I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J. Trump's Catastrophic Final Year

by Carol Leonnig

  “I’m on it,” Meadows said. “I’m on it.”

  The bunker story would become an obsession of the new chief of staff’s—and he would spend hours pursuing possible leads on the identity of the leaker, though the release of this White House gossip didn’t constitute a crime and Meadows’s fixation got in the way of his job managing the entire executive branch. Meadows would tell other aides that he suspected the leak originated from the first lady’s office, but he would never uncover solid enough evidence to make a convincing case.

  A few days later, Trump would deny what had happened. “It was a false report,” Trump said in a call-in interview with Fox News Radio’s Brian Kilmeade. “I went down during the day, and I was there for a tiny, little, short period of time, and it was much more for an inspection.”

  Trump’s risible explanation was a lie. His aides knew it. His Secret Service agents knew it.

  * * *

  —

  Going into that weekend, Trump gathered Meadows, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley, and other top advisers in the Oval Office to plan an end to the protests. The president wanted to deploy the military, both in Washington and elsewhere in the country. Sitting in front of the Resolute Desk, facing the president, Esper and Milley warned Trump that deploying active-duty troops on American streets was almost never a good idea, and especially not to handle civil unrest. Milley’s opposition to the use of military force domestically was well known throughout the Pentagon.

  From the back of the room, Stephen Miller piped up. Though Miller had previously only worked as a congressional staffer and had zero military experience, he was highly regarded by the president for his hard-edged nationalism and innate understanding of how to cater to Trump’s political base. He egged on Trump to use armed troops.

  “Mr. President, you have to show strength,” Miller said. “They’re burning the country down.”

  Milley, nothing if not blunt with his counsel, whipped his head around and locked eyes with Miller. The general didn’t like much of anything that Miller had to say about dealing with protests. He had told aides he considered him a Rasputin character, always whispering devilish ideas in the king’s ear. Milley raised his arm to point a finger in Miller’s direction, staring at him as he did so.

  “Stephen, shut the fuck up,” Milley snapped. “They’re not burning the fucking country down.”

  Then he turned back to Trump. The president’s obsession with tapping the military’s might led the Pentagon to keep at the ready data it had never needed before, so Milley could fight fire with facts. The chairman’s office got updated counts of the total number of law enforcement officers and National Guard available in every major city in the United States.

  “Mr. President,” Milley said, “there are two hundred seventy-six cities in America with over one hundred thousand people in them. We track this all the time.” In the last twenty-four hours, Milley said, there were only two cities with violent protests so large that local authorities might have needed reinforcements. Otherwise, he said, “there was some vandalism and some rioting, but they were handled by local police.”

  Then he turned back to Miller.

  “Stephen, that’s not burning the country down,” he said.

  Miller pushed back. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “We’re supposed to say, Sorry, your city’s being burned down. Too bad your mayor doesn’t want to do anything about it. That’s our argument? We can’t possibly take the position that the people are free to riot for as long as they want to in this country. This is a completely untenable position.”

  Still, Milley’s firmness made an impression on Trump, who watched silently and eagerly, as if the argument between his advisers were a pay-per-view fight on HBO. Miller was pressed on the ropes in the first round. Milley was setting a boundary with a president who saw none, something he would have to do far more often in the coming months. Yes, some protests were violent, but they were not enveloping entire cities, and it was the Pentagon’s assessment that law enforcement authorities could control the situations.

  This same weekend, Esper called Larry Hogan with a special request. He asked—pleaded, really—for the Maryland governor to deploy National Guard soldiers to Washington. Hogan’s gut reaction was no. He needed them on standby at home in case protests in Baltimore or elsewhere in Maryland got intense. More important, though, Hogan had mixed feelings about deploying his National Guard for the Trump administration. In 2015, he had called up the National Guard to assist law enforcement officers in keeping protests peaceful in Baltimore following the killing of Freddie Gray. Hogan was proud of the state’s response then and deeply uncomfortable with an additional military response to civil unrest, believing demonstrators need space to express their frustrations.

  “Look,” Hogan told Esper, “we’re always willing to help our next-door neighbor, but what are they going to be used for? We have nine hundred guys in Baltimore outside the city waiting if they’re needed and we don’t have a defined mission. What is it that you want to use them for?”

  “Here’s the situation,” Esper said. “The president wants me to use active-duty military troops and that’s the last thing I want to do. The citizen-soldiers in the National Guard, that’s what they’re for, but D.C. doesn’t have enough.”

  “No, we don’t want to do that,” Hogan said.

  The governor consulted with the guard’s adjutant general, who explained he didn’t have enough troops and did not want to send them on some undefined mission. Hogan called back Esper to negotiate. Esper urged Hogan to change his mind, noting that he was also asking a handful of neighboring states, including New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania to send National Guard soldiers. Hogan agreed to send one hundred National Guard members, and Esper was pleased, although the governor insisted upon a defined mission.

  “We’re not doing anything on protesters,” Hogan said. “We’ll go protect the monuments.”

  So Maryland’s soldiers stood guard around the Lincoln Memorial, far from the violence in front of the White House.

  Meanwhile, despite Milley whacking Miller’s argument, the issue of deploying troops came up in a subsequent White House meeting. Trump asked why it couldn’t be done. Protesters were looting stores and vandalizing buildings. The president reasoned that they had to be stopped just like when troops were used in the 1960s to bring order to the streets.

  “Mr. President, it doesn’t compare anywhere to the summer of sixty-eight,” Milley said. “It’s not even close.”

  Miller piped up again. “It’s an insurrection!” he said.

  This time, the general didn’t bother turning toward the young aide. Though Milley had been sharp with Miller before, he tried to stay calm with the president now. Milley pointed at the painting of President Lincoln that hung on the wall to the right of the Resolute Desk.

  “Mr. President, that guy had an insurrection,” Milley said. “You don’t have an insurrection. When guys show up in gray and start bombing Fort Sumter, you’ll have an insurrection. I’ll let you know about it. You don’t have an insurrection right now.”

  The Insurrection Act, enacted in 1807, had last been used in 1992 during the riots in Los Angeles after officers were found not guilty of beating Black motorist Rodney King. Invoking it was considered the very last resort—a nuclear option. And Milley was not about to let it happen on his watch. Some other key voices in Trump’s ear backed up Milley, including Kellogg, who told Trump, “Leave it alone. Let the governors worry about this with the National Guard.” Kellogg said invoking the Insurrection Act was “always something to keep in your back pocket, but don’t do it.”

  “The problem is, with all these riots going on, it’d have to be a massive group. You can’t just send troops to one location,” Kellogg told Trump. “And what you don’t want to do is seem like you’re doing martial law, putting federal troops into a
bunch of states. What I would do is reserve them, but don’t bring federal troops into cities until we find out something has become uncontrollable.”

  Trump believed troops in battle dress were the only way to show he meant business, to be the “law and order” president he styled himself as. Again and again, he would argue that cities were falling prey to violent extremists and he was needed to stop the chaos and prevent destruction. Each time, Milley could counter with the number of officers already on the ground prepared to enforce the peace.

  Milley hoped to calm Trump down: “Mr. President, that’s not what’s happening. Some protests are getting violent, but the cops got it. Law enforcement has got it. There’s no insurrection. There’s no need for troops.”

  * * *

  —

  The morning of Monday, June 1, Trump awoke early and lost his temper at the news coverage of the White House protests and his trip to the bunker. His advisers were on edge. Trump had been mulling a plan to personally dominate the situation: He would personally walk into Lafayette Square and, in the words of a military commander, retake that hill.

  Trump summoned Esper, Milley, Meadows, Barr, and deputy White House chief of staff Tony Ornato, his former Secret Service detail leader who oversaw operations and security, to the Oval Office. He wanted to get the mess on his front lawn straightened out. Trump complained about how weak he must look to other foreign leaders with fires burning in plain view of the White House.

  “How do you think this looks to hostile countries?” Trump asked. “They see we can’t even control our own capital city and the space around the White House!

  “I had to be fucking taken down,” Trump said of the trip to the bunker that he had earlier denied took place. “This is crazy.”

  Trump again proposed bringing in military troops. Speaking in a herky-jerky style, effectively brainstorming aloud, he threw out random numbers—ten thousand! five thousand!—of troops he could order to Washington. He asked about calling in the 82nd Airborne. He wanted reinforcements lining the White House perimeter. He suggested they invoke the Insurrection Act immediately. Neither Trump’s attorney general nor his Pentagon leaders liked the idea of active-duty soldiers patrolling city streets. Milley explained to the president that the 82nd Airborne would take a long time to mobilize and transport to Washington: troops could not just hop on a cargo plane and fly in immediately. Esper explained why the Insurrection Act was a dramatic move for civilian protests when there were so few dangerous lawbreakers.

  “Mr. President, the National Guard is best suited to do this,” Esper said. “This is a job for law enforcement. Law enforcement has the lead. The military should be in the back of the line and the active duty should be dead last.”

  Trump slammed on the Resolute Desk and yelled that Esper wasn’t helping him fix the problem. Everyone in the room went quiet for a bit. Trump then suggested Milley, whose tough bravado the president admired, could be the commander of an operation to restore order in the city. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff poured cold water on that idea, realizing the president didn’t understand he didn’t command troops.

  “No, no, Mr. President,” Milley said. “There’s a civilian leadership. I’m not in an operational role here.”

  Milley tried to explain that Americans had a constitutional right to protest and the military should not be used to stop them.

  “You can’t say that!” Trump interjected.

  “Well, I just did,” Milley said. “I’m your military adviser. I have to tell you that.”

  Now red in the face, Trump demanded that somebody give him a solution because this chaos in the streets required an immediate and deafening response. Milley held his tongue, figuring there was no winning this argument. Others stayed silent, too, and the president grew more frustrated.

  “You’re all fucked up,” Trump thundered. “Every one of you is fucked up.”

  Then he turned to look at Vice President Pence, who had been silent the entire time, and exclaimed: “Including you!”

  Barr, fortunate to not also be on the receiving end of this tirade, was listening. He had enjoyed an unusually good relationship with Trump compared to other Cabinet members and had aligned with Milley and Esper at times to help persuade the president. At this tense juncture, Barr sided with the Pentagon duo and urged Trump not to use active-duty troops. But despite Esper, Milley, and Barr all singing from the same hymn sheet, Esper sensed the president was on the verge of giving them a direct order to activate soldiers. Since Trump had suggested ten thousand troops, Esper proposed one tolerable way to get to the president’s number.

  “Mr. President, why don’t we do this?” Esper said. “Let me go back to the Pentagon, I will get the guard moving.” He said he thought he could get governors from neighboring states to loan five thousand National Guard members to team up with the five thousand members of law enforcement agencies under the Justice Department provided by Barr. Barr reconfirmed that he could do that. The truth was the Justice Department had very few officers who could provide this kind of help, and even fewer with the proper training. Bureau of Prisons officers were ideal for controlling riots in prisons. U.S. marshals were trained to track down fugitives. Neither force had much experience with the nuanced work of corralling civilian protesters exercising their right to free speech.

  There was a long pregnant pause. Trump was hardly overjoyed. But Esper’s proposal was good enough for now. Trump seized on this “plus-up” plan and turned to Barr: “You’re going to run this thing.”

  The attorney general had no control over, or even practical communication with, most of the agencies involved in the law enforcement response. He had no chain of command to the Park Police, the Secret Service, or the National Guard. But Trump’s goal was simple, and so were his solutions. He wanted to show he was dominating the streets of Washington, and he needed a commander.

  The attorney general shrugged and accepted his assignment: “Yes, Mr. President.”

  Barr relished his role as the go-to guy for the president, but also for Milley and Esper, who counted on him to talk sense into Trump. He didn’t really like to say no or give the impression he couldn’t handle something. But that Monday, Barr didn’t stop to point out to the president—or perhaps, even, to seriously consider for himself—all the minefields that stood in his way. This was a strategy that some senior advisers and Cabinet members had developed after months of working for Trump: get him to a palatable decision during a meeting—and then move to end the meeting and leave as soon as possible. “Get up and get out,” as one former Cabinet member said. It was risky to continue the discussion with Trump because a new and far worse plan could be proposed at any moment.

  Immediately after their tense meeting in the Oval, Trump and the others moved to the Situation Room for a conference call with the nation’s governors. It was contentious right off the bat, with the heated conversation in the Oval essentially overflowing into the next meeting.

  In his opening remarks, Trump said, “General Milley is here, who’s head of [the] Joint Chiefs of Staff, a fighter, a war hero, a lot of victories and no losses, and he hates to see the way it’s being handled in the various states. And I just put him in charge.” Having just explained why this was not possible, Milley could be seen blanching at the suggestion.

  Trump then said of his attorney general, “We will activate Bill Barr and activate him very strongly. . . . We’re strongly looking for arrests.”

  Then the president berated the governors. “You have to get much tougher,” he said, adding, “You have to dominate. If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time. They’re going to run all over you, you’ll look like a bunch of jerks. You have to dominate, and you have to arrest people, and you have to try people and they have to go to jail for long periods of time.”

  Barr then came on the line and backed up the president. “Law enforcement response is not gonna work
unless we dominate the streets, as the president said,” Barr told the governors. “We have to control the streets. If we treat these as demonstrations, the police are pinned back, guarding places, and don’t have the dynamic ability to go out and arrest the troublemakers.”

  Esper, who was on the clock to get governors to activate National Guard units to arrive by nightfall, hoped to encourage this step on the call. He praised Walz’s deployment of the National Guard in Minneapolis to reduce tensions and to deter further trouble there. Esper and Milley both chimed in about the need to “dominate the battle space,” a fairly mundane military phrase, but which sounded jarring to some of the governors’ ears. Several governors chimed in with overnight updates on the protests in their states. And then, when J. B. Pritzker was called to speak, the Illinois governor confronted Trump.

  “I wanted to take this moment . . . to say that I’m extraordinarily concerned with the rhetoric that’s been used by you,” Pritzker said. “It’s been inflammatory and not okay. . . . And I need to say that we are feeling real pain out here and that we’ve got to have national leadership on this that is calling for calm and for making sure that [people can have] legitimate peaceful protests. That will help us bring order.”

  “Well, thank you very much, Jay,” Trump responded. “I don’t like your rhetoric, either.”

  After the call wrapped up, Pritzker and his aides suspected Trump was on the verge of a serious escalation. The governor’s chief of staff, Anne Caprara, called his chief of strategy, Emily Bittner, to say, “You’ve got to watch the news. Donald Trump is going to do something crazy.”

  One part of the plan that emerged from the White House meeting, and which Barr agreed with, was to expand the northern security perimeter around the White House, both to protect the complex and St. John’s, where protesters had previously set fire to the basement. Park Police, aided by the Secret Service, would bring in reinforcements from D.C. police; the Justice Department’s units; law enforcement in neighboring Arlington, Virginia; and National Guard members. Once new fencing material arrived and enough forces were on location, they would move the protest barricade one block north, from H Street to I Street. But beyond that, there was not much of a plan. After their meetings at the White House, Meadows, Esper, Barr, and Milley met privately—without the president—to discuss how this was all going to work. Milley kept shaking his head.