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  These arrangements were approved by a board of directors entirely made up of Sekulow’s family members, all of them paid via the charities.

  “It’s more like a family business than a public charity,” said Daniel Borochoff, president of the American Institute of Philanthropy, which runs CharityWatch. “You would have to have a lot of trust in this family in order to want to give them your money.”9

  The most troubling of all of Trump’s hires, however, was his principal national security adviser during the campaign, the former lieutenant general Michael Flynn. Books could and will be written about the tragic arc of the heroic battlefield commander who dwindled into shabby dishonor (and perhaps much worse) after failing at the capstone job of his to-then impressive career, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Flynn turned to extremist anti-Muslim ideologues, accepted money from Russian and Turkish clients, failed to disclose as the law required, and made himself the face of some of the Trump campaign’s mob outbursts. In normal presidential campaigns, the national security team keeps well away from the more contentious forms of politicking. Condoleezza Rice, for example, spoke at the 2000 Republican convention—but she had not one single negative word to offer about any living person. The closest she approached to invective was this:

  The first Republican that I knew was my father, John Rice. And he is still the Republican that I admire most. My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did.10

  Here, by contrast, is Michael Flynn. He took the stage at the Cleveland convention to wild chants of “Lock her up! Lock her up!” Flynn repeated the chant, as he had so often done while campaigning for Trump.

  That’s right. Lock her up. That’s right. Lock her up. I’m going to tell you what, it’s unbelievable; it’s unbelievable. Yes; I use—I use #neverHillary; that’s what I use. I have called on Hillary Clinton, I have called on Hillary Clinton to drop out of the race because she, she put our nation’s security at extremely high risk with her careless use of a private email server.

  (The crowd resumed chanting “Lock her up!” and Flynn repeated the phrase.)

  Lock her up. Lock her up. You guys are good. Damn right; exactly right. There’s nothing wrong with that.

  (More chanting of “Lock her up!”)

  And you know why; and you know why? You know why we’re saying that? We’re saying that because if I, a guy who knows this business, if I did a tenth, a tenth of what she did, I would be in jail today. So—so, Crooked Hillary Clinton, leave this race now!11

  Two months after that “if I did a tenth” comment, Michael Flynn reportedly joined a conversation with top Turkish ministers to discuss the kidnapping and forcible removal to Turkey of a US permanent resident sought by the Ankara government for political offenses.12 Flynn surely knew of the notorious Trump Tower meeting in June 2016 at which Donald Trump Jr. was offered Russian state materials “incriminating” of Hillary Clinton. As a former DIA director, Flynn had to understand what Donald Jr. would later claim he did not appreciate: that he was witnessing—and being invited to participate in—a Russian espionage attempt against the US political process. Flynn would later neglect to disclose his Russia contacts on the relevant forms, forms signed under the penalty of felony.

  Enabling the bad people in the Trump orbit were the weak people. As White House counsel and as White House chief of staff, Trump appointed two of the least experienced, least commanding holders of either job in recent history. Counsel Don McGahn learned two weeks before Inauguration Day that Flynn was being investigated by the FBI. He did not or could not stop Flynn’s appointment.13 Chief of staff Reince Priebus allowed Trump’s favorites to build self-aggrandizing empires of a kind never before seen in the West Wing. Jared Kushner has—and Trump’s former political adviser Steve Bannon had—his own full-time press aide. Ivanka Trump and Kellyanne Conway each has her own “chief of staff.” Bannon even acquired a perk otherwise awarded only to the president and vice president, his own personal “body man” to follow him wherever he went. Sarah Huckabee Sanders answered a reporter querying the unprecedented entourages of Bannon, Kushner, Conway, and Ivanka Trump as follows:

  It’s a great thing that staffers are so engaged at such a high level and have created very ambitious portfolios within the president’s agenda. We are shaking things up, and it’s a great thing for which the results will ultimately speak for themselves.14

  Empire building by subordinates is made possible by Trump’s disengagement from management, policy, and lawmaking. In late June 2017, President Trump convened Republican senators in hopes of rallying support for the leadership’s version of Obamacare repeal. According to an account of the meeting published in the New York Times:

  A senator who supports the bill left the meeting at the White House with a sense that the president did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan—and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy, according to an aide who received a detailed readout of the exchange. Mr. Trump said he planned to tackle tax reform later, ignoring the repeal’s tax implications, the staff member added.15

  Trump had one big idea to gain passage of the health care bill: the intimidation of holdouts, like Nevada senator Dean Heller. Heller ranked as the most vulnerable of the Republican senators facing reelection in 2018. He shied from supporting the very unpopular Republican bill. Trump threatened to run seven figures’ worth of attack ads against Heller if he did not yield. McConnell complained to Reince Priebus that attacking Heller would be “beyond stupid.” As reported by Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin in the New York Times:

  “They didn’t check in with anybody,” said Josh Holmes, Mr. McConnell’s former chief of staff. “There was no clearing of channels, no heads-up, nothing.”16

  In this instance, Trump relented. But Trump would return to attack other members of his party who vexed him. He fixed all the blame for the failure of Obamacare repeal on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He waged Twitter battles with Arizona’s two US senators, John McCain and Jeff Flake, as well as with Tennessee’s Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, after each criticized him, never quite grasping that their support was at least as essential to him as his was to them.

  Over the course of 2017, the Trump White House one by one extruded its wild men and gradually assumed something more like orderliness under Chief of Staff John Kelly and National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster. But even as the courtiers evolved toward higher professionalism, their king’s madness raged hotter and fiercer. I close the editing of this book on the weekend that President Trump responded to a post-hurricane humanitarian catastrophe on the US territory of Puerto Rico by plunging into hours of Twitter abuse of the mayor of San Juan for not being nice to him. “The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.”17 “Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing fantastic job.”18 “We have done a great job with the almost impossible situation in Puerto Rico. Outside the Fake News and politically motivated ingrates, people are now starting to realize the amazing work that has been done by FEMA and our great military.”19

  Trump would not take advice. He would not behave “presidentially,” insisting rather that his behavior was perfect just as it was.

  My use of social media is not Presidential—it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!20

  After he nearly lost his top economic adviser, Gary Cohn, by seeming to condone Nazis and white supremacists on the rampage in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump doubled down at a rally in Phoenix, Arizona:

  Dishonest people. So here is—here is me—I hope they’re showin
g how many people are in this room, but they won’t. They don’t even do that. The only time they show the crowds is when there’s a disrupter or an anarchist in the room. I call them anarchists. Because, believe me, we have plenty of anarchists. They don’t want to talk about the anarchists. . . . If you’re reading a story about somebody, you don’t know. You assume it’s honest, because it’s like the failing New York Times, which is like so bad. It’s so bad.

  [Booing]

  Or the Washington Post, which [I] call a lobbying tool for Amazon, OK, that’s a lobbying tool for Amazon.

  Or CNN, which is so bad and so pathetic, and their ratings are going down.

  [Booing]

  Right?

  Crowd: CNN sucks! CNN sucks! CNN sucks!

  But all the networks—I mean, CNN is really bad, but ABC this morning—I don’t watch it much, but I’m watching in the morning, and they have little George Stephanopoulos talking to Nikki Haley, right? Little George. And—and he talks about the speech I made last night, which, believe it or not, got great reviews, right? . . .

  But they also said that he must be a racist because he never mentioned the driver of the car, who is a terrible person, drove the car and he killed Heather, and it’s a terrible thing. But they said I didn’t mention, so these are my words. “The driver of the car is a murderer, and what he did was a horrible, inexcusable thing.” They said I didn’t mention it.

  And then they asked me, just to finish it, they asked me, what about race relations in the United States? Now I have to say they were pretty bad under Barack Obama, that I can tell you.21

  (“Heather” is a reference to Heather Heyer, the young woman who was run over and murdered by a white nationalist at the August 2017 demonstration in Charlottesville; this was Trump’s only mention of her in his entire Phoenix rally speech, which took place ten days after her death.)

  As in his previous business career, President Trump reacted explosively to any attempt to subject him to anything like normal political or even human limits.

  White House officials and informal advisers say the triggers for his temper are if he thinks someone is lying to him, if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him.

  Thus Nancy Cook and Josh Dawsey reported for Politico in August 2017. They were reporting after the Charlottesville fiasco, a political crisis aggravated by Trump’s refusal ever to acknowledge error or change course.

  “In some ways, Trump would rather have people calling him racist than say he backed down the minute he was wrong,” one adviser to the White House said on Wednesday about Charlottesville.22

  It’s for that reason that Trump filled his White House and administration with the deferential, even servile. He appointed his former personal bodyguard Keith Schiller to direct “Oval Office operations.” On the campaign trail, Schiller and his team gained an ugly reputation for violence against lawful protesters. In maybe the most dramatic instance, Schiller snatched a protester’s banner, then smacked the protester in the face after he tried to seize it back.23 It was Schiller who would deliver to James Comey the notice of his termination as FBI director.

  Donald Trump entrusted his online presence to a former golf caddy, Dan Scavino. It was Scavino who oversaw the retweeting from accounts like @WhiteGenocideTM (located in “Jewmerica”) and the scavenging of message boards for images like that of Hillary Clinton’s face atop a pile of money and alongside a Star of David bannered “Most corrupt candidate ever!” (The Star of David was later amended to a circle.)

  Trump hired a former manager at the Trump hotel in Washington, DC, as chief usher of the White House.24 He named Omarosa Manigault, a former contestant on The Apprentice, to the White House staff. He appointed the former wedding planner of his son Eric Trump to oversee federal housing programs in New York City, a post in which loyalty matters even more than usual to Trump, since his company collects millions of dollars of revenue every year from that program.25 (Interestingly, that program was the only one to be exempted from the draconian cuts to housing spending in Trump’s first budget request.26 )

  Trump hates criticism and expects huge, heaping servings of flattery. The flattery mostly occurs behind closed doors. On June 12, 2017, however, the country was given a televised view, when Trump invited cameras to record the opening moments of a cabinet meeting. Vice President Pence set the tone: “The greatest privilege of my life is to serve as vice president to the president who’s keeping his word to the American people.” (By that point, Trump had already broken his campaign promise to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. Two weeks later, the Carrier furnace plant in Pence’s home state of Indiana supposedly “saved” by Trump’s efforts would close, and all its manufacturing jobs would move to Mexico.27) Chief of Staff Reince Priebus continued, “On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you’ve given us to serve your agenda.” One by one, like members of the Soviet Politburo addressing Comrade Stalin, they paid their more or less fulsome tributes. “I am privileged to be here—deeply honored—and I want to thank you for your commitment to the American workers,” said the secretary of labor. “It was a great honor traveling with you around the country for the last year and an even greater honor to be here serving on your cabinet,” gushed the secretary of the treasury. “Mr. President, what an incredible honor it is to lead the Department of Health and Human Services at this pivotal time under your leadership. I can’t thank you enough for the privileges you’ve given me and the leadership that you’ve shown,” said the head of that department.28

  A normal cabinet would balk at such self-abasement. A normal president would gag at it. (President George W. Bush, for whom I worked, especially distrusted flattery and flatterers. His eyes would narrow and a cynical smile would form, as if to say, “Now I see what you are.”) Donald Trump expects and rewards it. Such behavior is profoundly shameful, and honorable people will not do it. This fact forces a president who wishes to do it to hire dishonorable people—and to thrust honorable people into irretrievably dishonorable situations.

  No American military man of his generation commanded more universal admiration than did Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster. A combat veteran of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Gulf War, and also the author of an acclaimed book about civilian-military relations, McMaster embodied the high ideal of the soldier-intellectual, a man who excelled in both thought and action. When President Trump named McMaster to replace the Russia-compromised Michael Flynn as national security adviser, the wise people of national security breathed their relief. “An outstanding choice!” exulted Senator John McCain.29

  In the spring of 2017, this fine public servant faced a serious challenge. He had consented to serve a president elevated to power in some considerable part by clandestine help from Russia, an unfriendly power. The exact degree of collusion between the Trump team and Russia remained shadowy at that time; President Trump had not yet fired FBI director James Comey, and Donald Trump Jr.’s “I love it!” email welcoming Russian help would not come into public view until July 2017.30 Yet the odor of treason already hung heavy in April. The allies worried about Trump’s incessant praise of Vladimir Putin and about his campaign statements raising doubts about America’s NATO obligations, statements seconded by important campaign surrogates like Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House.31 America’s allies wanted reassurance, and McMaster believed he had found the perfect way to deliver it.

  At the newly built headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Brussels, a monument had been erected to the spirit of Article 5, the treaty’s mutual-defense guarantee. A NATO summit was scheduled for May 25, 2017. There Trump would personally dedicate the Article 5 monument—and reaffirm America’s pledge to defend its allies.

  The appropriate words were written, circulated, revised, and approved, in a process overseen by McMaster personally.32 The day before the speech, a seni
or administration official (most likely McMaster himself) briefed the New York Times that Trump’s NATO speech would explicitly endorse Article 5.

  President Trump is expected to publicly endorse NATO’s mutual defense commitment at a ceremony on Thursday at the alliance’s headquarters, an administration official said, breaking months of silence about whether the United States would automatically come to the aid of an ally under attack.

  Mr. Trump will make the promise in Brussels at the start of three days of meetings with European heads of state, according to the official.33

  The agreed language remained in place as late as the morning the speech was to be delivered, according to Susan Glasser of Politico.34

  Then, at the last second, Trump balked. He stood in front of the monument. He read the speech. He omitted the pro–Article 5 language. Why? Ideology? Russian influence? Truculent resistance to the advice of others unless swaddled in extravagant flattery? Who knows? Whatever the reason for the language’s disappearance, it fell to McMaster to undo the damage. Standing before the traveling press corps in Taormina, Sicily, on May 27, 2017, two days after the NATO speech, McMaster expostulated that nothing untoward had happened. On the record this time, he said:

  I think it’s extraordinary that there would be an expectation that the president would have to say explicitly that he supports Article 5. Of course he does. He did not make a decision not to say it. It was implicit in the speech. There was no decision to not put it in there. It is a matter of fact that the United States, the president, stands firmly behind our Article 5 commitments under NATO.35