Schmidt S. - Donald Trump V. the United States - Inside the Struggle to Stop a President

Copyright © 2020 by Michael S. Schmidt

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Hardback ISBN 9781984854667

Ebook ISBN 9781984854674

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Debbie Glasserman, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Carlos Beltrán

Cover photograph: iStock/Getty Images

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Prologue

Act One

Chapter I: Rule of Law, Rule of Trump

Act Two

Chapter II: The Institutionalist

Chapter III: The Point of No Return

Chapter IV: “Oh, God”

Act Three

Chapter V: The Road to Mueller

Act Four

Chapter VI: “He’s Saying Some Crazy Shit”

Chapter VII: Norms of Presidential Conduct 101

Epilogue: President Trump Finds His Roy Cohn

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak when power to flattery bows? To plainness honor’s bound when majesty falls to folly.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, KING LEAR

PROLOGUE

WHEN DONALD J. TRUMP entered the Oval Office as president of the United States on January 20, 2017, he ushered in a new age of American politics. His improbable victory stemmed from an explosive collision of novelties. Trump, a political unicorn, without the experience or comportment of any previous public figure seeking high office, was propelled by a new set of forces that were taking hold inside and outside the country.

These forces had begun swirling during the Obama era, when siloed echo chambers increasingly prevented objective facts from penetrating, hardening partisan lines. Political discourse started to reflect a growing sense of grievance and conspiracy, contributing to an erosion of public trust in established institutions. At the same time, a beleaguered foreign adversary tapped into the very same fissures forming in American society to sow chaos and discord, and to undermine the integrity of the country’s democratic institutions. Vladimir Putin’s Russia showed that in some ways it knew America better than Americans, using the very hallmarks of democracy—particularly the free flow of information—to launch a wide-ranging attack on the 2016 presidential election, designed to bolster Trump’s chances of winning the White House.

Nearly all public figures would reject this domestic divisiveness and foreign disruption. But Trump embraced these dual forces, emerging as both the outgrowth and embodiment of this new political era. His refusal to follow norms or honor tradition became a core feature of his political appeal. Trump weathered a series of campaign crises that would have ended the candidacies of anyone else. Stoking a growing tribalism and resentment among a segment of the electorate that felt ignored during the Obama years, he rode their support to the White House. By all accounts, Trump’s ascension to the presidency represented one of the most extraordinary stories in our nation’s political history.

But the story of his rise would soon be overshadowed by what happened next. As president, Trump sought to wield power in a way so concerning to those around him—his top aides and officials in the executive branch tasked with implementing the administration’s agenda and enforcing the law—that they pursued a path rarely, if ever, seen since the country’s founding. Instead of enabling the commander in chief’s exercise of power, several sought to thwart it. These individuals undertook a mission to stop a president because they feared he could damage himself, the country, and the presidency.

In this era, with Trump now installed as commander in chief, the traditional checks on presidential power would be largely neutered. No part of the Washington establishment seemed protected from the pull of Trump’s demand for loyalty to his party of one. Figures of the Washington establishment were faced with a singular question: Are you with Trump or against him? A professional bureaucracy that had historically operated outside the churn of partisan politics, keeping the gears of government turning across Democratic and Republican administrations, found itself thrust into the post-fact, hyperpartisan energy now emanating from the Oval Office. This phenomenon enveloped Congress. Trump routinely outflanked the Democratic lawmakers investigating him, and Republican leadership became Trump’s public defenders. Those charged with “calling balls and strikes,” career civil servants and journalists, were now maligned as part of the “Deep State” and deemed “fake news.”

The place where this new force had its greatest impact was at the Justice Department and its investigative arm, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the forty years since the Watergate scandal, DOJ and the FBI had evolved to a point where trying to keep the perception of politics out of their work was almost as important as enforcing the law itself. Trump’s unrelenting push to use the country’s law enforcement department as an appendage of his political and personal empire placed DOJ and the FBI under excruciating pressure. Some officials would seek to mollify Trump with half steps, others would outright refuse to bend, and face the consequences. All would feel the strain of the president’s demands.

For much of human history, journalists, authors, and academics have focused on how leaders, like presidents, with the help of their advisers, exert power to shape public policy, and on what that says about them, those whom they led, and the times in which they lived. Trump’s exercise of presidential power is, of course, worthy of examination, even more so because he has used his power in unprecedented ways. This book covers that ground.

But, at its heart, this book is not the standard account of presidential power or a chronicle of the cabinet meetings and deliberations that animate an administration’s agenda. Rather, this book tells the story of a few individuals who were compelled to confront the most powerful leader in the world, uncertain whether he was acting in the interest of the country, his ego, his family business, or Russia. Through their eyes and ears, we observe an epic struggle to restrain an unbound president.

The Trump presidency is the biggest story of our time—a tall tale of brute political power and the titanic struggle atop the United States government. But it is also the most basic human story about how people, thrust into highly unusual circumstances, reacted when, under great pressure, they saw right before their eyes the president act in ways that deeply unnerved them.

—

You and I will almost certainly never find ourselves in the position of standing between the most powerful person in the world and the abyss, fighting to stop a president from using his power. But whether dealing with a financial hardship, a setback at work, or even just a problem at home with a child, we have all faced a trying situation in which we thought, maybe, we could overcome a challenge that might ultimately be out of our control. In the clashes between Trump and those seeking to stop him, we see, and perhaps identify with, ordinary people operating under extraordinary pressure, trying to stop something that may ultimately be beyond them.

There were several officials who stood up to Trump that I could have chosen to concentrate on. I ultimately focused on two main ones: former FBI director James B. Comey and former White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II. I chose Comey because, besides Presidents Obama and Trump, I believe Comey made the decisions that had the greatest impact on the country. His significance makes anything that illuminates his decision making essential to history. If you scored the Trump administration, there are probably people—like John Kelly—who did more to stop Trump than McGahn did. But along with serving as a major container of Trump, McGahn did two other things that made him remarkable: He was in charge of Trump’s greatest political accomplishment, and he found himself caught up as the chief witness against Trump in an investigation that posed an existential threat to the president. The arc of this book covers how Comey’s decisions led directly to McGahn’s problems.