A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  A few days later, Pence’s national security adviser, Andrea Thompson, a retired army colonel who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq, reached out to thank Tillerson for speaking up on behalf of the military and the public servants who had been in the Tank. By September, she would leave the White House and join Tillerson at Foggy Bottom as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs.

  The Tank meeting had so thoroughly shocked the conscience of military leaders that they tried to keep it a secret. At the Aspen Security Forum two days later, longtime NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell asked Dunford how Trump had interacted during the Tank meeting. The Joint Chiefs chairman misleadingly described the meeting, skipping over the fireworks.

  “He asked a lot of hard questions, and the one thing he does is question some fundamental assumptions that we make as military leaders—and he will come in and question those,” Dunford told Mitchell on July 22. “It’s a pretty energetic and an interactive dialogue.”

  One victim of the Tank meeting was Trump’s relationship with Tillerson, which forever after was strained. The secretary of state came to see it as the beginning of the end. It would only worsen when news that Tillerson had called Trump a “moron” was reported in October by NBC News.

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  The following weekend, Attorney General Jeff Sessions was back in the president’s crosshairs. He was under scrutiny anew for his two 2016 conversations with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. On July 21, The Washington Post reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had intercepted Kislyak’s accounts of the conversations to his superiors in Moscow, telling them that he and Sessions had discussed matters related to the Trump campaign. This was important because Sessions had denied discussing the campaign with Kislyak.

  Again, the news coverage triggered a spasm of fury from Trump, who in conversations with advisers had called the attorney general “fucking worthless,” a “fucking idiot,” a “fucking jerk off,” a “fucking moron,” and a “fuck head.” Trump had been openly imitating Sessions’s Alabama drawl and mocking him for being portrayed by a woman, Kate McKinnon, on Saturday Night Live.

  On July 22, Trump traveled to Newport News, Virginia, to attend the commissioning ceremony for the USS Gerald R. Ford, the navy’s newest battleship. Aboard Marine One, as they choppered onto the ship, Trump gave Reince Priebus an order. “We gotta get rid of Jeff,” Trump told his chief of staff. “You have to get his resignation, and don’t give me any of this slow-me-down Reince bullshit, either. You’ve got to get it.”

  Trump told Priebus to write down his reason for forcing the attorney general’s resignation: “The American people cannot withstand any more of this,” referring to negative publicity. Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, the former Sessions protégé, both were on board the helicopter and said nothing to try to talk the president out of the rash action. At one point, Trump asked Mnuchin what he thought of removing Sessions, and Mnuchin told the president he agreed. Priebus was alone in trying to stop the president.

  On board the battleship, Priebus hovered backstage calling White House counsel Don McGahn to figure out what he should do. He knew it would be disastrous to follow Trump’s orders. Regardless, Jody Hunt, the attorney general’s chief of staff, had already told Priebus that Sessions would not quit and would have to be fired. So Priebus and McGahn decided to slow walk Trump. After the ceremony, Trump followed up with Priebus about the resignation letter. “Did you get it?” the president asked. Priebus persuaded Trump to hold off. The next day was Sunday, and he said the president would not want the ouster to dominate the Sunday political talk shows. “Let’s deal with this tomorrow,” Priebus told him. Trump relented. Over the next few days, Trump’s complaints to other advisers about Priebus being too “weak” would reach a fever pitch. “If we heard it once, we heard it 20 times [that] week, this erosion of confidence,” recalled a senior White House official. “The word was ‘weak’—‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘weak.’ Can’t get it done.”

  On Monday, July 24, with no action taken against Sessions, Trump took to Twitter to vent. In a 7:49 a.m. missive, the president admonished “our beleaguered A.G.” For Sessions and his aides, the tweet was devastating. Over the next twenty-four hours, the media were on Sessions’s death watch. The next afternoon, shortly after 3:00, Trump strode out to the Rose Garden for a news conference. The Justice Department’s senior leadership gathered in the attorney general’s office to watch on television. Sessions and his deputies thought he would use the occasion to announce his firing. The president called on Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News, who stood up to ask her question: “Your, kind of, catch-phrase or motto before the White House was, ‘You’re fired.’ So I’m wondering if you would talk to us a little bit about whether you’ve lost confidence in Jeff Sessions, whether you want him to resign on his own, whether you’re prepared to fire him if he doesn’t, and why you’re sort of letting him twist in the wind rather than just making the call for him.”

  Watching on television, Sessions was calm. He leaned back in his desk chair as if he were watching a football game. Hunt had his hand over his mouth. Rachel Brand, the department’s No. 3 who was considered a possible successor, focused intently. Noel Francisco, the solicitor general, held his hand to his head. And the attorney general’s spokeswoman, Sarah Isgur Flores, and legislative affairs chief, Stephen Boyd, both leaned forward in anticipation of what the president would say.

  “Well, I don’t think I am doing that, but I am disappointed in the attorney general,” Trump said. “He should not have recused himself almost immediately after he took office. And if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me prior to taking office, and I would have, quite simply, picked somebody else. So I think that’s a bad thing not for the president, but for the presidency. I think it’s unfair to the presidency. And that’s the way I feel.”

  Sessions had survived to live another day. But in the days that followed, he and his aides made plans for a “Saturday Night Massacre,” a reference to the series of Justice Department resignations triggered by President Nixon’s 1973 order that his attorney general fire the Watergate independent special prosecutor. They prepared for several scenarios: if Trump fired Sessions, if Trump fired Rosenstein, and if Trump ordered the firing of Mueller. Senior officials considered whether they would resign, too, and some had even drafted resignation letters. For instance, Hunt later told the special counsel that Sessions prepared a resignation letter during this period and for the rest of the year carried it in his pocket every time he visited the White House. At times, aides joked that the planning for a Saturday Night Massacre resembled 1950s nuclear drills: Get under your desk! Duck! Cover!

  Rosenstein warned the White House that the Justice Department building would effectively clear out within an hour of any such move by Trump. His objective was to instill fear of a mass exodus that could be politically crippling for the president. Secretly, however, Rosenstein and the team developed a different plan. Whether to stay or quit was dependent on each person’s conscience, of course, but it was important to Rosenstein that enough senior people remain in their jobs to protect the Justice Department and the integrity of the special counsel investigation. He and his team warned Brand to constantly be ready to assume control at a moment’s notice. If Trump named her acting attorney general, the plan was for Brand to hold a news conference within forty-five minutes to reassure public confidence in the probe.

  Rosenstein told Brand around this time that there was a good chance he would get fired, and if she took over the Russia investigation, the most important thing to do would be to buy herself time and to not act immediately on any White House orders. He said she should consult right away with the three officials under him who were up to speed on the probe. “It’s under control,” he told Brand. “It’s not a witch hunt. It’s not a fishing expedition. We’re monitoring it closely. We’re meeting with Mueller’s tea
m every other week. If I get fired, my advice to you is, whatever they tell you, tell them, ‘I need time to sort this all out.’”

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  On July 24, Sessions and Priebus were not the only advisers to draw Trump’s attention. Jared Kushner publicly defended his 2016 meeting with the Russian lawyer at Trump Tower, saying, “I did not collude with Russia,” and insisting that all of his actions during the campaign were “proper.” Because Kushner’s appearance in the West Wing driveway was his first on-camera press statement, it was covered as major news, and the president tuned in. “Jared looks like a little boy,” Trump told other advisers.

  Ever since the Trump Tower meeting story broke on July 8, Trump had been feeling sorry for his daughter Ivanka and Kushner. He thought they were being unfairly maligned in the news media, and he feared they could suffer from Mueller’s glare. He was convinced they were being targeted not for their own misdeeds or failures of judgment but because they were members of his family.

  “You guys should have never come here,” Trump told Ivanka and Kushner around this time, in the presence of other White House advisers. “You see what kind of a mess this is? You’re getting killed. Why would you come here? There’s a better life back in New York. I don’t understand why you want to stay here.”

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  July 24 turned out to be an eventful Monday for Trump. He flew to Mount Hope, West Virginia, to address the annual Boy Scout Jamboree. Some forty thousand boys, ranging in age from twelve to eighteen, assembled under the hot summer sun to hear inspiring words from their president. Onstage in West Virginia, Trump described Washington as a “cesspool”; attacked President Obama; trashed Hillary Clinton; threatened to fire Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price; lambasted the “fake news” media; mocked pollsters; and told a meandering tale about a famous home builder who frequented the Manhattan cocktail party circuit and engaged in “interesting” activities aboard his yacht, which he left to the boys’ imaginations. “Should I tell you?” Trump asked, teasing the crowd. “Oh, you’re Boy Scouts, but you know life. You know life.”

  As Trump rambled off script, speaking for thirty-five minutes in total, his aides cringed. Standing at attention behind him were two former Boy Scouts in his cabinet, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, but two others, Tillerson and Sessions, were not included on the trip. Zinke wore a scouting uniform, which White House aides mocked as a “Smokey the Bear” costume and said made the former Navy SEAL look absurd. At one point in his remarks, Trump reflected on Boy Scout values, saying, “As the Scouts law says, a Scout is trustworthy, loyal—we could use some more loyalty, I will tell you that.”

  The boys then chanted ten other attributes in Boy Scout law: “Helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.” But the president did not easily embody a single one. The head of the Boy Scouts of America later apologized to scouting families who were offended by the president’s comments.

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  Four days later, July 28, Trump provoked similar outrage from his critics when he addressed a gathering of law enforcement officers at Suffolk County Community College in New York. The president used stark language in describing the violent transnational gang MS-13 to effectively approve of police brutality in combating illegal immigration. He said when police throw “these thugs” into the backs of paddy wagons, “Please don’t be too nice. . . .

  “When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over, like, don’t hit their head, and they just killed somebody—don’t hit their head,” Trump said. He mimed an officer shielding a suspect’s head from hitting the police vehicle. “I said, ‘You can take the hand away, okay?’”

  A number of police officers attending Trump’s event chuckled and applauded. The scene led the Suffolk County Police Department to distance itself by tweeting, “We do not and will not tolerate roughing up of prisoners.”

  In Washington, Chuck Rosenberg, the acting administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, watched the speech with horror. The career prosecutor, already disgusted by Trump’s treatment of his friend Jim Comey, felt he had to say something to make clear that law enforcement agents would reject the president’s coarse proposal. Rosenberg sent an all-staff memo to DEA personnel mentioning Trump’s remarks and assuring them he trusted they would continue to respect defendants’ rights and conduct themselves with integrity.

  “The President, in remarks delivered yesterday in New York, condoned police misconduct regarding the treatment of individuals placed under arrest by law enforcement,” Rosenberg’s memo said. “So why do I write? I write to offer a strong reaffirmation of the operating principles to which we, as law enforcement professionals, adhere. I write because we have an obligation to speak out when something is wrong.”

  “You know you can’t do that,” Rosenstein, who oversaw the DEA administrator at the Justice Department, told Rosenberg after reading his email. Rosenberg was a career employee, not an appointee, so Trump could not summarily fire him. Still, his position was untenable. Rosenberg would stay at the DEA a while longer and announce his resignation on September 26, 2017.

  On the flight home on July 28 from Long Island after his rough- ’em-up speech to cops, Trump roughed up one of his own in humiliating fashion. When Air Force One touched down at Joint Base Andrews early that Friday evening, while most of his staffers deplaned the president stayed in his cabin and pecked out a tweet: “I am pleased to inform you that I have just named General/Secretary John F Kelly as White House Chief of Staff.”

  Priebus, who had been on board, was fired. Just like that. Priebus walked across the tarmac in the drenching rain and tucked into a black government SUV, which ferried him off alone, separate from the presidential motorcade, with no fanfare. Minutes later, when Trump stepped off the plane, he shouted at reporters from beneath a giant umbrella, “Reince is a good man.”

  Trump had had his eyes on Kelly for a while. After firing Comey in May, the president had asked Kelly to be FBI director. Kelly had declined, saying he preferred to stay as homeland security secretary, but he had observed to Trump that he had been poorly served by his staff because they had let him fire the FBI director without a Plan B. That conversation stuck with Trump, and the last week of July he asked Kelly to step in as chief of staff. Kelly asked to take the weekend to consider the offer, but the president was too impatient. He tweeted Kelly’s appointment before he had agreed to take the job.

  Priebus had been in an impossible position. Despite tireless efforts, he never could manage to assert control over basic White House functions, such as communications and policy development, in large part because of the president’s impulses. Trump never fully empowered Priebus, either, allowing Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka to operate as independent forces outside the chief of staff’s authority. Priebus complained to friends that he often felt demeaned by the president’s treatment of him. Trump had undermined Priebus by calling him “Reince-y.” When they flew to Priebus’s hometown of Kenosha, Wisconsin, for an April manufacturing event, the chief of staff peered out the window of Air Force One and spotted his home down below. The president mocked him for it. These episodes illustrated what some of Trump’s subordinates considered his cruelty as a manager. He was willing—eager, really—to belittle the people working for him.

  Ten

  UNHINGED

  The morning of Monday, July 31, John Kelly was sworn in as chief of staff in a small, private ceremony in the Oval Office. Kelly had just run homeland security, a bureaucratic behemoth overseeing a number of competitive agencies, each with its own individual culture. A former combat veteran whose valor on the battlefield had been chronicled in books, Kelly won at first the respect of Trump’s staff, including even Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. “This is the eleventh time I’ve taken this oath to defend the Constitution and
I want everybody here to know I’m here to defend the Constitution and to defend the rule of law,” Kelly told the other officials in attendance. When he later addressed the larger staff, in the soaring lobby of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, he pointed out that the oath “doesn’t say anything in there about being loyal to the president. It doesn’t say anything in there about the GOP being more important than your integrity.”

  Kelly’s first chore was deciding what to do with communications director Anthony Scaramucci, fifty-three. The flashy Manhattan financier, who called himself the Mooch, was friends with the president and had been recruited as communications director by Ivanka and Kushner in part to help oust Reince Priebus. Scaramucci unloaded on Priebus and Steve Bannon in an expletive-filled interview with The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza that was conducted on July 26 and published the next day.

  Minutes before Kelly’s July 31 swearing-in ceremony, Scaramucci approached the defense secretary in the West Wing lobby. “Hey, General Mattis,” he said. “I know you’re close to Kelly. Can you get me a meeting with him? He won’t see me.”

  Startled, Mattis replied, “Maybe you ought to talk to his scheduler.”

  “Oh, no,” Scaramucci said. “They’re blowing me off. General, you don’t understand.”

  Mattis tap-danced away from the request. Later that day, Kelly fired Scaramucci. He lasted just eleven days on the job.

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  July 31 also was Ty Cobb’s first day in the White House as special counsel for the Russia investigation. Cobb was not personally representing Trump, but was brought in to oversee the White House’s involvement in the probe, in part because Don McGahn had recused himself and most of the lawyers in his shop from the investigation because some of them were now witnesses.