Waiting in the reception area to see her doctor, Tumulty played the mystery caller’s voice mail. She was stunned by what she heard. She called McRaven back but only talked briefly to him because he was finally heading out to fish. She told him she felt sure the Post would publish some of his reaction, and McRaven said he’d be out of pocket for a while but trusted her to handle it. They hung up.
As Tumulty sat in the waiting room transcribing McRaven’s voice-mail recording, she felt certain it deserved more than a few quotes in a news story. A national military hero had called the president a national embarrassment and a poor role model for America’s children. He even compared Trump to Joseph McCarthy. She consulted with her editors, and they agreed they should publish McRaven’s impromptu speech word for word as an opinion piece.
McRaven’s essay went viral. It drew notice deep in the bowels of the country’s national security apparatus, where public servants working many rungs below McRaven had been silently disgusted watching Trump disrespect them and their brethren. They took private comfort reading McRaven’s words. As one of those low-level cogs described it, finally somebody revered, a boldfaced name, was declaring, in essence, “No more.”
Before Trump, this government aide had always felt the presidency had a kind of magic. No matter which party the president came from, he bore the weight of history on his shoulders, with the seriousness it deserved. But not anymore. “He’s ruined that magic,” this aide said of Trump. “The disdain he shows for our country’s foundation and its principles. The disregard he has for right and wrong. Your fist clenches. Your teeth grate. The hair goes up on the back of your neck. I have to remind myself I said an oath to a document in the National Archives. I swore to the Constitution. I didn’t swear an oath to this jackass.”
As this aide saw it, there has been a silent understanding within the national security community that diplomatic, military, and intelligence officers were doing the right thing, quietly risking their lives to protect the American way of life. This aide saw Trump’s move against Brennan as one of the first steps of undercutting America’s democratic system of government and the belief system upon which it was founded. According to the aide, it was the president declaring, “It’s not okay to disagree with me. I can remove you from this work and your career.
“If he wanted to, how far could he push this?” this aide asked. “Look back. Did people in the 1930s in Germany know when the government started to turn on them? Most Americans are more worried about who is going to win on America’s Got Talent and what the traffic is going to be like on I-95. They aren’t watching this closely.
“I like to believe [Trump] is too self-engrossed, too incompetent and disorganized to get us to 1930,” this aide added. “But he has moved the bar. And another president that comes after him can move it a little farther. The time is coming. Our nation will be tested. Every nation is. Rome fell, remember. He is opening up vulnerabilities for this to happen. That is my fear.”
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On August 21, in a courtroom in lower Manhattan, Michael Cohen was set to appear that afternoon as part of a plea agreement with federal prosecutors related to the hush-money payments he made to women claiming to have had affairs with Trump. More than 250 miles south, in a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, a jury was deliberating on charges against Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman.
Just after four o’clock in the afternoon, Cohen pleaded guilty to eight felony counts and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in New York. He testified that he had made these criminal payments “in coordination and at the direction of” Trump.
At nearly the same time, the jury in Alexandria reached a verdict in the Manafort case. Manafort was also found guilty of, coincidentally, eight counts: five counts of tax fraud, two counts of bank fraud, and one count of failure to disclose a foreign bank account. The judge declared a mistrial on the remaining ten charges.
The news broke as the president traveled to West Virginia for a rally, where he used his bully pulpit to repeatedly denounce the Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt.” The president cried out, his voice rising, “Where is the collusion? Where is the collusion?”
Unbeknownst to his throngs of supporters or the journalists covering the day’s events, Trump had used this day to try to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He worked the phones, seeking a recommendation for the prize. His main target was Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, who had proven to be the most obsequious of his major-nation counterparts, but he called other Asian heads of state, too. As Trump lobbied foreign counterparts, his pitch went along the lines of “It’s time. Obama got it without doing anything. I brought peace to North Korea. I need to win the Nobel.” Winning a Nobel had been a fixation of Trump’s, in large part because Obama was awarded one in 2009, less than one year into his presidency.
Trump’s hunger for recognition extended to other prizes, too. Oftentimes when he heard about somebody receiving a lifetime achievement award from a think tank, for instance, Trump would complain to aides and argue that he deserved it more. At one point in late 2017, he even suggested that he might award himself the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which President Harry S. Truman established as the nation’s highest civilian award. As Trump reviewed the biographies of potential candidates for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he remarked to aides, “Well, I’ve probably done even more. Maybe I should be the one getting this.”
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On August 27, Trump wanted to turn a personal phone call with Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto celebrating a new U.S.-Mexico trade deal into a live news conference. This was just another whim from the president, who called himself a game-day player. Aides had to rush to satisfy him. With the press pool whisked into the Oval Office and gathered around the Resolute Desk, Trump pushed the button on his phone to greet Peña Nieto.
“Enrique?” Trump said.
There was no response. Silence. The line was dead. Trump was impatient. “You can hook him up,” he called out to aides. “You tell me when. This is a big deal. A lot of people are waiting.”
Trump tried again.
“Hellooo?” he said. “Do you want to put that on this phone please? Hellooo?”
Finally, an aide picked up the handheld receiver and patched Peña Nieto through to Trump. The two presidents carried on with a conversation. It turned out Peña Nieto had been properly connected on the other line. The problem was that Trump wasn’t used to picking up the handset to ensure that the other side could hear him.
John Kelly and Sanders had green-lighted Trump’s idea to conduct his call with Peña Nieto live, with television cameras running, with only twenty minutes’ notice. White House communications officials did not have time to do a pretest to make sure the phone lines would connect properly. “Buy two minutes to get it right,” one top aide said later. “Mexico is not going to hang up the fucking phone. Nobody—nobody—is going to hang up on the president of the United States.”