In White’s telling, naturally, Trump’s calling was to win reelection. And in interviews with people in the crowd, it became clear that Trump’s followers took his word as gospel.
The Democrats? Liars and sore losers.
The Russia investigation? A witch hunt.
Mueller’s conclusion? No collusion. No obstruction. Total and complete exoneration.
“The whole thing was based on rumors—unsubstantiated, made-up facts,” said Karen Osborne, a sixty-two-year-old retired realtor from Vero Beach, Florida. She made air quotes with her fingers as she said “made-up facts.”
“The so-called obstruction of justice is no different than a kid being bullied at school and complains to his parents about it,” Osborne added. What Trump’s critics saw as paranoia, Osborne called “righteous anger.”
“He was pissed off and complained to his trusted advisers,” she said. “He could’ve stopped it, but he didn’t.”
Trump strode onto the stage with his wife, Melania, to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” The cheers were so loud that the arena’s concrete floors pulsated. People craned their necks and raised their phones in the air to snap photos and record videos. For the sweaty masses who had waited all day to see the president, this was the moment.
“Thank you, Orlando!” Trump said. “What a turnout! What a turnout!”
Trump declared himself the victor in “the greatest witch hunt in political history.” He called the Justice Department’s Russia investigation “an illegal attempt to overturn the results of the election” and to “subvert our democracy.”
Never mind that the Russians actually did subvert America’s democracy by interfering in the 2016 election to help Trump win, a brazen act of subterfuge that got the FBI investigation started in the first place.
“We call it the Russian hoax,” Trump said, still refusing two and a half years later to accept the conclusions of his own intelligence agencies.
Invoking the “18 very angry Democrats,” as he inaccurately described the special counsel team, Trump added, “They went after my family, my business, my finances, my employees, almost everyone that I’ve ever known or worked with, but they are really going after you. They tried to erase your vote, erase your legacy of the greatest campaign and the greatest election, probably in the history of our country. And they wanted to deny you the future that you demanded and the future that America deserves.”
Trump framed the 2020 election as a referendum not merely on his performance in office but also on “the un-American conduct” of investigators. “This election is a verdict on whether we want to live in a country where the people who lose an election refuse to concede and spend the next two years trying to shred our Constitution and rip your country apart.”
The crowd roared in approval.
EPILOGUE
On July 25, 2019, as the sun rose on a hot, humid Thursday morning, President Trump declared the witch hunt over. He had triumphed over Robert Mueller, who a day before gave Congress a halting, inconclusive summary of his investigation of the president—a painful capstone to the special counsel probe. Finally, the Russia cloud had lifted. Trump no longer had to obey his cautious advisers. He was invincible, or so he thought. And then the unfettered president walked himself right over the edge of a legal precipice and into a politically treacherous crevasse. At 9:03 a.m., he picked up the phone in the White House residence and was connected to his newly elected Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky. What Trump did next would stun national security officials, trigger impeachment proceedings, and culminate in the gravest test yet of whether America’s rule of law could survive its rogue president.
So many of Trump’s impulsive and reckless decisions had shocked the conscience. His aides and advisers had long ago grown accustomed to mad scrambles to avert dangerous plans or to repair the damage he had caused to international alliances out of pique or ignorance. But what Trump said to Zelensky on July 25 set off alarm bells with an entirely new and ear-piercing peal.
Trump’s call was supposed to be the clincher of a dodgy diplomatic effort that he had initiated that spring to help convince the Ukrainian government to announce it was investigating former vice president Joe Biden, a leading 2020 Democratic challenger, and lucrative fees his son, Hunter, collected from a Ukrainian energy firm. Speaking in the language of crime bosses, Trump reminded Zelensky that the United States had been “very, very good to Ukraine,” a reference to years of military aid that helped Ukraine protect itself from its aggressive neighbor, Russia. Trump didn’t mention that he had personally blocked the most recently approved U.S. aid package, nearly $400 million. He didn’t have to; a U.S. diplomat had warned Zelensky’s government that Trump wanted something before releasing the funds.
“I would like you to do us a favor though,” Trump added. He asked Zelensky to work with Rudy Giuliani as well as Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate the Bidens and look into an unproven conspiracy theory—which Trump embraced—that his perceived enemies had fabricated evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election. “I would like you to get to the bottom of it,” Trump said.
Just like that, Trump effectively asked the Ukrainian government to interfere in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. The brazen request—an apparent attempt to leverage taxpayer dollars to extort Ukraine for opposition research on a domestic political opponent—revealed what little Trump had learned from the Mueller investigation and the exhaustive national conversation about the illegality of seeking political assistance from a foreign government.
Pressuring the leader of a far smaller and more vulnerable nation to help him smear Biden in hopes of boosting his own reelection chances came naturally to Trump. As a developer, he had bullied casino regulators and manipulated contractors. This was, to borrow the Trumpian phrase, the art of the deal.
As he ended the call, a handful of the nearly dozen U.S. officials who had been listening in fretted about what they had just witnessed. If they believed their ears and their gut, Trump had tried to use his public office for personal gain. The next day, July 26, one of the White House aides who had listened to the call confided in a CIA official that Trump’s comments to Zelensky had been “crazy,” “frightening,” and “completely lacking in substance related to national security.” The aide added that “the President had clearly committed a criminal act.”
That fear led the CIA official to blow the whistle in a formal complaint that triggered House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to formally open an impeachment inquiry on September 24.
The Ukraine episode revealed some essential and worrisome truths about Trump, two and a half years into his term. He was a president entirely unrestrained, free from the shackles of seasoned advisers who sought to teach him to put duty to country above self and to follow protocols. He had concluded he was above the law, after dodging accountability for flouting rules and withstanding the Mueller investigation. He had grown so confident of his own power, and cocksure that Republicans in Congress would never dare break with him, that he thought he could do almost anything.
The result was a historic test for America’s institutions and the very durability of its democracy.
Trump came into office uncertain about how to operate the machinery of government and tolerated to some degree the efforts of his top advisers to influence him. John Kelly, Jim Mattis, Don McGahn, Rex Tillerson, and others tried to tutor him about the three branches of government and the constitutional balance of powers. They tried to temper his rash impulses. They tried to coach him about his sacred duty as leader of the world’s most powerful nation to always put country first.
Over time, however, Trump had systematically dispensed with these human guardrails. And by the time Trump deputized Giuliani to be his political avenger by running a shadow foreign policy with the Ukrainians, the adults were no longer there to stop or even to warn the president about the dangers of doing so, for they had been replaced by willing enablers. Trump had grown increasingly emboldened to m
ake his own decisions and to enforce them. “It’s very easy actually to work with me. You know why it’s easy? Because I make all the decisions,” Trump quipped on September 12, reflecting on John Bolton’s abrupt exit as national security adviser.
Trump appeared to head into a tailspin of volatility as the impeachment probe gained traction. In early October, he suddenly decided, against the counsel of his national security team, to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, abandoning America’s Kurdish allies. The commander in chief’s decision may have distracted the public from his conduct, but it was calamitous. It eased the way for Turkey to launch a deadly offensive that empowered Bashar al-Assad’s regime, thrust the Middle East into turmoil, and raised grave new doubts about America’s leadership around the world.
Former senior administration officials and many Republican lawmakers watched with horror. Earlier in Trump’s term, one of these officials explained, “There was more of an ethos in the place of trying to help the institution and to help enlighten him rather than simply to execute his marching orders.” Now, this official said, “I’m not sure there are many, if any, left who view as their responsibility trying to help educate, moderate, enlighten and persuade—or even advise in many cases.
“There’s a new ethos: This is a presidency of one,” this official added. “It’s Trump unleashed, unchained, unhinged.”
Indeed, Trump seemed unmoored at the bipartisan revolt over his callous abandonment of Kurdish allies in Syria and the U.S. military’s strategic presence in the region. He spoke illogically and inconsistently, calling Syria a place where warring factions could “play with a lot of sand,” threatening to torpedo Turkey’s economy if he so chose, and boasting of his “great and unmatched wisdom.”
Trump’s solipsism threatened to become his undoing. In Ukraine, the president’s determination to pursue his personal benefit even at the expense of the nation, coupled with his egocentric obsession with winning and exacting revenge on his enemies, led him into trouble.
By the fall of 2019, Trump was acting as if he were convinced of his own invincibility, believing that he could wield the vast powers of his office in pursuit of his personal and political goals without accountability. He genuinely believed that his interests came first and that, as president, he was above the law. Trump had good reason to think so, having sidestepped any legal punishment after the Mueller investigation produced extensive evidence that he had worked to block and thwart the Russia probe. Trump skirted penalties for a battery of other offenses, ranging from past racist, misogynistic, or otherwise bigoted comments to accusations of self-dealing in violation of the emoluments provision of the Constitution to blocking Congress’s ability to conduct oversight.
As the legislative branch scrutinized his actions, Trump looked in the mirror and saw no wrongdoing. Rather, he nursed a deep and inescapable sense of persecution and self-pity, casting himself as a victim in a warped reality and alleging that Democrats and the media were conspiring to perpetuate hoaxes, defraud the public, and stage a coup. This mind-set followed the historical pattern of authoritarian leaders creating a cult of victimization to hold on to power and to justify their repressive agendas.
“We haven’t seen anything like this in my lifetime. He appears to be daring the rest of the political system to stop him—and if it doesn’t, he’ll go further,” William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance at the Brookings Institution, told The Washington Post’s Robert Costa.
“What we’re discovering is that the Constitution is not a mechanism that runs by itself,” Galston added. “Ultimately, we are a government of men and not law. The law has no force without people who are willing to enforce it.”
As autumn bore on, the question facing the Congress and indeed the country was not whether Trump had done anything wrong. The emerging fact pattern plainly showed a quid pro quo with Ukraine and a White House scheme to cover it up. The question was who might enforce the Constitution.
When Alexander Hamilton wrote the two essays in The Federalist devoted to the idea of impeachment, Trump was the kind of president he had in mind—a populist demagogue who would foment frenzy, pander to prejudices, feed off chaos, and secretly betray the American people in the accumulation of power—according to Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow.
Two hundred thirty-two years after Hamilton put pen to paper, Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine forced a reckoning. Would the system the Founding Fathers imagined withstand the pressures of this moment? Or would Trump prevail yet again, another pursuit of justice stymied by his sheer political force and the fealty of his followers?
As Congress considered impeaching President Richard Nixon in 1974, most Republicans defended their president’s claim that he was the victim of a political witch hunt. But the decision of one Republican congressman marked a turning point. Maryland’s Lawrence J. Hogan became the first Republican to side with the Democrats and vote for all three articles of impeachment against Nixon. He said he wished “with all my heart” he could say the president had not committed impeachable offenses, but he knew the truth was that Nixon had. He was chastened by history.
Republicans now faced the same choice Hogan did forty-five years before. They had held their tongues in fear after so many Trump transgressions. They, too, had called the investigations into the president witch hunts. They had made quiet calculations about when, if ever, they might take a stand. Yet the time was nearing to consider not merely the judgment of their party or the punishment from their president, but the fate of history.
Acknowledgments
We first acknowledge the people who were willing to share their experiences from this period. We cannot name them here, but each aided us immeasurably in telling the full story of this presidency. We thank them. Some struggled with a difficult choice: to honor the duty they felt from government service to keep confidences and show respect for a sitting president, or to follow an internal compass urging them to help document these episodes to the public for the benefit of history.
This project would not have been possible without the generous support and commitment of our editors at The Washington Post—first and foremost Marty Baron, whose leadership, judgment, and commitment to unearthing truths has not only guided our newsroom but also helped shield and bolster a free press during this extraordinary period. Steven Ginsberg, who has expertly and gracefully directed the Post’s coverage of the Trump administration, was an enthusiastic and essential advocate of our partnership and of this deeper examination. We also are indebted to Cameron Barr, Dave Clarke, Dan Eggen, Matea Gold, Tracy Grant, Lori Montgomery, and Peter Wallsten for the faith they put in us and the energy they gave to our project. They made it possible for us to be absent during periods when news was furiously breaking and granted us the time and flexibility to see this book to completion.
Our work has been lifted and inspired by the very best journalists in America, our colleagues at the Post whose coverage of President Trump has lit the way. We thank profusely Devlin Barrett, Bob Costa, Alice Crites, Josh Dawsey, Karoun Demirjian, Karen DeYoung, Peter Finn, Anne Gearan, Tom Hamburger, Shane Harris, Rosalind Helderman, Sari Horwitz, John Hudson, Greg Jaffe, Michael Kranish, Greg Miller, Nick Miroff, Carol Morello, Ellen Nakashima, Ashley Parker, Paul Sonne, Julie Tate, and Craig Timberg. They lent us their wisdom and kindness and then took on more work when we temporarily stepped aside.
During a generation of turmoil for media companies, we have had the good fortune to find stability and success at the Post. Carol came to the paper in 2000 and Philip in 2005, and we consider ourselves lucky to work in a newsroom that seeds excellence in its journalism and nurtures collegiality in its journalists. The Post’s mission flourishes because of an unbroken chain of leaders committed to the public good and our democracy. These values were first enshrined by Katharine Graham and protected by Don Graham and Katharine Weymouth. Jeff Bezos and Fred Ryan have championed and built upon the Graham family legacy with their determination to uphold the highest journalisti
c principles, hold the powerful to account, and expand the Post’s reach.
We also are fortunate at the Post to work with a diligent group of public relations professionals, led by Kris Coratti, Molly Gannon, and Shani George, who dedicate themselves to ensuring our journalism finds a broad audience on many platforms. We also are indebted to Alma Gill, Brooke Lorenz, Sam Martin, Elliot Postell, and Liz Whyte for giving us the tools to do our best work.
Ann Godoff’s reputation as a peerless book editor precedes her. When she decided to take a chance on us, we were equal parts thrilled and terrified. Ann brilliantly nourished this project, pushing us out of our comfort zone and helping us bring our reporting into the round. She schooled us in teleology and was our lodestar in this work. Ann and her superlative team at Penguin Press, including Matthew Boyd, Colleen Boyle, Casey Denis, Bruce Giffords, William Heyward, Sarah Hutson, Do Mi Stauber, and Ingrid Sterner, ensured these pages would sparkle and reach many readers.
Elyse Cheney is the most committed agent, counselor, and advocate any author could ask for, and a force of nature. Elyse recognized the potential for this book before we did, and she remained intimately involved throughout. When we doubted whether we had what it took to craft this historic narrative, she dug deep and helped show us that we could. We are grateful for Elyse and her team, including Allison Devereux, Natasha Fairweather, Claire Gillespie, and Alex Jacobs.
A number of other people played essential roles in this project. Julie Tate, our longtime collaborator and friend, trained her scrupulous eye for detail to stress test our manuscript. There is a reason Julie has been a part of so many winning Pulitzer Prize entries. Grace Barnes conducted valuable research. Cynthia Colonna transcribed many of our interviews. Melina Mara, our friend and Post photojournalist, shot our author portraits, and Alicia Majeed made us look great.
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