A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  Trump began his grand-finale news conference in Singapore by playing a film he had commissioned, first a version in Korean and then one in English. It was startlingly reminiscent of Pyongyang’s propaganda videos. The movie portrayed North Korea as some kind of paradise, with gleaming high-rises, time-lapsed sunrises, high-speed trains, majestic horses running through water, and children merrily skipping through a city square. It included a montage of images of Kim and Trump waving their hands and flashing thumbs up, as if running mates in a campaign.

  Journalists were flabbergasted. Trump explained that he had it made to show Kim what his country’s future would look like if it abandoned its nuclear weapons and normalized relations with the West. The shores of North Korea could be an exclusive resort destination! Trump said he played the video personally for Kim on an iPad—and, yes, the North Korean dictator liked it.

  “They have great beaches,” Trump told reporters. “You see that whenever they’re exploding their cannons into the ocean, right? I said: ‘Boy, look at that place. Wouldn’t that make a great condo?’ And I explained it. I said, ‘Instead of doing that, you could have the best hotels in the world right there.’ Think of it from a real estate perspective.”

  The summit put a pause on bellicose rhetoric and threats of war but produced nothing concrete—certainly not a commitment from Kim to give up his nuclear arsenal. In the days following his Singapore trip, Trump spoke with apparent envy of Kim’s rule. He admired how the North Korean people “sit up at attention” when their dictator spoke and marveled at how tough Kim’s guards appeared. After watching clips from North Korean state television, Trump noted the female news anchor’s sycophancy and joked that she was even more lavish in her praise of the dear leader than Fox News hosts were of Trump.

  Eliot A. Cohen, a neoconservative who served as a top State Department official in the George W. Bush administration and was a critic of Trump’s candidacy, said in the aftermath that the Singapore summit was “just the latest manifestation” of Trump’s authoritarianism. He “has classic traits of the authoritarian leader. The one that’s always struck me most is this visceral instinct of people’s weaknesses and a corresponding desire to be seen as strong and respected and admired,” Cohen said. He added, “We’ve been very fortunate that the institutions have contained him.”

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  Trump’s courtship and flattery of Kim also laid bare Bolton’s limits and his capacity to influence the administration. For years, Bolton had advocated a hard-line position with North Korea. During the George W. Bush administration, he called Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, a “tyrannical dictator,” to which the North Korean leader responded by calling Bolton “rude human scum.” In February 2018, just before joining the Trump administration, Bolton had opined that the threat from Pyongyang was imminent and that the United States should launch a preemptive military strike as opposed to negotiating.

  Bolton was regarded not only for his ideology but also for his masterful, if sharp-elbowed, manipulation of the federal bureaucracy and disciplined focus. The chaos of the Trump White House gave him the opportunity to seize control of the foreign policy process. Whereas H. R. McMaster ran the National Security Council by hewing to precedent, which included producing reports and leading regular meetings of principals or deputies to surface and vet policy recommendations from subject-matter experts throughout the government, Bolton consolidated power within his personal office of loyalists and ideologues. He stopped holding all but the most essential NSC meetings and made clear to career staffers that he had no use for them. When NSC staff visited his office suite to confer with Bolton’s assistant about a scheduling matter or upcoming meeting, Bolton would sometimes emerge from his office with a frown that seemed to ask, “Why are you here?”

  Bolton saw his job as being Trump’s whisperer, carving out one-on-one time with the president to shape his policy views personally, as opposed to serving as an impartial broker who synthesized ideas and information from the vast array of federal departments and agencies. Bolton’s doctrinaire views alarmed some Western allies, but Trump liked having him around. In bilateral meetings with foreign leaders, Trump developed a habit of teasing Bolton for his warmongering instincts. The president would often say a variation of this: “I’ve got hawks and I’ve got doves. Bolton will just bomb you. He’ll turn your country into a parking lot. That’s just how he is.”

  Gérard Araud, the French ambassador, recalled a senior White House official explaining to him that Trump “can’t stand people who try to moderate him, but he loves people who are stronger or harsher than he is. He loves to be the moderator in the building. So compared to Bolton, he knows that Bolton wants to bomb anything. To Bolton, any problem can be solved by bombing, so he gets to be the voice of reason.”

  Bolton kept to an unusually strict daily regimen. He woke up well before dawn and was in the office by about 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning, giving him five or more solid hours to work before Trump showed up in the Oval Office. Bolton typically left the White House around 4:00 in the afternoon and went to sleep early, telling aides not to bother him after 8:30 at night. He bordered on anal retentive, once scolding an aide who handed him a ream of documents for not placing the paper clips in precisely the right place. Some longtime national security officials saw Bolton as a self-aggrandizing and untrustworthy recluse, calling him “Lone Wolf” because he would spend hours each day burrowed in his office on the first floor of the West Wing, reading with the door shut. Colleagues knew not to disturb him.

  Articulating the difference between McMaster’s and Bolton’s style, one government official said that with Bolton “there’s an underlying bias. He’s selling when he’s talking. . . . One man is being more objective; one man’s tone smells of deeper motivation.” Acting as the arbiter of what Trump needed to know was made infinitely easier for Bolton by the president’s impatience for national security or intelligence briefings and disinclination to study complicated issues.

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  In the third week of June 2018, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen was aboard a government jet returning from giving a speech when she received a call from Sanders. The White House press secretary wanted Nielsen’s help selling the administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy to reporters. “Can you come over and give the briefing on this?” Sanders asked. Sanders’s reasons were obvious. She and her colleagues were getting slammed with questions from journalists about why migrant children were being separated from their parents while crossing the border over the last several days.

  The situation was fast becoming a humanitarian crisis. John Kelly had opposed the policy when immigration officials first proposed it in March 2017 and he was the homeland security secretary. “No way. Not on my watch,” he told his team. Kelly had held them off for many months, including after he was named White House chief of staff. Once Nielsen took over at the Department of Homeland Security in December 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director Thomas Homan and Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin McAleenan had pitched her hard on the idea of family separations. Nielsen wasn’t sure the policy would actually deter crossings or that the government had the capacity to separate families safely, but Trump loved the policy, as did some of his advisers, including Stephen Miller. They believed it might finally slow illegal migration.

  Another agency with a piece of the nation’s immigration policy was the Department of Justice, where Attorney General Jeff Sessions was often looking for ways to repair his relationship with Trump. On April 6, Sessions had announced the zero-tolerance policy for prosecuting every immigrant who crossed the border illegally. It had been the existing law, but this was a hard-line interpretation, and it would require the government to separate adults from their children while they faced charges. The attorney general’s announcement had caught other leaders in the government by surprise. He had not briefed the other agencies that would be responsible
for implementing the policy, including the Departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services. Even Kelly had been caught off guard.

  By mid-June, the family separations had become a heart-wrenching global news story. At the White House, Sanders and her team were stuck having to answer for “zero tolerance,” and they didn’t know well the ins and outs of immigration enforcement. The communications team didn’t want to put Sessions in charge of defending the policy. The man who had christened it with his no-warning announcement was someone Trump considered a weak performer on television. “Everyone thought Sessions was incapable of selling this in any way,” one senior administration official recalled. “He was completely scatterbrained.”

  So the White House turned to Nielsen, forty-six, a disciplined lawyer with a calm demeanor, as the best choice to explain and defend why children were being temporarily held while their parents were prosecuted for crossing the border illegally. Nielsen agreed she would do it but it would have to be the following day, once she got back to Washington. Those closest to her urged her not to hold the briefing, including her deputy, Chad Wolf, and her chief of staff, Miles Taylor. Kelly was the firmest. If Nielsen did this, he warned, she’d become the face of the policy, which she had already cautioned would be tough to implement and which Sessions had enacted anyway.

  On June 18, Nielsen stepped to the lectern at the White House Press Briefing Room. The policy had been rolled out with little planning. Immigrants didn’t realize that if they came into standard entry points along the U.S. border, they could file for asylum and wouldn’t be prosecuted. Most didn’t know that they would be prosecuted for crossing the border illegally—by crossing deserts or riverbanks—and then have their children temporarily taken away from them. And in the United States, the public didn’t realize that to prosecute undocumented adults, the government was legally required to separate the children from their parents. By this point, the Department of Homeland Security had separated an estimated twenty-three hundred children from their parents since the zero-tolerance policy began in April. The policy wasn’t designed to separate kids in Nielsen’s mind, but it didn’t matter. Family separations were the result of deciding to prosecute the parents.

  Nielsen didn’t know how bad the situation really was, and as she stood before the cameras, she didn’t realize ProPublica, an investigative news organization, had just moments earlier posted an audio clip of migrant children, ages four to ten, crying and pleading to see their mothers and fathers while being corralled inside a Customs and Border Protection facility. Their misery had been recorded a week earlier by a Good Samaritan who preferred to remain anonymous but felt wrenched by their cries just hours after the children were separated from their parents. As Nielsen answered questions from reporters, Olivia Nuzzi of New York magazine played the recording aloud in the briefing room. In addition to the sounds of sniffling and cries of “Mami” and “Papi,” a six-year-old Salvadoran girl could be heard pleading to have someone call her aunt and repeating over and over the number she has memorized.

  A Customs and Border Protection agent could be heard joking in a deep voice, “Well, we’ve got an orchestra here.”

  A reporter shouted out to Nielsen, “How is this not child abuse?”

  Nielsen felt blindsided, but she was also wary of assuming that the sounds of crying children automatically meant there had been some government failure and fearful of attacking her own department’s employees without the full set of facts. Some claims of abuses by border agents had been exaggerated in the past. Her response was that of a careful lawyer, though she sounded callous. “Be more specific, please,” she said.

  The tapes brought visceral proof of the warning from the American Academy of Pediatrics that such separations can cause children “irreparable harm.” When asked for her reaction to the tapes, Nielsen said coolly, “They reflect the focus of those who post such pictures and narratives.” In her head, Nielsen was furious. All the warnings she had given her own agency heads about the difficulty of carefully separating children from parents were proving true. After giving the White House briefing, she became the public face of a government placing kids in cages.

  “She should have never gone to the fucking podium,” one senior government official said. “I wish she had explained everything. We needed another six months to do it properly. We should have spent months telling migrants, ‘If you are with a kid, please, please come to a point of entry, and you won’t be separated.’”

  The problems at the border only worsened. Agents were overwhelmed. Children were being held longer than expected in makeshift shelters that resembled giant chicken coops. Information wasn’t flowing quickly back to Washington, because Immigration and Customs Enforcement leaders, who had been gung ho to deter illegal border crossings by punitively breaking up families, were not reporting significant hiccups quickly enough to Nielsen. As a result, the secretary looked as if she were out of touch.

  In the two days following her briefing, Nielsen and White House officials intensely debated whether to reverse course and halt the zero-tolerance enforcement. They all feared pissing off Trump, but other advisers had been quietly lobbying the president—including Ivanka Trump, who told her father that no deterrence policy was worth making the administration appear so cruel.

  The president broke first. On the morning of June 20, he called Nielsen at home to say they had to fix what had become a public relations disaster. His conflicting instructions left her scratching her head. “Yeah, yeah, we got to fix this. Just stop it,” Trump told Nielsen, referring to family separations. “But I want zero tolerance to continue.”

  Nielsen called Taylor to explain her predicament. The president’s two directions were in clear conflict. “I don’t know what the fuck we are supposed to do,” she said.

  An executive order was the only way to sort it out. Nielsen and her team, Miller, and lawyers from the White House counsel’s office debated the wording of the order the president would need to sign to stop Sessions’s policy. They considered pausing zero-tolerance prosecutions for anyone who entered the country illegally with a child, but then feared that would encourage child traffickers. They agreed on an order that would pause zero tolerance for families illegally crossing the border.

  “So we’re going to have strong, very strong borders, but we’re going to keep the families together,” Trump said while signing the order. “I didn’t like the sight or the feeling of families being separated.”

  Nielsen stood behind the president smiling, thinking she now knew her instructions and the law of the land was clear. But at this exact moment, the White House distributed information showing the president had signed a different order from the one Nielsen thought they had agreed to. It said the United States would stop family separations but continue zero tolerance. She learned the truth only when she returned to her office. Nielsen would later figure out how to interpret and execute the order with administration lawyers. “It’s absurdity on top of absurdity with this administration,” the senior official recalled.

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  On July 11, Trump arrived in Brussels for the biannual NATO summit and complained immediately about an alliance he believed was taking advantage of the United States. The visit would become a transatlantic brawl. Sitting for what was billed as a perfunctory breakfast with NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, Trump accused many countries of being “delinquent” because they were not allocating enough money toward their own defense budgets. Trump then attacked Germany—whose longtime leader, Merkel, was respected as a consensus builder within NATO—as “totally controlled by Russia” because of an oil and gas deal between the two countries. This was a blatant attack on Merkel, who grew up in East Germany when it was actually controlled by the Soviet Union and who had worked since the end of the cold war to promote democratic values in unified Germany. As Trump made his case, members of the U.S. delegation were visibly stricken. This set the tone for an acrimonious NATO summit—a repea
t of Quebec.

  The next day, July 12, the situation went from uncomfortable to dangerous. The NATO summit was concluding as planned. European leaders were pleased that Trump had been reasonably well behaved, despite the visceral disdain he had long harbored for them because he believed they looked down on him. But late in the morning Trump arrived at NATO headquarters and was visibly fuming. He was frustrated that news reports of his first day in Brussels did not describe him as angry enough. In Trump’s mind, the stories failed to convey to people back home the depth of his agitation with allies for failing to up the ante on defense spending.

  Several U.S. officials could tell the president was in a foul mood, just by watching him enter the main atrium of the NATO headquarters from the windowed offices on a balcony above. He was about forty-five minutes late. Though his Secret Service detail entered the building with him, Trump looked very much like a man alone. The president was frowning, his head was down, and he made no effort to look up to greet anyone or say hello. He was walking toward the main NATO meeting hall with purpose.

  Trump arrived at the meeting of the North Atlantic Council, where members were already deep into a conference with the presidents of Ukraine and Georgia, and took it over without so much as a courtesy greeting. Holding the meeting hostage, Trump scolded and shamed countries one by one for their defense spending totals. He was on a tear. He harassed individual leaders. He had statistics at the ready, indicating his assault was preplanned. He warned that if NATO member nations did not meet their defense spending targets of 2 percent of their gross domestic product by January, the United States might leave the alliance. Trump had trouble putting his precise threat into words. First he warned there would be “grave consequences” if the allies didn’t draw up formal commitments to increase their defense spending amounts. Then he said the United States would “go our own way.”