What Trump needed to grasp in that moment was that the city that surrounded this new set in Washington was far different from New York. For his entire life in New York City, Trump had lied and arm-twisted his way through everything, operating in worlds dominated by tabloid coverage and businessmen a lot like himself who were brash, uncompromising, and ethically unbridled. The worst consequences he faced there for his misdeeds were bad press stories in the tabloids and civil lawsuits. But in Washington, the actors were more skilled, and the consequences were exponentially greater. Partisans, media, and officials from the law enforcement, military, and intelligence communities, and even foreign adversaries, played a sophisticated game of shivving at a far higher level, constantly calling fouls on each other for breaking a group of written and unwritten rules. In Washington, things like conflicts of interest, keeping a distance between politics and law enforcement, and even the appearance of improprieties that Trump had never given a moment’s thought were all serious matters.
At the most basic level, because Trump now headed the executive branch, he found himself closer to the law than any other person in the country. He had never shown great care or appreciation for nuance. Now everything he did—whether it was tweet, privately complain, or sign an executive order—would be seen through the prism of the law. If he made a real mistake, he would be labeled a criminal.
A friend who spoke with Trump the day after his inauguration said that Trump not only had failed to grasp the new realities and sensibilities of Washington but also had entered into “another dimension of reality.” The toys of the White House, the friend said, had turned Trump into a child who sounded as if he had just opened his birthday presents.
“I have the best toys, you won’t believe the toys, and I have the best Secret Service, they will kill anybody and follow you around everywhere—there’s nothing like them,” Trump told the friend.
“I got the sense,” the friend said, “that he came into this place and was completely oblivious to what he was walking into and was completely mesmerized by this new world he was in, and for the first time realized just how powerful he was going to be.”
For Trump’s entire life he had wanted to create his own reality, the friend said. But often, he ran up against others—people on the street, other businessmen, and the media—who reminded him of his standing as an outsider from Queens. But as he had skated along in the business world, he always had the ability to put things into perspective.
“He was in on the joke,” the friend said. “He was P. T. Barnum and he let you know from time to time he was in on the joke.”
Now, behind the walls of the White House, the friend sensed that Trump believed he could finally live in his version of reality and that no one was going to get in his way. With the symbols of ultimate power at his disposal, people would finally have to take him seriously.
“Behind the White House wall and gates he was completely protected,” the friend said. “Now he was surrounded by sycophants, and nobody around him would be honest with him. On January 20 he finally walked into a building where he could say whatever he wanted to say, and believe whatever he wanted to believe, and live in this alternate reality.”
Even after he had taken over his father’s real estate business, Trump still felt like a kid from the outer boroughs who was looked down upon by those he saw as members of the elite class. Even when he expanded his business and created a worldwide brand, the titans of New York real estate still thought of him as an act without real substance. But now, just months before he turned seventy-one, Trump had reached the pinnacle of American life. He was the president of the United States; no one, not even his doubters, had a more powerful job.
But Trump’s expectations for how the world would now see him were setting him up for a huge disappointment.
After first walking into the Oval Office and noticing the light, Trump posed for photos with his children behind the Resolute desk. His aides congregated behind him for what would be his first event at the White House: the signing of a largely symbolic executive order to signal his intentions to attempt a rollback of Obamacare and eliminate federal regulations generally.
Standing behind Trump in the room were the people who were supposed to be guiding his presidency. One of them was a family member, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Presidents had long been expected to turn to the best and the brightest in any given field and bring them into the executive branch, shunning nepotism and favoring experts. Trump, however, had no such compunction regarding the practice and eagerly installed members of his family in positions of great power like his daughter Ivanka and Kushner, who had ill-defined roles. On the organizational chart, the two highest-ranking White House officials were supposed to be the chief of staff, Reince Priebus, and the chief strategist, Steve Bannon. None of them had worked in government before, let alone the White House.
While the title of chief of staff belonged to Priebus, many of those who worked directly for him believed Kushner was the true chief of staff. Priebus acted as if he had little power, especially to say no to bad ideas. He seemed more comfortable in a glorified communications director role. He had his office set up with so many televisions hung on the wall that White House staffers joked that it looked like a Buffalo Wild Wings sports bar. Bannon, the chief strategist, came to the White House with all sorts of self-confidence and gusto and a slew of executive orders of questionable legality that he wanted to rush in to have Trump sign. But he had no idea how the government functioned.
However, two aides in the room did have extensive experience working in the executive branch. One was Flynn. The other was a longtime Washington lawyer named Don McGahn.
McGahn had been the lawyer for Trump’s campaign and had maintained a far lower profile than the Bannons and Kushners of Trump’s world. Throughout the race, he was more of a voice on the other end of the phone from Trump than someone who traveled with him; McGahn would update him on the nitty-gritty matters of a campaign, like fundraising numbers, and it was McGahn who would see to it that Trump would be on the ballot in all fifty states. Even during the transition, the two had spent little time together. McGahn largely stayed in Washington. He fought recount efforts in the few states where Hillary Clinton or Jill Stein supporters had challenged the vote. He hired lawyers to work under him at the White House, and he closed up his private law practice.
Although Trump and McGahn had known each other for only a year and a half, the two had developed a decent relationship. They found each other funny. Now that they were both in the White House, McGahn would see Trump just about every day. White House counsels are typically charged with attending meetings with the president and other top aides to offer advice on the legal restrictions that may arise in the process of everyday governing. They have a hand in questions of ethics, pardons, executive orders, and a slew of different topics. But more than any other White House counsel in recent history, McGahn—whose high-level experience was largely in the realm of campaign law—had a more defined role. Sure, he would have to commit time to many of the same things past White House lawyers had done. But he was given additional responsibility. Taking advantage of Trump’s lack of core political beliefs, McGahn—in the process of signing on as the White House’s chief lawyer—had the president grant him extraordinary latitude in the appointment of judges. As a staunch libertarian, McGahn had long dreamed of a judiciary that worked to limit the reach of government. (“I enjoy liberty,” McGahn once said in an interview. “I don’t like the government.”) With the okay from Trump, he could nominate scores of judges to lifetime appointments who were all far more conservative than the judges who had been appointed during the Obama and Bush administrations, changing the courts for decades. In fact, McGahn was so singularly focused on the appointment and confirmation of judges that he had a memo drawn up that had a day-by-day and even hour-by-hour schedule of the plan to announce and confirm Trump’s first Supreme Court pick.
McGahn knew he was receiving a once-in-a-never-again opportunity. In another Republican administration he would have been passed up for the job in favor of someone who had an Ivy League degree and perhaps even prior experience in a White House or the Justice Department. But now McGahn would have the sole power to present judicial options to Trump. No other White House had operated in a similar manner. And with a Republican Senate and an open seat on the Supreme Court, the arrangement gave McGahn an extraordinary power.
In the Oval Office on Inauguration Day, McGahn could tell that little work had been done during the transition to establish an agenda and that no one on the leadership team had any real idea what their roles were or, for that matter, what the administration’s plans were for its first several days. To McGahn, the assembled group of staff and family felt like a group of people who had decided on a whim to run the country, without putting any time or planning into learning what that actually entailed.
“It was a pickup game of basketball with some people who maybe you think are smart or have talent or whatever but they had never played on a court before, had never played as a team, weren’t going to work as a team, and have a coach who has never coached before and had no real interest in coaching,” said one aide.
And something seemed off about the president. Aides noticed that amid the feeling of joy and disbelief that suffused the White House, a darkness had quickly set in with Trump himself.
Trump said nothing about how he was feeling. It was Trump, after all; we may never know what he was feeling. The aides thought there could be two reasons for why the president acted upset. One sense was that Trump, now the most powerful man in the world, was finally feeling the weight of the office. He had been taken with the idea of being president, but now what?
Presidential historians have written for generations about how “the office” had changed presidents once they’d actually assumed the job and confronted the realities, responsibilities, and limitations of their position on the world stage, where the implications of any action they took could alter history. Maybe this scared Trump.
But maybe his emotions were shallower than that. After all, among the reasons Trump had looked forward to his inauguration was that he thought being the forty-fifth president of the United States meant at last he would be accorded the respect from the media he felt he deserved. Yet within hours of taking the oath of office on the Capitol steps, he was seeing media reports highlighting how many more people had attended Obama’s first inaugural than his.
On the campaign trail, Trump had flung vicious attacks at the other Republicans seeking the nomination and Clinton. They hit him back with damaging disclosure after damaging disclosure. But Trump survived them all. The rhythms and pace of campaigning had been perfect for him. He jumped from city to city on his own plane. At each stop he fed off the crowd. He lived in the spotlight and thrived on the constant motion and media attention and constant sense of embattlement. Even when the polls had been heading south, aides had rarely seen Trump lash out angrily or grow depressed. While he was someone who struggled to take criticism, running against Clinton not only gave him a foil, it also gave him an outlet for his insecurities.
“On the campaign, he was the one hurting others,” said one aide. “He had an enemy. As long as he’s hurting them more, he can take the incoming.”
But now Clinton was gone, and all the attention would be cast directly on him. By achieving the presidency, he would now breathe the rarefied air of a historic figure, and would now be measured against the likes of Washington and Lincoln. Bluster is fine in real estate and reality TV, but now it would be much harder to trash-talk his way out of his problems. Along with being upset with the media’s coverage of crowd sizes, Trump grew angry that Obama had received such a warm send-off that afternoon from television commentators when he departed the Capitol in a helicopter after the inaugural ceremony. To Trump it was as if the media were mourning Obama’s leaving and dreading his own ascendancy.
“All of a sudden he’s president, and he took it pretty hard,” said one aide. “All sorts of people who couldn’t believe he was elected were saying horrible things about him.”
His ego aside, Trump’s ignorance of how government worked could be a profound liability. To McGahn, a best-case scenario would be for Trump to emulate Ronald Reagan. Enjoy the trappings and ceremonial roles of the presidency and let aides like him ruthlessly execute his agenda. McGahn had seen the reporting that the FBI was investigating links between the campaign and Russia. He thought it was all bullshit. Whatever it was, the campaign and its lawyers could handle any questions that came up. It wouldn’t be anything serious that the White House would have to handle. He could focus on just the judges.
What McGahn did not realize was that a freight train was steaming toward the White House. Jim Comey and the FBI were closely watching Trump’s public behavior and the chaos that enveloped him. They were prepared to act in a way that would spark a series of events that would drastically change the trajectory of the presidency and McGahn’s life. For any White House, facing off with an adversarial FBI would be a complex, and even crippling, challenge. But for a White House that had little idea how to govern, dealing with the investigation in an organized, effective way would be virtually impossible. It would all happen so quickly that by the twenty-sixth day of the presidency, Trump would have done enough to create an existential threat to his presidency that would potentially define his term in office. More than that, the impending clash would create an unprecedented level of chaos at the highest levels of the American government, a chaos that in many ways would redefine Washington.
It would put Trump on a collision course with himself, the establishment, the FBI, and the Justice Department. Standing between Trump and the abyss would be Comey and McGahn. As the presidency got under way, McGahn thought everything would be fine.
But he might have known better. His own family’s history should have taught him that being Donald Trump’s lawyer was never that simple.
★ ★ ★
1980
ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY—Paddy McGahn was the most prominent lawyer and fixer in the newest industry in town. If you wanted to make it in casinos in Atlantic City, you had to see Paddy McGahn. As a young man, Paddy had spent three brutal months deployed on the front lines of the Korean War as a Marine platoon leader. A bullet struck him in the back of the head. A grenade went off in front of him, sending shrapnel flying into his face. Another explosion left fragments of metal lodged in his spine. His injuries were so severe that he lost some use of his right arm and would only ever be able to greet people with his left hand. The military awarded him the Navy Cross and three Purple Hearts for valor.
Despite the strain of the tour, Paddy returned home to Atlantic City after the war just as outgoing, aggressive, and ambitious as he had been before he left for Korea. But he needed a job. He felt endlessly proud to be a Marine—even keeping his military-style crew cut—and believed he could channel that energy into helping his hometown by getting involved in politics. His mother suggested he meet with the notorious South Jersey Republican political boss who ran Atlantic City, Hap Farley. Republican bosses had controlled the city’s public offices, and the locals were convinced that the power structure would never change. Bribes, backroom deals, and nearly unanimous Republican support made Farley the ultimate decision maker when it came to any government post or consequential policy decision. (Decades later, the book and HBO series Boardwalk Empire would evoke the bare-knuckle thuggery and horse-trading that dominated Atlantic City politics.)
There was another reason it made sense for Paddy to meet with the boss: Farley was close to the McGahns, even serving as a pallbearer at the funeral for Paddy’s father—an Irish immigrant who came through Ellis Island and went on to run a popular pub in downtown Atlantic City. Paddy believed that Farley would give him a low-level post so he could begin to work his
way up the machine’s ladder.
But when Paddy met up with Farley, their exchange went badly. Instead of finding Paddy a position, Farley suggested that he look for work out of state if he wanted a start in politics. Paddy felt rejected and, according to family lore, went down to city hall that very day to change his political affiliation from Republican to Democrat.
He also decided to finish getting the law degree he had started before the war. After graduation, he opened his own small law office in Atlantic City. Operating as a Democrat in a Republican town would be a challenge. But over the next decade, Paddy relied on charm and a whatever-it-takes mindset to deepen his ties with local officials. Along the way, he became a prominent lawyer specializing in working the wheels of the local bureaucracy, claiming that his connections went “all the way to heaven.”
As Paddy built up his legal practice, he watched Atlantic City continue its decline. Situated on a small swath of land that occupies just 3 miles of New Jersey’s 130-mile coastline, Atlantic City is about an hour’s drive southeast of Philadelphia and two and a half hours from Manhattan. It started as a spa and wellness retreat in the late nineteenth century. A railroad line that ran into the middle of the town from Philadelphia helped turn it into an easy weekend getaway for upper-middle-class city dwellers. With a boardwalk along the water and a government willing—even eager—to ignore the law to lure visitors, the city quickly grew to prominence, and fancy hotels sprouted up on the water. By the 1920s, gambling, drinking, and prostitution were freely available along the boardwalk, and local authorities would raise the drawbridge at night, a signal to law enforcement on mainland New Jersey to mind its own business. The Miss America pageant got its start there, and entertainers like Harry Houdini and W. C. Fields worked the boardwalk.
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