A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  On his first day, Cobb came to learn that such distinctions were rather blurry in Trump’s world. Cobb was filling out administrative paperwork and preparing to move into his new office when two senior officials raised the same request. McGahn and Bannon both asked for Cobb’s help removing Kushner and Ivanka from the White House staff. Each of them tried to convince Cobb that this was the most important way to protect the president.

  McGahn, who was already on bad terms with the president because of his refusal to comply with some of his demands, including to ask Rosenstein about having Robert Mueller removed as special counsel, told Cobb he needed to persuade Trump about the problems his daughter and son-in-law created. Bannon was more forceful, stressing the many obstacles they presented. “You need to shoot them in the fucking head,” Bannon jokingly told Cobb.

  Cobb was wary of making any snap decisions this early. But Cobb’s view was also partly shaped by a careful reading of the palace intrigue. Priebus had just been fired, and Bannon might be the next to go, while McGahn had an especially prickly relationship with the president and the kids. Cobb reasoned that he could not get his job done without the support of Kushner and Ivanka, and he came to like and trust them.

  Cobb had his own instant tensions with McGahn, who had lobbied Trump to appoint other lawyers for Cobb’s job. Cobb’s first big task was reviewing documents and submitting them to Mueller’s team. But he did not initially have a staff, and McGahn initially would not lend him lawyers to help. Cobb learned on his first day that McGahn had been trying to deny Cobb the premium West Wing office Trump had promised him. By September, however, Cobb would have as a deputy Steven Groves, an able lawyer and skilled strategist who had been U.S. ambassador Nikki Haley’s chief of staff at the United Nations.

  On August 1, his second day at work, Cobb called James Quarles, Mueller’s deputy who was in charge of the special counsel’s interactions with the White House, to try to introduce himself. Cobb got a phone call back from Quarles and Michael Dreeben, a soft-spoken and well-known appellate lawyer on the Mueller team. Dreeben explained that Mueller’s team was a bit frustrated. They had made a series of requests of the White House and thus far had not received a satisfactory reply. In particular, they wanted White House permission to review a key document, one of the draft statements Trump wrote in May in Bedminster as he prepared to fire Comey. Mueller’s team felt they were getting stonewalled. They had a general idea about the contents but had been waiting for the White House to decide if they wanted to hold the document back due to executive privilege concerns.

  Dreeben laid out for Cobb one way the White House could cooperate. He cited a 2008 opinion under Attorney General Michael Mukasey that found the White House could share sensitive internal documents with another executive branch office, such as the Justice Department, for the purposes of an investigation. As Dreeben explained, the White House wouldn’t have to deal with the question of whether these records should be shielded by executive privilege because under the Mukasey memo the executive branch would agree not to divulge any of the records without White House permission. Cobb consulted with a career attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who confirmed Dreeben’s interpretation: the White House would not waive executive privilege or risk anything by sharing internal notes or the recollections of staff with the special counsel.

  A veteran of previous independent counsel fights, Cobb felt cooperation was the right path for several reasons. Trump had been emphatic with Cobb that he had done nothing wrong and that he wanted to get the investigation over with as quickly as possible. As Cobb saw it, that could be achieved by cooperating fully with the investigators, turning over every document they needed, helping to provide staff witnesses for interviews, and reaching a resolution without subpoenas and court fights. Cobb laid out this cooperative approach to John Dowd and fellow attorney Jay Sekulow, who then explained its virtues to Trump. The Mukasey memo meant no potentially sensitive or embarrassing material would automatically become public without White House agreement, and sharing broadly with Mueller would speed up the investigation. Trump immediately embraced what lawyers on the team dubbed an “open kimono” strategy.

  On August 1, Cobb authorized the Justice Department to give Mueller’s team the draft of Trump’s letter to fire Comey. Trump lawyers had reviewed four drafts of the termination letter, including the final version that Keith Schiller—“the Manila Killa,” as one adviser called him—carried in a manila envelope to FBI headquarters. They felt that the letter exonerated Trump of obstructing justice because they believed it showed he was firing Comey for declining to state publicly that the president was not under investigation, not because of corrupt intent to end the Russia probe.

  Over the next several days, Cobb further consulted the Office of Legal Counsel, reviewed the law, and became even more convinced. He was familiar with a ruling in an independent counsel investigation of Mike Espy, an agriculture secretary under President Clinton, which set a very high bar that investigators had to meet in order to question a president and force his or her testimony. Investigators had to show they couldn’t get the information any other way. Under the Espy precedent, the more the White House cooperated by providing detailed records and responsive witnesses, the more difficult it would be for Mueller to subpoena the president himself.

  “You can build a record of cooperation every day that you’re cooperating, and every time you’re making a production and every time people are testifying voluntarily, that builds a big mountain,” Cobb told Trump and his advisers. Cobb argued that this mountain of cooperation could therefore shield the president from having to answer investigators’ questions, which Trump’s personal lawyers wanted to avoid in part out of fear that he might perjure himself, given his tendency to embellish or fabricate.

  Dowd, who had been meeting with Mueller’s team, told Cobb he thought he could see light at the end of the tunnel and a speedy end to the probe, at least as it related to concluding the Trump campaign had engaged in no collusion. Dowd believed that Mueller had assured him he would make a rather quick decision on this and would alert Dowd in the near term. Dowd was cheered by Mueller’s insistence that he would move speedily. Cobb liked the sound of that because he felt he could use Mueller’s promise of a swift investigation to apply pressure in public by telling reporters that the White House could turn over all its records and witnesses by Thanksgiving or the end of the year, and so the probe could be completed then as well. Dowd shared a rosy outlook with the president.

  “This could be over by the end of January,” Dowd told Trump.

  Cobb, sixty-seven, noticed right away that he and Trump had different styles. Cobb liked to think before he spoke, while Trump liked to talk off the cuff, as part of his process of testing ideas and gathering information. Cobb watched Trump throw up in the air theories and proposals to get reactions, but recognized the president as nobody’s fool. Cobb was intrigued by Trump’s habit of keeping a running score on his senior aides’ popularity and “performance ratings.”

  Others noticed that the president was obsessed with knocking down as inferior what his predecessors had built. “His whole DNA is, whatever anybody else has done is stupid, I’m smarter, and therefore that’s why he goes around breaking glass all the time,” one senior Republican senator recalled. “He’s torn a lot of things up. He likes to break things. But what has he put together yet?”

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  In August, the West Wing underwent a renovation for two weeks, so Trump had a change of scenery. The staff was displaced, just as Kelly was settling into his new post, and Trump decamped to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Trump was hypersensitive to any suggestion that he was on vacation, even though he effectively was, and he ordered aides to plan public events each day: a briefing on health care or a roundtable session on opioids, for instance. But they occupied only an hour or so of his time, and he spent the rest of each day playing a round of golf, chatting with friends in
the clubhouse, and hanging out in his private cottage.

  Trump was accompanied by a small coterie of aides, including Kelly, communications director Hope Hicks, and staff secretary Rob Porter. But he spent hours each day alone in the cottage watching cable news and reading newspapers. Aides carted up from Washington boxes that contained back issues of The New York Times and The Washington Post that the president had not had a chance to fully peruse in the White House. The extensive news coverage about Mueller’s investigation—“pure hate,” as Bannon would refer to it—put Trump in a foul mood.

  “Can you believe how obsessed they are with this?” Trump fumed to aides. “It’s so overblown. That’s all they want to talk about. This is so ridiculous. We didn’t do anything.”

  Trump was not only bothered by the Russia investigation. He was confounded over what to do about North Korea. Ever since Obama had told him, back in November 2016, that North Korea would be the greatest challenge he would confront as president, Trump had been vexed by the security threat posed by Kim Jong Un. A series of missile tests in the spring and summer of 2017 rattled him, and as he vacationed at Bedminster, he was getting regular updates from National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and other officials about the rogue regime. On August 8, Trump issued a fresh warning to Kim after North Korea vowed to develop a nuclear arsenal capable of reaching the U.S. mainland.

  “They will be met with fire and fury and, frankly, power, the likes of which this world has never seen before,” Trump said, folding his arms and staring straight into the cameras.

  The bellicose threat was interpreted as yet another unscripted presidential eruption, but one with the consequence of escalating the war of words between the two countries and their unpredictable leaders. Trump’s advisers rushed to reassure suddenly jittery world leaders that Trump’s statement was part of an agreed policy of pressure on Pyongyang. But Trump’s intimates recognized that there was no grand strategy at play and that the president was unsettled.

  During his stay in Bedminster, Trump invited Chris Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, over for dinner one night. The three of them ate in private on the patio. Melania was away (and in fact had visited the White House only occasionally in the winter and spring, living instead in New York so that their son, Barron, could finish the school year there). Trump was usually punctual to dinner, but he got to the table about fifteen minutes late and seemed preoccupied, even rattled. Trump had known the Christies for nearly two decades, and he and Mary Pat always hugged and kissed when they saw each other. But this time, the president extended his hand for a more formal shake.

  Once Trump sat down, he didn’t say much. The Christies were used to dinners in which they listened to Trump gab for two hours straight, but this time the president was mostly silent. Trump eventually explained the reason for his delay: he had just been on calls with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and South Korean president Moon Jae-in, discussing the nuclear brinkmanship with North Korea.

  “It’s really complicated,” Trump told the Christies, adding that he needed the New Jersey governor to give him regular advice on what to do. It was immediately clear to his guests that the North Korea quandary simply overwhelmed Trump.

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  The Mueller investigation kept needling Trump at every turn. On August 9, while he was still in Bedminster, the president watched the jarring news reports that FBI agents had raided the home of Paul Manafort, his former campaign chairman. Using a search warrant, agents had entered Manafort’s Alexandria, Virginia, home in the early-morning hours of July 26 and seized a trove of documents and other materials related to the Russia probe. This was Mueller’s first shock-and-awe move, and it signaled a newly aggressive phase of the investigation.

  Trump was unnerved. “Pretty tough stuff,” he told reporters of the FBI’s tactics. Privately, Trump told his advisers he was at once worried about Manafort’s well-being and upset that the media portrayed them as close. “The press is acting like we’re best friends,” Trump lamented to Kelly, Porter, and Hicks.

  That weekend, a group of white supremacists and neo-Nazis held a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. People marched in a nighttime parade on August 11 holding tiki torches and chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” and on August 12 their daytime celebration of white nationalism turned deadly when one of the white supremacists deliberately drove his car into a crowd of peaceful counterprotesters, killing one woman and injuring twenty-eight others.

  Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” and initially refused to condemn white supremacy, a stunning ambiguity that drew bipartisan opprobrium. This abdication of moral leadership was one of the lowest points of his presidency and inspired one of his top advisers, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, to do an on-the-record interview with the Financial Times condemning his handling of Charlottesville.

  The white supremacist rally occurred during the time that cities around the country, from Annapolis to New Orleans to Louisville, were removing monuments to the Confederacy. Trump opposed what was happening. “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments,” he tweeted on August 17. Trump had told his aides many times that summer, “This is a shame. They’re destroying our heritage. This is ridiculous.”

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  On August 18, after almost a week of racial unrest over Trump’s handling of Charlottesville, and with Kelly trying to break up the West Wing’s warring factions, Trump dismissed Bannon, putting out to pasture the adviser who had most zealously channeled his pugilistic and nationalist impulses. Locked in a tortuous ideological and personal feud with Kushner, McMaster, and other senior aides he derided as “globalists,” Bannon came to embody the White House’s dysfunction and self-destructive tendencies.

  Bannon considered himself a historical figure, likening his work for Trump to leading a revolution, and he cast his departure as the end of an era. “The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” he said in an exit interview with The Weekly Standard, adding that he felt liberated and vowing to achieve even greater influence from outside the government. “I feel jacked up. Now I’m free. I’ve got my hands back on my weapons. Someone said, ‘It’s Bannon the Barbarian.’”

  The discarding of Bannon underscored the fact that the president wanted all the glory for himself. He had deeply resented the Saturday Night Live portrayal of Bannon as the Grim Reaper making presidential decisions behind the Resolute Desk while Trump played with an expandable toy from behind a kiddie desk. With Bannon out, Kelly centralized power inside the White House and inspired new confidence that he could get the president to act more like a president.

  On August 23, Trump flew to Phoenix for a rally, his first since Charlottesville. His supporters had waited for hours in 107-degree heat to get through security, and a quartet of introductory speakers, including Alveda King, a niece of Martin Luther King Jr., and the evangelist Franklin Graham, delivered carefully scripted speeches denouncing racism and praising Trump as a unifier. Then the president took the stage and ranted and rambled for seventy-five minutes, sixteen of which he spent attacking the “damned dishonest” media for their coverage of his Charlottesville equivocations. At one point, Trump called Kelly onto the stage. “Where’s John?” the president asked. “Where is he? Where’s General Kelly? Get him out here. He’s great. He’s doing a great job.”

  Kelly did not go onstage, which irritated Trump, who later vented to other aides that his chief of staff did not follow his command. Trump had begun chafing against Kelly’s restrictions, which his deputy, Kirstjen Nielsen, brusquely enforced. She ordered shut the doors of the Oval Office to block staffers from wandering in without appointments; screened the president’s phone calls, making it harder for outside friends to get patched in; and mandated prescreening any papers, including the printouts of news stories about himself that Trump liked to read, before
they reached the president’s desk.

  Just about everything Kelly did ran counter to Trump’s spontaneity, setting the two men on a collision course. Trump was embarrassed by the media narrative that Kelly was “managing” the president with his rigid structures. Kelly instructed White House operators to patch him into many of Trump’s calls so that he could hear what people told the president and vice versa. And Kelly tried to restrict who had direct access. When some of his friends complained that their calls were not connected, Trump sometimes yelled at his personal assistant, Madeleine Westerhout. “People say they’ve not been able to reach me for two weeks,” the president fumed. Westerhout blocked the calls under Kelly’s orders. Worse, though, Trump thought Kelly was acting morally superior. Trump started derisively dubbing him “the church lady” behind his back.

  The danger for Kelly was that insiders, too, were starting to turn against him over his strict new procedures. It was Trump, of course, who birthed this nest of vipers, allowing his staff to snipe at foes and sometimes rewarding them for it. Some Trump loyalists had come to consider the West Wing’s chaos a ladder for personal ambition, back channeling to the president and influencing the government in ways beyond the scope of their positions. But once their wings were clipped, they sought to undermine Kelly, in ways the new chief of staff did not necessarily see.

  “When you take Fallujah, you know the incoming is coming directly in front of you because you can see it,” one Trump adviser explained. “When you’re in Washington, it’s coming from everywhere. . . . You don’t know if I’m killing you from inside the tent or outside the tent.”

  At the outset, Kelly decided not to give Ivanka and Kushner special treatment, a move that would later lead the kids to conspire against him and imperil his ability to manage effectively. Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager, who remained close to the president and was among those outsiders Kelly tried to isolate, sought to warn the new chief of staff. Early in Kelly’s tenure, Lewandowski explained what he saw as a survival mechanism in Trump World: “Embrace the family, because when you’re home having Thanksgiving dinner with your family, they’re with the president, and if you don’t embrace them, you’re going to lose.”