For the next several days, Giuliani stopped appearing on TV. Trump temporarily benched his lawyer.
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By its thirty-fifth straight day, the government shutdown that Trump had said he would be proud to instigate was wreaking havoc across the country. The nation’s air travel was in chaos. Federal workers were lining up at food banks. Some Republican senators were in open revolt. Even Christopher Wray, Trump’s handpicked FBI director, was decrying the dysfunction.
“It takes a lot to get me angry, but I’m about as angry as I’ve been in a long, long time,” Wray said in a video message to FBI employees.
“I’m not a loser,” the president said. “I’m not going to lose this. I’m not going to look weak. I’m not going to give in.”
But on January 25, Trump gave in.
The master deal maker wasn’t the wizard he claimed. “It’s like McDonald’s not being able to make a hamburger,” the Republican strategist Mike Murphy said.
Trump cast about for someone to blame and pointed fingers at two staffers who led the negotiations on Capitol Hill, Mulvaney and Jared Kushner. During the shutdown, Kushner claimed his bipartisan victory in reforming criminal sentencing law as evidence that he could execute a grand bargain around wall funding and broader immigration changes. Another senior administration official recalled of Kushner, “He kind of said, this is how we made the donuts last month and this is how we’ll make donuts again this month because they were really delicious donuts, we made them well, and it worked, so let’s use the same recipe.” But it was naive to think Democrats like Senator Dick Durbin, who had been willing to support a bill reducing recidivism, would ever agree to fund Trump’s wall.
Trump did not give up on the wall, however. He reopened the government only temporarily, giving Congress three weeks to pass a longer-term budget. During that period, as a seventeen-member bipartisan panel of lawmakers negotiated a spending compromise, Cipollone, Mulvaney, and other officials devised a drastic plan for Trump to build his wall. The president would declare a national emergency at the southern border, which would trigger extraordinary powers to redirect taxpayer money.
On February 15, Trump signed the new budget agreement, which contained $1.375 billion for fencing and other border expenditures—far less than the $5.7 billion Trump had sought—and formally declared the national emergency. He used the word “invasion” seven times to describe the migration patterns at the border. “We’re talking about an invasion of our country with drugs, with human traffickers, with all types of criminals and gangs,” Trump said.
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At the Pentagon around this time, Shanahan considered gradually withdrawing the troops Trump deployed to the border shortly before the November 2018 elections, but he quickly realized he would not last very long if he did. After all, Shanahan was acting, and Trump liked it that way. He was more vulnerable to the president’s pressure. “He gets to lord it over them,” explained one senior administration official.
Shanahan was left shaky in his interim position. It was clear that Trump would never nominate him as the permanent secretary of defense unless he played ball. So on February 22, the Pentagon announced it would increase the number of military personnel on the border by a thousand, bringing the total number of troops to six thousand. Their primary orders were to string concertina wire along the border and install detection systems to secure remote areas between official entry points.
This decision tended to confirm the doubts within the Pentagon that Shanahan would not be able to fill Mattis’s shoes. Officials noticed that he liked to bring Dunford or Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army Mark Milley to any substantive meetings, leaning on their expertise as a crutch. Shanahan wasn’t trying to pretend he had Mattis’s credentials. He knew he was “the Accidental Secretary,” thanks to Trump’s vicissitudes, and had no problem admitting what he didn’t know. Still, he had critics inside who yearned for someone with Mattis’s grounding.
“He likes the red carpet,” one military official said of Shanahan. “But he can’t stand up to Trump. He doesn’t have the credibility and experience to say, ‘Hey, this is why you shouldn’t do that.’”
After two years of being told no by Mattis, Trump considered Shanahan precisely the kind of replacement he had in mind.
Twenty-three
LOYALTY AND TRUTH
On February 27, 2019, Michael Cohen, who had once said he would take a bullet for Trump, gave the most sensational day of congressional testimony of the Trump era. The president watched snippets from half a world away in Vietnam, where he was turning up the charm for Kim Jong Un at their second summit. For him, Cohen’s testimony before the House Oversight Committee amounted to the ultimate betrayal. And with the collapse of the Hanoi summit over the murderous North Korean dictator’s refusal to abandon his country’s nuclear program, Trump was dealt twin disasters.
Cohen’s decision to turn on the president—to become “a rat,” in Trump’s mobster lingo—was set in motion several months earlier. On November 29, 2018, a week after Thanksgiving, Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about then-candidate Trump’s interest in a Trump Tower project in Moscow. Cohen admitted that he told a false story to match Trump’s repeated public denials that he had pursued the project deep into the presidential campaign. Cohen also acknowledged repeated contacts with Russian officials to try to secure approvals for the Trump project, and that he kept Trump apprised of his progress.
In Washington, meanwhile, the Democratic congressman Elijah Cummings was preparing to become chairman of the House Oversight Committee. The congressman called an old friend from his days defending the Clintons, Lanny Davis, who had taken on Cohen as a client. Cummings asked Davis whether Trump’s estranged fixer might be willing to testify before his committee and reveal to the American people, in more detail than he had in his guilty plea, how Trump directed him to commit crimes.
Davis replied that he didn’t think so. Cohen was under a continuing cooperation agreement with federal investigators—both in the Southern District of New York, which was trying the campaign finance case, and in Robert Mueller’s special counsel office—as part of his plea deal. SDNY prosecutors still had an open case examining the Trump Organization and Trump’s role in the hush-money payments, while Mueller’s Russia investigation was ongoing. Prosecutors held a lot of power over Cohen’s life, including advising on how much time he should serve in prison. Still, Davis told Cummings, “I’ll ask him.”
A few days before Christmas, Cohen got on the phone with Cummings and agreed to testify before his committee. Cohen decided he wanted to explain himself fully, in a way he had not yet been able to—certainly not when he was under investigation and trying to sing from Trump’s songbook, and not when he was following the strict choreography dictated by the prosecutors who negotiated his plea deal. Working closely with Davis, Cohen cataloged dozens of stories he was ready to share about Trump that would spotlight the president’s dishonesty and depravity. Davis believed there were many words that described Trump: “insane,” “sociopath,” “monster,” and “cruel.” But he wanted to hear Cohen walk through the characteristics he had witnessed firsthand.