Donald Trump V. the United States : Inside the Struggle to Stop a President (9781984854674)

by Schmidt, Michael S.

  Trump’s success at confirming conservative judges had become his political umbilical cord to the base—no matter how unseemly his personal conduct or how bombastic his tweets, the judges were his insurance policy against the growing threats to his presidency. Social conservatives, the largest and most enthusiastic faction of the Republican base, had increasingly seen the courts as their best avenue to enact policies they supported on issues like abortion and gun rights. Trump’s transformation of the courts allowed many of these Republicans, who otherwise found Trump revolting, to hold their noses and continue to support him, arguing that a president who wanted to champion their values was more important than one who actually lived by them. The bond between Trump and his voters over judges was vital to his survival—Democrats would need to peel off Republicans in Congress if they ever wanted to drive the president from office.

  But could this dynamic really explain why McGahn stayed in the West Wing despite misgivings about the president’s conduct? Or was McGahn so alarmed by Trump’s behavior that he stayed to do whatever he could to protect the country? By advising Trump while at the same time talking to Mueller’s prosecutors, was he ethically compromised? I needed to find out, and the only source who was in a position to answer these things was almost at the northwest gate of the White House.

  I had been alerted to McGahn’s whereabouts ninety seconds earlier by my editor, Amy Fiscus, who’d called me at my desk as she made her way out of the bureau. Until that point, it had been a typical day in the Trump era. Typical in the sense that it had been upended that afternoon by yet another astonishing development that alone would have been a remarkable moment in any other presidency but would soon be overwritten in our collective consciousness by the next outlandish thing the president did. That day, my colleague Maggie Haberman and I had reported that Trump claimed he still wanted to sit for an interview with the special counsel’s office, even though his personal lawyers had told him not to, because they believed he would lie.

  We’d filed our story on the development late, around 6:00 p.m., and it would be 8:00 p.m. by the time it was edited and sent up to the Times’ headquarters in New York, going online and making the first edition of the next day’s paper. At that hour, the bureau was finally quiet. The rest of the evening looked to be time to finally catch up on everything that had fallen by the wayside—going through my notebook and emails to take inventory of all the leads for stories I had to follow up on. My high school baseball coach had taught us that we should run out every ground ball because you never knew whether there was a scout in the stands clocking times on how quickly you made it to first base. I had adapted this to work, setting out to run down every lead because you never knew which one would turn out to be the big one. And while a call that Don McGahn had just left a nearby restaurant didn’t exactly qualify as a standard lead per se, it was an opportunity to talk to the key source in the biggest story in the world.

  “He’s headed back to the White House,” Amy relayed to me, watching him head down the street.

  As soon as I’d received Amy’s message that McGahn was on the move, I threw on my sport coat and raced to the elevator and out of our building, just three blocks north of the White House. About three hundred feet from the White House, in the middle of Lafayette Park, I could see Secret Service officers, straggling tourists, and protesters scattered on Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the spiked fence. I was running on land that supposedly used to be an actual swamp, and even though it wasn’t raining, the humidity and heavy air made it feel as if I were running through water.

  A hundred feet away, I saw what looked vaguely like the back of McGahn’s head as he took his final steps toward the northwest gate. As I got closer, I had to slow down—the last thing I needed was for the Secret Service officers to think I was a fence jumper or that I meant to assault the White House counsel and apprehend me. About forty feet from the entrance, I reached him.

  “Don,” I said, out of breath.

  He turned around.

  He did not look happy to see me, and for a second I tried to see myself through his eyes—winded, sweaty, and frantically chasing him toward the most fortified office building in the world at a full sprint. How had it come to this?

  * * *

  —

  I’ll try to explain. By this point, Trump had been president for eighteen months, and by every measure, he was looking increasingly vulnerable politically and legally. To understand where we were in the story of the Trump presidency, how susceptible it was to his impulses, and what might happen next, you had to understand every step that had come before it. Because for as polarizing and destabilizing as his presidency had become, the reality was that a series of highly unusual and combustible events and reactions to those events over the past six years had contributed to the defeat of both Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, and had propelled Donald Trump to the White House. The way the events lined up was likely more accident than conspiracy, but whatever it was, the conditions had been created to make this extraordinarily unconventional presidency possible.

  The way I had come to see it, it had all started with Mitt Romney and a decision he made on September 11, 2012.

  In the eleven years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which had put America at war and changed everything about the way we think of ourselves and our relationship to the world, the anniversary of that day had become a solemn occasion. And in election years, that day had unofficially become a twenty-four-hour period when the political battles would be suspended. Whether motivated truly by patriotism or out of fear of appearing crass and callous, politicians had learned to control themselves on that day. Indeed, in 2008, John McCain and Barack Obama had actually visited the site of the Twin Towers together, where they laid roses, bowed their heads in prayer, and met with the family members of victims.

  But on September 11 four years later, at 6:54 p.m. eastern daylight time, as Mitt Romney’s campaign plane made its way over the southeastern United States, the wire service Agence France-Presse moved an alert, indicating a major breaking news story. One American had been killed and another injured in an attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, by “an armed mob protesting over a film they said offended Islam,” according to the wire service. And that wasn’t all. In Cairo, reports indicated that dozens of protesters had climbed over the walls of the American embassy, torn down the American flag, defaced it, and then raised a black flag that read, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger.” Images from the scene showed protesters standing atop the concrete walls that surrounded the facility.

  The embassy in Cairo, in an apparent attempt to calm the protesters, had released a statement about the controversial film in question, in effect saying that free speech had its limits. The statement had condemned “the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims,” and added, “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

  Romney campaign aides immediately convened a call to figure out how to respond to the attacks. For the Romney aides on the call, the portrait emerging of American diplomatic outposts overrun by violent Muslims as the Obama administration remained largely silent played directly into the image of how Republicans and the conservative media had long sought to portray the president. Since Obama had first emerged on the national scene in 2004 as a candidate for Senate in Illinois, Republicans saw national security issues as one of his greatest vulnerabilities. But depending on where they stood on the party’s political spectrum, Republicans displayed their dissatisfaction differently. At the far end of the party, figures like Sarah Palin and Trump openly questioned Obama’s patriotism, with Palin describing Obama as “palling around with terrorists” and Trump falsely suggesting that Obama might have been born outside the United States and therefore was constitutionally prohibited from being pr
esident. More sophisticated and moderate Republicans like Romney and his aides portrayed Obama as too eager to apologize for the United States abroad, contending that he failed to support allies like Israel and that he had been soft on dictatorships like Russia, which Romney argued as he campaigned was the greatest geopolitical threat to the United States.

  In Obama’s first term, he offered a rebuttal by aggressively pursuing terrorists through drone strikes and commando raids. No major terrorist attacks on Americans occurred, and he oversaw the greatest national security accomplishment of the post-9/11 era, the successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden. But now a nasty firefight with jihadis—with American casualties—appeared to provide an opening to counter that narrative. “From the point of view of some on the Romney high command, this was manna from heaven,” said Gabriel Schoenfeld, a campaign adviser.

  On their call, the aides discussed how the White House’s reluctance to issue a statement signaled that Obama, in their view, wanted to pretend the attacks were not terrorism because such an admission would mean admitting that al-Qaeda was still active. The aides kept coming back to words like “feckless,” “weak,” and “coddling.”

  Several advisers on the call suggested it might be wise to wait a day, until more complete information could be known about the attacks. But others advocated a more confrontational approach. Stuart Stevens, Romney’s chief strategist, and policy adviser Lanhee Chen drafted a statement to be issued in Romney’s name. “I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi,” the statement read. “It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.” Initially, the statement was meant to be embargoed until the next day, but when the campaign received word that a reporter had sent the statement to the White House seeking comment, the embargo was lifted. And so, too, was the informal embargo on campaigning on September 11.

  Romney’s statement tapped a reservoir of dark energy that had been simmering, first on the margins of right-wing media with the advent in 2007 of Breitbart News, a far-right website trafficking in incendiary commentary, and then brought to a boil—and into the mainstream—by the aggrieved, conspiratorial tone of Fox News and conservative talk radio pundits. Whether he realized it or not, with his Benghazi statement, Romney had sounded a dog whistle to an emergent base of the Republican Party, who were primed by this aggressive style and hypernationalist, even nativist, rhetoric of the far-right media machine. On a primal level, as this version of the story went, the Benghazi attacks were perpetrated by shadowy foreigners who posed a threat to “us,” possessed values alien to our own, and could have been thwarted with better fortified walls protecting the besieged American outposts. Had the United States not been so deeply—and wrongly—engaged in global affairs, intervening in conflicts in far-flung countries while ignoring the erosion of life at home, according to this narrative, we could have avoided such violent attacks. Perhaps worst of all in the eyes of this growing faction of right-wing activists, instead of standing strong in the face of violence directed at America, the Obama administration’s response was to cower and capitulate. Now the Republicans’ so-called mainstream candidate was using his position as the face of the party to throw an accelerant on this smoldering fire in the party.

  The Romney campaign was roundly attacked for responding prematurely to a still-unfolding national security crisis, and for doing so on a solemn day of mourning. Even some Republicans said that what Romney had done was “hasty and stupid.”

  Then, at 7:22 a.m. on September 12, the news got worse for the country, and for Romney. The White House said that the death toll in Benghazi, which had risen to four, included the American ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens.

  In Florida, Romney believed he had been right on the merits to attack Obama but was increasingly nervous about the backlash. He knew he could not afford to fall further behind in the race, and walking back the statement felt like the safest thing to do. On an 8:00 a.m. conference call, he let his frustration be known, criticizing his top aides for botching the response and suggesting they might need to reverse course.

  “Guys, we screwed up,” he said. “This was a mistake.”

  It took Romney’s advisers some time to convince him that he had to hold the line. In fact, they said, the only option was to double down. Eventually, Romney agreed, even if he was going to have to face more contentious responses from adversaries and key allies.

  Around 9:00 a.m., Chen received a call from John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona, who immediately began berating him.

  “You guys have got your heads up your asses,” McCain told Chen. “What kind of irresponsible operation are you guys running?”

  McCain, seventy-six at the time, was a war hero, had run for president twice, and was considered one of the elder statesmen of Washington. He knew when to put politics aside, and in his view this was just such a time. McCain was so concerned by how partisan Romney’s initial response had been that he feared it could hurt his chances of winning, and he was desperate to see Obama defeated.

  McCain told Chen that Romney had crossed a line, having acted far too hastily and failing to consider the implications of going after a sitting president in the middle of an international crisis. The gambit, McCain said, made Romney appear undisciplined and un-presidential on such an important day.

  “Why put out a statement when you don’t have all the facts?” McCain asked Chen. “Why talk about this in this sort of way without recognizing there was a whole bunch going on you don’t know about?”

  Well, in terms of the politics and the norms, McCain was right. The way in which Romney had responded to the attack in Benghazi had damaged his faltering campaign. He would go on to lose to Obama less than two months later. His embrace of the most sinister narrative about the Benghazi attacks wasn’t solely to blame, but his legitimization of it would put in motion events that would contribute to the defeat of another establishment politician from a famous political family: Hillary Clinton.

  To the Republican base, long suspicious that Obama was not ardent in defense of the country against the threat of radical Islam, Romney’s line of attack took root and allowed some middle-of-the-road Republicans to question whether the White House’s shifting explanations amounted to fog-of-war confusion or a cover-up. For a year and a half, those suspicions deepened, mixed in with half-truths and elements of dark-web conspiracies, as various Republican-controlled committees investigated the attacks. The pressure from the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party to continue digging became so great that in May 2014, the Speaker of the House, Republican John A. Boehner, appointed a select committee to look into the attacks. Boehner named South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy as head of the committee. Gowdy, who had been a death penalty prosecutor, knew the strongest cases were built on documents, so that’s where he started his work.

  He wanted to have a baseline understanding of what the State Department had handed over to the four other committees that had already investigated the Benghazi attacks.

  Gowdy would learn that, indeed, the State Department had a tranche of fifteen thousand documents that had never been handed over to Congress because there were thorny questions about whether they contained sensitive information, such as classified materials. In a meeting between State officials and Gowdy’s investigators, the investigators said they wanted those documents as soon as possible.

  At State, now led by Secretary John F. Kerry, lawyers and document specialists worked furiously to go through the documents so they could be quickly produced to the House, celebrating with whiskey as they were pushed out the door in boxes to Gowdy’s committee.

  The committee, up and running for two months, had only a few investigators on staff and little work space, so the boxes were taken to
a windowless room inside the House visitor’s center. One of the investigators parked himself on the floor, opened up one of the boxes, and began going through the papers inside. As they thumbed through the emails, giant stacks of documents began to build up on the floor. The investigators saw that some of the most senior officials, including Clinton’s top advisers, had sent messages to someone whose name came up only as “H.” Given what was written in the text of the emails, the investigators believed it was likely Clinton herself. Other messages were sent to or from another email: hdr22@clintonmail.com.