On the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Donald Trump returned to his hometown to mark the solemn occasion. Trump skipped the official memorial ceremonies at the World Trade Center, which were attended by President Joe Biden, instead visiting a police station in Manhattan. Even as he was memorializing the anniversary with a group of New York City police officers, Trump couldn’t help regaling the cops with his long-debunked claim that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” against him. This was a lie: more than fifty lawsuits by Trump or his surrogates challenging those election results had already been dismissed in federal and state courts, while Trump’s own election security officials had publicly stated that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.”
The same day that Trump was in Manhattan, former president George W. Bush was attending a memorial service for the passengers and crew on United Flight 93, which had crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on 9/11. During the service, Bush took a thinly veiled swipe at Trump and the violent forces he had unleashed with his constant lies about the presidential election, which had culminated in the January 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol by hundreds of enraged Trump supporters, some of whom fought pitched battles with police officers.
In Shanksville, Bush, who rarely made public statements now that he was out of office, said, “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home, but in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.” A Republican former president publicly calling out Trump’s supporters on the anniversary of 9/11 for defiling the US Capitol quickly generated a forest of headlines.
Back at the Manhattan police station, Trump slammed the Biden administration for its ignominious departure from Afghanistan the previous month. That same day, half a world away, the Taliban raised their distinctive white flag over the presidential palace in Kabul, which was their way of memorializing the twentieth anniversary of 9/11.
The Taliban’s seizure of Afghanistan was one of Trump’s most significant foreign policy legacies. President Biden certainly deserved blame for claiming that he was bound by Trump’s 2020 “peace” deal with the Taliban, which was really a “surrender agreement” in the mordant words of H. R. McMaster, Trump’s former national security advisor. And Biden also deserved blame for the botched execution of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan during the summer of 2021. Some Afghans were so desperate to flee the Taliban that they hung on to the fuselage of a US military plane taking off from Kabul Airport; two of them dropped to their deaths. Thirteen US service members and 170 Afghans were also killed at the airport by the Afghan branch of ISIS as the Americans hurriedly withdrew. The chaos and tragedy made the US pullout from Saigon in 1975 look like a dignified retreat.
But it was Trump, not Biden, who had laid the groundwork for the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. In 2018, Trump authorized his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, to begin negotiations with the Taliban. US ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad led the effort, making an agreement with the Taliban that, in exchange for a total US withdrawal from Afghanistan, they would break with al-Qaeda and engage in genuine peace talks with the Afghan government. Despite these agreements, the Taliban maintained close ties with al-Qaeda and prepared for a major military offensive against the Afghan government. Meanwhile, the Trump administration agreed to pressure the Afghan government to release five thousand Taliban prisoners, some of whom rejoined their old comrades on the battlefield once they were released.
Trump often asserted he was a great dealmaker, but his administration’s agreement with the Taliban was one of the worst deals in American diplomatic history. The Taliban received everything that they wanted without offering anything substantive in return, other than an agreement not to attack US forces as they withdrew from Afghanistan. Since the Taliban’s main goal in their negotiations with the United States was a total American withdrawal—which would also precipitate the withdrawal of thousands of allied NATO forces, as well as more than fifteen thousand contractors, many of whom were supporting the Afghan air force and army—this was an easy concession for the Taliban to make. A total American withdrawal would then help pave the way for their complete victory over the Afghan government.
The week before the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, the Taliban had appointed Sirajuddin Haqqani, a member of al-Qaeda’s leadership, to a top cabinet position in their new government. Haqqani was appointed acting interior minister, a job analogous to running the US Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. The Taliban peace negotiations initiated by Trump ended up leading to the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban and ensured that al-Qaeda would play a role in the leadership of the country.
And so it went with many other of Trump’s foreign policy initiatives. Trump believed that by dint of his personal charm he could persuade the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to give up his nuclear weapons. American presidents going back to Bill Clinton had tried to persuade the nuclear-armed hermit state to rein in its weapons program, and all of them had failed. Trump met with Kim three times as president, first in Singapore in 2018, and a year later in Hanoi and then at the border between North and South Korea. Each meeting generated a media frenzy, giving Kim and the US president equal billing on the world stage, which was a huge coup for the dictator of a country whose GDP was similar to that of the state of Vermont.
At the Singapore meeting, Trump unilaterally gave a key concession to Kim—canceling joint US–South Korea military exercises, which had been a longtime cornerstone of containing the North Korean rogue state—and got nothing in return. Trump didn’t consult any members of his cabinet before telling Kim the exercises would be canceled, blindsiding the Pentagon. Trump told Kim that North Korea was doing the US a big favor because canceling the exercises “saved the United States a lot of money.” When Trump made this remark, Kim was smiling broadly, laughing from time to time. The jovial dictator had correctly pegged Trump as an easy mark. It was the same negotiating strategy that the Trump administration would later employ with the Taliban, giving away major concessions and getting nothing in return.
Trump and Kim also exchanged twenty-seven letters, publicly described by Trump as “love letters.” Yet, these summits and exchanges yielded nothing. While Trump was in office, the North Koreans continued producing fissile material and tested short-range ballistic missiles in contravention of UN Security Council prohibitions, in addition to developing hard-to-detect submarine-launched missiles.
While Trump’s efforts to constrain North Korea’s nuclear program failed, his erratic diplomacy encouraged Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Trump regularly castigated Obama’s 2015 nuclear agreement with the Iranians as the “worst deal in history.” But unlike Trump’s peace agreement with the Taliban, the Iranians were observing their end of the nuclear deal, according to Trump’s own intelligence agencies. Yet, Trump was determined to get out of Obama’s Iran agreement, which he did in 2018. As a result, by the time that Trump left office in January 2021, the Iranians were planning to enrich uranium up to 20 percent purity, far above the 4 percent purity agreed to in their deal with the Obama administration. While 20 percent is well short of the 90 percent purity needed for a nuclear bomb, the Iranians had accumulated enough fissile material by the time Biden assumed office that they were within a few months of having enough for a nuclear weapon. The Iranian nuclear program took a large step forward as a result of Trump’s ham-handed approach.
Throughout his presidency, Trump embraced Russian strongman president Vladimir Putin while regularly taking potshots at key American allies such as the British, French, and Germans. What was the strategic benefit of all this geopolitical trumpery to the United States? It was never clear, although it was certainly a key aim of Putin’s to weaken the NATO alliance. Rather than seeing NATO as a mutual self-defense alliance that served American interests very well, Trump saw it as a constellation of countries that were ripping off the United States. Trump often told his key advisers that he wanted to pull out of NATO, which his own defense secretary, Jim Mattis, described as the most successful alliance in history. Luckily, Trump never followed through, but by the time he left office, Trump was largely despised by ordinary British, French, and German citizens whose countries were at the core of NATO.
Trump, who had a fascination with autocrats, also embraced the dictatorial Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the Saudi kingdom, known as MBS. The headstrong prince embroiled his country in a war in neighboring Yemen that precipitated one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. Rather than extirpating Iranian influence in Yemen, which was a key goal of the Saudi war, Iran’s influence in Yemen was amplified as its alliance with the anti-Saudi Houthi rebels deepened. MBS also jailed innocuous Saudi dissidents, such as women who had demanded the right to drive, and his goons murdered the Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul in 2018. None of this advanced American interests, yet Trump bragged that he’d shielded MBS after Khashoggi’s murder, and he also vetoed a bill attempting to end US military assistance for the Saudis’ war in Yemen.
Trump’s embrace of dictators overseas was of a piece with his attempts to undermine democratic processes and norms at home in the United States, which was exemplified by his continued refusal to accede to the will of the people in the 2020 presidential election and his support of his followers storming the US Capitol. As a result, two-thirds of Republicans believed that the 2020 election was rigged against Trump, despite all evidence to the contrary. That statistic underlined how polarized American society had become, a polarization greatly intensified by Trump himself.
Trump also tuned out the baleful effects of a warming planet, pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. The evidence for accelerating climate change during the Trump presidency was plain to see, from the vast forest fires in the American West to the NASA analysis, which found that 2020 was the hottest year since record keeping began.
But it was, above all, in his mishandling of the COVID pandemic that Trump revealed his many weaknesses as a leader.
On February 28, 2020, as Americans first became aware of the threat from the coronavirus, Trump said that cases of the virus would go down to zero “within a couple of days.” He also claimed that the coronavirus was no more dangerous than the seasonal flu. The following month, Trump said that “anybody that wants a test can get a test” at a time when there were only seventy-five thousand tests for 330 million Americans. Trump then said that come Easter Sunday on April 12, 2020, the US should be “opened up” because he “just thought it was a beautiful time.”
The Trump administration abdicated its responsibilities by not issuing a mandate to wear masks and also never developed a nationwide COVID-19 testing strategy. After the expiration on April 30, 2020, of a voluntary forty-five-day federal advisory to “slow the spread,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance on how to reopen carefully in phases was ignored in many states. As Trump pressed for states to reopen, social distancing often went out the window. In defiance of CDC guidelines on large gatherings, Trump held a large indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 20, 2020, which likely contributed to a spike of cases there. One of the attendees at the Tulsa rally was Republican governor Kevin Stitt, who subsequently became the first US governor to test positive for the virus. By prioritizing “reopening” over public health, the Trump administration chose to accept that hundreds of thousands of Americans could die of COVID-19.
In late April, Trump suggested that injecting bleach might prove to be a treatment for the virus. A month later, Trump said that he was taking the drug hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial. In June 2020, the Food and Drug Administration revoked “emergency use” of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19 patients because it could cause heart problems.
When testing became more widespread in July 2020, Trump claimed that the only reason coronavirus cases were rising in the US was not because of rapid community spread, but because there was more testing. And Trump publicly denigrated his top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as an “alarmist.”
For Trump, the buck never stopped at his desk. Trump tried labeling the virus the “China virus,” the “Wuhan virus,” and even the “kung flu.” But those diversionary efforts fell flat. A poll released in July 2020 by the Associated Press found that Trump’s approval rating on his handling of the virus had fallen to an all-time low of 32 percent.
Occasionally, Trump officials made sensible decisions, such as when, on January 31, 2020, they barred non-US citizens who had recently visited China from entering the United States and also imposed two-week quarantines on Americans who had visited Hubei province, where the virus had originated. But these good calls were far outweighed by the procession of bad policy choices made by Trump. Before effective vaccines, there were two tools that worked to stop the spread of the virus: social distancing and wearing a mask in public. Trump denigrated mask wearing and almost invariably refused to wear a mask himself.
He explained it was all about the optics: “Somehow sitting in the Oval Office behind that beautiful Resolute Desk, the great Resolute Desk. I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens—I don’t know, somehow, I don’t see it for myself. I just, I just don’t.” Trump turned masks into political footballs rather than symbols of sound public health policy. He also convened events at the White House with large numbers of guests mingling without masks, such as the celebration of the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on September 26, 2020.
By August 2020, eighteen American states had set records for their numbers of confirmed coronavirus cases, and there were more than four million confirmed cases in the US, a quarter of the total number of known cases in the world, though Americans made up just over 4 percent of the global population.
Trump’s falsehoods and cavalier behavior had other impacts. A Cornell University study released in October 2020 found that mentions of Trump made up 37 percent of the overall “misinformation conversation” about the coronavirus based on a sample analysis of thirty-eight million articles in English from around the world. Even when Trump had the chance to make a public statement that might have made a difference to the scope of the pandemic, he failed to do so. He and his wife, Melania, were vaccinated at the White House during the closing days of his presidency. Any leader with the slightest regard for his own people would have allowed the media to cover this event, especially given the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy in the United States. Trump chose instead to be vaccinated in secret.
More than four hundred thousand Americans died from COVID-19 during Trump’s final year in office, which was more than the American death toll in wars going back to World War II. Many of those deaths could have been avoided with better leadership; COVID mortality in the US was 40 percent higher than the average of other advanced nations such as Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The first duty of the commander in chief is the protection of US citizens, and Trump clearly was derelict in this duty. In short, Trump was the most incompetent president in modern American history. This book is an attempt to tell the story of how that happened.