1 While Trump is the 45th president, he is only the 44th man to occupy the office; Grover Cleveland is counted twice because of his nonconsecutive terms. So for those of you who thought I counted wrong, please allow me this toddler-like response: nyah nyah nyah!!
2 Chuck Schumer, quoted in Ben Kamisar, “Schumer: Trump’s ‘Temper Tantrum’ over Wall Funding Is Leading to Shutdown,” NBC News, December 16, 2018; Sally Yates (@SallyQYates), Twitter, January 5, 2019, 10:11 a.m., https://twitter.com/SallyQYates/status/1081583896217694209; Nancy Pelosi, quoted in Paul Kane, Philip Rucker, and Josh Dawsey, “‘She Wields the Knife’: Pelosi Moves to Belittle and Undercut Trump in Shutdown Fight,” Washington Post, January 16, 2019.
3 Glenn Thrush, “Pelosi Warns Democrats: Stay in the Center or Trump May Contest Election Results,” New York Times, May 4, 2019.
4 See, for example, Caitlin Oprysko, “Bullock: ‘We’re Expecting More from Preschoolers’ Than Trump,” Politico, May 15, 2019.
5 Jack Shafer, “Donald Trump Is a 2-Year-Old: It’s Time for the Press to Treat Him Like One,” Politico, June 1, 2016.
6 Mark Wilson, “Data Proves It: Trump Has the Emotional Maturity of a Toddler,” Fast Company, January 20, 2017.
7 Trevor Noah, The Daily Show, November 30, 2016, segment accessed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P1IVQJdVvE.
8 David Brooks, “When the World Is Led by a Child,” New York Times, May 15, 2017; Ross Douthat, “The 25th Amendment Solution for Removing Trump,” New York Times, May 16, 2017.
9 David A. Graham, “The Infantilization of the President,” Atlantic, October 11, 2017.
10 Dana Milbank, “President Trump Is Entering His Terrible Twos,” Washington Post, January 7, 2019.
11 Adam Serwer, “Trump the Toddler,” Atlantic, January 10, 2019.
12 Tony Schwartz, quoted in Jane Mayer, “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All,” New Yorker, July 18, 2016.
13 Donald J. Trump and Tony Schwartz, The Art of the Deal (New York: Random House, 1987), 176.
14 The triggering story was Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, “Inside the Failing Mission to Tame Donald Trump’s Tongue,” New York Times, August 13, 2016.
15 Joshua Green, Devil’s Bargain (New York: Penguin, 2017), 201. See also Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 14.
16 Woodward, Fear, 37.
17 Trump also told Stahl, “I’m President and You’re Not.” 60 Minutes, October 14, 2018, transcript available at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-full-interview-60-minutes-transcript-lesley-stahl-2018-10-14/.
18 Mary Papenfuss, “Jim Acosta: Trump ‘Hates’ Mattis Letter—And News Stories That He Needs Adult Supervision,” Huffington Post, December 21, 2018; See also Josh Wagner, Josh Dawsey, and Robert Costa, “Trump Pushes Back on Chief of Staff’s Claims That Border Wall Pledges Are ‘Uninformed,’” Washington Post, January 18, 2018; Michael C. Bender, “Trump Gets White House Witnesses to Attest to His ‘Very Calm’ Demeanor,” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2019.
19 Michael D’Antonio, Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2015), 40.
20 Trump and Schwartz, Art of the Deal, 70–71.
21 Paul Schwartzman and Michael E. Miller, “Confident. Incorrigible. Bully: Little Donny Was a Lot like Candidate Donald Trump,” Washington Post, June 22, 2016.
22 Tim O’Brien, quoted in Michael Kruse, “‘He Was Surprised as Anyone,’” Politico, November 11, 2016.
23 Jason Kurtz, “Van Jones on Trump: ‘He Became President of the United States in That Moment, Period,’” CNN, March 1, 2017.
24 Mark Hensch, “CNN Host: ‘Donald Trump Became President’ Last Night,” The Hill, April 7, 2017.
25 Ashley Parker and Robert Costa, “‘Everyone Tunes In’: Inside Trump’s Obsession with Cable TV,” Washington Post, April 23, 2017. Throughout this book, unless otherwise indicated, all emphases are mine and not in the original text.
26 Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner), Twitter, April 25, 2017, 9:23 a.m., https://twitter.com/dandrezner/status/856876322001432581. This tweet begins a thread of more than a thousand tweets, but its functionality on Twitter is far from perfect.
27 Josh Dawsey, Shane Goldmacher, and Alex Isenstadt, “The Education of Donald Trump,” Politico, April 27, 2017.
28 Robbie Gramer, “NATO Frantically Tries to Trump-Proof President’s First Visit,” Foreign Policy, May 15, 2017.
29 Hunter Walker, “Even Some in White House Are Frustrated by the Stonewalling on Donald Jr.’s Meeting,” Yahoo News, July 12, 2017.
30 Katie Walsh, quoted in Michael Wolff, “Donald Trump Didn’t Want to Be President,” New York, January 3, 2018.
31 Erick Erickson, “The Problem for the GOP,” Maven, January 23, 2018. Erickson subsequently deleted that portion of his blog entry, but not before I captured it here: Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner), Twitter, January 23, 2018, 7:35 a.m., https://twitter.com/dandrezner/status/955796157095084033.
32 Sonam Sheth, “‘He’s Losing His S---’: Trump’s Advisers Are Increasingly Worried about His Mental State following Days of Erratic Behavior,” Business Insider, September 6, 2019; Karen DeYoung, Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan, and Michael Birnbaum, “Trump Decided to Leave Troops in Syria after Conversations about Oil, Officials Say,” Washington Post, October 25, 2019.
33 On Mattis, see Patrick Radden Keefe, “McMaster and Commander,” New Yorker, April 23, 2018; on Kelly, see Tara Palmeri (@tarapalmeri), Twitter, September 4, 2018, 8:26 p.m., https://twitter.com/tarapalmeri/status/1037150064391737344.
34 Vivian Salama and Jill Colvin, “Kelly Wins Praise across the Aisle, but Will Trump Change?” Associated Press, August 1, 2017.
35 Quotes from, respectively, Josh Dawsey, “Trump’s Dizzying Day of Interviews,” Politico, May 1 2017; Dawsey, Eliana Johnson, and Josh Meyer, “Trump’s Handling of Classified Info Brings New Chaos to White House,” Politico, May 15, 2017; and Eli Stokols, Rebecca Ballhaus, and Louise Radnofsky, “Fired FBI Director James Comey to Testify in Public,” Wall Street Journal, May 20, 2017.
36 On the importance of same-party cues on partisans, see Tim Groeling and Matthew Baum, “Crossing the Water’s Edge: Elite Rhetoric, Media Coverage, and the Rally-Round-the-Flag Phenomenon,” Journal of Politics 70 (October 2008): 1065–85.
37 “I Am Part of the Resistance inside the Trump Administration,” New York Times, September 5, 2018.
38 Jake Tapper (@JakeTapper), Twitter, August 2, 2019, 4:08 p.m., https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/1157397870724702208.
39 Gabriella Munoz, “Trump Goes after Anonymous Sources, Says Stories That Use Them Are ‘Fiction,’” Washington Times, August 28, 2018.
40 Indeed, the odds are excellent that Lewandowski is one of those anonymous sources. Corey Lewandowski, quoted in Marc Leibovich, “On the Trump-Mood Beat—But Why?” New York Times Magazine, November 30, 2018. The story makes clear that Lewandowski has offered anonymous quotes to reporters in the past.
41 Newt Gingrich, quoted in Ashley Parker and Robert Costa, “Trump’s Lack of Discipline Leaves New Chief of Staff Frustrated and Dismayed,” Washington Post, August 16, 2017.
42 CNN State of the Union (@CNNSotu), Twitter, February 11, 2018, 8:34 a.m., https://twitter.com/CNNSotu/status/962696451024355335.
43 Bob Corker (@SenBobCorker), Twitter, October 8, 2017, 10:13 a.m., https://twitter.com/SenBobCorker/status/917045348820049920.
44 Karl Rove, “Political Death by 1,000 Tweets,” Wall Street Journal, June 7, 2017.
45 Christopher Ruddy, quoted in Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, Tom Hamburger, Robert Costa, and Matt Zapotosky, “‘Buckle Up’: As Mueller Probe Enters Second Year, Trump and Allies Go on War Footing,” Washington Post, May 13, 2018.
46 Urs Gehriger, “Tucker Carlson: Trump Is Not Capable,” Die Weltwoche, December 7, 2018, https://www.weltwoche.ch/ausgaben/2018–49/artikel/trump-is-not-capable-die-weltwoche-ausgabe-49–2018.html.
47 Aaron Blake, “Rex Tillerson on Trump: ‘Undisciplined, Doesn’t Like to Read’ and Tries to Do Illegal Things,” Washington Post, December 7, 2018.
48 Ryan Costello (@RyanCostello), Twitter, December 21, 2018, 1:28 p.m., https://twitter.com/ryancostello/status/1076197684401373184.
49 Rachel Frazin, “Graham: Trump ‘Can Be a Handful,’” The Hill, February 7, 2019.
50 Adam Kinzinger (@RepKinzinger), Twitter, August 2, 2019, 11:12 a.m., https://twitter.com/repkinzinger/status/1157323336139137024?lang=en.
51 Tim Alberta, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), 489.
52 Chris Christie, Let Me Finish (New York: Hachette, 2019), 5.
53 Robert S. Mueller III, Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, March 2019, 2:32n155.
54 Mueller, Report, 2:39, 2:81, 2:85.
55 Mueller, Report, 2:51, 2:54, 2:57, 2:79.
56 See Dana Milbank, “The United States Is Being Run by a Toddler,” Washington Post, November 8, 2019.
57 Isabel Oakeshott, “Britain’s Man in the US Says Trump Is ‘Inept,’” Daily Mail, July 7, 2019.
58 David E. Sanger, “‘It Could Have Been Any of Us’: Disdain for Trump Runs among Ambassadors,” New York Times, July 10, 2019.
59 Siobhán O’Grady and Claire Parker, “U.K. Ambassador Kim Darroch’s Private Cables Were Frank. Trump’s Public Response Was a ‘Nasty Diplomatic Step,’” Washington Post, July 10, 2019.
60 To qualify for inclusion, a respected media outlet had to source the toddler-like descriptions of the president from individuals who had a vested interest in Trump succeeding as president.
61 Michael Scherer and Zeke Miller, “Donald Trump after Hours,” Time, May 11, 2017.
62 Felicia Sonmez, Anne Gearan, and Damian Paletta, “Trump Postpones Denmark Trip after Prime Minister Declines to Sell Him Greenland,” Washington Post, August 21, 2019.
63 Woodward, Fear; Omarosa Maningault-Newman, Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House (New York: Gallery, 2018); Howard Kurtz, Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War over the Truth (New York: Regnery, 2018); Cliff Sims, Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2019).
64 Josh Chafetz, Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017). It is true that, compared to the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution created a stronger executive. This does not vitiate the point that the framers wanted an executive who was less powerful than the King of England who inspired the American Revolution. See Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), chap. 4.
65 Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers (New York: Bantam, 1982), 263.
66 Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, Federalist Papers, Federalist no. 69 (Hamilton), 348–54.
67 Daniel Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “Pathways to the Present: Political Development in America,” In The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, ed. Brian Glenn and Steven Teles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Philip Rocco, “The Anti-Analytic Presidency Revisited,” Forum 15 (July 2017).
68 Christopher Condon, “Here’s a Timeline of All Trump’s Key Quotes on Powell and the Fed,” Bloomberg, July 22, 2019.
69 Jimmy Carter, quoted in Ronald Randall, “Presidential Power versus Bureaucratic Intransigence: The Influence of the Nixon Administration on Welfare Policy,” American Political Science Review 73 (September 1979), 795.
70 Gretchen Helmke and Steven Levitsky, “Informal Institutions and Comparative Politics: A Research Agenda,” Perspectives on Politics 2 (December 2004), 727.
71 Julia Azari and Jennifer Smith, “Unwritten Rules: Informal Institutions in Established Democracies,” Perspectives on Politics 10 (March 2012), 49.
72 Peter Haas, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” International Organization 46 (Winter 1992): 1–35.
73 Barack Obama, quoted in Yoni Appelbaum, “Memo to Trump: This Is Why You’re Losing,” Atlantic, June 15, 2017.
74 Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents (New York: Free Press, 1990), 7.
75 William Howell and Terry Moe, Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government—And Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency (New York: Basic Books, 2016), xvii.
76 Yashar Ali, “What George W. Bush Really Thought of Donald Trump’s Inauguration,” New York, March 29, 2017.
77 See, for example, Eric Posner, “Are There Limits to Trump’s Power?” New York Times, November 10, 2016; Jack Goldsmith, “Libertarian Panic, Unlawful Action, and the Trump Presidency,” Lawfare, November 22, 2016; Daron Acemoglu, “We Are the Last Defense against Trump,” Foreign Policy, January 18, 2017.
78 On the history of bad Presidential behavior, see James M. Banner, ed., Presidential Misconduct: From George Washington to Today (New York: New Press, 2019).
79 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), x.
80 Philip J. Cooper, By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), 2. See also William Howell, Power without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
81 Howell, Power without Persuasion, 7.
82 Julia Azari, “The Constitution Doesn’t Say Enough about Limiting Executive Power,” Vox, April 11, 2019, https://www.vox.com/mischiefs-of-faction/2019/4/11/18306412/constitution-executive-power-limits.
83 Schlesinger Jr., Imperial Presidency, 208.
84 For a full list, see Barbara Salazar Torreon and Sofia Plagakis, “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798–2019,” Congressional Research Service Report 7-5700, July 17, 2019.
85 See, on this point, James Goldgeier and Elizabeth Saunders, “The Unconstrained Presidency,” Foreign Affairs 97 (September/October 2018): 144–56.
86 Mira Rapp-Hooper and Mathew Waxman, “Presidential Alliance Powers,” Washington Quarterly 42 (Summer 2019): 67–83.
87 See Douglas Irwin, Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), chap. 9.
88 Linda Fowler, Watchdogs on the Hill: The Decline of Congressional Oversight of U.S. Foreign Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
89 Helen Milner and Dustin Tingley, Sailing the Water’s Edge: The Domestic Politics of American Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
90 Howell, Power without Persuasion, 134.
91 Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005); Charles A. Kupchan and Peter L. Trubowitz. “Dead Center: The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United States,” International Security 32 (Fall 2007): 7–44; Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012); Pew Research Center, “Political Polarization in the American Public,” June 12, 2014, http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/political-polarization-in-the-american-public/; Kenneth Schultz, “Perils of Polarization for U.S. Foreign Policy,” Washington Quarterly 40 (Winter 2018): 7–28.
92 See, for example, Christopher Hare and Keith Poole, “The Polarization of Contemporary American Politics,” Polity 46 (July 2014): 411–29; Mann and Ornstein, It’s Even Worse.
93 Andrew Rudalevige, The New Imperial Presidency (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 15. See also Howell, Power without Persuasion, 176–77.
94 Christopher Ingraham, “Six Times Trump Said Executive Orders Were Bad before He Decided They Were Actually Good,” Washington Post, April 25, 2017.
95 Howell, Power without Persuasion, chap. 6.
96 Hedrick Smith, The Power Game: How Washington Works (New York: Ballantine, 1988).
97 Randall, “Presidential Power”; Andrew Nathan, The Administrative Presidency (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1983); Andrew Rudalevige, “Bureaucratic Control and the Future of Presidential Power,” White House Studies 10 (February 2010): 51–68; Gary Hollibaugh, Gabriel Horton, and David Lewis. “Presidents and Patronage,” American Journal of Political Science 58 (October 2014): 1024–42.
98 Danny Vinik, “America’s Government Is Getting Old,” Politico, September 27, 2017.
99 See Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018).
100 Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “Bannon Vows a Daily Fight for ‘Deconstruction of the Administrative State.’” Washington Post, February 23, 2017.
101 See Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), and Daniel W. Drezner, The Ideas Industry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 2, from which this paragraph is drawn.
102 Gallup, “75% in U.S. See Widespread Government Corruption,” September 19, 2015, http://www.gallup.com/poll/185759/widespread-government-corruption.aspx.
103 Gallup, “Honesty/Ethics in Professions,” http://www.gallup.com/poll/1654/honesty-ethics-professions.aspx.
104 Tom W. Smith and Jaesok Son, “Trends in Public Attitudes about Confidence in Institutions,” National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago, May 2013, http://www.norc.org/PDFs/GSS%20Reports/Trends%20in%20Confidence%20Institutions_Final.pdf.
105 Scott Detrow, “Show’s Over? Trump Pledges to Be ‘So Presidential You Will Be So Bored,’” NPR, April 21, 2016.
106 Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman, and Alexander Burns, “Trump Pressed Top Republicans to End Senate Russia Inquiry,” New York Times, November 30, 2017.
107 Kimberly Dozier, “New Power Center in Trumpland: The ‘Axis of Adults,’” Daily Beast, April 16, 2017; Ilan Goldenberg, “Here’s How Trump’s ‘Axis of Adults’ Weathered the First 100 Days,” Foreign Policy, April 28, 2017; Annie Karni, “Tillerson’s Stock Rises in the White House,” Politico, April 15, 2017; Tara Palmeri, “Trump Learning to Love Bush Aides,” Politico, April 17, 2017; James Mann, “The Adults in the Room,” New York Review of Books, October 26, 2017.
108 See, for example, Elizabeth Saunders, “Leaders, Advisers, and the Political Origins of Elite Support for War,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 62 (October 2018): 2118–49.
109 Woodward, Fear, 73–74.
110 Matthew Lee and Josh Lederman, “Trump Wants Out of Syria, but Don’t Say ‘Timeline,’” Associated Press, April 5, 2018.
111 Helene Cooper, Peter Baker, Eric Schmitt, and Mitchel Ferman, “Two Years In, Trump Struggles to Master Role of Military Commander,” New York Times, November 16, 2018.
112 Richard Spencer, “I Was Fired as Navy Secretary. Here’s What I’ve Learned Because of It,” Washington Post, November 27, 2019.
113 Barbara Starr, “Trump Is Fraying Nerves inside the Pentagon,” CNN, January 17, 2019.
114 Quoted in Jonathan Martin and Mark Landler, “Bob Corker Says Trump’s Recklessness Threatens ‘World War III,’” New York Times, October 8, 2017.
115 Eliana Johnson, “How John Kelly Became ‘Chief in Name Only,’” Politico, July 29, 2018.
116 Nancy Cook, “Trump Bulldozes across the Presidency’s Red Lines,” Politico, April 12, 2019.
117 Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe, “For Some Foreign Diplomats, the Trump White House Is a Troubling Enigma,” Washington Post, October 9, 2017.
118 Karen DeYoung and Josh Dawsey, “France Tries to Orchestrate a No-Drama G-7 Summit, but Trump Is the X Factor,” Washington Post, August 22, 2019.
119 Woodward, Fear, 225–26; VandeHei and Allen, “Trump’s State of Mind”; Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, “Trump, Defending His Mental Fitness, Says He’s a ‘Very Stable Genius,’” New York Times, January 6, 2018.
120 Cook, “Trump Bulldozes.”
121 Alexi McCammond and Jonathan Swan, “Insider Leaks Trump’s ‘Executive Time’–Filled Private Schedules,” Axios, February 3, 2019.
1 Marc Leibovich, “On the Trump-Mood Beat—But Why?” New York Times Magazine, November 30, 2018. Leibovich also noted about the anonymous sources, “To state the obvious, any on-the-record source inside the White House willing to discuss the president with any meaningful level of candor would almost certainly not keep her or his job.”
2 See Daniel W. Drezner, “The Angry Populist as Foreign Policy Leader: Real Change or Just Hot Air?” Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 41 (Spring 2017): 23–43.
3 Steven Webster, “Anger and Declining Trust in Government in the American Electorate,” Political Behavior 40 (December 2018): 933–64; Ethan C. Busby, Joshua R. Gubler, and Kirk A. Hawkins, “Framing and Blame Attribution in Populist Rhetoric,” Journal of Politics 81 (April 2019): 616–30.
4 Curt Mills, “Trump: ‘I Will Gladly Accept the Mantle of Anger,’” Washington Examiner, January 14, 2016.
5 Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature (New York: Viking, 2011); Andrew Linklatter, “Anger and World Politics: How Collective Emotions Shift over Time,” International Theory 6 (November 2014): 574–78.
6 Neta Crawford, “Institutionalizing Passion in World Politics: Fear and Empathy,” International Theory 6 (November 2014), 540. See also Leonie Huddy, Stanley Feldman, and Erin Cassese, “On the Distinct Political Effects of Anxiety and Anger,” In The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior, ed. Russell W. Neuman, George E. Marcus, Ann N. Crigler, and Michael MacKuen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 202–30; and Todd Hall, “On Provocation: Outrage, International Relations, and the Franco-Prussian War,” Security Studies 26 (January 2017): 1–29.
7 Daniel W. Drezner, “Why Do Populists Get Lost in Translation?” Washington Post, February 23, 2017.
8 Michael Hirsh, “How Trump Practices ‘Escalation Dominance,’” Foreign Policy, April 19, 2019.
9 James Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,” American Political Science Review 88 (September 1994): 577–92.
10 Hall, “On Provocation.”
11 Asawin Suebsaeng and Lachlan Markay, “John Kelly Pushing Out Omarosa for ‘Triggering’ Trump,” Daily Beast, September 2, 2017.
12 On Miller, see McKay Coppins, “Trump’s Right-Hand Troll,” Atlantic, May 28, 2018. On Navarro, see Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 277.
13 Daniel Lippman, “The Print Reader in Chief: Inside Trump’s Retro Media Diet,” Politico, July 29, 2019.
14 Lippman, “Print Reader in Chief.” On Kelly’s temporary success, see Jonathan Swan, “Trump’s New World,” Axios, September 15, 2017.
15 Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, “Forceful Chief of Staff Grates on Trump, and the Feeling Is Mutual,” New York Times, September 1, 2017.
16 Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Humiliated Jeff Sessions after Mueller Appointment,” New York Times, September 14, 2017.
17 Zack Beauchamp, “‘Toxic on a Day-to-Day Level’: How Trump Is Mismanaging the White House,” Vox, October 5, 2017.
18 See, for example, Mark Landler and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Urges Unity, but Puerto Rico and Las Vegas Visits Could Test His Words,” New York Times, October 2, 2017; Josh Dawsey, “White House Aides Lean on Delays and Distraction to Manage Trump,” Politico, October 9, 2017; Andrew Restuccia and Nancy Cook, “White House Puts Mueller on Notice after Raids,” Politico, April 10, 2018.
19 See Kathryn Dunn Tempas, “Record-Setting White House Staff Turnover Continues with News of Counsel’s Departure,” Brookings Institution, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2018/10/19/record-setting-white-house-staff-turnover-continues-with-news-of-counsels-departure/, October 28, 2018; Denise Lu and Karen Yourish, “The Turnover at the Top of the Trump Administration Is Unprecedented,” New York Times, March 29, 2019.
20 “Several senior officials say televised briefings stopped because of worry TV watcher-in-chief, President Trump, would get angry if he saw something he didn’t like,” Barbara Starr on CNN’s Reliable Sources. Transcript accessed at http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1906/02/rs.01.html.
21 Michael S. Schmidt, “White House Asked McGahn to Declare Trump Never Obstructed Justice,” New York Times, May 10, 2019.
22 Jonathan Swan and Alayna Treene, “Former White House Counsel Don McGahn off the Record,” Axios, April 7, 2019.
1 Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents (New York: Free Press, 1990).
2 Alberto Nardelli, “This Is What European Diplomats Really Think about Donald Trump,” BuzzFeed, August 9, 2017.
3 Colby Itkowitz and Mike DeBonis, “Former Bush Official Puts Trump on the Couch: A ‘10 Out of 10 Narcissist,’” Washington Post, May 15, 2019.
4 Barrett quoted in Michael Kruse, “‘He Was Surprised as Anyone,’” Politico, November 11, 2016.
5 Tim O’Brien, quoted in Toluse Olorunnipa, “‘It’ll Happen Fast’: Trump Creates Problems and Then Rushes in to Solve Them,” Washington Post, March 29, 2019.
6 Tony Schwartz, quoted in Jane Mayer, “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All,” New Yorker, July 18, 2016.
7 Comey’s memo can be accessed at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4442900-Ex-FBI-Director-James-Comey-s-memos.html.
8 Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 83.
9 Damian Paletta, Erica Werner, and Taylor Telford, “GOP Senators Raise Alarms, Criticize Trump as U.S.-China Trade War Heats Up,” Washington Post, May 14, 2019.
10 Woodward, Fear, 271.
11 Woodward, Fear, 230–31.
12 Rebecca Ballhaus and Byron Tau, “Trump Meets Rosenstein about Democratic Surveillance Memo,” Wall Street Journal, February 6, 2018.
14 Ashley Parker and Greg Jaffe, “Inside the ‘Adult Day-Care Center’: How Aides Try to Control and Coerce Trump,” Washington Post, October 16, 2017. See also Peter Nicholas and Rebecca Ballhaus, “Talking to Trump: A How-to Guide,” Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2018.
15 Elaina Plott, “Ignoring Trump’s Orders, Hoping He’ll Forget,” Atlantic, May 15, 2019.
16 Katie Benner, “Inside the Government, Addressing Domestic Terrorism Has Been Fraught,” New York Times, August 11, 2019.
17 Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper, “Trump Discussed Pulling U.S. from NATO, Aides Say Amid New Concerns over Russia,” New York Times, January 14, 2019.
1 Kellyanne Conway, quoted in Philip Rucker and Robert Costa, “‘It’s a Hard Problem’: Inside Trump’s Decision to Send More Troops to Afghanistan,” Washington Post, August 21, 2017.
2 David Nakamura and Damian Paletta, “Trump Unrestrained: Recent Moves Show President Listening to His Gut More Than Advisers,” Washington Post, March 13, 2018.
3 Tim O’Brien, quoted in Michael Kruse, “‘He Was Surprised as Anyone,’” Politico, November 11, 2016.
4 Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies (New York: Free Press, 2018), 89.
5 Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey, and Damian Paletta, “Trump Slams Fed Chair, Questions Climate Change and Threatens to Cancel Putin Meeting in Wide-Ranging Interview with the Post,” Washington Post, November 27, 2018.
6 Unnamed Trump advisor, quoted in Jonathan Swan, “Trump’s Strategic Planning Inspiration: Mike Tyson,” Axios, January 16, 2019.
7 Trump’s decision to stay in Afghanistan would be the best example of this; unsurprisingly, it also represents the apex of Trump’s advisors’ influence and a decision that Trump subsequently regretted. See Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 254–60. In many of the other examples that come to mind—his choices for the judiciary, for example—Trump’s role has been minimal.
8 Michael Hirsh, “How Trump Practices ‘Escalation Dominance,’” Foreign Policy, April 19, 2019.
9 Juhani E. Lehto, Petri Juujärvi, Libbe Kooistra and Lea Pulkkinen, “Dimensions of Executive Functioning: Evidence from Children,” British Journal of Developmental Psychology 21 (March 2003): 59–80.
10 Akira Miyake et al., “The Unity and Diversity of Executive Functions and Their Contributions to Complex ‘Frontal Lobe’ Tasks: A Latent Variable Analysis,” Cognitive Psychology 41 (August 2000): 49–100.
11 Stephanie Carlson, Louis Moses, and Hollie Rix, “The Role of Inhibitory Processes in Young Children’s Difficulties with Deception and False Belief,” Child Development 69 (June 1998): 672–91.
12 Stephanie Carlson and Louis Moses, “Individual Differences in Inhibitory Control and Children’s Theory of Mind,” Child Development 72 (August 2001): 1032–53; Stephanie Carlson, Dorothy Maskill, and Luke Williams, “Executive Function and Theory of Mind: Stability and Prediction from Ages 2 to 3,” Developmental Psychology 40 (November 2004): 1105–22.
13 See Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: PublicAffairs, 2008), 539–40; Robert McFarlane, Special Trust (New York: Cadell & Davies, 1994), 21.
14 Wesley Morgan, “How Trump Trips Up His Own Afghan Peace Efforts,” Politico, August 16, 2019; Sami Yousafzai, Erin Banco, and Christopher Dickey, “The Taliban Scoff at Trump’s Afghan Peace Talks Bluff,” Daily Beast, September 4, 2019.
15 Susan Glasser, “Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of Trump,” New Yorker, August 19, 2019.
16 Nishant Kishore et al., “Mortality in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria,” New England Journal of Medicine 379 (July 12, 2018): 162–70.
17 On Trump’s attempted denials, see Zack Beauchamp, “Trump’s Puerto Rico Tweets Are the Purest Expression of His Presidency,” Vox, September 13, 2018. On Trump’s allies distancing themselves from him, see Alex Isenstadt and Marc Caputo, “Trump Rails on Top Florida Ally over Hurricane Maria Flap,” Politico, September 18, 2018.
18 Tracy Jan, Arelis R. Hernández, Josh Dawsey, and Damian Paletta, “After Butting Heads with Trump Administration, Top HUD Official Departs Agency,” Washington Post, January 25, 2019.
19 Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Widens War on Black Critics While Embracing ‘Inner City Pastors,’” New York Times, July 29, 2019.
20 Tim Alberta, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), 561–62.
21 Jim Newell, “The Administration Is Handing Its Enemies Tools to Topple Trump the Usual Way,” Slate, March 28, 2019.
22 Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Desiderio, “‘Clean-Up on Aisle Trump’: President Reverses Course on Neo-Nazis, Slams the ‘Alt-Left,’” Daily Beast, August 15, 2017.
23 Anne Sartori, Deterrence by Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); John Mearsheimer, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth about Lying in International Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
24 Karen DeYoung and Josh Dawsey, “For Inured Foreign Officials, the Sting of Trump’s Tweets Has Begun to Dull,” Washington Post, April 30, 2019.
25 Julie Pace and Alan Fram, “Trump’s Impulses Put White House Credibility on the Line,” Associated Press, March 24, 2018.
26 John Cornyn, quoted in David Nakamura and Seung Min Kim, “‘He’s a Gut Politician’: Trump’s Go-to Negotiating Tactics Aren’t Working in the Shutdown Standoff,” Washington Post, January 9, 2019.
27 John Bresnehan and Burgess Everett, “Trump’s Credibility on Capitol Hill Is Shot,” Politico, January 17, 2018.
28 Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies, 46.
29 See, for example, Woodward, Fear, 205.
30 Woodward, Fear, 206.
31 See, for example, Woodward, Fear, 234–35.
32 Nick Miroff, “ICE Raids Targeting Migrant Families Slated to Start Sunday in Major U.S. Cities,” Washington Post, June 21, 2019.
33 Janet Hook, Kristina Peterson, and Michael C. Bender, “Alabama Defeat Stokes Divisions among Republicans,” Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2017.
34 Peter Baker, “Riding an Untamed Horse: Priebus Opens Up on Serving Trump,” New York Times, February 14, 2018.
35 Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, “Trump at Lowest Point with 35% Job Approval Rating . . . Crack at the Base,” August 16, 2017, http://maristpoll.marist.edu/wp-content/misc/usapolls/us170809/Complete%20Survey%20Findings_Marist%20Poll_USA_President%20Trump_August%202017_FINAL.pdf; Quinnipiac University, “U.S. Voters Feel Good about Economy, but Not Trump, Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds; Voters Take a Knee for Both Trump and NFL Players,” October 11, 2017, https://poll.qu.edu/images/polling/us/us10112017_Uhj87ke.pdf/; Eli Yokley, “Almost 3 in 4 Americans Say Trump Uses Twitter Too Much,” Morning Consult, May 31, 2018, https://morningconsult.com/2018/05/31/almost-3-in-4-americans-say-trump-uses-twitter-too-much/.
36 Ben Leubsdorf and Nick Timiraos, “Trump Tweeted about Jobs Report before Release,” Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2018.
37 Jeremy Diamond and Kevin Liptak, “Trump’s Man with the Singapore Plan: Joe Hagin,” CNN, June 4, 2018.
1 Howard Kurtz, Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War over the Truth (New York: Regnery, 2018), chap. 6.
2 Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT), Twitter, June 5, 2017, 11:51 p.m., https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/871771530707050497.
3 Frances Gardner and Daniel Shaw, “Behavioral Problems of Infancy and Preschool Children (0–5),” in Rutter’s Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 5th ed., ed. M. Rutter (New York: Blackwell, 2008).
4 Sandy Jones, The Toddler Years (New York: Sterling, 2011), 76.
5 Trevor Noah, The Daily Show, November 30, 2016, accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P1IVQJdVvE.
6 D’Antonio quoted in Philip Rucker, Robert Costa, and Josh Dawsey, “Trump Creates Political Storm with False Claim on Puerto Rico Hurricane Death Toll,” Washington Post, September 13, 2018.
7 Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 176.
8 See Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).
9 “Transcript: Donald Trump Foreign Policy Speech,” New York Times, April 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/us/politics/transcript-trump-foreign-policy.html.
10 For more examples, see Chris Cillizza, “A Running List of Donald Trump’s Conspiracy Theories,” CNN, September 13, 2018.
11 Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin, “Trump Once Said the ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape Was Real: Now He’s Not Sure,” New York Times, November 28, 2017.
12 Jonathan Swan, “Trump Lied to RNC Donors about ‘Tim Apple’ Video,” Axios, March 16, 2019.
13 Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer, The Hill to Die On (New York: Crown Books, 2019), 265.
14 See, for example, Gabriel Sherman, “‘I’ve Got Another Nut Job Here Who Thinks He’s Running Things’: Are Trump and Kelly Headed for Divorce?” Vanity Fair, January 22, 2018.
15 Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Has Made More than 10,000 False or Misleading Claims,” Washington Post, April 29, 2019; Daniel Dale, “Every False Claim Donald Trump Has Made as President,” Toronto Star, http://projects.thestar.com/donald-trump-fact-check/.
16 Jonathan Swan, “White House Perjury Panic,” Axios, January 28, 2018.
17 Peter Baker and Linda Qiu, “Inside What Even an Ally Calls Trump’s ‘Reality Distortion Field,’” New York Times, October 31, 2018.
18 Betsy Woodruff and Asawin Suebsaeng, “White House Abruptly Canceled Trump’s Meeting with Intel Chiefs,” Daily Beast, January 31, 2019.
19 John Walcott, “‘Willful Ignorance’: Inside President Trump’s Troubled Intelligence Briefings,” Time, February 5, 2019; Julian E. Barnes and Michael S. Schmidt, “To Woo a Skeptical Trump, Intelligence Chiefs Talk Economics Instead of Spies,” New York Times, March 3, 2019.
20 Barbara Starr, Zachary Cohen, Elise Labott, Kaitlan Collins, and Jamie Gangel, “McMaster Could Leave WH after Months of Tension with Trump,” CNN, February 22, 2018.
21 Nancy Cook, “Trump Is Tiring of Mulvaney,” Politico, June 25, 2019.
22 Asawin Suebsaeng, “Trump and Omarosa Had a ‘F*cking Weird’ Fight with Vietnam Vets,” Daily Beast, August 17, 2018.
23 On Charlottesville, see Woodward, Fear, 241–44; on McCain, see “Katie Rogers, Nicholas Fandos, and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Relents under Pressure, Offering ‘Respect’ to McCain,” New York Times, August 27, 2018; on his tweets about the “Squad,” see Michael Scherer, Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, and Seung Min Kim, “‘He Always Doubles Down’: Inside the Political Crisis Caused by Trump’s Racist Tweets,” Washington Post, July 20, 2019.
24 Nancy Cook, “The Short Arc of a Sharpie Captures the Long Arc of Trump,” Politico, September 5, 2019; Andrew Freedman, Colby Itkowitz, and Jason Samenow, “NOAA Staff Warned in Sept. 1 Directive against Contradicting Trump,” Washington Post, September 7, 2019; Daniel W. Drezner, “The Perfect Synecdoche for the Trump Presidency,” Washington Post, September 10, 2019; Peter Baker, Lisa Friedman, and Christopher Flavelle, “Trump Pressed Top Aide to Have Weather Service ‘Clarify’ Forecast That Contradicted Trump,” New York Times, September 11, 2019.
25 Caroline Mortimer, “Donald Trump’s Staff Get Him to Agree to Policies by Saying ‘Obama Wouldn’t Have Done It,’” Independent, February 7, 2017.
1 Sandy Jones, The Toddler Years (New York: Sterling, 2011), 38.
2 Kathleen Stassen Berger, The Developing Person through Childhood and Adolescence, 2nd ed. (New York; Worth Publishers, 1986).
3 Stephanie Carlson, Louis Moses, and Hollie Rix, “The Role of Inhibitory Processes in Young Children’s Difficulties with Deception and False Belief,” Child Development 69 (June 1998): 672–91.
4 Tony Schwartz, quoted in Jane Mayer, “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All,” New Yorker, July 18, 2016.
5 Michael D’Antonio, quoted in Michael Kruse, “‘He Was Surprised as Anyone,’” Politico, November 11, 2016.
6 Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer, The Hill to Die On (New York: Crown Books, 2019), 73.
7 Nancy Cook and Ben White, “‘They Are Riding a Rubber Ducky into Alligator-Infested Waters,’” Politico, September 4, 2019.
8 Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo, and Meg Kelly, “President Trump Has Made 13,435 False or Misleading Claims over 993 Days,” Washington Post, October 13, 2019. To be fair, the journalist Daniel Dale engaged in a similar fact-checking exercise and counted approximately half the number of false claims during the same time period. See Daniel Dale, “Every False Claim Donald Trump Has Made as President,” Toronto Star, http://projects.thestar.com/donald-trump-fact-check/.
9 See Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). No, really, go read it.
10 Daniel Dale (ddale8), Twitter, August 8, 2019, 6:28 a.m. https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1159426229449232386.
11 Chris Cillizza, “‘We’ll See What Happens’: An Investigation into Donald Trump’s Favorite Phrase,” CNN, May 13, 2019.
12 Melissa Chan, “5 Things President Trump Says America Doesn’t Know,” Time, March 24, 2017.
13 Jenna Johnson, “‘People Don’t Realize’: Trump and the Historical Facts He Wants You to Know,” Washington Post, April 18, 2018.
14 See, for example, Tim Alberta, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), 449.
15 Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 262.
16 Woodward, Fear, 263 and 287.
17 Rebecca Morin, “‘Idiot,’ ‘Dope,’ ‘Moron’: How Trump’s Aides Have Insulted the Boss,” Politico, September 4, 2018.
18 Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey, and Damian Paletta, “‘Am I Out of Touch?’: Trump Administration Struggles to Show Empathy for Workers,” Washington Post, January 24, 2019.
19 Steve Eder, “Did a Queens Podiatrist Help Donald Trump Avoid Vietnam?” New York Times, December 26, 2018.
20 Steve Bannon, quoted in Woodward, Fear, 75.
21 “A Transcript of Donald Trump’s Meeting with the Washington Post Editorial Board,” Washington Post, March 21, 2016; Maggie Haberman and David Sanger, “Transcript: Donald Trump Expounds on His Foreign Policy Views,” New York Times, March 26, 2016; Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, “Transcript: Donald Trump Interview with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa,” Washington Post, April 2, 2016; Maggie Haberman and David Sanger, “Transcript: Donald Trump on NATO, Turkey’s Coup Attempt and the World,” New York Times, July 21, 2016.
22 Maggie Haberman and David Sanger, “Donald Trump’s Trial Balloons Are Catching Up with Him,” New York Times, April 9, 2016.
23 Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman, “Trump and Staff Rethink Tactics after Stumbles,” New York Times, February 5, 2017; Damian Paletta and Rob Taylor, “Trump Slams Australia Refugee Deal as ‘Dumb,’ Hints at Possible Pullout,” Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2017; Jonathan Landay and David Rohde, “In Call with Putin, Trump Denounced Obama-Era Nuclear Arms Treaty,” Reuters, February 9, 2017.
24 Mattathias Schwartz, “Mike Pompeo’s Mission: Clean Up Trump’s Messes,” New York Times Magazine, February 26, 2019.
25 “Transcript, May 21, 2019, Interview with Secretary Tillerson,” US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs website, https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/_cache/files/e/7/e7bd0ed2-cf98-4f6d-a473-0406b0c50cde/23A0BEE4DF2B55E9D91259F04A3B22FA.tillerson-transcript-interview-5-21-19.pdf.
26 Josh Dawsey, Robert Costa, and Ashley Parker, “Inside the Tense, Profane White House Meeting on Immigration,” Washington Post, January 15, 2018.
27 Sam Stein and Asawin Suebsaeng, “Team Trump’s Goal for the Next Three Weeks: Keep Him ‘the Hell Away’ from Chuck Schumer,” Daily Beast, January 23, 2018.
28 Marc Fisher, “Donald Trump Doesn’t Read Much: Being President Probably Wouldn’t Change That,” Washington Post, July 17, 2016.
29 Trump’s poor theory of mind also helps to explain why his lies are so bald-faced. Some interpret his obvious lies as a demonstration of power, and there is likely some truth in that. It might also be the case, however, that Trump is simply incapable of recognizing how his utterances will appear to others.
30 Eliza Collins, “Trump: I Consult Myself on Foreign Policy,” Politico, March 16, 2016.
31 Amy Harder and Jonathan Swan, “Trump’s Manic Energy Policy,” Axios, July 29, 2018; Toluse Olorunnipa and Josh Dawsey, “Trump Disparages Boeing 737s in Private before Grounding the Plane after Deadly Crash,” Washington Post, March 13, 2019; Jonathan Swan and Joann Muller, “Trump Hates “Crazy” Driverless Cars,” Axios, March 17, 2019.
32 Andrew Restuccia, “Trump Fixates on IQ as a Measure of Self-Worth,” Politico, May 30, 2019.
33 Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Maggie Haberman, and Peter Baker, “Trump Was Repeatedly Warned That Ukraine Conspiracy Theory Was ‘Completely Debunked’,” New York Times, September 29, 2019.
34 Philip Rucker, Damian Paletta, and Josh Dawsey, “Trump, Banking on Strong Economy to Win Reelection, Frets over a Possible Downturn,” Washington Post, August 15, 2019. See also Josh Boak and Jonathan Lemire, “Signs of Recession Worry Trump Ahead of 2020,” Associated Press, August 17, 2019.
35 Peter Nicholas, “The Art of Flattering the President,” Atlantic, June 8, 2019.
36 Josh Dawsey, Philip Rucker, ad Ashley Parker, “Trump Complains about Traveling to Canada ahead of Singapore Summit with Kim,” Washington Post, June 6, 2018; Ben Riley-Smith, “Donald Trump ‘Tired of Theresa May’s School Mistress Tone’ and Will Not Hold Talks with Her at G7,” Daily Telegraph, June 8, 2018.
37 Kevin Liptak, Michelle Kosinski, and Jeremy Diamond, “Trump to Skip Climate Portion of G7 after Twitter Spat with Macron and Trudeau,” CNN, June 8, 2018.
38 Greg Jaffe, Josh Dawsey, and Carol Leonnig, “Ahead of NATO and Putin Summits, Trump’s Unorthodox Diplomacy Rattles Allies,” Washington Post, July 6, 2018. See also Woodward, Fear, 231–32.
39 Elizabeth Saunders, “No Substitute for Experience: Presidents, Advisers, and Information in Group Decision-Making,” International Organization 71 (April 2017): S219–47.
40 Saunders, “No Substitute for Experience,” S224.
41 “Interview with Secretary Tillerson,” 111–12.
42 Peter Baker, “As Trump Swerves on Trade War, It’s Whiplash for the Rest of the World,” New York Times, August 26, 2019.
1 American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child (New York: Bantam, 2014), 814–16.
2 World Health Organization, “To Grow Up Healthy, Children Need to Sit Less and Play More,” April 24, 2019, https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/24-04-2019-to-grow-up-healthy-children-need-to-sit-less-and-play-more.
3 Unless otherwise noted, the claims in this paragraph are found in American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, 813–17.
4 Linda S. Pagani, Caroline Fitzpatrick, and Traci A. Barnett, “Early Childhood Television Viewing and Kindergarten Entry Readiness,” Pediatric Research 77 (September 2013): 350–55.
5 American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, 814.
6 Braydon Carter, “Trump: I Don’t Watch Much Television ‘Primarily Because of Documents,’” The Hill, November 11, 2017.
7 Maggie Haberman, Glenn Thrush, and Peter Baker, “Inside Trump’s Hour-by-Hour Battle for Self-Preservation,” New York Times, December 9, 2017.
8 On Pence, see Peter Nicholas, “A Survival Guide for the Trump White House,” Atlantic, April 14, 2019. On Ryan, see Cliff Sims, Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2019), 115–16.
9 Anna Altman, “Matt Gertz Tracks How Fox News Manipulates Trump,” Columbia Journalism Review, February 13, 2019.
10 Jane Mayer, “Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells All,” New Yorker, July 18, 2016.
11 Philip Elliott, “Inside Donald Trump’s Twitter-Fueled Weekend Meltdown,” Time, February 20, 2018.
12 Winneke A. van der Schuur et al., “The Consequences of Media Multitasking for Youth: A Review,” Computers in Human Behavior 53 (December 2015): 204–15.
13 Brandon C. W. Ralph, David R. Thomson, James Allan Cheyne, and Daniel Smilek, “Media Multitasking and Failures of Attention in Everyday Life,” Psychological Research 78 (September 2014): 661–69.
14 Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 102.
15 Monica Hesse, “I Tried to Watch as Much ‘Fox & Friends’ as the President: Here’s What I Learned,” Washington Post, March 16, 2017. See also Andrew Marantz, “How ‘Fox & Friends’ Rewrites Trump’s Reality,” New Yorker, January 8, 2018.
16 For example, see John Koblin and Nick Corasaniti, “One Nation, under Fox: 18 Hours with a Network That Shapes America,” New York Times, March 25, 2017.
17 Unnamed White House official, quoted in Olivia Nuzzi, “Donald Trump and Sean Hannity Like to Talk before Bedtime,” New York, May 14, 2018.
18 Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer, The Hill to Die On (New York: Crown Books, 2019), 192.
19 Sherman and Palmer, Hill to Die On, 216, 372–81.
20 Jonathan Swan, “Trump Considered Declaring State of Emergency in Baltimore,” Axios, August 4, 2019.
21 Asawin Suebsaeng, “After Mass Shootings, Trump Veers Quickly from Horror to Score Settling,” Daily Beast, August 5, 2019.
22 Rocque Planas, “How Fox News Anointed Trump’s New Border Chief,” Huffington Post, May 15, 2019.
23 Matthew Gertz, “A Comprehensive Review of the Revolving Door between Fox and the Trump Administration,” Media Matters for America, July 22, 2019.
24 Manuel Roig-Franzia, “Hard-Line Views Made Lou Dobbs a Fox Powerhouse: Now He’s Shaping Trump’s Border Policy,” Washington Post, April 27, 2019; Maxwell Tani, Betsy Woodruff, and Asawin Suebsaeng, “Tucker Carlson Tells Trump in Private: No War with Iran,” Daily Beast, June 20, 2019.
25 Kate Nocera et al., “Sean Spicer Has Resigned,” BuzzFeed, July 21, 2017.
26 Jim Acosta (@Acosta), Twitter, August 2, 2019, 3:49 p.m. https://twitter.com/Acosta/status/1157392890089357317.
27 Tim Alberta, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), 461–62.
28 Alberta, American Carnage, 462, and Woodward, Fear, 195.
29 Josh Dawsey, “Trump’s Must-See TV: Judge Jeanine’s Show and Her Positive Take on the President,” Washington Post, April 5, 2018.
30 John Wagner and Josh Dawsey, “With One Tweet, Trump Inserts Himself into Florida’s GOP Gubernatorial Primary,” Washington Post, December 22, 2017.
31 Nuzzi, “Donald Trump and Sean Hannity.”
1 “President Trump in Fire Truck,” C-SPAN, July 17, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-TSHiOF-UA.
2 Farah Stockman and Keith Bradsher, “Donald Trump Soured on a Deal, and Hong Kong Partners Became Litigants,” New York Times, May 30, 2016.
3 David Bossie and Corey Lewandowski, Let Trump Be Trump: The Inside Story of His Rise to the Presidency (New York: Center Street, 2017), 89–90.
4 Julie Pace, “Worldwide Effort Set to Keep Trump Happy on 1st Trip Abroad,” Associated Press, May 17, 2017.
5 Maya Oppenheim, “Donald Trump Shuns Japanese Food for American Burger at Golf Club near Tokyo,” Independent, November 6, 2017.
6 Kaitlin Collins and Kevin Liptak, “Inside Trump’s Air Force One: ‘It’s Like Being Held Captive,’” CNN, May 25, 2019.
7 Jennifer Steinhauer, “Trump Kicks Away Obama Traditions Even at the Dinner Table,” New York Times, December 14, 2018.
8 Eliza Relman, “Trump’s Former Bodyguard Went on McDonald’s Runs for Him Because the White House Kitchen Couldn’t Satisfy His Cravings for a Quarter Pounder,” Business Insider, November 7, 2017; Sam Gillette, “President Trump’s Love Affair with Fast Food: A Brief (and Salty) History,” People, February 26, 2019.
9 Collins and Liptak, “Inside Trump’s Air Force One.”
10 Peggy McGlone, “What Happened When Trump Visited the African American History Museum, According to Its Founding Director,” Washington Post, August 31, 2019.
11 Eliana Johnson and Daniel Lippman, “Trump’s ‘Truly Bizarre’ Visit to Mt. Vernon,” Politico, April 10, 2019.
12 American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child (New York: Bantam, 2014), 387.
13 Vivian Salama, “Trump in Paris: The Curious Case of His Friend Jim,” Associated Press, July 12, 2017.
14 Toluse Olorunnipa, “Trump’s Speeches Feature Mystery Men the White House Won’t Name,” Bloomberg, August 16, 2018.
15 Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, “New White House Chief of Staff Has an Enforcer,” New York Times, September 8, 2017.
16 Robert S. Mueller III, Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election, March 2019, 2:32n155.
17 Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 251.
18 American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child.
19 Daniel Lippman, Andrew Restuccia, and Eliana Johnson, “Trump’s New Nickname for Pete Buttigieg: ‘Alfred E. Neuman,’” Politico, May 10, 2019.
20 Sandy Jones, The Toddler Years (New York: Sterling, 2011), 104.
21 Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer, The Hill to Die On (New York: Crown Books, 2019), 152–53.
22 Matthew Dallek, “In the Weeds,” Washington Post, September 13, 2019.
1 Marcy Whitebook and Laura Sakai, “Turnover Begets Turnover: An Examination of Job and Occupational Instability among Child Care Center Staff,” Early Childhood Research Quarterly 18 (Autumn 2003): 273–93.
2 Daniel W. Drezner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
3 Philip Bump, “Donald Trump Only Hires the Best People (at Generating Unhelpful Headlines),” Washington Post, August 30, 2016.
4 David Lewis, “Trump’s Slow Pace of Appointments Is Hurting Government—and His Own Agenda,” Washington Post, August 3, 2017.
5 Heather Ba and Terry Sullivan, “Why Does It Take So Long to Confirm Trump’s Appointments?” Washington Post, April 24, 2019.
6 Kathryn Dunn Tempas, “Tracking Turnover in the Trump Administration,” Brookings Institution, July 2019.
7 See Denise Lu and Karen Yourish, “The Turnover at the Top of the Trump Administration,” New York Times, April 12, 2019.
8 Eliana Johnson, “Kelly Knew before Abuse Reports That Porter Would Be Denied Security Clearance,” Politico, February 8, 2018.
9 Jason Silverstein and Nicole Hensley, “The Running List of Typos from President Trump’s White House,” New York Daily News, May 20, 2018.
10 Monmouth University, “Few Say Trump Hires ‘Best People,’” August 20, 2018, https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_US_082018/.
11 Chris Christie, Let Me Finish (New York: Hachette, 2019), 5–6.
12 Christie, Let Me Finish, 5–6. See also Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 28–32.
13 Jonathan Swan, Juliet Bartz, Alayna Treene, and Orion Rummler, “Exclusive: Leaked Trump Vetting Docs,” Axios, June 23, 2019.
14 Sebastian Murdock, “Trump Attacks, Then Says He Relies on Press to Vet Nominees,” Huffington Post, August 2, 2019.
15 “Open Letter on Donald Trump from GOP National Security Leaders,” War on the Rocks, March 2, 2016, http://warontherocks.com/2016/03/open-letter-on-donald-trump-from-gop-national-security-leaders/; “A Letter From G.O.P. National Security Officials Opposing Donald Trump,” New York Times, August 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/08/us/politics/national-security-letter-trump.html. Full disclosure: I was one of the signatories to the March letter.
16 “Transcript, May 21, 2019, Interview with Secretary Tillerson,” US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs website, 24, https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/_cache/files/e/7/e7bd0ed2-cf98-4f6d-a473-0406b0c50cde/23A0BEE4DF2B55E9D91259F04A3B22FA.tillerson-transcript-interview-5-21-19.pdf.
17 Bill Faries and Mira Rojanasakul, “At Trump’s State Department, Eight of Ten Top Jobs Are Empty,” Bloomberg, March 13, 2018.
18 Annie Linskey, “Putting ‘White House’ on the Resume Is Less of a Boost,” Boston Globe, May 15, 2018.
19 Tarini Parti, “Trapped in the White House: Many Trump Aides Are Too “Toxic” to Get Jobs,” BuzzFeed, April 13, 2018.
20 Tim Alberta, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), 412.
21 Maggie Haberman and Katie Rogers, “‘Drama, Action, Emotional Power’: As Exhausted Aides Eye the Exits, Trump Is Re-energized,” New York Times, June 10, 2018.
22 Haberman and Rogers, “‘Drama, Action, Emotional Power.’”
23 In Trump’s first few months in office, Melania Trump had yet to move into the White House, and it was initially hoped by some staffers that the First Lady would constrain Trump’s worst impulses. This did not come to pass.
24 Annie Karni, “Meet the Guys Who Tape Trump’s Papers Back Together,” Politico, June 10, 2018.
25 Nahal Toosi, “Inside the Chaotic Early Days of Trump’s Foreign Policy,” Politico, March 1, 2019.
26 Julia Hirschfield Davis, “Trump’s Cabinet, with a Prod, Extols the ‘Blessing’ of Serving Him,” New York Times, June 12, 2017.
27 Ashley Parker and Greg Jaffe, “Inside the ‘Adult Day-Care Center’: How Aides Try to Control and Coerce Trump,” Washington Post, October 16, 2017.
28 Matthew Nussbaum, “Foreign Leaders Who Embraced Trump Now Feel Burned,” Politico, June 7, 2018.
29 Alex Thompson, “Trump Gets a Folder Full of Positive News about Himself Twice a Day,” Vice News, https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/zmygpe/trump-folder-positive-news-white-house, August 9, 2017.
30 Alex Thompson, “Trump Gets a Folder of Positive News.”
31 Mike Allen, “Trump’s Bedtime Story: ‘The Book,’” Axios, June 8, 2018.
32 Josh Dawsey and Steven Shepard, “Trump Still Loves Polls,” Politico, November 18, 2017.
33 Clare Foran and Kevin Liptak, “Trump’s Lawyers Updated Him on the Mueller Investigation: Then Trump Tweeted,” CNN, August 1, 2018.
34 Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey, and Seung Min Kim, “Trump Defiant as Crisis Grows over Family Separation at the Border,” Washington Post, June 18, 2018.
35 Ashley Parker and Robert Costa, “Trump’s Lack of Discipline Leaves New Chief of Staff Frustrated and Dismayed,” Washington Post, August 16, 2017.
36 Glenn Thrush, Michael D. Shear, and Maggie Haberman, “John Kelly Quickly Moves to Impose Military Discipline on White House,” New York Times, August 3, 2017.
37 Thrush, Shear, and Haberman, “Kelly Quickly Moves to Impose Military Discipline.”
38 Thrush, Shear, and Haberman, “Kelly Quickly Moves to Impose Military Discipline.”
39 Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker, “During a Summer of Crisis, Trump Chafes against Criticism and New Controls,” Washington Post, August 31, 2017. Some of Trump’s friends nicknamed Kelly “The Church Lady” because of his schoolmarmish management style.
40 Julie Hirschfield Davis, “Is Trump All Talk on North Korea? The Uncertainty Sends a Shiver,” New York Times, September 24, 2017.
41 Allen, “Trump’s Bedtime Story.”
42 Jonathan Swan, “Trump’s Secret, Shrinking Schedule,” Axios, January 8, 2018.
43 Noah Bierman, Cathleen Decker, and Brian Bennett, “Trump Unleashes Himself from Would-Be Handlers, Lashing Out Mornings, Nights and Weekends,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2017. See also Eliana Johnson and Daniel Lippman, “9 hours of ‘Executive Time’: Trump’s Unstructured Days Define His Presidency,” Politico, October 29, 2018.
44 Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, and Philip Rucker, “‘When You Lose That Power’: How John Kelly Faded as White House Disciplinarian,” Washington Post, April 7, 2018.
45 David Graham, “The Infantilization of the President,” Atlantic, October 11, 2017. To understand the “goddamned steam reference, see J. D. Simkins, “Navy Should Return to ‘Goddamned Steam’ on Carrier, Trump Says,” Navy Times, May 11, 2017.
46 Mike Allen, “Why Top White House Officials Won’t Quit Trump,” Axios, August 20, 2017.
47 Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker, “Trump Veers Past Guardrails, Feeling Impervious to the Uproar He Causes,” Washington Post, November 29, 2017.
48 Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey, “Time at Mar-a-Lago Is a Respite for Trump—and a Headache for His Staff,” Washington Post, December 30, 2017.
49 Michael C. Bender, “Trump Finds Loopholes in Chief of Staff’s New Regime,” Wall Street Journal, December 5, 2019.
50 Philip Rucker, “John Kelly’s Credibility Is at Risk after Defending Aide Accused of Domestic Violence,” Washington Post, February 8, 2018.
51 Catherine Lucey and Jonathan Lemire, “Trump Flies Solo More, Is Said to Want to Rely Less on Staff,” Associated Press, March 10, 2018.
52 Jonathan Lemire and Catherine Lucey, “Inside a White House in Tumult, John Kelly’s Clout Dwindles,” Associated Press, April 5, 2018.
53 Jonathan Swan, “Trump’s Giddy Spree,” Axios, March 11, 2018.
54 Philip Ricker and Robert Costa, “‘Tired of the Wait Game’: White House Stabilizers Gone, Trump Calling His Own Shots,” Washington Post, March 31, 2018.
55 Annie Karni, “Trump’s Turnberry Getaway: A Little Golf, a Lot of Promoting,” Politico, July 14, 2018.
56 Helene Cooper and Julian E. Barnes, “U.S. Officials Scrambled behind the Scenes to Shield NATO Deal from Trump,” New York Times, August 9, 2018.
57 Jonathan Swan and Mike Allen, “Trump’s Helsinki Humiliation,” Axios, July 15, 2018; Julie Hirschfield Davis, “Trump, at Putin’s Side, Questions U.S. Intelligence on 2016 Election,” New York Times, July 16, 2018.
58 Eliana Johnson, “How John Kelly Became ‘Chief in Name Only,’” Politico, July 29, 2018.
59 Maggie Haberman, “Kelly, on His Way Out, Says Administration Long Ago Abandoned Idea of Concrete Wall,” New York Times, December 30, 2018.
60 Molly O’Toole, “John F. Kelly Says His Tenure as Trump’s Chief of Staff Is Best Measured by What the President Did Not Do,” Los Angeles Times, December 30, 2018.
61 Elaina Plott and Peter Nicholas, “Trump’s Chief of Staff Says He’s Having a Ball,” Atlantic, April 25, 2019.
62 Alexi McCammond and Jonathan Swan, “Insider Leaks Trump’s ‘Executive Time’-Filled Private Schedules,” Axios, February 3, 2019.
63 Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, “Mick Mulvaney Tries Letting Trump Be Trump,” New York Times, April 10, 2019.
64 Plott and Nicholas, “Trump’s Chief of Staff Says He’s Having a Ball.”
65 Plott and Nicholas, “Trump’s Chief of Staff Says He’s Having a Ball.”; Katie Rogers, Annie Karni, and Maggie Haberman, “Trump’s Personal Assistant, Madeleine Westerhout, Shared Intimate Details of First Family,” New York Times, August 30, 2019.
66 Mark Landler and Helene Cooper, “Bolton Walked Back Syria Statement: His Disdain for Debate Helped Produce It,” New York Times, January 7, 2019.
67 See Julian E. Barnes and Helene Cooper, “Trump Discussed Pulling U.S. from NATO, Aides Say amid New Concerns over Russia,” New York Times, January 14, 2019.
68 Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Undercuts Bolton on North Korea and Iran,” New York Times, May 28, 2019.
69 Ashley Parker and Toluse Olorunnipa, “Trump Seeks to Campaign on Problems He Promised to Fix,” Washington Post, April 8, 2019.
70 Brian Bennett, “‘My Whole Life Is a Bet’: Inside President Trump’s Gamble on an Untested Re-election Strategy,” Time, June 20, 2019.
71 Unnamed former White House staffer, quoted in Gabby Orr, “How Trump Aides Rushed to Repackage the ‘Go Back’ Tweets,” Politico, July 15, 2019.
72 Jim VendeHei and Mike Allen, “Trump Creep: Bad Habits Spread Fast,” Axios, February 14, 2018.
73 See, for example, Nancy Cook, “Trump Is Tiring of Mulvaney,” Politico, June 25, 2019; Jennifer Jacobs and Justin Sink, “Trump’s Trade Chief Lectures His Boss and Gets an Earful in Return,” Bloomberg, February 22, 2019.
74 Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, “Trump’s Interest in Buying Greenland Seemed Like a Joke. Then It Got Ugly.” New York Times, August 21, 2019. See also Nancy Cook, “An Unshackled Trump Finally Gets the Presidency He Always Wanted,” Politico, September 19, 2019.
75 Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker, “‘You’re a Prop in the Back’: Advisers Struggle to Obey Trump’s Kafkaesque Rules,” Washington Post, September 11, 2019.
76 Andrew Restuccia, Daniel Lippman, and Eliana Johnson, “‘Get Scavino in Here’: Trump’s Twitter Guru Is the Ultimate Insider,” Politico, May 16, 2019.
77 On Bolton, see Dexter Filkins, “John Bolton on the Warpath,” New Yorker, April 29, 2019. On Pompeo, see Daniel W. Drezner, “Mike Pompeo’s Faustian Bargain,” Washington Post, November 29, 2018. On Barr, see Adam Serwer, “The Dangerous Ideas of Bill Barr,” Atlantic, May 2, 2019. On Mulvaney, see Seung Min Kim, Lisa Rein, Josh Dawsey, and Erica Werner, “‘His Own’: Mulvaney Builds ‘an Empire for the Right Wing’ as Trump’s Chief of Staff,” Washington Post, July 15, 2019.
78 Andrew Kaczynski, “Trump National Security Pick Monica Crowley Plagiarized Multiple Sources in 2012 Book,” CNN, January 7, 2017; Alex Caton and Grace Watkins, “Trump Pick Monica Crowley Plagiarized Parts of Her Ph.D. Dissertation,” Politico, January 9, 2017. These were not the first instances of plagiarism for Crowley. See also Timothy Noah, “Nixon’s Monica Stonewalls about Plagiarism!” Slate, August 23, 1999.
79 Mueller, Report, 2:158.
80 See Deputy Press Secretary Hogan Gidley’s comments quoted in Michael C. Bender, “Trump Gets White House Witnesses to Attest to His ‘Very Calm’ Demeanor,” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2019.
81 Peter Nicholas and Elaina Plott, “Trump’s Guardrails Are Gone,” Atlantic, April 19, 2019.
82 Paul Ryan, quoted in Alberta, American Carnage, 556.
83 Ashley Parker, Philip Rucker, and Josh Dawsey, “Seven days: Inside Trump’s frenetic response to the whistleblower complaint and the battle over impeachment,” Washington Post, September 25, 2019.
1 Paloma Sotelo, “Let’s Stop Comparing Donald Trump to Babies and Kids,” Huffington Post, February 6, 2017.
2 See, for example, Jonathan Chait, “Donald Trump Wants You to Burn the Flag While He Burns the Constitution,” New York, November 29, 2016.
3 Tarini Parti and Chris Geidner, “Trump Allies Don’t See ‘Three-Dimensional Chess’ in Dinesh D’Souza’s Pardon,” BuzzFeed, May 31, 2018. See also Mark Landler and Julie Hirschfield Davis, “After Another Week of Chaos, Trump Repairs to Palm Beach: No One Knows What Comes Next,” New York Times, March 23, 2018.
4 Krikorian quoted in Nahal Toosi, “Trump’s Use of Immigration as 2020 Wedge Could Backfire on Other Policies,” Politico, August 11, 2019.
5 Heidi Stevens, “Stop Comparing President Trump to a Toddler,” Chicago Tribune, June 13, 2018.
6 Alison Gopnik, “4-Year-Olds Don’t Act like Trump,” New York Times, May 20, 2017.
7 Stephanie Carlson and Louis Moses, “Individual Differences in Inhibitory Control and Children’s Theory of Mind,” Child Development 72 (August 2001): 1032–53.
8 Sandy Jones, The Toddler Years (New York: Sterling, 2011), vii.
9 American Academy of Pediatrics, Caring for Your Baby and Young Child, 6th ed. (New York: Bantam, 2014).
10 Stephen Dinan, “William Barr: Donald Trump Was Right to Be ‘Frustrated’ by Russia Narrative,” Washington Times, April 18, 2019.
11 See Cliff Sims, Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2019), 84–90.
12 Maryanne Trump quoted in Tim O’Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald (New York: Business Plus, 2005), p. 49; Trump’s teacher quoted in Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power (New York: Scribner, 2016), p.35. See, more generally, Michael Kruse, “’If He’s Not in a Fight, He Looks for One,’” Politico, September 23, 2019.
13 Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner), Twitter, April 25, 2017, 9:23 a.m., https://twitter.com/dandrezner/status/856876322001432581.
14 Manu Raju, “GOP Sen. Bob Corker to Trump: Stop ‘Whining’ about Sessions,” CNN, September 4, 2018.
15 Bob Woodward, Fear: Trump in the White House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018), 299. See also Jonathan Chait, “The President as Adolescent Bully,” New York, April 1, 2019.
16 Woodward, Fear, 308.
17 Masha Gessen, “Trump Doesn’t Govern like a Toddler, He Governs like a Teenager,” New Yorker, October 16, 2017.
18 Full clip posted by ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics), Twitter, December 23, 2018, 10:04 a.m., https://twitter.com/ABCPolitics/status/1076871248917889025.
19 Philip Zelazo, Fergus Craik, and Laura Booth, “Executive Function across the Life Span,” Acta Psychologica 115 (February 2004): 167–83.
20 Rebecca Savransky, “Scarborough: Trump Allies Told Me He Has Dementia,” The Hill, November 30, 2017.
21 Omarosa Maningault-Newman, quoted in NBC News (@NBCNews), Twitter, August 12, 2018, 9:20 a.m., https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1028647323172306946.
22 William D. Cohan, “Oh My God, This Jackass’: The Mooch Explains Why He Thinks Trump Is ‘Crazy,’ ‘Narcissistic,’ and a ‘Paper Tiger’ Who Will Drop Out By March 2020,” Vanity Fair, August 16, 2019.
23 Marc Coutanche and John Paulus, “An Empirical Analysis of Popular Press Claims regarding Linguistic Change in President Donald J. Trump,” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (November 2018): 1–5.
24 Carlson and Moses, “Individual Differences in Inhibitory Control.”
25 Josh Dawsey, “‘Nasty Guy’: Trump Attacks Critic, Touts Accomplishments in House GOP Meeting on Immigration,” Washington Post, June 19, 2018.
26 An excellent test will be President Trump’s reaction to this book upon publication. Trump-as-teenager would likely respond by studiously ignoring it. Trump-as-dotard would likely forget being angry if he heard about the book. The Toddler in Chief, however, would not let go, and tweet at least once about “Dopey Dan Drezner, whom I have never met. . . .”
27 See, for example, Matthew Glassman, “Donald Trump Is a Dangerously Weak President,” Vox, December 27, 2017; David Lewis, Patrick Bernhard, and Emily You, “President Trump as Manager: Reflections on the First Year,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 48 (September 2018): 480–501; Corey Robin, “Why Has It Taken Us So Long to See Trump’s Weakness?” New York, February 20, 2019.
28 Juliet Elperin, Lisa Rein, and Marc Fisher, “Resistance from Within: Federal Workers Push Back against Trump,” Washington Post, January 31, 2017; Yoni Appelbaum, “Memo to Trump: This Is Why You’re Losing,” Atlantic, June 15, 2017.
29 Jonathan Chait, “Trump Has Lost His War on the War on Coal,” New York, February 18, 2019.
30 Fred Barbash and Deanna Paul, “The Real Reason the Trump Administration Is Constantly Losing in Court,” Washington Post, March 19, 2019.
31 Mary Amiti, Stephen Redding, and David Weinstein, “The Impact of the 2018 Trade War on US Prices and Welfare,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper no. 25672, March 2019.
32 Daniel W. Drezner, “Economic Statecraft in the Age of Trump,” Washington Quarterly 42, (Fall 2019): 7–24.
33 Daniel W. Drezner, “The World Is Laughing at President Trump,” Washington Post, September 26, 2018.
34 Tim Alberta, American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump (New York: Harper Collins, 2019), 529–48.
35 The Gallup data can be accessed at https://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donald-trump.aspx.
36 Megan Brennan, “Record-High 75% of Americans Say Immigration Is Good Thing,” Gallup, https://news.gallup.com/poll/235793/record-high-americans-say-immigration-good-thing.aspx, June 21, 2018.
37 Jeffrey M. Jones, “Slim Majority in U.S. See Trade as Benefiting American Workers,” Gallup, https://news.gallup.com/poll/247970/slim-majority-trade-benefitting-workers.aspx, March 21, 2019.
38 Daniel W. Drezner, “The Economic Case for Free Trade Is Stronger Than Ever,” Reason, June 2018.
40 Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern President (New York: Free Press, 1990).
41 Philip Rucker, Robert Costa, and Ashley Parker, “Who’s Afraid of Trump? Not Enough Republicans—at Least for Now,” Washington Post, June 27, 2017.
42 Alan Rappeport, “How Companies Learned to Stop Fearing Trump’s Twitter Wrath,” New York Times, March 20, 2019.
43 Karen DeYoung and Josh Dawsey, “For Inured Foreign Officials, the Sting of Trump’s Tweets Has Begun to Dull,” Washington Post, April 30, 2019.
44 Noah Bierman, “What’s behind All Those Executive Orders Trump Loves to Sign? Not Much,” Los Angeles Times, March 27, 2019.
45 Amiti, Redding, and Weinstein, “The Impact of the 2018 Trade War on US Prices and Welfare.”
46 Perry Bacon Jr., “Trump Hasn’t Needed the Wall to Remake U.S. Immigration Policy,” FiveThirtyEight, December 6, 2018.
47 Susan Glasser, “Donald Trump’s Year of Living Dangerously,” Politico, January/February 2018.
48 Henry Kissinger, quoted in Michael Wolff, Siege: Trump under Fire (New York: Henry Holt, 2019), 253.
49 Daniel W. Drezner, “The World Hates President Trump,” Washington Post, January 22, 2018.
50 Daniel W. Drezner, “This Time Is Different: Why U.S. Foreign Policy Will Never Recover,” Foreign Affairs 98 (May/June 2019): 10–17.
51 Burgess Everett and Josh Dawsey, “White House Orders Agencies to Ignore Democrats’ Oversight Requests,” Politico, June 2, 2017; Tom Hamburger, Karoun Demirjian, Josh Dawsey, and Rachael Bade, “Trump Moves to Resist House Inquiries, Setting Up Fight over Congressional Subpoena Powers,” Washington Post, April 16, 2019; Charlie Savage, “Trump Vows Stonewall of ‘All’ House Subpoenas, Setting Up Fight over Powers,” New York Times, April 24, 2019.
52 Jason Lemon, “Trump Insists That the Constitution’s Article II ‘Allows Me to Do Whatever I Want,’” Newsweek, June 16, 2019; Donald J. Trump, remarks before Marine One departure, July 12, 2019, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-marine-one-departure-52/.
53 Elizabeth Goitein, “The Alarming Scope of the President’s Emergency Powers,” Atlantic, January/February 2019.
54 Jonathan Swan and Stef Knight, “Exclusive: Trump Targeting Birthright Citizenship with Executive Order,” Axios, October 30, 2018.
55 See Attorney General William Barr’s lecture to the Federalist Society, November 15, 2019, http://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-p-barr-delivers-19th-annual-barbara-k-olson-memorial-lecture.
56 As one Department of Housing and Urban Development official explained about Trump’s political appointees, “They’re honestly some of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with, but they’re totally incompetent. It’s not that they don’t have the right answers. They don’t even know the questions. . . . This isn’t the EPA or the State Department where the leadership is actively trying to undermine the workforce. It feels like we just have benign neglect.” Quoted in Rachel Cohen, “‘I Fully Intend to Outlast These People’: 18 Federal Workers on What It’s Really Like to Work for the Trump Administration,” Washingtonian, April 7, 2019.
57 See Lewis, Fifth Risk, chap. 2.
58 Ryan McCrimmon, “Economists Flee Agriculture Dept. after Feeling Punished under Trump,” Politico, May 7, 2019; Helena Bottemiller Evich, “Agriculture Department Buries Studies Showing Dangers of Climate Change,” June 29, 2019; Helena Bottemiller Evich, “Trump’s USDA Buried Sweeping Climate Change Response Plan,” Politico, July 18, 2019.
59 McCrimmon, “Economists Flee Agriculture Dept. after Feeling Punished under Trump.”
60 Liz Crampton, “USDA Expects ‘Significant Delays’ in Economic Research Reports,” Politico, September 24, 2019.
61 Unnamed former DHS official, quoted in Jason Zengerle, “Inside Trump’s Border Wars,” New York Times Magazine, July 16, 2019; see also Garrett Graff, “The Border Patrol Hits a Breaking Point,” Politico, July 15, 2019.
62 Nahal Toosi, “White House Slap at Dissenting Diplomats Sparks Fear of Reprisal,” Politico, January 30, 2017.
63 Ronan Farrow, War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence (New York: W. W. Norton 2018), ix.
64 Ursa Zeya, “Trump Is Making American Diplomacy White Again,” Politico, September 17, 2018.
65 Colum Lynch and Robbie Gramer, “Federal Watchdogs Target Bullying, Retaliation at State Department,” Foreign Policy, September 7, 2018. See also Robbie Gramer and Amy Mackinnon, “U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Recalled in ‘Political Hit Job,’ Lawmakers Say,” Foreign Policy, May 7, 2019; Department of State Office of the Inspector General, “Review of Allegations of Politicized and Other Improper Personnel Practices in the Bureau of International Organization Affairs,” ESP-19-05, August 2019.
66 Farrow, War on Peace; Jason Zengerle, “Rex Tillerson and the Unraveling of the State Department,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2017.
67 Chuck Park, “I Can No Longer Justify Being a Part of Trump’s ‘Complacent State.’ So I’m Resigning.” Washington Post, August 8, 2019. See, more generally, Jeet Heer, “The Myth of Resistance inside the Trump Administration,” The Nation, August 9, 2019.
68 Nancy McEldowney, quoted in Roger Cohen, “The Desperation of Our Diplomats,” New York Times, July 28, 2017.
69 Daniel W. Drezner, “Present at the Destruction: The Trump Administration and the Foreign Policy Bureaucracy,” Journal of Politics 81 (April 2019): 723–30.
70 Barbara Stephenson, “Time to Ask Why,” Foreign Service Journal, December 2017.
71 Daniel Lippman and Nahal Toosi, “Interest in U.S. Diplomatic Corps Tumbles in Early Months of Trump,” Politico, August 12, 2017; Ronan Farrow, War on Peace, 274.
72 Drezner, “Present at the Destruction,” 727–28.
73 Matthew Lee, “State Department Admits Low Morale, as It Defends Reorganization,” Associated Press, November 18, 2017.
74 Elliot Hannon, “Trump on Core State Department Vacancies: “I’m the Only One That Matters,” Slate, November 3, 2017.
75 John Wagner and Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “Trump Says He Won’t Fire Kellyanne Conway over Hatch Act Violations,” Washington Post, June 14, 2019.
76 This is in some ways an update of Salena Zito’s claim during the 2016 campaign that Trump should be taken seriously but not literally. See Salena Zito, “Taking Trump Seriously, Not Literally,” Atlantic, September 23, 2016.
77 Ezra Klein, “Trump Is Winning,” Vox, January 29, 2018.
78 Jacob T. Levy, “The Weight of the Words,” Niskanen Center website, February 7, 2018, https://www.niskanencenter.org/the-weight-of-the-words/.
79 Julia Azari and Jennifer Smith, “Unwritten Rules: Informal Institutions in Established Democracies,” Perspectives on Politics 10 (March 2012): 37–55.
80 Peter Baker, “A President of the People or a President of His People?” New York Times, April 16, 2019.
81 Levy, “Weight of the Words.”
82 Ezra Klein, “The Rise of Donald Trump Is a Terrifying Moment in American Politics,” Vox, February 10, 2016.
83 Justin Amash, quoted in Alberta, American Carnage, 505.
84 Maxwell Tani, “Poll: 78% of GOP Fox News Viewers Say Trump Is Best President Ever,” Daily Beast, March 21, 2019.
85 Rachel Bade, “Trump’s Takeover of GOP Forces Many House Republicans to Head for the Exits,” Washington Post, September 22, 2019.
86 Alex Isenstadt, “Trump Launches Unprecedented Reelection Machine,” Politico, December 18, 2018.
87 Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Kirell, “Former Trump Aide David Bossie Has Disappeared from Fox after Pissing Off Trump,” Daily Beast, June 4, 2019.
88 Alberta, American Carnage, 495.
89 Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, and Philip Rucker, “Trump Administration Prepares for Massive Shake-up after Midterms,” Washington Post, November 5, 2018.
90 Rebecca Klar, “Mulvaney: Attempt to Move USS John McCain during Trump Visit ‘Not Unreasonable,’” The Hill, June 2, 2019.
91 Daniel W. Drezner, “How Much Weight Will Trump’s Words Carry on the World Stage?” Washington Post, February 3, 2017.
92 Karen DeYoung, “Departing French Ambassador Reflects on a Turbulent Time in Washington,” Washington Post, April 19, 2019.
93 Jonathan Swan, “Why Trump Keeps Bolton,” Axios, July 21, 2019. On the general ability of advisors to freelance with an inexperienced president, see Elizabeth Saunders, “No Substitute for Experience: Presidents, Advisers, and Information in Group Decision-Making,” International Organization 71 (April 2017): S219–47.
94 Courtney Kube, Kristen Welker, Carol E. Lee, and Savannah Guthrie, “Trump Wanted Tenfold Increase in Nuclear Arsenal, Surprising Military,” NBC News, October 11, 2017.
95 Jonathan Swan and Margaret Talev, “Trump Suggested Nuking Hurricanes to Stop Them from Hitting U.S.” Axios, August 25, 2019.
96 Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfield Davis, “Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border,” New York Times, October 1, 2019.
97 David M. Drucker, “‘I Feel Bad That I Left’: John Kelly Warned Trump He Would be Impeached, Washington Examiner, October 26, 2019.
98 Henry Pu Yi, The Last Manchu: The Autobiography of Henry Pu Yi, Last Emperor of China (New York: Skyhorse, 2010), 5.
99 Pu Yi, Last Manchu, 6.
100 To be fair to the Kaiser, he had a more persuasive case to make than Trump, given that he was a blood relative to most of the royal courts in Europe at the time.
101 Miranda Carter, George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I (New York: Knopf, 2010), 207. See also François Heisbourg, “The Emperor vs the Adults: Donald Trump and Wilhelm II,” Survival 59 (April-May 2017); 7–12.
102 Carter, George, Nicholas and Wilhelm, 132.
103 Carter, George, Nicholas and Wilhelm, 213.
104 On the very important concept of chaos muppets, see Dahlia Lithwick, “Chaos Theory: A Unified Theory of Muppet Types,” Slate, June 8, 2012.
105 See Daniel W. Drezner, The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas (New York: Oxford University Press), chap. 4.
106 Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, “Let Us Now Praise Great Men: Bringing the Statesman Back In,” International Security 25 (Spring 2001): 107–46.
107 Ezra Klein, “How Political Science Conquered Washington,” Vox, September 2, 2014.
108 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Imperial Presidency, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004), 212.
109 Rose McDermott, Political Psychology in International Relations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Joseph Nye, Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Elizabeth Saunders, Leaders at War: How Presidents Shape Military Interventions (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Michael Horowitz, Allan Stam, and Cali Ellis, Why Leaders Fight (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
110 Sims, Team of Vipers, 148.
111 See, for example, Jack Shafer, “How Baby Donald Slew the Imperial Presidency,” Politico, March 10, 2017, and John Dickerson, “The Hardest Job in the World,” Atlantic, May 2018.
112 See Woodward, Fear, 240.
113 Elise Labott, “John Bolton Is Living His Dream,” Politico, February 4, 2019.
114 See, for examples, Asawin Suebsaeng and Lachlan Markay, “Trump Manages to Not Screw Up for a Day, Stunning His Aides,” Daily Beast, June 9, 2017; or Jonathan Allen, “What’s Driving the Toned-Down Trump?” NBC News, December 4, 2018.
115 Julie Ray, “Americans’ Stress, Worry and Anger Intensified in 2018,” Gallup, April 25, 2019. Accessed at https://news.gallup.com/poll/249098/americans-stress-worry-anger-intensified-2018.aspx.
116 Pew Research Center, “Public Highly Critical of State of Political Discourse in the U.S.,” June 2019.
117 Daniel Nexon, “Normalizing Trump,” Lawyers, Guns, and Money (blog), April 9, 2018, http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/04/normalizing-trump.
118 Also, it is interesting that most of the presidents mentioned in this paragraph are judged poorly by historians.
119 Charlie Savage, “Presidential Power Must Be Curbed after Trump, 2020 Candidates Say,” New York Times, September 12, 2019.
120 See, on this point, Naunihal Singh, “Steven Bannon Is Wrong: The White House ‘Resistance’ Is the Opposite of a Coup,” Washington Post, September 11, 2018; Jonathan Bernstein, “Thwarting Trump from Within Isn’t Anti-Democratic,” Bloomberg, September 13, 2018; Josh Chafetz, “Constitutional Maturity, or Reading Weber in the Age of Trump,” Constitutional Commentary 34 (2019): 17–41.
121 Elizabeth Saunders, “No Substitute for Experience: Presidents, Advisers, and Information in Group Decision-Making,” International Organization 71 (April 2017): S219–47.
122 Josh Chafetz, Congress’s Constitution: Legislative Authority and the Separation of Powers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).
123 Max Weber, quoted in Chafetz, “Constitutional Maturity, or Reading Weber in the Age of Trump,” 18.
124 Matt K. Lewis, Too Dumb to Fail (New York: Hachette, 2016); Charles Sykes, How the Right Lost Its Mind (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017); Rick Wilson, Everything Trump Touches Dies (New York: Free Press, 2018); Alberta, American Carnage.
125 Juliegrace Brufke, “House Republicans Dismissive of Paul Ryan’s Take on Trump,” The Hill, July 12, 2019.
126 Jeremi Suri, The Impossible Presidency (New York: Basic Books, 2019), p. 290.
127 Alan Wolfe, The Politics of Petulance: America in an Age of Immaturity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 15.
128 Wolfe, Politics of Petulance, 164.
129 “Majority Says Trump Has Done ‘Too Little’ to Distance Himself from White Nationalists,” Pew Research Center website, March 28, 2019, https://www.people-press.org/2019/03/28/majority-says-trump-has-done-too-little-to-distance-himself-from-white-nationalists/.
130 See Daniel W. Drezner, “Political Economy of Secular Stagnation: Why Capital in the United States Swipes Right,” in Facing Up to Low Productivity Growth, ed. Adam Posen and Jeromin Zettelmeyer (Washington: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2019).