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To John, Elise, and Molly—you are my everything.
To Naomi and Clara Rucker
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Authors’ Note
Prologue
PART ONE
One. BUILDING BLOCKS
Two. PARANOIA AND PANDEMONIUM
Three. THE ROAD TO OBSTRUCTION
Four. A FATEFUL FIRING
Five. THE G-MAN COMETH
PART TWO
Six. SUITING UP FOR BATTLE
Seven. IMPEDING JUSTICE
Eight. A COVER-UP
Nine. SHOCKING THE CONSCIENCE
Ten. UNHINGED
Eleven. WINGING IT
PART THREE
Twelve. SPYGATE
Thirteen. BREAKDOWN
Fourteen. ONE-MAN FIRING SQUAD
Fifteen. CONGRATULATING PUTIN
Sixteen. A CHILLING RAID
PART FOUR
Seventeen. HAND GRENADE DIPLOMACY
Eighteen. THE RESISTANCE WITHIN
Nineteen. SCARE-A-THON
Twenty. AN ORNERY DIPLOMAT
Twenty-one. GUT OVER BRAINS
PART FIVE
Twenty-two. AXIS OF ENABLERS
Twenty-three. LOYALTY AND TRUTH
Twenty-four. THE REPORT
Twenty-five. THE SHOW GOES ON
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Authors
AUTHORS’ NOTE
Reporting on Donald Trump’s presidency has been a dizzying journey. Stories fly by every hour, every day. With each momentous event we chronicled, we realized history was unfolding in front of our eyes and we had little chance to take stock. There was always something next. So we decided to hit the pause button. We wanted to drill down deeper than our daily news reporting allowed, to truly understand what was happening behind the scenes, and to assess the reverberations for the country.
This book is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with more than two hundred sources, including Trump administration officials, friends, and outside advisers to the president, as well as other witnesses to the events described herein. Most of the people who cooperated with our project agreed to speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity, either to protect their careers in the government or because they feared retaliation from the president or his allies. Many of our sources recounted their experiences in a background capacity, meaning we were permitted to use the information they shared so long as we protected their identities and did not attribute details to them by name. We recorded many of our interviews.
We are objective journalists who seek to share the truth with the public. In this book, we aimed to provide the closest version of the truth that we could determine based on rigorous reporting. We carefully reconstructed scenes to reveal President Trump unfiltered, showing him in action rather than telling readers what to think of him. These scenes are based on firsthand accounts and, whenever possible, corroborated by multiple sources and buttressed by our review of calendars, diary entries, internal memos, and other correspondence among principals, as well as private video recordings. Dialogue cannot always be exact but is based here on multiple people’s memories of events and, in many cases, contemporaneous notes taken by witnesses. In a few instances, sources disagreed substantively about the facts in an episode, and when necessary we note that in these pages, recognizing that different narrators sometimes remember events differently.
This book is an outgrowth of our reporting for The Washington Post. As such, some of the details in our narrative first appeared in stories we authored for the newspaper, some of them in collaboration with other colleagues. However, the vast majority of the scenes, dialogue, and quotations are original to our book and based on the extensive reporting we conducted exclusively for this project.
To reconstruct episodes that played out in public, we relied upon video of events, such as presidential speeches, many of which are archived on C-SPAN’s website. We also relied on contemporaneous news reports in an array of publications. We have also drawn from the government record, including the report produced by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and in most instances built upon the published record with our own original reporting. Material gleaned from such accounts is properly attributed, with a direct reference either in the text or in the endnotes.
We sought to interview President Trump for this project and first approached him in the early stages of our reporting. In a phone call, Trump told Philip Rucker he would like to sit for an interview. “Come in. You’ll do a fair one,” Trump said. The president added, “I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’d like to have a proper book done. You’re a serious person. So that’s good.” In later months, as Trump escalated his war with the media, he declined through an aide the opportunity to sit for an interview and to provide his own recollection and context for events described in this book. After several weeks of back-and-forth discussions, Trump’s spokespeople were unable to substantively answer questions about those events or to provide the president’s responses before the deadline for publication.
PROLOGUE
I alone can fix it.”
On July 21, 2016, as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland, Donald John Trump spoke more than four thousand words, but these five would soon become the tenet by which he would lead the nation.
That night, Trump stood by himself at the center of Quicken Loans Arena on an elevated stage, which he had helped to design. A massive screen framed in gold soared behind him, projecting a magnified picture of himself along with thirty-six American flags. This was a masculine, LED manifestation of his own self-image. His speech was dark and dystopian. He offered himself to the American people as their sole hope for renewal and redemption. Past presidential nominees had expressed humility, extolled shared values, and summoned their countrymen to unite to accomplish what they could only achieve together. But Trump spoke instead of “I.”
“I am your voice.”
“I will be a champion—your champion.”
“Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
It would be all too easy to mistake Trump’s first term for pure, uninhibited chaos. His presidency would be powered by solipsism. From the moment Trump swore an oath to defend the Constitution and commit to serve the nation, he governed largely to protect and promote himself. Yet while he lived day to day, struggling to survive, surfing news cycles to stay afloat, there was a pattern and meaning to the disorder. Trump’s North Star was the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling our shaky democracy. Public trust in American government, already weakened through years of polarizing political dysfunction, took a body blow.
Tens of millions of Americans were angry, feeling forgotten by bureaucrats in Washington, derided by liberal elites, and humiliated by a global economy that had sped ahead of their skills and consigned their children to be the first American generation to fare less well than their parents. Trump crowned himself their champion. He promised them he would “make America great again,” a brilliant, one-size-fits-all mantra through which this segment of the country could channel their frustrations. They envisioned an America in which regulations didn’t strangle the family business, taxes weren’t so onerous, and good-paying jobs were plentiful and secure. Some of them also harked back to the 1950s, envision
ing a simpler, halcyon America in which white male patriarchs ruled the roost, decorous women kept home and hearth, and minorities were silent or subservient.
President Trump was the indefatigable pugilist for MAGA nation. He did not bother with carefully selecting a group of leaders to help him govern. The flashy promoter and reality-television star believed he could run the U.S. government the way he led his real estate development company from a corner suite on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower—on his own gut instincts to seize opportunities and to size up and cut down competitors.
Yet Trump’s own recklessness hampered his ability to accomplish the very pledges on which he campaigned. From the start, government novices and yes-men made up much of his inner circle, a collective inexperience that exacerbated the troubles, wasted political capital, and demoralized committed public servants. The universal value of the Trump administration was loyalty—loyalty not to the country but to the president himself. Some of his aides believed his demand for blind fealty—and his retaliation against those who denied it—was slowly corrupting public service and testing democracy itself.
Two kinds of people went to work for the administration: those who thought Trump was saving the world and those who thought the world needed to be saved from Trump. The latter, who at times were drawn in by Trump’s charm, were seasoned and capable professionals who felt a duty to lend him their erudition and expertise. Yet as the months clicked by, the president wore down these “adults in the room” with what they considered the inanity, impropriety, and illegality of his ideas and directives. One by one, these men and women either resigned in frustration or were summarily dismissed by Trump. He engaged in a constant cycle of betrayal, rupturing and repairing relationships anew to constantly keep his government aides off balance to ensure the continuity of his supremacy. Some of them now sigh from a distance at a president they hoped to guide and the realization that fewer voices of wisdom remain to temper his impulses. They lament a president who nursed petty grievances, was addicted to watching cable television news coverage of himself, elevated sycophants, and lied with abandon.
Trump has delivered in part on his promise to be a human hand grenade, to raze and remake Washington. He has weakened the regulatory state, toughened border enforcement, and refashioned the federal judiciary, including with two nominations to the Supreme Court—all priorities for his conservative political base.
Trump also transformed America’s trade posture, weakening multilateral agreements, which he believed allowed smaller countries to take advantage of the United States, and forging new bilateral accords on more favorable terms. He inherited a growing economy from President Obama and kept it humming, even as economists in mid-2019 predicted an eventual downturn.
As Trump often reminded his critics, he has been a president like no other. He has challenged the rule of law and jolted foreign alliances, disregarding seventy years of relations with other democracies while encouraging dictators and despots. He questioned the nation’s very identity as a diverse haven for people of all races and creeds by not silencing the white supremacists and bigots among his followers—and, occasionally, by employing racist rhetoric of his own. He treated subordinates and military officers with malice and detained migrant families. He broke boundaries for reasons significant and picayune, nefarious and innocuous. For this president, all that mattered was winning.
Trump’s ego prevented him from making sound, well-informed judgments. He stepped into the presidency so certain that his knowledge was the most complete and his facts supreme that he turned away the expertise of career professionals upon whom previous presidents had relied. This amounted to a wholesale rejection of America’s model of governing, which some of his advisers concluded was born of a deep insecurity. “Instead of his pride being built on making a good decision, it’s built on knowing the right answer from the onset,” a senior administration official said.
When Trump’s own intelligence analysts presented him with facts, the president at times claimed conspiracies. He refused to fully acknowledge that Russia had tried to help him win the 2016 election, despite conclusive evidence. He sought to thwart the Justice Department’s investigation of Russia’s election interference—and, after Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel, tried to have him removed. Yet Trump escaped being accused of a crime, despite scores of federal prosecutors who believed he would have faced criminal charges if he were anyone other than a sitting president.
These are conclusions drawn from nearly three years of reporting about Trump’s presidency. They reflect the experiences and opinions of several of the most senior principals who served in his administration, lived its dysfunction, and now fear the damage it is inflicting on the country they served. They took us for the first time inside some of the most controversial and defining moments of Trump’s presidency.
In a way, never before has an American president been as accessible and transparent as Trump. He telegraphed his moods and aired his disagreements in daily, sometimes hourly posts on Twitter. Behind-the-scenes revelations of tumult and lawlessness spilled forth daily. Whistle-blowers stood up in dark corners of the federal bureaucracy to bring light to corruption and malfeasance. The president’s state of mind was obvious to anyone. But the greater and perhaps more shocking meaning of the events of Trump’s first term, beyond the daily news cycle, has not yet been made clear.
“I’ve served the man for two years. I think he’s a long-term and immediate danger to the country,” a senior national security official told us.
Another senior administration official said, “The guy is completely crazy. The story of Trump: a president with horrible instincts and a senior-level cabinet playing Whac-A-Mole.”
Most of the officials who spoke with us did so on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution from Trump and his team or because they felt honor-bound not to publicly criticize a sitting president. Sometimes government officials decide to cooperate with book authors to settle scores or generate a political outcome, and certainly some of our sources fall into this category. However, we found that many of them were motivated to tell the truth for the benefit of history. Some wanted to accurately explain moments that had been contorted by the president and his handlers’ spin, easily forgotten, or, in some cases, kept entirely secret until now.
Trump’s defenders said those who fear his presidency have it all wrong. What others saw as recklessness, they saw as the courage to make decisions. They pointed out that every night on television the president’s critics decried the end of democracy as we know it but the sun still rose the next morning.
There are no perfect heroes in our book. Robert Mueller, perhaps Trump’s greatest antagonist, was a faultless paragon of integrity from his days as a platoon commander in Vietnam to his directorship of the FBI, but emerged from two years of shadowboxing with Trump with scratches. In the estimation of many fellow prosecutors, he got outfoxed.
World leaders, meanwhile, were ever adjusting to react to Trump’s whims. Allies had little faith in what U.S. diplomats said because they could be overruled by a presidential tweet at a moment’s notice. Foreign presidents and prime ministers were terrified about what Trump might plunge into in the name of “America First.”
“This guy is the most powerful man on earth,” said Gérard Araud, France’s ambassador to the United States for the first two years of Trump’s presidency. “Everything he does and decides may have very, very dire consequences on us, so we are all in a mode of damage control.” Ahead of Trump’s first major summit with foreign counterparts, the May 2017 Group of Seven gathering in Taormina, Sicily, Trump’s advisers offered the other governments damage-control tips: don’t be patronizing to Trump, and sprinkle in compliments of him. “It was all advice on how to handle a difficult teenager—a very sensitive, touchy teenager,” Araud recalled. “So you have six adults trying not to excite him, and they are facing somebody who has no restraint and no limits. To be the adult in the room is to suffer the tantrum o
f the kid and not to take it seriously.”
The title of this book borrows Trump’s own words. In January 2018, as Trump neared the end of his first year in office, a national discussion was under way about the president’s fitness for office—specifically, his mental acuity and psychological health. Just before sunrise on January 6, Trump tweeted that the media were “taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence.”
“Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he continued. “Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius . . . and a very stable genius at that!”
Trump invoked the “stable genius” phrase at least four additional times. At a NATO summit in July 2018, he labeled himself “a very stable genius” as he tried to dismiss a reporter’s question about whether he would reverse his support for NATO after leaving the Brussels meeting. In a July 2019 morning tweetstorm that covered everything from the Democratic presidential primaries to the Pledge of Allegiance, Trump wrote of himself, “What you have now, so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!” On a Saturday morning in September 2019, Trump quoted himself on Twitter by writing: “‘A Very Stable Genius!’ Thank you.” And in October 2019, as he defended his conduct on a phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, Trump remarked, “There are those that think I’m a very stable genius, okay? I watch my words very, very closely.”
Critics mockingly concluded that any man who feels compelled to announce to the world that he is a stable genius is neither stable nor a genius; however, Trump’s intimates offered a different interpretation. “He truly has genius characteristics,” said Thomas Barrack, a longtime Trump friend and business associate who chaired his presidential inaugural. “Like all these savants, he has edges that at times people wish weren’t there. He may not have the trained or staged elegance of an Obama or the ambassadorial restraint of a Kennedy or the soft regal-ness of a Reagan, but he has a kind of brilliance and charisma that is unique, rare, and captivating, although at times misunderstood. When he speaks one-on-one or to a crowd, you believe that you are the only star in his galaxy. . . . He is a genius warrior.”
A Very Stable Genius Page 1
