A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

  Both behind the scenes and in public, some of Trump’s most important advisers were telling him not to fire Rosenstein. The Friday night after the Times’ “wire” story broke, Sean Hannity said to his loyal viewers, including Viewer No. 1: “I have a message for the president tonight. Under zero circumstances should the president fire anybody.” Hannity, who spoke with Trump nearly every day, warned on air that the president’s enemies were “hoping and praying” that Trump fired Rosenstein to lure him into a scandal. “The president needs to know it is all a setup,” Hannity said.

  Some of Trump’s attorneys were also throwing up cautions. Firing Rosenstein would only make it appear he was interfering with the probe once again. Before Trump’s planned meeting with Rosenstein on Thursday, the threat of his ouster seemingly vanished, without so much as an acknowledgment from Trump that he had been demanding it.

  Trump and Rosenstein spoke several more times on the phone that week. They met in person the following week, aboard Air Force One on October 8 for a day trip to Florida, and had a perfectly cordial conversation about a range of other topics. They were, in the acronym used by one Trump adviser who interacted with them on the flight, “BFFs.” Best friends forever.

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  In mid-September, Trump confronted a political crisis over Kavanaugh’s embattled Supreme Court nomination. The #MeToo reckoning had arrived at the doorstep of the White House. Christine Blasey Ford alleged, first in a private letter to Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee and then in an on-the-record interview published September 16 in The Washington Post, that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in 1982, when the two of them had been high school students in suburban Maryland. Ford told the Post reporter Emma Brown that Kavanaugh corralled her into a bedroom during a house party, pinned her to a bed, groped her, pressed his body against hers, and, when she tried to scream, put his hand over her mouth to silence her. Kavanaugh denied the allegation.

  Ford was not the only woman to accuse Kavanaugh of assault, but she was the most prominent and most credible. Hers was a horrifying and serious allegation against a sitting federal judge, former senior official in the George W. Bush White House, and darling of the conservative establishment. Kavanaugh was under consideration to succeed retiring justice Anthony Kennedy, a longtime swing vote on the bench, and his confirmation would push the high court’s center of gravity to the right.

  Politically, the Kavanaugh crisis was a grave threat to Republicans on the ballot in November. Polling showed Trump and his party already underwater with women voters. The gender gap was growing wider during Trump’s presidency: the percentage of women who said they leaned toward the Republican Party was 32 percent in September, down from 35 percent in 2016, according to Washington Post–ABC News polling. But Trump had long been blind to the political liability of gender issues.

  Trump’s instinct throughout was to defend his Supreme Court pick and muscle Kavanaugh’s nomination through the Senate. He calculated that the mere act of fighting to protect a conservative jurist would endear him to his political base and galvanize conservatives in the midterm elections, especially evangelicals. For Trump, however, the Kavanaugh allegations were not just about politics. They were personal. The president himself had been accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women and infamously bragged on tape of grabbing women by the genitals. The president was hypersensitive to the modern reality that a powerful man’s career could be ruined by a single accusation, as had occurred to a litany of business and media figures, some of whom were Trump’s friends or acquaintances.

  On September 26, Trump inserted himself into the anguished national debate over Kavanaugh allegations and sexual assault more broadly by calling the #MeToo movement “very dangerous.” In a defiant and freewheeling news conference on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, Trump revealed his myopic obsession with his own jeopardy. Asked whether the allegations brought against himself influenced his thinking about Kavanaugh’s accusers, the president replied, “Absolutely.”

  “I’ve had a lot of false charges made against me, really false charges,” Trump said. “I know friends that have had false charges. People want fame. They want money. They want whatever. So when I see it, I view it differently than somebody sitting home watching television, where they say, ‘Oh, Judge Kavanaugh this or that.’ It’s happened to me many times.”

  The next day, Ford and Kavanaugh both appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for one of the most extraordinary days of public testimony in modern political history. The day unfolded like a play in two acts. First Ford declared herself “100 percent” certain that Kavanaugh was the prep school boy who assaulted her. She was credible. Kavanaugh was in trouble. Trump, watching her on television on the flight home from New York, thought Ford came across as Mother Teresa reborn. He was worried. Then, shortly after three o’clock in the afternoon, Kavanaugh appeared. He practically shouted his opening statement denying Ford’s allegations. His face was red with righteous indignation. He decried “a calculated and orchestrated political hit.” He was positively Trumpian, a performance artist spinning his own reality in direct contradiction to Ford’s testimony, and Trump was riveted. He loved it. “This is why I nominated him,” the president crowed privately.

  On October 2, with senators preparing to vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination, Trump took matters into his own hands. At a rally that Tuesday evening in Southaven, Mississippi, he delivered a thirty-six-second, off-script, ruthless jeremiad ripping into Ford’s credibility with the pacing and delivery of a stand-up comedian. From the presidential lectern, Trump reenacted Ford’s Senate hearing and mocked her memory lapses:

  “How did you get home?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “How did you get there?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Where is the place?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “How many years ago was it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “What neighborhood was it in?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s the house?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Upstairs? Downstairs? Where was it?”

  “I don’t know. But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.”

  Trump’s advisers had implored him not to attack Ford, but he did it anyway, relying on his primal instincts for political combat. The Mississippi crowd of thousands was in stitches, hooting and hollering at the president’s impersonation of an alleged sexual assault victim.

  Predictably, Democrats reacted with horror—as did some Republicans at first—but as Trump’s mockery of Ford was replayed many times on television, the national discussion shifted to include doubts about the truthfulness of Ford’s allegations. It became a familiar “he said, she said” debate. The president had also helped turbocharge momentum among conservative activists and made Republican senators more emboldened to muscle his nomination through. By week’s end, on October 6, the Senate voted to confirm Kavanaugh, 50 to 48. His swearing-in two days later was a crowning achievement for Trump’s presidency.

  Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court also was McGahn’s swan song. The White House counsel had prioritized judicial appointments during the first two years of the administration, installing two conservatives to the high court and scores more to federal district and circuit courts. This left an enduring legacy. As soon as the Kavanaugh fight was over, McGahn was set to depart the administration and not entirely on his own terms. Since late 2017, his relationship with Trump had been strained, but in the late summer and the fall of 2018 it deteriorated to the point where the two were barely on speaking terms. On August 18, The New York Times reported that McGahn had sat for thirty hours of interviews with the special counsel team and that his testimony was central to Mueller’s understanding of how Trump acted in key moments under review for obstruction of justice. This was a fla
sh point. The Times story did not mention that several other White House advisers also had spent lengthy periods as Mueller witnesses, including Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon. It should not have been news to the president that so many of his aides had been interviewed by the special counsel. But in Trump’s mind it was evidence of McGahn’s disloyalty.

  On August 29, Trump decided to take a public stand and tweeted that McGahn would be leaving his position once Kavanaugh was confirmed. The tweet was preemptive. If McGahn wanted to reconsider his tentative plan to depart, he couldn’t do it now. This was Trump’s way of saying he was the one who decided which staff left and when. The president telegraphed to everyone that he was the boss.

  McGahn’s final day was October 17. Trump picked as his replacement Pat Cipollone, a well-respected commercial litigator and a conservative Trump fan. Since early summer, Cipollone had been informally advising Trump and his outside legal team about the Mueller probe. He also had a close working relationship with Emmet Flood, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka supported his hiring.

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  In the weeks before the November 6 midterm elections, Trump barnstormed the nation, singularly focused on illegal immigration. He fixated on a slow-moving migrant caravan consisting mostly of families fleeing violence traveling on foot from Central America, through Mexico, and toward the United States to seek asylum. Trump warned voters that the “caravans” were in fact a dangerous “invasion” of migrants threatening the safety and prosperity of U.S. citizens. Privately, Trump demanded that his aides take “tough action” at the border to demonstrate “strength.” No one came under more pressure from the unrelenting president than Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security and a close ally of John Kelly’s.

  Trump’s relationship with Nielsen had been tempestuous from the start as he made her a battering ram for illegal immigration. He routinely complained to other advisers that Nielsen was not doing enough to secure the border; her defenders said she was doing all she could within the confines of the law. In some instances, the volatile president was verbally and emotionally abusive toward Nielsen. “Kirstjen, you’re just not tough enough,” Trump would tell her.

  Trump complained that Nielsen did not “look the part” of homeland security secretary. He made fun of her stature and believed that at about five feet four inches she was not physically intimidating. “She’s so short,” Trump would tell others about Nielsen. She and Kelly would try to make light of it. Kelly would rib her and say, “But you’ve got those little fists of fury!”

  A number of federal agencies bore responsibility for managing the influx of migrants. The Justice Department housed asylum judges and administered the legal process. The State Department negotiated with Latin American countries and issued visas. The Department of Health and Human Services oversaw the care of migrant children. The Army Corps of Engineers managed construction of the border wall. But in Trump’s mind, everything related to immigration and the border fell under the Department of Homeland Security, and he held Nielsen accountable for it all.

  At a cabinet meeting on May 9, 2018, Trump had berated Nielsen in front of roughly two dozen administration colleagues over the rising number of illegal border crossings. In an explosive, extended tirade, a red-faced Trump excoriated Nielsen for not bringing him enough “solutions.” Then Trump instructed Nielsen to “shut down” the southern border. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose relationship with the president was the most strained of all the cabinet members, seized an opportunity to get on the boss’s good side for once. Seated across the table from the president, Sessions interjected, “I just think we’re not being tough enough. I think we need to shut down the border.”

  Trump concurred and, turning to Nielsen at the far end of the table, asked, “Why haven’t you shut down the border?” It was more of an admonition than a question. Nielsen knew this would be illegal, not to mention economically disastrous because it could choke off trade routes.

  “I’m not sure what we are saying here,” Nielsen said. “As the attorney general knows, people have a legal right to cross the border and try to claim asylum. That’s just the law.”

  Trump looked back at Sessions.

  “No,” Sessions said, “we should just shut the border down.”

  Trump then lit into Nielsen. Why couldn’t she use the power of her department to keep immigrants from flooding into the United States? What was so hard about this? Trump was so worked up that some attendees thought he looked manic. Kelly silently shook his head at Nielsen to signal to her to stop engaging with the president. Kushner made eye contact with Nielsen and moved his finger across his neck to signal to her to cut it off. It was clear to others in the meeting that Nielsen hadn’t properly read the room or the president. By the time Trump eventually tired of yelling at Nielsen, nobody had stuck up for her—not even Kelly. He had decided that speaking up would only further provoke the president. After the cabinet meeting had concluded, Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, said to Trump, “You know, the attorney general was wrong about the law. The attorney general is saying this, but that is not the case.” But it was too little too late.

  Trump’s abuse continued episodically through the summer and fall. He harassed Nielsen with angry phone calls, waking her as early as five o’clock in the morning and routinely calling her at 6:30 or 7:00 a.m. as she was heading to work. He also pestered her late at night. Once, after the president had heard a rumor from a Republican lawmaker that a mid-level homeland security official had been “disloyal” to the president during a classified briefing, Trump became obsessed with getting the man fired. He had called Nielsen late at night demanding she remove the official from his job. “That doesn’t sound like something he would do, but I’ll look into it, sir,” she had told him. He had called Nielsen back early the next morning. “Is it done?” the president had asked. Nielsen explained that she couldn’t check as her employees had been asleep overnight.

  Trump regularly called Nielsen after watching Lou Dobbs’s nightly show on Fox Business. Dobbs delivered regular diatribes about illegal immigration, proposing unrealistic solutions and castigating Nielsen as a squish. To Trump, the Dobbs monologues were gospel and created in the White House a near-daily drumbeat. The president would routinely call Nielsen to say a version of “Did you see Lou Dobbs? You’re totally fucking embarrassing me. This is my issue!” One of his go-to complaints was, “They’re killing me,” a reference to Fox coverage of immigration policy. “You’ve got to fix it,” he would demand of Nielsen. Sometimes, Trump would refer to one of Dobbs’s proposals and say, “Kirstjen, just do it. Just do it.”

  “But we can’t do it,” Nielsen would explain, usually because whatever Dobbs had uttered on TV was against the law.

  Other times, when Trump would call Nielsen and demand she execute one of Dobbs’s ideas, she would interrupt the president’s yelling to inform him, “Sir, we’re already doing that. I briefed you on that the other day.”

  Nielsen recognized the power Dobbs had over Trump, and saw that his commentary was infecting her relationship with the president. The White House communications shop had tried to book Nielsen on Dobbs’s show, but he had declined, saying Nielsen wasn’t “my cup of tea.” As the volume of border crossings spiked, Dobbs had a show focusing on the administration’s failure to enact three ideas to secure the border. Nielsen shook her head as she watched. One proposal was legally shaky, the second had already been discarded by the administration because it was impossible to implement, and the third was something the administration was already doing.

  Nielsen called Dobbs from her car to correct him. Her aides listened fearfully, sure she would start yelling at the TV host, but she was gracious. “Lou, we’d be happy to help you with your reporting,” Nielsen said. “If you ever need any facts or statistics or one of our experts, we’d really be glad to provide it.” She then went over why the three ideas he had outlined on air were not workable. With
in hours, Trump called Nielsen. He was excited. “Did you call Lou Dobbs?” he asked. She said she had. “That’s great,” Trump told her. “Lou says you’re very smart!”

  One of Nielsen’s tactics for when Trump asked her to do something illegal—or something that violated a regulation or a treaty—was to ask him, “Okay, sir, what are you trying to accomplish here?” She would then try to figure out a legally permissible way to achieve the same result and often arranged briefings to try to inform the president what he could and could not do. “Let me bring people in,” Nielsen would tell Trump. “You don’t have to trust me.” But the briefings rarely made an impression on Trump. Just when Nielsen thought an illegal or unfeasible idea had been put to bed, the president would awaken it. Trump did not see the law as an impediment, a mind-set forged as a real estate developer. A developer could always just sue, battle it out in court, and negotiate some middle ground.

  “Look, we’ll get sued and then we’ll work it out,” Trump told Nielsen during one such discussion. “Just block people from coming in.” Stopping people from seeking asylum was a favorite solution of the president’s. But he had many ideas, and they would sometimes feel like a sandblast of suggestions, any one of them violating the international conventions on torture, or U.S. rules requiring the study of environmental harm, or regulations governing competitive contracts. Lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security and the White House rarely pointed this out to Trump. Nobody wanted to get him even angrier. Just as he used to recoil from McGahn’s repeatedly telling him he couldn’t do some of the things he wanted to do, Trump got frustrated with Nielsen.

  “Federal law enforcement doesn’t work like that,” Nielsen told Trump in one such meeting. “People could get in trouble. These people have taken an oath to uphold the law. Do you really want to tell them to do the opposite?”