A Very Stable Genius

by Philip Rucker

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  At the Pentagon around this time, Shanahan considered gradually withdrawing the troops Trump deployed to the border shortly before the November 2018 elections, but he quickly realized he would not last very long if he did. After all, Shanahan was acting, and Trump liked it that way. He was more vulnerable to the president’s pressure. “He gets to lord it over them,” explained one senior administration official.

  Shanahan was left shaky in his interim position. It was clear that Trump would never nominate him as the permanent secretary of defense unless he played ball. So on February 22, the Pentagon announced it would increase the number of military personnel on the border by a thousand, bringing the total number of troops to six thousand. Their primary orders were to string concertina wire along the border and install detection systems to secure remote areas between official entry points.

  This decision tended to confirm the doubts within the Pentagon that Shanahan would not be able to fill Mattis’s shoes. Officials noticed that he liked to bring Dunford or Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army Mark Milley to any substantive meetings, leaning on their expertise as a crutch. Shanahan wasn’t trying to pretend he had Mattis’s credentials. He knew he was “the Accidental Secretary,” thanks to Trump’s vicissitudes, and had no problem admitting what he didn’t know. Still, he had critics inside who yearned for someone with Mattis’s grounding.

  “He likes the red carpet,” one military official said of Shanahan. “But he can’t stand up to Trump. He doesn’t have the credibility and experience to say, ‘Hey, this is why you shouldn’t do that.’”

  After two years of being told no by Mattis, Trump considered Shanahan precisely the kind of replacement he had in mind.

  Twenty-three

  LOYALTY AND TRUTH

  On February 27, 2019, Michael Cohen, who had once said he would take a bullet for Trump, gave the most sensational day of congressional testimony of the Trump era. The president watched snippets from half a world away in Vietnam, where he was turning up the charm for Kim Jong Un at their second summit. For him, Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee amounted to the ultimate betrayal. And with the collapse of the Hanoi summit over the murderous North Korean dictator’s refusal to abandon his country’s nuclear program, Trump was dealt twin disasters.

  Cohen’s decision to turn on the president—to become “a rat,” in Trump’s mobster lingo—was set in motion several months earlier. On November 29, 2018, a week after Thanksgiving, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about then-candidate Trump’s interest in a Trump Tower project in Moscow. Cohen admitted that he told a false story to match Trump’s repeated public denials that he had pursued the project deep into the presidential campaign. Cohen also acknowledged repeated contacts with Russian officials to try to secure approvals for the Trump project, and that he kept Trump apprised of his progress.

  In Washington, meanwhile, the Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings was preparing to become chairman of the House Oversight Committee. The congressman called an old friend from his days defending the Clintons, Lanny Davis, who had taken on Cohen as a client. Cummings asked Davis whether Trump’s estranged fixer might be willing to testify before his committee and reveal to the American people, in more detail than he had in his guilty plea, how Trump directed him to commit crimes.

  Davis replied that he didn’t think so. Cohen was under a continuing cooperation agreement with federal investigators—both in the Southern District of New York, which was trying the campaign finance case, and in Robert Mueller’s special counsel office—as part of his plea deal. SDNY prosecutors still had an open case examining the Trump Organization and Trump’s role in the hush-money payments, while Mueller’s Russia investigation was ongoing. Prosecutors held a lot of power over Cohen’s life, including advising on how much time he should serve in prison. Still, Davis told Cummings, “I’ll ask him.”

  A few days before Christmas, Cohen got on the phone with Cummings and agreed to testify before his committee. Cohen decided he wanted to explain himself fully, in a way he had not yet been able to—certainly not when he was under investigation and trying to sing from Trump’s songbook, and not when he was following the strict choreography dictated by the prosecutors who negotiated his plea deal. Working closely with Davis, Cohen cataloged dozens of stories he was ready to share about Trump that would spotlight the president’s dishonesty and depravity. Davis believed there were many words that described Trump: “insane,” “sociopath,” “monster,” and “cruel.” But he wanted to hear Cohen walk through the characteristics he had witnessed firsthand.

  “Name-calling isn’t what we do,” Davis told Cohen. “You are going to be name-calling with facts you can prove. Because Bob Mueller is going to be listening.”

  As Cohen studied his anecdotes and memories, he sorted them into three categories that he believed best described Trump: racist, con man, and cheat. In telephone calls and emailed exchanges of drafts, Cohen worked with Davis to structure the opening statement he would deliver before Cummings’s committee. Davis had two requirements for his client: Cohen had to acknowledge his regret and shame over what he had done in service to Trump, and he had to state unequivocally that he was not seeking and would not accept a pardon from the president. Together these two assertions would help address the skepticism many lawmakers felt about Cohen, a convicted felon who previously lied before Congress.

  Just before his February 27 testimony, a team that Davis had assembled ran Cohen through a murder board, asking him intentionally vicious questions to steel Cohen for what one member of the team called “the nastiest cross-examination Republicans would give him.” Cohen was uneasy about admitting to a national audience that he was ashamed about his behavior but ultimately agreed with Davis that it wasn’t sufficient to state, “I’m sorry,” or, “I take responsibility.” Those phrases had become almost trite in modern political theater.

  The morning of February 27, Cohen stood in the House Oversight Committee’s hearing room, raised his right hand, and swore an oath that his testimony was the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Looking down to read from his prepared statement before a hushed room, Cohen expressed far more than an apology. “I regret the day I said ‘yes’ to Mr. Trump,” he said. “I regret all the help and support I gave him along the way. I am ashamed of my own failings, and I publicly accepted responsibility for them by pleading guilty in the Southern District of New York. I am ashamed of my weakness and misplaced loyalty—of the things I did for Mr. Trump in an effort to protect and promote him. I am ashamed that I chose to take part in concealing Mr. Trump’s illicit acts rather than listening to my own conscience.

  “I am ashamed because I know what Mr. Trump is,” Cohen continued. “He is a racist. He is a conman. He is a cheat.”

  Cohen laid out a devastating bill of particulars against the president, sharing specific anecdotes and, in some cases, brandishing evidence to support his claims. He presented copies of Trump’s financial statements from 2011 to 2013; a copy of a check Trump wrote from his personal bank account after becoming president to reimburse Cohen for hush-money payments to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels; and copies of letters Cohen wrote at Trump’s direction threatening civil and criminal action against his high school, colleges, and the College Board if they ever released his grades or SAT scores.

  Cohen offered testimony that drove at the heart of Mueller’s investigation. He said Trump directed negotiations over the proposed Trump Tower in Moscow, which continued throughout the 2016 campaign, and lied to the public about it. Cohen also alleged that then-candidate Trump knew that Roger Stone had spoken with Julian Assange in advance of WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic National Committee emails.

  The most chilling part of Cohen’s testimony, however, was what he said about Trump’s character. Cohen argued that Trump ran for office “to make his brand great, not to make our country great,” and that as president he has become “the worst version of himse
lf.” Cohen described Trump as far more craven, dishonest, and racist in private than he lets on in public. He said Trump “speaks in code, and I understand the code,” as if he were a mob boss giving orders to his henchman.

  Cohen said working for Trump was “intoxicating,” adding that he became so “mesmerized” by his boss that he routinely did things that he knew were wrong. And he said his experience should be a cautionary tale for Republican members of Congress. “I did the same thing that you’re doing now for 10 years. I protected Mr. Trump for 10 years,” Cohen said. He added, “People that follow Mr. Trump, as I did blindly, are going to suffer the same consequences that I’m suffering.”

  Trump’s allies on the panel treated Cohen roughly, just as Davis’s murder board team had prepared him for. “You’re a pathological liar,” the Republican congressman Paul Gosar said. “You don’t know truth from falsehood.”

  The well-rehearsed witness didn’t flinch. “Are you referring to me or the president?” Cohen shot back.

  “When I ask you a question, I’ll ask for an answer,” Gosar replied, cutting him off.

  The Republican congressman Jim Jordan, a fierce Trump defender, sought to portray Cohen as a disgruntled former employee who was left behind in New York when his boss became president. “You wanted to work in the White House,” Jordan said. “You didn’t get brought to the dance.”

  “Mr. Jordan, all I wanted was what I got, to be personal attorney to the president,” Cohen replied.

  Notably, no Republican on the panel tried to defend Trump by engaging with the substance of Cohen’s testimony. They only attacked Cohen’s credibility as a witness.

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  Eighty-three hundred miles away from the fireworks in Cummings’s hearing room, Trump was cozying up to Kim at the luxurious Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi hotel. At the very moment he was conducting diplomacy with the world’s most erratic dictator, Trump was being called a con man by his former attorney. At a brief photo opportunity during his one-on-one meeting with Kim, Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press asked whether he had a response to Cohen’s testimony. Trump bristled, shaking his head and declining to answer.

  The White House abruptly banned Lemire and three other U.S. journalists from covering Trump’s dinner with Kim shortly thereafter, where the leaders tried to bond over grilled sirloin and chocolate lava cake. This was an extraordinary act of retaliation by the U.S. government, which had historically upheld the rights of journalists whenever a president traveled overseas, and especially in the presence of autocrats whose countries do not have a free press. Sarah Sanders cited “sensitivities over shouted questions in the previous sprays.” Trump had complained to aides many times before about being embarrassed by the questions reporters ask him in front of other world leaders. Trump had hoped his interactions with Kim would drive news coverage back home, showing him acting as a statesman, just as in Singapore seven months earlier. Instead, television networks aired round-the-clock coverage of Cohen’s testimony.

  The next day, February 28, Trump made a play for history when he sat for more formal negotiating sessions with Kim and their delegations. He was so certain that he could broker a nuclear disarmament accord of some kind with the North Korean leader that the White House announced a joint signing ceremony at the summit’s conclusion that afternoon. But there ended up being nothing to sign. A working luncheon for the two leaders was canceled amid a standoff over Kim’s demand that the United States remove economic sanctions against North Korea without a promise to end his nuclear program. The talks were over. “Sometimes you have to walk, and this was just one of those times,” a chastened Trump told reporters before flying home to Washington.

  Before leaving Hanoi, Trump delivered a stunning defense of Kim’s brutality. Early in his presidency, Trump made Otto Warmbier the heart of his maximum-pressure campaign on North Korea. He spotlighted the twenty-two-year-old University of Virginia student’s death upon being released by the North Koreans in a coma following seventeen months in captivity, and invited Warmbier’s grieving parents as his guests to his first address to a joint session of Congress. Yet when The Washington Post’s David Nakamura asked Trump in Hanoi whether he had confronted Kim about Warmbier’s death, the president said Kim was not to blame. “I don’t believe that he would’ve allowed that to happen,” Trump said. “Just wasn’t to his advantage to allow that to happen. Those prisons are rough. They’re rough places. And bad things happened. But I really don’t believe that he was—I don’t believe he knew about it.”

  Here again Trump accepted the words of a foreign autocrat, just as he had believed Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman did not order the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and as he had believed Russian president Vladimir Putin did not interfere in the 2016 U.S. election. Trump said that Kim “felt very badly,” but claimed to only know about Warmbier’s case after the fact. “He tells me that he didn’t know about it,” Trump said, “and I take him at his word.”

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  Jim Mattis, John Kelly, and Kirstjen Nielsen had once all been wary of Trump’s October 2018 decision to deploy troops to the southern border, realizing they provided useful support but uneasy about service members being used as political props. By February 2019, however, Nielsen realized she desperately needed those troops—and even more of them—at the U.S.-Mexico border to support the overwhelmed customs and immigration officials in Texas and Arizona. Scores of migrant families, as well as some traffickers using children as decoys, were rushing the border claiming asylum. The number of migrants detained in February, seventy-six thousand, marked a twelve-year high for illegal border crossings. The arrivals deluged U.S. border agents.

  Now that the midterms were over, Trump and his political advisers cared little about the humanitarian crisis of immigrants. “They said, ‘Yeah, yeah, you have a bunch of kids to take care of,’” a senior national security official recalled. “They [just] want the illegals to stop coming in.”

  Nielsen asked for a meeting with Trump and finally got one in early March. The homeland security secretary hoped that if they met face-to-face she could get the president to focus on this one topic. Trump veered toward discussing the overall immigrant “invasion” but would not acknowledge Nielsen’s consistent argument that the only real solution to immigrants seeking asylum was thoughtful legislation to close legal loopholes. But Trump was angry and believed Nielsen and her team should be doing much more. As Nielsen tried to refocus the meeting on the impossibility of her agency’s shouldering the crush of migrants entering the country in the last two months, Stephen Miller, who was also in attendance, brought up a side project. He suggested to Trump and Nielsen that they start imposing visa sanctions for countries that had a high number of residents overstay their visas. Miller’s visa idea was diverting the president’s attention from the crisis at the border and would do nothing to address the current problem.

  Nielsen left the meeting cursing under her breath. She couldn’t get through to Trump and felt the aides around him were suggesting she could pull some mythical solution out of her hat that she was stubbornly refusing to do. After their meeting, the crisis got worse. That spring, Department of Homeland Security officials counted fourteen hundred immigrant children under their care in a single day.

  Fresh from her frustrating meeting with Trump, Nielsen began urging White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney to convene a cabinet meeting to create a crisis action plan. The border problem was crying out for health-care workers and supplies, food stocks, and emergency response teams—resources that involved other federal departments. Nielsen hounded Mulvaney for two weeks, telling him she urgently needed help from the Pentagon to transport families, and she needed the Department of Health and Human Services to speed up the conveyor belt to take kids into its care.

  The Department of Homeland Security wasn’t supposed to keep children in its custody longer than seventy-two hours. The border patrol stations—concre
te slabs with little jail cells that resembled the inside of a small-town sheriff’s department—were never designed to detain kids, but they had crammed four times as many people as the fire code allowed in ten border stations. The department’s border effort was on the cusp of disaster: Nielsen had a backlog of a thousand kids who were overdue to get into Health and Human Services facilities, but the agency was moving too slowly to take them in.

  “I urgently need a cabinet meeting,” Nielsen told Mulvaney. “I’m going to explain to you how bad this is. I’m going to show you photos and [then] you tell me you aren’t going to help me.” Mulvaney agreed, but when Nielsen arrived, she was shocked to see there were no other cabinet secretaries present. “Well, look, I thought we would talk about it a little more,” Mulvaney told her.

  Nielsen told Mulvaney what she thought this emergency demanded: a White House czar to coordinate border security steps among agencies. Mulvaney suggested she work through this with the other agencies. She said she had tried that already. The Pentagon, HHS, and other agencies weren’t treating the situation like the emergency it was. They needed the boss to tell them this was a priority. Children were in danger. Border stations were in violation of their fire codes. There was no more time for more discussion, she said. They needed an action plan.

  Nielsen was used to her close partnership with Kelly, but Mulvaney seemed more interested in managing up—talking to Trump—than in managing down, more like a chief staffer than a chief of staff. After she returned from the White House, Nielsen told her senior leadership team, “Forget it. We’re going to pull down our own cabinet meeting.” She convened other agency heads on a conference call, and they made a plan to address the emergency together. It was what a normal White House would have taken the lead in doing.