While we were on the road one day, a fellow advisor vented about a request issued from the Oval Office. Trump wanted to use a domestic presidential power to do something absurd overseas, which for security reasons I cannot disclose.
“It doesn’t make sense. So I told him he doesn’t understand. We’re talking about apples and refrigerators here,” the official remarked. “He doesn’t get it. He just doesn’t get it. Also, if we do any of this stuff, we’ll get enjoined by the courts right away.”
The phrase stayed in my head. Apples and refrigerators. When the president mixes up words, the result is unusual; when he mixes up concepts, the result can be unlawful. It’s like the time Trump told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that he would consider accepting dirt from a foreign government, such as China or Russia, about a political opponent. The president said he would take it, equating the information to opposition research, or “oppo research.” To Trump, it would be mere politics. To some experts, it would be “textbook illegal.” Hadn’t the special counsel just finished investigating whether this happened in 2016? How could President Trump, after that national nightmare, still not understand the difference between politics-as-usual and naked corruption? Didn’t he care? The ABC interview foreshadowed the answer. No, he didn’t.
Only months later, Trump decided to use the influence of the presidency to pressure Ukraine to investigate one of his potential 2020 election rivals. He urged the country’s president to launch an inquiry into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, whose profitable work for a Ukrainian gas company drew scrutiny, especially in light of his father’s engagement with Ukraine as vice president. Whether or not the allegation of improper dealings had merit, the system was not supposed to work this way. It’s up to the Justice Department to probe potential crimes. American presidents don’t implore foreign leaders to open investigations into domestic political opponents. But with the campaign consuming his daily mental bandwidth, Trump couldn’t resist the temptation to use his office to gain a competitive edge.
Those of us who have seen these sorts of reckless actions, again and again, wanted to slam our heads against the wall. The explanation that he wanted to help combat “corruption” in Ukraine was barely believable to anyone around him. The obvious corruption was in the Oval Office. The president had apparently learned nothing from the Mueller saga. Only we did. We learned that, given enough time and space, Donald J. Trump will seek to abuse any power he is given. This is a fact of life we’ve been taught inside his administration through repeated example. No external force can ameliorate his attraction to wrongdoing. His presidency is continually jeopardized by it, and so are America’s institutions.
If the president’s assault on democracy seems too remote for most Americans, don’t worry. You can look closer to home because President Trump has sought to abuse his power to target you directly. He has repeatedly tried to leverage his office to punish what he calls “Democratic states”—those where the majority of citizens voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, ignoring the fact that his supporters live in those places, as well. The president surprises staff with horrifying ways to make life difficult for these parts of America.
California is the quintessential example. Trump hates California. He can’t believe that an entertainer such as himself is unable to win over the home of Hollywood. He rants about its governor, Gavin Newsom, for criticizing administration policies, and he believes the state “stole” electoral votes from him by allowing so many supposed “illegal” voters to cast ballots. After wildfires devastated homes and properties in California, Trump insisted that federal funds be cut off to the state. No emergency dollars should be flowing to Californians, the president told staff. Word of his spiteful demand spread throughout the building, in part because Trump was raising the idea, as he often did, with random people. It was jaw-dropping, especially considering that clips of burned-out homes and Americans living in temporary shelters were still replaying on our television screens.
To protect the president from himself, staff members tried to make sure the press didn’t get a hold of the story. Communications aides breathed a sigh of relief when it seemed the storm had passed. Then several weeks later, the president fired off tweets anyway, saying he’d ordered relief aid for California to be halted, probably because he was frustrated that it hadn’t. To my knowledge, officials never acted on the public demand. It faded from view. But the request showed his true colors, as a politician blatantly seeking to hurt people in places where he can’t see an electoral advantage.
He’s found other ways to go after the state, though. President Trump announced that the administration was revoking California’s tailpipe emissions waiver, which for years allowed the state to set a tougher standard when it came to reducing automobile pollution. He’s moved to cut funding for its high-speed rail projects, and he’s threatened to dump more migrants in California to punish it for statewide policies shielding illegal immigrants, only a sample from a longer list. If Congress is examining politically motivated activity in the Executive Branch, might I suggest that some of these threats and decisions warrant further scrutiny.
The net effect of the president’s war on democratic institutions is that he has turned the government of the United States into one of his companies: a badly managed enterprise defined by a sociopathic personality in the c-suite, rife with infighting, embroiled in lawsuits, falling deeper into debt, allergic to internal and external criticism, open to shady side deals, operating with limited oversight, and servicing its self-absorbed owner at the expense of its customers. We should have seen this one coming. This is only what President Trump has done here at home. Remember, this man is also the de-facto leader of the free world.
CHAPTER 5
A Weakness for Strongmen
“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.”
“LGBT… Q… I… ZXW?—who knows,” one Trump official laughed, trying to spell out the abbreviation used to define aspects of sexuality and gender. “I just learned what the I stood for.”
“Interracial?” another interjected.
“No. Intersex,” the first explained. “I still don’t know what the hell that actually means, though.” More laughter.
This was a group of senior Trump officials chatting about the president’s participation in a G7 summit. The Group of Seven (“G7”) consists of the world’s wealthiest nations, comprised of the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom, which gather regularly to discuss economic and security issues. In June 2018, Canada was set to play host to the annual get-together of leaders. The Canadians announced that gender equality and women’s empowerment would be a major focus, among other issues, and several officials mused about whether sexual orientation might come up, too. It was not the agenda they were hoping for.
Some White House aides were not taking the gathering seriously in part because the president himself wasn’t taking it seriously. Trump didn’t like forums where he wasn’t guaranteed star billing, or where he would be outnumbered by other leaders with different points of view. He was never one to sit through long meetings, and most of the issues that concerned our allies didn’t interest him. Additionally, in advance of the summit, Trump alienated—or was in the process of alienating—a majority of the G7 allies. He’d recently slapped tariffs on a number of them and was being criticized by the group, which has historically worked to break down trade barriers, not erect new ones. The president considered pulling out, but it was impossible to come up with a suitable excuse for stiffing America’s biggest allies.