Trump raced to his phone. “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” the president tweeted. He followed up: “How low has President Obama gone to [tap] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
Five minutes later, at 6:40 in the morning, the president dialed Priebus. The chief of staff, hoping for an uneventful weekend with Trump out of town, was jolted out of his sleep. “Did you see my tweets?” came an excited voice on the other end.
Priebus leapt from his bed and opened Twitter on his iPhone, quickly finding Trump’s pair of statements.
“Who told you this?” he asked the president.
“It’s all over the place,” Trump replied. “Listen to this!”
The president, a longtime fan of the TiVo recording device, rewound and played for Priebus the Special Report clip, a muddled exchange that offered nothing but confusion for most viewers.
“See! Did you hear that?” Trump asked Priebus.
It wasn’t unusual for the president to begin his day with predawn tweets inspired by whatever he had seen or heard on Fox News, making Fox and Friends the most influential bit of programming in the world. Priebus could live with that. It was unusual, however, for the president to publicly accuse his predecessor of spying on him—without a shred of evidence to support the allegation.
The chief of staff felt sick. He hung up and called Ryan in Wisconsin. He was an hour behind, in the central time zone, and still asleep. “Paul, what the hell is going on?” Priebus asked. “What the hell is he talking about?”
Ryan, too, jumped out of bed and located the president’s tweet. When Priebus explained that Trump’s charge against Obama was based on the Baier clip, Ryan burst into maniacal, almost punch-drunk laughter. “I didn’t even know what Bret was talking about,” the Speaker exhaled. “I just BS’d my way through the question!”
It was a needed moment of levity for Ryan, but Priebus couldn’t find the humor.
APRIL BROUGHT A BRIEF INTERLUDE OF TRANQUILITY. BUT THE MONTH of May saw fireworks the likes of which Americans hadn’t witnessed since Watergate.
At the beginning of the month, Trump told his top aides that he’d made up his mind: He wanted to fire James Comey. They warned him that this was a very bad idea; that the FBI was investigating Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 election, a probe that would be looking closely at him, his family, and his campaign. Firing Comey would make the president look suspicious. But Trump didn’t care. In fact, it was Comey’s very handling of the Russia case that irked him: Three times, the president claimed, Comey had assured him privately that he was not personally being investigated (which the FBI director later confirmed in congressional testimony), and yet he refused to say so publicly.
Desperate to stop Trump from acting impetuously, Priebus and White House counsel Don McGahn persuaded him to wait until at least getting an opinion from Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who was overseeing the Russia inquiry. They felt certain that Rosenstein, an even-keeled career prosecutor, would help them talk the president down. Instead, when he arrived in the Oval Office, Rosenstein blindsided them by agreeing with Trump: Comey deserved to be fired, he said, based on his handling of the Clinton email investigation in 2016.
Trump sacked Comey on May 9, publicly citing Rosenstein’s reasoning for doing so. Senior White House officials, including Pence himself, insisted to reporters that Trump had acted on the recommendation of Sessions and Rosenstein. They swore up and down that the president’s decision had nothing to do with the Russia probe. Trump, however, would quickly undermine those claims—and sabotage his own stated rationale for dismissing the FBI director.
In the Oval Office a day later, Trump hosted two top Russian officials, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. The president called Comey “a real nut job,” according to the New York Times,17 and told them of the FBI probe, “I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” (Trump also disclosed highly classified information about an operation targeting the Islamic State, according to the Washington Post.18 The only photos of the meeting were shared by a Russian state photographer; no American media were permitted.)
The next day, May 11, the president continued to stray from his original story. Sitting down with Lester Holt of NBC News, Trump said of the Comey firing, “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’”
Trump then committed a presidency-defining mistake the next day. Fittingly, it started with a tweet.
“James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” the president wrote on the morning of May 12.
Trump would later admit that he possessed no such tapes. But that wasn’t the point anymore. Prompted by the tweet, Comey, who had written contemporaneous memos after his meetings with the president, shared the memos with a law professor friend, authorizing him to leak them to the press. Comey’s goal was to trigger the appointment of a special counsel to continue the investigation into Russian meddling. The ploy worked. One day after the New York Times published a story detailing Comey’s claims about the president’s request for lenient treatment of Flynn, raising questions about obstruction of justice, Rosenstein named a special counsel.19
Robert Mueller, the highly respected former FBI director who had served under Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, wouldn’t merely be picking up where previous investigators had left off. He would be expanding the probe into places it might never have ventured before.
Trump’s impulsive dismissal of the FBI director, his self-contradictory statements, and his taunting tweets had conjured a nightmare that would haunt the first term of his presidency.
Chapter Twenty
June 2017
“Rainy Sunday afternoons are the devil’s play shop.”
MEAN.
That’s how the Republican president of the United States described the Republican House majority’s hard-fought legislation to finally, at long last, deliver on the seven-year promise of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act: “Mean.”
Facing the wrath of the base following the March 24 debacle, with Fox News and conservative talk radio leading the way in lampooning a congressional party that was ruining Donald Trump’s prospects for a successful presidency, Republicans got their act together. And it started with Mike Pence.
From the moment Trump picked him, through the first few months of 2017, the vice president had been all but invisible in the parade of palace intrigue stories detailing the rivalries, alliances, backstabbing, self-promoting, and stock watching inside Trump’s reality TV–inspired White House. That was no accident: Pence had gathered his team, first after the VP announcement and then once more on the eve of the inauguration, and warned them that the spotlight belonged to Trump. Leaking, speaking out of turn, or doing anything to upstage the president, he said, would not be tolerated.