security subjects. “He’s just talking to the fucking lunatics all weekend, with the Chinese and Russians and everybody listening,” a national security official said. Did they know for sure? “Fuck yeah,” the official said. The intelligence was clear-cut. One Republican senator recalled Trump calling to ask him about proposed military strikes in Syria. The senator begged Trump not to talk on the unsecured line and simply to listen. “He just can’t help himself,” the national security official said.

Jared and Ivanka had initially pushed not for Pompeo to replace Tillerson but for Nikki Haley, the U.N. ambassador. Trump, however, balked. Some in the White House thought it was because Haley was too tough on Vladimir Putin, but the president, who made no secret of judging even the most senior female officials on their looks, told John Kelly the real reason was the blotch marks on her cheeks, which were neither particularly visible nor in any way a reason not to pick someone for secretary of state. “She’s not good for me. She’s got that complexion problem,” he told Kelly. “She’ll be here all the time. It doesn’t look good.”

He had first threatened to quit the previous fall after a particularly off-the-rails Trump phone call in which he disparaged President Emmanuel Macron of France on November 27. McMaster was so offended that he muttered something intemperate, as one of those present recalled, and walked out of the Oval Office. He agreed to remain only after John Kelly followed him back to his office and brandished a copy of McMaster’s book, Dereliction of Duty, about the Vietnam-era generals who had failed to offer the honest counsel that might have prevented a debacle. “You wrote the book!” Kelly exclaimed. The point, not lost on either modern-day general, was that Trump was their LBJ and his administration was their Vietnam; they had an obligation to stay and head off disaster. “We’ve got to hang with this guy,” Kelly pleaded with him. “Otherwise, God knows who he’ll bring in.”

If Mitch McConnell’s price in the bargain with Trump was an almost free hand to transform the federal judiciary, Ryan’s was the tax cut package. “Once that effort was done, there was no next. There’s nothing next on the list,” said Michael Steel, a political strategist for House Republicans who had worked closely with Ryan’s predecessor as speaker, John Boehner. The bargain was simply less attractive for Ryan—and for Trump. Each had gotten what he could out of the other.

Ryan was a committed conservative, a policy wonk. But Trump’s Washington was a “totally post-policy world,” Buck observed. “Policy doesn’t matter. Principles don’t matter. It’s totally cult of personality and he can do no wrong and he can’t make a mistake, so like what are you supposed to do?”

The North Koreans responded to Bolton with a statement that said, “We do not hide our feelings of repugnance toward him.”

From then on, Trudeau was almost persona non grata with Trump. The young Canadian had started out willing to play along with Trump’s photo ops but had ended up a target just like all those who challenged Trump publicly. While en route to Asia, Trump dispatched advisers to attack the Canadian prime minister in television interviews. Peter Navarro would prove to be especially zealous, claiming in one appearance “there’s a special place in hell” reserved for Trudeau.[53] For years afterward, Trump would randomly disparage Trudeau during unrelated conversations. Once, flying on Air Force One, he turned to Stephanie Grisham, then his White House press secretary. “Trudeau’s mom,” he said out of the blue. “She fucked all of the Rolling Stones.”

McCain had a little history with Trump. At a 1993 congressional hearing, Trump tried to buttonhole McCain as part of an effort to block casinos on American Indian reservations that would compete with his gambling houses in Atlantic City. McCain brushed past him without pausing. “I gave money to your campaign,” Trump called after him. McCain looked back over his shoulder. “Oh yeah? See what that will get you.”

Twenty-two years later, when Trump presented himself as a would-be president, McCain publicly dismissed him again. This time, Trump fired back. “He’s not a war hero,” declared the tycoon, who had avoided the draft in Vietnam with the questionable bone spurs claim. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”[11] McCain’s many fans were outraged, including Graham, but the senator himself just rolled his eyes and told aides not to get worked up.

McCain grudgingly endorsed Trump after he won the nomination, but then withdrew it when the Access Hollywood tape was released, saying he was considering a write-in vote for his “old, good friend” Graham instead.[16] Less than two weeks after Trump won, McCain attended an international security forum in Halifax where he was approached by a British friend who told him that a former intelligence officer had collected damning evidence of Trump’s ties to Russia. McCain was seized by the tip and instructed an adviser, David Kramer, to fly to London to check it out. “Time is of the essence,” McCain said. Mulling it over, McCain said, “You know what this means if it’s true? It means Mike Pence becomes president.” Kramer flew to Britain and met with the former spy, Christopher Steele, who had assembled what would become the infamous dossier on Trump, working first for Republican opponents and later for Clinton’s campaign. Kramer brought it back and gave it to McCain, who consulted his old friend. Graham was intrigued and urged him to turn it over to the FBI, which he did. Behind the scenes, Graham also passed along tips to colleagues on the Senate Intelligence Committee, pressing them to investigate Trump. “Go get him,” he told them.

The president had long scorned soldiers in private, much as he had expressed disdain for John McCain’s combat service. “Anyone who went to that war was a sucker,” Trump had once said about Vietnam, as Kelly recounted it to colleagues. “I don’t know why you guys think these guys who get killed or wounded are heroes. They’re losers.” When Trump at one point accompanied Kelly to visit his son’s grave in Arlington Memorial Cemetery, the president said he could not understand why anyone would give up his life in a war. Kelly told colleagues that Trump seemed genuinely perplexed at the notion of sacrifice for something greater than oneself.

Pointed as Mattis’s letter was, it did not catalogue the many ways he had grown frustrated with the president. He had resisted Trump’s efforts to withdraw from Afghanistan, abandon the Iran nuclear agreement, ban transgender troops from the military, cancel military exercises with South Korea and pull out troops or dependents, undercut or even leave NATO, and conduct a military parade down the streets of Washington. More broadly, Mattis thought Trump was wildly reckless, oddly blind to the threat posed by Russia, and irresponsibly cavalier about America’s international commitments.

Trump wanted vengeance that extended well beyond mean tweets and nasty nicknames. He repeatedly and publicly pressured Jeff Sessions and later Bill Barr to bring criminal charges against his adversaries, including Clinton and James Comey. At one point in the spring of 2018, Trump instructed Don McGahn to direct Sessions to prosecute Clinton and Comey and, if the attorney general refused, said he would do it himself as president. McGahn had to explain that the president had no such power. “You can’t prosecute anybody,” he said. Then he set about compiling an extraordinary memo explaining to Trump how inappropriate it was to use the criminal justice system as a political weapon, as if the United States was a dictatorship. “Congress could seek to ‘impeach and remove’ the president if it concluded that he abused the power of intervening in a criminal matter,” McGahn wrote, using boldface and italics to emphasize his point.

The Trump team’s war against Mueller was coordinated closely with allies at Fox News, who eagerly amplified the president’s assaults and initiated their own. Sean Hannity exchanged hundreds of texts with Paul Manafort collaborating on the best way to undercut the special counsel; investigators eventually obtained the texts and released them nine months after Manafort’s sentencing. Hannity made no pretense of journalistic detachment. “I’m in campaign war mode every day,” he wrote Manafort in one text. “We are all on the same team,” he added in another.

The case against Trump for trying to hinder the investigation was far different. The prosecutors thought they had rock-solid evidence of obstruction of justice. There was no question in their minds that the president sought to thwart investigators and if anything was saved only by advisers like Don McGahn who refused to go along. 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. Although that opinion was hotly debated and had never been tested in court, Mueller under special counsel regulations was bound by it. But Mueller took it one step further: if he could not indict Trump, he told his staff, then he should not even state in his report that the president had violated the law because Trump would have no opportunity to defend himself in court. That, in Mueller’s mind, deprived him of basic due process. And so even though Mueller’s team identified ten potential counts of obstruction, the special counsel ordered his staff not to make a straightforward declaration that those acts constituted crimes. This logic once again drew protests from Andrew Weissmann and other prosecutors, who thought that let the president off the hook.

Barr’s letter selectively characterized the report in several important respects. He wrote that Mueller did not find that the Trump campaign “conspired or coordinated with Russia” but did not mention that the special counsel report nonetheless documented extensive links between the two and noted that the Trump team knowingly benefited from Moscow’s help in the election. As for obstruction of justice, the attorney general quoted Mueller saying that “while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him”—entirely leaving out that Mueller identified ten episodes that were potentially obstruction. Barr left the impression that Mueller “did not draw a conclusion—one way or the other” even though the clear message of the special counsel’s report was that Mueller did consider them potentially obstruction but felt he could not say so because of the Justice Department policy barring indictment of a sitting president.

In fact, Mueller made no determination about “collusion,” which is not a legal term. What he concluded was there was not enough evidence to prove a criminal conspiracy. At the same time, his report pointed out that Trump willingly and knowingly accepted help from Russia for the purpose of winning an election, certainly scandalous and unprecedented in American history even if not illegal. As for fully cooperating, the president had deprived Mueller of the most important witness—Trump himself. And Trump tried repeatedly to have Mueller restrained or fired even while hinting at pardons for witnesses who might testify against him.

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 president often explained publicly that windmills caused cancer, climate change was a hoax, and American toilets did not work properly anymore because of federal regulations.

Bolton’s time in Crazytown, at least, soon came to an end. On September 10, he finally resigned after a series of disagreements with Trump, including over the president’s insistence on hosting representatives of the Taliban at Camp David on the anniversary of September 11, when he hoped to announce his Afghan peace deal—an idea that “mortified” Joe Dunford, the outgoing Joint Chiefs chairman, and plenty of others.

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.

He has betrayed our national security and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections and he will do so again. You will not change him, you cannot constrain him. He is who he is. Truth matters little to him. What’s right matters even less, and decency matters not at all. I do not ask you to convict him because truth or right or decency matters nothing to him, but because we have proven our case and it matters to you. Truth matters to you. Right matters to you. You are decent. He is not who you are.

He will do it again. You cannot constrain him. So many had told themselves that they could manage the unmanageable president, that they could keep him from going too far, that they could steer him in the direction of responsible governance. Cabinet secretaries, White House chiefs of staff, national security advisers, political advisers, senators, congressmen, family members—they had all at one point or another adopted this reasoning. They had justified their service to him or their alliances with him or their deference to him on the grounds that they could ultimately control him. And what Schiff was saying is that three years had shown that was not possible.

Pence’s elevation put him in the public spotlight in a sustained way for the first time since he took office as the nation’s forty-eighth vice president. For the preceding three years, he had been the invisible man with the frozen smile, noticed only when he stood silently behind the president, “mustering a devotional gaze rarely seen since the days of Nancy Reagan,” as Jane Mayer wrote in The New Yorker.[28] Republicans on Capitol Hill nicknamed him “the Bobblehead” for his ritual nodding whenever Trump spoke.[29] Pence was no more revealing in private. Senior administration officials could not recall him saying anything of consequence on virtually any subject at virtually any meeting.

“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.

Of all the absurd ideas that Trump would entertain about the coronavirus, perhaps the most nonsensical was that the pandemic would not be so bad if the government simply stopped testing so much—as if the testing was causing the virus to spread. It was like a teenager hoping that as long as she did not take a pregnancy test, she would not actually be pregnant.

Laura Ingraham had been pushing hydroxychloroquine on her Fox News show for a couple days, hosting a Long Island lawyer, Gregory Rigano, who falsely passed himself off as an adviser to Stanford Medical School. When her guest asserted that hydroxychloroquine would “just get rid of it completely,” Ingraham exulted, “That’s a game changer.” Trump loved it. Game changer. That’s what he wanted. Why was Azar resisting?

Two days after pandemic fatalities hit triple digits in the United States, Trump picked up the phone and called Chris Christie. The coronavirus that the president had blithely promised would go away was instead spreading rapidly. He had ordered most travel banned with Europe, much as he had done with China, decisions that would do powerful damage to America’s economy, and he had just reluctantly agreed to the doctors’ demands to shut down most everything inside the United States as well.

This was classic Trump. He had some of the world’s smartest scientists, the most experienced disaster relief managers, and highly educated economists whose job was to prepare for moments like this working for the government, but he did not trust them. He was looking for someone to tell him how to get out of this situation without having to do what they were telling him to do. He was less than eight months from an election, and he just wanted the virus to go away.

Whatever mix of vanity or political concern played into Trump’s decision to reject masks, it would have a profound effect. Rather than bring the country together behind a simple, modest preventive measure, he helped make mask wearing a political statement and one more battleground in the country’s perpetual culture war.

Jack O’Donnell, former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, said Trump would be upset if he noticed too many Black Americans on the gambling floor. “It’s a little dark tonight,” he would tell O’Donnell, who also claimed that Trump asserted that “laziness is a trait in Blacks” and complained about an African American accountant. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” Once on a construction site, Trump noticed a Black worker. “What is that Black guy doing over there?” he demanded, according to Barbara Res, one of his executives. “Get him off there right now and don’t ever let that happen again. I don’t want people to think that Trump Tower is being built by Black people.”

No matter his efforts to deny, dismiss, and generally make light of the virus, Trump knew he could not persuade enough Americans outside his hard-core fan base to simply pretend Covid was not a threat, not when nearly 200,000 people had already died, and there was no cure. So while he campaigned at mask-less rallies all but ignoring the pandemic, he pressured his public health officials to deliver rapid, pre-election approval for the shots.

By September, Trump had become increasingly explicit in demanding that the vaccine be released before the election, insisting that science meet his political timetable. On Labor Day, he touted progress of vaccine trials and promised approval would soon be forthcoming. The vaccine was “incredible,” he said, and “it’s going to be done in a very short period of time,” maybe as soon as October.[1] He continued to express optimism for the next couple weeks. “Vaccines are moving along fast and safely!” he tweeted in mid-September. A day later, he was so sure the vaccine would benefit him, he made it an attack line against the opposition. “The Democrats are just ANGRY that the vaccine and delivery are so far ahead of schedule. They hate what they are seeing. Saving lives should make them happy, not sad!”

When action was not forthcoming, Trump took his grievance public on Saturday, August 22, two days before the convention. “The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics,” he tweeted. “Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!”

His tweet did not satisfy critics who thought it still misstated the data and it predictably infuriated Trump. But it was a turning point for Hahn. After months of battering, he was done with the president. He had bowed to the White House before, generating consternation by many within the FDA, but he now told others he understood that Trump was a bully, surrounded by other bullies like Meadows. He was determined not to cave in anymore—especially with the trustworthiness of a lifesaving vaccine on the line.

Trump’s tweet accusing “the deep state, or whoever” of trying to delay a vaccine until after the election set off alarms not just at the FDA but at the pharmaceutical companies developing the shots. Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer, was outraged. He had launched his own company’s Project Lightspeed nearly two months before Operation Warp Speed got underway and he was not about to allow his vaccine to be politicized. Trump’s tweet, he said later, was “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”[4] Bourla rallied his counterparts at eight other drug companies to issue a joint public pledge in fourteen newspapers on September 8 vowing to “only submit for approval” any new vaccines “after demonstrating safety and efficacy.”[5] They would not be rushed by a president seeking to salvage his flailing election hopes.

In public, Trump was alternately incredulous and defiant. “I don’t see any reason why it should be delayed further,” he tweeted. He later hinted that he would personally block the FDA from adopting the sixty-day standard. “That has to be approved by the White House,” he said, adding, “We may or we may not approve it”—comments that further shook confidence at a time when the public was increasingly worried that Trump would rush the shots heedless of the risks.[7] Polls showed the number of Americans saying they were ready to take a vaccine had fallen from 72 percent in the spring to 51 percent in September.

With no magic end to the pandemic in sight and only weeks until the election, even the Trump campaign’s internal surveys of seventeen battleground states showed a win was unlikely. Brad Parscale, the former campaign manager demoted to running campaign data before being iced out altogether, told others that more than 90 percent of voters had made up their minds by August.

But if Trump could not win, he had no intention of losing either. He preemptively declared the election the most crooked in history—unless he won. For months, he had been laying the groundwork to dispute any result other than his own victory. He began calling the contest “rigged” in May, months before any votes were cast.

This was an old playbook for Trump. Anytime he was beaten in any kind of contest he cried foul. When The Apprentice lost an Emmy to The Amazing Race in 2004, he complained that the awards were a con game. “We were robbed!” he fumed as he stormed out of the auditorium. “They cheated us!”[10] When Republicans lost the 2012 presidential race, he called the election “a total sham.” When Ted Cruz beat him in the Iowa caucuses in 2016, he cried “fraud,” and claimed that “Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.” In the fall of that year, fearing he would lose to Hillary Clinton, he said the outcome was “absolutely being rigged”—until he actually won. Even then, while victorious in the Electoral College, he claimed that Clinton’s three-million-vote margin in the popular vote was fraudulent, an assertion for which his own handpicked commission found no evidence. A search of Trump’...

Over the summer, as it became increasingly clear that the pandemic was going to lead to a historic increase in voting by mail and states were working to make it easier, Trump had even proposed postponing the fall election, saying it would be the most “INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” Why should the United States not “Delay the Election,” he asked, “until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” While Republican leaders including Mitch McConnell and Liz Cheney forcefully shot down that proposal and made clear the election would take place as it had even during times of war, Trump continued to inveigh against mail-in ballots and new state laws facilitating them, never mind that he himself had voted by mail during Florida’s primary earlier in the year. His newly installed postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor, imposed sharp cutba...

But the timing was unprecedented, another busted norm in a presidency full of them. Trump wanted Barrett confirmed just days before the election, after millions of Americans would have already cast early ballots. There would barely be time for hearings or even the pretense of a process in the Senate, where McConnell obligingly arranged a lightning-fast confirmation only four years after denying Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, a hearing because the nomination came eight months before the 2016 presidential election. Trump would eventually be extraordinarily blunt in admitting that he wanted to push Barrett’s nomination through so close to November 3 to ensure his own victory. “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court,” Trump said of the election, “and I think it’s very important that we have nine justices,” rather than risk a four-to-four tie. Trump appeared to believe that, with three of his appointees on the bench, they would surely swing the outcome his way if necessary.

Trump emerged from the hospital more desperate than when he went in, and his obsession with finding dirt on Joe Biden took a darker, almost frantic turn. Undaunted by his impeachment for trying to strongarm Ukraine into opening a politically charged investigation of the Bidens, Trump now tried to do the same with his own attorney general. He wanted Bill Barr not just to investigate Biden but to put him in prison. And while he was at it, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton too. All in time to win him the election.

“Where are all the arrests?” Trump demanded on Twitter on the morning of October 7, twisting the FBI investigation into Russian election interference into a Democrat-led conspiracy against him. By the afternoon, he had grown even more strident. “BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN—GOT CAUGHT!!!”

The contours of his post-election strategy were clear: to disrupt the counting, to ensure as few votes as possible in Democratic areas were cast, to claim there was widespread fraud. The goal was to get into court and sue. Trump, saying the quiet part out loud, as was his habit, admitted it a few days before the election, declaring that as soon as the campaign ended, “we’re going in with our lawyers.”

When it was Lewandowski’s turn at the microphone, he dramatically presented proof that the election was stolen. A woman named Denise Ondick had requested an absentee ballot but died, according to her obituary, nine days before her ballot arrived at her local election office. “This is hard evidence!” Lewandowski thundered, challenging reporters to “do your jobs” and find more examples.