“I’ve served the man for two years. I think he’s a long-term and immediate danger to the country,” a senior national security official told us.
Another senior administration official said, “The guy is completely crazy. The story of Trump: a president with horrible instincts and a senior-level cabinet playing Whac-A-Mole.”
Most of the officials who spoke with us did so on the condition of anonymity to avoid retribution from Trump and his team or because they felt honor-bound not to publicly criticize a sitting president. Sometimes government officials decide to cooperate with book authors to settle scores or generate a political outcome, and certainly some of our sources fall into this category. However, we found that many of them were motivated to tell the truth for the benefit of history. Some wanted to accurately explain moments that had been contorted by the president and his handlers’ spin, easily forgotten, or, in some cases, kept entirely secret until now.
Trump’s defenders said those who fear his presidency have it all wrong. What others saw as recklessness, they saw as the courage to make decisions. They pointed out that every night on television the president’s critics decried the end of democracy as we know it but the sun still rose the next morning.
There are no perfect heroes in our book. Robert Mueller, perhaps Trump’s greatest antagonist, was a faultless paragon of integrity from his days as a platoon commander in Vietnam to his directorship of the FBI, but emerged from two years of shadowboxing with Trump with scratches. In the estimation of many fellow prosecutors, he got outfoxed.
World leaders, meanwhile, were ever adjusting to react to Trump’s whims. Allies had little faith in what U.S. diplomats said because they could be overruled by a presidential tweet at a moment’s notice. Foreign presidents and prime ministers were terrified about what Trump might plunge into in the name of “America First.”
“This guy is the most powerful man on earth,” said Gérard Araud, France’s ambassador to the United States for the first two years of Trump’s presidency. “Everything he does and decides may have very, very dire consequences on us, so we are all in a mode of damage control.” Ahead of Trump’s first major summit with foreign counterparts, the May 2017 Group of Seven gathering in Taormina, Sicily, Trump’s advisers offered the other governments damage-control tips: don’t be patronizing to Trump, and sprinkle in compliments of him. “It was all advice on how to handle a difficult teenager—a very sensitive, touchy teenager,” Araud recalled. “So you have six adults trying not to excite him, and they are facing somebody who has no restraint and no limits. To be the adult in the room is to suffer the tantrum of the kid and not to take it seriously.”
The title of this book borrows Trump’s own words. In January 2018, as Trump neared the end of his first year in office, a national discussion was under way about the president’s fitness for office—specifically, his mental acuity and psychological health. Just before sunrise on January 6, Trump tweeted that the media were “taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence.”
“Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he continued. “Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius . . . and a very stable genius at that!”
Trump invoked the “stable genius” phrase at least four additional times. At a NATO summit in July 2018, he labeled himself “a very stable genius” as he tried to dismiss a reporter’s question about whether he would reverse his support for NATO after leaving the Brussels meeting. In a July 2019 morning tweetstorm that covered everything from the Democratic presidential primaries to the Pledge of Allegiance, Trump wrote of himself, “What you have now, so great looking and smart, a true Stable Genius!” On a Saturday morning in September 2019, Trump quoted himself on Twitter by writing: “‘A Very Stable Genius!’ Thank you.” And in October 2019, as he defended his conduct on a phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, Trump remarked, “There are those that think I’m a very stable genius, okay? I watch my words very, very closely.”
Critics mockingly concluded that any man who feels compelled to announce to the world that he is a stable genius is neither stable nor a genius; however, Trump’s intimates offered a different interpretation. “He truly has genius characteristics,” said Thomas Barrack, a longtime Trump friend and business associate who chaired his presidential inaugural. “Like all these savants, he has edges that at times people wish weren’t there. He may not have the trained or staged elegance of an Obama or the ambassadorial restraint of a Kennedy or the soft regal-ness of a Reagan, but he has a kind of brilliance and charisma that is unique, rare, and captivating, although at times misunderstood. When he speaks one-on-one or to a crowd, you believe that you are the only star in his galaxy. . . . He is a genius warrior.”
Many close observers of Trump saw his so-called genius as far more destabilizing. One of them was Peter Wehner, who served in the Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush administrations. An early and outspoken critic of Trump’s, Wehner was one of the first Republicans to warn publicly about his psychological unfitness to be president. By the spring of 2019, Wehner had become truly distraught by what he was witnessing.
“He is a transgressive personality, so he likes to attack and destroy and unsettle people,” Wehner said. “If he sees an institution that he thinks is not doing his bidding, not protecting him like he wants or is a threat to him, he’ll go after it. The intelligence community because they didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. The Justice Department because it wasn’t doing what he wanted to do. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization because he doesn’t think they pay enough. . . . The press is ‘the enemy of the people.’ So he doesn’t have any regard for institutions, the role they play, why they’re important, and he delights in tearing them down.”
Wehner pointed to the British philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke, who wrote in his 1790 pamphlet, Reflections on the Revolution in France, that “the rudest hand” of any mob could annihilate an institution but rebuilding one from the rubble would be far more difficult. “Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.”
What follows is a chronological account of Trump’s vainglorious pursuit of power in his first term, one that seeks to make meaning by finding patterns in the seeming chaos. There are rages and frenzies but also moments of courage and perseverance. The narrative is intended to reveal Trump at his most unvarnished and expose how decision making in his administration has been driven by one man’s self-centered and unthinking logic—but a logic nonetheless. This is the story of how Trump and his advisers have scrambled to survive and tested the strength of America’s democracy and its common heart as a nation.
PART ONE
One
BUILDING BLOCKS