PENGUIN PRESS An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC penguinrandomhouse.com Copyright © 2020 by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader. Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952799 ISBN 9781984877499 (hardcover) ISBN 9781984877505 (ebook) Cover design by Darren Haggar Cover photograph: Pool / Getty Images btb_ppg_c0_r2 To John, Elise, and Molly—you are my everything. To Naomi and Clara Rucker CONTENTS Title Page Copyright Dedication Authors’ Note Prologue PART ONE One. BUILDING BLOCKS Two. PARANOIA AND PANDEMONIUM Three. THE ROAD TO OBSTRUCTION Four. A FATEFUL FIRING Five. THE G-MAN COMETH PART TWO Six. SUITING UP FOR BATTLE Seven. IMPEDING JUSTICE Eight. A COVER-UP Nine. SHOCKING THE CONSCIENCE Ten. UNHINGED Eleven. WINGING IT PART THREE Twelve. SPYGATE Thirteen. BREAKDOWN Fourteen. ONE-MAN FIRING SQUAD Fifteen. CONGRATULATING PUTIN Sixteen. A CHILLING RAID PART FOUR Seventeen. HAND GRENADE DIPLOMACY Eighteen. THE RESISTANCE WITHIN Nineteen. SCARE-A-THON Twenty. AN ORNERY DIPLOMAT Twenty-one. GUT OVER BRAINS PART FIVE Twenty-two. AXIS OF ENABLERS Twenty-three. LOYALTY AND TRUTH Twenty-four. THE REPORT Twenty-five. THE SHOW GOES ON EPILOGUE Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Authors AUTHORS’ NOTE eporting on Donald Trump’s presidency has been a dizzying R journey. Stories fly by every hour, every day. With each momentous event we chronicled, we realized history was unfolding in front of our eyes and we had little chance to take stock. There was always something next. So we decided to hit the pause button. We wanted to drill down deeper than our daily news reporting allowed, to truly understand what was happening behind the scenes, and to assess the reverberations for the country. This book is based on hundreds of hours of interviews with more than two hundred sources, including Trump administration officials, friends, and outside advisers to the president, as well as other witnesses to the events described herein. Most of the people who cooperated with our project agreed to speak candidly only on the condition of anonymity, either to protect their careers in the government or because they feared retaliation from the president or his allies. Many of our sources recounted their experiences in a background capacity, meaning we were permitted to use the information they shared so long as we protected their identities and did not attribute details to them by name. We recorded many of our interviews. We are objective journalists who seek to share the truth with the public. In this book, we aimed to provide the closest version of the truth that we could determine based on rigorous reporting. We carefully reconstructed scenes to reveal President Trump unfiltered, showing him in action rather than telling readers what to think of him. These scenes are based on firsthand accounts and, whenever possible, corroborated by multiple sources and buttressed by our review of calendars, diary entries, internal memos, and other correspondence among principals, as well as private video recordings. Dialogue cannot always be exact but is based here on multiple people’s memories of events and, in many cases, contemporaneous notes taken by witnesses. In a few instances, sources disagreed substantively about the facts in an episode, and when necessary we note that in these pages, recognizing that different narrators sometimes remember events differently. This book is an outgrowth of our reporting for The Washington Post. As such, some of the details in our narrative first appeared in stories we authored for the newspaper, some of them in collaboration with other colleagues. However, the vast majority of the scenes, dialogue, and quotations are original to our book and based on the extensive reporting we conducted exclusively for this project. To reconstruct episodes that played out in public, we relied upon video of events, such as presidential speeches, many of which are archived on C-SPAN’s website. We also relied on contemporaneous news reports in an array of publications. We have also drawn from the government record, including the report produced by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, and in most instances built upon the published record with our own original reporting. Material gleaned from such accounts is properly attributed, with a direct reference either in the text or in the endnotes. We sought to interview President Trump for this project and first approached him in the early stages of our reporting. In a phone call, Trump told Philip Rucker he would like to sit for an interview. “Come in. You’ll do a fair one,” Trump said. The president added, “I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’d like to have a proper book done. You’re a serious person. So that’s good.” In later months, as Trump escalated his war with the media, he declined through an aide the opportunity to sit for an interview and to provide his own recollection and context for events described in this book. After several weeks of back-and-forth discussions, Trump’s spokespeople were unable to substantively answer questions about those events or to provide the president’s responses before the deadline for publication. PROLOGUE alone can fix it.” I On July 21, 2016, as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in Cleveland, Donald John Trump spoke more than four thousand words, but these five would soon become the tenet by which he would lead the nation. That night, Trump stood by himself at the center of Quicken Loans Arena on an elevated stage, which he had helped to design. A massive screen framed in gold soared behind him, projecting a magnified picture of himself along with thirty-six American flags. This was a masculine, LED manifestation of his own self-image. His speech was dark and dystopian. He offered himself to the American people as their sole hope for renewal and redemption. Past presidential nominees had expressed humility, extolled shared values, and summoned their countrymen to unite to accomplish what they could only achieve together. But Trump spoke instead of “I.” “I am your voice.” “I will be a champion—your champion.” “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.” It would be all too easy to mistake Trump’s first term for pure, uninhibited chaos. His presidency would be powered by solipsism. From the moment Trump swore an oath to defend the Constitution and commit to serve the nation, he governed largely to protect and promote himself. Yet while he lived day to day, struggling to survive, surfing news cycles to stay afloat, there was a pattern and meaning to the disorder. Trump’s North Star was the perpetuation of his own power, even when it meant imperiling our shaky democracy. Public trust in American government, already weakened through years of polarizing political dysfunction, took a body blow. Tens of millions of Americans were angry, feeling forgotten by bureaucrats in Washington, derided by liberal elites, and humiliated by a global economy that had sped ahead of their skills and consigned their children to be the first American generation to fare less well than their parents. Trump crowned himself their champion. He promised them he would “make America great again,” a brilliant, one-size-fits-all mantra through which this segment of the country could channel their frustrations. They envisioned an America in which regulations didn’t strangle the family business, taxes weren’t so onerous, and good-paying jobs were plentiful and secure. Some of them also harked back to the 1950s, envisioning a simpler, halcyon America in which white male patriarchs ruled the roost, decorous women kept home and hearth, and minorities were silent or subservient. President Trump was the indefatigable pugilist for MAGA nation. He did not bother with carefully selecting a group of leaders to help him govern. The flashy promoter and reality-television star believed he could run the U.S. government the way he led his real estate development company from a corner suite on the twenty-sixth floor of Trump Tower—on his own gut instincts to seize opportunities and to size up and cut down competitors. Yet Trump’s own recklessness hampered his ability to accomplish the very pledges on which he campaigned. From the start, government novices and yes-men made up much of his inner circle, a collective inexperience that exacerbated the troubles, wasted political capital, and demoralized committed public servants. The universal value of the Trump administration was loyalty—loyalty not to the country but to the president himself. Some of his aides believed his demand for blind fealty—and his retaliation against those who denied it—was slowly corrupting public service and testing democracy itself. Two kinds of people went to work for the administration: those who thought Trump was saving the world and those who thought the world needed to be saved from Trump. The latter, who at times were drawn in by Trump’s charm, were seasoned and capable professionals who felt a duty to lend him their erudition and expertise. Yet as the months clicked by, the president wore down these “adults in the room” with what they considered the inanity, impropriety, and illegality of his ideas and directives. One by one, these men and women either resigned in frustration or were summarily dismissed by Trump. He engaged in a constant cycle of betrayal, rupturing and repairing relationships anew to constantly keep his government aides off balance to ensure the continuity of his supremacy.