A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  “You’re no fucking good!” Res recalled Trump yelling at her. “You’re making me look bad! This is cheap shit! Who told you to buy this?”

  Res had shown Trump three samples of green marble—one for $5, one for $9, and one for $13—and he had picked the cheapest one. “I just stood there and said, ‘Donald, you approved it,’” Res recalled. “I thought he might explode. He was that angry. He was that volatile. His face gets red and his lips get white. He gets in these rages. The screaming. The cursing.”

  The morning of March 3, 2017, Trump was in one of these screaming, volatile rages. In the Oval Office, the president gave Priebus and Bannon an earful about how much he despised Sessions and then summoned McGahn. He wanted to make clear to the White House counsel that he had failed him as well. Trump’s words were blistering as he conjured the ghost of Roy Cohn, his former personal lawyer, fixer, and mentor who had previously been a top aide to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy during the Senate’s hunt for communist sympathizers in the 1950s. Trump complained that he wished Cohn were still alive because McGahn wasn’t properly protecting him.

  “I don’t have a lawyer!” the president screamed. “Where’s my lawyer?”

  McGahn felt Trump’s fury was aimed at him, although the president appeared to tilt back and forth in his tirade about his “attorney,” appearing to be complaining about the abdication of both his White House counsel and his attorney general. Neither was actually Trump’s attorney, an important constitutional detail lost on the president.

  “Roy wouldn’t have handled it this way,” Trump said, directing his ire at McGahn. “He would have told them all to go to hell.”

  McGahn, Priebus, and Bannon explained to Trump that Sessions had no choice. But Trump wouldn’t listen. To him, everything was personal, and he saw Sessions’s recusal as a betrayal. The attorney general is the top federal law enforcement official in the country, serving the American people and leading a quasi-independent institution, the Justice Department. In Trump’s mind, however, the attorney general’s job was to protect the president, and by that measure Sessions had failed.

  “Sessions should be fired,” he said.

  “I never would have appointed Sessions if I knew that he would have recused himself,” the president said at another point.

  “Where is my Bobby Kennedy? Where’s my Eric Holder? Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump bellowed to his advisers.

  Trump held up Holder as a model attorney general because of what he perceived as his unwavering loyalty to Obama and his political savvy. He believed Holder acted as Obama’s protector, much the way Robert F. Kennedy had protected his older brother President John F. Kennedy as attorney general. Trump cited yet another example: J. Edgar Hoover, the politically cunning FBI director who served under eight presidents and was later found to have abused his powers.

  Trump’s advisers tried to explain that the attorney general is not the president’s personal attorney. Independence was expected at the Justice Department, and the attorney general could not be seen as the president’s fixer. Bannon told Trump that times had changed. “There’s something that happened between those days of having Bobby Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover bringing over the files,” he said. “It’s called Watergate. It just doesn’t work like that anymore.”

  Trump believed Sessions should have protected him and his family at all costs. Now oversight of the probe was transferring to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whom Trump hardly knew and therefore did not trust. Trump accused McGahn of not fighting hard enough to defend his oversight of the probe and told him to persuade Sessions to unrecuse himself. That was not legally or ethically possible, and McGahn told him it would look as if the president were interfering with an investigation if anyone at the White House tried to pressure the attorney general. Trump pushed back on McGahn, saying it was a stupid rule.

  “You’re telling me that Bobby and Jack didn’t talk about investigations?” Trump said, throwing up his hands in disgust. “Or Obama didn’t tell Eric Holder who to investigate?”

  Once the yelling subsided, Trump gathered a couple of his grandchildren to walk across the South Lawn to board Marine One. They were headed to Mar-a-Lago for the weekend. Bannon and Priebus were planning to accompany the president for the trip to Florida, but they stayed at the White House. “Figure this out,” Trump told them.

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  In Trump World, people’s fortunes can rise and fall based on the president’s changing moods, but the speed with which Sessions went from confidant to persona non grata was breathtaking. Trump and Sessions had known each other for twelve years, first meeting over a shared interest in a New York real estate project. A backbench, ultraconservative senator from the Gulf Coast of Alabama, Sessions led the crusade in Congress against building a new headquarters for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York. He discovered an unexpected ally when he read an article in The New York Sun. The headline: “Trump Scoffs at U.N.’s Plan for New H.Q.”

  Sessions invited Trump to testify before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee on July 21, 2005, and Sessions was spellbound. He told the other senators on the subcommittee, “Mr. Trump is a breath of fresh air for this Senate,” and praised the star witness for his construction know-how. Sessions then invited Trump to his office to have lunch. Sitting at a conference table in the Russell Senate Office Building, the two men—one practiced discipline as a Sunday school teacher at his family’s Methodist church and kept the Boy Scout motto, “Be Prepared,” engraved on a stone on his office desk, the other was a bombastic braggart from Queens who broadcast his sexual exploits on Howard Stern’s radio show and survived life by winging it—bonded over Subway sandwiches.

  In Sessions, Trump saw a man who shared his worldview and instincts and could help him establish credibility with conservative base voters. In August 2015, Trump, a newly minted presidential candidate, swooped into Sessions’s hometown of Mobile for what was his biggest mega-rally to date. It was something between a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert and the Daytona 500. Just before sunset, the sweaty masses in Ladd-Peebles Stadium heard the roar of a jet engine and snapped their heads toward the sky. Gliding toward them was a gleaming Boeing 757 with “T-R-U-M-P” stretched across its navy blue fuselage, dipping its wing toward the sloped stadium bleachers as if to say hello. The flamboyant candidate soon strode onstage to “Sweet Home Alabama” and ticked through all the polls where he was leading Jeb Bush and the other Republican candidates.

  Sessions was blown away. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he told one of his political advisers. “Something is happening here.” After Trump finished speaking that August in Mobile, he invited Sessions and his wife, Mary, into his motorcade of Cadillac Escalades to ride to the airport, where Trump took the couple onto his plane to show it off—the white leather, the gold trim, the big-screen TV, everything.

  In February 2016, Sessions became the first U.S. senator to publicly back Trump, and helped craft the candidate’s first major foreign policy speech in April 2016. He also lent some of his top staffers to the campaign, including Stephen Miller. Trump bragged about how smart Sessions was. Whenever he saw the senator, he would point at him and say, “So respected!” or “Totally gets it!” In his mind, there was perhaps no greater attribute than toughness, and Trump would tell aides about Sessions, “That guy is tough.”

  Trump had signaled that Sessions could have whatever job he wanted. Initially, Kushner, Bannon, and others in Trump’s inner circle favored Rudy Giuliani for attorney general. During the campaign, Giuliani had contorted himself every which way to defend Trump, including after the release of the devastating Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women. They thought the former federal prosecutor and longtime Trump friend was the closest thing to a modern-day Cohn. The trouble is, Giuliani was not interested.

  “I don’t have the energy,” Giuliani told Bannon one Saturday afternoon in November, talkin
g through a possible cabinet role. “You don’t understand how tough a job that is.”

  Bannon replied, “You’ve gotta do this. We need you. It will only be for a year, but we have to have you.”

  “Steve, you’re not a lawyer,” Giuliani said. “You don’t understand. It’s the worst job. . . . I’m too old. I’m not going to do it.”

  Instead, Trump installed Sessions at the Justice Department with a mandate to oversee a hard-line anti-immigration agenda and start rolling back civil rights protections. In a statement, Trump hailed Sessions as “a world-class legal mind” who is “highly respected” and “greatly admired.” For Sessions, becoming attorney general was a personal triumph. His network of aides and advisers called him “Joseph,” referring to the Old Testament son of Jacob and Rachel who was shunned by his brothers and sold into slavery as a boy outcast. But Joseph eventually came under the good graces of an Egyptian pharaoh, rising to become his right hand and oversee the grain supplies of Egypt, ultimately helping civilization survive famine.

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  At Mar-a-Lago the weekend of March 3, Trump was joined by his daughter Ivanka and Kushner, who are often described by their admirers as calming influences on the tempestuous president. Ensconced at the Palm Beach castle, the kids were helpless to contain the president. Trump had a tendency to try to distract from bad news stories by creating new stories, and starting at 6:35 a.m. on March 4 he pecked out four tweets accusing Obama of orchestrating a politically motivated plot to tap the phones at his Trump Tower campaign headquarters in the run-up to the election. “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process,” Trump wrote. “This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”

  Trump made this explosive allegation without citing any evidence, although a Breitbart article posted the day before about the Obama administration’s alleged “police state” tactics had been circulating among Trump’s senior staff. An Obama spokesman, Kevin Lewis, called Trump’s allegations “simply false.” But that didn’t seem to bother Trump, who went golfing later that morning and vented to friends. “This will be investigated. It will all come out. I will be proven right,” Christopher Ruddy said Trump told him. “This is bad; this is really bad. I hope the media focus on this.”

  Just six weeks in office, Trump believed he was being tormented in ways known and unknown by a group of Obama-aligned critics, federal bureaucrats, intelligence figures, and, most especially, the news media. His angst over the “Deep State,” already well established, was fomenting daily and fueled by rumors and conspiracies.

  Four

  A FATEFUL FIRING

  On March 21, 2017, Trump directed Don McGahn to find a way to get James Comey to tell the public the president himself was not under investigation. Trump was upset about the FBI director’s confirmation in congressional testimony the day before that the bureau was probing possible coordination between Russia and Trump’s campaign, leading to speculation that the president was a suspect. Over the next five days, Trump made similar requests of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, CIA director Mike Pompeo, and National Security Agency director Michael Rogers. On March 30, he personally called Comey to ask him to help “lift the cloud.” Yet none of these government officials, sworn to serve the public and protect the integrity of investigations, complied with Trump’s requests. They observed a professional code of honor Trump knew little about.

  Increasingly vengeful, Trump considered delivering a prime-time televised address to the nation debunking what he dubbed the “Russian hoax.” When aides resisted, Trump shot back, “This is the only thing they’re talking about in politics. Why shouldn’t I grab the bully pulpit?” Eventually, Reince Priebus and others persuaded Trump not to give the speech, in part by arguing that a prime-time address would help define his legacy and it would be unwise to make it about the Russia investigation.

  On May 3, Trump reached the boiling point when Comey declined in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee to say that the president was not under investigation. One by one, the officials he considered his servants had failed him. The president flew into a rage—“Like DEFCON 1,” one of his advisers recalled—that set in motion a quick progression of events culminating in the appointment of a special counsel that would threaten the president for two years to come.

  Trump repeatedly insisted to aides, “I don’t know any Russians” and “I’ve never been to Russia.” Both statements were outright lies. Trump also groused about Comey. He’s a bad guy! He’s a showboater! He’s a grandstander! Rank-and-file FBI agents don’t respect him! The Democrats all hate him! Our base hates him! As they watched Comey’s testimony together, Steve Bannon told Trump that even if every single FBI agent hated the director, “The moment you fire him, he’s the greatest martyr. He’s Joan of Arc.”

  Bannon argued that “the fucking deplorables don’t give a fuck” about the Russia investigation, referring to Trump’s base voters. “It’s the C block on Anderson Cooper. People are tired of talking about it,” he added. But, he explained to Trump, “you fire him and the FBI is going to bleed you out because they have to. They’re the FBI. You’re just a guy passing through here. They’re the FBI and they’re going to be here a hundred years from now.”

  Trump was indignant. As he saw it, Coats, Pompeo, Rogers, and Comey were tools he could use to improve his situation, even if it meant lying or asserting something they did not know to be true. He issued an edict to four different officials he thought worked at his personal beck and call, yet none complied. “The president knew he didn’t collude with any Russians,” Trump’s longtime friend Thomas Barrack said. “It was infuriating to him to continue to have that whiff of scandal out there.” Trump’s orders to Comey and the others violated precedent and standard. But the fact that federal intelligence and law enforcement leaders were not working to protect him frightened and infuriated the president.

  The next day, May 4, Trump unloaded on Jeff Sessions.

  “This is terrible, Jeff,” Trump said in a meeting that included McGahn and the attorney general’s chief of staff, Jody Hunt. “It’s all because you recused. AG is supposed to be the most important appointment. Kennedy appointed his brother. Obama appointed Holder. I appointed you and you recused yourself. You left me on an island. I can’t do anything.” Sessions again explained that he had no choice but to recuse himself, considering the Justice Department’s ethics rules, but Trump was still furious.

  On Friday, May 5, he flew to Bedminster, New Jersey, to spend the weekend at his private golf club. The rainy and windy weather did little to improve the president’s sour mood. He hung around, watched television, drank Diet Cokes, and stewed. He mused about how badly Comey had let him down. Over dinner that night, Trump told Jared Kushner, Stephen Miller, and some family members that he wanted to dismiss Comey. Kushner encouraged the firing and noted that congressional Democrats already viewed Comey with contempt because of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. Trump had ideas for what to say in his firing letter. Miller took notes as Trump dictated specific language, including that the letter should begin by clearing the president: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me that I am not under investigation concerning what I have often stated is a fabricated story on a Trump-Russia relationship . . .” Over the weekend, Miller drafted a four-page termination letter, and Trump offered several rounds of edits, insisting that the letter establish that Comey had been “under review” and that the president and the American people had lost faith in his judgment.

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  On Sunday, May 7, when Trump returned to Washington, he was champing at the bit to fire Comey. Around 10:00 a.m. on May 8, the president summoned McGahn to the Oval Office. When McGahn arrived, Trump was at the Resolute Desk surrounded by nearly a dozen aides, including Priebus, Kushner, and Miller. Also present was strategic communications director Hope Hicks, who had received a download on the Comey pl
an when she caught a ride Sunday on Air Force One after spending the weekend in Connecticut with her parents. Trump greeted McGahn with a smile and waved him in. “You’re here. Wonderful,” he said. “We’re going to fire Comey.”

  McGahn was surprised. He thought of himself as an independent agent of value to Trump precisely because of his objective eye and was unique among White House aides because he did not fawn over the president, though he could get prickly when he felt pushed. As McGahn told colleagues, he was never entirely sure when the president barked out a plan whether he was giving orders or merely crowdsourcing an idea by saying it aloud. But this time it was clear Trump was determined to fire Comey. The president read aloud from the firing letter Miller had drafted and told his advisers, “Don’t talk me out of this. I’ve made my decision.”

  McGahn went through two threshold questions with the president. The first: Would it be legal to fire Comey? The answer was yes, absolutely. FBI directors served ten-year terms but could be dismissed at any time. The second: Would it be a good idea? McGahn felt reasonably sure Trump would get roasted by Democrats and even by some Republicans for such a drastic action. But the White House counsel also had grown tired of being Trump’s Dr. No and figured it would be impossible to talk the president out of it.

  To buy some time, McGahn told the president that the Justice Department had already been discussing Comey’s status and suggested that Trump first talk with Sessions, who was to meet with McGahn for a previously scheduled lunch. They could invite the new deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, to join them and see what they both thought.

  Over lunch in McGahn’s second-floor West Wing office, Sessions told McGahn he supposed firing Comey would be legal. “I assume he can,” the attorney general said. McGahn figured Rosenstein might raise concerns and warn of the political dangers of something this rash, but McGahn was a little taken aback when Rosenstein said there were justified reasons to fire Comey, including his handling of the Clinton case, and even sounded gung ho about the idea. McGahn couldn’t catch a break.