The tweets were the elephant in the room when everyone gathered a short while later around a colossal conference table. Trump seemed his typical self, no more or less animated than usual. He was relatively engaged during remarks from several of the cabinet secretaries and seemed exceptionally interested by a classified briefing from Mattis on clashes with ISIS fighters. As the Pentagon chief spoke, the president scribbled wildly on a sheet of paper in front of him, all the while nodding and looking up to make eye contact. The others in the room took this as an encouraging sign: The Pentagon had released a report just weeks earlier claiming that ISIS had lost 98 percent of its territory.
When Mattis finished, the president lifted the piece of paper while gesturing, just high enough for several people to see it. He had drawn a flight of bullet points on the page, all of them underneath an all-caps header that was clearly visible: “SLOPPY STEVE.”
THE WHITE HOUSE HAD GROWN ADEPT AT WEATHERING RHETORIC-BASED storms, with Trump showing a breathtaking capacity for turning the page on statements that would have been definitional for any other president. Whether it was his boasting about the size of his nuclear button, or calling himself “a very stable genius,” or questioning an immigration policy that would allow people from “shithole countries” like Haiti into the United States, Trump spent the first month of 2018 defying conventions in the same way he had throughout his first year in office—and paying no real political price for it.
It was a different story when it came to the outward, existential threats to his presidency. Try as he might, Trump could not counter or distract from the growing perception of unscrupulous, and possibly unlawful, activity emanating from his inner circle. For much of 2017, this had been narrowly focused on the twin questions of collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice in his dealings with (and eventual firing of) FBI Director James Comey. But 2018 brought a different and potentially more damaging set of revelations.
On January 12, the Wall Street Journal reported that Michael Cohen, the president’s longtime attorney and fixer, had paid $130,000 to a pornographic film star during the 2016 campaign to prevent her from sharing details of their past romance.1 Stephanie Clifford, who went by the professional name of Stormy Daniels, alleged that she and Trump had had sexual intercourse soon after meeting at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe back in 2006—when the future president was newly married to Melania Trump, who had just birthed the couple’s first child.
The story was ground-shaking. The moral implications of Trump cheating on his new wife with a porn star aside, the reported outlay of hush money would represent a flagrant violation of federal campaign finance laws. The Journal was reporting that Cohen had paid off Daniels in October 2016, the same month Trump’s candidacy went on life support due to the Access Hollywood tape. If true, the Republican nominee’s campaign had bought the silence of someone whose disclosures could have altered the outcome of the presidential election.
The White House denied the report. So did Cohen, who provided a signed statement from Clifford that read, “Rumors that I have received hush money from Donald Trump are completely false.” Yet, the next month, in a statement to the New York Times, Cohen admitted that he had paid the porn star $130,000—and insisted that it came out of his own pocket.2 “Neither the Trump Organization nor the Trump campaign was a party to the transaction with Ms. Clifford,” Cohen said, “and neither reimbursed me for the payment, either directly or indirectly.”
This was a lie—one of many that would come back to torment both Trump and his associates.
Then, in March, both Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, the former Playboy model whose own story had been bought and buried by Trump’s friends at the National Enquirer, sued to invalidate the nondisclosure agreements they had signed. (Cohen had played a role in negotiating both.) Topping it all off, at month’s end, Daniels appeared on 60 Minutes. She gave a highly credible account of the unprotected sexual intercourse she had with Trump in 2006 and told of how, five years later, after sharing her story with the gossip magazine In Touch, a man approached her with a physical threat: “Leave Trump alone.”
Trump didn’t take the bait—at least not right away. “So much Fake News. Never been more voluminous or more inaccurate,” the president tweeted the morning after 60 Minutes aired. “But through it all, our country is doing great!”
TRUMP WAS NOT DOING GREAT.
The First Lady was seething at the humiliations suffered by the Stormy Daniels discoveries, he confided to friends. Far more bothersome, the president’s children were being pulled into Mueller’s probe, and his legal team seemed more concerned with each passing day about the scope of the special counsel’s investigation. For all aggravations Russia-related, Trump held one person responsible: Jeff Sessions.
Once a darling to the president’s team—Sessions was the first senator to endorse his 2016 campaign—the attorney general had become Trump’s enemy number one since recusing himself from the Russia inquiry. (According to the New York Times, Trump asked White House counsel Don McGahn to lobby Sessions against the recusal and “erupted in anger” when Sessions would not comply, “saying he needed his attorney general to protect him.”3) When Mueller was installed as the special counsel, a direct result of Trump’s firing of Comey, the president made Sessions his whipping boy: mocking his southern drawl, tweeting insults at him, and telling reporters that he never should have chosen the former Alabama senator to lead the Justice Department. On at least two occasions Trump requested his attorney general’s resignation only to be convinced by White House aides that Sessions’s dismissal would only compound his myriad legal problems.
Sessions wasn’t the only cabinet member who had taken up residence on Trump’s bad side.
Rex Tillerson had come to annoy the president in ways big and small. Trump found the secretary of state to be dreary and slothful; not far, he laughed with friends, from the “low energy” caricature he’d slapped on Jeb Bush. Because of Tillerson’s deliberate speaking style, Trump joked about the secretary of state being slow, and was therefore bemused at reports of Tillerson calling him not just “a moron” but a “fucking moron.”
“I think it’s fake news, but if he did that, I guess we’ll have to compare IQ tests,” Trump told Forbes magazine in response to the alleged quote. “And I can tell you who is going to win.” (Tillerson never denied the reports.)
Increasingly isolated from the White House and removed from decision-making processes—to the extent that such processes existed—Tillerson found himself hopelessly out of sync with Trump. In the fall of 2017, the secretary of state told reporters that the United States was looking to negotiate with North Korea; one day later, the president tweeted, “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man . . . Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”
Six months after that episode, Tillerson condemned Russia for its poisoning of an ex-Russian spy and his daughter with a military-grade nerve agent, calling the attack in England “a really egregious act” that “clearly” had been ordered by the Kremlin. The next morning, Trump fired Tillerson via Twitter.