Rupert Murdoch ambled on the sloping Scottish driveway, steadying himself against a gust of wind that afternoon. It was June 2016.
He slowly moved to his seat on a waiting golf cart. His wife, model and actress Jerry Hall, stepped inside. Murdoch, the then eighty-five-year-old founder of News Corporation, ran a global conservative media empire, including the most influential voice in American cable news, Fox News. He drove the right-leaning coverage that swayed millions of viewers across the United States, helping deeply polarize the politics of an increasingly divided nation.
But Murdoch wasn’t at the steering wheel this day. He was sitting in the rear, riding backward. The golf cart suddenly lurched forward, after the driver slammed the gas without warning. Murdoch nearly fell off, a frantic grab for a safety rail the only thing preventing the aged media mogul from tumbling to the hard pavement below.
The driver was Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, and he didn’t slow down. The cart careened recklessly along the path with Murdoch just trying to hang on. And that moment displayed a dynamic that would dominate the next five years.
The image of the golf cart offered a telling preview of Trump’s power over the conservative media, an entity that had helped create him but was powerless under his direction and forced to follow wherever he would take them. This dynamic began during that campaign and only intensified during his time in office. Trump bent the conservative media and much of the Republican Party to his will, becoming such a dominant force that lawmakers and pundits alike rarely dared to break with him. Instead, they rushed to his defense, attacking his critics and muddying the waters about his faults. They took his falsehoods and ran with them, acting as reinforcements when Trump faced the gravest crises of his presidency, including the COVID-19 pandemic, Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and his impeachment over threatening to withhold military aid from Ukraine.
And the conservative media and nearly all Republicans would be well trained to have Trump’s back when he began to tell the Big Lie.
Trump had invited the world’s media to Scotland, where he took a bizarre break from the campaign trail to showcase his newly purchased golf course just outside of Turnberry. The course, former host of the British Open, was undeniably beautiful, nestled along Scotland’s craggy west coast. The promotional blitz was a precursor to how Trump would mingle his politics with his business, as he took advantage of his status as the presumptive Republican nominee to draw the political press to write about the course. His son Eric, who oversaw the renovation, offered a few reporters private tours.
Trump held a news conference at one hole’s tee box, the Irish Sea shimmering behind him on a rare sunny day. The next day, at another course on the Aberdeenshire coast, he would hold one long, roving news conference, moving from hole to hole as I and other reporters chased him and took in the views. The press availability in Turnberry was briefly interrupted by a protester who tossed a bunch of golf balls emblazoned with Nazi symbols. Trump’s subsequent freewheeling remarks also featured an improbable victory lap about Brexit, which had passed the night before. Scotland, a “Remain” stronghold, was numb from the stunning result, yet Trump—who didn’t even know what Brexit meant a few weeks prior—was crowing about the win and linking it to the populist movement that he was leading on the other side of the Atlantic.
Murdoch’s News Corp.’s entities in both the United States and the United Kingdom bolstered the “Leave” moment, as did, it would emerge later, the same shadowy Russian forces that quietly backed Trump. At the time, Fox News was in charge of shaping the United States’ conservative political coverage, its hosts GOP kingmakers. The 2016 candidates all vied for its attention and approval, and Trump, for a while, didn’t seem like its favored choice. After what he deemed unfair coverage of the first Republican debate that cycle, the celebrity developer viciously turned on the network and the debate moderator Megyn Kelly, who he insinuated was having her period. Murdoch was one of the Manhattan elites who looked down upon Trump’s gauche ways, and he strongly disagreed with the reality TV star’s views on immigration and disapproved of his treatment of John McCain.
“When is Donald Trump going to stop embarrassing his friends, let alone the whole country?” Murdoch had tweeted early in the campaign.
But another voice at News Corp.—one of the few employees allowed to operate outside of Murdoch’s influence—was more inclined to bolster Trump. Roger Ailes, a former Richard Nixon adviser turned media consultant, had run CNBC, founded what became MSNBC, and then taken over fledgling Fox News in 1996 and turned it into the most dominant force on Republican politics. The United States’ TV news institutions had traditionally been objective, with little in the way of obvious outward bias, but Ailes set out to change that. Brandishing the slogan “Fair & Balanced,” Fox News gave voice to conservatives who felt drowned out by the so-called mainstream media that so many on the Right felt implicitly favored the liberal politics supported by the nation’s elites in New York, Washington, and Hollywood. Ailes fed into baseless speculation about Barack Obama’s birthplace and stoked the rage that accompanied the Tea Party movement. Pugnacious and provocative, Ailes saw something in Trump that resonated with the blue-collar audience he was trying to attract to the network. He spearheaded Trump’s regular appearances on the morning show Fox & Friends, and his understanding of the self-proclaimed billionaire’s surprising appeal helped hone the network’s grievance-oriented rhetoric that became a perfect venue for the future president.
Once Trump became the Republican nominee, Fox News had no choice but to go along for the ride. The Republican National Convention was held in Cleveland a few weeks after the Scotland excursion, and the meld between network and candidate was complete. Fox News relentlessly bashed Hillary Clinton, seizing upon her use of a private email account while secretary of state and not subtly playing into sexist tropes about her health and stamina. Moreover, it provided air cover for Trump, whitewashing his scandals and eagerly offering a platform for his views. Fox News repeatedly and strenuously denied slanting its coverage for Trump or any Republican, steadfastly declaring that they were providing “fair and balanced” coverage of the news. But at times, it felt like he was a Fox News contributor as well as a presidential candidate.
Other conservative media heavyweights followed suit. Rush Limbaugh, long the king of conservative talk radio, became a friendly platform and would frequently have Trump on. Glenn Beck initially opposed Trump but later bowed to him once his media company began to lose money as MAGA fans turned on him. And a few other conservative news organizations soon moved to Fox News’ right, sensing that some of the Trump fan base had rebelled against the cable giant’s minimal nod to objective news. Newsmax and One America News Network (OAN) would, at times, be completely detached from reality, openly musing about conspiracy theories that even Fox News wouldn’t touch. Trump would occasionally shower them with praise when he was annoyed at the Fox News coverage; early in his administration, he would particularly flash his ire at some of the network’s weekend anchors, who tended to play the news straighter than the more opinionated weeknight hosts. Fox News hosts largely supported him while a number at CNN and MSNBC attacked him. Ratings soared across the board. Anchors and contributors all got paid. Some of the loudest voices attacking Trump were filling their bank accounts because of him.
It was the golden age of cable TV.
Kellyanne Conway was frustrated. A senior adviser to the president, she was having a difficult time getting through to Trump on a passion project of hers, a task force to combat the nation’s opioid crisis. He didn’t read the memos. He ignored her in meetings. Once, she thought she had convinced him during an Oval Office meeting, but she lost him when he got distracted by another aide. She needed a way to get Trump to pay attention and to move him on the issue.
So she went on Fox News.
It became a standard practice among Trump aides and outside allies. The best way to get the president to pay attention, embrace a new policy, or retreat from a catastrophe was to make the appeal on cable. Aides, including Conway, often found it far more effective to make the case via Fox News than even in the Oval Office. Getting an administration official to come on air was, traditionally, a significant coup for a cable booker. But at times during the Trump years, bookers at Fox News had to turn down one White House aide from coming on a show because another had already called offering an appearance in order to make a pitch to the president.
The TV was always on in the White House. Trump started his day around 6:00 a.m. and, before leaving his bedroom, would turn on cable news. Fox & Friends was his favorite, but he’d often flip to Morning Joe, which, most of the time, he would hate-watch. Though he used to be a guest on the show, the hosts consistently blasted him, condemning his racism and disruption of presidential norms and global alliances. Sometimes he’d watch Fox live and catch up on the MSNBC juggernaut via DVR later in the day, which would explain some curiously timed tweets. With some frequency in the Morning Joe 7:00 a.m. hour, Trump would suddenly unleash a tweet attacking something the show’s panel had discussed a solid hour earlier. As a frequent guest, sometimes I’d be called upon to read Trump’s blistering tweets on air. The show’s chyron, when Trump attacked, would playfully change in response: “Morning Joe Thanks Faithful Viewer.”
Trump was obsessed with TV: he’d talk about ratings and slam hosts he didn’t like or who were being critical of him. He told advisers that a good way to measure a guest’s on-air talent was to watch with the TV on mute and see if that person was still compelling to watch; to their surprise, many found that Trump was right. Aides who had scheduled morning meetings found themselves at times waiting an hour or more for the president, who could not tear himself away from the television. Tired of Trump being late even to meetings with senior lawmakers or to calls with heads of state, White House aides eventually adopted a policy of giving the president some unstructured “executive time” in the mornings, which everyone took to mean time watching television and working the phones about what he had just seen.
The TV would stay on in a private dining room just off the Oval Office, which would eventually play a role on the most consequential day of Trump’s presidency. But most days, it became just another spot for him to keep an eye on cable at lunch and in between meetings. Ever the host, Trump would invite awestruck guests to pose for photos in the Oval Office and then, excitedly, whisk them into the dining room for a demonstration of his “Super TiVo,” a souped-up television recording/watching device. At night, more TV. Unlike many of his predecessors, Trump was not one to sample Washington’s cultural or culinary options; in fact, the only restaurant where he ever dined in DC was in his own hotel down the street. Most nights, you could find him just where you could find many seventysomething men: in front of the television. And his channel of choice was the Fox News prime-time lineup.
The cable critic in chief, he fixated on individual reporters and hosts. Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the married Morning Joe anchors, drew particular ire, as did their colleague “Sleepy Eyed” Chuck Todd and CNN’s Don Lemon and Jim Acosta. On the print side, the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman was his primary obsession; if she was in the press pool traveling on Air Force One, it was all but guaranteed that the president would take questions. He singled out others too, whom he tried to impress or win over, hearkening back to his long-held desire to be liked and respected by institutions or people he felt mattered. He would, at times, pass along notes to me via his press secretary, sometimes slipped to me on Air Force One, criticizing my coverage or trying to convince me of his popularity.
Trump cared desperately about his press coverage and frequently complained about it. And to be fair, every president has had a litany of gripes about the fourth estate. But no one placed the media at the center of his presidency like Trump. And no one else declared it the “enemy of the people.”
Republican politicians love to point out what they say is liberal bias in the mainstream media and then position themselves against it. Trump was certainly not the first conservative to use the New York Times or MSNBC as a foil. But from early on in his campaign, he took the anti-media rhetoric to new, more dangerous places. Those who saw him night after night at his rallies recognized the routine: at some point during his stem-winder, he’d point to the back of the hall where the bank of TV cameras was set up. He’d declare that, as he was attacking Clinton, “the red lights” on the cameras were going off, meaning the liberal-controlled networks were cutting away from their coverage. None of that was true. In fact, Trump enjoyed outsize media coverage, dwarfing what was received by his Republican rivals or Clinton. His rallies were outrageous and generated big ratings, with people watching in both delight and horror. He was such a draw that, infamously, CNN once kept up a steady shot of Trump’s empty podium, waiting for the candidate to appear. Even the possibility of Trump speaking at some point actually seemed like better television than watching his rivals.
But the anger Trump ginned up led to threats graver than the loud chants of “CNN sucks” that became a nightly staple at his rallies. Individual reporters became targets. Acosta was frequently harassed while trying to do on-air hits. NBC’s Katy Tur had to travel with security after Trump singled her out from the stage. Haberman and others received harassing emails and tweets. Suspicious packages were mailed to newsrooms and individual anchors’ homes. Many in Trump’s crowd were friendly: asking for selfies with reporters just moments before (somewhat) good-naturedly booing them. But other times, the crowd surged the barricades and some loose cannons spewed hateful words at reporters just trying to do their jobs.
The old saying in politics is “never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel,” meaning that it rarely was a winning proposition for an outgunned candidate to brawl with the mass media. But Trump had his own megaphone, with tens of millions of followers on Twitter and Facebook, and a conservative media that uncritically amplified his message. He deemed the press the “opposition party,” trying to foster the belief that the media was doing the bidding of the Democratic Party. And in moments of criticism, Trump began to use the phrase “enemy of the people” to describe the press, a phrase born of Henrik Ibsen’s famous play and used, perhaps most infamously, with the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, where being labeled an enemy of the people was akin to a death sentence. Hardly a historian, Trump may not have known those specific references, but he was an expert in labeling his opponents as “Other” or something less intrinsically worthy than he and his allies. The label was inflammatory and dangerous, prompting a surge in threats against members of the media.
“The FAKE NEWS … media is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People. SICK!” he wrote in the early days of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
But not all the media.
Trump’s relationship with Fox News only got cozier the longer he was in office. He’d grant its anchors frequent interviews, largely spurning other media outlets. His staff would frequently fan out on its airwaves, knowing that they could offer largely unchallenged talking points. Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s third press secretary, never gave a press briefing but would frequently give interviews to Fox News. Later, she would say that aides would go on Fox News and Fox Business because “that’s just where we went to get what we wanted out” and not be pushed with any tough lines of questioning. Trump aides were speaking to their base and could count on laudatory coverage because, as Grisham said in an example, “Lou Dobbs would do all the talking about how great everything was and I would just nod and say, ‘Yes.’”
Many times, when Trump would call in to Fox & Friends, the hosts would dutifully try to keep him on track by getting him to focus on the issue of the day—like a strong jobs report—instead of a tangent like Hillary Clinton’s emails. They’d clean up his mistakes, give him a second chance to say things, and, at times, gently nudge him to end the interview and get back to work. But Trump usually missed the subtle cues; he was the most powerful man on the planet, but his job felt secondary to time he could spend talking on his favorite morning cable show.
More than once, but most famously before the 2018 midterms, Fox would suddenly seize upon an issue that would excite its viewers and, perhaps not coincidentally, help Trump and Republicans. Ahead of those elections, the network began warning of a “caravan” of migrants heading toward the United States’ southern border, all but labeling them a threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. During the campaign, and again when the border was in the news, Trump took to reciting “The Snake,” a thundering spoken-word performance of the dark song—written by social activist Oscar Brown Jr. in 1963 and made famous by singer Al Wilson five years later—as an allegory of what he saw as the dangers of illegal immigrants and refugees allowed into the United States.
“Take me in, oh tender woman, sighed the vicious snake!” Trump would roar, before concluding the poem by channeling the snake in declaring that the woman “knew” all along the danger she had let in as the serpent injected her with poison. Fox would carry the whole performance. At times, the lines blurred: Was Fox News taking its cues from the White House or was the Trump administration picking its political fights based on what it was watching on cable?
And the Fox personalities were more than just images on a screen.
Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Laura Ingraham, Lou Dobbs, Jeanine Pirro. They all would grow used to their phones lighting up soon after their show went off the air, with the president on the other side of the call praising how they had defended him or gone after his enemies. He’d preview attack lines, review the quality of guests, suggest better lighting. And it became a two-way street: the hosts would lobby Trump as well, with Dobbs, in particular, pushing the president to build his border wall and ramp up his anti-immigration diatribes. But the hosts weren’t always in lockstep: in January 2020, viewers witnessed a marked difference in approach to Iran from Tucker Carlson in the 8:00 p.m. hour and Sean Hannity in the 9:00 p.m. hour. Carlson slammed Trump’s decision to authorize the killing of top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, while Hannity praised the move. Both men also made their cases privately to Trump on the phone.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the network and the White House became more intertwined. Carlson, who would supplant Hannity as the network’s top host, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago to warn him that the virus could cost him the election. Ingraham, in April 2020, visited the White House to push hydroxychloroquine, a drug that many on the Right touted as a cure for COVID. There was no evidence to support such a claim, and it was later deemed ineffective to use. But Trump himself took the medication, and the constant hype around it on Fox left it scarce for patients, including people with lupus and other autoimmune disorders, who truly needed it.
And even more pervasive—and dangerous—on the network’s airwaves was skepticism over masks and then the vaccine, misinformation that undoubtedly cost American lives. Trump voters, per polling, were far less likely to take the vaccine than Biden voters.
First, Donald Trump said that Ted Cruz’s wife was ugly. Then, Trump said Cruz’s father helped assassinate President John F. Kennedy.
How did Ted Cruz get back at Trump?
By becoming one of his most faithful and fierce defenders.
Cruz’s calculated capitulation to Trump, a move made largely out of fear of Trump’s supporters, served as a perfect microcosm of how Trump bent the Republican Party to his will. For a time in the 2016 campaign, Cruz was Trump’s most potent rival in the GOP, his Texas persona and Ivy League debate club pedigree making him a shrewd politician, even if he was also one of the most disliked people on Capitol Hill. He was savvy but smarmy, and a number of Democrats and Republicans alike made no secret that they believed he was a phony. But Cruz’s well-organized ground game won several states—including Iowa and Wisconsin—and his delegate operation outmaneuvered the Trump team to keep the contest alive for months.
Trump dubbed him “Lyin’ Ted” and offered a nightly routine at rallies when he’d declare that “Lyin’ Ted holds the Bible high, puts the Bible down, and then he lies.” He also had fun noting that the Texan was actually born in Calgary. And for a time, Cruz fought back. Right as his campaign drew to a close that spring, the Texas senator unleashed a diatribe on Trump, calling him a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” and “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen.” And at that party’s convention in Cleveland that summer, Cruz was given a prime speaking spot but declined to offer a full-throated endorsement, instead urging the delegates to “vote their conscience.” The speech was stunning and explosive and a betrayal. It was a rare moment of surprise, a real piece of political drama at a political convention, which in recent decades had turned into tightly scripted and often boring set pieces. The crowd booed loudly. Trump, flanked by his family, emerged from a skybox and glared down at the senator.
The moment was electric. It also marked the end of Ted Cruz’s political courage.
The backlash was immediate and vicious. The audience was deafening in their boos, and Cruz and his family got jeered as they were whisked out of the downtown arena. Fox News, which usually gave Cruz a friendly home, turned on him immediately and denounced what he did. Other Republicans declared that Cruz had shattered efforts at party unity. Donors threatened to withhold their checks. Cruz was up for reelection, and there was immediate talk of a GOP challenge. Cruz was stunned, telling aides that he did not realize that Trump’s takeover was so immediate and thorough.
Only two months after Cruz declared that his principles would not allow him to endorse Trump, the senator officially backed the GOP nominee. He later privately apologized to Trump and began to be one of his loudest supporters in the Senate. And his transformation was mirrored, if less dramatically, by other Republicans. There were a few exceptions—John McCain, Mitt Romney, Bob Corker—but for the most part, GOP lawmakers fell in line behind Trump. Some, like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio and Representative Devin Nunes of California, were true believers, enthralled by Trump’s policies and personalities. Others, like Cruz, supported him out of fear. Their own future success, they reasoned, would happen only if they lashed themselves closely to Trump, staying out of his Twitter crosshairs and avoiding the wrath of his supporters and his favorite cable channel.
Mostly through intimidation, Trump had consolidated power. Both the conservative media and the Republican Party followed his whims—and they rushed to his defense during two of the biggest challenges of his presidency, setting the stage for what was to come.
The first was named Robert Mueller.
The special counsel worked in the shadows.
He had served as FBI director for more than a decade under presidents both Republican and Democrat, receiving bipartisan acclaim for his toughness, fairness, and relentlessness. Once he left his post in 2013, he quietly settled into private life, moving away from the bright Beltway spotlight. But in the first months of 2017, Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the early stages of the Russia investigation, citing his own questionable contacts with Moscow’s ambassador. And then, in a fit of rage over the probe, Trump fired James Comey. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, now atop the case with Sessions sidelined, appointed a special counsel to oversee the investigation that was threatening to overwhelm the Trump White House.
He picked Mueller.
Trump was devastated by the appointment, slumping over when he heard the news and moaning to the aides present that “my presidency is over.” Mueller’s credentials were impeccable, earning compliments from both sides of the aisle. He staffed up with some of the nation’s top investigators. For a time, even the White House pledged some cooperation, and negotiations began for Trump to give an interview with investigators.
Mueller’s team moved swiftly, examining any and all contacts between the Trump campaign and Russians—and there seemed to be a shocking number of them—and zeroing in on some key figures in the president’s inner circle. One focus: a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower of Jared Kushner, Donald Trump Jr., and then–campaign manager Paul Manafort with a Kremlin-connected lawyer. Roger Stone came under scrutiny for his ties to WikiLeaks and the hacker who was releasing Clinton’s emails during the campaign. And beyond the Russia interference, Mueller opened an investigation into whether Trump had obstructed justice in the early stages of the probe, including by firing Comey.
The breadth of the probe was breathtaking, and it happened in silence. Immediately, the edict came down from Mueller to his team: they would not talk. With remarkable discipline, the special counsel’s office did not speak to the press; it did not leak. The quiet added to the air of mystery around the probe, filled by breathless speculation on the cable news shows and relentless, award-winning journalism by outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. The White House was under siege, enshrouded in a scandal that felt like Watergate in scope.
But Mueller’s silence left a vacuum. And Trump and his allies seized the opportunity to fill it and shape the story.
The White House was initially caught off guard by the sweep of Mueller’s probe—the investigation was called “Crossfire Hurricane”—and the president’s aides’ initial responses were faltering. Trump, briefly, held his tongue, for fear that attacks on the popular special counsel could backfire. But soon, his reticence faded, and he went on the offensive, declaring the Russia probe “a witch hunt,” the phrase that would come to dominate his defense to Mueller’s investigation. Always desperate to be defended on TV, he drafted former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani to be the public face of his legal team, as other lawyers toiled behind the scenes. Just a decade and a half earlier, Giuliani had been hailed as “America’s Mayor” for his stoic defiance after the September 11 terror attacks, becoming the face of American resolve. But times had changed.
Giuliani had drifted ever rightward, first for his ill-fated 2008 presidential run and then in an effort to stay relevant on the conservative media circuit. His consulting firm picked up some unsavory international clients, and Giuliani’s personal life became a fixture in the tabloids. Still, he had been a useful surrogate for Trump on the campaign trail, as well as a subject of the candidate’s mockery, usually for drinking too much and falling asleep on the plane. When Trump won office, Giuliani had asked to be secretary of state. Trump had said no.
Giuliani was therefore eager to get back in the game and took on the dirty work. His media performances were scattershot, compelling, and at times incoherent. Sometimes, there was a method to his apparent madness: more than once, he’d get out ahead of an unflattering story to defuse the bad headlines, such as when he revealed to Hannity that Trump did, in fact, reimburse his fixer Michael Cohen the $130,000 that was paid to keep porn star Stormy Daniels from talking about their affair. Other times, well, he just plain messed up. But, writ large, his tactics proved surprisingly effective: he spewed such nonsense every day, and floated such outlandish conspiracy theories—wait, Hillary was the one colluding with Russia?—that it got too confusing for many average Americans to follow. What was real and what was the lie? It all became noise. And both Giuliani and Trump eventually unleashed a fusillade of attacks on Mueller, ignoring his sterling reputation and record as a Vietnam War hero to suggest that the man investigating the president’s possible ties to Moscow was actually the treasonous one.
They had help. Other Republicans, leery at first of attacking the special counsel, began to join in, with Representative Jim Jordan declaring that “the public trust in this whole thing is gone,” and others insinuating that previous donations to Democrats made by members of Mueller’s team undermined their integrity. Fox News did the same, with its prime-time hosts bemoaning the probe’s time and expense while painting it as a Democratic plot to bring down a GOP president. The media ran with two of the president’s more outlandish claims: that Mueller had once begged him for his old FBI job back and that the special counsel had once quit one of Trump’s country clubs in a rage. Neither of those was true.
It was night after night, attack after attack, lie after lie. Trump’s falsehoods filled the space and his right-wing allies both in Congress and in TV studios were happy to regurgitate them. To be sure, they didn’t distract the methodical, quiet nature of Mueller’s work: the special counsel’s team indicted or got guilty pleas from thirty-four people and three companies during their lengthy investigation. Among those convicted or pleading guilty were some of Trump’s closest allies: Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone.
But the attacks dragged down the perception of Mueller in the public eye. The special counsel remained silent, but the withering broadsides that filled that void sent the special counsel’s approval rating falling. That, in turn, emboldened more Republicans to denounce the probe, making Trump’s impeachment and removal from office unlikely. A sitting president couldn’t be charged with a crime, according to a Justice Department guideline that the special counsel seemed committed to following; so the probe would likely end with a political outcome, and Trump’s allies—as they would after the 2020 election—went along with whatever falsehood he claimed if it meant keeping him in office and maintaining their own access to power.
Washington’s wait for Mueller’s report lasted nearly two years.
Finally, in March 2019, the special counsel turned in his findings to the Department of Justice. William Barr had become attorney general not long before and had the first look at the findings, which he then summarized in a letter to Congress released two days later.
Barr wrote that Mueller was unequivocal in his conclusion that Russia did try to interfere with the election, both by online disinformation and by hacking and releasing Clinton’s emails. But he quoted the report as saying, “Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” And then Barr took it upon himself to color how he presented the rest of the findings, writing that Mueller had reached no conclusion on the question of obstruction of justice and noting that the special counsel wrote, “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”
Trump’s response was immediate: “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!”
That, of course, was not true: Trump was not exonerated. And in reality, the findings were more damaging to the president. Once a redacted version of the report was released the following month, it became clearer that Mueller had uncovered plenty of evidence of obstruction. But at that point, the nation had largely moved on. Barr had established the narrative, the final piece of Trump’s enablers’ lengthy campaign to help the president. In what would be a moment of stark foreshadowing, a powerful government official stepped beyond his usual role to assist Trump.
After years of being convinced that the Russia probe would bring Trump down, the Left was disheartened. And its last embers of hope were extinguished when Mueller turned in a shaky performance in a congressional hearing on the matter that July 24, at times seeming uncertain about the findings of the investigation that bore his name.
Trump had won. His allies in the media and the Republican Party had helped. And a playbook had been written.
Just one day after Mueller’s shaky showing, Trump called Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Zelenskyy, a former actor and comedian, was under extraordinary pressure due to the threat posed by Russian troops along his border and was eager for a show of support from Washington.
Trump had other ideas. He pushed the new Ukrainian president to get his country’s prosecutor to open an investigation into Joe Biden, at the time perceived as the Democratic front-runner for the 2020 election, and his younger son, Hunter Biden. Trump and his allies had seen a potential opening for an attack: when he was vice president, Biden had pushed the Ukrainian government in 2015 to fire its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was widely seen as an obstacle to reform because he failed to bring corruption cases. At the time, Hunter Biden sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings Limited, which was the subject of an investigation that Shokin’s office had essentially abandoned.
Trump was holding back hundreds of millions of dollars in military assistance that Congress had appropriated to help Ukraine fend off Russian aggression. And when he mentioned the aid, and the possible investigation into the Bidens, he asked Zelenskyy for a “favor.”
A whistleblower soon sounded the alarm and furor quickly followed. Democrats were outraged as they connected the dots: Trump had threatened to withhold US military aid to an ally in need unless that foreign government investigated his domestic political rival. And once more, he seemed to be doing Vladimir Putin’s bidding.
Trump had declared war on the wheels of American governance, from the diplomatic corps to the intelligence community to Congress. In an effort to bend Zelenskyy to his will, the president ousted the American ambassador to Ukraine, froze congressionally approved military aid, shut out foreign-policy experts in the National Security Council, and sidestepped the State Department to set up a back channel to Kyiv with Giuliani, his personal lawyer. After the whistleblower flagged the call, and key members of Congress objected to withholding the aid, the White House released it and Zelenskyy—who would return to the global spotlight a few years later—abandoned a promise to investigate the Bidens. But word of the whistleblower report leaked late that September. The Democrats swiftly began an impeachment inquiry in the House.
Once more, the president and his allies raced to his defense. Trump denied any wrongdoing, deeming his conversation with Zelenskyy a “perfect call.” He and Giuliani railed against the whistleblower, calling him a spy. Others who flagged the president’s inappropriate behavior, like Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, feared for their lives. Those who tried to report on the episode were vilified in the conservative media; Tucker Carlson called the whole proceedings “a flimsy scandal.”
A number of key Republicans—including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Representative Trey Gowdy—deemed the investigations into the call “a sham.” Lindsey Graham went further: though he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee and would have to swear an oath to uphold his sacred duty as a potential impeachment juror, Graham immediately denounced the proceedings and suggested he had no intention of being impartial.
“I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind. I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here,” Graham said. “I will do everything I can to make [the impeachment trial] die quickly.”
The Democrats held the House and had the votes: Trump was impeached. But the GOP-controlled Senate stayed in lockstep: only one Republican, Mitt Romney, voted to remove Trump from office. The rest voted to acquit. Trump remained president.
Trump was stung: he was only the third president to be impeached, and this would be (so he thought) the first line of his political obituary. But he also, once again, proved indestructible. Using their now-familiar scorched-earth playbook, the president’s allies had done their job: Trump’s approval rating went up during the impeachment trial. In early February, he hovered just below 50 percent, his highest mark yet in the Gallup daily tracking poll. And the day after his acquittal, he strolled into the White House’s elegant East Room. It was time to gloat and settle scores.
“It was evil,” Trump said of the attempt to end his presidency. “It was corrupt. It was dirty cops. It was leakers and liars.”
His rambling, angry, sixty-two-minute remarks were meant to air out grievances and unofficially launch his reelection bid—with the crucible of impeachment behind him, his so-so approval ratings unharmed, Republicans unified, and the economy roaring. The president’s advisers also watched, relieved that the shadow of impeachment was now behind them, letting them focus on the reelection battle ahead. Trump had won again.
But there was something else stirring. The Russia and Ukraine probes had used the same script: he and his allies created a smokescreen, tossing out false accusations and exaggerated claims to impugn Mueller’s integrity or that of the Democrats running the Ukraine investigation. While most of the claims were laughable on the surface, many got traction in the conservative media and, therefore, were taken as gospel by many Trump supporters. Polling suggested stark divides, with Republicans believing blatant falsehoods put forth by the president in his own defense.
Angry tribalism was growing. And it created a template for the year—and the election—on the horizon.