by Bob Woodward
It is the press, Trump said. “They’re kicking the crap out of me.”
“Mr. President, you’re the one that didn’t give up your tax returns. You’ve already won round one. They’re sore as hell. They hate you. They hate your guts.”
What does the press want? Trump asked.
“I’d pull all their credentials. I’d throw them the fuck out of here. I don’t think they have any right to come into the White House and behave the way they do.”
Trump said that was his sentiment. “But I always get overruled, John. They”—Hope Hicks and Kelly—“overrule me every time I want to pull someone’s credentials.”
The press, Mueller, Congress, Dowd said, “We ought to tell them to go fuck themselves. And let’s get back to being president of the United States. Because compared to what you do every day, this is a gnat on an elephant’s ass. And we’ve got to treat it that way and get going.” Dowd considered it his closing argument.
“You’re a great guy,” Trump said. “I thank you. I’m sorry to keep you up so late.”
* * *
The next morning Dowd told his wife, Carole, “I’m gone.” He called the president and said he was resigning. “I’m sorry I am resigning. I love you. I back you. And I wish you the very best. But if you’re not going to take my advice, I cannot represent you.”
“I understand your frustration,” the president said. “You’ve done a great job.”
“Mr. President, anything else I can do for you, call me anytime.”
“Thank you.”
Two minutes later, The New York Times called Dowd, and The Washington Post called. Dowd could see Trump picking up the phone and imagined him calling Maggie Haberman at the Times. “Maggie? Fucking Dowd just resigned.” Trump always liked to be the first to deliver the news.
At least Dowd felt he’d gotten ahead of it, had resigned before being fired and getting his ass trashed.
Dowd remained convinced that Mueller never had a Russian case or an obstruction case. He was looking for the perjury trap. And in a brutally honest self-evaluation, he believed that Mueller had played him, and the president, for suckers in order to get their cooperation on witnesses and documents.
Dowd was disappointed in Mueller, pulling such a sleight of hand.
After 47 years, Dowd knew the game, knew prosecutors. They built cases. With all the testimony and documents, Mueller could string together something that would look bad. Maybe they had something new and damning as he now more than half-suspected. Maybe some witness like Flynn had changed his testimony. Things like that happened and that could change the ball game dramatically. Former top aide comes clean, admits to lying, turns on the president. Dowd didn’t think so but he had to worry and consider the possibility.
Some things were clear and many were not in such a complex, tangled investigation. There was no perfect X-ray, no tapes, no engineer’s drawing. Dowd believed that the president had not colluded with Russia or obstructed justice.
But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying “Fake News,” the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: “You’re a fucking liar.”
1 President Donald J. Trump, first lady Melania Trump and their son Barron, age 11, at the White House on April 17, 2017.
2 After the Access Hollywood tape was released in October 2016, Mike Pence, Trump’s running mate, released a tough statement, and some believed he was prepared to take Trump’s place as the Republican presidential candidate with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as his running mate.
3 Trump named former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State in December 2016, telling aides that Tillerson looked the part he would play on the world stage. Tillerson had spent 40 years at Exxon and was untainted by government experience. “A very Trumpian-inspired pick,” campaign manager Kellyanne Conway said on television, promising “big impact.”
Tillerson and Trump clashed regularly. He called the president a “moron” and was later fired on March 13, 2018.
4 Retired Marine General and Secretary of Defense James Mattis helped top White House Economic Adviser Gary Cohn and Staff Secretary Rob Porter underscore to Trump the necessity of staying in a crucial trade deal with South Korea. “Mr. President,” Mattis said, “Kim Jong Un poses the most immediate threat to our national security. We need South Korea as an ally. It may not seem like trade is related to all this, but it’s central. We’re not doing this for South Korea. We’re helping South Korea because it helps us.”
5 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford argued in favor of NATO and against leaving the South Korean trade deal. When Trump asked for a new war plan for a military strike on North Korea, Dunford was shaken. “We need better intelligence before I give the president a plan,” Dunford said.
6 CIA Director Mike Pompeo, a former Republican congressman, became a Trump favorite. Pompeo initially tried to find a middle ground for the war in Afghanistan. Could the CIA paramilitary force be expanded, making a large troop increase unnecessary? Persuaded by old hands at the Agency that the CIA should avoid overcommitting to Afghanistan, Pompeo told the president the CIA was not a viable alternative to conventional forces in Afghanistan.
He was later named as Tillerson’s replacement as secretary of state.
7 Trump felt Attorney General Jeff Sessions had failed him by recusing himself from the Mueller investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. “Jeff isn’t a guy that, through thick and thin, is willing to stick with me,” Trump said. Sessions was an “idiot,” a “traitor,” and “mentally retarded” for recusing himself. “How in the world was I ever persuaded to pick him for my attorney general?” Trump asked. “He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.
“What business does he have being attorney general?”
8 Reince Priebus, Trump’s first chief of staff, believed the White House was not leading on key issues like health-care and tax reform, and that foreign policy was not coherent and often contradictory. The Trump White House did not have a team of rivals but a team of predators, he concluded. “When you put a snake and a rat and a falcon and a rabbit and a shark and a seal in a zoo without walls, things start getting nasty and bloody. That’s what happens.” In July 2017, Priebus was replaced by Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly.
9 Homeland Security Secretary and retired Marine General John Kelly privately criticized the disorder and chaos of the White House. Kelly told the president he believed he could straighten the place out. But he was taken by surprise when Trump announced that he had named him his new chief of staff via Twitter in July 2017. Kelly was soon sidelined by Trump, although he remained in his post.
10 Retired General Michael Flynn resigned as Trump’s first national security adviser on February 13, 2017, for lying about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Flynn later plead guilty to lying to the FBI but denied emphatically that he had committed treason.
11 Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, Trump’s second national security adviser, considered Secretary of Defense Mattis and Secretary of State Tillerson “the team of two” and found himself outside their orbit. He believed Mattis and Tillerson had concluded that the president and the White House were crazy. They sought to implement and even formulate policy on their own without interference or involvement from McMaster, let alone the president. “It is more loyal to the president,” McMaster said, “to try to persuade rather than circumvent.”
12 Trump clashed with his national security adviser, H. R. McMaster; his chief of staff, retired General John Kelly; and his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson. In contrast, his vice president, Mike Pence, kept a low profile, avoiding conflict.
13 National Economic Council Chairman Gary Cohn formed an alliance with Staff Secretary Rob Porter and at times Secretary of Defense
Jim Mattis to curb some of Trump’s most dangerous impulses. “It’s not what we did for the country,” Cohn said. “It’s what we saved him from doing.”
14 Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, almost single-handedly engineered Trump’s first overseas visit. The May 2017 summit in Saudi Arabia solidified relations among the Saudi Kingdom, other Gulf allies and Israel.
This was done in the face of resistance from Trump’s foreign policy advisers.
15 Steve Bannon became the Chief Executive Officer of Trump’s campaign in August 2016. Bannon had three campaign themes: “Number one, we’re going to stop mass illegal immigration and start to limit legal immigration to get our sovereignty back. Number two, you are going to bring manufacturing jobs back to the country.
“And number three, we’re going to get out of these pointless foreign wars.”
16 Ivanka Trump, the president’s 36-year-old daughter, was a senior White House adviser whose influence with her father was resented and resisted by others in the White House. Chief strategist Steve Bannon got into a screaming match with her. “You’re a goddamn staffer!” Bannon yelled. “You’re nothing but a f---ing staffer! You walk around this place and act like you’re in charge, and you’re not. You’re on staff!”
Ivanka shouted back, “I’m not a staffer! I’ll never be a staffer. I’m the first daughter.”
17 Kellyanne Conway became Trump’s campaign manager in August 2016 and coined the phrase “the hidden Trump voter. . . . There’s not a single hidden Hillary voter in the entire country. They’re all out and about.”
18 Hope Hicks served as Trump’s press secretary during the campaign and became White House strategic communications director. Like many others, she tried and failed to rein in the president’s tweeting. “It’s not politically helpful,” she told Trump. “You can’t just be a loose cannon on Twitter. You’re getting killed by a lot of this stuff. You’re shooting yourself in the foot. You’re making big mistakes.” Hicks is pictured here with Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
19 As Staff Secretary, Rob Porter briefed Trump on decision memos and other important presidential documents. In alliance with Gary Cohn, he attempted to block Trump’s most dangerous economic and foreign policy impulses.
Porter told an associate, “A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they weren’t such good ideas.”
20 Peter Navarro, a 67-year-old Harvard PhD in economics, received a White House post from Trump. Both Trump and Navarro were passionate believers that trade deficits harmed the U.S. economy. Navarro agreed with Trump on steel and aluminum tariffs though few others did.
21 Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) pushed Trump to take a hard line on North Korea. “You don’t want it on your résumé that North Korea, a nuclear power, got a missile that could reach the United States on your watch,” Graham told Trump.
“If they have a breakout and have a missile that will reach the United States, you’ve got to whack them.”
22 FBI director James Comey was fired by Trump in May 2017. “Don’t try to talk me out of it,” Trump told his White House counsel, Don McGahn, and his chief of staff, Reince Priebus. “Because I’ve made my decision, so don’t even try.” He believed Comey was a grandstander and out of control.
Trump seized on allegations that Comey had mishandled the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails as grounds for his firing.
23 Former FBI director Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to investigate Russian election meddling and any connection to the Trump presidential campaign. Trump rejected him as Comey’s replacement for FBI director.
“He was just in here and I didn’t hire him for the FBI,” Trump said. “Of course he’s got an ax to grind with me.”
24 John Dowd joined Trump’s legal team in May 2017. He convinced the president not to testify in the Mueller investigation, but resigned in March 2018 when Trump changed his mind and Dowd could not dissuade him.
“Mr. President, I cannot, as a lawyer, as an officer of the court, sit next to you and have you answer these questions when I full well know that you’re not really capable,” Dowd told Trump.
25 White House counsel Don McGahn wanted the president to assert executive privilege in the Mueller investigation and resist handing over documents. Trump’s lawyer John Dowd disagreed and cooperated with Mueller in order to speed up the investigation.
“We’d get a hell of a lot more with honey than we would with vinegar.”
26 Trump and first lady Melania Trump with Chinese president Xi Jinping and first lady Peng Liyuan. Trump believed China’s support for sanctions against North Korea was a result of his personal relationship with Xi. “Isn’t it good that I’m friendly when all you guys say that we should be adversarial with them,” he said, despite warnings that Xi was using him. “Because if I didn’t have that great relationship with President Xi, they never would have done that. So that I can get them to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do.”
27 North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un, 34, was a more effective leader of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles programs than his father, Kim Jong Il, according to U.S. intelligence. The younger Kim accepted that weapons and missile testing would inevitably lead to failures. He did not order officials and scientists shot after failures as his father had. Trump believed the building conflict between the U.S. and North Korea was a contest of wills.
“This is all about leader versus leader. Man versus man. Me versus Kim.”
Acknowledgments
This is my 19th book with Alice Mayhew, my editor at Simon & Schuster, over the last 46 years. Alice understood immediately, in the midst of the Trump presidency with all its controversies and investigations, the importance of finding out what Trump actually did as president in foreign and domestic policy. It was Alice’s full and brilliant engagement on the concept for the book, the pace, structure and tone.
Jonathan Karp, president and publisher of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing, is at the top of his game. He devoted time and his keen intellect to this book. He helped edit and thought through the opportunities, responsibilities and dilemmas of publishing a book about President Trump in this convulsive era. I owe him much. He used to be the Boy Wonder; now he is the Middle Age Wonder but still has the Boy Wonder’s energy.
I thank Carolyn K. Reidy, the CEO at Simon & Schuster, who for decades has sponsored and promoted my work.
At Simon & Schuster I thank the following: Stuart Roberts, Alice Mayhew’s talented, energetic and thoughtful assistant, and Richard Rhorer, Cary Goldstein, Stephen Bedford, Irene Kheradi, Kristen Lemire, Lisa Erwin, Lisa Healy, Lewelin Polanco, Joshua Cohen, Laura Tatum, Katie Haigler, Toby Yuen, Kate Mertes and Elisa Rivlin.
My special thanks to Fred Chase, traveling counselor and extraordinary copy editor, who spent a week in Washington with Evelyn and myself. Fred loves words and ideas. In that week he went through the manuscript three times with meticulous care and wisdom. We call Fred the Fixer, which he does on nearly every page with his sharp red and green pencils.
I wish I had taken careful notes over the last two years of my regular conversations with Carl Bernstein, my Nixon-Watergate partner, as we discussed Trump. We did not always agree but I loved those talks and the deep insights he has about the presidency, Washington and the media. The friendship and affection for Carl is one of the half-dozen joys of my life.
The Washington Post has generously kept me on as an associate editor. I associate very little these days because I rarely go to the Washington Post in downtown Washington but work out of my office at home. And my editing might, at most, be a phone conversation with a reporter who has a query, often about the past. Associate editor is a wonderful title, however, and allows me to keep connected to my journalist roots. The Post has been my institutional home and family for 47 years. It is run exceptionally well these days, doing some of the b
est, most aggressive and necessary journalism of the Trump era. My thanks to Marty Baron, the executive editor, Cameron Barr, the managing editor, Jeff Leen, the investigations editor, Robert Costa, Tom Hamburger, Rosalind Helderman, David Fahrenthold, Karen Tumulty, Philip Rucker, Robert O’Harrow, Amy Goldstein, Scott Wilson, Steven Ginsberg, Peter Wallsten, Dan Balz, Lucy Shackelford and countless others at the Post.
I thank many old colleagues and friends there at the Post or once there: Don Graham, Sally Quinn, David Maraniss, Rick Atkinson, Christian Williams, Paul Richard, Patrick Tyler, Tom Wilkinson, Leonard Downie Jr., Marcus Brauchli, Steve Coll, Steve Luxenberg, Scott Armstrong, Al Kamen, Ben Weiser, Martha Sherrill, Bill Powers, Carlos Lozada, Fred Hiatt, John Feinstein and publisher Fred Ryan.
Many thanks to Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, who assembled a group of reporters from the Post, including myself, to report on Trump before the election. The result was Michael and Marc’s book, Trump Revealed, one of the best sources on the president-to-be. It includes more than 20 hours of interviews with Trump.
All those still employed by or connected to the Post have reason to be thankful that Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and CEO, is owner of the Post. He has spent time and a great deal of money to give the newspaper the extra reporting and editing resources to make in-depth examinations. The independent newspaper culture fostered, and rigorously supported, by Katharine Graham and Don Graham is alive and well.