The Divider, page 88
“Are you going to stop by for a few minutes?” she asked.
“Yeah, I’ll see you outside,” Trump said.
What was the event? we asked after she left.
“I don’t know,” he confessed. Nonetheless, he would end the evening entertaining the crowd down by the pool, taking the microphone to welcome them after a hula dance show by young women in grass skirts.
A conversation with the former president was like a live-action reenactment of the Twitter feed he no longer had access to—rambling, bizarre, untruthful, and strikingly vituperative. Trump rarely answered a question directly, instead wandering off into some digressive riff, usually bringing the discussion back to the “rigged” election. He was jarringly incoherent, impossibly contradictory. There was rarely a noun, a verb, and a specific ending to a sentence.
He had a hard time keeping his story straight even in the same interview. One minute he said he did not march with protesters to the Capitol on January 6, as he told them he would, because “Secret Service wouldn’t let me do it.” Then less than thirty seconds later he said, “Well, I never told Secret Service.” Then less than thirty seconds after that, he said again that the “Secret Service wouldn’t let me go.”
He likewise denied ever pressing for Joe Biden or his son to be prosecuted despite tweets doing exactly that. “I specifically didn’t want them to go into Biden and I didn’t want him to go after the son either because frankly I viewed that as a tragedy,” he said, an assertion that would have surprised Bill Barr, who had been harangued by Trump demanding to know “where are all the arrests?”
The former president, strangely, dissembled even about his own well-documented family history. When we noted that his grandfather Frederick Trump died of influenza during the pandemic of 1918–19 (an outbreak that for some reason he always incorrectly identified as happening in 1917), he denied it. “Nope, he didn’t die of that,” Trump insisted. “He died of pneumonia. He went to Alaska and he died of pneumonia.” In fact, he died seventeen years after leaving Alaska. The future president’s father, Fred Trump, told the family biographer Gwenda Blair a dramatic story about how Frederick had succumbed to the Spanish flu, falling ill in the midst of a parade and dying within hours. “I never heard that,” Trump insisted.
As he sat in Mar-a-Lago, Trump had little interest in hashing over the results of his presidency, positive or negative. When we asked about his accomplishments, Trump could barely think of what to mention, eventually settling awkwardly on the establishment of the Space Force for the American military and the defeat of the Islamic State in Syria. He waxed nostalgic about his “excellent” Helsinki summit with Vladimir Putin—and indeed, months later, on the eve of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine he would praise the Russian’s strategic “genius,” and go on to oppose a major $40 billion American assistance package for Kyiv. The only regrets Trump expressed to us were that he was not able to push through all the tough policies he hoped to against America’s allies, whether imposing tariffs on German cars or sticking up South Korea for $5 billion in payment for American troops stationed there—both preoccupations of his he told us he planned to pursue in a second term.
He had other achievements he could have boasted about, including renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, signing a large package of tax cuts, increasing military spending, and curbing regulations, even if none of these actions was quite as sweeping as he liked to claim. He left a major impact on the federal judiciary, appointing 226 judges, including three conservative justices who would dramatically transform the Supreme Court and ultimately push for the reversal of Roe v. Wade. But policy was never what animated him, and his post-presidency, as his presidency, was more about personal grievance than what he did or didn’t manage to get done in the job.
Some of Trump’s misstatements when we spoke were repetitions of his greatest-hits whoppers from the 2020 campaign trail, and repeating them did not make them any more true. Trump, no matter how much he talked about it, never built the wall he promised. At the end of the day, 453 miles of steel bollards anchored in concrete went up, but most of it just replaced older barriers; only forty-seven miles of new primary wall were added along the two-thousand-mile border. And none of it was paid for by Mexico.
As always with Trump, he never stopped overstating even legitimately good news. The “best economy in history” was not really that. Even putting aside the pandemic, Trump’s economy was roughly similar to what he inherited from Barack Obama, growing 7.7 percent and adding 6.2 million jobs during his first three years compared with 7.5 percent and 7.6 million new jobs in the previous three years. The stock market did significantly better; the S&P index grew 44 percent in Trump’s first three years compared with 25 percent in Obama’s final three years. But Trump failed to fulfill pledges to reduce the trade deficit (it went up instead) or revive the coal industry (it went down instead). The national debt, which Trump boasted he could wipe out in its entirety in eight years, instead increased by $7.8 trillion.
More broadly, America grew even more polarized in the Trump years. It was already a divided country when he took over; the schisms of society did not start with him. But he profited from the divisions and widened them. After four years of Trump’s war on the truth—and on the independent media that challenged him—three quarters of Americans said that Republican and Democratic voters could no longer agree even on basic facts, much less plans and policies.
Trump took no responsibility for any of that, nor for any of the setbacks of his time—not for the rising tide of racist violence, not for the peace deal with the Taliban that when implemented by his successor would lead to the takeover of Afghanistan, not for the crushing toll of the pandemic. When Deborah Birx, his White House coronavirus coordinator, said after leaving office that the first 100,000 deaths from the virus were unavoidable but the rest were due to Trump’s handling of the pandemic, the former president accepted no fault. “I did a great job with the pandemic,” he insisted. Trump dismissed Birx, saying he never had any respect for her. “The only thing she did well was scarves,” he said of her fashion sensibility.
In the course of our two sessions, Trump freely dispensed insults about many of those who worked with and for him, disparaging John Bolton (“a degenerate”), Chris Christie (“sloppy Chris”), Mark Esper (“just wasn’t meant for the job”), John Kelly (“wasn’t mentally fit for the job”), Jim Mattis (“the world’s most overrated general”), H. R. McMaster (“a total lightweight”), Mark Milley (“one of the dumbest people in the world”), Jeff Sessions (“not up to the job”), and Marc Short (“Marc Long”). And those were just the people he had picked to advise him. He also did not think much of Joe Biden, Liz Cheney, James Comey, Ashraf Ghani, Andrew McCabe, John McCain, Angela Merkel, Lisa Page, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, Adam Schiff, Peter Strzok, Alexander Vindman, or Marie Yovanovitch.
Of all his many targets, Trump reserved special fury in both our interviews for Mitch McConnell, the “disloyal son of a bitch,” a “schmuck,” “stupid person,” and “stiff” with “no personality” who was “like a dead fish.” People he had no words of criticism for? Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, the January 6 rioters, or white supremacists.
For all that, Trump never explained why he hired so many stupid and mentally unfit people in the first place, much less what that would say about his judgment if they really were so incompetent. Jared Kushner left the White House concluding that poor personnel decisions represented the biggest problem of their administration. But Trump constructed ever-evolving explanations for why his own people turned on him. He explained Barr’s apostasy on the election fraud claims as a response to being criticized. “When you start calling somebody a puppet,” he said, the reaction was to say, “I’ll do the exact opposite.” Similarly, Trump decided that Brett Kavanaugh had ruled against his election lawsuits at the end because the justice’s enemies “changed him” during the confirmation process. “Kavanaugh is petrified of still being impeached,” he claimed.
As for his own vice president, Trump said he would not pick Mike Pence as his running mate if he ran again in 2024. January 6 was now the admissions test for being a Trump Republican, and the vice president who had risked his life to stand by his oath to the Constitution had, in Trump’s view, failed. “It would be totally inappropriate,” Trump said. “Mike committed political suicide by not taking votes that he knew were wrong.”
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Donald Trump was, by many measures, the most politically unsuccessful occupant of the White House in generations. He was the first president since Benjamin Harrison to lose the popular vote twice. He was the only president in the history of Gallup polling never to have the support of a majority of Americans for a single day of his tenure. Instead, surveys showed that he was the most polarizing president in the history of surveys. And he was the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose the White House, the House, and the Senate in just four years. As Trump himself might put it, he was not just a loser, but a big loser.
Yet Trump still emerged from a seven-million-vote defeat, two impeachments, and the January 6 insurrection as the dominant force in the Republican Party. He remains the undisputed frontrunner for its nomination in 2024 should he mount a comeback. In the months after his reluctant exit from the White House, he cowed Republicans like Kevin McCarthy, purged the party of those who stood against him, and set about stacking primaries for the upcoming 2022 midterm elections with his supporters.
Rather than disgrace and banishment, the normal fate for a president with such a record, Trump turned his big lie about the election into a post-presidential business model—and an unlikely formula for his own continued relevance. Practically no day went by in his new life when he did not bomb his followers’ email inboxes with frenetic fundraising appeals and they responded by filling a war chest with $250 million in the weeks after the election, including for a fund that investigators found did not even exist, with much more to follow in the months to come. Many of the missives were signed by Trump’s new favorite child, Don Jr., still a zealous promoter of his father’s fantastic claims.
Trump’s old favorite Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, had taken up their far more tasteful exile in a Miami waterfront rental, waiting out the years of construction it would take to make their $32.2 million empty lot on an exclusive private island nearby ready for them. Indeed, construction was taking so long the couple purchased a second, $24 million mansion on the island to move into in the meantime. Kushner, no longer Trump’s consigliere, turned away from American politics to monetize the network of relationships he built in the Middle East, including raising more than $2 billion for his private equity venture from a Saudi government investment fund which appeared to be acting on the direct order of his fellow princeling, Mohammed bin Salman. The former first lady, in theory in residence at Mar-a-Lago, was nowhere to be seen during our visits, although she too was pursuing her own moneymaking venture, in her case selling digital art and mementos of the Trump presidency on a Melania Trump–branded NFT platform, essentially a trendy effort to capitalize on the cryptocurrency boom. She even auctioned off the hat she wore during the French president’s 2018 state visit, though the sale, poorly timed during a cryptocurrency bust, netted far less than the $250,000 she had asked for it.
If his family was fractured by the strains of the presidency, Trump’s involuntary exit from office made him an object of almost religious faith to followers who continued to believe in his outlandish claims about the “stolen” 2020 election. A month after his second Senate impeachment trial, 65 percent of Republicans told pollsters they believed Joe Biden’s victory resulted solely from voter fraud; by the one-year anniversary of the January 6 attack one poll found that 71 percent of Republicans thought Biden’s victory was probably or definitely illegitimate. Trump may have even convinced himself; at some point he started telling allies that he expected to have the election annulled and to be reinstated as president, no matter that nothing in the Constitution permitted such a scenario.
His insistence on his alternate reality was relentless. “They cheated, they stole this election,” he would say again and again, as if sheer repetition would make it true. “It’s a fraud. Don’t forget.” Trump, as ever, was road-testing lines, test-marketing his next outrage, rewriting history. “The insurrection took place on November 3,” he insisted in our second interview. “What took place on January 6 was literally a protest.” Trump must have thought the line worked; he was soon using it in the public statements he now sent by email since Twitter had banned him, and in the occasional interviews he granted to his cheering squad on Fox News.
It did not matter, to Trump or his followers, that not one independent authority, not one judge, not one prosecutor, not one election agency, not one official who was not a Trump partisan ever found widespread fraud. None. Even an audit in Arizona sponsored by Trump allies only confirmed the result. A federal judge described the effort to overturn the election as a “coup in search of a legal theory” and opined that Trump most likely committed conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruct the work of Congress. A bipartisan House investigating committee concluded that Trump had committed a crime.
Those rejecting Trump’s assertions included many of his own allies and advisers—two attorneys general, his election security chief, his campaign manager, lawyers, and advisers, Republican governors and secretaries of state, loyalists like Lindsey Graham, and even his oldest daughter and son-in-law.
Indeed, most of the people still circling in Trump’s orbit knew he was promoting a fantasy yet went along with it, humoring the volatile deposed president. “None of us are willing to say to him, ‘It wasn’t stolen from you,’ ” one Trump campaign adviser confided to a Republican friend. Because if they did, the friend said, “he just goes into complete meltdown.”
Mike Pompeo, who privately worried about the “crazies,” said nothing of the sort publicly in hopes of running for president himself. Sarah Huckabee Sanders won the Republican nomination for governor of Arkansas with Trump’s endorsement and refused to disavow his 2020 election lies. The Republican National Committee called the January 6 protest “legitimate public discourse.” Even Mike Pence sought to avoid a running debate with Trump, before finally declaring more than a year after leaving office that “President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.”
Democrats, meanwhile, continued to chase after the fantasy of a knockout punch, a transformative moment when a federal prosecutor’s indictment or an eviscerating judge’s decision or an embarrassing defeat of one of his protégés would finally shatter Trump’s armor and deliver the accountability he had managed to evade for so long. But a long-running criminal investigation of Trump’s business by the Southern District of New York yielded no charges against him. His Trump-branded hotel in Washington’s Old Post Office Building closed down, with no more Gulf princes seeking to hold events, but Trump did not go bankrupt. With crushing loans hanging over him, he simply found new lenders.
Some faced consequences even if Trump did not. Steve Bannon, granted a last-minute pardon by Trump for bilking Trump supporters, was indicted for contempt of Congress after defying a subpoena from the January 6 investigating committee. Giuliani’s law license was suspended and he and Sidney Powell were sued for defamation stemming from their false claims; Powell defended herself by saying that “no reasonable person” would have believed her Kraken assertions “were truly statements of fact.” Mark Meadows, who facilitated Trump’s allegations of vote fraud, came under investigation for vote fraud himself after casting an absentee ballot from a mobile home in North Carolina where he did not live and had never even visited. Even that embarrassing disclosure did not cause Meadows to forswear his lies about the election—or the former president who told them.
On January 6, and in the days immediately afterward, it was still possible to envision a post-Trump world in America, one where Trump was expelled from the realm of active politics after having been the first defeated president in American history to refuse to accept his loss and the peaceful transfer of power that should have come with it. But it did not happen.
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Trump, the Napoleon of Mar-a-Lago, knew little about history. But like the French emperor banished to Elba, his aspirations for a comeback could not be ruled out. History is full of similarly improbable might-have-beens. Just because no American president before or since Grover Cleveland has managed the feat of returning to office once cast out of it does not mean it cannot happen.
After Napoleon reclaimed the throne and was finally defeated once and for all at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, the victorious British general, the Duke of Wellington, summed up the twelve-hour fight. It was, he wrote a friend, “the nearest-run thing you ever saw.” John Kelly thought of Waterloo when he would tell the story about the time Trump almost blew up the NATO alliance at a Brussels summit less than twenty miles away from where the famous battle took place. “That was a very close-run thing,” Kelly would say. Mark Milley thought of the famous quote about Waterloo when he considered how nearly the country came to losing its democracy altogether. “It was a very close-run thing,” he told an associate. After it was all done and over, Milley believed that Trump had tried something never tried before in the 230 years of the republic—to illegitimately hold on to power. “They shook the very republic to the core,” Milley would eventually reflect. “Can you imagine what a group of people who are much more capable could have done?”
