On Wednesday morning, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, walked out to address the cameras stationed in front of the West Wing and offered one of the week’s most unintentionally revealing comments. The first reports were out about the contents of Bob Woodward’s damning new account of the Trump Administration, “
Fear: Trump in the White House,” and she was trying, not all that successfully, to downplay and deny the book’s sorry chronicle of internal chaos, dissension, and dismay within the White House over the President’s behavior. “I haven’t read a lot of his books,” she said, of Woodward, before going on to dismiss his latest as fiction.
Trump is the eighth President of the United States to have been subjected to the Woodward treatment, and, had Sanders read his previous works, she would have known exactly what to expect: a devastating reported account of the Trump Presidency that will be consulted as a first draft of the grim history it portrays long after the best-sellers by
Michael Wolff and
Omarosa Manigault Newman have been forgotten. Merely dismissing it as fiction was never going to work. The book begins with what Woodward calls “an administrative coup d’etat”—Trump’s former chief economic adviser deciding to steal key papers off the President’s Oval Office desk in order to stop him from pulling out of a South Korean free-trade deal as tensions escalated with North Korea last summer. The book ends with the President’s lawyer John Dowd quitting his legal team, concluding that he could no longer represent someone he believed to be “a ******* liar.”
As Sanders spoke to reporters on Wednesday, her White House colleagues told journalists that they had only just managed to obtain a copy of the book, which does not go on sale to the public until next week. Up until then, they were left with the excerpts in the Washington
Post, the New York
Times, and CNN, which mostly emphasized, as Dwight Garner put it, in the
Times, that “if this book has a single point to drive home, it is that the president of the United States is a congenital liar.” Trump’s lies, of course, have been thoroughly covered territory throughout his Presidency, especially because so many of them occur in public. Amazingly, it is no longer big news when the occupant of the Oval Office is shown to be callous, ignorant, nasty, and untruthful.
Reading through a copy of the book obtained by
The New Yorker, however, I was struck by a different theme: what Woodward has written is not just the story of a deeply flawed President but also, finally, an account of what those surrounding him have chosen to do about it. Throughout much of Trump’s first year in office, the shorthand had it that, while Trump was an inexperienced, and possibly even dangerous, newcomer to politics, he could be managed by the grownups he had invited into his government. Many of those grownups are now gone, fired by Trump or pushed out by scandal, and for months they have been telling people how bad it was, or how much they did to stop the President, or how much worse it could have been. Here, then, are some of the details of what they claim to have done to control Trump: Gary Cohn, who was the economic adviser until he resigned, early this year, swiped that order to withdraw from a free-trade agreement with South Korea, and another one to unilaterally withdraw from nafta.
H. R. McMaster, the soon-to-be-fired national-security adviser, pondered quitting after the President ranted against U.S. allies and threatened to pull troops out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, but he remained in the job and convinced Trump, at least temporarily, not to go through with it.
James Mattis, the generally unflappable Defense Secretary, told the President, “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III here,” during a contentious meeting that exasperated him so much, according to Woodward, that he later complained Trump behaved like a “fifth- or sixth-grader.” Another session in the Pentagon with the national-security team and Trump went so famously badly that, afterward, the Secretary of State at the time,
Rex Tillerson, called Trump a “******* moron,” a detail that Woodward confirms here for posterity.
This is hardly a flattering picture of what the internal pushback to Trump looks like. Many of Woodward’s sources come across as caricatures of Washington power brokers, scheming against one another as they jockey for Trump’s favor, shamelessly flattering the President, fuming about insults and threatening to quit but never actually doing so. I was about halfway through the book on Wednesday afternoon when the news cycle interrupted my reading:
an anonymous Op-Ed by a “senior official in the Trump administration” had just been published by the
Times, praising the “unsung heroes” inside the White House who have secretly been members of the same clandestine “resistance” chronicled in the Woodward book. “It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era,” Anonymous wrote, “but Americans should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even when Donald Trump won’t.”
It was as if one of Woodward’s sources had chosen to publish a real-time epilogue in the pages of the
Times. Reading the Op-Ed, I immediately thought of an amazing passage in the book, which quoted a summary of a national-security meeting written by a White House official (and which never even made it into the news accounts about the book). It said, “The president proceeded to lecture and insult the entire group about how they didn’t know anything when it came to defense or national security. It seems clear that many of the president’s senior advisers, especially those in the national security realm, are extremely concerned with his erratic nature, his relative ignorance, his inability to learn, as well as what they consider his dangerous views.”
Both the Op-Ed and the book convey the laments of conservatives who, in many respects, are fine with the Trump agenda but not with the man. That is, for now, what passes for the Republican wing of the resistance. So far, it is mostly underground, or perhaps still largely nonexistent; we don’t really know. The Republicans who control Capitol Hill have not joined, or even made token moves toward addressing these significant concerns raised by members of their own party. Instead, the silence from the congressional G.O.P., awaiting its fate in the
November midterm elections and still wary of crossing the President who remains popular with the Republican base, has been deafening.
Meanwhile, the anonymous article and the nameless accounts in Woodward’s book have already infuriated those who have publicly struggled against Trump. For instance,
The Atlantic’s David Frum, a former Bush Administration speechwriter, called the Op-Ed “a cowardly coup from within the administration” and said it “threatens to inflame the president’s paranoia and further endanger American security.” Such objections to the nascent Republican resistance are understandable; this is not the principled public combat of a democratic system as envisaged by the Founders. It is secretive and uncomfortable, the stuff of office backstabbing and private betrayals. It is not enough for those who have staked out public opposition to Trump, and it likely never will be. It is about ego and vanity as much as patriotism and principle. Most of all, it is a reminder of the terrible dilemma that Trump has posed for Republicans since the moment he announced his campaign for President, and will pose as long as he is in office.
A few minutes after the
Post published the first story about the Woodward book, I met with a foreign-policy expert who is well connected in the Trump national-security world. The news seemed very much consistent with what both of us had been hearing since the beginning of the Administration. His friends who have been on the inside, he told me, have invariably told him stories like those now turning up in the news: “As bad as you think it is, it’s actually worse.” Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, who is one of Trump’s most open critics on Capitol Hill, made a similar point to an interviewer on Thursday. “It’s just so similar to what so many of us hear from senior people around the White House, you know, three times a week,” Sasse said. “So it’s really troubling, and yet, in a way, not surprising.”
As Thomas Wright, a Brookings scholar who has emerged as one of the most insightful analysts of Trump’s foreign policy, told me, “It’s the first time, maybe in history, key advisers have gone into the Administration to stop the President, not to enable him”—and that was back in January. The call has always been coming from inside the building.
By Thursday morning, Chris Cillizza had posted on CNN’s Web site a list of thirteen Trump insiders who could have written the article: Don McGahn, the departing White House counsel (Trump kicked him out, via Twitter, just last week); Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, who was publicly humiliated by Trump in the aftermath of Trump’s summit with Vladimir Putin; Kellyanne Conway, the White House counsellor whose own husband has emerged as a Trump-bashing tweeter; John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, reported by Woodward and others to have called Trump an “idiot”; Kirstjen Nielsen, the Kelly ally who heads the Department of Homeland Security and has been repeatedly dressed down by Trump in front of her colleagues; Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has come under withering, near-daily attack by Trump; Mattis, the Secretary of Defense and the most respected member of the President’s Cabinet; Fiona Hill, the top Russia expert on the National Security Council; Vice-President Mike Pence; Nikki Haley, the Ambassador to the United Nations, who has publicly expressed differences with Trump on Russia; and even “Javanka”—Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law, Jared Kushner—and Trump’s own wife, the long-suffering Melania Trump.
Others I spoke with suggested less well-known names in the senior ranks of various foreign-policy and national-security jobs, or in top economic posts. Could it have been Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, a former Democrat who has been humiliated by Trump from the start, according to the Woodward book? Or Larry Kudlow, the free-trader heading his National Economic Council? One prominent Washingtonian sent me a long e-mail laying out the case for John Bolton, the national-security adviser whose hawkish views on such subjects as North Korea and Russia have been repeatedly undercut by Trump.
National Review published a case for Jon Huntsman, the 2012 Republican Presidential candidate now serving as Trump’s Ambassador to Moscow.
Just as quickly as the speculation about who did it, the denials started rolling in. The Vice-President, the director of National Intelligence, the Secretary of State, the Attorney General, the Defense Secretary, the Treasury Secretary, the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Ambassador to the United Nations, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and several others I’m sure I’m missing felt compelled to put out statements on Thursday morning denying that they wrote the Op-Ed calling Trump “impetuous, adversarial, petty, and ineffective.” Even Ben Carson, the wacky former surgeon and 2016 Presidential candidate now serving as Trump’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, put out a statement saying he wasn’t the Op-Ed author, though no one, at least that I am aware of, had speculated that he was. And that was a day after the Woodward denials: the White House chief of staff denied calling Trump an “idiot”; the Secretary of Defense denied calling him a middle-schooler; and his former lawyer denied calling him a “******* liar.”
The denials seemed like some of those pointless, if required, Washington rituals. After all, Mark Felt, the deputy director of the F.B.I. during the Nixon Administration, who had been Woodward’s original secret source about the Watergate scandal, denied publicly for years that he was “Deep Throat,” a fact pointed out on Twitter on Wednesday, as journalists circulated a copy of an old
Wall Street Journal story with Felt’s denial as the lede. Felt revealed himself as Woodward’s source before he died, and Woodward later published a book all about their dealings, “
The Secret Man,” another book that Sarah Huckabee Sanders presumably did not read but should have: at the center of the tale is the story of how the F.B.I., outraged by the flagrant lawlessness of the President, decided to use its powers to take Nixon on.
At 6:58 a.m. on Thursday, as Washington obsessed over the identity of this latest Anonymous and I read the last few pages of Woodward’s damaging account, Trump tweeted about one person he had worked closely with who had “unwavering faith” in him: the dictator of North Korea. “Thank you Chairman Kim,” he enthused. “We will get it done together!” It was plaintive and pathetic and, yes, more than a little bit crazy.
It’s mornings like these that Trump’s beleaguered staff must dread more than anything. Reince Priebus, Trump’s fired first chief of staff, called the White House bedroom where Trump did most of his tweeting “the devil’s workshop,” Woodward reported. But Priebus’s successor, John Kelly, came up with the phrase that probably best sums up the situation. At one point in “Fear,” Woodward quotes Kelly calling his post as Trump’s chief of staff “the worst job I’ve ever had,” and describing the Trump White House as “crazytown.” It would have been the perfect title for the book, and I suspect that Kelly’s memorable description of the Trump Presidency may well outlive Kelly’s accomplishments in the job.
For twenty months, Washington has been asking, Is this the crisis? Is this finally the constitutional confrontation we have been waiting for? The Trump Presidency, to those closely watching it, and to many of those participating in it, has always seemed unsustainable. And yet it has gone on, and will keep going on, until and unless something seismic happens in our politics—and our Congress—to change it. We don’t need to wonder when the crisis will hit; it already has. Every day since January 20, 2017, has been the crisis.
