Trump and his aides had debated whether to tell the Mexicans that Peña Nieto’s voice would be played on speakerphone live on TV. Ultimately, they concluded that they had to. The White House would later tell reporters that they coordinated the call in advance with the Mexican government. That was taking major license with the word “coordinated.” The White House gave the Mexican president’s office only about 120 seconds’ notice of what Trump was planning to do. That lack of advance preparation was clear in Peña Nieto’s halting language. To celebrate the deal, Peña Nieto offered a tequila toast.
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Trump loathed John McCain. Even as the Arizona senator was dying of brain cancer at his Sedona ranch, Trump attacked him at his rallies over his decisive 2017 vote against the GOP’s proposed health-care overhaul. After McCain passed away on August 25, 2018, at the age of eighty-one, Trump stubbornly rejected his aides’ suggestion to issue a statement about his death. The White House briefly flew the American flag at full staff, even though Washington protocol dictated that it remain at half-staff until the senator was laid to rest.
On September 1, McCain’s memorial service at Washington National Cathedral served not only as a memorial for an American hero but also as a stinging rebuke of Trump and Trumpism. The cathedral rang with paeans to bipartisanship, compromise, and civility in a melancholy last hurrah for all that now seemed lost. One by one, mourners celebrated elements of McCain’s epic life—basic decency and morality; common values that transcended ideology, class, or race; service to nation over self—that Trump most starkly lacked.
Meghan McCain, the late senator’s thirty-three-year-old daughter, delivered the rawest repudiation: “We gather here to mourn the passing of American greatness. The real thing, not cheap rhetoric from men who will never come near the sacrifice he gave so willingly, nor the opportunistic appropriation of those who lived lives of comfort and privilege while he suffered and served.”
Gathered in the pews was a collection of global elites: the previous three presidents and every major-party nominee for the past two decades; military generals; intelligence chiefs; senators and representatives; foreign ambassadors and other world leaders. The lone man out was Trump, who spent the day golfing at his Virginia course because the McCain family made clear he would not be welcome at the service. His isolation was underscored by the chumminess inside the cathedral, where Hillary Clinton sat shoulder to shoulder with Dick Cheney and at one point George W. Bush snuck candies to Michelle Obama.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner attended at the invitation of Senator Lindsey Graham, a close friend of McCain’s, and rubbed elbows with the very people who so disdained the president. Kelly and Jim Mattis had special roles in the proceedings. The White House chief of staff and defense secretary escorted McCain’s widow, Cindy, into the cathedral and were seated prominently in camera view. And as he watched clips of them on television, Trump grew furious, telling other advisers that he felt Kelly and Mattis had betrayed him by sidling up to the McCain family.
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On September 5, Trump become irate when The New York Times published an extraordinary editorial. The title was “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” and the author was anonymous, identified by the Times only as a “senior official.” The column was without precedent, and it was published a day after the first revelations surfaced from Bob Woodward’s Fear, also a scalding portrait of the president. The anonymous editorial writer described Trump as “impetuous” and accused him of acting “in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.” The official also alleged that there had been “early whispers” among members of Trump’s cabinet about invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment to remove him from office but that they decided to instead work within the government to contain him. It amounted to a portrait painted from within of what Senator Bob Corker had called the “adult day care center.”
Administration aides were so alarmed by the column—and by the president’s resulting fury—that some texted each other the phrase “The sleeper cells have awoken.” One recently departed White House official likened it to the opening sequence in When a Stranger Calls, a 1979 psychological thriller: “It’s like the horror movies when everyone realizes the call is coming from inside the house.”
Trump considered figuring out the identity of Anonymous one of the government’s most pressing priorities. Beginning just after dawn on September 6, press statements forcefully denying that they were the author rolled in one by one from more than two dozen cabinet members and other top administration officials. They read as public declarations of absolute loyalty to Trump. On September 7, Trump directed the Justice Department to investigate the author of the “resistance” op-ed. He spoke freely to reporters that day about his fresh paranoia regarding whom in his midst he could trust. “What I do now is I look around the room,” he said. “I say, ‘Hey, if I don’t know somebody . . .’”
White House staff began going through records to see who had outstanding copies of foreign leader calls with the president, as well as other sensitive documents. A White House official made a request to Mattis’s assistant: Why hadn’t the defense secretary’s office returned some of the copies of readouts of the president’s calls with foreign leaders? The White House needed them returned ASAP. This was a normal housecleaning request, but some officials at the Pentagon felt the timing conveyed an undeniable message: we’re watching you.
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In early September 2018, Trump’s lawyers finally reached a conclusion with Mueller over his request for a presidential interview. Trump’s lawyers had argued to prosecutors all summer why they didn’t believe it was necessary to provide the president’s responses to their questions and tried to appear open to a possible compromise for him to provide limited answers. The discussion took the form of a volley of emails and memos between Trump’s lawyer Jane Raskin and her old law firm friend James Quarles.
Some of the correspondence was rudimentary. The Trump lawyers wanted to know what criminal statutes Mueller’s team was investigating as possible crimes and why this would require answers from the president. Raskin’s shorthand version was something to the effect of “You have told us our client is the subject of the investigation and you won’t even tell us what you are looking at.” It took roughly three weeks to get an answer to that question. Quarles responded that the statutes governed the criminal acts of hacking, under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as the very general crimes of wire fraud and mail fraud. Trump’s lawyers shrugged. That’s it? That’s useless, they said to each other. They were certain the president hadn’t engaged in any of those crimes.
Mueller’s team would be silent for long stretches, especially later in the summer. At one point, Quarles told the Trump lawyers that it was important to ask about the president’s view of events surrounding his pursuit of the Trump Tower Moscow project, as well as his role in describing Donald Trump Jr.’s 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer who was expected to provide damaging information on Clinton. Raskin and her colleagues had a shared reaction: “What conceivably is criminal about that? Why do you want to ask about that?” The president’s team also argued that prosecutors were not entitled to question Trump on decisions he made as president because anything prosecutors needed to know from Trump’s time in office could be obtained from the thousands of documents and dozens of witnesses the White House had helped provide.