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

by Peter Baker

While Trump was threatening North Korea’s “Rocket Man,” Tillerson was trying to talk with Kim Jong-un. He had been working back channels to set up a meeting and was already on the way there when, during a stop in China, his legs were cut out from under him via Twitter. “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man,” Trump wrote. “Save your energy Rex,” he added, “we’ll do what has to be done!”[21] As soon as the tweet appeared, North Korea canceled the meeting. Tillerson was beside himself. Rarely if ever had a commander in chief so undermined his secretary of state on a diplomatic mission.

With the effort to repeal Barack Obama’s health care plan effectively dead on Capitol Hill, Trump and Republican congressional leaders turned to their other major priority—a sweeping set of tax cuts that they argued would turbocharge the economy. In the end, it would be Trump’s most important legislative achievement, but one he had very little to do with. Which may be why it passed in the first place.

Melania had been a largely invisible figure in Trump’s White House. More than any first lady in modern times, she had eschewed much of a public role, mostly keeping to herself. She almost never showed up at the East Wing office that Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, and other first ladies used, preferring to deal with her staff by telephone and text or, if need be, meeting in the Map Room on the ground floor of the White House. She spent most of her time with her son, Barron, and her parents, and her main occupation seemed to be photo albums that she curated meticulously. If her staff could get her to do a single event a week, they considered it a victory. Secret Service agents who thought of her as a beauty locked away in a tower privately nicknamed her “Rapunzel.”

But that did not mean she was not upset. In the days that followed, she made her displeasure known in her own way. On the one-year anniversary of the inauguration, which came a few days after the Daniels story, she edited the tweet that her staff had written for her to delete any mention of her husband and tweeted a photo of herself on the arm of a good-looking young military aide.

When Grisham wrote the phrase “wife, mother and First Lady,” Melania took out the word “wife” before agreeing to issue it.

The president would sit with Kelly and Sarah Huckabee Sanders to go over what to tell the news media about one issue or another, and Trump would try out lines without any regard for whether they were accurate or not. He would tell Sanders to say something he just made up and Kelly would reply, “but that’s not true,” and Trump would say, “but it sounds good.”

What do you do when you are a White House adviser and the president of the United States has the whole world wondering whether he is in the pocket of the former KGB spy leading Russia?

Republican-controlled Congress passing legislation over Trump’s objections. But it did nothing to diminish Trump’s disconcerting affection for Putin. He seemed to take anything the master of the Kremlin told him at face value.

It all came to a head on December 7, when Trump, over the course of just a few hours, made what were arguably three of the most consequential decisions of his presidency. He resolved, at last, to fire the White House chief of staff and to make sure he did not get another one who would try to restrain him. He named a new attorney general he expected to serve, finally, as his Roy Cohn, protecting him from federal investigators and going after his political enemies. And he selected a new commander of the American military he hoped would end the resistance at the Pentagon and put the armed forces more securely under his control. None of the decisions would work out quite as he planned.

The decision about Russia, in the end, was not a hard one for the Mueller team. They had conclusive intelligence proving that Moscow conducted a wide-ranging operation to interfere in the 2016 election with the goal of electing Trump. They also had plenty of evidence that the Trump campaign had extensive contacts with various Russians and intermediaries, welcomed Moscow’s help, and profited from it.

Trump, who said publicly that he considered Biden his likeliest 2020 opponent and toughest rival among the Democrats, made a particular point of criticizing Biden’s age, IQ, and competence—exactly the traits that many critics questioned about Trump himself. “Does anybody really believe he is mentally fit to be President?” Trump tweeted of Biden that summer. Even many Republicans were amazed: Was that a debate that Trump really wanted to have?

Lyndon Johnson alternated between bouts of mania and depression. Richard Nixon popped pills and had legendary alcohol-fueled rages as the Watergate scandal closed in around him.

which became the most expensive in the nation that year, and he effectively bashed Rogan for ignoring the district in favor of “national partisan ideological crusades.”[14] The lesson Schiff took from that race was to keep his head down and stick to the center, and for eight terms he more or less did. A Harvard-trained lawyer who entered politics after making his career prosecuting an FBI agent who had been caught in a sex-for-secrets trap by Russia, Schiff was invariably described as a “moderate’s moderate” before Trump arrived on the scene. He even managed to preserve this reputation through the House Intelligence Committee’s years-long Benghazi investigation of Hillary Clinton, when the panel put out a bipartisan report rejecting the elaborate conspiracy theories promoted by the Fox News echo chamber and House Republicans like Mike Pompeo. But from the earliest days of Trump’s presidency, Schiff turned his perch as the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee into a platform for demanding answers about Trump’s Russia ties. He channeled outrage over Trump’s fawning statements about Putin and warned Trump not to shut down the Mueller investigation. He became a regular on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow program and the Sunday talk shows. His relationship with Devin Nunes, the Republican committee chairman, previously cordial enough that they exchanged texts while cheering for the Oakland Raiders, broke down. His Twitter feed, once home to polite policy wonkery, morphed into a rapi...

“You know, you do a really good job on TV,” Kushner had told Schiff before the deposition began. “I don’t think your father-in-law would agree,” Schiff responded. “Oh yes, he does, and that’s why,” Kushner replied.[15]

On December 10, the two articles were publicly released. Article I, “Abuse of Power,” outlined Trump’s Ukraine scheme, characterizing the investigations the president demanded of Zelensky as an effort to influence the 2020 election on his behalf and his withholding of the military aid to Ukraine in furtherance of those investigations as a misuse of official resources. Article II, “Obstruction of Congress,” charged the president with directing “unprecedented, categorical, and indiscriminate defiance of subpoenas” and undermining the principles of “constitutional governance.”[45]

On December 18, 2019, Donald Trump became only the third president impeached by the House of Representatives—and the first to live-tweet his own impeachment.

In the aftermath of his acquittal, Trump felt emboldened, free to use his power as he saw fit to punish enemies and benefit friends. His approval rating had climbed to the highest level of his presidency and now stood at 49 percent in the Gallup poll, which, even though it meant he still had not earned the support of a majority of Americans, was enough to convince him that the public stood with him.[6] With the trial over, he no longer had to worry about alienating squishy Republican senators. He felt no fear of accountability. What were they going to do? Impeach him again?

Stone, a political consultant and self-described dirty trickster who proudly showed off the Richard Nixon tattoo on his back and favored swingers’ clubs in Miami, had been a friend and adviser to Trump for decades. His political credo matched Trump’s: “Admit nothing, deny everything, launch counterattack.”[14]

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?” The president, meanwhile, happily introduced the visiting South American leader—a self-styled populist like himself, often called the Trump of the Tropics—to guests including Tucker Carlson, boasting that he “gave him a good gift” by not imposing tariffs on Brazil and “that made him much more popular.” Bolsonaro laughed and agreed. But it was to be the last tango at Mar-a-Lago, at least for a while.

As it turned out, Guilfoyle’s birthday bash would incubate a Covid hot zone, offering dramatic proof that no one was safe, not even the president of the United States.

The dire news temporarily broke the political gridlock in Washington. In a rare bipartisan move, Trump quickly agreed with Democrats on a massive $2.2 trillion package of relief for individuals and businesses hurt by the pandemic. But it had to be negotiated by Steven Mnuchin since the president was still not on speaking terms with Nancy Pelosi following the impeachment. And once it was passed, instead of using the moment to promote national unity as other presidents would have, Trump invited only Republicans to the March 27 signing ceremony in the Oval Office, stiffing the Democrats who helped make it happen. He then made sure that the $1,200 paper checks sent to 35 million American households that did not receive payments electronically bore his own name on them, as if it were his personal largesse, something no president had ever done.

Why would he refuse to follow the recommendation? “Wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens—don’t know,” he said, although of course he had not greeted any foreign leaders recently, nor was he likely to anytime soon. The whole world was closed for Covid. “Somehow, I don’t see it for myself.”[17] 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.

As the cemeteries filled up, Trump took no time publicly to lead a nation in grief. Not once since the start of the pandemic had he gone to a church to mourn the victims. He refused to order the nation’s flags lowered until Democratic congressional leaders pleaded with him to do so. He did not call for a moment of silence. At various points, he had invited to the White House health company executives, governors, cruise boat company heads, religious leaders, and others affected by the crisis—but never Americans who had actually lost someone to the virus.

Barely one week before Lafayette Square, Trump had sent out a tweet that would soon become a refrain. The 2020 presidential race, he warned for the first time, would end up as “the greatest Rigged Election in history.” The date that Milley was now aiming for, the focus of all his fears and anxieties, was January 20.

Trump’s obsession with the base worried some of his team. He had pulled off an improbable win in 2016 by cobbling together a victory in the Electoral College despite losing the national popular vote by three million, but plenty of seasoned advisers thought it was folly to expect lightning to strike twice in the same way. Among them was Bill Barr, who had watched George H. W. Bush go down in 1992 and thought Trump was heading in the same direction. The attorney general had approached Jared Kushner in the spring to warn him. “People are tired of the fucking drama and chaos,” Barr told him, and voters would blame Trump if he did not change course. Kushner agreed and said he had been trying to enlist others to make the same point to the president, an intervention of sorts. At Kushner’s urging, Trump invited Barr to meet in April and listened as the attorney general told him that his strategy would not work. “You’re going to lose the election because you’re focusing only on your base,” Barr told him. “Your base is with you and they are going to turn out. But the election, I think, is going to be over a very small segment of voters, independents and Republicans in the suburbs, who think you’re an asshole.” Trump did not think much of that. “I need my base,” he told Barr. “I need to fight. My opponents are vicious.”[3] Chris Christie also saw defeat on the horizon. He drafted a three-page memo arguing that 2020 was not 2016. “Your team is taking the same approach as four years ag...

Rove argued that Trump had already waited too long to define his opponent. By this point in the 2004 cycle, when Rove was running his re-election campaign, George W. Bush had already painted John Kerry as a flip-flopping elitist, and by spring of 2012, Obama had already defined Mitt Romney as a heartless, job-killing plutocrat. “You have to disqualify your opponent,” Rove said. “You’re late.” The task was admittedly harder for Trump than for his predecessors. As long as the nation’s consuming focus was the coronavirus, the campaign was effectively a referendum on Trump and that was a dynamic his team feared he could not win. If the choice for Americans was do you want four more years of Trump or not, he would lose. “We basically were one foot in the grave, one foot on a banana peel,” as a senior campaign adviser put it. They had to find a way to change the equation.

Instead, Trump seemed to be channeling Richard Nixon circa 1968, the height of Vietnam and civil rights protests, filling his Twitter feed with phrases famous from the Nixon lexicon like “LAW & ORDER” and “SILENT MAJORITY.” With his talk of “shooting” looters and turning “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” on “thugs” in the street, Trump arguably went beyond Nixon to emulate the segregationist George Wallace’s even more bellicose campaign that year.

Where other leaders saw an overdue moment of racial reckoning, Trump saw an opportunity. Without much of a campaign theme and with the country still hobbled by the coronavirus, suddenly Trump had a law-and-order message. He would channel the backlash among white Americans and position himself as the defender of American heritage against the forces of political correctness. This was the best chance he had of changing the subject from the pandemic at a time when he was trailing Joe Biden by 10 percentage points in public polls.[8] His base would love it.

Trump not only embraced racial animosity, he sought to instigate it. While hosting The Apprentice, he even toyed with setting up a race conflict as the main theme for its fourth season. “It would be nine blacks against nine whites, all highly educated, very smart, strong, beautiful people, right?” Trump said, previewing the idea on Howard Stern’s radio show. “Yes,” Stern said. “Do you like it?” “Yes,” Stern said. Trump asked Robin Quivers, the Black cohost. “Do you like it, Robin?” “Well,” she said, “I think you’re going to have a riot.” “It would be the highest-rated show on television,” Trump exulted.[14] NBC executives rejected Trump’s vision of a Black-versus-white theme. But at the end of that same season, Trump again drew accusations of bias when he undercut Randal Pinkett, the Black contestant who won. During the finale, Trump suggested Pinkett share the honor with the white woman he had just beaten. Shocked, Pinkett declared it “racist.”[15]

In meetings, he deployed racial and ethnic stereotypes that shocked even senior military types accustomed to rough language. “He would say stuff like, ‘Who gives a shit about Korea? You can’t sell a goddamn Ford in Korea, who cares? Why the fuck are we there? Why do I give a shit about these rathole countries in Africa? What the fuck are we doing in Niger?’ ” recalled a senior national security official who spent a lot of time with him.

Or at least her staff was. The first lady’s office controlled use of the White House grounds, and the South Lawn had just been resodded after a thousand energized supporters tromped all over it during the Republican National Convention. The last thing Melania’s office wanted was to ruin the expensive repair work with another large crowd tearing up the backyard. So it rejected the request. Kushner and his team were dumbfounded. They were making history and could not use the lawn? After all the delicate bargaining to bring Israelis and Arabs together, resolving part of the world’s greatest geopolitical turf battle, the final obstacle to their day of celebration would be the actual turf?

At the end of the day, it was both a close election and not at all close. Trump collected 74 million votes, far more than four years earlier, but Biden drew even more, an all-time record of 81 million. Biden’s popular vote margin of 4.5 percentage points was larger than the winner had in eight of nineteen presidential elections since World War II, and turnout of 66.8 percent, despite the pandemic, was the highest it had been since 1992. Biden’s Electoral College victory with states totaling 306 votes to 232 was identical to Trump’s total over Hillary Clinton four years earlier, an outcome that Trump had labeled a “landslide.”[14]

At the end, Jacob dropped his civil, lawyerly tone. “And thanks to your bullshit,” he wrote, “we are now under siege.”[7]

At the White House, the man who had spent months campaigning on “LAW & ORDER” did nothing but watch television. Some of his staff, horrified by Trump’s tweet, had in the intervening few minutes pleaded with him to release a message urging his followers to stand down. The resulting tweet at 2:38 p.m. was hardly that. It read in its entirety: “Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!”

The second impeachment trial of Donald Trump opened on Tuesday, February 9, and unlike any in history it unfolded in the scene of the crime itself with all one hundred jurors having themselves been witnesses.

generations. He was the first president since Benjamin Harrison to lose the popular vote twice. He was the only president in the history of Gallup polling never to have the support of a majority of Americans for a single day of his tenure. Instead, surveys showed that he was the most polarizing president in the history of surveys. And he was the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose the White House, the House, and the Senate in just four years. As Trump himself might put it, he was not just a loser, but a big loser. Yet Trump still emerged from a seven-million-vote defeat, two impeachments, and the January 6 insurrection as the dominant force in the Republican Party. He remains the undisputed frontrunner for its nomination in 2024 should he mount a comeback. In the months after his reluctant exit from the White House, he cowed Republicans like Kevin McCarthy, purged the party of those who stood against him, and set about stacking primaries for the upcoming 2022 midterm elections with his supporters.