Trump didn’t yet know the full details about the exchanges, but he and his allies in Congress were already bashing Mueller’s team as politically tainted Democrats trying to undermine his presidency. Outside the secure conference room at the Justice Department command center where the inspector general had briefed everyone on the texts, Rosenstein pulled Mueller aside in the hallway to apologize. He felt badly that a national hero was getting assailed by the president and lawmakers whose idea of public service was appearing on television and tweeting. He knew the texts, when they came out, would only make Mueller’s job harder.
“I’m really sorry I got you into this,” Rosenstein said.
Mueller waved it off. “I would’ve really regretted it if I hadn’t agreed to do it,” he said.
Nine
SHOCKING THE CONSCIENCE
There is no more sacred military space than room 2E924 of the Pentagon. A windowless and secure vault of a conference room where the Joint Chiefs of Staff meet regularly to wrestle with classified matters, its more common name is “the Tank.” It got its name from the Joint Chiefs’ original meeting location during World War II, in the basement of a federal building on Constitution Avenue in Washington, where attendees had to walk through an austere arched portal with exposed wires that gave the impression of entering a tank. Unlike the command centers conjured in Hollywood thrillers, the Tank at the Pentagon resembles a small corporate boardroom, with midcentury stylings including a gleaming golden oak table and leather swivel armchairs. The room, saturated by history, also is known as the Gold Room for its thick carpeting and ornate drapery.
Uniformed officers think of the Tank a bit like a church. Inside its walls, flag officers observe a reverence and decorum for the wrenching decisions that have been made here. To sit at its table is a great honor. The room is controlled by four-star generals, not the president’s civilian appointees, and it is a safe space for them to speak candidly without intrusions from the political dramas of the day. The Tank is reserved for serious discussions of military tactics. Here is where matters of war and peace are determined, where the Joint Chiefs decide to send young men and women to their deaths.
Hanging prominently on one of the walls, along with the American flag and the banners of the military branches, was The Peacemakers, a painting that depicted a historic meeting of a president and his three service chiefs: an 1865 Civil War strategy session with President Abraham Lincoln, Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. One hundred fifty-two years after Lincoln hatched plans to preserve the Union, President Trump’s advisers staged an intervention inside the Tank to preserve the world order. The July 20, 2017, meeting in the Tank has been documented numerous times, most memorably by Bob Woodward in Fear, but subsequent reporting reveals a more complete picture of the moment and the chilling effect Trump’s comments and hostility had on the nation’s military and national security leadership.
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had grown alarmed over the first six months of the Trump administration by gaping holes in the president’s knowledge of history and of the alliances forged in the wake of World War II that served as the foundation of America’s strength in the world. Trump had unnerved trusted friends by dismissing existing relations with Western democracies as worthless, including by questioning the value of NATO, while cultivating friendlier ones with Russia and other authoritarian regimes. He wanted to tear up trade deals to squeeze more out of partners. And he advocated withdrawing troops not only from active theaters like Afghanistan but also from strategic outposts like South Korea, where U.S. forces were helping keep the peace, complaining that the military presence around the world was a waste of billions of dollars.
Trump organized his unorthodox worldview under the simplistic banner of “America First,” but Mattis, Tillerson, and Cohn feared his proposals were rash, barely considered, and a danger to America’s superpower standing. They also felt that many of Trump’s impulsive ideas—and their continuing difficulty communicating U.S. interests abroad with the president—stemmed from his lack of familiarity with U.S. history, and even with the map of the world. Cohn had confided to his peers he had been surprised at the many gaps in Trump’s understanding of world affairs. To have a useful discussion with him, the trio agreed, they had to lay a foundation with Trump and create a basic knowledge, a shared language. So on July 20, Mattis invited Trump to the Tank for what he, Tillerson, and Cohn had carefully organized as a tailored tutorial on the state of the world and America’s interests abroad.
The meeting was billed as a briefing on Afghanistan, because Trump was in the midst of developing a long-term strategy to defeat the Islamic State there, but in reality the session was to be a gentle lesson on American power, with the president as a student. The organizers viewed it as a course correction, an intervention to educate Trump and give him some fundamentals for analyzing the world.
The Tank was selected as the venue because Trump was impressed by the room when he first visited it in January 2017, telling advisers that it was cool and classic, a relic from an earlier era. He marveled at the idea that he, Donald Trump, sat in the same room where commanders in chief before him had drawn up war plans. If it hadn’t been across the Potomac River in Virginia and such a schlep from the White House, Trump would have liked to have held all his national security meetings there.
On July 20, just before 10:00 a.m. on a scorching summer Thursday, Trump arrived at the Pentagon. He stepped out of his motorcade, walked along a corridor with portraits honoring former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs, and stepped inside the Tank. The uniformed officers greeted their commander in chief. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford sat in the seat of honor midway down the table, because this was his room, and Trump sat at the head of the table facing a projection screen. Mattis and the newly confirmed deputy defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, sat to the president’s left, with Vice President Pence and Tillerson to his right. Down the table sat the leaders of the military branches, along with Cohn and Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin. Steve Bannon was in the outer ring of chairs with other staff, taking his seat just behind Mattis and directly in Trump’s line of sight.
At one end of the room, opposite Trump, an opaque screen hung on the wall for the slide projections to come, with another sliding screen showing maps of different parts of the world. Mattis, Cohn, and Tillerson and their aides decided to use maps, graphics, and charts to tutor the president, figuring they would help keep him from getting bored.
In his regular intelligence briefings, Trump would ravenously ingest glinting nuggets and latch onto names he recognized or hot spots he knew from the news, but he would not read written materials or have the patience for lectures. So his briefers would huddle around the Resolute Desk and show Trump maps and charts and pictures and videos, as well as “killer graphics,” as CIA director Mike Pompeo described them. One surefire way to get Trump’s attention, they found, was to feature his name somewhere in the text. “That’s our task, right? To deliver the material in a way that he can best understand the information we’re trying to communicate,” Pompeo said.