Chapter 5

Betrayals

Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer took his Catholicism seriously. So when the attendance list for President Trump’s May 2017 meeting with Pope Francis was released, reporters were startled to see Spicer’s name missing. First Lady Melania Trump would attend, as would Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. The secretary of state would join, as would the national security adviser. Then the list took a detour down the protocol hierarchy. Trump’s communications adviser Hope Hicks made the list. So did his bodyguard and factotum Keith Schiller. So did Dan Scavino, Trump’s social media manager, famous for retweeting alt-right memes (sometimes with a sharp anti-Semitic edge). No Spicer.

Even the White House press corps, its members frequent targets of Spicer’s rages and victims of his manifold untruths, felt a pang of sympathy for their tormentor. “That planners of this trip couldn’t or wouldn’t get @seanspicer into the Vatican speaks to a small-mindedness I find incredibly depressing,” tweeted the New York Times’ Glenn Thrush.¹ His colleague Maggie Haberman agreed: “This seems needlessly harsh—when else is Spicer likely to meet the Pope, and it mattered to him?”²

Anyone who follows President Trump’s Twitter feed has perceived Trump’s unstable temperament: his self-pity, his tantrums, his blame shifting. The reporters who cover him struggle to convey the ritual humiliations he inflicts, the rancor he incites. “He’s the meanest man I’ve ever met,” a reporter who traveled on the Trump campaign remarked to me in the spring of 2017. Trump has created a snake pit working environment, seething with hatreds and perforated by mutually vindictive leaks. He extracts groveling flattery in public and private, but never requites even the most abject loyalty.

To work for Donald Trump, you must ready yourself to lie and lie. Remember Trump’s doctor Harold Bornstein? In August 2016, Bornstein put his signature to a medical assessment that Donald Trump’s health was “astonishingly excellent.” The assessment concluded, “If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”³ In fact, Donald Trump would become the oldest man to enter the presidency, and most likely the third most obese, after William Howard Taft and Grover Cleveland.

Those who work for and with Trump must accept that he reserves the right to embarrass or denigrate them at any moment for any reason, or for no reason at all, just impulsive whim. Here’s one of dozens of examples, chosen because it involved the aide Trump has praised more volubly and publicly than any other, Kellyanne Conway.

There is no den she will not go into. When my men are petrified to go on a certain network I say, “Kellyanne, will you go?” Then she gets on and she just destroys them. So anyway, thank you, baby. Thank you. Thank you. Be careful.⁴

Trump thrust upon this lavishly praised aide the duty to appear on CNN on the day of the firing of FBI director James Comey to deny the obvious. She said,

This has nothing to do with Russia. Somebody must be getting fifty dollars every time [Russia] is said on TV. . . . [This] has everything to do with whether the current FBI director has the president’s confidence and can faithfully execute his duties.⁵

Two days later, of course, President Trump would himself appear on NBC with Lester Holt and acknowledge that the firing was driven by his exasperation at Comey’s refusal to exonerate him of “the Russia thing.”

And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said “You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”⁶

Conway—and the rest of the Trump talkers—were abandoned to make the best they could of that, as of so many things. In one mad Twitter moment, Trump actually formally alerted the whole country not to rely on those who spoke for him. “As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!”⁷

Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, has been obliged to deliver untruth after untruth on Donald Trump’s behalf. On January 15, 2017, Pence confronted a carefully phrased question from CBS’s John Dickerson on Face the Nation.

Dickerson asked, “Did any adviser or anybody in the Trump campaign have any contact with the Russians who were trying to meddle in the election?”

Pence replied:

Of course not. And I think to suggest that is to give credence to some of these bizarre rumors that have swirled around the candidacy and—the fact that a few news organizations, not this one, actually trafficked in a memo that was produced as opposition research and associated that with intelligence efforts I think could only be attributed to media bias. And I said this week at the press conference, the American people are tired of it.⁸

At the time Pence spoke, the flagrant falseness of those words was known to President Trump himself, to the president’s son, to the president’s son-in-law, to the president’s former campaign manager, and (it seems likely) to the president’s newly designated chief of staff. Yet nobody set the poor vice president straight—and the highly forgiving vice president seems not to have objected at all to being left in the dark in this way.

During the Russia inquiry, the country got to know Trump’s so-called legal adviser Jay Sekulow. Sekulow ran a pair of nonprofit Christian advocacy groups from which he directed some tens of millions of dollars to himself, his family, and their businesses. Between 2011 and 2015, Sekulow collected $230 million in charitable donations, the Washington Post reported in June 2017.

Through a complex arrangement involving [the two charities], $5.5 million was paid directly to Sekulow and five family members in salary or other compensation, tax records covering those years show. Another $7.5 million went to businesses owned by Sekulow and his sister-in-law for producing and consulting on TV, movie and radio shows, including his weekday program, “Jay Sekulow Live!” And $21 million went to a small law firm co-owned by Sekulow, records show.

These arrangements were approved by a board of directors entirely made up of Sekulow’s family members, all of them paid via the charities.

“It’s more like a family business than a public charity,” said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, which runs CharityWatch. “You would have to have a lot of trust in this family in order to want to give them your money.”⁹

The most troubling of all of Trump’s hires, however, was his principal national security adviser during the campaign, the former lieutenant general Michael Flynn. Books could and will be written about the tragic arc of the heroic battlefield commander who dwindled into shabby dishonor (and perhaps much worse) after failing at the capstone job of his to-then impressive career, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Flynn turned to extremist anti-Muslim ideologues, accepted money from Russian and Turkish clients, failed to disclose as the law required, and made himself the face of some of the Trump campaign’s mob outbursts. In normal presidential campaigns, the national security team keeps well away from the more contentious forms of politicking. Condoleezza Rice, for example, spoke at the 2000 Republican convention—but she had not one single negative word to offer about any living person. The closest she approached to invective was this:

The first Republican that I knew was my father, John Rice. And he is still the Republican that I admire most. My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did.¹⁰

Here, by contrast, is Michael Flynn. He took the stage at the Cleveland convention to wild chants of “Lock her up! Lock her up!” Flynn repeated the chant, as he had so often done while campaigning for Trump.

That’s right. Lock her up. That’s right. Lock her up. I’m going to tell you what, it’s unbelievable; it’s unbelievable. Yes; I use—I use #neverHillary; that’s what I use. I have called on Hillary Clinton, I have called on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race because she, she put our nation’s security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private email server.

(The crowd resumed chanting “Lock her up!” and Flynn repeated the phrase.)

Lock her up. Lock her up. You guys are good. Damn right; exactly right. There’s nothing wrong with that.

(More chanting of “Lock her up!”)

And you know why; and you know why? You know why we’re saying that? We’re saying that because if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth, a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today. So—so, Crooked Hillary Clinton, leave this race now!¹¹

Two months after that “if I did a tenth” comment, Michael Flynn reportedly joined a conversation with top Turkish ministers to discuss the kidnapping and forcible removal to Turkey of a US permanent resident sought by the Ankara government for political offenses.¹² Flynn surely knew of the notorious Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 at which Donald Trump Jr. was offered Russian state materials “incriminating” of Hillary Clinton. As a former DIA director, Flynn had to understand what Donald Jr. would later claim he did not appreciate: that he was witnessing—and being invited to participate in—a Russian espionage attempt against the US political process. Flynn would later neglect to disclose his Russia contacts on the relevant forms, forms signed under the penalty of felony.

Enabling the bad people in the Trump orbit were the weak people. As White House counsel and as White House chief of staff, Trump appointed two of the least experienced, least commanding holders of either job in recent history. Counsel Don McGahn learned two weeks before Inauguration Day that Flynn was being investigated by the FBI. He did not or could not stop Flynn’s appointment.¹³ Chief of staff Reince Priebus allowed Trump’s favorites to build self-aggrandizing empires of a kind never before seen in the West Wing. Jared Kushner has—and Trump’s former political adviser Steve Bannon had—his own full-time press aide. Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway each has her own “chief of staff.” Bannon even acquired a perk otherwise awarded only to the president and vice president, his own personal “body man” to follow him wherever he went. Sarah Huckabee Sanders answered a reporter querying the unprecedented entourages of Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and Ivanka Trump as follows:

It’s a great thing that staffers are so engaged at such a high level and have created very ambitious portfolios within the president’s agenda. We are shaking things up, and it’s a great thing for which the results will ultimately speak for themselves.¹⁴

Empire building by subordinates is made possible by Trump’s disengagement from management, policy, and lawmaking. In late June 2017, President Trump convened Republican senators in hopes of rallying support for the leadership’s version of Obamacare repeal. According to an account of the meeting published in the New York Times:

A senator who supports the bill left the meeting at the White House with a sense that the president did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan—and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy, according to an aide who received a detailed readout of the exchange. Mr. Trump said he planned to tackle tax reform later, ignoring the repeal’s tax implications, the staff member added.¹⁵

Trump had one big idea to gain passage of the health care bill: the intimidation of holdouts, like Nevada senator Dean Heller. Heller ranked as the most vulnerable of the Republican senators facing reelection in 2018. He shied from supporting the very unpopular Republican bill. Trump threatened to run seven figures’ worth of attack ads against Heller if he did not yield. McConnell complained to Reince Priebus that attacking Heller would be “beyond stupid.” As reported by Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin in the New York Times:

“They didn’t check in with anybody,” said Josh Holmes, Mr. McConnell’s former chief of staff. “There was no clearing of channels, no heads-up, nothing.”¹⁶

In this instance, Trump relented. But Trump would return to attack other members of his party who vexed him. He fixed all the blame for the failure of Obamacare repeal on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He waged Twitter battles with Arizona’s two US senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, as well as with Tennessee’s Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, after each criticized him, never quite grasping that their support was at least as essential to him as his was to them.

Over the course of 2017, the Trump White House one by one extruded its wild men and gradually assumed something more like orderliness under Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster. But even as the courtiers evolved toward higher professionalism, their king’s madness raged hotter and fiercer. I close the editing of this book on the weekend that President Trump responded to a post-hurricane humanitarian catastrophe on the US territory of Puerto Rico by plunging into hours of Twitter abuse of the mayor of San Juan for not being nice to him. “The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.”¹⁷ “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing fantastic job.”¹⁸ “We have done a great job with the almost impossible situation in Puerto Rico. Outside the Fake News and politically motivated ingrates, people are now starting to realize the amazing work that has been done by FEMA and our great military.”¹⁹

Trump would not take advice. He would not behave “presidentially,” insisting rather that his behavior was perfect just as it was.

My use of social media is not Presidential—it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!²⁰

After he nearly lost his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, by seeming to condone Nazis and white supremacists on the rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump doubled down at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona:

Dishonest people. So here is—here is me—I hope they’re showing how many people are in this room, but they won’t. They don’t even do that. The only time they show the crowds is when there’s a disrupter or an anarchist in the room. I call them anarchists. Because, believe me, we have plenty of anarchists. They don’t want to talk about the anarchists. . . . If you’re reading a story about somebody, you don’t know. You assume it’s honest, because it’s like the failing New York Times, which is like so bad. It’s so bad.

[Booing]

Or the Washington Post, which [I] call a lobbying tool for Amazon, OK, that’s a lobbying tool for Amazon.

Or CNN, which is so bad and so pathetic, and their ratings are going down.

[Booing]

Right?

Crowd: CNN sucks! CNN sucks! CNN sucks!

But all the networks—I mean, CNN is really bad, but ABC this morning—I don’t watch it much, but I’m watching in the morning, and they have little George Stephanopoulos talking to Nikki Haley, right? Little George. And—and he talks about the speech I made last night, which, believe it or not, got great reviews, right? . . .

But they also said that he must be a racist because he never mentioned the driver of the car, who is a terrible person, drove the car and he killed Heather, and it’s a terrible thing. But they said I didn’t mention, so these are my words. “The driver of the car is a murderer, and what he did was a horrible, inexcusable thing.” They said I didn’t mention it.

And then they asked me, just to finish it, they asked me, what about race relations in the United States? Now I have to say they were pretty bad under Barack Obama, that I can tell you.²¹

(“Heather” is a reference to Heather Heyer, the young woman who was run over and murdered by a white nationalist at the August 2017 demonstration in Charlottesville; this was Trump’s only mention of her in his entire Phoenix rally speech, which took place ten days after her death.)

As in his previous business career, President Trump reacted explosively to any attempt to subject him to anything like normal political or even human limits.

White House officials and informal advisers say the triggers for his temper are if he thinks someone is lying to him, if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him.

Thus Nancy Cook and Josh Dawsey reported for Politico in August 2017. They were reporting after the Charlottesville fiasco, a political crisis aggravated by Trump’s refusal ever to acknowledge error or change course.

“In some ways, Trump would rather have people calling him racist than say he backed down the minute he was wrong,” one adviser to the White House said on Wednesday about Charlottesville.²²

It’s for that reason that Trump filled his White House and administration with the deferential, even servile. He appointed his former personal bodyguard Keith Schiller to direct “Oval Office operations.” On the campaign trail, Schiller and his team gained an ugly reputation for violence against lawful protesters. In maybe the most dramatic instance, Schiller snatched a protester’s banner, then smacked the protester in the face after he tried to seize it back.²³ It was Schiller who would deliver to James Comey the notice of his termination as FBI director.

Donald Trump entrusted his online presence to a former golf caddy, Dan Scavino. It was Scavino who oversaw the retweeting from accounts like @WhiteGenocideTM (located in “Jewmerica”) and the scavenging of message boards for images like that of Hillary Clinton’s face atop a pile of money and alongside a Star of David bannered “Most corrupt candidate ever!” (The Star of David was later amended to a circle.)

Trump hired a former manager at the Trump hotel in Washington, DC, as chief usher of the White House.²⁴ He named Omarosa Manigault, a former contestant on The Apprentice, to the White House staff. He appointed the former wedding planner of his son Eric Trump to oversee federal housing programs in New York City, a post in which loyalty matters even more than usual to Trump, since his company collects millions of dollars of revenue every year from that program.²⁵ (Interestingly, that program was the only one to be exempted from the draconian cuts to housing spending in Trump’s first budget request.²⁶ )

Trump hates criticism and expects huge, heaping servings of flattery. The flattery mostly occurs behind closed doors. On June 12, 2017, however, the country was given a televised view, when Trump invited cameras to record the opening moments of a cabinet meeting. Vice President Pence set the tone: “The greatest privilege of my life is to serve as vice president to the president who’s keeping his word to the American people.” (By that point, Trump had already broken his campaign promise to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. Two weeks later, the Carrier furnace plant in Pence’s home state of Indiana supposedly “saved” by Trump’s efforts would close, and all its manufacturing jobs would move to Mexico.²⁷) Chief of Staff Reince Priebus continued, “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda.” One by one, like members of the Soviet Politburo addressing Comrade Stalin, they paid their more or less fulsome tributes. “I am privileged to be here—deeply honored—and I want to thank you for your commitment to the American workers,” said the secretary of labor. “It was a great honor traveling with you around the country for the last year and an even greater honor to be here serving on your cabinet,” gushed the secretary of the treasury. “Mr. President, what an incredible honor it is to lead the Department of Health and Human Services at this pivotal time under your leadership. I can’t thank you enough for the privileges you’ve given me and the leadership that you’ve shown,” said the head of that department.²⁸

A normal cabinet would balk at such self-abasement. A normal president would gag at it. (President George W. Bush, for whom I worked, especially distrusted flattery and flatterers. His eyes would narrow and a cynical smile would form, as if to say, “Now I see what you are.”) Donald Trump expects and rewards it. Such behavior is profoundly shameful, and honorable people will not do it. This fact forces a president who wishes to do it to hire dishonorable people—and to thrust honorable people into irretrievably dishonorable situations.

No American military man of his generation commanded more universal admiration than did Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster. A combat veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Gulf War, and also the author of an acclaimed book about civilian-military relations, McMaster embodied the high ideal of the soldier-intellectual, a man who excelled in both thought and action. When President Trump named McMaster to replace the Russia-compromised Michael Flynn as national security adviser, the wise people of national security breathed their relief. “An outstanding choice!” exulted Senator John McCain.²⁹

In the spring of 2017, this fine public servant faced a serious challenge. He had consented to serve a president elevated to power in some considerable part by clandestine help from Russia, an unfriendly power. The exact degree of collusion between the Trump team and Russia remained shadowy at that time; President Trump had not yet fired FBI director James Comey, and Donald Trump Jr.’s “I love it!” email welcoming Russian help would not come into public view until July 2017.³⁰ Yet the odor of treason already hung heavy in April. The allies worried about Trump’s incessant praise of Vladimir Putin and about his campaign statements raising doubts about America’s NATO obligations, statements seconded by important campaign surrogates like Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House.³¹ America’s allies wanted reassurance, and McMaster believed he had found the perfect way to deliver it.

At the newly built headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels, a monument had been erected to the spirit of Article 5, the treaty’s mutual-defense guarantee. A NATO summit was scheduled for May 25, 2017. There Trump would personally dedicate the Article 5 monument—and reaffirm America’s pledge to defend its allies.

The appropriate words were written, circulated, revised, and approved, in a process overseen by McMaster personally.³² The day before the speech, a senior administration official (most likely McMaster himself) briefed the New York Times that Trump’s NATO speech would explicitly endorse Article 5.

President Trump is expected to publicly endorse NATO’s mutual defense commitment at a ceremony on Thursday at the alliance’s headquarters, an administration official said, breaking months of silence about whether the United States would automatically come to the aid of an ally under attack.

Mr. Trump will make the promise in Brussels at the start of three days of meetings with European heads of state, according to the official.³³

The agreed language remained in place as late as the morning the speech was to be delivered, according to Susan Glasser of Politico.³⁴

Then, at the last second, Trump balked. He stood in front of the monument. He read the speech. He omitted the pro–Article 5 language. Why? Ideology? Russian influence? Truculent resistance to the advice of others unless swaddled in extravagant flattery? Who knows? Whatever the reason for the language’s disappearance, it fell to McMaster to undo the damage. Standing before the traveling press corps in Taormina, Sicily, on May 27, 2017, two days after the NATO speech, McMaster expostulated that nothing untoward had happened. On the record this time, he said:

I think it’s extraordinary that there would be an expectation that the president would have to say explicitly that he supports Article 5. Of course he does. He did not make a decision not to say it. It was implicit in the speech. There was no decision to not put it in there. It is a matter of fact that the United States, the president, stands firmly behind our Article 5 commitments under NATO.³⁵

One of the most honorable soldiers of his generation felt obliged to speak untruths to protect the United States’ global interests from the consequences of the president’s willfulness.

When good men do bad things, they usually have good motives. McMaster, like many other national security experts and veterans, joined the Trump administration in the hope of protecting the country. Perhaps there was ambition mixed in, or some other lesser motive—we are all human—but they could fairly assure themselves that they dealt with the devil for the noblest of reasons.

In the months after Trump’s surprise Electoral College victory, many conscientious people wrestled with the question “Should I take a job in the Trump administration?” A week after the election, Eliot Cohen—an anti-Trump Republican who had served at senior levels in past administrations—eloquently advised those facing this dilemma to answer yes.

It seems to me that if they are sure that they would say yes out of a sense of duty rather than mere careerism; if they are realistic in understanding that in this enterprise they will be the horse, not the jockey; if they accept that they will enter an administration likely to be torn by infighting and bureaucratic skullduggery, they should say yes. Yes, with two conditions, however: that they keep a signed but undated letter of resignation in their desk office (as I did when I was in government), and that they not recant a word of what they have said thus far. Public service means making accommodations, but everyone needs to understand that there is a point where crossing a line, even an arbitrary line, means, as Sir Thomas More says in A Man for All Seasons, letting go without hope of ever finding yourself again.

It goes without saying that friends in military, diplomatic, or intelligence service—the career people who keep our country strong and safe—should continue to do their jobs. If anything, having professionals serve who remember that their oath is to support and defend the Constitution—and not to truckle to an individual or his clique—will be more important than ever.³⁶

Scarcely a week later, Cohen changed his mind.

My about-face began with a discreet request to me from a friend in Trumpworld to provide names—unsullied by having signed the two anti-Trump foreign policy letters—of those who might be willing to serve. My friend and I had agreed to disagree a while back about my taking an uncompromising anti-Trump stand; now, he wanted assistance and I willingly complied.

After an exchange about a senior figure who would not submit a résumé but would listen if contacted, an email exchange ensued that I found astonishing. My friend was seething with anger directed at those of us who had opposed Donald Trump—even those who stood ready to help steer good people to an administration that understandably wanted nothing to do with the likes of me, someone who had been out front in opposing Trump since the beginning.

The problem, as Cohen now perceived it, was less Trump himself than the “mini-Trumps” with whom Trump surrounded himself.

One bad boss can be endured. A gaggle of them will poison all decision-making. They will turn on each other. No band of brothers this: rather the permanent campaign as waged by triumphalist rabble-rousers and demagogues, abetted by people out of their depth and unfit for the jobs they will hold, gripped by grievance, resentment and lurking insecurity. Their mistakes—because there will be mistakes—will be exceptional.

Nemesis pursues and punishes all administrations, but this one will get a double dose. Until it can acquire some measure of humility about what it knows, and a degree of magnanimity to those who have opposed it, it will smash into crises and failures. With the disarray of its transition team, in a way, it already has.³⁷

Deals with the devil seldom end as good bargains, and so it has been for all who signed the Mephistophelean pact with Donald Trump. Rather than constraining Trump, they have been, if not outright corrupted by him, at least tainted by him. McMaster’s lie in Taormina was an eminently pardonable one, but a lie it remained. Those less exquisitely honorable than McMaster—and serving in less indispensable roles—found themselves called on to abase themselves much deeper. Trump’s communications director Anthony Scaramucci inaugurated his brief moment in the national spotlight with an outburst of grotesque flattery.

I’ve seen this guy throw a dead spiral through a tire. I’ve seen him at Madison Square Garden with a topcoat on. He’s standing in the key and he’s hitting foul shots and swishing them, okay? He sinks three-foot putts.³⁸

(The official White House transcript improved the compliment by amending “three-foot putts” to “30-foot putts.”³⁹)

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recited the same cringing script in a March public forum with Axios’s Mike Allen: “This guy’s got more stamina than anybody I’ve ever met,” Mnuchin said of Trump. “I mean, I thought I was in good shape. . . . I mean, it’s unbelievable. He’s constantly doing things.” Asked how that was possible, given Trump’s bad diet and abhorrence of exercise, Mnuchin answered perfectly straight-faced, “He’s got perfect genes. He has incredible energy, and he’s unbelievably healthy.”⁴⁰

It was behaviors like this that I foresaw when I delivered my own answer to Eliot Cohen’s question in January 2017.

Good people can do the right thing even under pressure. But be aware: The pressure to do the wrong thing can be intense—and the closer one approaches to the center of presidential power and prestige, the more intense the pressure becomes. It’s easy to imagine that you’d emulate Walters [the IRS director who refused to release political opponents’ tax returns to the Nixon White House] when reading the book he wrote four decades after the fact. But in the moment? In the Oval Office? Face to face with the president of the United States?

So maybe the very first thing to consider, if the invitation comes, is this: How well do you know yourself? How sure are you that you indeed would say no?

And then humbly consider this second troubling question: If the Trump administration were as convinced as you are that you would do the right thing—would they have asked you in the first place?⁴¹

One thing was clear: everyone who entered the Trump administration for nonselfish motives would sooner or later find himself or herself betrayed by a president who demanded loyalty in its most servile form, but who never returned it.

Trump equally betrayed those who had believed his campaign promises and election pledges. Isolationists and anti-interventionists had lauded Trump as the candidate who would stay clear of the Syrian Civil War and wind down America’s overseas commitments. In the words of the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s few high-profile supporters from the technology industry:

Trump’s agenda is about making America a normal country. A normal country doesn’t have a half-trillion dollar trade deficit. A normal country doesn’t fight five simultaneous undeclared wars. In a normal country, the government actually does its job.⁴²

Instead, Trump plunged deeper into the Syria conflict than Barack Obama had ever dared, firing cruise missiles at Syrian government airfields and shooting down Syrian government aircraft. Trump escalated the tempo of violence in Yemen and approved a surge of additional troops to Afghanistan. Trump mused aloud about military intervention in Venezuela and did not halt the US military buildup in Poland and Romania. He threatened preemptive war upon North Korea and edged toward military confrontation against Iran.

Tough on terror? Trump promised to “bomb the shit out of [ISIS]”—and, less colloquially, to deliver a plan within thirty days of taking office to finish the terror group once and for all.⁴³ The plan was never presented. Instead, the US military continues to execute Obama-era plans against ISIS in Iraq, capturing Mosul on exactly the timetable Trump had once derided as too slow and “so dumb.”⁴⁴ Trump’s distinctive change to US counterterrorism policy has been to mock terrorism’s victims. After the murder of a French police officer in Paris on April 20, 2017, Trump chortled on Twitter that the attack would likely help his French cognate, Marine Le Pen.⁴⁵ It didn’t. In May, Trump got into a Twitter feud with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, hours after an ISIS-inspired terror attack that killed seven and wounded forty-eight.⁴⁶ (Some British observers attribute Labour’s electoral surge in London in the 2017 UK general election to Trump’s obnoxious comments four days before the vote.)

Compel allies to contribute more to their defense? Days before the 2017 South Korean presidential election, Trump reneged on his own deal to install missile defenses in the peninsula, demanding an additional $1 billion from Seoul toward the system’s costs.⁴⁷ He threatened to rip up the US–South Korea Free Trade Agreement in an interview given only a week before the election. Trump’s ill-timed words helped elect the more soft-line candidate, who promptly disregarded Trump’s policy and sought negotiated agreements with North Korea.⁴⁸

Strong advocates for Israel choked back their revulsion against the Trump campaign’s appeals to anti-Semitism in order to support a candidate who pledged to move the US embassy to Jerusalem and abrogate Barack Obama’s Iran deal. Within weeks of taking office, Trump defaulted on both commitments.⁴⁹

The most famous and electorally important of Trump’s campaign pledges was his vow to “build the wall and make Mexico pay for it.” There will be no wall, and Mexico will pay for nothing. The first budget proposed by the supposed great builder-president allowed for nothing but some prototype extensions to existing fencing near San Diego. As of midsummer 2017, no work had begun.⁵⁰

Of all the Fausts to Trump’s Mephistopheles, none paid higher prices—and received less in return—than Trump’s supposed partisan allies in Congress.

The unexpected 2016 Electoral College result offered Republicans an opportunity they had experienced only once since the Great Depression: united control of all the elected branches of the federal government. That previous opportunity, many Republicans felt, had been squandered by the George W. Bush administration. The Iraq War had consumed the administration’s energy and political credit. Its most enduring domestic policy legacy was a deviation from orthodoxy: the prescription drug benefit, which by 2016 was adding almost $100 billion per year to the cost of Medicare. Conservatives took no more joy in Bush’s signature education reform, No Child Left Behind. His temporary tax cuts had mostly lapsed since 2013. In retrospect, the years before the loss of Congress in November 2006 looked to conservatives at best like a series of unprincipled improvisations, at worst an active sellout. Even Jeb Bush felt obliged to criticize George W. Bush’s record. Asked in New Hampshire in May 2015 about differences between the two, the younger Bush answered, “I think that in Washington during my brother’s time, Republicans spent too much money. I think he could have used the veto power—he didn’t have line-item veto power, but he could have brought budget discipline to Washington, DC. That seems kind of quaint right now given the fact that after he left, budget deficits and spending just like lit up astronomically. But having constraints on spending across the board during his time would have been a good thing.”⁵¹

Republicans resolved not to waste the opportunity if it ever recurred. They would cut taxes and spending, roll back regulations, undo Obama-era programs. All that was required from the next Republican president, the antitax crusader Grover Norquist jested, was enough working digits to sign their bills into law.⁵²

But when that wish was finally granted, it was incarnated in the weird form of Donald Trump. Unlike the automaton president of Norquist’s dreams, Trump very much had a mind of his own: a mind uninterested in, and in fact barely cognizant of, the hyperideological program of his party. What Trump did care about was personal wealth, power, and domination.

“Paul Ryan, I don’t know him well,” said candidate Trump at a press conference after his streak of Super Tuesday wins on March 1, 2016, “but I’m sure I’m going to get along great with him. And if I don’t, he’s going to have to pay a big price.”⁵³ Trump attempted to exact that price in August of that election year. Paul Ryan faced a primary challenge that month from a Trump wannabe: a wealthy Wisconsin businessman with provocative views on trade, immigration, and minority groups. That challenger, Paul Nehlen, publicly flattered Trump—even backing him in his bizarre dispute with the family of the fallen war hero Humayun Khan. Trump thanked and praised Nehlen for his “good campaign.” Trump for weeks refused to endorse Ryan, even mockingly using the same language (“I’m just not quite there yet”) Ryan had previously used about him.⁵⁴ Trump eventually reversed course, as it became evident that Nehlen would lose (ultimately by a margin of 68 points). Three days before the primary, Trump leaped to the side of the certain winner.

Trump never did extract from Ryan the formal surrender he craved. Yet Trump had discerned that the balance of power between the two men favored Trump, not Ryan. Normal presidents arrive in Washington with an ambitious policy agenda they seek to enact through Congress. They propose; Congress disposes. Trump had no such agenda, but Republicans in Congress did: a big, ambitious, and radical agenda. They wanted to undo the health care changes of the Obama years and outright reverse them, to slow the projected growth of Medicare and Medicaid. They wanted to rewrite the corporate tax code, overturn Obama-era rules on greenhouse gases, and return trillions of dollars of redistributed income. They wanted to federalize gun policy, compelling states like California and Illinois to accept within their own borders the concealed-carry permits issued by more permissive states. They wished to bestow regulatory favors on favored industries and firms.

All those actions and many others would require the signature of a president who neither understood nor cared about most of them. What he needed in return from Congress was not action, but inaction: inaction on ethics, inaction on disclosures, and above all inaction on allegations that Russia manipulated the election to help him—and them.

We’ll protect your business if you sign our bills. That was the transaction congressional leaders offered Trump. They failed to appreciate until too late that Trump, not they, had the stronger hand in this bargaining.

Two perverse factors strengthened Trump against the congressional Republicans.

The first factor was the stark unpopularity of much of what the congressional Republican leadership wished to do. Speaker Ryan, a true believer, would willingly hazard his political career to finish off Obamacare once and for all. But Ryan could not trust Donald Trump to do the same. At the first affront to his ego, Trump might defect, as he did on debt-ceiling negotiations in September 2017. Trump betrayed the Republican demand for a twelve-month extension in favor of the Pelosi-Schumer offer of three months’ reportedly because he was peeved at that moment with Republican congressional leaders. Or as when he reversed his position on deferred action for young illegal aliens reportedly to punish his attorney general for failing to protect him against the appointment of a special counsel. Congressional Republicans dared not impose any restraint or even oversight on Trump lest he wreck all their plans out of peevish spite or simple loss of interest.

The second unlikely factor enhancing Trump’s power over Congress was Trump’s own unpopularity. In June 2010, the Gallup organization reviewed all the House elections since World War II. Gallup found that when a president polls above 50 percent approval, his party loses an average of thirteen seats in midterm elections, but thirty-seven seats when he polls below 50 percent. (Adding the two Obama midterms of 2010 and 2014, losses of sixty-three and thirteen respectively, does not change the math.)⁵⁵ With Trump polling below 40 percent through his first months in office and a margin of only twenty-three seats, House Republicans had to assume that their majority might not have long to last. That made it all the more urgent to get Trump’s signature on laws fast—and to protect Trump from damaging investigations that might push his popularity deeper into the danger zone. The one postwar president to poll below 35 percent during a midterm election—Harry Truman in 1946—suffered the staggering loss of fifty-five seats.

The worse Trump behaved, the more frantically congressional Republicans worked to protect him.

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee entangled himself in a bizarre sequence of misconduct and untruths in an effort to sabotage the investigation of Trump’s Russia connections.

Republican leaders in Congress kept silent when Trump’s designated attorney general, Jeff Sessions, testified inaccurately about his Russia connections during his confirmation hearing—and silent again as it emerged that Trump’s son-in-law and most powerful aide, Jared Kushner, had lied about his Russia contacts on his application form for a security clearance.

Congressional committees that exhaustively investigated the deaths of US personnel at the Benghazi consulate in 2012, and the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of the tax-exempt status of conservative groups that strayed too close to electoral politics, yawned away the ethical infractions of the Trump White House. “I think the people who voted for Donald Trump went into it with eyes wide open,” Jason Chaffetz, the chair of the House Oversight Committee, told my Atlantic colleague McKay Coppins in March 2017. “Everybody knew he was rich, everybody knew he had lots of different entanglements. . . . These other little intrigues about a wealthy family making money is a bit of a sideshow.”⁵⁶

“He’s a businessman, not a politician,” said Mike Pence in October 2016, defending Donald Trump after the New York Times published a 1995 tax return in which Trump took a nearly $1 billion deduction for losing other people’s money.⁵⁷

“He’s learning the job,” said Senate Majority Leader McConnell to Newsmax TV in April 2017, assuring viewers that Trump had come to appreciate NATO—six weeks before the NATO summit at which Trump demonstrated he had not.⁵⁸

“The president’s new at this. He’s new to government.” That was Paul Ryan’s excuse for Trump’s attempt to pressure the FBI into halting its investigation into the Russia matter.⁵⁹

“It does no good for me to comment on his Twitter behaviors,” said Utah senator Mike Lee on the morning of Trump’s “body slam CNN” tweet, a video originating from a racist and anti-Semitic account that showed an image of Trump wrestling and punching a man with a CNN logo in place of a head.⁶⁰

What did these party loyalists receive in return for their indulgence and protection? In the end, not much. The “enough working digits” theory of the presidency proved wrong. Absent effective presidential leadership, Congress could not organize itself to enact a bold reform agenda. House members from ultra-secure districts could not agree with senators from competitive states. Leaders in the House and Senate could not cajole or coerce straying votes. No effective communication strategy could be agreed on, nor did anyone have the authority to absorb feedback from the communicators and revise the reform program in ways that responded to criticism. The only criticism that mattered was criticism from the activist base, never from the reachable center. As much as any crank on Facebook, the Republican majority in Congress had locked itself within a closed information system. A party that listens only to itself, and speaks only to itself, deprives itself of the power to persuade anybody else.

Yet, whatever sordid things Republicans in Congress did for Trump, it was never enough for Trump’s voting base. In August of 2017, a George Washington University poll asked Republican voters in Republican-held districts what they thought of their member of Congress. Was he or she doing enough to support President Trump, too little, or too much? Only 35 percent answered “just enough.” A majority, 53 percent, said “too little.” (A defiant 4 percent said “too much.”)⁶¹

So the time ticked down, month by month, with scant domestic legislation to show for it. Some individual members of Congress did receive highly personal returns for their indulgence of Trump’s use of power. Representative Tom Price of Georgia, one of Congress’s most active traders of stocks under the jurisdiction of his committee, was appointed secretary of Health and Human Services. Price resigned in September 2017, after incurring almost $1 million in charter jet costs in less than eight months. Representative Mick Mulvaney, a Tea Party radical who had pushed the United States to default on its obligations in the debt-ceiling battles of 2011 and 2013, was named the director of the Office of Management and Budget. The former Montana congressman Ryan Zinke, a hunting companion of Donald Trump Jr., got the Interior Department. Elaine Chao, the wife of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, returned to head the Labor Department, resuming a post she had held under President George W. Bush.

The supply of such tangible rewards is finite, however. Appointments of House members to executive branch jobs generate special elections, with all their political risks. Although the GOP retained the seats opened by Trump’s appointments, it did so by worryingly narrowing margins: only four points in Georgia’s Sixth District special election, for example, down from twenty-three points in the election of November 2016. This kind of patronage could be safely distributed only to representatives of the reddest seats in the reddest states. It might seem more prudent to reward members of Congress by promoting their aides to executive branch jobs. That method bumped into another problem: the slow Trump staffing process. There are many explanations for that slowness, but at the bottom of them all seems to be Trump’s own profound and incorrigible distaste for organization.

The Trump Organization had habitually lived in chaos, careening from crisis to crisis. Trump’s biographers have reported with amazement that his companies did not generate balance sheets or profit-and-loss reports, in large part because Trump could not or would not read them.⁶² “It surprised me how much of a family-type operation it was, instead of a business kind of orientation where there is a structure and there is a chain of command and there is delegation of authority and responsibility.” That assessment of Trump’s business style was delivered in 1989 by the CEO of Trump’s brief and disastrous venture into the airline business. “I don’t think he manages,” said the head of a construction company that worked on Trump Tower. “I think he lets it all just happen.”⁶³

Trump never built a proper transition team. New Jersey governor Chris Christie, Vice President Mike Pence, Jared Kushner—each headed his own effort, each canceling out the work of the others. The head of the office of presidential personnel in the new administration, Johnny DeStefano, had headed the data operation of the Trump presidential campaign. A former congressional aide, DeStefano had no executive branch experience, no experience in recruiting in either the private or public sector, and limited authority anyway to make hiring decisions. Trump himself insisted on reviewing the résumé of every candidate for every sub-cabinet and sub-sub-cabinet job—a process that held the entire staffing process hostage to Trump’s short attention span, weak work ethic, and ferocious demand for abject personal loyalty. Yet it would be wrong to regard the irregularity of Trump’s White House and administration as a story of failure. Trump the president, like Trump the businessman and Trump the candidate, plunged his working environments into chaos because he intuited that chaos enhanced his power. “We can’t do that, sir, it’s against the rules” are words Trump never wanted to hear.

Trump did not merely fail to organize his government. He actively sabotaged organization wherever it began to take form. He let his former personal secretary schedule his telephone calls, subverting the accustomed role of the White House chief of staff.⁶⁴ He staffed his National Security Council with sinister oddballs. He mocked the stature of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and questioned the IQ of the secretary of state. He conducted public business on his insecure personal cell phone.⁶⁵ He made political speeches to agents of the Central Intelligence Agency, exhorted captive military audiences to call their members of Congress to support his agenda, and delivered an address to the National Scout Jamboree so vituperatively partisan that the organization felt obliged to apologize to attendees.⁶⁶ Most catastrophically of all, he exposed his hurts, rages, fears, and schemes for all to see on his personal Twitter account.

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in February 2017, Trump’s senior presidential aide Steve Bannon listed “the deconstruction of the administrative state” as one of the three supreme goals of the new administration.⁶⁷ Deconstruction would involve repealing laws and eliminating agencies. This was the kind of work President Carter did when he deregulated passenger air travel and commercial freight traffic in the 1970s; that President Reagan did when he freed oil and natural gas prices in the 1980s; that President Clinton did—for better or worse—when he scrapped the New Deal regulation of the financial services industry in the 1990s. It’s hard work, built on serious economic analysis, requiring approval by Congress and support from public opinion.

The Trump administration settled for an easier project: paralyzing the state either by failing to staff it in the first place or else by filling its ranks with incompetents and self-seekers, by trashing ethical rules, and by abdicating the responsibility of the president and White House to set policy and then confirm that policy is in fact executed.

Trumpocracy as a system of power rests not on deregulation but on nonregulation, not on deconstructing the state but on breaking the state in order to plunder the state.