The presidency began with a lie.
President Donald J. Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States, a man who had transformed from laughingstock to the most powerful man on the planet in five short years, woke up on January 21, 2017, in the White House. Here was a man who cared about status and power above all else, and on a blustery Saturday morning in Washington, Trump stirred early at the world’s most famous address, a place he now called home. He had done it.
He woke up angry.
Trump had long been an obsessive cable TV watcher, a habit that only accelerated once he became president, despite the demands of the office. And it was fitting, in a way, that his TV fixation played a role in his very first full day in office. It would be far from the last.
The news on January 21 was, of course, wall-to-wall coverage of the new commander in chief. Trump had, again, achieved his ultimate goal of being the center of conversation, the name on everyone’s lips. But what the anchors were saying—and displaying—infuriated him.
The hosts that day were showing photos of the National Mall and the crowd that fanned out from the Capitol’s west steps, where Trump had delivered his sixteen-minute inaugural address: dark, almost dystopic remarks, quickly dubbed the “American carnage” speech after a stunningly bleak line that prompted former president George W. Bush to deem the whole thing some “weird shit.”
The crowd was sizable. But it was not nearly as large as the one that had welcomed President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. Obama’s crowd was packed shoulder to shoulder and stretched all the way to the Washington Monument. Trump’s was nowhere near that.
And that was unacceptable to the new president, as was the footage that dominated the TVs that day of the Women’s March, as women—and some men—thronged cities across the globe, many wearing pink hats, as a protest against one common cause: Trump. These crowds, too, dwarfed what Trump’s inauguration had drawn. Crowd size was a particular obsession with Trump, who night after night during the campaign would brag that his crowds were bigger than those drawn by his competitors (that was almost always true) and that thousands more people were lined up outside unable to get into the sold-out venue (that was almost always not true).
He was furious. He felt he was the target of mockery. What came next was the birth of the first lie of Trump’s presidency.
The day after Trump’s inauguration was Sean Spicer’s first full day as White House press secretary.
It was a career pinnacle for a good GOP soldier, one who had climbed the ranks in the Republican National Committee and earned a reputation among political journalists as a solid guy, one who could be slippery but, in the right moment, could give you a more unvarnished take on his party’s power brokers. Spicer was closely linked to Reince Priebus, Trump’s first White House chief of staff, both party loyalists who fit uneasily in Trump’s orbit. It was Priebus, in fact, who told Trump he should bow out after the release of the Access Hollywood tape. And it was Spicer who had offered an off-the-record briefing to reporters just before the election, mapping out how Trump would likely lose.
But, short of better options and at the time (nominally) still trying to remain in the party’s good graces, Trump put them both in key posts. Spicer was nervous but also proud and excited. He had grown up in New England; he would defend Tom Brady to the death; and while he had mixed feelings about the man for whom he now worked, he also believed that Trump could change, could moderate some of his positions once he got to office.
“Reince,” Spicer would tell his longtime colleague, “the president has the right people around him and we can keep him in check.” Priebus was less sure.
Spicer’s first press briefing was slated for Monday. That Saturday, the first full day in the West Wing, was meant for staffers to move in and figure out how to work the light switches and overhead intercom (it took a while on both). Spicer, wearing a suit that didn’t fit quite as well as it should have, was unpacking his office when he was summoned.
Trump wanted him out there. He wanted a briefing. And he wanted Spicer to say that Trump’s crowd was bigger than Obama’s. It was a lie, by any measure. But it was the first full day, and Spicer’s job and proximity to power were already on the line. So he did it. He lied.
In the grand scheme of things, an exaggeration about crowd size seems quaint, trivial. And indeed, most Republicans on Capitol Hill laughed it off. But it set a template, and not just because Spicer’s credibility was thrown away in his first moments on the job. This was a lie that had come from the White House podium. The levers and power and symbols of government were behind the lie, even if it was a fairly inconsequential one. White House staffers could have snuffed out the lie but they didn’t, for fear of losing power and access. A year later, a National Park Service employee admitted he edited photos to cut out empty spaces to make the crowd look bigger, an early example of a government employee misusing power to make the president look good. Trump got ridiculed, to be sure, but no one told him no. There were no real consequences. He could lie and put the power of the government behind it.
And soon, he turned his attention to the vote.
Fueled by a refusal to admit any sort of defeat, even though he now called the White House home, Trump went on a crusade and, for the first time at the executive mansion, made repeated and unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. How many votes, in Trump’s estimation, were cast illegally? Well, just about exactly the number by which he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.
Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million ballots, handing Trump the largest popular vote defeat of any president who won the Electoral College. That didn’t sit well with the president-elect, who sought ways to explain why such a humbling defeat couldn’t possibly be legitimate.
The answer included a golfer.
Trump began privately telling confidants—and then a group of Republican lawmakers soon after taking the oath of office—that his friend professional golfer Bernhard Langer had tried to vote near his Florida home on Election Day only to be turned away. Worse yet, people who didn’t “look like they should be allowed to vote” were permitted to stay in line, the president claimed, citing potential Latin American countries of origin for the would-be voters. He told the story to Senate and House Republicans, who were noshing on pigs in a blanket as they gathered in the White House’s State Dining Room for a get-to-know-you just a few days after Inauguration Day.
Langer later denied that the story had happened that way, and his daughter noted that he, as a German citizen, was not permitted to vote in the United States anyway. But it took hold in Trump’s mind, as did the apocryphal tale that Democrats were loading up buses to drive voters from deep-blue Massachusetts across the border into swing state New Hampshire, causing the president’s narrow defeat in a state that, since his primary win there in February, he deeply prized. And all those votes in California must be from illegal immigrants, Trump thought.
A framework was established: the Republicans eating hors d’oeuvres at the White House said nothing to dispute Trump’s claims of voter fraud. White House chief of staff Priebus prodded Trump to change the subject, according to those in attendance, but none of the lawmakers pushed back, even slightly, to the president’s wildly erroneous claims. Nor did they object when he took to Twitter to announce a major federal investigation into his evidence-free claims.
“The president does believe that there was election fraud,” said Spicer. “It’s a belief that he’s maintained for a while, a concern that he has about voter fraud. And that’s based on information that’s provided.”
Republicans had advanced claims of voter fraud, large and small, for years, though virtually no evidence of such improprieties has been discovered—and none had neared the magnitude of the claims put forth by Trump. He wrote on Twitter, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
Then that May, Trump announced a new commission to chase down the allegations of voter fraud—ones thoroughly debunked since Election Day—and while it would be nominally led by Vice President Mike Pence, symbolizing its importance, it would be run by Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state known for sharing the president’s hard-line immigration views. The idea of the commission had been percolating behind the scenes for a while, but the formal announcement of its creation—done in typical slapdash Trump fashion—was rushed, hurriedly sent out to distract from the constitutional crisis the president had sparked that week by firing FBI director James Comey, which led to the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller, whose Russia investigation would shadow the White House for two years.
The commission went nowhere fast. With no credible evidence of fraud in hand to validate the conclusion that both Trump and Kobach had clearly already reached, it had to turn up something quickly before the famously impatient president lost his temper. In June, Kobach sent a letter to states asking for all publicly available voter data, including names, addresses, voting history, party affiliation, felony convictions, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.
That was a bridge too far for some state Republicans who, while long advocates of more restrictive voting laws, also bristled at the idea that they had overseen a fraudulent election. Foreshadowing the stands taken by GOP secretaries of state in places like Georgia and Arizona years later, some officials balked, with Bill Gardner, New Hampshire’s secretary of state and a commission member, rejecting the group’s efforts to probe fraud in his home state. And even a few Republicans from Trump strongholds said no, including Mississippi secretary of state Delbert Hosemann, who addressed the commission’s request by memorably saying, “My reply would be: they can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.”
The commission was put out of its misery in January 2018, having found no evidence of voter fraud and disbanding without even disclosing its findings. After a lawsuit filed by Maine’s secretary of state forced the release, the final report was put out there for the nation to see: there was unequivocally no widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election. It was over. Trump had lied. The tangible impact was minimal: some taxpayer money was spent and plenty of ink spilled, but for the most part the nation shrugged and moved on, the nonsensical probe overshadowed by the daily dramas consuming the West Wing.
But there were ripple effects. According to polls, the number of Republicans who believed there was the potential for voter fraud increased. The conservative media more freely tossed around accusations without penalty. And the national Republicans had largely stayed silent, allowing Trump to make the false claims with impunity. He paid no price for his lies. The message from the GOP seemed to be: Yes, Trump’s election fraud claims were unseemly, inaccurate, and embarrassing, but what harm did they do?
What harm could they possibly do?
The election fraud claims became the Big Lie, but there were many (many, many, many) other falsehoods. While it’s tempting to say that Trump told too many lies to count, that’s not accurate since the fact-checkers at the Washington Post did, in fact, tally them. During the president’s four years in office, he uttered 30,573 false and misleading claims, according to the newspaper. That’s 7,643 a year, nearly 21 a day. And those are only the ones he told in public.
There was the time he told reporters on Air Force One that he knew nothing about the payments made to purchase the silence of Stormy Daniels, the porn star with whom Trump had sex. He claimed to have ended Obama’s family separation program when in fact he dramatically grew it and enforced it to draconian levels. He lied repeatedly that Joe Biden’s health care plan eliminated coverage for those with preexisting conditions.
Some lies were pointless, like when he claimed that the head of the Boy Scouts told him that his address to their national jamboree was the best speech ever given to the organization—when in actuality it was an inappropriate ramble and the group’s leader never said such a thing. Some lies were silly, like when he’d make up tales of burly men crying and addressing him as “sir” to thank him for, well, whatever it is Trump felt like talking about that day.
Some lies were dangerous, like when he claimed that Representative Ilhan Omar supported Al Qaeda, leading to death threats to the Somali-born congresswoman from Minnesota. Some lies showcased his willingness to take advantage of dirty politics, like when he was able to name Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court in 2017 on the back of the lie told by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that Obama was not eligible to fill a vacant Supreme Court seat the year before because there was an election upcoming.
And some lies were just plain hard to categorize, like Trump’s insistence that windmills cause cancer.
But a deeper dive into a pair of his falsehoods reveals how, over his four years in office, Trump was willing to repeatedly tell shameless lies, overrun any allies’ objections to them, and abuse the power of his office to insist they were true.
One way Trump pushed his lies was simply by repetition, by sheer force of will and personality, fueled by the belief that if he just said something over and over again he could will it to be true or at least confuse or convince others to go along with it.
The Veterans’ Access to Care through Choice, Accountability, and Transparency Act—shorthanded as the Veterans Choice Program—was signed into law by President Obama in 2014. That is true. On June 6, 2018, President Donald Trump signed the John S. McCain III, Daniel K. Akaka, and Samuel R. Johnson VA Maintaining Internal Systems and Strengthening Integrated Outside Networks Act—the MISSION Act—which was a modest and good update to the law. That is also true.
Very little of what happened next was.
White House aides and allies of the president were not quite sure how it started, or if Trump made a conscious choice to erase Obama’s contribution. But in the coming weeks, Trump began systematically rewriting history, eliminating not just Obama’s role but also that of Senator John McCain of Arizona, a Republican rival who was a fierce critic of Trump and who cast the deciding vote to scuttle his health care legislation. McCain was one of the three senator sponsors for whom the MISSION Act was named, and yet Trump would go on to say that McCain—a veteran himself who had spent years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—had nothing to do with the bill.
“McCain didn’t get the job done for our great vets and the VA, and they knew it,” Trump said during a 2019 campaign stop in Ohio. Over the next two years, Trump told more than 150 false and misleading statements about the bill, according to terrific reporting in the Washington Post, his story changing until, in his version, he was the sole force behind it.
The president’s handling of the Veterans Choice legislation offers a sharp look into the evolution of a Trump lie: the initial false claim, the subsequent embellishment, the incessant repetition, and clear signs that he knows the truth but chooses to keep telling the lie—all enabled by aides either unwilling or unable to stop him.
Stakeholders acknowledge that Obama’s 2014 legislation was well intentioned but flawed, and Trump could have just touted his own measure as an improvement. But that wasn’t good enough, especially for a president looking to burnish his ties to the military ahead of a reelection effort.
The Veterans Choice Program sprang up in the aftermath of a massive Veterans Affairs scandal in 2014, in which scheduling staff at VA hospitals across the country had been instructed to falsify their waiting lists to cover up the long waits for even basic care. The woes at one VA medical center in Phoenix made national headlines, with an inspector general’s report finding that officials there falsified records to cover up the fact that veterans on average waited 115 days for an appointment—and some died while waiting. The legislation Trump signed made it easier for veterans to seek private care and offered improvements such as allowing veterans to see non-VA doctors for primary care if the VA faced delays.
There were some West Wing aides who, behind the scenes, tried to get Trump to change his language, suggesting that it unnecessarily left them open to fact-checking and diluted the impact of what was, by any measure, a successful piece of legislation. But the president refused.
“No one loves veterans like me. Obama and McCain didn’t do anything, they didn’t do what I did,” Trump would say, according to multiple aides. He’d sometimes toss in an expletive and just steamroll over the aides’ concerns. But the president and his speechwriters were wedded to the language of “Veterans Choice,” the language of the Obama bill, because they wanted to take full credit and because they believed “choice” was an appealing word, and no one knew, they believed, what the “MISSION Act” was.
So Trump continued to just use “Choice,” erasing Obama’s role and taking full credit. It was not a dangerous lie, but a blatant one, and one on which he did not like to be challenged. He finally was pushed in August 2020, during a coronavirus news conference at his tony Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, when CBS News White House correspondent Paula Reid asked him, “Why do you keep saying that you passed Veterans Choice?”
As Trump tried to call on another reporter instead, Reid continued, “You said that you passed Veterans Choice. It was passed in 2014 … it was a false statement, sir.”
Trump paused and looked around the room. He then abruptly ended the news conference and walked out. Later, when an aide pointed out that the offending question was built on a correct premise, Trump ignored him. And, in the weeks ahead, he continued telling the same lie.
Another—and more ominous—way Trump pushed a lie was to use his presidential power to make it appear true.
Hurricane Dorian was massive and deadly. With winds reaching more than 220 miles per hour, it grew to be a Category 5 storm, one that could wipe a community off the map, as it gained power in the Atlantic Ocean. Before it was done, it would tear through the Bahamas, becoming the most destructive storm to ever smash through the islands.
As it moved menacingly toward the United States, the National Weather Service and local and government officials who, due to climate change, had become depressingly practiced at warning the populace about extreme weather, began to send out the usual alerts. It certainly was not uncommon for a president of the United States to use his platform and visibility to do the same. It was just everything that followed that was unusual.
Trump tweeted on September 1, 2019, that “In addition to Florida—South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, will most likely be hit (much) harder than anticipated.”
Most of that was true, to be sure. But Trump’s claim that Alabama was in harm’s way was not. A National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast from two days earlier found that a tiny portion of southeastern Alabama might be affected by Dorian because the “cone of uncertainty” extended a few miles into the state. But NOAA forecasts current at the time of Trump’s tweet showed the storm not impacting the state at all, since it was moving north instead of west.
Within a half hour, due to fears that the president’s erroneous statement could lead to panic in the state ahead of the storm, the Birmingham, Alabama, Twitter account for NOAA’s National Weather Service tweeted that the state would not be affected by the hurricane: “Alabama will NOT see any impacts from #Dorian. We repeat, no impacts from Hurricane #Dorian will be felt across Alabama. The system will remain too far east.”
This was what government agencies typically do: they deal in facts and try to provide the most current information possible for the citizens who rely on them, particularly ahead of a looming crisis. But an hour later, during a briefing at the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s headquarters, Trump again referred to supposed new information that “just came up, unfortunately.”
“And, I will say, the states—and it may get a little piece of a great place: It’s called Alabama. And Alabama could even be in for at least some very strong winds and something more than that, it could be. This just came up, unfortunately. It’s the size of—the storm that we’re talking about. So, for Alabama, just please be careful also.”
But, again, that was not true. And by the night, the contradiction began to get traction in the media, as the Birmingham NOAA tweet went viral. Trump only dug in. He went on to argue that “certain original scenarios” had suggested Alabama could be affected. But that claim was plainly contradicted by all three of his Sunday comments, in which he had suggested he was referring to new information.
A few days later, the saga took a turn for the absurd. On September 4, after the worst of the storm had cascaded across the United States, Trump called reporters into the Oval Office. Though some Americans had died in the storm, that was not what was on the president’s mind: instead he held up a NOAA forecast from the morning of August 29—altered with a crudely drawn black line that took the hurricane forecast into Alabama.
Reporters in the room looked at one another. One pulled up an image of the original version of the map on his phone—the image did not display a black line extending into Alabama. No, it was only this map, being held by this president, that featured a black line, obviously drawn by a black Sharpie of the type that Trump favored.
“What the fuck?” one reporter whispered to himself. Trump pushed forward, declaring again that “Alabama was in the original forecast.” He insisted: “They actually gave that a 95 percent chance—probability.” But again, that never happened. Advisers later admitted that Trump had demanded a map to justify his original claim and, outraged that it did not show Alabama impacted, grabbed a marker to alter it.
The story could have ended there, as the latest example of Trump’s ego running out of control and his refusal to admit a mistake leading to an embarrassing display. Twitter had a field day, as did the late-night talk shows, and Trump, again, looked petty and unserious, unable to admit a mistake. But the story took a more serious turn. And once more, it showed that Trump was not above using the levers of power, the tools of the federal government, to back up a lie.
As the focus shifted to rebuilding in the wake of Dorian, the NOAA on September 6 suddenly published an unsigned statement in support of Trump’s initial claim. Its key line: that National Hurricane Center models “demonstrated that tropical-storm-force winds from Hurricane Dorian could impact Alabama.” Trump crowed that he was right. Democrats and good government watchdogs fretted that the White House had exerted undue influence to push a nonpartisan government agency—a team of scientists! meteorologists!—to do the president’s bidding. Was there nothing, Democrats feared, that Trump would not corrupt?
Investigations were launched and the results were not surprising. By the following summer, a pair of probes—one internal, one launched by the inspector general of the Commerce Department—found that the acting NOAA administrator, Neil Jacobs, a Trump appointee, and other officials inappropriately used their positions during the flap. Jacobs, the probes found, had ordered the drafting of the September 6 statement and criticized the employees in Birmingham for contradicting Trump. He had “engaged in the misconduct intentionally, knowingly, or in reckless disregard” for the agency’s scientific integrity policy, according to a panel commissioned by the agency to investigate complaints against him. And the Commerce Department inspector general concluded that some department employees—NOAA falls within the Commerce Department—had received instructions from the White House itself to support Trump’s claims.
This was no longer a sideshow about a bad tweet or even a Sharpie drawing on a map. This was no longer a moment meant for Stephen Colbert. This was something far more serious: Trump knew no bounds, and there were few checks on his power. The guardrails were gone.
And as Trump so casually pulled the levers of power in support of his lies, he changed the very nature of the nation’s politics and deliberately exacerbated the mistrust many Americans already had in their government. Faith in the nation’s institutions first began to waver after the Kennedy assassination and then fell dramatically after Vietnam and Watergate. The government, which after the New Deal and World War II was largely seen as a force for good, suddenly couldn’t be trusted to do the right thing or do anything well.
That erosion in confidence only accelerated after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks; the faulty justification for the Iraq War; the federal government’s mishandling of the response to Hurricane Katrina that left a proud American city to nearly drown; and the government’s response to the financial crisis of 2008–9, with bank bailouts, home foreclosures, and the sense that the rich were getting richer at the expense of everyone else.
Similarly, the partisan warfare had intensified in the decades before 2016. The 1990s, which featured an explosion in conservative media, saw the fault lines grow, with fury over culture wars and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. That fight—Team Red versus Team Blue—grew far more vicious during the contested election of 2000, which was captured by George W. Bush with the support of fewer voters than Al Gore but more Supreme Court justices.
There were accusations of dirty tricks, claims that the Republicans had stolen the election, and, for the first time in a century, questions about a president’s legitimacy. The bitter partisan anger grew after the misguided invasion of Iraq and the near collapse of the financial market, with many placing the blame for both catastrophes squarely at Bush’s feet. Obama’s election provided a brief, fleeting moment of national exultation, but it too was soon lost to pure Republican obstructionism—with a meeting of powerful Republicans declaring on the very night of Obama’s inauguration that they would kill his legislative agenda, and then–Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell soon declaring, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president”—and the rise of the Tea Party, as well as a surge in racist rhetoric and violence. The Republican Party was already becoming more anti-science and antiestablishment, a party that jettisoned a lot of policy in favor of fighting along cultural lines.
Trump threw gasoline on those smoldering flames. Coherent party ideology? Gone. Long-held policy beliefs? Gone. Respect for the sanctity of the judiciary and military? Gone. Being tough on Russia? Gone. Leaning on international alliances? Gone.
Upholding the dignity of the office? Gone. As was rarely made clearer than on Saturday, March 4, 2017.
Washington woke up that morning to be greeted by a series of incendiary tweets from the commander in chief. They were jaw-dropping, with one Democratic congressional staffer awakening his wife with a shouted “Oh shit!” when he first glanced at his phone. They came in quick succession:
“Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”
“Is it legal for a sitting President to be ‘wire tapping’ a race for president prior to an election? Turned down by court earlier. A NEW LOW!”
“I’d bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October, just prior to Election!”
“How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
The president of the United States, without any evidence, had claimed that his predecessor had wiretapped him, which would have been one of the gravest misuses of power in the history of the office. The ramifications would be massive. Had a sitting president used the powers of the office to try to put his thumb on the scale to rig the results of an election?
Trump himself, of course, would try to do just that four years later. But Obama had not. And Trump’s claim came not from the US intelligence agencies or federal law enforcement, but from an influential conservative radio host who would occasionally wade into the right-wing fever swamps.
Mark Levin wasn’t a boldface name, like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, but he had amassed a devoted following on the Right, aiming to add intellectual heft to some of the arguments espoused by conservative figures who, to put it charitably, were not intellectuals. Levin was antagonistic and combative, known for calling out media figures by name on his radio show and, at times, penning critical open letters (and posting them on Facebook) when he disagreed with a reporter’s coverage of his show. Brian Stelter, CNN’s media reporter, got one. So did yours truly.
Levin had stitched together material—including from such “liberal” media outlets as the New York Times and Washington Post—on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court warrants sought during the election. He went on to claim that the Obama administration had used unspecified “police state” surveillance tactics against the Trump campaign throughout the stretch run of 2016.
That claim was then amplified in a Breitbart piece that ran on Friday, the day before Trump’s tweets, and it was passed along by Priebus in a phone call with the president. There was no hard evidence. But for Trump, there was enough to spew the falsehood.
“This is bigger than Watergate,” Trump immediately told Priebus in that call, engaging in his favorite game—whataboutism—as he was eager for anything to deflect from the growing questions about his ties to Russia.
The institutional guardrails, this time, held against the lie. But there were consequences. Over the next forty-eight hours, the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, and the FBI director, James Comey, both put out public statements refuting the accusation and making it clear that the Obama administration had not done any spying. Trump leaned on Spicer, once again, to back up the lie, and the embattled press secretary pushed Congress to investigate.
One GOP congressman happily led the charge.
Devin Nunes was the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and, therefore, tasked with running the investigation into Trump’s claims. Nunes, whose family ran a dairy farm and who now represented inland California, was very much in Trump’s thrall and would spend the remainder of his time in Congress bowing before the forty-fifth president. About two weeks into the wiretap matter, Nunes raced to the White House to meet with a source at a secure location to discuss possible evidence of surveillance.
Within a day, Nunes had largely backed off his claim, but the howls of protest about his behavior were deafening. Nunes was accused of collaborating with the White House, compromising the independence and integrity of his investigation.
“[Nunes] will need to decide whether he is the chairman of an independent investigation into conduct which includes allegations of potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russians, or he is going to act as a surrogate of the White House, because he cannot do both,” said Representative Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the committee.
Citing ethical complaints lodged against him, Nunes would eventually step down from his post, though he deemed the claims scurrilous and denied any wrongdoing. Four years later, after Trump had departed office, Nunes would actually announce his resignation from Congress as a whole, turning down a possible spot helming the powerful Ways and Means Committee in favor of taking a leadership post in Trump’s fledgling social media start-up. Nunes, once more, tied himself to Trump.
But more significantly, Nunes was an early example of a Republican congressman defying tradition and breaking congressional norms in order to help Trump. He, like so many Republicans who would follow him, seemed to toss aside his integrity and loyalty to the job in order to back his party’s president.
The Russia probe would come to define Trump’s first two years in office. Democrats and certain cable news hosts deified the man put in charge of it, former FBI director Robert Mueller, as a man above the political fray, above Washington, a man with impeccable integrity and a crackerjack team who would surely—surely!—prove that Trump had conspired with Russia to get him elected in 2016. Russia had meddled in the election—that much was known—but the role that Trump and his campaign may have played was the source of 24/7 speculation.
It drove Trump crazy. He demanded loyalty from others on the payroll, acting more like a mob boss than commander in chief. He demanded subservience from officials, whom he treated as if they had sworn allegiance to him and not to the Constitution. Soon after Comey refused to publicly clear his name in the Russia probe, Trump fired him, an impulsive move that led to Mueller’s appointment.
The special counsel worked in secret, and each incremental development in the probe was greeted with breathless headlines. Indictments followed of key figures in TrumpWorld: Paul Manafort, his campaign chairman; Michael Flynn, his first national security adviser; Roger Stone, his longtime political guru. They lied to the feds and paid the price.
Trump’s behavior toward Russian president Vladimir Putin was always deferential, as he’d talk about his admiration for the authoritarian regime despite anger from his own party. Was Trump actually in Moscow’s employ? Did they have kompromat on him? Or was his behavior fueled by insecurity, fears that if he admitted that Russia had interfered with the election, it would cheapen his victory and chip away at his legitimacy? So he lied, claiming that Russia had not interfered, undermining the very intelligence agencies that worked for him.
Trump’s erratic behavior only fueled the whispers that he must have been in Putin’s pocket, never more so than during the two leaders’ July 2018 summit in Helsinki, Finland. It came at the end of a week in Europe in which Trump had threatened to blow up the NATO alliance and repeatedly undermined some of his nation’s most faithful allies. I had covered Trump for three years at this point, three years that were shadowed by questions about Trump’s ties to Moscow. This was the moment, as Trump stood with Putin, when it was time to ask.
Throughout the meeting, Trump appeared meek, dominated by his Russian counterpart. And then in the news conference afterward, I asked Trump to plainly state his allegiance.
“Just now President Putin denied having anything to do with the election interference in 2016. Every US intelligence agency has concluded that Russia did,” I said to Trump. “My first question for you, sir, is who do you believe? My second question is, would you now with the whole world watching tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016 and would you warn him to never do it again?”
Trump did not hesitate, immediately denying there was any interference and siding with Putin over American intelligence officials. “I have President Putin,” Trump said. “He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Fiona Hill, the senior Russia expert on the National Security Council, who was sitting one row in front of me, later told me that she considered doing something, anything—including faking a heart attack—to disrupt the proceedings and get Trump to stop talking. Then, I asked Putin if he possessed any kompromat on Trump or his family. He chuckled darkly at the question and, chillingly, did not break eye contact with me as he answered. Putin said it would be difficult to obtain damaging information on all prominent Americans. But he also didn’t deny it.
The president’s mood darkened soon after Air Force One raced back to Washington, as he watched Republicans and even Fox News excoriate his performance. He even yelled at Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary who replaced Spicer, for calling on me, a “tough reporter,” to ask a question. And desperate to put the summit behind him, Trump pushed the pilot to return to Washington as fast as possible, shaving more than an hour off the aircraft’s planned flight time. Aides tried to do some damage control, which Trump undermined days later by publicly floating the idea of having another summit with Putin, this time at the White House. It never happened.
The humiliation in Helsinki only heightened scrutiny of Trump’s ties to Russia. And it added to the sense of tumult that gripped the nation and hurt the Republicans’ efforts to keep power in the 2018 midterms. Beyond passing a major tax cut, which largely helped the wealthy, Trump’s legislative scorecard was fairly empty, independents were turned off, and Democrats were motivated. Though the GOP held the Senate that November, Democrats seized control of the House, restoring Nancy Pelosi as Speaker and giving the party the ability to run scores of congressional investigations into the Trump administration—as well as, notably, impeachment power.
But when Mueller finally delivered his report in March 2019, it did not fulfill many Democrats’ dreams. The public’s first glimpse of its contents was conveyed via a letter from newly appointed Attorney General William Barr, who whitewashed Mueller’s findings. It concluded that Russia actively tried to help Trump and that the Republicans’ campaign eagerly accepted the help; however, it did not find sufficient evidence to bring conspiracy charges against Trump or his aides. Mueller also did not reach a conclusion about an obstruction of justice charge against Trump, leaning heavily into a Justice Department recommendation that prohibited federal indictment of a sitting president.
But that ambiguity mattered to Trump not at all. With a roar, he leaped into a victory lap, again declaring the whole investigation a “witch hunt” and falsely claiming that he had received a “total exoneration.” When Mueller’s congressional appearance months later proved anticlimactic, with the former FBI director faltering at times, the Russia probe finally seemed to be behind Trump.
Emboldened, he picked up the phone.