“As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?”
—@realDonaldTrump, June 4, 2018
TRUMP SPENT CHRISTMAS and New Year’s Day at Mar-a-Lago, his private, for-profit club. Tradition dictates that presidential travel, even vacation, is funded by taxpayers. Trump added a new complexity to the equation: His privately held companies were profiting from his trips. This hadn’t happened before with a president, and Trump traveled often to Mar-a-Lago and other properties he owned.
In 2017, he’d taken ten trips there for a total of forty-four days. He made more than ninety visits to his own golf clubs. And he took still more trips to other Trump properties. In his first year in office, Trump spent one in three days at a property his company owns.
Travel by Obama and his family had cost on average $1 million a month during his presidency. The Trump family’s travel costs during his first year as president were higher; a conservative watchdog group tracked his spending at $13.5 million for just the Air Force One portion of travel.
All presidential travel is costly, in part because of security requirements. Golf cart rental for the Secret Service cost $150,000 by late 2017, an expense Trump is not legally allowed to reimburse because of conflict-of-interest rules. Trump took special heat because his businesses were profiting at the expense of taxpayers, and because his presidency was possibly giving Trump properties an unfair advantage over his competitors.
Unlike other presidents, Trump did not sever his relationship with his businesses. Although his sons Don Jr. and Eric were put in charge, Trump still owned them and profited when his businesses do.
Unlike other presidents, Trump did not sever his relationship with his businesses.
The Constitution has two clauses that prohibit “emoluments,” or payments and gifts from foreign or domestic governments. With this in mind, the District of Columbia and State of Maryland filed suit against Trump. It was new legal ground; never in the nation’s history had a federal court been asked to determine what a ban on emoluments means when it comes to the president. The Justice Department, which represents the president, had argued unsuccessfully in federal court that the case should be dismissed.
But it was not just that Trump’s visits to his properties, paid for by the public, enriched him. The Trump Organization does business in many countries around the world. It was conceivable that his business interests and American foreign policy might at some point be in conflict. Some argued this position left him open to bribery and even blackmail by foreign governments.
Trump rejected the suggestion that his ongoing business interests presented a conflict of interest.
“The law’s totally on my side,” he said. “The president can’t have a conflict of interest.”
It’s more of a gray area than Trump made out. Generally, officials who work in the executive branch are breaking the law if they participate in government business where they, their families, or their business partners have financial interests. But the president and vice president have traditionally gotten a pass from Congress. There isn’t a legal requirement for a president to give up a business because of a conflict of interest. The president and vice president have been trusted to do the right thing.
In the past, the men holding these offices made efforts to avoid conflicts of interest and even the appearance of them.
When Nelson D. Rockefeller, a wealthy man, was being considered as Gerald Ford’s vice president, Congress scrutinized Rockefeller’s business. Trump withheld his tax returns, so no such examination could be made. Past presidents also separated themselves completely from their businesses. President Jimmy Carter put his peanut farm into a blind trust that allowed an independent manager to operate, sell, or rent portions of it without Carter’s approval, for example.
Just as Trump had no interest in being like other candidates, he had no interest in being like other presidents.
Likewise, as 2017 became 2018, he wasn’t going to follow diplomatic protocol. Aggression had always worked for him, and so in the second year of his presidency, he turned up the dials as soon as he was back in Washington.
On January 2, he responded to a tweet from North Korea’s dictator:
“North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the ‘Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.’ Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!”
The same day, Trump called for the jailing of Comey and a Clinton aide. He criticized the Department of Justice. And he announced he’d be giving awards to the most “dishonest and corrupt” members of the media.
While some people viewed those tweets as an example of Trump being Trump—calling things as he saw them and being a strong leader—experts on authoritarian governments considered the sentiments embedded in tweets like these to be warning signs of assaults on democracy.
Dictators threaten and sometimes imprison their opponents. They stack the courts and interfere with an independent judiciary. They also intimidate, threaten, and censor the free press.
During his campaign rallies, he’d reveled in chants of “Lock her up!” directed at Clinton, even after the FBI had found no criminal intent with her use of a private e-mail server for public business.
As president, he criticized the US judicial system as being “broken and unfair.” Having not forgiven Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia investigation, Trump frequently insulted Sessions and even attorneys in the Justice Department for how they did their jobs, especially when it came to the Mueller investigation. Trump expected the Justice Department to protect him, and he believed he had an “absolute right” to do what he wanted with the nation’s top law-enforcement agency and its investigations.
Trump’s threats on the media were also relentless and grave. During the campaign, Trump banned reputable media outlets from covering his rallies. As a candidate and as president he criticized journalists for being the “most dishonest” people. He tweeted hundreds of times about “fake news” in an attempt to diminish the credibility of information that he considered unflattering. He also tweeted about changing the nation’s libel laws, an assault on the First Amendment.
Trump’s threats on the media were also relentless and grave.
Although this extreme behavior was new for an American president, there is historical precedent elsewhere.
In Germany before World War II, Adolf Hitler was both hostile to the press and a master of the dark art of propaganda. Trump had long been familiar with Hitler’s propaganda tactics. When Trump and Ivana were in the midst of their divorce, she wrote that Trump kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. Titled My New Order, the speeches illuminated how Hitler had used propaganda to lead his nation to the murders of six million Jews, as well as millions more communists, gay people, disabled people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and members of the Roma ethnic group. Hitler also tarred his critics as Lügenpresse, which means “lying press.” The term carried an anti-Semitic connotation, much like Trump’s “America First” proclamation—associations that aren’t evident to people unaware of those moments in history.
Trump also borrowed an insult from the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, calling the press “the enemy of the people.” This was the exact phrase Stalin used to justify putting his opponents to death. Stalin used a state news outlet called Pravda—which means “truth”—to create a fact-free reality fueled by hysteria and maintained by gaslighting, an intentional manipulation of facts to make a person doubt their memory, perceptions, and even reality itself. His use of propaganda, biased information meant to mislead people, led to the purges and deaths of millions.
IT WAS IN TRUMP’S INTEREST TO DISCREDIT the media.
The job of the political press is to fairly and accurately cover what members of the government say and do, and to correct reporting errors when they occur. When Trump, his campaign, and his family business were under investigation, and when that investigation regularly appeared in the news, discrediting the press was a strategy for self-preservation.
What’s more, Trump enjoyed praise. He liked people to be “nice” to him, and he criticized the journalists and media outlets who did not meet this expectation as “horrendous,” “fake news,” and “failing.” He also called journalists “sick people.”
Although the media typically cover presidents critically, Trump created many of his own problems with the media by failing to tell the truth.
During his first hundred days in office—before the Mueller investigation began—Trump lied repeatedly. The Washington Post’s fact checkers tallied 492 lies for Trump’s first hundred days, an average of 4.9 lies per day. He lied more frequently afterward, bringing his average for the first year and a half of his presidency to more than six lies per day. In June and July 2018, he averaged sixteen lies per day.
Trump’s record of deception has no presidential precedent.
Obama also lied, but far less often. In his eight-year presidency, journalists caught him in eighteen public falsehoods. By early 2018, Trump was uttering that many false and misleading statements every two days. By mid-2018, Trump was lying almost twice that often. It is true that both presidents have said untrue things, but during the first half of his presidency, Trump lied 1,230 times as often as Obama did. That is, for each lie Obama told, Trump told 1,230.
Trump’s lies carried consequences.
His lies about Obama’s birthplace, for example, meant that in 2017, 57 percent of Republicans still believed Obama had been born outside the United States. While this had been a politically useful lie for Trump, it also meant some people would not be able to shed misinformation Trump had aggressively advanced for years. Trump had created a new and false reality for many voters.
Trump also frequently characterized inquiries into Russia’s cyberattack on the election as a “witch hunt.” He persisted in calling Russian interference in the election “fake news.” He disregarded consensus among the intelligence agencies of the United States and the nation’s allies, and he dismissed classified e-mail evidence he’d seen proving that the Russian government had hacked servers and spread disinformation and misinformation meant to divide voters, undermine Clinton, and elect Trump.
His assault on people’s perceptions of reality was effective.
In October 2017, the conservative-leaning polling agency Rasmussen Reports found that 52 percent of voters believed Mueller’s investigation was honest. By April 2018, only 46 percent trusted the investigation. Forty percent considered it a “partisan witch hunt,” up from 32 percent over the same period.
Republicans were especially inclined to believe misinformation Trump provided. So, even if Trump could not shut down the Mueller investigation without political consequence, he could undermine the public’s faith in it, especially with people likely to vote for his reelection.
TRUMP’S FLURRY OF NEWS-MAKING TWEETS CONTINUED on January 6, when he was at Camp David, the rustic presidential retreat in Maryland. Trump had traveled there to discuss his legislative priorities for the year, but the day before, a book called Fire and Fury came out, and it raised questions about Trump’s mental state.
The book’s author, Michael Wolff, said White House insiders were having regular conversations about the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which can be used to remove a mentally unfit president from office. The amendment was put in place in response to the Kennedy assassination, and it specifies who replaces a president who has died or resigned or is experiencing “an inability to discharge the powers and duties of the office.”
“The Twenty-fifth Amendment is a concept that is alive every day in the White House,” Wolff said. “It’s that bad. I mean, it’s an extraordinary moment in time.”
Such talk threw Trump into a state of outrage. Instead of focusing on his legislative priorities, he took to Twitter, his means of talking with people without interference from his aides and without filter from the media.
“Now that Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the Fake News Mainstream Media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming mental stability and intelligence.….,” he tweeted.
“…. Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star.….
“…. to President of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius…. and a very stable genius at that!”
Trump provided no evidence to prove the Russia investigation was a “total hoax.” To the contrary, his campaign manager and national security adviser, among others, had been charged with crimes. So had Russian citizens and businesses. Less significantly, Trump had also once been a Reform Party candidate for president and therefore could not accurately claim he’d won on his first try, regardless of how big of an upset his victory had been. But Trump, being Trump, wanted to construct another reality he and his loyalists could inhabit. Anyone who challenged his version of it, whether it was the press, his political opponents, or the courts, could expect a fight. The media was “fake news.” Opponents in government were the “deep state.” The court system was “broken and unfair.”
Immigration, particularly of people of color, remained an intensely frustrating subject for him, too. In a meeting to hammer out a bipartisan deal on DACA, which was intended to remove the threat of deportation for nearly 690,000 people brought to the United States as children, Trump told lawmakers he wanted more immigrants from places like Norway.
“Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he reportedly asked.
He was referring to immigrants from some countries in Africa, and also earthquake refugees from Haiti and El Salvador, hundreds of thousands of whom had been protected from deportation by President George W. Bush and President Obama. Trump’s administration had just ended those protections when he described poor countries using crude language. His description of these poor nations struck many as another example of the president’s disdain for people of color. He took to Twitter to deny having made the remarks, and a few days later, before a dinner at Trump International Golf Club, he defended himself to reporters: “No, I am not a racist. I’m the least racist person you have ever interviewed.”
Soon the reality of the remarks had become a question. Had Trump made them?
Republican senator Lindsey Graham and Democratic senator Dick Durbin both said Trump had. But two other Republican senators, Tom Cotton and David Perdue, put out a joint statement implying the language was not used.
“In regards to Senator Durbin’s accusation, we do not recall the President saying these comments specifically,” the statement said.
Later the men said they’d heard the term “shithouse” instead of “shithole,” which allowed them to defend the president and support his version of reality.
Lindsey Graham split from his fellow Republicans here.
“My memory hasn’t evolved,” he told reporters. “I know what was said and I know what I said.”
For some Republicans, this was the bargain they faced with Trump in the Oval Office. Either stand with him or run the risk of threatening the political majority that would allow them to pass their legislation and put conservative judges on the nation’s courts.
Sometimes, the reality in dispute was greater than whether Trump said a word that ended with “house” or “hole.”
Representative Devin Nunes, a Republican from California and chairman of the House Select Intelligence Committee, set to work on a four-page memorandum called “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Abuses at the Department of Justice and The Federal Bureau of Investigation.” The memo was meant to discredit an FBI investigation of Carter Page and therefore the ongoing Mueller investigation into Trump’s campaign.
Nunes was not a wholly impartial source. He’d been a part of Trump’s presidential transition team. The FBI issued a statement saying it had “grave concerns” about the accuracy of the Nunes memo. Democrats who objected to the memo wrote a ten-page rebuttal.
But Trump’s supporters waged a social media campaign urging public release of the Nunes memo. Russian propaganda bots on Twitter embraced it, along with Don Jr. and other prominent conservatives. Trump permitted the release of the Nunes memo and initially blocked the release of the Democrats’ rebuttal.
Then Trump tweeted that Nunes’s “memo totally vindicates ‘Trump’ in probe.
“But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on…. This is an American disgrace!”
It would be easy to write this off as partisan bickering, or as a government agency resisting criticism. This is where provable facts matter. The Republican memo claimed the surveillance warrant was tantamount to spying on the Trump campaign. But Carter Page was no longer part of the campaign when the FBI applied for the warrant. The FBI had also had Page in its sights for years before he joined the Trump campaign.
The Nunes memo also asserted the FBI did not tell the court issuing the warrant that it had received information from a British spy paid by a firm that had been hired by Democrats—the reports that became the Steele dossier.
This was also false. The FBI application disclosed the political origins in a lengthy footnote, and it noted that Steele—identified as Source #1—had a history of credibility with the bureau.
It’s one thing to make a partisan argument based on different political philosophies. But it’s another thing to ignore or misstate facts to protect a political party or its leader. To chip away at objective truth is to threaten the bonds that hold a society together.
“Sociologists say that a belief in truth is what makes trust in authority possible,” said Timothy Snyder, a professor of European history at Yale. “Without trust, without respect for journalists or doctors or politicians, a society can’t hang together. Nobody trusts anyone, which leaves society open to resentment and propaganda, and of course to demagogues.”
Disregarding and distorting truth is also dangerous, he said. “Post-truth is pre-fascism. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”
Trump continued his assault on facts and notions of American liberty and patriotism.
In Cincinnati on February 5, during a speech about tax cuts, Trump bemoaned a lack of applause from some Democrats to his State of the Union address. He called it “un-American.”
“Somebody said ‘treasonous,’” he said. “I mean, yeah, I guess. Why not? Can we call that treason? Why not. They certainly don’t seem to love our country very much.”
Trump’s definition of treason diverges from the legal description: when someone who owes allegiance to the country wages war against it or gives its enemies “aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere.”
Not clapping for the president falls short of that threshold.
Less than two weeks later, on February 16, the Mueller investigation made its first charges against thirteen Russians and three Russian companies believed to be responsible for the attacks on the American electoral system.
The allegations went beyond hacking into e-mail accounts and servers. Russians also traveled to the United States to disrupt democracy, prosecutors said. The indictment alleged that Yevgeny Prigozhin, an oligarch known as “Putin’s Cook” for his proximity to the Russian president, funded the Internet Research Agency which, starting as early as 2014, hired thirteen Russians to pose as Americans, create fake social media identities, post inflammatory social media, and host fake political rallies. They also allegedly stole the identities of real Americans as part of their criminal scheme.
Their goal was to sow political discord, support Trump, and disparage Clinton, the thirty-seven-page indictment said. The Russians capitalized on inherently divisive issues: immigration, religion, and race. They also targeted certain states, such as Texas and Tennessee, with fake social media groups that had hundreds of thousands of followers. Using false identities, they communicated with unwitting Trump campaign staff to get signs for their fake rallies, and in one case paid an American to dress up as Hillary Clinton in a prison uniform at a rally. Mueller also charged an American, Richard Pinedo, with illegally selling bank account numbers over the internet.
On February 18, more charges came. A Dutch attorney named Alex van der Zwaan was indicted for lying to the FBI about his interactions with Manafort’s associate, Rick Gates. Van der Zwaan pled guilty, served thirty days, and was deported.
On February 22, Mueller filed new charges against Manafort and Gates. The indictment listed thirty-two charges, including tax and bank fraud. Gates pled guilty the next day and agreed to cooperate with the special counsel.
Trump persisted in trashing the investigation despite the number of serious charges and guilty pleas.
“WITCH HUNT!” he tweeted on February 27.
“WITCH HUNT!” he tweeted on February 27.
He also continued making comments that violated American democratic norms.
On March 3, in a private speech given to Republican donors at Mar-a-Lago, Trump complained about a decision not to investigate Clinton after the election, called the system “rigged,” and suggested China’s president, Xi Jinping, had achieved something noteworthy: “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great,” Trump said. “And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
Even if he was kidding during the conversation, which CNN described as “upbeat” and “peppered with jokes,” Trump’s words gave critics one more instance of a time Trump expressed admiration of an authoritarian leader. And given the number of times he’d called Clinton “crooked” and pressed for her incarceration, it’s hard to make a case that threats of prison for a political enemy were entirely in jest.
Trump was often less than upbeat with his staff. He could be abusive to them, as he had been on the campaign trail and at times with employees of the Trump organization. He excoriated Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen when data showed undocumented border crossings were rising, much as he’d humiliated Attorney General Jeff Sessions after the appointment of Mueller as special counsel.
This wasn’t the only way Trump’s behavior defied presidential norms. He also had a habit of tearing up papers after he was done with them. As a candidate, he’d done this after a debate with Clinton. Presidents aren’t supposed to do this. The Presidential Records Act requires the preservation of all documents the president touches. Trump was especially zealous in tearing up a letter written to him by Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator from New York.
Aides had to spend their days taping sheets of paper back together—including some that had been torn into confetti-like bits. The behavior contrasted starkly with that of Trump’s predecessors, especially Obama, whose staff had had an organized and color-coded system for preserving presidential documents.
“It was the craziest thing ever,” said Solomon Lartey, a records-management analyst with thirty years’ experience. “He ripped papers into tiny pieces.”
As rocky as February was for Trump, March was no better. Because Trump announced and signed tariffs on imported steel and aluminum in early March, his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, resigned. On March 13, Trump fired Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, putting CIA chief Mike Pompeo in the job. Tillerson and Trump hadn’t gotten along for months; in 2017, Tillerson reportedly called Trump “a moron” within earshot of cabinet members and Trump’s national security team. Later, Trump tweeted that Tillerson was “wasting time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.”
Trump did score a political victory against Andrew McCabe, the former FBI deputy director. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired McCabe for an alleged lack of candor.
“The FBI expects every employee to adhere to the highest standards of honesty, integrity, and accountability,” Sessions said.
McCabe, who’d worked for the FBI for twenty-one years, was fired on March 16, two days before he was eligible for a government pension. He denied being dishonest.
“This is part of an effort to discredit me as a witness” in an obstruction of justice investigation of Trump, he said.
Meanwhile, relations with Russia crackled with tension.
In early March, a Russian double-agent and his daughter were found slumped on a park bench in Salisbury, England. They’d been poisoned with a nerve agent developed in the former Soviet Union, a substance so toxic it sickened police officers who were investigating the deaths, putting one in intensive care for two weeks.
Putin denied responsibility. Had it been a military-grade nerve agent, he said, the victims “would have died on the spot.”
Though Putin dismissed any link to him or the Kremlin, his critics had sometimes ended up dead. The same poison later killed another British woman on July 9.
“A very sad situation,” Trump said. “It certainly looks like the Russians were behind it. Something that should never, ever happen. And we’re taking it very seriously, as I think are many others.”
America’s traditional allies—Britain, France, and Germany—denounced the attack. The White House imposed sanctions on Russian companies and individuals for this and the election interference. But Trump still called the Mueller investigation a hoax, setting him apart not only from the nation’s foreign allies but also from factions inside his own White House.
That same day new sanctions were announced, March 15, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security jointly issued a warning that Russian hackers were targeting critical US infrastructure, including power and nuclear facilities. Hackers had also managed to get remote access to energy facilities. The chances of an attack on the nation’s electrical grid were low; this would be an act of war. But the intrusions were an indication that Russia was gathering an understanding of how to do this.
Vladimir Putin was reelected on March 18 to another six-year term as Russia’s president. It wasn’t a clean election. One of his opponents was barred from the ballot, and reports were made of employers forcing their employees to vote for him. Nonetheless, Putin won 77 percent of the vote, despite putting the barest effort into a campaign.
Despite the fresh round of sanctions, Putin wanted Trump to offer his congratulations. He went about getting them in an indirect way; his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said Putin didn’t consider it “unfriendly” that Trump hadn’t called.
“Tomorrow’s another day,” Peskov said.
Trump resolved to telephone Putin. Before the call, his aides wrote briefing materials with specific instructions.
“DO NOT CONGRATULATE,” the briefing said in capital letters.
Trump’s national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, also told Trump in person to withhold his congratulations. There were reasons for this. It wasn’t just that the Russian election was suspect. Putin’s leadership did not warrant praise.
Nevertheless, Trump congratulated Putin.
Trump also failed to mention the nerve-agent poisoning or Russian interference in the US election. Nor did he condemn the hacks on the nation’s infrastructure.
“We had a very good call,” Mr. Trump said afterward. “We will probably be meeting in the not-too-distant future.”
Trump’s critics pounced.
“An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections,” Senator John McCain said.
The next day, McMaster resigned as national security adviser; he and Trump had long butted heads. John Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations, took McMaster’s place.
Despite Trump’s deference to Putin, the United States expelled sixty Russian diplomats and closed the Russian consulate in Seattle on March 26, calling all of the ousted diplomats spies. The diplomatic expulsion was part of a joint response to the poison attack by the US, Canada, Ukraine, and European Union states. Russia was not pleased.
The official White House statement was brief and measured, calling the expulsion an “appropriate response” to the deadly attack: “Russia’s response was not unanticipated, and the United States will deal with it.”
Meanwhile, as attempted crossings of the United States’ southern border rose, Trump’s administration had begun dealing more aggressively with immigrants. On April 6, Jeff Sessions announced a new policy that directed federal prosecutors to criminally prosecute all adult migrants entering the country without documentation.
“The situation at our Southwest Border is unacceptable. Congress has failed to pass effective legislation that serves the national interest—that closes dangerous loopholes and fully funds a wall along our southern border,” Sessions said.
Trump repeatedly exaggerated the danger immigration posed to citizens. He said immigrants bring “death and destruction … They are thieves and murderers and so much else.” This is a widely held misbelief—almost half of Americans think immigrants worsen crime. Both undocumented and documented immigrants commit less crime less often than citizens.
What’s more, while border crossings rose from 2017 to 2018, they were far lower than they had been in 2000. Since that peak, border crossings had diminished sharply. Very few of the people who crossed the border illegally were gang members. Many who attempted to gain entry to the US were families seeking safety from gang violence or to escape from poverty. It is also legal for immigrants to seek and apply for asylum.
Although an international law passed after World War II established a human right to seek asylum, the Trump administration sought to make refuge harder to obtain, and the new policy subjected all undocumented border-crossers to criminal prosecution, including those legally seeking safety from danger.
The policy meant that parents and children—even babies—were separated from one another. The Trump administration had been considering doing exactly this for months. In March 2017, then–Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly—later Trump’s chief of staff—said it was intended to “deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network.” Not long after that, Kelly said parents and children would be separated at the border only “if the child’s life is in danger.”
This was not true.
The administration started separating families in October 2017.
The administration started separating families in October 2017. Groups that advocate for immigrants complained about the practice in December 2017. A lawsuit later alleged that some of these detained children were being forcibly administered powerful drugs meant to act as “chemical straitjackets.”
Before the family separation policy, families seeking asylum could cross the border or show up at a port of entry and request asylum. Then they would be taken to a family detention center and interviewed to determine whether their fear of returning home was credible. Most families seeking asylum—77 percent—proved their fear of home was real. At that point, they could pay a bond or wear an ankle monitor while awaiting their case in court.
But under the Trump administration, this policy changed drastically. Between April 19 and May 31, nearly two thousand children were taken from their parents.
The Trump administration expressed no remorse for separating families.
“We have to do our job,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen said. “We will not apologize for doing our job. This administration has a simple message—if you cross the border illegally, we will prosecute you.”
The public outcry was intense. In the face of it, Trump signed an executive order that would keep migrant families together. The administration failed to reunite all of the families it had separated, despite a court order to do so, leaving hundreds of children effectively orphaned.
In the midst of the Trump administration’s efforts to ramp up law enforcement at the border, the FBI brought law enforcement closer than ever to Trump himself.
On April 9, federal authorities raided the office of Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen. Among other things, Cohen had arranged payoffs to Stormy Daniels and other women to keep their sexual affairs with Trump secret. Trump initially denied knowledge of the hush money to Daniels, money paid weeks before the election to ensure her silence about the adulterous relationship they had had in 2006. But in 2017, Trump had disclosed the payments as federal law required.
Cohen did more than block disclosure of potential sex scandals for Trump. Cohen also helped pursue business deals for the Trump Organization in Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Russia—including the Trump Tower Moscow deal Cohen had tried and failed to launch when Trump was a candidate. In seizing documents from Cohen, Mueller had crossed the “red line” of Trump’s business dealings. It also meant Mueller’s team—with deep expertise in criminal law, organized crime, corruption, and money laundering—would have access to a great deal of information about Trump’s business and its practices.
The raid infuriated Trump.
The raid infuriated Trump.
“Attorney–client privilege is dead!” he tweeted.
Rather than say the raid threatened the Trump Organization, Trump claimed Mueller’s “Fake & Corrupt” investigation was harming the nation’s relations with Russia.
“Our relationship with Russia is worse now than it has ever been, and that includes the Cold War … Russia needs us to help with their economy, something that would be very easy to do, and we need all nations to work together. Stop the arms race?”
Trump’s claim that the Russian economy was in trouble was true. Russia produces a lot of oil, and prices had cratered between 2013 and 2016. But sanctions Russia received for annexing Crimea and interfering with Ukraine had also hobbled the country’s economy by blocking international funding sources for Russia’s businesses. Putin’s actions led to the original sanctions. Putin responded to these sanctions by interfering with the 2016 election and working to sow political divisions among Americans, resulting in more sanctions. Even if no bombs were dropped, this represented an attack on the United States.
Even if no bombs were dropped, this represented an attack on the United States.
And it was an attack Trump knew about even before he took office. Not only did the nation’s intelligence agencies agree on that fact in early 2017, a bipartisan Senate report confirmed that assessment in 2018. The report also concluded Russia’s interference had not stopped.
There was no doubt that the Russian government disliked Mueller’s investigation. But Putin’s acts of aggression had resulted in the investigation. To blame the investigation for deteriorating relations was a bit like saying the burglar resented the homeowner for pressing charges.
What’s more, the investigation that Trump had called fake and corrupt had led to real criminal charges and guilty pleas. Trump’s language amounted to an attack on the judicial system, a pillar of the nation’s democracy. Trump’s statements were designed to diminish public opinion of the courts, and they amounted to a violation of the Constitutional principle of separation of powers.
Meanwhile, Mueller filed another charge against Manafort on June 8—this time for obstruction of justice. He also indicted Manafort’s Russian business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, on the same charge. That same day, Trump traveled to the G7 summit in Quebec, a meeting of the United States and key economic partners. Russia had once been part of the group but was kicked out after it illegally annexed Crimea. At the summit, Trump argued that Russia should be brought back into the group. He also blasted trade deficits America has with other countries—something he had tried to remedy by imposing tariffs on imports. Trump’s views represented departure from traditional American policies, which had favored free trade. What’s more, his tariffs and rhetoric incensed traditional US allies and trade partners.
Trump’s positions had caused a rift, French President Emmanuel Macron said. “The American President may not mind being isolated, but neither do we mind signing a 6 country agreement [without the United States] if need be … [T]hese 6 countries … represent an economic market which has the weight of history behind it and which is now a true international force.”
A few days later, Trump traveled to Singapore for a summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. The move was a gamble. Kim was considered a pariah among world leaders. He’d ordered the assassinations of his uncle and half-brother and spent money on developing nuclear weapons even as his people starved. His record on human rights was riddled with abuses. No sitting US president had met with a North Korean head of state. For Trump to meet with him would transform Kim from a pariah into a peer. In exchange for this, the United States asked nothing in return.
Trump had hoped to make progress on a deal to disarm North Korea. This did not happen. But the meeting did reduce rising tensions and the name-calling the two men had engaged in, diminishing the chance of war between the two nations.
Trump considered that a win.
“If I have to say I’m sitting on a stage with Chairman Kim and that’s going to get us to save thirty million lives, maybe more than that, I’m willing to sit on the stage. I’m willing to travel to Singapore very gladly.”
As Trump was smashing diplomatic norms, his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, had his bail revoked and was sent to jail on June 15 for attempting to coerce witnesses in his pending trial.
Trump once again criticized the court. “Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort,” Trump tweeted. “Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair!”
Not long after that, Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy announced he’d retire, giving Trump a second court seat to fill. Trump announced the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh on July 9. Kavanaugh was a federal appeals court judge who earlier in his career had participated in the investigation of President Bill Clinton. After he helped impeach Clinton, Kavanaugh wrote an article that suggested a sitting president should not be subject to the distraction of a civil lawsuit or criminal investigation or prosecution. His nomination raised the possibility that Trump was appointing a judge who might protect him from the Mueller investigation.
Mueller, meanwhile, indicted a dozen Russian intelligence officers on July 13 for their roles in hacking the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and for leaking stolen e-mails and other documents. Significantly, the charging papers also described how Guccifer 2.0—the front for Russian intelligence officers—communicated with the Trump team. Guccifer 2.0 exchanged messages with an unnamed “US person” who was “in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump.”
Roger Stone, a political dirty trickster who was Trump’s longtime confidante, acknowledged on CNN that he was probably that unnamed source.
“It’s benign, it’s innocuous,” Stone said of his exchanges.
Not everyone saw it that way. The ongoing nature of Russia’s cyberwarfare alarmed intelligence experts. Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, likened the urgency of the situation to the months just before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on American soil, when there were ample signs the nation was in danger.
“And here we are nearly two decades later, and I’m here to say the warning lights are blinking red again,” Coats said. “Today, the digital infrastructure that serves this country is literally under attack.”
It wasn’t just the nation’s digital infrastructure.
At least one Russian allegedly succeeded in infiltrating American political organizations, as well. On July 16, the Justice Department charged a Russian woman named Maria Butina with conducting a covert operation against the United States on behalf of the Russian government.
The charges—for conspiracy and failing to register as a foreign agent—were not part of the Mueller investigation; the FBI had been already scrutinizing Butina before Mueller came on the scene. The red-haired Russian agent came to the United States ostensibly to study and during that time infiltrated the National Rifle Association and other conservative organizations. She’d even started a sexual relationship with a much older Republican operative as part of her covert operations. Butina’s boss, Alexander Torshin, had been the one to arrange a meeting at the NRA’s National Prayer Breakfast with Don Jr., after Trump himself was not available. When investigators arrested Butina, she’d been just about to flee for Russia.
President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation shake hands. July 16, 2018. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
The day her arrest became public, Trump was in Helsinki, the capital of Finland, a city only an hour flight from Moscow, preparing for a private summit with Putin.
Trump had already been in Europe for a NATO meeting. It had not gone smoothly. He’d threatened to leave the organization over a funding dispute with America’s allies. The cooperation of these allies had helped contain Soviet aggression during the Cold War, and Putin, who’d been a KGB officer during that time, was no doubt pleased to see NATO bonds strain under Trump’s pugilistic diplomatic style.
Trump and Putin hold a joint press conference in Helsinki, Finland. July 16, 2018. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
People in Finland protested the meeting with signs criticizing both Trump and Putin. The summit also caused concern in the States. Democrats and some Republicans implored Trump to cancel.
Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, a Republican, issued a statement that read, “All patriotic Americans should understand that Putin is not America’s friend, and he is not the President’s buddy. We should stand united against Putin’s past and planned future attacks against us.”
Rather than stand against Putin’s onslaughts, Trump turned on the United States.
“Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of US foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!”
Trump and Putin had their private meeting July 16. There were no reporters. No aides. The only American besides Trump was a US government interpreter. Only Trump, Putin, and their interpreters knew what was said in the meeting. No one else ever would, at least not for certain. Interpreters don’t take notes that are meant to be long-term records, and their code of ethics prevents them from sharing what was exchanged.
But whatever was said in the meeting, the words said afterward were explosive.
At a joint press conference with both Putin and Trump, a reporter asked Trump about interference in the 2016 election: Whom did Trump believe? Putin or American intelligence agencies?
It was an opportunity for Trump, once and for all, to show his allegiance to the United States and the intelligence officers who serve the nation. It was also an opportunity for Trump to confront a foreign adversary who’d launched information warfare against America—to fight back, as presidents had done after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the terrorist attack on 9/11.
He did neither.
“My people came to me,” Trump said. “Dan Coats came to me and some others and said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be.”
Trump’s remarks were met with two reactions: silence from his allies, and astonishment from others.
House Speaker Paul Ryan said: “There is no question that Russia interfered in our election and continues attempts to undermine democracy here and around the world. That is not just the finding of the American intelligence community but also the House Committee on Intelligence. The president must appreciate that Russia is not our ally.”
Jeff Flake, a Republican senator from Arizona, called Trump’s performance “shameful.”
“I never thought I would see the day when our American president would stand on the stage with the Russian president and place blame on the United States for Russian aggression.”
John Brennan, director of the CIA under Obama, said the performance rose to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors, an impeachable offense.
“It was nothing short of treasonous,” he tweeted. “Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”
In the days that followed, Trump briefly claimed he’d misspoken. He’d meant to say he didn’t know why it wouldn’t be Russia engaging in cyberwarfare.
But his historical revisionism didn’t last.
By July 22, Trump was back in the ring throwing rhetorical jabs and hooks that had no basis in reality. The whole thing was a “big hoax.” It was Obama’s and Clinton’s faults. And worse, they’d spied on his campaign for political gain.
A few hours later, Trump was once again banging the drums of war. Not against North Korea, nor against Russia, who had waged information warfare against the nation he’d sworn to serve.
This time, Iran was in Trump’s crosshairs, because the Iranian president had the audacity to tell Trump not to “play with the lion’s tail, because you will regret it eternally.”
Not one to let a punch go unanswered, Trump hit back.
He hit back firmly, swiftly, and in a way no president ever had: by threatening war on Twitter in capital letters.
“NEVER, EVER THREATEN THE UNITED STATES AGAIN OR YOU WILL SUFFER CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE. WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY THAT WILL STAND FOR YOUR DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH. BE CAUTIOUS!”
It was an astounding moment in American history, and at the same time, it hardly made a splash in the history of Trump’s presidency.
It was a day on which Trump trafficked in conspiracy theories, partisan sniping, threats, and lies. A day on which Trump accused law enforcement agencies investigating him of betraying their principles for the sake of politics. A day on which threats to destroy the world passed for attempts to keep the nation secure.
It was a day on which reality could be torn as easily as a sheet of paper that others would have to reassemble for the sake of history.
It was a day like many others in the Trump White House. It was unprecedented.
And Donald Trump, the nation’s forty-fifth president, was not yet halfway through his term.
President Donald J. Trump (Department of Defense)